A Man of Integrity Stays for the Election : Mexico’s Salinas was right not to let Carpizo quit

Given the traumas Mexico has faced this election year, the minor political melodrama that played itself out last weekend in Mexico City might seem insignificant. It wasn’t. It was a defining moment leading up to Mexico’s most historic election day since 1910, when a controversial presidential vote set off a major revolution.

The weekend crisis began when the popular government minister who will oversee Mexico’s elections, Jorge Carpizo MacGregor, threatened to resign. In a letter to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Interior Minister Carpizo said a political party--which he did not identify--was making his job so difficult it was hard for him to deal with that party in the impartial manner his position called for. Salinas refused to accept Carpizo’s offer to resign. The two men met and on Sunday it was announced that Carpizo would remain.

That decision was met by acclaim from all the major political parties: Salinas’ powerful Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) and the conservative National Action Party (PAN). For all the political differences among them, and for all the personal enmity among some of their leaders, Mexico’s political factions agree that Carpizo is someone they can trust to run a clean election.

Some observers believe that Carpizo’s threat to resign was a brilliant maneuver to jar political leaders into a sense of reality and responsibility. The rhetoric and conduct of the campaign had become increasingly corrosive as the Aug. 21 election grew closer. Carpizo, 50, an attorney, was a respected human rights advocate when Salinas named him to be his government’s first human rights ombudsman. He later was attorney general and then became head of the Interior Ministry after his predecessor there failed to anticipate the peasant revolt that broke out in the southern state of Chiapas Jan. 1.

There was powerful symbolism in Carpizo’s appointment to the Interior Ministry. Besides other things, that ministry oversees Mexico’s often-criticized election system. Among many electoral improvements, from campaign spending limits to a new high-tech voting system, Carpizo’s appointment was the single most visible sign that Salinas really wants political, as well as economic, reform. Salinas put a man with a reputation for outspoken integrity in charge of the voting. And having an honest election is the single most important challenge facing Mexico, notwithstanding the unresolved Chiapas rebellion and the controversial probe into the assassination of PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

Those two challenges--and many more--will be waiting for Mexico’s next president. But the effectiveness with which the new president can deal with all of Mexico’s problems will be determined by how openly and honestly he is selected. Salinas knows that as well as anyone. For despite all his remarkable reforms, Salinas’ tenure has been dogged by suspicions that his narrow electoral victory as PRI candidate in 1988 was tainted by voter fraud.

Thus it is utterly vital--whoever wins the August vote, be it PRI standard-bearer Ernesto Zedillo, the PRD’s Cuauhtemoc Cardenas or the PAN’s Diego Fernandez de Cevallos--that the victory be clean. Only a president who is honestly elected can govern with popular support and international respect. Carpizo is the man who will have a great deal to say about whether Mexico’s next president gets either.