How to Move Mexico Forward : Salinas is right to emphasize absolute need for clean elections

Some Mexicans say that the guerrilla war in the poor southern state of Chiapas, starting last Jan. 1, pulled their country back into the Third World just as it was about to use a new North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and the United States to leap into the First World. While that is obviously an overstatement, the Chiapas fighting was a symbolic setback for the economic-reform program of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, eager to end inflation and spur development in his country.

Now Salinas has focused, some critics say belatedly, on trying to bring about political reform to match the economic progress Mexico has made over the last five years. His government has spent prodigious amounts of money to build a high-tech, presumably fraud-proof election system prior to the Aug. 21 national election, when voters will pick a new president and several state governors.

There is widespread cynicism in Mexico over whether that election will be honest, given the notorious reputation of Salinas’ Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI. One reason the PRI has never lost a presidential election is because of the historic skill of its political operatives at ballot-box stuffing and other forms of vote fraud.

Yet by most independent accounts, Mexico’s new election system is indeed another achievement for the reformist president. Salinas took control of Mexico’s elections away from one of his Cabinet ministers and gave it to an independent citizens’ commission. That electoral commission has since spent $630 million manufacturing and distributing 45 million tamper-proof voter cards to eligible citizens. The plastic documents are similar to credit cards and feature many of the same security features that bank cards do--photos, fingerprints and computer-readable magnetic strips. The process of making duplicate cards is so complex that widespread fraud is unlikely. So, for all their understandable cynicism, Mexicans are about to have their cleanest national election ever.

But that doesn’t mean there won’t be some fraud, especially in Mexico’s hinterlands, where old-style political bosses still hold power. A troubling incident in Chiapas last week may have been a chilling reminder of that fact. A leftist party’s candidate for governor, the top challenger to the PRI candidate, was critically injured in a suspicious hit-and-run collision still under investigation. Opposition leaders claim the incident was a murder attempt. But even if it was an accident, the incident can only heighten the suspicion and anxiety that Mexicans feel as the Aug. 21 vote nears.

Salinas must not let up on his effort to give Mexico as clean an election as possible. Only an honest, widely-accepted vote can move Mexican democracy into the First World from the Third.