Mexico Results Draw Range of Responses : Reaction: Clinton Administration takes cautious approach. Expatriates are passionately divided.

Although the Clinton Administration took a cautious approach Monday to commenting on Mexico’s partial election results, Mexican expatriates in Southern California offered passionate, conflicting views about the claim by Ernesto Zedillo, the ruling party’s candidate, of a presidential victory.

A group called Hispanics for Zedillo, for example, convened a news conference at UCLA’s Westwood campus to laud what they termed true democracy at work.

“This shows the maturing of the Mexican political system,” said an exultant Eddie Varon, a Los Angles-based activist for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which nominated Zedillo as president. “We won it fairly.”

But even some PRI supporters still suspected the election was rigged.

“There were international witnesses, but they somehow do things illegally,” said baker Jorge Morales, 23, a PRI supporter, at a Mexican bakery in Van Nuys. “Still, last time, ask anyone, 80% didn’t believe in the vote. Now, maybe 60% don’t believe in it. We’re closer--maybe next time the elections will be honest.”

Some Mexican Americans worried that the election results would provoke a riot.

“I’m worried about my family,” said Ricardo Ramirez, 32, a delivery truck driver unloading bread at a Van Nuys mini-mall, whose family lives in Mexico City.

“I heard there will be problems.”

Some expressed a lack of faith that any election outcome would change things in Mexico, preventing those who hold power from abusing it.

“Nothing changes,” said Cynthia Gonzalez, 25, of Van Nuys, as she shopped at a local carniceria . “They’re all corrupt. Maybe it’s better the PRI stays. . . . Now, things will remain more stable.”

But across town at his Eastside tortilleria, Jesus Cardenas was contemplating a strategy to protest what he and allies called electoral chicanery.

“It was fraud as usual,” complained Cardenas, a supporter of the Democratic Revolutionary Party--whose candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas (no relation), was finishing a distant third in preliminary returns. “The government party wants to impose another president.”

In Washington, the Administration said Monday that it was too early to say whether Mexico’s election was free and fair, although one official described it as “peaceful . . . in spite of some irregularities.”

Although Zedillo has claimed victory on the basis of partial returns, State Department spokeswoman Christine Shelly said Washington would not comment on the results until more votes were officially counted.

Still, it seemed clear that the Administration is prepared to work closely with Zedillo, a Yale-educated economist. Before the voting, a senior Administration official said that Washington expected a cooperative relationship regardless of which of the three top candidates won.

While insisting the United States had no favorite among the candidates, Shelly said the Administration was very concerned about the fairness of the balloting.

“Mexican electoral law provides for redress of voting irregularities, and we certainly would expect that all credible charges of this kind, including if there were any raised about fraud, that they would certainly be very fully adjudicated under that system,” she said.

In Los Angeles, and elsewhere in California, there was ample evidence Monday of the passions unleashed by Sunday’s watershed national elections.

The intense interest, and the different factions that have developed in Southern California among Mexican expatriates, are an indication of the region’s diversity. Los Angeles County, with perhaps 3 million people of Mexican ancestry, boasts the largest such population outside Mexico.

In recent years, Mexican politicians have made strong overtures to Mexican nationals in the United States, whose remittances home and other expenditures in Mexico are a crucial source of foreign currency. PRI officials have traveled here often, and Cardenas has made many trips to Los Angeles, most recently this spring.

The North American Free Trade Agreement, which took effect in January, has further served to bolster cross-border ties.

And some in Mexico have called for amending electoral laws to allow Mexicans abroad to cast absentee ballots at consulates, a practice that could create a huge new voting bloc.

Salvador Rizzo, a Mexican native who is a 22-year resident of Los Angeles, traveled to Mexico to observe the process firsthand. Rizzo, who heads the California chapter of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, said he was appalled that thousands of citizens nationwide were turned away because some voting booths ran out of ballots.

He and other PRI opponents denounced Monday’s results--and what they termed Zedillo’s premature claim of victory--during an event held outside the Mexican Consulate across from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles.

McDonnell reported from Los Angeles and Kempster from Washington.