Mexican Vote to Test Ruling Party Reforms

As a closing campaign act for elections today that will test Mexico’s President Ernesto Zedillo and his ruling party as never before, Eugenio Ruiz Orozco’s final rally in the capital of the state of Jalisco had it all.

In the state where mariachi music was born, the would-be ruling-party governor had hired the nation’s top two bands. A modern fleet of buses packed Guadalajara’s Plaza Juarez with thousands of rural peasants. Trucks brought banners, chairs and a sound system to cover an acre. There were free lunches and free Cokes; free T-shirts, free baseball caps, free flags and free buttons--all bearing Ruiz Orozco’s name.

A hot-air balloon towered overhead. A helicopter circled. Local television and radio trucks set up ground stations, and a 50-foot stage backdrop promised, “Together, we will build a New Jalisco.”

But behind the scenes in the machine that has secured the vote for Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in hundreds of state elections during its 66-year grip on power, there were clear signs of fraying--a glimpse of a historic transition that many analysts predict will begin unfolding on Mexico’s political landscape today.

Subtly, it seemed, the gubernatorial candidate was distancing himself from his party. His latest flags didn’t bear the party’s name or symbol. His closing speech sounded more like those of the opposition than of the party in power: “We are going to win because we will build a new Jalisco that responds to the demands of the people, the women . . . the youth . . . an entire generation of frustration.”

Until the moment he took the stage at the rally last week, it was unclear whether Ruiz Orozco even wanted the president of the ruling party, Maria de los Angeles Moreno, beside him. There were no references to Moreno in his prepared text; he ad-libbed several lines when she turned up, stressing her promise to radically reform the party that has presided over Jalisco’s recent years of rising violence and unemployment.

The reason was in the numbers--and in the local impact of severe national economic and political crises only two months into a presidential term that Zedillo vowed would usher in a new era of democracy.

As Ruiz Orozco staged his spectacle, his leading opponent, 36-year-old Alberto Cardenas Jimenez of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), was drawing thousands of supporters to a campaign run on a shoestring and selling campaign caps and cups for several pesos each.

And the latest opinion polls were unequivocal, showing Cardenas and the PAN winning 56% of the vote to 36% for Ruiz Orozco and the ruling PRI.

As Jalisco’s 3 million voters head to the polls--nearly half of them here in Mexico’s second-largest city--to elect a new governor, a state legislature and more than 100 local mayors, this conservative state will become Ground Zero in a critical first test of the ruling party’s ability to win cleanly.

Jalisco’s is the first of four elections scheduled over the next few months in states where the opposition PAN--the nation’s second-largest party--enjoys widespread support. A defeat here, party insiders fear, could bolster the opposition in the other states and ultimately confirm the dire predictions of those such as gubernatorial hopeful Cardenas, who flatly declared the PRI “a living corpse.”

So great is the concern within the ruling party that last week Zedillo had to defend his reform policies before the party’s national executive committee. “I want to say most clearly,” the 43-year-old president told a leadership of skeptics and loyalists alike, “I refute those who think that the democratic mission of Ernesto Zedillo is to liquidate the PRI.”

Even more urgently, today’s elections will test Zedillo’s commitment to electoral reform, his ability to enforce it and the strength of what the president billed as a landmark national accord signed by the country’s four largest political parties last month. That agreement is aimed at avoiding the type of post-election conflict that has violently polarized the southern states of Chiapas and Tabasco.

Many analysts in the Mexican capital have even linked the elections to Zedillo’s sudden crackdown on the leadership of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas. Several political columnists speculated Saturday that Zedillo ordered the arrest of five top guerrilla leaders and deployed the Mexican army in towns throughout the southern state last week partly to placate hard-line PRI conservatives--a faction that opposition leaders fear could turn to street violence if the ruling party loses in Jalisco.

The mere hint last month that Zedillo planned to force the resignation of the state’s ruling party governor in Tabasco sparked an unprecedented street rebellion by the PRI’s local rank and file. The opposition and independent poll watchers asserted that the PRI had won state elections last November through traditional ruling party fraud. Amid fears of a similar ruling party rebellion or violent opposition protests when the final tallies are announced in Jalisco early in the week, political analysts in Guadalajara and Mexico City agreed that the stakes are higher here.

“These elections are definitely a test for Zedillo, but it’s not only that,” said Jorge Zepeda Patterson, editor of Guadalajara’s most independent daily newspaper, Siglo 21. “There’s no way out for Zedillo in these elections.

“If the National Action Party wins, the election will end with a lot of resentment in the PRI. They’ll see it as a rejection by Zedillo (for failing to win by any means necessary), and they’ll mobilize in the streets. If the PRI wins, the opposition will see it as a theft by Zedillo, and they’ll mobilize in the streets. There’s tremendous resentment on both sides already.”

Behind that apparent lose-lose situation is Jalisco’s long history of regional pride and recent years of growing resentment toward the federal government in a state that has been plagued by violence. For Zedillo, this electoral test could not have come in a worse place.

It has been just three years since the streets of Guadalajara literally exploded. Gasoline leaking from an underground pipeline owned by the state oil company ignited on April 22, 1992, triggering a series of explosions that killed more than 200 people.

The blasts shattered Guadalajara’s confidence in the federal government. So great was the outrage that the state’s ruling party governor was removed and its mayor temporarily jailed. But today, no one has been convicted for what most Guadalajarans see as a state crime, and the federal government announced earlier this month that the case is closed.

One year later, the Roman Catholic cardinal of a state that is one of Mexico’s most religious was gunned down in a shootout at the Guadalajara airport. Few here believe the government’s version that Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo was caught in cross-fire between rival drug gangs. In the state that spawned an uprising by armed revolutionaries from the clergy in 1926, many are deeply embittered that the gunmen who killed the cardinal remain at large.

Such traumas have produced fertile ground for candidate Cardenas and the PAN. “Of course, the people are still thinking about it,” Cardenas told The Times last week. “The people believe these cases should be reopened and justice done. . . . Crime and accountability are important to the people now.”

A dramatic illustration came as Cardenas spoke. The interview at an outdoor cafe in Guadalajara was interrupted briefly when police in bulletproof vests and armed with machine guns screeched to a halt at a bank across the street. An armed robbery was in progress, sending Cardenas’ sole bodyguard scrambling to hustle the candidate from the terrace into the cafe.

Ruling party candidate Ruiz Orozco attempted to capitalize on popular insecurity during the campaign. “Jalisco wants certainty and confidence. Jalisco is not for experiments, and even less for invented tomorrows,” he told the huge crowd at his campaign close, invoking the PRI’s traditional appeal for security and the status quo. “We’re going to win because Jalisco rejects extremist positions that lead nowhere.”

The most extensive and objective opinion poll conducted near the close of the campaign indicated that Jalisco’s deep conservative streak is no longer working in favor of the PRI. The poll by Louis Harris Intermerc, commissioned by Siglo 21, showed that most people believed that the ruling party had conducted the best campaign. The PRI also had the best name recognition. But the poll also predicted that the ruling party is going to lose, and badly--particularly in Guadalajara, one of the few cities where Zedillo himself lost in last August’s presidential election.

“In Jalisco, we have particular grievances with the national government,” said Siglo 21 editor Zepeda, who stressed that he hired Harris for the poll because other surveys are widely believed to be biased toward the opposition. “There is a general feeling that national decisions have gone against the interests of this region.”

Zepeda, whose newspaper won its credibility in 1992 with an expose on the dangers of underground gas lines published four hours before the explosions, conceded that the Harris poll hit “like a bomb” when he published it at the peak of a campaign that the opposition charged was “a dirty war.”

The bitterly fought campaign was marked by smears that bode ill for hopes of a vote that will be clean and acceptable to all parties. Slick, anonymous booklets were published picturing the PAN’s Guadalajara mayoral candidate with a giant swastika drawn behind him. Small stickers were circulated bearing the PAN logo on a car skidding off the road above the words: “A turn to the right is dangerous.” Both were references to the party’s deep conservatism, which critics have charged borders on neo-fascism.

For most analysts and independent observers, key to the success of today’s vote are the fairness and openness both of the voting and of a counting process that will probably last well into Monday. Privately, even Zedillo’s aides concede that the process itself and post-election peace are far more important to the president than which party wins.

Given Mexico’s history of ruling party politics marked by election fraud and misuse of state resources, few at Guadalajara’s grass roots expect a fair fight. Several independent poll-watching groups have said they will deploy to at least half the state’s polling booths today. And at least three independent opinion-research companies have been hired to take exit polls and make quick counts that are expected to yield results soon after midnight tonight.

“Well, the PAN will win on Election Day,” said the front desk clerk at Hotel Palacio, a structure rebuilt from one badly damaged in the 1992 blasts. “But on Monday, the PRI will be in the governor’s palace.”

Taxi driver Alphonso Ruiz agreed. He too supports the opposition--a difficult choice, because he belongs to one of several powerful labor groups that all publicly back the PRI. He shows his protest by hanging a PAN sticker on his ashtray, although he removes it at the end of each day.

“The people are sick and tired. They’re frustrated and furious, and everyone I know is voting PAN,” he said. “But will their votes be counted? We’ll see.”

Ramiro Mora is a member of the same union. But his fears ran the other way. He decided to opt for the status quo. “I guess this guy’s better,” he said, pointing to a Ruiz Orozco poster.

“But the PAN will never accept this. . . . Even if the PRI wins clean, nobody will believe it.”