State Elections in Mexico May Signal Nation’s Future

Policemen glowered inside the village hall when Luis Correa Mena and his road show rolled into town last weekend.

It wasn’t much: a battered Dodge flatbed that opened into a stage, a generator, a Volkswagen Beetle with a megaphone on the roof and a 20-foot banner urging, “Correa for Governor. Right Now!”

But in Correa’s bid to unseat Mexico’s ruling party in Yucatan’s state elections Sunday, Chemax, home to 6,300 Maya Indians, was a special stop in a race that will help shape Mexico’s political future.

After allegedly fraudulent local polls nearly a decade ago, a villager from Correa’s National Action Party, or PAN, was gunned down by police during an opposition protest. The man’s best friend was jailed for three years for taking the dying man to the hospital. The police have occupied the village hall ever since. And the man who was the ruling-party governor then is Correa’s opponent now.

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So when the bearded and bellowing Correa danced onto the stage with the party’s national president, their challenge to what Correa calls “the politics of the cavemen” was clear.

Hoisting a black coffin bearing the symbol of Mexico’s long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, Correa boomed to the applause of several hundred--the dead PAN worker’s best friend among them--”Chemax is the bastion of a new age of democracy, freedom and respect.”

The coffin may have been premature: Opinion polls show Correa and PAN either in a dead heat or trailing the PRI and its Old Guard candidate, 59-year-old Victor Cervera Pacheco.

In a year that many political analysts predict will mark the beginning of the end of the PRI’s 66 years of rule, Sunday’s vote in Yucatan and in a gubernatorial election in the central state of Guanajuato are landmarks on Mexico’s political landscape.

Polls from Guanajuato indicated that Vicente Fox, the PAN’s charismatic candidate, is considered an almost sure winner.

A victory would bolster Fox’s expected bid to replace President Ernesto Zedillo in the year 2000 and add to the ruling party’s woes after its bitter statewide loss to PAN in Jalisco in February.

Opinion polls also show that voters on Sunday will deal a blow to Mexico’s political left. The opposition, populist Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, is fielding candidates in Yucatan and Guanajuato, but it is running far behind the PRI and PAN in both states.

Sunday is especially important to the conservative PAN. The right-of-center party is the nation’s oldest opposition force, yet it has never held more than a few state governments at a time. With six state legislatures and three governorships up for grabs this year--and the ruling party hurt by internal splits and a national economic crisis--Yucatan and Guanajuato are keys to PAN’s hope of building a national base this year.

Analysts and opposition leaders said the ruling party also has much to lose.

Facing defeat in Guanajuato’s gubernatorial race, they said, the ruling party’s hard-liners are so desperate for a win in Yucatan--where the legislature and governorship are on the line--that they will stop at nothing to achieve it. Those stakes make the vote a key test of President Zedillo’s promise of electoral reform.

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Analysts have, in fact, billed Yucatan’s elections for governor, the state legislature and 106 mayoralties as a clear-cut confrontation between Mexico’s political future and its past.

They described the race between the 35-year-old Correa and Cervera as a grudge match between an opposition reformer and a powerful ruling-party fixture whom opposition and PRI reformers call “the dinosaur of dinosaurs.”

For Correa the election is partly personal: His father is widely believed to have been robbed of victory in fraud-tainted gubernatorial elections in Yucatan a quarter-century ago.

An open nominating process is a key element of the PRI’s promised internal reforms, but Cervera was not selected at an open party convention, as his counterpart in Guanajuato was. Party sources said he and his hard-line supporters blocked the convention.

“Cervera’s group is traditional and always has acted that way,” said PRI member Victor Manzanilla Shaffer, a former Yucatan governor himself and now part of the PRI’s reform faction. “There are other groups in the PRI that did not agree with his selection. But Cervera has always been heavy-handed and authoritarian. In his eyes, what is not Cervera’s does not exist.”

So analysts here in Mexico’s turbulent southeast, where the local PRI briefly rebelled against Zedillo’s federal authority during an election dispute in nearby Tabasco in January, said that post-election violence is a risk in Yucatan after preliminary results begin coming in Sunday night.

A narrow PRI victory and opposition cries of fraud, they said, could fill the streets with protesters; a narrow PRI defeat could trigger another internal PRI rebellion and again test Zedillo’s clout within his party.

“If Yucatan returns to post-electoral problems, this will have direct repercussions in Mexico City--with President Zedillo, with the party and with the opposition,” Manzanilla said.

Civic and human-rights groups have already given the Yucatan campaign low marks.

“Guanajuato’s gubernatorial election will likely be fair, but Yucatan’s upcoming elections already teem with irregularities,” said Cecilia Montes de Oca, whose Family Civic Front was among the watchdog groups monitoring the campaign.

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The civic groups said local PRI bosses have used their financial power to shower the state with gifts. PRI bosses in Chemax have handed out everything from chickens and beer to shirts and aprons in an effort to woo women’s votes, a newly awakened force in villages where thousands of men have left for tourism-related jobs in Cancun, off the country’s eastern coast.

Many voters, particularly in remote villages such as Chemax, reported that they were threatened against voting for PAN. And a detailed study by the Mexican Academy of Human Rights showed that coverage of the campaign by Yucatan’s mostly pro-government media favored the ruling party over the opposition by as much as 9 to 1.

“If the PRI wins in Yucatan,” said Correa, whose party already controls the state capital and four other municipalities, “it will mean a victory for the dark side. It will mean Mexico is not yet ready for real change.”

Correa was 9 years old when his father, then the elected PAN mayor in the state capital of Merida, was officially declared the loser in a gubernatorial election many believed he won. His father accepted the defeat.

If there is fraud this time, Correa vowed, he and his supporters will take to the streets, “peacefully.”

Besides victory, Correa said in an interview, his goal has been “to generate a new social culture” in Yucatan’s impoverished villages.

In a state that is 90% dependent on federal subsidies, Correa denounced what sociologists here call “a culture of submission.” And he sought to harness what former Gov. Manzanilla characterized as a widespread negative vote.

“The people are tired,” Manzanilla said. “They want change.”

For the PRI’s Cervera, who did not respond to requests for an interview, the campaign message has been more straightforward. At one rally last weekend in the tiny pueblo of Kopoma (population 1,400), Cervera delivered it in less than three minutes.

First, for nearly an hour before he arrived, Cervera’s campaign staff gave away hundreds of T-shirts, baseball caps, fans, aprons and other gifts to villagers gathered in the square.

Then, Cervera stood silent on a stage in the town’s basketball court while the ruling-party mayor reminded his villagers that it was Cervera--during his years as appointed interim governor from 1984 to 1989--who gave Kopoma telephone service. It was Cervera who built their primary school and the basketball court where they were sitting.

The mayor then asked Cervera for a secondary school, a sports camp and other projects. During his brief speech, Cervera pledged to build them--”not just for Kopoma, but because this is part of modernizing Yucatan as a whole.”

Cervera’s pitch of progress and patronage was based largely on his unusual stature in the race.

Even by traditional PRI standards, the former governor is an anomaly under Mexico’s state and federal constitutions, which bar officeholders--even the president--from seeking the same office twice. Opponents say Cervera, who was minister of agrarian reform in the Cabinet of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, urged the Yucatan legislature to modify the state constitution to permit his candidacy. The constitution now specifies that interim appointees can seek the same post again.

Such tactics, after years of tainted elections here, have bred cynicism among many of Yucatan’s nearly 750,000 registered voters.

In Chemax, a young carpenter named Jose Domingo Kamal Be--the PAN supporter who was jailed for taking his dying friend to the hospital in 1986--expressed that attitude.

Asked at Correa’s campaign rally last weekend whether PAN actually could win Sunday, he smiled and said: “The PAN always wins. They just never count our votes. But this time, I feel a change is near.”

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The Split

The long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party still holds the governorship in 27 of Mexico’s 31 states. It has been successfully challenged by the National Action Party in four others. This year, it faces legislative challenges in six states and gubernatorial contests in three, including Sunday’s vote in Yucatan and Guanajuato.

Governorships Hold by...

Institutional Revolutionary Party

National Action party

Governor’s races in 1995

Source: Mexican government’s Federal Election Institute