Candidate Seen as Next President

For generations, the people of Guanajuato have voted with their feet. Fleeing the grinding poverty that six decades of one-party rule was unable or unwilling to relieve, they have picked strawberries in California and pecans in Texas, sending money home to dusty villages like this one in the central Mexican state.

Sunday, Guanajuato residents will cast a gubernatorial vote of national significance. In what is expected to be the cleanest election in modern Mexican history, they will choose between a traditional ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, loyalist and the man who, at this early date, is the odds-on favorite to become Mexico’s first opposition party president in the year 2000.

Polls show opposition candidate Vicente Fox, a lanky, gray-bearded vegetable packer from the industrial town of Leon, winning by a margin of 2 to 1. He is campaigning on a platform of economic development to create jobs in Guanajuato for the thousands of people who now go north every year in search of work.

A victory for the 52-year-old Fox would not only be revenge for a triumph that most Mexicans believe was denied him by vote fraud nearly four years ago, the governorship would also give Fox a bully pulpit for the right-leaning National Action Party’s message of state’s rights--and a forum for launching a presidential bid.

“Vicente is going to win the governorship, and it is impossible to stop him,” said Leticia Calzada, a lawmaker from the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, the third political force in the state. “This is going to have repercussions at the national level.”

Guanajuato is a state that generates tremendous wealth from silver mines, vegetables, pig farming, oil refining and leather-goods manufacturing.

But much of that wealth goes to Mexico City in taxes, leaving the state’s residents poor. Fox, along with a growing contingent of governors from other states, wants to change that.

Ignacio Vazquez Torres, a career politician who lives in Mexico City and who analysts say has coveted the governorship for 18 years, is the candidate chosen by a PRI state convention to try to stop Fox.

He acknowledges that he is running under a major handicap: the economic crisis, which voters blame on his party.

Vazquez Torres is also the first ruling-party candidate ever forced to run a campaign without the resources of the government behind him.

*

The blatant fraud that cost Fox the 1991 election caused such an outcry that then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari forced the ruling-party candidate to resign and appointed an interim governor from Fox’s party, known as PAN.

That governor last year persuaded the PRI-dominated state legislature to accept reforms that placed control of the elections completely in the hands of citizens who are not government officials, a first in Mexican history. The legislature also passed strict campaign-spending regulations that have cut down on handouts--from sandwiches to T-shirts--that have been part of Mexican campaign tradition.

“People come back from campaign rallies disconcerted,” said Father Guadalupe Arguelles, the village priest here. “They say, ‘They didn’t even give me a visor.’ That is probably more efficient, but it . . . is a cold, business-like vision of government.”

But Fox argues that a more business-like government is needed to combat the chronic economic problems of this state and to provide jobs for its residents.

“There is no more time to lose,” Fox told an auditorium full of enthusiastic students at the private University of the Bajio in his hometown. “Too many children do not have schools. Too many young people are saying goodby to their families to go on the painful adventure of working in the United States.”