Opposition Leader Elected in Baja : Mexico: Hector Teran’s victory in governor’s race increases pressure for reforms by national ruling party. Voting is peaceful, with 80% turnout.

It was Hector Teran’s turn to make history Monday.

With his victory in the closely watched Baja California gubernatorial elections, the courtly, 64-year-old senator culminated a long career that parallels the rise of his opposition party from token outsider status to regional dominance and national prominence.

Teran held a commanding 51% of the vote Monday, leading his rival from Mexico’s ruling party by nine percentage points with two-thirds of the ballots counted. Baja, where Teran’s National Action Party (PAN) won its historic first governorship six years ago, became the first Mexican state to elect a second governor from the opposition party. Sunday’s vote echoed all the way to Mexico City, increasing pressure on the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) to reform both itself and a national power structure in which the PAN has become a genuine challenger.

Despite the scope of the triumph, despite his decades of dutiful candidacies that were doomed by the ruling party’s refusal to share power, Teran offered words of conciliation to cheering supporters at a hotel here late Sunday night.

“I call here tonight for all of us to continue to participate, the National Action Party and other parties, in the construction of this democracy,” Teran said. “I come to the government of Baja California without resentment for anyone. Whatever happened and was said in the campaign is forgotten in terms of personal attacks. I come to govern absolutely for all, without regard to political insignias.”

The PAN victory was impressive in content and form, defying the press and pundits, some of whom tended toward favoring the PRI and predicted a tight race. Adding to the weight of the victory, PAN candidates easily retained control of Tijuana, the state’s largest city, and gained the City Hall of this desert capital, a ruling party bastion, for the first time. The polling places were calm, busy and well-guarded, avoiding the violence and disputes that have erupted in other Mexican state elections this year.

“This was really a triumph of the citizenry,” said Victor Alejandro Espinosa, a political analyst at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana. “It was an exemplary electoral process.”

Other than a PRI upset in Ensenada, the vote reconfirmed the conservative opposition party’s strength among its core supporters in the urban, middle-class north of Mexico. And many observers said it amounted to a referendum of approval for the pioneering policies of outgoing Gov. Ernesto Ruffo Appel: He reformed the election process, cracked down on the strongman leaders of ruling party unions and squatters’ organizations, and demanded more resources from an often hostile federal government.

The PRI concentrated much of its campaign on vitriolic, sometimes personal criticism of Ruffo, who was perceived as vulnerable because his final years have been marked by violence related to drugs and politics. But Teran suggested that the voters rejected that attack strategy.

“This is the recognition that Gov. Ruffo has been a leader accepted by the majority,” Teran said. “The vote represents decisive proof that the manner in which Baja has been governed, within the limitations of economics and circumstances of this administration, has the approval of the majority.”

The aftermath for the PRI looks grim in Baja and beyond. After an uninspired campaign offering a familiar litany of promises, the state party is racked by division and dominated by an archaic faction that voters associate with Old Guard corruption, according to analysts.

“This just deepens the crisis which the party has experienced since 1989,” when the PAN took power, Espinosa said. “It has to fundamentally reconsider its strategies.”

On a national level, the weak showing in Baja could help bring down the embattled president of the party, Maria de los Angeles Moreno, who was appointed in the waning months of the Administration of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, according to analysts. Moreno and other national leaders came to Baja to campaign with their candidates in recent weeks.

“A reform of the PRI at the national level is urgently needed,” Espinosa said. “There is a clamor within the party that is being heard for a new leadership that is not so anchored in the Salinas Administration.”

Reform of the ruling party entails a reform of the Mexican state and of the national party system, Espinosa said. Although Mexican President Ernesto Zedillo grew up in Baja, he kept his distance from the race and may actually benefit from the image of peaceful pluralism in the border state.

The national ruling party leadership issued a statement Monday expressing its “recognition of the citizenry who attended the polls to support the candidates of their preference, and gave a lesson in civics that contributed to the enrichment of the democratic life of our nation.”

The reaction in Mexicali Sunday night was more terse, with gubernatorial contender Francisco Perez Tejada and other candidates avoiding the press after Teran declared victory. In Tijuana, a local television crew that tried to interview the PRI’s municipal president after spotting him on the street alleged that the official and his bodyguards threatened them and roughed them up.

In less important legislative and municipal elections held elsewhere Sunday, the ruling party trailed the PAN in the state of Aguascalientes and led the vote count in Oaxaca, Veracruz and Zacatecas. Press reports estimated turnout as low as 30% in Oaxaca.

In contrast, almost 80% of the voters in Baja went to the polls, state officials said. That kind of citizen participation is fundamental to the democratization of Mexico, Teran said in an interview with The Times shortly before the election. He pledged to overhaul electoral law to institute ballot referendums and direct elections for attorney general, which would be unprecedented in Mexico.

Teran also gave top priority to one of the most urgent and dangerous tasks facing the new chief executive: fighting crime and corruption caused by the drug cartels that have made Baja one of the world’s most lucrative smuggling corridors. Teran proposes a new secretariat of justice to overhaul the judiciary and prison system, a public security council of prosecutors and police chiefs, and a new academy to professionalize the state police.

“These are very corrupt forces that over time have become a mafia with the cartels,” he said. “We cannot base the fight against drug trafficking on salaries, but rather on the moral sense of the fight.”

Cross-border issues such as drugs and trade require a closer relationship between Baja California and California, said Teran, who calls for “internationalizing the economy” of Baja in partnership with its northern neighbors.

“We have to take concrete actions with San Diego, Los Angeles, San Francisco, to join forces,” he said. “We can produce and they can market the product. We need alliances to take advantage of the North American Free Trade Agreement.”

Teran, a businessman from Mexicali, has a long history in the PAN. He is a veteran of an era when he and other opposition leaders lost fraud-tainted elections and were even briefly jailed over protests against the government. The Mexicali faction of the party, including newly elected Mayor Eugenio Elorduy, has an ideologically conservative, hard-charging reputation. But Teran represents a more pragmatic, conciliatory current.

His final words as he declared victory Sunday night appeared to be directed at those who perceive his party as insensitive to the poor and intolerant of other ideologies.

“We extend the hand of friendship and service of a person who aspires to govern without hate or interest in political groups, but with a spirit of service to all Baja Californians,” he said.