LATIN AMERICA : Mexico’s Political Parties Hunt for Treasure in Poor Michoacan

By most standards, Michoacan ranks among Mexico’s poorer states: bad roads, low income, high illiteracy, soaring unemployment. It is a major source of economic migration to California and the southern United States. And traditionally it has been a hotbed of Mexico’s political left.

But as Michoacan’s 1.8 million registered voters prepare for key state and local elections Sunday, the central state has emerged as a singular prize, a potential political treasure--or disaster--for all three of Mexico’s major parties.

In fact, in a year that most analysts agree is shaping Mexico’s political landscape into the next century, Michoacan’s elections, they say, will be climactic--by far the most critical of several state and local polls Sunday in Oaxaca, Puebla and elsewhere.

For starters, the race is too close to call. The latest opinion polls indicate that all three parties have a shot at the governorship and 113 mayoral seats.

Although all the polls put the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ahead in the hard-fought governor’s race, they vary widely on which of the nation’s two major opposition parties is running second: the National Action Party, known as PAN, or the Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD.

Of the two, the left-leaning PRD appears to have the most to lose. Sunday’s vote, political observers say, may well determine whether the party even survives.

The state is home to the PRD’s 1994 presidential candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, and the results of the last gubernatorial race between the PRI and PRD in 1991 were so close that the federal government intervened. It replaced the declared winner, from the PRI, with an interim appointee to quell the chaos. In a year when the PRD has placed a distant third in half a dozen key state contests, another third-place finish--this time in its traditional bastion--could well deliver a death blow.

The governing PRI also has much at stake in Michoacan. After 66 years of continuous and often authoritarian rule, the PRI has been badly wounded by an electoral reform effort by President Ernesto Zedillo and by Mexico’s worst economic crisis in more than a decade. The party that once bought or stole state governorships with impunity has suffered bitter defeats in largely clean contests in Jalisco, Guanajuato and Baja California--all three now in the hands of PAN. Yet another defeat in Michoacan, where the PRI has never given up the governor’s seat, would reinforce the party’s declining image.

Perhaps the one party with the most to gain Sunday is the center-right PAN, which is fast emerging as the change of choice for Mexico’s increasingly conservative body politic. The party’s victories this year have already boosted it toward its goal of wresting the presidency from the PRI in the year 2000.