Mexico Opposition Making Electoral Gains in State Beset by Rebels

MEXICO CITY — The party that has ruled Mexico for 67 years was headed for defeat in several key races Tuesday in local elections that analysts called an important test of Mexican democracy carried out amid the nation’s latest guerrilla threat.

With more than three-fourths of the votes counted in impoverished Guerrero state, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was clinging to power in the resort city of Acapulco; the capital, Chilpancingo; and more than 50 other cities and towns.

But opposition candidates were leading in 18 mayoral races and threatening to gain a majority in the 46-member state legislature for the first time.

Election officials pledged final results later today in the state’s 76 mayoral contests, with legislative results due Sunday.

Despite expected PRI victories in a majority of the mayoral races, computer projections indicated that results from Sunday’s elections were the party’s worst showing in the troubled state. And as the party prepares for crucial federal, state and local polls next year--including the first direct election of Mexico City’s mayor--independent analysts and opposition leaders called the preliminary Guerrero results another indication that the PRI is in decline nationwide.

Publicly, PRI officials were celebrating their emerging victories and playing down the defeats. But the party quickly replaced several top officials in Guerrero.

“There is a national tendency that is obvious here in Guerrero that the PRI is becoming discredited,” said Rafael Arestegui Ruiz, a social science professor at the Autonomous University of Guerrero. “These votes are meant to punish the PRI.”

Less certain was the impact of the vote on the Popular Revolutionary Army, or EPR, the rebel force that has attacked police and soldiers throughout southern Mexico since it first appeared in Guerrero in June.

The EPR declared a cease-fire for the elections, and the Mexican army--deployed in force in the state since June--suspended patrols on election day. As a result, Sunday’s vote was one of the most peaceful in the history of the traditionally violent state.

But analysts said the simmering guerrilla threat helped explain Sunday’s record-low voter turnout--just less than 50%. And they agreed that elections alone--even free and fair ones--are not enough to channel support away from the guerrillas.

“The birth of the EPR is not a direct cause of clean or dirty elections,” said Carlos Montemayor, a specialist in Mexican guerrilla movements and author of a book about a 1970s peasant uprising in Guerrero. “In no country can the electoral process be sufficient to ensure a broad exercise of democracy. . . . Social injustice, hunger, political repression and the massacres of peasants provoke the guerrilla [movement].”

The analysts added, however, that opposition charges of ruling-party fraud in the Guerrero elections’ aftermath--if proved--could fuel popular support for the EPR in the months ahead.

The elections were the first held since the PRI approved sweeping internal reforms at a national assembly in Mexico City last month, and analysts considered the vote a test of the party’s ability to play fair.

But in the Acapulco mayoral race--one of the most important and one that the opposition had cast as a referendum on alleged ruling-party corruption--Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) candidate Zeferino Torreblanca cried foul Tuesday. As he ran a close second to the PRI’s apparent victor, Juan Salgado Tenorio, Torreblanca said he will file formal protests today alleging that the PRI used its control of state power to “shave” names from voters’ lists and manipulate government subsidies in areas where his party had strong support.

Arestegui said that, although the PRI’s new reforms helped make the Guerrero polls fairer than those in the past, his own studies indicated that about 10% of voters’ names failed to appear on official electoral lists. He also cited “hidden discrepancies--the unfair handling of public funds, for example,” that he said indicated the party’s reforms had been insufficient.

In any event, candidates from the populist PRD were leading PRI rivals in Iguala, one of the state’s largest cities, and 16 other mayoral races, many of which the PRI won by huge margins in the past. The National Action Party, a conservative opposition party, was on the brink of victory in the silver-manufacturing center of Taxco, which the PRI has never lost.

And Torreblanca’s 42% of the vote was the strongest opposition showing ever in Acapulco, where PRI officials conceded that past mayoral elections have been little more than “rubber stamps.”

Analysts said the low turnout could reflect a new sense of apathy among Mexican voters, who see few differences among the nation’s major political parties.