PRI Losing Mexico City Mayor Race; Legislative Grip Periled

Opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, whose 10-year crusade against Mexico’s long-ruling party became a rallying point for political change for millions of voters Sunday, was headed for a landslide victory early today in the first-ever election for Mexico City’s mayor.

Preliminary official returns and two independent quick counts also showed the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, likely to lose its seven-decade hold on the nation’s 500-seat Chamber of Deputies. Such a loss could be a severe blow to the PRI’s decades of unchallenged central authority and create more of a balance of political power than Mexico has seen since the PRI’s dynasty began in 1929.

PRI officials, however, insisted last night that they still were within sight of holding a clear majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress.

What was not in dispute Sunday night, as the nation’s capital filled with the yellow flags of the Cardenas camp, bleating horns and celebration, was the outcome of Mexico City’s historic mayoral vote.

Early official returns posted by Mexico’s newly independent Federal Electoral Institute here and on the World Wide Web gave the 63-year-old Cardenas--who is the son of a legendary president but who twice has failed to win the presidency himself--was leading with nearly double the votes of the PRI candidate.

With 30% of city’s total vote counted, Cardenas of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, was leading with about 47% of the vote, far ahead of the 25% posted for the PRI’s Alfredo del Mazo and the 17% for Carlos Castillo Peraza of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN. Those trends were confirmed in independent quick counts and exit polls.

Speaking nationwide from PRI headquarters Sunday night, a grim-faced Del Mazo issued what amounted to a rare, yet dignified, concession of defeat by the world’s oldest continuously ruling party.

“I want to recognize that the trend in the counting . . . favors the PRD to such an extent that it is difficult to imagine that this trend will be reversed,” Del Mazo said.

Addressing the civil engineer by training who, if the voting trend holds up, will take the helm of a city government next December that includes 120,000 employees and some of the most vexing urban problems on the globe, Del Mazo added: “I wish engineer Cardenas success in his position as head of the federal district’s government.”

Later, President Ernesto Zedillo congratulated Cardenas in a nationally televised address and offered to work with him in a “relationship of respectful cooperation.” The president said it was too early to comment on the outcome of the congressional elections.

As wildly cheering supporters filled the streets and plazas of the Mexican capital, which has been ruled by a succession of PRI appointees since 1929, Cardenas thanked Del Mazo for his statement and told reporters: “The Democratic Revolution Party will lead the next government of the federal district.”

Earlier, based on several independent quick counts that gave him up to 53% of the city’s vote, Cardenas looked toward the next presidential elections in three years. “We must prepare to win in the year 2000,” he told supporters over their cheers and mariachi medleys in a downtown Mexico City hotel.

The emerging victory of the once-quixotic leftist leader capped a day in which tens of millions of Mexicans from Tijuana to Yucatan recited a mantra for a change in the nation’s 68-year one-party rule, voting in mostly peaceful local, state and federal midterm elections that were expected to redraw this country’s political landscape.

Final, official results in the deputies’ races and the Mexico City election for mayor and city council will not be ratified until later this week. Also pending from Sunday’s vote is the outcome in races for six gubernatorial posts, state legislative assemblies, scores of mayorships and a quarter of the nation’s Senate.

With 42% of the vote counted, the PRI had won 36.4% of the vote in the national legislative races. The PAN had 28%; the PRD had won 26%.

The PRI needs 42.5% to maintain its legislative majority. PRI leaders predicted the party still could hold on to a narrow majority in the lower house.

PRI President Humberto Roque Villanueva cited internal party projections in asserting that his ruling party will emerge with 40% or more of the congressional vote.

“That shows that we are still the first political force in the country and clearly the majority party,” Roque said, adding that Cardenas’ emerging victory in the capital showed “the electorate decided he was the best. This is what democracy is about.”

But a large bloc of the federal deputy seats will be determined in the nation’s capital, where voters traditionally do not split their tickets. And the same opinion polls that showed Cardenas far ahead last week also indicated the PRI would narrowly lose its legislative majority for the first time in its history.

The voters’ clear call Sunday for change--for less corruption and more democracy, less crime and more accountability--came from the rich and the poor, the rural and the urban, judging from interviews with voters at dozens of polling stations throughout Mexico City and the nearby countryside during what analysts called the most competitive midterm polls under PRI rule.

Even before the polls had closed, most of Mexico’s political parties, the candidates and independent poll watchers already had praised the vote--marred only by isolated reports of voter intimidation in the poorer sections of the capital and confirmed reports of violence confined to the southeastern state of Chiapas, where sympathizers of an Indian rebel group burned about two dozen polling stations. The rebels had announced last week that they would boycott the balloting.

Together, the major players called the elections--the first since sweeping electoral reforms reduced the PRI’s monopoly on government and power--a watershed in Mexican democracy.

In the aftermath of the vote, California Secretary of State Bill Jones, who headed a 37-member observer team from the International Republic Institute to 16 Mexican states during the balloting, said: “From a technical standpoint, the reforms seem to be working. . . . I was impressed, and if this process continues throughout the counting . . . it will be a great step forward for democracy in Mexico.

“Strong, successful elections in Mexico are important for California and for Mexico,” he added.

As for voters, regardless of their party preference, they expressed a unanimous call for an end to Mexico’s high crime, official corruption and arrogance.

At the sprawling hillside villa in Mexico City’s wealthy Bosques de las Lomas neighborhood where PRI candidate Del Mazo cast his vote early Sunday morning, even the villa’s owner said he was not voting for the PRI this year.

On the backyard tennis court that his family provides as a polling station each year, Mauricio Gil replied when asked whom he would vote for: “Definitely not for the PRI. It’s enough already. The PRI’s policies are malfunctioning under all the corruption.

“Speaking in general, I think the population as a whole has a higher consciousness this year than in previous votes.”

Luz Maria Marin, a 60-year-old teacher who was voting in the heart of the city, agreed. She said she has always voted for the PRI.

“But unfortunately, I have gotten a totally negative picture of the PRI lately. And for the first time, I won’t vote for them,” she said. “When it all came down to it, what they did was invest in their own personal benefit and leave the country behind.”

Marin said she was voting for the PAN. Aerobics instructor Gustavo Navarro Serna said he voted for the PAN in the last presidential election, in 1994--a decision he said he now regrets. The 34-year-old Navarro, a voter in the same district as Marin, said he was voting for Cardenas and the PRD.

“We need a change, whether it is for good or bad,” he said. “We need another alternative. Education, social security, police and public security in general--it’s all really bad.”

So universal was the call for change in Mexico City that even voters casting ballots for the PRI’s Del Mazo said they were voting for him because they felt he would bring changes in his own party.

“We’re aware the PRI has made its mistakes, but this time we think they’ll work for a change,” said truck driver Rogoberto Cruz Medoza, 43.

“I have confidence in Del Mazo that he will change this city,” added 68-year-old homemaker Esperanza Garcia. “I’m a PRI-ista to the heart.”

But most of those interviewed decidedly were not PRI-istas. Most, in fact, said they threw their support behind Cardenas, a leftist who found strong support even among the city’s rich conservatives--and also among voters outside Mexico City.

“I’m voting for Cuauhtemoc,” said Jesus Velazquez, a 28-year-old factory worker in Tejalpa, a town in the state of Morelos, far outside the capital.

Reminded that Cardenas--a two-time presidential candidate widely believed to have been cheated of victory in 1988--was a candidate only in Mexico City, Velazquez explained that he had voted for Cardenas’ PRD in the local congressional race in the hope that Cardenas would dominate his party after a mayoral victory.

Among Cardenas’ unlikely supporters in his own upper-class neighborhood of Polanco were two well-dressed sisters who asked that they remain unidentified. The elderly women voted just moments before Cardenas marched down the street, trailed by photographers and well-wishers, to cast his ballot at noon Sunday.

“For Cardenas,” one of the sisters said when asked for whom she had voted.

Asked the most important issue of the day, the other sister replied: “That they change. That all of them change. That everything change. But most importantly, that they respect our vote for change.”

Times researcher Helena Sundman and intern Delia Lopez contributed to this report.