Mexicans Vote in Stiff Challenge to One-Party Rule

Reciting a mantra for a change in the nation’s 68-year one-party rule, tens of millions of Mexicans from Tijuana to Yucatan voted Sunday in mostly peaceful local, state and federal elections that are expected to redraw this country’s political landscape.

The call 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 since the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, took power in 1929.

The latest opinion polls indicated that the PRI--the world’s oldest continuously ruling party--could lose its seven-decade majority in the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies, which would check the once unchallenged power of the Mexican presidency and redistribute legislative power among the nation’s two largest opposition parties.

Opinion polls also showed Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, with a large lead in the race for Mexico City mayor, far ahead of the PRI’s Alfredo del Mazo and Carlos Castillo Peraza of the conservative National Action Party, or PAN.

With just a fraction of the official vote counted Sunday evening, a syndicate of Mexican radio and television stations announced the results of the first of several “quick counts” conducted through the day.

Based on its scientific sample, the traditionally pro-PRI organization declared Cardenas “the virtual winner” of the Mexico City mayoral race, with 45.77% of the vote compared with 23.43% for Del Mazo and 18.5% for Castillo.

Cardenas, appearing before wildly cheering supporters soon after the quick-count results were announced, said those and other tallies showed that he and his party would win the most votes, but he stopped short of declaring victory.

Mexico’s newly independent Federal Election Institute, which started posting preliminary official results on the Internet when the last polls closed in Tijuana on Sunday night, said it expected to have clear trends in the race for Mexico City mayor around midnight and in the congressional contests later today.

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Final, official results in the races for the lower house of Congress and the first election for Mexico City’s powerful mayoralty in more than 70 years will not be known until later this week. Also pending is the final outcome in races for six gubernatorial posts, state legislative assemblies and scores of mayorships.

Even before the polls closed Sunday, most of Mexico’s political parties, the candidates and independent analysts 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.

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.

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On the backyard tennis court that his family provides as a polling station each year, Mauricio Gil replied when asked who 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.”

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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, where the mayoral post has been filled by presidential appointment for seven decades, 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 Rigoberto Cruz Mendoza, 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.

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But most of those interviewed were not PRI-istas. Most, in fact, said they threw their support behind the once-quixotic 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 a sea of 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.