Mexico Governors Meet Their Match: the Opposition, Public

He was one of the nation’s toughest governors, a veteran of top military and drug-fighting jobs. But Morelos state Gov. Jorge Carrillo Olea was defeated this week by an unexpected enemy: opposition parties and an angry public.

Carrillo Olea, a prominent figure in the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, resigned Friday after an unheard-of impeachment procedure got underway against him in his state’s Congress.

“[This] is a wake-up call for all bad governors,” said Gonzalo Altamirano, a top official of the opposition National Action Party, or PAN.

But Carrillo Olea wasn’t the only one hearing the alarm. As democracy takes hold after nearly seven decades of one-party rule, Mexicans are confronting a new concept: impeachment. Two other governors are facing investigations that could cost them their jobs as well.

The impeachment process goes to a central question of democracy: how to hire and fire one’s leaders. To some, the cases represent a new system of checks and balances championed by increasingly powerful opposition parties.

But other analysts see danger, not democracy. Critics fear that politicians will use impeachment to seek partisan advantage and settle old scores, tying up the country in bitter fights over the past. They are especially concerned about the two cases now before the national Congress.

“It is difficult to talk about democracy when all [opposition politicians] are doing is seeking to destroy the old order instead of hastening to build a new one,” political analyst Luis Rubio wrote in the daily Reforma newspaper.

Carrillo Olea’s resignation had been considered a foregone conclusion for some time. Opposition deputies were confident that they had the votes to oust him: The governor had been the target of increasing public protests over crime and drug-trafficking problems in his state.

But a political firestorm has blown up over the other two targets of investigations: Tabasco state Gov. Roberto Madrazo, accused of electoral irregularities and misuse of federal funds; and Yucatan Gov. Victor Cervera Pacheco, accused of violating laws on term limits. The governors--both PRI members--have denied wrongdoing.

The opposition faces an uphill battle in seeking to bring down the two governors because it has a majority in only one of the two houses in the national Congress. Carrillo Olea, in contrast, was under examination by his state’s Congress, which is controlled by the opposition. In Mexico, impeachment proceedings can begin at either level.

Even if they are not forced out, the governors of Tabasco and Yucatan may face spectacular proceedings. Under little-known regulations, the opposition-controlled lower house can name a panel that would be a rough equivalent of U.S. independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, experts say.

Until recently, impeachment was a rarity in Mexico. When the PRI held sway, unpopular governors were ousted only on quiet orders to resign from the president himself, always a PRI member.

Santiago Creel, a PAN member of Congress, sees the impeachment procedure--known here as a “political trial”--as a necessary part of Mexico’s new democratic institutions.

“This is fundamental in terms of establishing, in Mexico, a procedure that would allow us to demand accountability,” said Creel, whose committee oversees the process.

But the PRI sees an all-out attack on its stalwarts.

“Everything the opposition is doing is related to political work for the presidential succession” in 2000, Tabasco Gov. Madrazo recently said. He is considered a possible presidential candidate.

Creel insisted that his committee must act on requests for impeachment that are brought to Congress by citizen or political groups. Even if the process is bitter, he said, it is the law.