U.S. Votes Could Sway Mexico’s Next Election

From a Maywood storefront on a strip of Slauson Boulevard punctuated with Spanish-language signs for fast-food joints and coin laundries, a group is plotting the next Mexican revolution.

Activists there are part of a movement to gain voting rights for millions of Mexicans living in the United States--enough voters to influence Mexico’s watershed elections next year.

“We can elect the next president of Mexico,” said Armando Moreno, a Compton boot salesman and part-time volunteer.

Many call the goal quixotic. There is strong opposition on both sides of the border, with critics in Mexico warning of U.S. interference in Mexican sovereignty.

“In today’s political context, it’s a longshot,” said Emilio Zebadua, a board member of the Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute.

But revolutions have been built on less, say supporters. Approval by Mexican lawmakers would shift the dynamics of next year’s national elections, a contest that may mark a turning point in Mexican history. It also would produce an extraordinary spectacle: the conversion of Southern California into a campaign battlefield for Mexican candidates.

Pro-vote volunteers in Southern California embody the range of Mexican immigrants, from gardeners and factory hands to business owners. Undaunted by the many hurdles that remain, organizers are planning a national meeting in San Antonio next month.

“We contribute to the well-being of Mexico, why shouldn’t we participate in its political life?” asked Carlos Olamendi, an Orange County restaurant owner.

While most of the activists are longtime U.S. residents, many with children born here, they maintain strong civic and emotional links to their homeland. They have garnered considerable support among immigrant organizations here, as well as from political groups in Mexico.

“The only thing stopping our compatriots living abroad from voting in 2000 is political will,” said Mexican Sen. Mario Saucedo of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party. He was speaking to an enthusiastic crowd at the Maywood headquarters of the Pro Vote Mexico 2000 Committee, the volunteer group spearheading the effort in conjunction with sister organizations stretching from New York to Texas to Washington state.

Mexicans are seeking an electoral right that many others--including U.S. citizens living abroad--have long enjoyed. South Africans, Armenians and Colombians are among those in the United States who can vote in their homelands’ elections.

In Mexico, critics view the prospect as a source of foreign manipulation and destabilization, at a time when the nation is moving gradually toward democracy.

“It seems incongruous to me that people would be voting for someone who doesn’t represent them where they live,” said Diego Valades, one of two former Mexican attorneys general who authored a recent book blasting the idea.

Distraction From U.S. Politics Feared

On this side of the border, Latino activists fear it would draw attention away from U.S. elections--just as Latino voting rates are soaring.

“The obvious concern is that a campaign by Mexican candidates in the United States could be a great distraction and source of division in Mexican-origin communities, at precisely the time when Latino leaders want to increase Mexican participation in our elections here,” said David Ayon, a research associate at the Center for the Study of Los Angeles at Loyola University.

Others worry about the backlash created by high-visibility Mexican campaigns, with marches, rallies and broad Spanish-language advertising.

“The vote of Mexicans abroad could unleash new or worse anti-immigrant measures in the United States,” said Jose Angel Pescador Osuna, Mexico’s consul general in Los Angeles.

The landmark constitutional amendments necessary to allow absentee voting have already been approved. But implementing legislation is still needed. Opposition groups plan to take up the question in March, when the Mexican Congress reconvenes. For the voting plan to be approved for the 2000 election, the Congress must act by July.

Even consideration of the measure by lawmakers is a testament to the growing political clout of Mexicans in the United States, once reviled in their homeland as traitors.

Today, the growing strands of Mexico’s political structure are vying for the support of Mexico’s immigrants, who send home at least $5 billion a year. Trips to Los Angeles are now de rigueur for political candidates. These days, no major party dares sneer publicly at Mexicans abroad.

Nonetheless, out-of-country voting would be a powerful new factor in an election already expected to be momentous. Many observers believe there is a chance the long-dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party--called the PRI--will lose the presidency for the first time since it emerged as a unifying force a decade after the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1917.

Crucial questions remain. Among the most fundamental: Who would be eligible to vote? What would be the registration process? How and where would voters cast ballots?

Cost would certainly be a major factor. Creating an electoral infrastructure in the United States--including voter identification cards and thousands of polling places--would cost between $76 million and $350 million, according to official estimates.

Even so, a special panel appointed by Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute said in a November report that the landmark change was plausible.

The report’s findings stunned those who had assumed the most workable plan would be to allow out-of-country voting in 2000 by only a limited number of immigrants--those who were born in Mexico and had not become U.S. citizens.

Instead, the report concluded it was feasible to allow voting by all adult Mexican nationals, as well as everyone newly eligible for Mexican nationality--including about 2.7 million U.S.-born children of Mexican parents. Millions of U.S. residents of Mexican heritage are now eligible for Mexican nationality under separate constitutional changes approved last year.

That could add up to more than 10 million new Mexican voters--99% of them living in the United States, according to the commission. They would make up as much as 15% of Mexico’s voters, with about half living in California--concentrated in and around Los Angeles County.

That prospect has energized pro-vote advocates working out of the Maywood storefront. In recent months they have gathered signatures, badgered consulates, held protest meetings and hosted Mexican lawmakers.

“It is time our views and interests are represented in Mexico,” said Felipe Aguirre, a paralegal who is president of the local group. “For too long we have been treated like second-class citizens.”

The degree of commitment is itself revolutionary. Mexican immigrants--unlike Cubans, Irish and other groups--have traditionally been viewed as largely apathetic to the politics of their home country. But that is changing.

Many activists, like Aguirre, are naturalized U.S. citizens and longtime residents. Aguirre, 47, arrived in the United States with his family when he was 13 and attended high school in Chicago, where his father was a steelworker. He came to Los Angeles as a newspaper reporter for a now-defunct Eastside weekly and became involved in union and Democratic Party politics.

He visits Mexico often and is a partisan of Mexico’s Democratic Revolutionary Party.

“I don’t see any conflict at all,” Aguirre said of voting in both the Mexican and U.S. presidential elections next year. “It’s an exercise in democracy.”

Supporters include people connected to all major Mexican parties.

Armando Moreno, the Compton boot merchant, supports the conservative National Action Party, whose right-wing views are an anathema to Aguirre and others. Yet all are working together toward the goal of enfranchisement.

“This is not a question of party loyalty,” said Moreno, also a naturalized U.S. citizen. “On the matter of the vote, we are united.”

Allies Found in Home-State Groups

Organizers have pulled in key allies, including influential home-state associations. The group representing the northern state of Zacatecas, a major source of immigrants, was an important player in the victory last July of Gov. Ricardo Monreal, of the opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party. He is an avid supporter of absentee voting.

“It is only natural that we Mexicans here should be able to vote,” said Victor Manuel Sanchez, local president of a federation of dozens of U.S.-based fraternal groups tied to Zacatecas.

Some see the movement as part of an inexorable expansion of human rights. Absentee voting is already available for many foreign citizens living outside their home countries. Mexicans make up by far the largest foreign-born group in the United States.

“Should the Mexican authorities pass a law permitting external voting, it would serve as an example and model for the world of the enfranchisement of such a large population abroad,” said Richard Soudriette, president -of the International Foundation for Election Systems, a nonprofit research group based in Washington, D.C., that monitors elections worldwide.

The absentee voting proposal has the outright support of only one major Mexican political faction: the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party. The conservative National Action Party, the nation’s second political force, is split. The ruling PRI is widely viewed as adverse to broad absentee voting rights, unnerved by a new electoral front to the north, far from its control.

One widely repeated assumption is that immigrants in the United States would vote against the ruling party. But the PRI, through its consular networks, has close ties to social clubs and other Mexican American civic groups, relationships that could be mobilized to the party’s benefit.

That said, Pescador, the Mexican consul, voiced strong reservations.

“The Mexican community in the United States has more serious worries than the vote, such as how to find a good job, getting a good education for their children, having better opportunities or being safer--but the vote to elect a president in Mexico is not a worry,” wrote Pescador, who provided a two-page written response to questions. “They live here, vote here, pay taxes here.”

One likely outcome, observers say, is a compromise plan in which only registered Mexican voters temporarily living in the United States--for work, travel or schooling, for example--could cast ballots. Under that plan, about 1 to 2 million Mexicans living abroad would be eligible.

But Southern California activists oppose such a compromise.

“Why shouldn’t we be able to vote for the president of Mexico?” asked Pilar M. de Ramirez, 87. She, along with her husband, Vicente Valencia Ramirez, 85, were among a group of naturalized U.S. citizens who regained their status as Mexican nationals during a ceremony this month at the Mexican Consulate in Los Angeles.

“We want to work to help our beloved Mexico,” she said.

And who would Ramirez vote for after residing for 40 years in the United States? “Not for the PRI,” she said. “I think it’s time someone else had a chance.”