PRI Gives Itself a Make-Over

The beauty contest bore all the hallmarks of a beloved Latin tradition. Fifteen women sashayed in evening gowns. There was a sash for Miss Congeniality, and an entertainer in tight black pants lip-synced “La Vida Loca.”

But this was no normal pageant.

“What does the Institutional Revolutionary Party mean to you?” the emcee asked Contestant No. 3 inside the Iztacalco neighborhood gym. Smiling nervously, she replied: “It’s a party that has known how to bring progress. It will always help women advance. It cares about us.”

In its struggle to survive, the world’s longest-ruling political party has come to this: Miss PRI.

The pageant in this gritty Mexico City barrio is one small example of the dramatic make-over that is transforming the institution that has dominated Mexican life this century. What happens to the PRI will determine the future of Mexico itself.

Forget the days of one-party arrogance. Confronted with a new democratic era, the PRI is pursuing voters with a vengeance, sponsoring beauty pageants and health fairs and drenching the airwaves with publicity.

Its boldest reform is Sunday’s presidential primary, which marks nothing less than the end of the PRI’s most important tradition: the dedazo, through which the all-powerful Mexican president designated the party candidate, who then won, election after election, for 70 years.

The stakes are huge. The bitterly contested primary could split and destroy the party. Or, if it goes well, the race could revive the PRI, making it a stunning exception to the list of official parties, such as the Soviet Communists, that have lost power with the onset of democracy.

“This would show that the PRI’s capacity to adjust is greater than that of any government party in the world,” said Jose Antonio Crespo, a political scientist in Mexico City. “I’d like to see any [Communist] party in Eastern Europe holding an American-style primary.”

The PRI campaign is not just about creating a new image. The PRI is struggling to shape a true political party from what has been a vast welfare institution.

Through its corporatist structure, similar to a union system, the party penetrated nearly every Mexican office, factory and farm. The PRI had representatives in every state, every town, nearly every block.

“Go to any small town in the middle of nowhere, and you see two signs: Coca-Cola and the PRI logo,” said political scientist Agustin Basave, a member of the party’s reform wing.

On the national level, the party was pervasive in a different way. It assumed functions that would correspond to Congress, the courts or the media in the United States and doled out power among PRI factions. It brought a political stability unmatched in coup-prone Latin America. And for years, the authoritarian party won popularity by bringing development to a poor country.

These days, though, the PRI is battling to regain a grip that has weakened due to economic crises, greater democracy and a more educated population.

Maria Rosa Vazquez, 45, is an example of the disaffection.

For much of her life, Vazquez was a PRI stalwart. As a child, she lived during the Mexican “economic miracle,” the period from 1950 to the mid-1970s when the economy grew more than 6% each year. As a teacher in centrally located Queretaro state, she saw illiteracy drop and schools flourish.

As Mexico prospered under PRI rule, so did she; a member of the PRI-affiliated National Union of Education Workers, she enjoyed good pay and a union mortgage. But now she has her doubts.

“I always believed in and helped the PRI and got involved in PRI campaigns. But they have disappointed us, especially in recent years,” said the soft-spoken Vazquez, now principal of a primary school.

Economic Crisis Fuels Protest

A major reason for the disappointment: an economic crisis that has shrunk starting pay for teachers in Queretaro from the equivalent of about $500 a month in 1994 to $300 today. Local teachers were so upset that they defied their union and protested against the government in 1997, helping fuel an unprecedented victory by the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, in the very state where the PRI was founded.

“The union has lost power in defending our salaries,” said Vazquez, who is also bitter about her spiraling mortgage costs. She is not even sure whether she will vote for the PRI in July’s presidential election.

PRI-affiliated groups such as the teachers union continue to permeate Mexican society. They are divided into three PRI “sectors”: the peasants association, made up of 49 areas ranging from soy producers to coffee growers; the workers group, which includes more than 200 unions, embracing everyone from steelworkers to beer makers; and the professional and social group, with another 200 affiliates, from lawyers to university students.

The three sectors can still turn out armies of people for PRI rallies, often by threatening to withhold union members’ pay if they don’t attend. But, as democratic reforms have ensured a fairer vote, the rank and file have registered their protests in the voting booth. And some key union groups have distanced themselves from the PRI.

“The sectors have declined,” acknowledged Federico Granja, the PRI’s head of political organization, in an interview at party headquarters, a complex of offices where dim lights, peeling paint and gray-suited functionaries suggest all the glories of East European communism.

Granja puts some of the blame on sector leaders who became corrupt or power-hungry. But the fundamental problem is the two-decade-long string of economic crises that has led to austerity budgets. The government pie has shrunk further as authorities have privatized hundreds of firms in an economic liberalization drive.

“We don’t have enough to give to everyone,” Granja said.

Democratic competition has chipped away further at the PRI’s resources. Through a combination of pressure, popularity and fraud, the PRI had won every governor’s race in Mexico from 1929 to 1989. Now, however, it governs only two-thirds of the states and has lost hundreds of towns and cities.

The electoral losses mean forfeiting control of such goodies as operating permits for local merchants. In a system where votes were exchanged for benefits, the price for the party can be steep.

Consider the case of Jose Merced Aguilar Trejo. The 58-year-old street trader built the pro-PRI traders association in Queretaro from a handful of members to 20,000 today.

“We have direct contact with housewives, and we chat with them. It’s a very intimate, very close opportunity to promote PRI candidates,” said the sturdy union boss. “And we can get people together very fast, within a few hours.”

But PRI leaders have proved less and less responsive to vendors’ needs, he said. And to his surprise, the union was recently able to negotiate with the local PAN government a new system in which street hawkers use handsome mobile stands, painted in the hues of Queretaro’s colonial-era downtown.

“We were always unconditional supporters of the PRI,” said Aguilar, whose five children are merchants too. “But this political watershed, this wake-up, gave us the opportunity to see how big we are and how far we can get on our own on behalf of small business. We are colder now in analyzing what suits us.”

The decline in the sectors’ loyalty has been accompanied by other setbacks for the PRI. In recent years, the country suffered a fierce recession. Citizens were outraged to learn, through the increasingly free press, about wild corruption associated with the family of ex-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who left office in 1994.

In midterm elections in 1997, voters dealt the PRI a stinging blow. The party lost the key mayoralty of Mexico City and, for the first time, its majority in the lower house of Congress. The PRI seemed to be going the way of the Soviet Bloc’s Communists.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the PRI’s demise: It discovered a formula that could give it new life.

The formula--allowing competitive primaries--addressed the PRI’s two main problems: a lack of legitimacy with voters, and a hemorrhage of ambitious politicians who had been passed over by the PRI’s traditional dedazo, or big finger. In the old days, such people had to stay in the party if they wanted a government career. But now, they could join other parties.

It was up to Patricio Martinez to test the system.

Martinez was the face of the new PRI. Unlike most Mexican politicians, who are lifelong bureaucrats, Martinez was a successful publisher in the northern state of Chihuahua who went on to become mayor of the state capital. Smart, with the mustached good looks of a Mexican Clark Gable, he impressed citizens by improving parks, roads and the police in the city of Chihuahua.

Candidate Pleads for a Primary

As the 1998 governor’s race approached, Martinez was confident that he could take the government back from the PAN, which had triumphed in 1992. Newspaper polls showed that he was popular. But an old-style PRI pol was in line for the party candidacy.

Martinez went to PRI leaders in Mexico City, pleading for a primary.

“I said, ‘Open it. . . . I know I’ll win. I know I’ll win the candidacy, and then the governorship, because the people believe in me,’ ” Martinez recounted in a recent interview at the governor’s mansion.

The PRI threw open the contest in March 1998. More than 230,000 people turned out for the open primary, electing Martinez and energizing the party. The businessman went on to win, the first time the PRI had taken a state back from the opposition.

Martinez became the symbol of a PRI that could produce winning candidates in the new democratic era. Primaries were subsequently held in other gubernatorial contests.

Then, on the party’s 70th anniversary in March, President Ernesto Zedillo stunned the country by calling for a U.S.-style primary.

It’s difficult to exaggerate the importance of eliminating the dedazo. It has been a central feature of Mexican politics since the PRI was formed in 1929 to end chronic violence after the Mexican Revolution. At the time, an estimated 8,000 parties battled for power. The PRI was formed to combine the factions and guarantee a controlled hand-over of power every six years.

The PRI hopes that the primary system will give it the democratic credentials to appeal to an increasingly urban and educated electorate, people as familiar with Bill Gates as with Benito Juarez, a 19th century national hero. People like 21-year-old Adrian Melendez.

“My mother always votes PRI. She’s bought their line. I say, ‘Mom, look at this candidate.’ She says, ‘No, the PRI always wins,’ ” sighed Melendez, who was sitting outside with a group of students on a sunny autumn afternoon at the Autonomous University of Chihuahua.

Melendez generally votes PAN “because it’s not the PRI.” But last year, he cast his ballot for Martinez, judging him the better candidate.

Young people “always want to see more options,” said the student, part of the first generation in his family to attend college. “We have access to more media than our parents. This means we think more about things.”

In many areas of Mexico, the PRI has changed little. That’s especially true in the poor, more rural south, where education and economic opportunities are more limited and residents traditionally are more reliant on the government. The south remains a PRI bastion.

But the party has had to broaden its strategies for remaking itself: In regions such as the economically thriving, U.S.-influenced north, the PRI has become competitive by putting up more appealing candidates. It is reaching out to groups outside its traditional structure, trying to sign up the elderly, the disabled, human rights activists, ecologists. And it is revving up its neighborhood activism.

That’s what’s going on in Iztacalco, a hardscrabble industrial neighborhood of Mexico City. These days, the red-brick PRI headquarters is humming with activities to attract residents.

For example, there was the recent beauty pageant, sponsored by the campaign of Francisco Labastida, one of four PRI presidential contenders. PRI volunteers are offering a series of low-cost classes: manicure lessons, aerobics, artistic Jello-making.

“The PRI, as a political party, has always done social services. If there was a pothole, for example, you reported it to the local PRI official. He asked the government to fix it,” explained Jose Lara, 37, head of electoral activities for the PRI center.

But over the years, he said, the PRI grew lazy. It didn’t respond to citizens. Its social activities tapered off.

“Since we had the vote assured, we didn’t have to do social services,” Lara said. “Now that there are other options, there is open competition. . . . We realized we could lose the presidency and all political power.”

One doesn’t have to look far to see the competition. Across the street from the PRI center is the Democratic Revolution Party’s “House of Culture.” Neon signs advertise classes in aerobics, flower-arranging, yoga.

Forget party competition based on primaries, platforms and campaign promises. In Iztacalco, democracy wears a Danskin.

“Now, there’s an alternative for people,” said PRD representative Irma Calderon. “Cross the street and take aerobics here.”

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Mexico’s Election History

The fortunes of the Institutional Revolutionary Party have risen and fallen since it was formed 70 years ago:

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Source: “Mexican Society 1996-1998,” Banamex Division of Economic and Social Studies

LORENA INIGUEZ / Los Angeles Times

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PRI CAMPAIGN ENDS

Campaigning for the PRI presidential primary ended with the hopefuls exchanging barbs. A14