Old Ways Die Hard in PRI Bastion Amid Signs of Slow Change

Something is missing from the central square in this Maya community of former hacienda peasants and modern-day clothing factory laborers.

The office of the Institutional Revolutionary Party no longer occupies pride of place alongside the town hall, a common rural practice in a country where the PRI and the government often were one and the same.

“We moved the PRI office out of the municipal building about a year ago. It was a conscious decision, a matter of ethics, to remove party politics from the central square,” said Juan Manuel Tun, the private secretary to the mayor.

But for the PRI’s foes, towns like Acanceh represent the worst excesses of authoritarian control by old-fashioned caciques, or local bosses who expect lock-step loyalty and are renowned experts at vote-buying and worse. Opposition party leaders insist that change is skin-deep at best in these backwater towns.

Even in Acanceh, however, signs of modest and grudging change within the PRI are appearing as the party heads toward its first-ever presidential primary Sunday. These reforms may help the PRI renew itself enough to win July’s presidential election--for the 12th straight time since the party was born in 1929.

Like many humble villages in the state of Yucatan, Acanceh remains a bastion of the PRI, the omnipresent political and social force that has ruled Mexico for the past seven decades. Virtually everyone here seems to be openly PRI-ista. The party’s initials and its red, white and green colors, not coincidentally the same as those of the Mexican flag, festoon lampposts and walls throughout the town.

“My father taught me to be a Catholic and to be a PRI member,” said Francisco Javier Herrera Carrillo, 49-year-old head of the Acanceh taxi association.

Indeed, Acanceh gave the PRI the highest percentage of votes in the 1998 municipal elections of any town in Yucatan.

Ismael Pech, the local PRI president, said the party raised its voting tally in the mayoral ballot from 67% in 1995 to 82% in 1998 “because people saw the good works the PRI was doing. One of the dreams of the people here is work--and Acanceh now has lots of small companies coming here and investing. That has helped the PRI grow strong again.”

Yucatan is one of eight states that form the PRI’s solid south, along with Guerrero, Veracruz, Tabasco, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Campeche and Quintana Roo. Each has a PRI governor and legislature.

These states also have the highest percentage of indigenous peoples of any in Mexico. Most are Maya descendants of the builders of the region’s spectacular ruins such as Chichen Itza. About 90% of the people of Acanceh speak Mayan, said Tun, and many women wear traditional embroidered blouses.

Acanceh, a town of 14,000 about 20 miles southeast of the state capital, Merida, had been dying a slow economic death as the sisal industry faded in the 1970s and ‘80s. Sisal was the staple of Yucatan’s elegant haciendas, many of them now abandoned ruins.

The town’s new clothing factory employs more than 600 people, stitching jeans for export to the United States. Its $50 average weekly wage is princely in a town where a few years ago 60% of the population earned less than the minimum wage, now about $2.50 a day.

Pech, a 38-year-old laborer at the jeans factory, said his own election as Acanceh’s unpaid PRI president a year ago reflected the kind of reforms that have kept young people supporting the party.

Whereas local PRI leaders in the past were appointed by the state party hierarchy, Pech was one of eight candidates who competed for the post last year--and for the first time via a secret ballot. Town elections for mayor and council members also are decided by secret ballot. In the past, residents gathered publicly and divided into groups for each candidate--hardly a secret vote.

“I am part of a party that is changing,” Pech said.

Yet Acanceh is among the towns with the highest reported levels of vote-buying and influence-peddling in the 1995 statewide municipal elections.

A report by Efrain Poot Capetillo and Leticia Paredes Guerrero of the Autonomous University of Yucatan declares: “We found that the use of such a broad gamut of pressure mechanisms is so deeply rooted in the region’s political life that they pass unnoticed by the majority of potential voters.”

In 76% of the towns, for instance, party activists went door to door collecting details of prospective voters’ identity documents and suggesting that future social programs would depend on attending rallies and voting for PRI candidates. The report also found that in 82% of the towns, the PRI handed out food packages, chickens or other gifts in return for promises of a vote.

The PRI lost the mayoralty of Merida a decade ago, and the stylish urban capital remains an anti-PRI island in a state dominated by the PRI from the governor down to most town halls.

Jose Alberto Castaneda, state president of the conservative National Action Party, which is the only serious challenger in Yucatan for the PRI, says angrily: “The younger, better educated, more urban people are voting for the PAN. So what suits the PRI? A country of ignorant people, poor people and old people. It makes you think they want to generate more poverty so they can buy the votes more cheaply.”