Election Gets a Yawn in Poor Rural Enclave

Their nation’s ruling party made history Sunday, and residents of this impoverished rural corner answered with a resounding yawn.

The first presidential primary held by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, came and went almost as an afterthought around this region of coffee and coconuts on Mexico’s Pacific coast.

Voters amounted to barely a trickle at most polling places here--about 50 miles northwest of the tourist resort of Acapulco--and it was hard to find people who felt strongly about the party’s much-touted attempt at a democratic make-over.

Blame apathy. Or cynicism. Both were evident in hefty doses.

But Ginardo Rebolledo, a local party hand, offered another theory: election fatigue.

“Too much democracy,” he suggested, relaxing at a sidewalk restaurant just off the town’s bustling central plaza.

The PRI’s internal reform efforts, coupled with quirks in the local election calendar, meant that Sunday’s vote was the fifth time party members here had been summoned to the polls in the past year, officials said.

Last month, it was to pick a mayor. In February, it was to select a governor of Guerrero state. Each election was preceded by a primary campaign--and a surfeit of electioneering.

“People think it’s a game,” Rebolledo sighed.

The PRI dominates here but gets a run for its money from the left-leaning Democratic Revolution Party, which finished a close second in the governor’s race and captured the mayor’s position in Acapulco, the state’s biggest city.

In Atoyac, so many painted slogans and campaign posters remain from the recent elections that there was little indication that Sunday’s vote to choose among four PRI would-be candidates for next year’s presidential election was anything special.

Throughout the town of 60,000, a commercial hub for a farming region that is home to one group of guerrilla insurgents, the sidewalk polling stations awaited voters. It hardly mattered that Precinct 603, a trio of card tables and see-through ballot boxes set up in front of a bank, was more than half an hour late in opening. The first voters didn’t make it until 15 minutes after that.

There was little evidence of the long-standing PRI tactic of busing hordes of voters to back the party’s candidate in general elections. No hordes appeared.

But some were pleased to be taking part in the watershed primary.

Tortilla shop owner Antonio Radilla Reyes, 62, said he had voted PRI for more than 40 years and looked forward to having a say in choosing the presidential candidate. His choice was Francisco Labastida, the front-runner and apparent favorite of President Ernesto Zedillo, who traditionally would have tapped his successor.

“It’s very satisfying. It’s significant for us. It’s better because there’s no more of that old system of unilateral designation,” Radilla said after marking his ballot, which bore photographs of all four candidates. “It’s an important step.”

The skeptical and disillusioned chose to stay away.

In neighboring San Jeronimo, taxi driver Misael Flores said he was withholding his vote to protest the outcome of the party’s mayoral primary in Atoyac. The winner, he said, won with a stacked deck--the blessing of party higher-ups.

“I don’t believe in the ‘new PRI,’ ” Flores said. “There’s supposedly a new approach--that you can be a candidate of the grass roots. That’s a lie. . . . They don’t respect the decisions of the grass roots.”

Down the street, a pair of poll workers sat in the shaded quiet of an arcade. There was little for them to do. The strains of a Roman Catholic Mass drifted from the open doors of a church half a block away. The women figured they might have some business once church let out.

“First, you take care of your conscience,” said Maria Diega Valle, the precinct secretary. “Then the politics.”