‘Bad Boy’ of Mexico Politics Bent on Testing Ruling Party

For years, Roberto Madrazo was the bad boy of Mexican politics.

The president tried to fire him. The opposition fought to impeach him. A top official of his own party invoked Adolf Hitler in questioning Madrazo’s character. Critics have accused the candidate of illegal campaign spending, drug ties, election fraud.

Could this be the man who brings democracy to the world’s longest-ruling party?

Since Madrazo entered the first-ever presidential primary of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexican politics haven’t been the same. Swinging at the president and party mandarins in tough TV ads, the 47-year-old governor has shaken up a party accustomed to all the democratic verve of a 1960s Soviet congress.

Now comes the ultimate test. Will the PRI, as the party is known, really allow its supporters to vote freely, even if that means that the bad boy will win?

President Ernesto Zedillo has vowed that the Nov. 7 primary will mark a clean break with the seven-decade tradition by which Mexican presidents, all members of the PRI, handpicked their successors. Still, many Mexicans believe that the “official candidate” is Madrazo’s main rival, longtime bureaucrat Francisco Labastida.

“This hasn’t happened in 70 years. A major [PRI] faction is opposing the president,” noted Federico Estevez, a prominent political scientist.

Estevez said that he isn’t a fan of Madrazo but that a Madrazo victory would be the best thing for Mexican democracy: “It will have turned the party upside down in terms of authoritarianism and vertical tradition.”

Madrazo, who denies the allegations against him, has captured voters’ attention by breaking the mold for PRI campaigns. He has boldly insulted his rivals, a novelty in a party that long suppressed open debate. In a country where politicians favor courtly bureaucrat-speak, he has also shocked audiences with cantina slang.

In one TV ad, for example, he discusses Mexico’s crime crisis, using the friendly tone of a neighbor.

“To solve the problem, you need . . . well, you know,” he declares, alluding to a cherished part of the male anatomy. “And boy, I’ve got them.”

Madrazo may have inherited his rebellious streak from his father, Carlos, a legendary PRI president who pressed for more democracy. Carlos Madrazo died in a 1969 plane crash that his son insists has never been clarified.

Roberto Madrazo frequently invokes his father as he calls on cheering crowds to embrace democracy. He also cites another PRI figure he was close to: Luis Donaldo Colosio, the young, pro-reform PRI presidential candidate who was assassinated in 1994. Many Mexicans still suspect that the ruling party was involved in Colosio’s death.

“My family tried to do this 35 years ago. My father wanted to democratize the party. Colosio also tried to open a process of democratization,” Madrazo, a slender man with dark hair and intense brown eyes, said in an interview. “I have inherited commitments, some to my family, some to my generation.

“This open PRI process gave us an opportunity.”

In rallies and campaign ads, Madrazo has portrayed himself as David against the Goliath of the PRI machinery, the man fighting for democracy and battling against the dedazo, the traditional presidential “fingering” of a successor.

To critics, however, nothing could be more false.

To judge Madrazo’s democratic credentials, they say, just look at his last election. Madrazo was declared winner of the November 1994 governor’s race in the southeastern state of Tabasco, but the opposition immediately cried foul. As the complaints of vote fraud ballooned into a national scandal, the president pressured Madrazo to resign.

But Madrazo fought back. In an unprecedented step, he stood up to Zedillo, organized a rebellion of the party in Tabasco and refused to go.

That didn’t mark the end of Madrazo’s scandals.

In June 1995, as leftists rallied in Mexico City against the Tabasco election result, a stranger pulled up, unloaded 14 boxes from his car, then sped off. Peering into the boxes, the leftists were stunned: They were stuffed with detailed receipts indicating that Madrazo had spent 238 million pesos, about $79 million, on his campaign--or about 50 times the state limit.

Mexico’s attorney general launched an investigation, declaring in court papers that the funds could be linked to drug trafficking or money laundering. He confirmed that the PRI in Tabasco had spent at least 128 million pesos, about $43 million, on the campaign--still far above the limit. But in the end, authorities found no federal crimes and sent the investigation to Tabasco authorities, who absolved their governor.

The opposition has continued to paint Madrazo as the poster boy for fraud. But the message doesn’t seem to have reached voters like Maria del Consuelo Castaneda, who was attending a recent Madrazo rally.

“We see he’s more honest [than his competitors],” said the 34-year-old homemaker, part of an enthusiastic crowd packing a plaza in front of a colonial-era church in the central city of San Juan del Rio. “He’s done lots of good work as governor of Tabasco.

“I think Labastida is dishonest, because he was put there as a candidate,” she added. “There was a dedazo.”

Comments like that reflect an extraordinary campaign by Madrazo to remake his image.

Madrazo first became a familiar figure in Mexican living rooms last winter. Anticipating the precedent-shattering PRI primary, he launched a slick national television campaign emphasizing his accomplishments in Tabasco.

Daniel Lund, head of the Latin American polling firm MUND, says Madrazo is the PRI’s first television candidate. In previous ad campaigns, Lund said, “the television always came later, to put a halo around the designated person.”

Madrazo’s ads were far more powerful than the newspaper reports that for years had chronicled the fraud allegations against him. That’s because only a tiny percentage of Mexicans are newspaper readers; the vast majority obtain their news from the country’s two main television networks, which have generally favored the PRI.

“That was essentially an elite issue,” Lund said of the Tabasco scandals.

Madrazo’s rivals have criticized his ads as a misuse of millions of dollars of state money. But the result was that the governor’s support in the polls had nearly tripled by May, putting him roughly even with the better-known Labastida, who until recently was the powerful interior minister. The latest polls show that Labastida has pulled ahead, especially among likely voters. But Madrazo has succeeded in turning the primary, which features four candidates, into a two-man race.

Madrazo denies that he is a creature of publicity. His popularity, he says, comes from taking on issues people care about, such as the failure of Mexico’s economic recovery to trickle down to households.

He sounds like an opposition politician as he assails the economic policies of the government. Implicitly, such attacks are aimed at Zedillo, the unofficial leader of the PRI, who has staunchly defended the austerity budgets that have helped Mexico recover from a devastating 1995 recession.

“What good is it if they tell us our country is on the right road if every day families are reminded that the official statistics aren’t the reality we’re living?” Madrazo demanded at the rally in San Juan del Rio, to enthusiastic applause.

In their barrage of attacks, Madrazo and his allies even assailed the president over the recent disastrous flooding in Tabasco, charging that the federal government mishandled the region’s dams and then focused relief programs on other states. “Why, Mr. President?” Madrazo’s fund-raising organization demanded in a letter to Zedillo. The government has denied the charges.

Madrazo’s rivals in the Labastida camp become nearly apoplectic when discussing the governor’s campaign.

“When I heard a commercial in which [Madrazo] was talking about honesty, I imagined Hitler talking about human rights,” Esteban Moctezuma, a former Zedillo aide who now coordinates Labastida’s campaign, sputtered in a recent speech.

Labastida’s team accuses Madrazo of lying and violating spending limits in the primary. They charge that he has received a fortune from Carlos Hank Gonzalez, a powerful party boss who has been tied to drug trafficking in U.S. intelligence reports.

Madrazo says he is friendly with Hank Gonzalez but denies being funded by him. Hank Gonzalez has denied any participation in narcotics trafficking.

Many wonder whether such mudslinging could contribute to a debilitating split in the party, especially if Madrazo loses and blames his defeat on fraud. If Madrazo quits the party, he could take away enough supporters to cost the PRI next year’s election--something he frequently hints at.

“What’s at stake here for the PRI is the presidency,” Madrazo said. “If there is not a fair process, with clear rules and respect for the vote, the party won’t have the force to compete in 2000.”

Does that mean he might bolt the PRI if he loses?

Madrazo refuses to even entertain the possibility.

“I think I’m going to win,” he said.