Mexico’s PRI Holds First Presidential Debate

Trading insults and accusations, presidential hopefuls of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party plunged into unprecedented fiery arguments Wednesday night in the first-ever debate among candidates for the party’s presidential nomination.

All four candidates, including front-runner Francisco Labastida and upstart challenger Roberto Madrazo, joined a strikingly open exchange that was rife with criticism of the way their party has governed Mexico. The nationally televised one-hour debate was the only such showdown before the party--known by its initials in Spanish, PRI--holds its primary Nov. 7.

There was no obvious winner in Wednesday’s debate, but Labastida and Madrazo proved forceful as they dueled sharply, shattering a tradition of strict internal discipline and decorum that has helped the PRI win every presidential election during the past seven decades.

This time around, the PRI hopes that its shift toward internal democracy, including the first presidential primary in its history, will prove the route to victory in July’s presidential election.

Although the debate format allowed little room for direct interchanges, Madrazo struck the first blow moments into his opening five-minute address, branding Labastida “the official candidate” of party leaders and saying, “He represents all that you and I want to change.”

“Labastida, I saw your TV ad last night and frankly, I didn’t like it,” Madrazo said. “With great sadness I saw you say that during your brilliant 37-year career you never got your hands dirty.

“When one doesn’t leave the office,” he continued, “one’s hands can stay clean. But when one puts oneself to work in the country, in the factories, with the peasants, then one’s hands get dirty with the sweat of work.”

Labastida counterattacked immediately, saying, “Roberto, you are telling one more of your lies, one more of your long series of lies.” Labastida said the debate itself was proof that party leaders had not designated a favored candidate: “What is happening is in front of your nose. And if you don’t see it, it is because you don’t want to see the reality, Roberto. Don’t deny what all Mexicans are now seeing.”

Labastida, the former interior minister and ex-governor of Sinaloa state, then challenged Madrazo to declare his personal wealth, as Labastida did recently--about $800,000 in total assets. Madrazo, 47, the governor of the state of Tabasco since 1994, has ducked such a declaration.

Madrazo declared Labastida’s team to be “plagued with collaborators of Salinas,” a reference to widely disdained former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

Labastida answered, “It’s as if I said you were the candidate of Carlos Salinas because he made you a senator and later the governor of Tabasco.”

Labastida told Madrazo later: “You are two-faced: You spent more money on self-promotion than in helping street children. You tell Americans and the British that you will sell PEMEX [the national oil company], but you say the opposite to Mexicans.”

Opinion polls rated Madrazo’s performance slightly better than Labastida’s, a potential boost for Madrazo since recent polls have put him about 10 percentage points behind Labastida. That is still closer than anyone expected, given Labastida’s broad support in government circles.

Historian Enrique Krauze called the verbal attacks “steps in the democratic apprenticeship of Mexico. Some say this is licentiousness. I say it is the use of freedoms that cannot be constrained.”

Madrazo is the son of the party’s former national president, but he often has sounded more like an opposition candidate than a PRI stalwart.

Indeed, the Confederation of Mexican Workers, or CTM, endorsed Labastida, 57, on the eve of the debate. Confederation leader Leonardo Rodriguez Alcaine said the CTM’s 29 federations, claiming 6 million members, viewed Labastida as the best candidate for labor.

The other two PRI hopefuls were more courteous in the debate--and less visible. Former Puebla state Gov. Manuel Bartlett, like Madrazo, criticized the government for forgetting about poor families while focusing on free-market reforms. Bartlett, 63, has held about 10% support in the polls.

Humberto Roque Villanueva, the least-known aspirant, was president of the PRI in 1996-97 and a PRI legislator from the northern state of Coahuila. Villanueva, 56, gets just a few percentage points of support in most polls.

The four candidates spent days preparing for the debate, some reportedly with the help of U.S. campaign strategists. The PRI barred all other public campaign activities Wednesday to focus on the debate and prohibited media advertising five hours before and after the event.

Beyond the opening statements, the format called for two rounds of three-minute remarks by each candidate and a closing three-minute statement. There was no live audience for the debate, held in a studio at the World Trade Center in Mexico City.

Opposition parties scoffed at the PRI debate as a formality without content.

In the past, the PRI incumbent president designated his successor, although that process led to splits in the party in 1988 and 1994. This time, President Ernesto Zedillo announced early in his term that he would not exercise that right, and he has pushed the party into greater internal democracy.

Jose Diaz Briseno in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.