Ruling Party Loses Vote for Chiapas Governorship, Early Results Show

Just weeks after losing the presidency, Mexico’s once-invulnerable Institutional Revolutionary Party suffered another decisive defeat Sunday in the troubled state of Chiapas, according to preliminary results, leaving a huge hole in the heart of the party’s southern stronghold.

State electoral chief Eduardo Pineda said that Sen. Pablo Salazar, who pulled together an unusual eight-party opposition coalition, defeated the PRI’s Sami David for the governorship in a victory that analysts said could help restart stalled peace talks between the government and Zapatista rebels in the state.

Salazar’s supporters--anti-PRIistas from left to right--in Tuxtla Gutierrez, the state capital, and other towns staged flag-waving street celebrations and horn-honking caravans.

“We changed the system!” said Francisco Rodas Santiago, an alliance volunteer in San Cristobal de las Casas. “The people now believe in change; we enter a new stage now. Today, the system fell.”

Pineda said official “quick counts” of representative polling stations gave Salazar insurmountable leads of 9 to 14 percentage points, figures confirmed by four independent exit polls announced earlier by broadcasters. In every survey, Salazar topped 50% of the vote.

On July 2, center-right candidate Vicente Fox won the presidency by defeating the PRI in the ruling party’s first presidential defeat since it was formed in 1929. Fox’s national victory apparently encouraged Chiapans to break from the party as well, dashing the PRI’s hopes for a quick recovery and putting in jeopardy the party’s longtime grip over the other seven southernmost states.

Turnout appeared to be moderate among the 2.1 million eligible voters in the most competitive and closely monitored election in the state’s history. More than 4,000 observers--including a group called Eyes for Democracy, armed with video cameras--watched the overwhelmingly peaceful balloting. Polling was well organized by the state’s independent electoral institute, one of the reforms of the 1990s that has for the most part ended the PRI’s legendary electoral fraud.

The combination of credible victories over the PRI at both the federal and state levels would go far toward meeting rebel leader Subcommander Marcos’ call for greater democracy in Chiapas. Still, Marcos has not responded to Fox’s victory, and some of his followers boycotted the vote Sunday in the mountain region north of this historic colonial town and in the canyons and jungle stretching east to the border with Guatemala.

Guatemalan Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchu, who was among the human rights observers, said as she watched the voting in San Andres Larrainzar, site of aborted 1996 peace talks with the rebels: “This election has a historic importance. It’s historic because it can guarantee that the peace talks resume, that there are good conditions for the players to return to the table.”

San Andres Larrainzar, 25 miles north of San Cristobal de las Casas, remains a glaring example of the divisions in Chiapas. A pro-Zapatista group has occupied the town hall since 1996, while the elected PRI town government operates from a new town hall a block away. Sunday, as Maya women in white blouses embroidered in bright red and maroon patterns lined up to vote on the raised bandstand in the town square, rebel Mayor Marcos Gonzalez Gonzalez and his councilors were ignoring the balloting.

“We are not going to participate, we are not with any party,” Gonzalez said. “We are going to wait and see what they do.”

Salazar’s supporters contended that if the PRI could be ousted in Chiapas, prospects would improve immediately for an end to a 6 1/2-year rebellion by the Zapatista guerrillas, who seek better treatment of the region’s Maya people. Salazar, a former PRI member who broke with his party in 1998, serves on a congressional peace commission.

Even ahead of the vote, there were hints of detente. At the urging of the Roman Catholic Church and others, the army returned to its barracks late Friday for the entire weekend. Military roadblocks that often make travel through the region difficult were removed, eliminating obstacles to those who wanted to vote.

In San Cayetano, a village in the municipality of El Bosque, 30 miles north of San Cristobal, voting proceeded calmly. Officials checked photo IDs against voter rolls and dabbed voters’ thumbs with indelible ink as Spaniards who live in a nearby Zapatista rebel cultural center watched.

Peasant farmer Miguel Gonzalez said he had always voted for the PRI but this time was voting for Salazar.

“We want to see a change,” he said. “The others always promise, but they never deliver.”

In San Juan de Chamula, a PRI stronghold near San Cristobal, the voting took place on the fringes of a bustling Sunday market where peasants sold corn and beans from burlap bags. PRI voter Antonio Gonzalez Hernandez declared: “I wouldn’t mind if Pablo [Salazar] won, but I don’t like it that he is with eight parties of the opposition. We don’t know what they will do or if they can work together.”

Gonzalez also said he worried that Salazar, a Protestant, might discriminate against the state’s Catholic majority.

Religious disputes have been a source of bitter conflict in Chiapas. More than 30,000 evangelicals, a rapidly growing percentage of the population in southern Mexico, have been driven out of towns like San Juan de Chamula in recent years despite attempts by Catholic and Protestant clerics alike to stop such clashes.

In Paraiso, a new suburb of San Cristobal whose inhabitants are part of that Protestant diaspora, teacher Pedro Vargas Gomez said he voted for change: “Democracy won in Mexico on July 2. Now it’s Chiapas’ turn.”

But Vargas was annoyed, as were others elsewhere, that the three-sided plastic voting booths mounted atop folding aluminum frames did not have covers, making it possible for determined snoopers to see how people voted.