PRI Party Boss Arrested a Week After Deadly Riot

The She-Wolf has been captured, officials said Friday.

Guadalupe Buendia, a notorious political boss who once ran this conglomeration of shantytowns east of Mexico City, was arrested outside Toluca, the capital of Mexico state, on charges that she masterminded a riot a week ago that left 15 people dead, an official in the attorney general’s office told a local radio station.

The blood bath that officials blame on her mortified the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, already shamed by its first presidential election defeat in 71 years. Buendia is a product of the PRI, and many in Mexico fear that powerful party bosses like her, born of a greed for votes and a dearth of basic services, will terrorize the countryside because the PRI will no longer be in control.

“This is the future,” warned Joy Langston, a political scientist based in Mexico City.

If that is true, then the future began at dawn Aug. 18 in a secret tunnel that connects City Hall to the home of the She-Wolf, the nickname that Buendia has proudly borne since she was a teenager.

Authorities believe that Buendia hid nearly 100 armed supporters in her house and slipped them through the tunnel that morning to block the mayoral inauguration of a rival within the PRI.

After the deadly riot, more than 200 people, including her sister, were arrested. But Buendia escaped.

While victims and their families clamor for justice, leaders of the party that once ruled Mexico are trying to figure out why some members violently turned on others. They also are trying to distance the PRI from two violent factions on which the party, leaders admit, has traditionally depended for votes.

“What happened is the private business of two Chimalhuacan organizations,” insisted Fernando Alberto Garcia Cuevas, the PRI chairman in Mexico state, where Chimalhuacan is located. “Although they certainly do belong to the PRI, this is not PRI business. This is the business of private interests whose members reached a level of intolerance that drove them to violence.”

He acknowledges that PRI leaders had known about the power struggle in Chimalhuacan, a rapidly growing community of about half a million struggling people--peasants who can no longer eke out a living on the land and poverty-stricken city dwellers unable to afford rents in established parts of the sprawling metropolis that greater Mexico City has become.

These are the poorest Mexicans, whose needs are so great and whose opportunities for fulfilling them are so minuscule that they are easily attracted to the grass-roots organizations of political bosses such as Buendia.

Buendia figured out Mexico’s complex system of land tenancy in 1982 when she defended her inherited property from invaders, according to local legend. Armed with that knowledge, she became an expert on the subject most vital to Chimalhuacan’s dispossessed new arrivals: how to get land.

That knowledge made her a powerful woman. People owed her their hovels, and she collected votes for the PRI.

In return for delivering those votes, she demanded that the party nominate candidates of her choice for local office and let her run municipal services as she saw fit. That often meant contracting with companies that her Villages and Neighborhoods Organization owned to collect trash with carts pulled by burros and to deliver water from tanker trucks in areas without plumbing.

This was a time when the PRI was losing votes from its traditional supporters in organized labor and the countryside. Membership in PRI-affiliated unions declined significantly and, by 1980, two-thirds of the population lived in cities, compared with half in 1960.

Further, growing democracy made the votes of the remaining unionists and peasants less of a certainty for the PRI.

In contrast, the grass-roots organizations, political analyst Rogelio Hernandez said, “are so primitive that they can control people physically and personally, so they can [guarantee] votes, which unions have not been able to do for years.”

Former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari actively tried to draw such community-based organizations into the PRI, using his brother Raul, now in prison for murder, as a liaison, Hernandez says.

“The party little by little became a hostage of interests, of powerful groups and organizations that wanted to control the party,” party leader Garcia Cuevas said.

Hernandez noted, “They were held hostage, but it was also convenient.”

One of the organizations that the party tolerated was a vaguely Maoist group of rural PRI sympathizers who were following their constituents into the cities. The Peasant Torch worked against the opposition but could never quite be controlled by the party the way that labor unions and peasant organizations were, Hernandez says.

The Peasant Torch arrived in Chimalhuacan 12 years ago to resolve a dispute at a community school. The group stayed, with Jesus Tolentino as its leader, to “spread throughout the neighborhoods of Chimalhuacan and help with other kinds of social needs--from jobs to health care to personal problems,” Tolentino said.

The Peasant Torch--and Tolentino--became Buendia’s rival. Under party pressure, she reluctantly accepted his nomination as candidate for mayor this year and then campaigned against him, Tolentino said during an interview at City Hall, now guarded by police in riot gear.

Tolentino received 48,018 votes July 2, 20% fewer than the ballots cast that Chimalhuacan residents cast for PRI candidates for president and Congress. When he won, Buendia demanded that she be allowed to name the city treasurer and water commissioner, Tolentino says. He refused.

Tolentino says that he warned the state’s governor of trouble on inauguration day but that the governor sent only 150 extra police officers, who were posted three blocks from City Hall.

Langston, the political scientist, predicts that conflicts such as the one in Chimalhuacan will become more difficult to prevent because such disputes traditionally were resolved by the interior minister. When Vicente Fox of the National Action Party becomes president Dec. 1, the interior minister isn’t likely to be a PRI member and will, therefore, have no clout in intraparty conflicts.

Further, with the huge losses that the PRI suffered in the July 2 elections, party sympathizers will fight more openly--and sometimes violently--for the offices that they think they can win, she says. “The safer the district, the harder the fight,” she said.

But Garcia Cuevas says the PRI’s defeat has given the party a chance to reorganize and to purge the groups that have held it hostage. “We can finally unload this burden,” he said. New, clearer rules for candidates will emerge in December, he says.