PRI’s Man Sells Soul to the Same Old Devil

Francisco Labastida, the candidate of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has sold his soul to the devil.

Frightened by the polls that place him neck-and-neck with his rival, Vicente Fox, Labastida has reorganized his campaign and brought back old-time party bosses. By embracing yesterday’s politicians, Labastida is losing tomorrow’s voters. By linking arms with the party’s dinosaurs, Labastida is betraying the party’s modernizers. The PRI’s strategy of bringing back the dead and mobilizing the party’s machine is going to backfire. Labastida clearly lost the presidential debate May 26 and is headed for a loss in the July election. Tired of the PRI and its tricks, Mexicans are getting ready to throw the bums out.

At the beginning of his campaign, Labastida augured winds of change. He promised to write a new chapter in the old history of the PRI. The ruling party would move from dirty elections to clean politics, from a dishonorable past to an honorable future, from the dedazo--or picking a successor--to democracy. He proposed a “new PRI” and offered to slam the door on fraudulent practices and corrupt officials. The return of the PRI’s retrograde rear guard, however, shows that Labastida is willing to compromise his principles to revive his political fortune. Today, Labastida, the promising winner of the PRI’s first-ever primary, has disappeared without a trace.

Perhaps Labastida believes that he has only rented his soul for the election. Perhaps he hopes that he will be able to exorcise his current campaign demons with a post-electoral prayer, on his knees in Los Pinos, the presidential residence. But it is unlikely that his traveling companions--members of the PRI’s old guard--will let him jump on the party machine for free. They will charge him for every ballot box they stuff, for every Indian they intimidate, for every peasant they pressure, for every journalist they attempt to buy off. They won’t be happy with second-rate jobs in second-tier embassies. They will want a slice of the political pie and a large portion of power.

Labastida may say that he is in charge of his campaign, and he has promised to announce his cabinet prior to the election, in an effort to prove his modernizing credentials. Even if he actually includes some token technocrats in the lineup, it may be too late to dispel the perception that the PRI’s candidate has been taken hostage.

Labastida has succumbed to the old guard because the future of the PRI as a way of life, and a way of making a living, is at stake. Politics in Mexico has always been a fig leaf for corruption and a front for dirty deals. A Fox victory would entail more than the arrival of an opposition government to power, more than another landmark in Mexico’s tortuous transition to democracy. If Fox wins, the PRI would lose its capacity to buy and sell factories and favors, banks and businesses, highways and honey pots.

The PRI is not about to run any risks: The ruling party will mold and control Labastida to its heart’s desire. This time the PRI will not have to kill its faltering candidate, as many believe it did in 1994, when Luis Donaldo Colosio was gunned down in Tijuana. This time the PRI has simply sucked the blood out of its contender and turned him into a shadow of his former self.

Meanwhile, Labastida and the PRI will continue to miscalculate. Both have shown and said that they will do anything it takes to win. Both will try to twist arms and annihilate their adversaries. Both will dally with the dinosaurs and manipulate the media. Both will bring out the party’s steamroller and raze the country in order to govern it. What they have failed to realize is that 60% of Mexicans favor change. Those citizens from all walks of life will go to the polling booths on July 2, they will stand up, they will be counted, and they will bring an end to seven decades of small-time crooks.

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Denise Dresser is a visiting fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy at USC.