Baja Offers Mexico Lessons on Opposition-Party Rule

Mexican politics got a jolt in 1989 when Ernesto Ruffo Appel, an upstart mayor from Ensenada, pulled off an astonishing electoral upset to become the first opposition-party governor in the nation’s modern history.

Ruffo and elated backers in Baja California promised a fresh style of governance, based on openness and efficient public services. Their goal: to reverse decades of graft and cronyism on the part of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, whose grip across Mexico dated to 1929.

“The system,” Ruffo declared in triumph, “has fallen.”

He was partly right. Ruffo’s pro-business National Action Party, or PAN, has easily held the governor’s office and the mayoralty of Tijuana, which it also seized in 1989. Two of Baja’s four remaining cities, Mexicali and Rosarito, have PAN mayors. During the 1990s, the PAN chalked up wins elsewhere in Mexico, and it now holds sway in six of the nation’s 31 states and about 285 of 2,400 municipalities, including many big cities.

If Mexican voters carry out the equivalent of political revolution July 2 by electing as president the PAN candidate, Vicente Fox, Baja California will be where the first decisive skirmish was won. It is already where the PAN has logged its longest record in office.

While Baja is a special case owing to its traditional independence, relative wealth and home-grown political realities, it offers a preview of how the PAN might make the shift from being the entrenched opposition to being the establishment.

The state has seen important government reforms--from the creation of fraud-proof voting credentials to vastly improved tax collection--in addition to brick-and-mortar gains, such as the installation of hundreds of miles of water and sewer lines. The PAN’s middle-class attitudes echo in its calls for greater local control and self-reliance among residents--an approach that one U.S. scholar calls a Mexican “compassionate conservatism.”

But the party also bears the taint of lingering official corruption, particularly within the police and court systems, and the rising crime rate in Baja dismays even residents sympathetic to the PAN. The PRI’s presidential candidate, Francisco Labastida, has seized on the Baja crime problem as a sign of PAN ineptitude.

Baja officials, meanwhile, recently confirmed the worst fears of those leery of the party’s social conservatism and roots in the Roman Catholic Church--in contrast to the PRI’s secularism: It came to light that Baja health and judicial officials had sought to dissuade a Mexicali woman from arranging an abortion for her 14-year-old daughter, impregnated during a rape. Though the officials eventually relented, the mother decided that the health risks of an abortion were too great and the girl gave birth.

In addition, a new crop of young voters, born too late to recall the shortcomings of PRI administrations in Baja California, represents a potentially threatening wild card at the polls in upcoming local elections. Some analysts believe that the PAN, riven by factionalism, could be unseated in next year’s gubernatorial race. Mexico’s third major party, the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, is a negligible presence in the factory-rich border state of 2.7 million residents.

For PAN leaders, who have watched voter turnout decline from a record high in 1989, the giddy idealism that accompanied “Ruffo-mania” has given way to the reality of governing a complex region with vaulting population growth and a drug cartel that is arguably the meanest and most powerful in Mexico. PAN rule is now taken for granted. The excitement centers on Fox, who has the party’s best chance in history of winning the presidency.

“The revolution has occurred and been completed in Baja California. It has gone on to the next level,” said David A. Shirk, a visiting professor at UC San Diego who has researched PAN governance.

Some read the public’s diminished participation in the electoral process as a sign of overall satisfaction.

“Across the board, you’ve seen real advances in Baja California that simply haven’t taken place where politics has stagnated in the hands of the PRI,” Shirk said.

Even critics acknowledge that the PAN-led state and local governments have operated with a bottom-line efficiency unseen in PRI bureaucracies, which are bloated by patronage and featherbedding.

In addition, the PAN takeover in Baja has reconfigured local rule by snipping the weblike ties between PRI governments and a host of unions, grass-roots organizations and neighborhood chieftains who had enjoyed privileged access to government goods and services--and, in turn, delivered PRI voters. Services provided by this local leadership, such as the granting of taxicab licenses, became the sole province of City Hall. Some local bosses who had led peasant squatters onto land illegally were jailed after the PAN took over.

“They’ve begun to institute a politics of individualism,” said Victor Espinoza Valle, a scholar at the College of the Northern Border in Tijuana.

PAN governments have emphasized partnerships with neighborhood associations as a way to stretch public dollars in building streets, erecting street lights and restoring parks. In the Buena Vista neighborhood of Tijuana, a residents group rescued an abandoned, trash-strewn park by joining forces with the state and local governments and providing its own workers. The park now boasts trees, new ball courts, lights and sidewalks.

“When the PAN came in, a lot changed,” said the neighborhood association’s president, Ernesto Barron, who describes himself as a political independent. “We used to ask for help, but [the PRI] never came through.”

But the same bustling stretch of middle-class homes, beauty shops and bakeries reveals the PAN’s greatest failing: a crime wave that residents say is worse than any under the PRI. Car thefts and break-ins are common. An increasing number of fearful merchants have hired private security guards.

“We only ask God to help us and protect us,” said the manager, who asked that her name be withheld because of concerns about her safety. “What else can we do?”

Answering neighbors’ appeals for better police protection, Tijuana Mayor Francisco Vega de Lamadrid and an entourage of city officials recently visited the park and, amid speeches and a recorded soundtrack, reopened a dormant police substation. Vega announced plans for 18 such facilities in troubled areas.

Yet the fanfare disguises skimpy funding, slapdash planning and the nagging sense that the crime problem may be more than the PAN governments can handle. A long wait faces anyone who goes to a prosecutor’s office to report a crime. The new Buena Vista substation, aimed at giving residents instant access to police, lacks even a telephone.

The PAN’s legacy is “changes that have set us back,” said Alcide R. Beltrones, head of the local PRI. “The violence has grown in the state, and they have not been able to control it.”

Most observers say indications of corruption are less evident in Baja now than when the PRI was in charge, but the PAN has hardly been immune. A state attorney general stepped down in 1994 amid an investigation into whether Baja authorities were protecting members of the Tijuana-based Arellano Felix drug gang. Weeks earlier, a deadly shootout broke out between federal authorities and state police believed to be working for the gangsters. New charges of corruption cropped up recently with disclosures that a ranking state official had approved the sale of public land to the brother of suspected mafia lieutenant Jesus Labra Aviles when the official was in charge of a redevelopment agency. He has denied wrongdoing.

PAN leaders insist they have made reforms, such as granting police pay raises and supplying cars and equipment to the force to eliminate the need for bribes. They say the blame for the drug violence lies with the PRI-run federal government, which prosecutes narcotics crimes.

Ruffo’s victory was born from an eruption among Baja voters tired of prior excesses and spotty services. A former fish-processing plant manager, Ruffo was a rebel as Ensenada’s mayor, butting heads often with the PRI governor.

The PAN’s quixotic, half-century saga changed course with Ruffo’s win over a little-known PRI state lawmaker in the governor’s race--an outcome quickly acknowledged by then-Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The president’s recognition was significant, because at least one PAN gubernatorial candidate and two mayoral contenders were thought to have been robbed of victories previously.

Ruffo took the experiences to heart, creating an independent state election institute and pioneering a fraud-proof voter credential to prevent cheating.

Subsequently, PAN administrators in Tijuana prompted howls of protest when they overhauled property tax rolls, boosting assessments and adding owners who had not been paying. Property tax revenues in Tijuana jumped nearly eightfold between 1989 and 1998. But PAN officials grouse that they are shortchanged in federal revenue distributions, which nationwide make up the lion’s share of local coffers.

Steep hikes in local water fees helped finance new water lines to the multiplying shantytowns on the outskirts of the cities. The increases also fed complaints that the PAN disregards the poor and has let poverty climb.

Elections are scheduled in Baja California next year not only for governorship but also five mayoralties. The outcome of the presidential race will go far toward determining the tone of those campaigns, agree officials in both the PAN and PRI.

Even Ruffo concedes that the PAN is bound to lose in the state someday. That might offer a healthy lesson, he said during an interview, and validate the notion, central to his 1989 crusade, that handing over power is a sign of real democracy.

“The PAN has to change,” said Ruffo, who left office in 1995. “It has to suffer too. This isn’t Disneyland.”