In Mexico, Rural ‘Fear Vote’ Could Boost PRI

The aging peasant woman glanced nervously around this isolated mountain village and furtively tucked inside her shawl the opposition-party pamphlets she’d just been handed.

This is modern multi-party Mexico, not the old Soviet Union. And she was merely holding brochures of the Democratic Revolution Party, one of the two main parties challenging the 71-year rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in upcoming national elections. So why was she so scared, even to give her name?

“This is a PRI town,” she muttered, not wanting to be overheard, “and if we say we are from another party, problems can occur. We are afraid.”

The “fear vote,” especially among the 27% of the population defined as rural, could help hand the PRI another six-year presidential term when Mexicans go to the polls July 2. Apart from such fears, the PRI also commands, in much of the countryside, a historic loyalty akin to that felt for the Roman Catholic Church.

At the same time, however, the PRI’s longtime dominance in the countryside appears to be waning, and for the first time, the party’s share of the rural vote is likely to fall below 50%. A greater number of balanced television and radio reports are reaching rural areas than before, and the grip of pro-PRI citizens groups such as the National Campesino Confederation is weakening.

With polls indicating that the presidential race is extremely close, even this partial erosion of rural control poses a threat to PRI candidate Francisco Labastida. His ability to stem such defections could prove decisive.

Yet the voto verde, or green vote, remains the backbone of Labastida’s support. He still has 46% of the peasantry behind him, compared with 25% who back PRD candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, his main rival for the rural vote, according to a poll this month in the respected daily Reforma.

The Mexican countryside is far from homogenous. It ranges from the indigenous mountain villages of Oaxaca and Chiapas to modern agro-industrial developments in the northwest.

“The political panorama of rural Mexico is a patchwork quilt,” said Jonathan Fox, chair of the Latin American and Latino studies program at UC Santa Cruz. “In some areas, there have been democratic breakthroughs, and other areas remain highly militarized, where the fear vote may predominate. And there are many areas in between.”

New Openness Reaches Remote Communities

But the front line in the current competition for votes is in areas such as this one--the Loxicha region of Oaxaca, a group of tough farming villages where the PRI was once unchallenged.

These isolated hamlets are among the nation’s most heavily subsidized, and residents’ apprehension about a possible loss of government aid is powerful.

Yet even in San Bartolome Loxicha, an hour’s drive from San Agustin Loxicha and three hours from the nearest paved road, there are hints that Mexico’s version of glasnost is reaching even the remotest corners of the country.

“For me, it would be good to change regimes and to end this PRI dictatorship,” said peasant farmer Edilberto Pacheco, 44. “The people are more open now. We want to be more developed.”

Pacheco said “there is still fear of speaking openly in the community, and people are careful about what they say.” But he wasn’t the least bit hesitant about speaking as he waited out a rain shower beside the one-room village office.

Mayor Tomas Gaspar, a PRI member, acknowledged that “the people do want to see change from the government,” though he said that town officials are chosen on a non-party basis in keeping with local Indian tradition and that “the PRI committee here dissolved years ago.”

Pacheco agreed that “there is no pressure, there are no tricks” to force people in San Bartolome Loxicha to vote for the PRI; there is not even any open campaigning in the town. Radio and television are the main sources of information, he said, and many people watched the recent presidential debates and formed their own impressions of the candidates.

But these communities are also extremely dependent on government largess. Gaspar said 60% of the 5,000 people in San Bartolome receive benefits from Progresa, the federal welfare program linked to education and health.

Enrique Lepine, director of government issues for the center-right National Action Party, or PAN, in Mexico City, said “the sin is not that poverty exists but that instead of combating it, you administer it. The PRI has administered poverty for 40 years. And what happened was, people got used to putting their hand out.

“We arrive in the country, and people ask, ‘What are you going to give me?’ ” Lepine added. “It has generated a culture of dependence. The PRI manipulates poverty to win elections.”

Many Farmers Receive Government Assistance

There’s no doubt that government programs reach deep into the lives of rural dwellers throughout Mexico. Nearly 3 million farmers, for example--85% of them with fewer than 12 acres of cropland--receive $70 per acre in agriculture support annually through a program called Procampo. A network of 23,000 mostly rural government discount stores serves 30 million Mexicans.

Opponents say the PRI works to instill fear among recipients that they will lose such aid if they don’t support the government’s candidate. For example, Jose Antonio Vazquez, a PRD organizer in coastal Santa Cruz Huatulco, said municipal officials there are belatedly giving out housing materials to repair hurricane and earthquake damage, “and they are making this conditional on voting for the PRI.”

Although the center-left PRD, many of whose members are former PRI loyalists who broke from the ruling party in 1988, is the main challenger in the countryside, the PRD’s Cardenas is running a distant third nationally. It is center-right challenger Vicente Fox of the PAN who is deadlocked with Labastida, thanks to Fox’s strong support in the cities.

Fox, from a hacienda-owning ranching family in central Guanajuato state, is portraying himself as a man of the countryside and has made major inroads in rural areas of northern and western Mexico. Despite his trademark cowboy boots and his folksy style, however, he has struggled to win a presence in the south.

In commercial farming areas in the northwest, both Fox and Cardenas have sought to capitalize on anti-PRI sentiment among farmers angered by policies that have encouraged sometimes devastating competition from U.S. imports.

At a forum in northern Sinaloa state last month, Cardenas listened to a parade of farmers pledging their support for him and raging against the PRI government’s phaseout of subsidies and price supports, which has left farmers vulnerable and driven some off the land altogether.

In Oaxaca, the PAN also is beginning to compete with the PRD for the anti-PRI vote.

Luis Rodriguez of the PAN, who got just 4% of the vote in the 1999 mayoral race in semirural Santa Maria Huatulco, said: “People have gotten rid of their fear. People now are more cynical, more open.”

Indeed, in the farming village of Xuchil, lifelong PRI voter Ricardo Gabriel Gabriel declared: “I am going to vote for the PAN, to see if they can change Mexico. We need a change. The women need support [and] credits so they can develop small businesses. And we want our children to go to school, to high school.”

Horacio MacKinlay, a sociologist at the Autonomous Metropolitan University in Mexico City who studies rural politics, said the PRI’s rural vote fell from 71% in 1991 to 51% in the 1997 congressional elections.

In a draft version of a report for the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego, MacKinlay says the PRI’s declining voter support is partly due to land reforms introduced in the early 1990s that reduced the power of local leaders over communal lands known as ejidos. More and more federal government programs deal directly with individual families, not through local bosses.

“Like Mexican society in general, which is steadily freer, there are also changes in the rural environment,” MacKinlay said in an interview. “These are changes toward a more plural society, although [they are occurring] more slowly than in urban areas because it is easier to maintain the old mechanisms of control. The PRI still has control over huge networks of influence.”

Inertia also works in the PRI’s favor. Near Huatulco, Cecilio Carreno, the 75-year-old founder of the village of Arroyo Limon, population 61, said he’ll stick with the PRI though he’s experienced no pressure to do so.

He explained his reasoning this way: “They give us a little, they fool us at times, but it’s better than nothing.”