Cardenas Won’t Back Rival in Mexican Race

Running a distant third in the polls, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas angrily rejected an offer Tuesday to join forces with an opponent, turning down the opposition’s last chance to unite before Sunday’s presidential election in Mexico.

Vicente Fox of the center-right National Action Party, who is running neck and neck with the ruling party’s Francisco Labastida in the polls, made an emotional plea last week for Cardenas to join him in ending the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s 71-year rule.

But Cardenas--making his third bid for the presidency--denied in an interview that he would even consider throwing his votes to Fox.

“If Fox wants an opposition victory, then he should stand aside, he should go home, go back to his ranch and his businesses, and get out of politics,” Cardenas said.

Fox, however, told hundreds at a rally Tuesday in the southern Mexican city of Tapachula in Chiapas state that he is the only one who can topple the ruling party.

When asked about the attacks by Cardenas, Fox said: “Who is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas? That subject doesn’t interest me.”

Cardenas, meanwhile, claimed that his center-left Democratic Revolution Party “definitely” still has a chance to win the presidential race, despite the fact that almost all polls show him with less than 20% support among voters.

Labastida was favored by 42% of likely voters, and Fox by 39%, in a poll released Friday by ACNielsen. The poll had a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

Cardenas declined to say whether he thought that the presidential campaign had been fair to date. But he pledged that if Sunday’s vote is free of fraud, “we will accept the results, whatever they are.”

Cardenas denied speculation that, by focusing his criticism on Fox instead of Labastida, he is actually paving the way for another in a string of ruling-party victories stretching back to 1929.

But while Cardenas focused his fire on Fox, more evidence emerged that the ruling party, known as the PRI, may be using government resources to defeat the opposition.

In Villahermosa, capital of the Gulf Coast state of Tabasco, employees of Mexico’s state-run oil company said Monday that the company and union officials were pressuring them to vote for Labastida.

Pemex workers Jose Luis Rosas Munoz and Gilberto Quintero Reyes showed reporters forms from the Union of Petroleum Workers in Mexico that required members to give their voting credentials and vote for Labastida.

“We are obliged to sign these forms,” Rosas said. “If we refuse, we run the risk of administrative officials refusing to lend us money and give us a line of credit for living expenses.”

The workers also showed reporters a company e-mail that encouraged workers to “fill out the form with the names of voters that you have secured.”

The return addresses on the forms were of Pemex offices--despite a law forbidding use of government sites for campaigns.

Pemex workers in Monterrey, capital of the northern state of Nuevo Leon, voiced similar concerns Monday, saying company and union officials had required them to vote for Labastida or risk losing their jobs.

Last week the company denied accusations of vote coercion--but did not launch an investigation--after other Pemex workers voiced similar complaints.