PRI Revolt May Shake Mexico’s Stability

The southern heartland of Mexico’s once-mighty Institutional Revolutionary Party is abuzz with political rebellion reminiscent of the 1963 battle over states’ rights in Alabama, where Gov. George Wallace defied federal orders to integrate the schools.

Here in Yucatan state, the legislature--still controlled by the PRI, as the party is known--is refusing to obey a federal order to swear in a new state electoral council that in May will run an important gubernatorial election.

The party says the Federal Electoral Tribunal, Mexico’s highest balloting authority, wrongly interfered with state affairs last month when it dismissed the old council and named new members.

A confrontation is looming. If no solution is negotiated by noon Monday, the tribunal might even order national police to remove the old council forcibly so that the new panel can occupy the premises and begin work.

This is the latest in a series of signs that the PRI has lurched from ruling party to reeling party in a span of six months. But hardly anyone expected it to happen in what was once the PRI’s solid south.

The states south of Mexico City were the bulwark of the party’s national control for 71 years until Vicente Fox’s presidential victory last July 2. One state, Morelos, fell to Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, on the same election day. In three more key states in the deep south, the PRI’s control is either in jeopardy or already lost.

In Tabasco on the Gulf Coast, the federal tribunal last month annulled the PRI’s razor-thin gubernatorial victory in October on grounds of fraud. In the resulting crisis, two interim governors--both from the PRI--jousted for control until a compromise was worked out early Thursday that gave Enrique Priego the post and called for a new ballot in November, the first such revote in modern Mexican history.

In Chiapas, an opposition coalition candidate won the governorship in August and was sworn in last month, prompting a wave of PRI political maneuvers to try to unsettle the state’s new coalition government.

But the confrontation in Yucatan between the PRI-controlled state legislature and the federal tribunal is the most stark sign yet of the party’s diminished role. Some worry that the PRI uprising here could send dangerous shock waves throughout the country.

“The political stability of the whole country is at stake, because if you allow this barbarous rebellion to prevail, you could have 12 more rebellions this year,” said Yucatan legislator Jacinto Sosa of the PAN, referring to the number of states with gubernatorial or local races this year.

The Yucatan dispute began when the legislature tried last August to reappoint the entire electoral council, which organizes and monitors the fairness of elections. The federal tribunal, created in 1996 to eliminate once-common voting abuses, ruled the legislative appointments invalid on grounds that all nominated candidates were not considered.

Subsequent legislative maneuvers were twice more ruled invalid for various reasons, and last month the tribunal chose a panel by lottery from nominees proposed by civic groups.

But PRI leaders in Yucatan, including the state’s powerful political boss, Gov. Victor Cervera Pacheco, have refused to recognize the new electoral council, arguing that the tribunal violated the constitution’s division of powers and its precepts on states’ rights.

The PRI’s Myrna Hoyos, head of the legislature’s standing commission, said in an interview Thursday that “the tribunal was created to guarantee impartiality, but in the case of Yucatan they have been openly partial in defending the interests of the PAN and the PRD,” the initials of the small center-left Democratic Revolution Party.

“It is not stubbornness or caprice. It is just a matter of sticking to the law,” she said. “For us, this order is juridically nonexistent.”

She portrayed the PRI’s attitude as civil disobedience: “If the tribunal magistrates had ordered us to kill, would it be right to carry out that crime just because the tribunal’s decisions cannot be appealed?

“I believe that the tribunal magistrates should have taken juridical decisions, should have analyzed all the legal arguments, and they haven’t done it,” she said, “because if they had they would have decided in our favor.”

That defiance enrages other parties in the state.

Benito Rossel, a former federal senator from the center-right PAN, said the PRI’s attitude reminded him of the U.S. civil rights clashes between Southern states and the federal government.

In June 1963, Gov. Wallace tried to block two black students from entering the University of Alabama to register. President Kennedy federalized the state National Guard, which enforced the order. The pattern was repeated three months later when Alabama’s public schools were integrated. In his later years, Wallace renounced his own stand against integration.

Rossel said the PRI’s refusal to comply with the nation’s highest electoral body is a national threat.

“In a country in transition like Mexico, the only guarantee is the law, and for the law to prevail there has to be goodwill,” he said. “If an institution like the Federal Electoral Tribunal is flouted, what do we return to? Back-room solutions? What will this cost us?”

Rossel said the dispute poses a delicate challenge for Fox just six weeks after the president’s inauguration. Fox needs an effective opposition to negotiate with and hardly wants to invite a confrontation, but he can ill afford to cave in on the first major constitutional issue of his term when he has made respect for the rule of law a key issue.

Jose Alberto Castaneda, former Yucatan state president of the PAN, noted that Fox lost a ruling by the tribunal during the presidential campaign when the panel refused the candidate’s request to allow his photo to be used with the party’s logo on the ballot. Fox obeyed the ruling. The tribunal also ruled against the PAN in a dispute over control of the legislature in Mexico City’s Federal District, a decision the party accepted.

National analysts have seized on the PRI’s conflicts as signs of decay. Columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio, writing in the weekly Milenio newsmagazine, called the unrest “the PRI-ista revolution in the Mexican southeast, converted into a power struggle against everything and everyone that doubtless rather than reflecting the strength of the party signals its decomposition.”

In the past, disputes such as those in Yucatan and Tabasco would have been solved by presidential fiat. “But on July 2, the PRI was decapitated,” Castaneda noted. “And who’s in charge? The PRI now is neither revolutionary nor institutional, despite its name, and it is going back to its roots as a coalition of caciques [local bosses].”

In Yucatan, Gov. Cervera is described by supporters and foes alike as a politician with almost limitless power. He has served a total of 10 years as governor, and as PAN federal Deputy Miguel Gutierrez put it, “not one leaf moves in Yucatan without his knowledge and his approval.”

Cervera has kept a low profile in the conflict, deferring to legislative leaders. He told reporters Thursday that his government had “full respect for the tribunal” and said, “We have never violated the constitution.

“Don’t be nervous, the elections will be held as required,” he added.

Patricio Patron of the PAN, former mayor of Merida, Yucatan’s capital, and the party’s gubernatorial candidate, said the PRI’s defiance “shows Cervera couldn’t understand the changes that occurred on July 2. He wants to keep blackmailing, threatening. . . . If we have faulty laws, we can change them. But the first thing we must do is learn to obey the law. Here we have had far too much discretion.”

Civic groups and human rights organizations have applauded the tribunal’s ruling, saying it will encourage people to believe that change is possible.

“It is good that citizens are seeing this happen. Citizens are starting to feel their power,” said Cristina Munoz, head of the Indignation activist group. “And we have achieved this not through public protests but through the use of institutional rights.”