Mexico’s PRI Swears In Leader

Mexico’s former ruling party officially installed Roberto Madrazo as its new leader Monday, averting a rupture even as it suffered a setback in efforts to clean up its image as a corrupt political machine.

In a sign of reconciliation between candidates who only last week leveled bitter criticism at each other, Madrazo praised losing candidate Beatriz Paredes during his swearing-in ceremony.

Madrazo’s victory caps an intense struggle for the soul of the PRI, which lost its 71-year hold on Mexican politics in July 2000 when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party swept to power.

In the first election for the party leadership, Madrazo positioned himself as someone who could work with President Fox and achieve progress. He criticized his party’s “obstructionism” over the past year.

Paredes struck a more independent and populist tone, saying among other things that globalization was an “exhausted” economic model.

The PRI had hoped the election, which took place Feb. 24, would give it a new, more democratic image, but widespread charges of irregularities--corroborated by teams of independent observers and academics who oversaw the polling--tended to reinforce its reputation for corruption.

“The door was blatantly open to abuses,” said Meghan Bishop, a researcher with the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was with a team of poll observers in the state of Mexico.

Madrazo’s camp said votes were miscounted in the state of Mexico and other Paredes strongholds, while Madrazo’s supporters were accused of stuffing ballot boxes in Tabasco and Oaxaca states.

“Unfortunately, backward-looking and primitive segments within the party fraudulently distorted the vote . . . thus harming the process at a high cost for the PRI,” Paredes said in a statement published in Sunday morning newspapers here.

A party commission voted 8-1 on Sunday to accept the results giving 1,518,063 votes to Madrazo, 49, the former governor of Tabasco state, and 1,486,217 to Paredes, 48, former governor of Tlaxcala state.

Madrazo, whose election to the Tabasco governorship in 1994 was marked by allegations of vote irregularities, was installed Monday at PRI’s headquarters here before 10,000 party loyalists. He struck a conciliatory tone in his remarks.

“I want to make with all the strength of my heart and partisan conviction a respectful and fraternal salute to Beatriz Paredes for her efforts and role representing the party,” Madrazo said.

The prospect of a PRI split was also a problem for Fox, whose difficulties in pushing his legislative agenda have been due partly to the fractured PRI leadership.

Any temptation that Paredes might have had to split off and form a new party may have been doused by the harsh realities of such a move, said Benito Nacif, director of political studies at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching here.

“It takes a lot of time to build a reputation as a political party and electoral base,” Nacif said, adding that the only successful one in recent years has been the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, co-founded by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1989.

If Madrazo follows through on his promise to work with the Fox administration, his election means a new “political scenario for Mexico,” said Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.

“There is a window of opportunity for Madrazo to change his image, to reinvent himself as a policy statesman. Fox is also desperate to have something, to deliver on something,” Estevez said.

Rogelio Hernandez of the College of Mexico said the election’s strong turnout bolsters the party’s power, as do recent polls that indicate voter preference for the PRI is climbing as Fox’s popularity slips.