PAN Candidate Takes the Lead in Ciudad Juarez

President Vicente Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, clung to a slim lead Sunday night in the Ciudad Juarez mayoral election, a closely watched race climaxing at a time of increasing national political turmoil and polarization.

With 91% of the ballots counted in Mexico’s largest border city, the PAN’s Jesus Alfredo Delgado led with 127,557 votes, or 47.1% of those cast, to 123,080, or 45.4%, for Roberto Barraza of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.

The contest was Ciudad Juarez’s second mayoral election in 10 months. The first, in July, was annulled because winner Delgado had run TV spots across the border in El Paso, which is against Mexican law. Juarez currently has a provisional mayor.

Polls just before Sunday’s election indicated that the race was too close to call. Voter turnout Sunday was described as low.

With a population of about 1.5 million, Juarez has been a PAN stronghold for most of the last two decades and has been governed by the party since 1992.

The mayoral election was seen as a critical test of efforts by the PRI to redefine itself--after its loss of the 2000 presidential election to Fox--and to appeal to younger and more affluent voters.

The PRI had hoped to capitalize on the inability of the previous elected mayor, a PAN member, to solve serial killings now totaling more than 250 victims, mostly young women. The city’s economy, dominated by foreign-owned assembly plants called maquiladoras, has been hit hard by the U.S. recession. Thousands of jobs have been lost since 2000.

A victory in Juarez would give the PRI momentum in the run-up to next year’s national elections, in which six governorships and 300 seats in the Chamber of Deputies are up for grabs.

But border states generally and Chihuahua especially have been bastions of strength for the PAN as it rose to national prominence. Chihuahua’s current governor, Patricio Martinez, is from the PRI, however.

To boost its chances, the PRI borrowed a page from the PAN’s playbook by forming an alliance with three other parties to make Barraza a coalition candidate. PRI bylaws were changed last year to permit such alliances.

Over the last two years, the PAN has allied with other parties to win several important national contests, including the governorships of Yucatan and Chiapas states.

Political analyst Alfonso Zarate of the GCI consulting firm in Mexico City stressed that the Juarez election ultimately would be decided by local issues and should not be viewed as a “thermometer” of the nationwide political climate.

“This is a city which does not reflect the electoral mosaic of Mexico. It has characteristics that are very different from the rest of the country,” Zarate said. “It’s a border city, with very little indigenous population [and] with a very strong entrepreneurial and democratic spirit.”

Also stressing voters’ local concerns, political scientist Federico Estevez of Mexico’s Autonomous Technological Institute said the PAN was hurt by “10 years of serial murders, large problems in public security and a little recession on its hands.”

If Delgado wins, it would be despite Fox’s declining popularity. The president’s domestic agenda has stalled in a bitterly divided Congress in which no party has a majority. His campaign to secure concessions from President Bush on immigration, border infrastructure and other binational issues has made little progress.

In a speech Thursday night in New York that seemed aimed at his domestic critics, Fox warned that there could be no “privileged relation between the United States and Mexico without a real advance in substantive issues in our bilateral agenda.”

Topping that agenda is regularizing the status of about 3 million illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States.

Fox’s PAN received another slap last week when a federal election tribunal voted to reopen an investigation of alleged illegal election financing during the president’s victorious 2000 campaign.

The judges’ decision came as a federal judge issued warrants for the arrest of six former Petroleos Mexicanos executives in connection with illegal diversions of $173 million in Pemex funds to the oil workers union in the year before Fox took office.

Investigators have told local news media that some of the money was used to finance the PRI’s losing presidential campaign in 2000.

Just as the PRI had charged the Fox administration with using the Pemex investigation for electoral purposes, there were murmurings in the PAN corner that the reopening of the Fox election finance case was somehow political retaliation.

Not likely, said political scientist Jose Antonio Crespo of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching. He said that the two events were probably coincidental.