PRI Mayoral Hopeful Wants a Recount in Ciudad Juarez

The rerun of last summer’s Ciudad Juarez mayoral election is proving as close and contentious as the first round, with one side declaring victory, the other demanding a recount and a razor-thin margin separating the candidates.

By late Monday, Jesus Alfredo Delgado, the National Action Party candidate whose victory last July was overturned because of campaign irregularities, had 137,614 votes, or 46.5%, with all but 2% of the ballots cast Sunday counted. He led Roberto Barraza of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, by a mere 2,365 votes.

A final count is expected by Wednesday night, but PRI campaign spokesman Jose Acosta said Monday that his party was already demanding that the state election commission recount about 12,000 disallowed votes to make sure they should have been disqualified. “We aren’t talking about irregularities because at the moment we don’t know of any,” he said.

Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, president of the National Action Party, or PAN, nevertheless declared victory Monday, sending a “strong, sincere and profound congratulations to the people of Juarez” for choosing Delgado, “who for a second time has won the election.”

Delgado’s victory over Barraza in July was overturned by a state electoral tribunal because of his party’s improper use of campaign advertising across the border in El Paso.

Although both parties stressed that the Ciudad Juarez election was strictly local in its implications and should not be construed as a barometer of the electoral mood in the rest of Mexico, a loss would be disappointing for the PRI.

The former ruling party, which lost the presidency for the first time in 71 years to the PAN’s Vicente Fox in 2000, had hoped to capitalize on the previous PAN mayor’s inability to solve a string of slayings totaling 250. The border city’s acute economic slowdown was also seen as giving the PRI an edge.

But the relatively weak performance by the PAN in its electoral stronghold showed that the party may be losing momentum after more than a decade of gaining power in local elections such as the Juarez race, said David Shirk, a political scientist at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, Calif.

“We are seeing gradually declining rates of turnout and narrowing margins of victory for the PAN in the northern states in Mexico. The PAN could be satisfying voters so greatly that, like U.S. voters, they are not voting,” Shirk said.

“Or you could say that the PAN model for municipal governance is becoming exhausted, that they don’t know what to do now that they have taken care of the obvious egregious stuff left behind by the PRI, like cleaning up the padded municipal payrolls and building a tax base that works,” he said.

The number of PAN mayors in Mexico went from 18 in 1982 to 250 in the mid-1990s, Shirk said, but the gains are leveling off.

The PRI had hoped that an electoral alliance formed with the Workers and Green parties--the first such alliance in its history--would give it victory in Mexico’s biggest border city as well as a boost going into next year’s midterm elections, which will include races for six governorships.