Mexico’s PRI Picks a New Whip

The Institutional Revolutionary Party named a party stalwart as its new congressional whip Wednesday, but the move did little to calm an ugly leadership crisis that threatens to split the party and sink President Vicente Fox’s reform proposals.

The PRI’s congressional delegation named former Interior Minister Emilio Chuayffet Chemor as its new leader after a council of PRI party leaders voted Monday to depose Elba Esther Gordillo. Gordillo denounced the process by which she was ousted as invalid and vowed to fight to keep her job.

The shuffle has polarized the PRI, which was Mexico’s ruling party for 71 years until Fox, of the National Action Party, or PAN, won the presidency in 2000. The PRI still has a plurality of seats in the 500-seat lower house of Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, with 222 seats to the PAN’s 151.

On Wednesday, 118 PRI deputies voted to name Chuayffet as their new leader.

The immediate issue driving Gordillo’s ouster was concern that she was too supportive of Fox’s proposals to change the tax system and permit foreign investment in power plants, analysts said.

On a deeper level, she and PRI President Roberto Madrazo were at odds over the party’s future, observers said.

“This is the worst schism the party has seen in 30 years,” said Roberto Pena Guerrero, a political analyst at the National Autonomous University here. “It implies more than a rupture. [It’s] a recomposition of forces along the traditional, hierarchical lines favored by Madrazo.”

The divide comes as the party prepares for elections next year, including 10 governorships.

In remarks to the press Wednesday, Chuayffet was at once conciliatory and defiant in asserting that the party had every right to change leaders.

“We will now try to recover the unity of the group,” Chuayffet said. “The process just concluded is perfectly legal.... The will of the majority is not negotiable.”

Gordillo’s supporters in the legislature insisted that she was removed illegally, noting that her term, which began in September, was supposed to run for 2 1/2 more years.

Her allies briefly blocked the passageway to her office Wednesday in a symbolic bid to prevent the new whip from taking over.

“They can’t take the position,” Gordillo said. “What I will say simply and plainly is that the [whip] registered before the secretary-general, the one who followed the appropriate steps, is Elba Esther Gordillo. I have no proof of the rest.”

Gordillo supporter Maria Elena Orantes, a member of the lower house, said that the process by which Gordillo was ousted was “invalid” because PRI leaders outside the chamber had initiated it.

Gordillo heads the powerful Mexican teachers union and represents the wing of the PRI favoring cooperation with Fox’s party in achieving reform.

But a sizable faction of the party favors keeping its distance from Fox. There is a long-standing reluctance among many in Congress to open up the nation’s energy sector to outside investment. The PRI promised during midterm elections this year to fight a Fox proposal to extend the nation’s value-added tax to food and medicine.

On Wednesday, Madrazo said he favors “not the reforms of a capricious government that blindly leads our country, but those that are conducive for development, economic growth and well-being of the people.”

Carlos Elizondo Mayer-Serra, political scientist and director of the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City, said that Fox’s energy reform proposal is now “practically dead” and that his tax plan “has very few possibilities.”

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Times researcher Froylan Enciso in The Times’ Mexico City Bureau contributed to this report.