Ex-Backers Say Fox’s Party Lacks Heart

As a foot soldier in the campaign to remake Mexico after decades of one-party rule, Felipe de Jesus Cantu can claim credit for one of its most open and efficient city administrations.

The 37-year-old mayor of Monterrey, elected on President Vicente Fox’s coattails three years ago, has pushed through the country’s first municipal “transparency law,” allowing public scrutiny of anything from the city’s payroll to contracts with its suppliers.

Getting a permit to start a small business here, a process that once lasted months and routinely involved bribes, can now take as little as 48 hours. A new electronic system tracks patrol cars, making the police more accountable and, many citizens agree, less corrupt. The city is greener, with new or refurbished plazas in scores of neighborhoods.

Nearing the end of his term, however, Cantu may have taken efficiency a step too far: He evicted 356 corpses from their tombs to widen a road, pitting a backhoe against enraged widows. Many voters who helped make Monterrey a stronghold of Fox’s National Action Party say they are tired of this style of leadership -- industrious but aloof, bent on making things work but often insensitive, especially to the poor -- and are ready to sweep the party from power.

The changing mood in Mexico’s third-largest city could be a bellwether. Monterrey was an early leader in the voter insurgency that eroded the monopoly of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, before Fox finally wrested away the presidency in 2000. Now his party, the PAN, is struggling to retain control of legislative seats, statehouses and city halls in nationwide midterm elections July 6.

Hurt by a stagnant economy and Fox’s inability to enact reforms, the PAN is expected to remain well short of a majority in both houses of Congress -- regardless of whether it manages to erase the PRI’s plurality in the 500-seat lower Chamber of Deputies, where none of the three major parties have a majority. (The 128-seat Senate is not up for election.) But the PRI’s strong campaign in this northern industrial center could produce the biggest upset of the election -- and some early lessons for the race in 2006 to succeed Fox.

In Nuevo Leon state, the PAN has held the mayor’s job for nine years in Monterrey and the governor’s for six -- long enough to make an impact on the lives of the city’s 1.2 million people. But voter surveys show the PRI poised to recapture both offices by wide margins -- a crushing turnabout akin to a Republican loss of Texas.

In interviews, many voters said the PAN had improved their surroundings while hurting their pocketbooks or their pride. Some longtime PAN supporters said they no longer felt bound by party loyalty and were attracted to individual PRI candidates who support Fox’s free-market proposals.

“It’s not that Fox and his people are doing a poor job,” said Aurelio Collado, a political scientist at the Technological Institute of Monterrey. “But they sold the voters on this big idea of change and raised expectations impossibly high. Many people were let down. For them, the PRI has become the next option and is waiting its turn to get back in power.”

In Topochico, a working class neighborhood of about 1,000 families, voters bought the PAN’s promises of a booming economy -- Fox talked of 7% growth and 1 million new jobs a year -- and better city services.

In part, the city’s administrators have delivered. At their initiative, Topochico and other Monterrey districts set up Community Action Programs, led by citizen volunteers who work with City Hall to identify pressing local needs.

Safer, Cleaner Streets

Marta Cavazos, 30, who runs an auto repair shop with her husband, said Topochico was a much rougher place in 1994 when the PAN took office and recruited her as a volunteer.

“Most of the streets were dirt, so we got the city to pave them,” she recalled. “Then the gangs started taking gravel from the road crews, to use in their street fights, so we demanded protection.... Back then, the police never entered Topochico unless they were called in. Now we have two police posts, each with four patrolmen round the clock. They got the gangs under control. The streets feel safer.” They are also cleaner; garbage collection has increased from one to three times a week.

Cavazos is now lobbying for a better drainage system to keep rain and Topochico’s underground springs, which feed a mineral water bottling plant, from periodically flooding the streets.

Many people in Topochico insist, however, that the most important change has been the tripling of their gas bills and the 80% hikes in water and electricity rates since PAN governments withdrew PRI-era subsidies. With Fox’s promised boom not materializing and wages depressed, they complain about another change: PAN administrations are more zealous about collecting those utility bills and cutting off services to customers who cannot pay.

As more Mexicans scrape out a living outside the formal economy, municipal inspectors have clamped down on unlicensed vendors in the neighborhood, threatening many families with a loss of income.

“The PAN does not understand people in need,” said Juventino Carrillo, who was butchering a hog for sale on a sidewalk in Topochico and spoke to a reporter only after checking ID to make sure he did not work for the city.

Indeed, critics of the PAN’s Community Action Programs say the programs fail to relieve poverty or lobby for the poor. After the state water company had overcharged 35,000 customers a total of $4 million, it was a PRI-aligned civic group, Committed to Mexico, that blew the whistle and got much of the money reimbursed.

Eduarda Patena, who manages a branch of the city’s relief agency in Topochico but says she will vote for the PRI, spoke bitterly of what she called the PAN administration’s betrayal of the poor. She said the city has eliminated beans, powdered milk and soup from the food packages she doles out twice a month to 380 registered indigents, leaving only lentils, oats, cooking oil and gelatin.

“The higher-ups do not explain these decisions,” Patena said after sending an 83-year-old widow home with her rations. “They visit our community during the campaign, make promises and take office. Then they forget who elected them.”

Monterrey is headquarters to many of Mexico’s biggest corporations, and some of their millionaire CEOs joined the PAN to seek public office, giving politics here an edge of class struggle. Fernando Canales, for example, led the Industrias Monterrey conglomerate before his election as governor six years ago. The backlash against him and other PAN-istas is, in part, a blue-collar revolt against governance by corporate bosses.

Experience That Counts

Last year, 86% of voters polled by the Publicum Consultores firm in Nuevo Leon said the next governor should have “the experience to govern,” while 10% said the officeholder should have “experience as an entrepreneur.”

“Our entrepreneurs are good at discipline, order, collecting revenue and building things, but they have not been good politicians,” said Luis Santos de la Garza, an 81-year-old Monterrey attorney and veteran PAN activist, interpreting the poll result. “They lack a human touch.”

The PRI has exploited this sentiment, campaigning for a kinder, gentler administration. It is moving to erase its image as a corrupt political machine by putting up relatively untainted candidates and rebranding itself, along with three smaller parties, as the citizens’ alliance. While 6,000 PAN activists in Nuevo Leon held closed caucuses to fill their party’s July 6 ballot (Mexican law bars officials from reelection), the PRI held an open primary that drew 360,000 voters and gave its nominees better exposure.

Jose Natividad Gonzalez, a Sorbonne-trained lawyer and former senator who won the PRI’s gubernatorial primary, has led in the polls from the start. The PAN hopeful, paint magnate Mauricio Fernandez, hurt himself by calling for legalization of marijuana and trails by 13 to 17 percentage points in the latest surveys.

PRI mayoral nominee Ricardo Canavati, leading PAN rival Francisco Javier Cantu by an even wider margin, has hardly bothered to campaign.

The polls alarm Luis Felipe Bravo, the PAN’s national president, who argues that defeat here would undermine Fox’s vision of decentralized free-market democracy.

In an interview, Bravo accused the PRI of blocking Fox’s reform proposals in Congress so the party can return to “the top of the pyramid, with the same concentration of barbaric power” it wielded for 71 years. An overall PAN victory on July 6, he said, could serve as a “booster rocket” to propel Fox’s proposed programs into practice.

But some longtime PAN voters, such as Elpidio Rodriguez, no longer view politics in such black and white terms. He is splitting his ticket this time -- for the PAN nominee for Congress and the PRI candidates for mayor and governor.

The 46-year-old Monterrey lawyer explained his choices in a vacated downtown clothing boutique, shouting over the bustle of workers installing refrigerated display cases. Rodriguez, who owns the property, says he can rent it out as a convenience store for more money than the boutique could afford.

Such a switch requires a city permit. Until this year, he said, that might have meant waiting at least eight months and bribing as many as five inspectors. But after the mayor streamlined the licensing system, Rodriguez won quick approval. The city’s new inspectors, he said, “do not even ask for bribes because they are afraid of losing their jobs.” So why does he want to throw the PAN out of City Hall?

Better Candidates

Simple, he said: The PRI nominee is better qualified and won the televised debate. Asked how to curb prostitution, for example, the PAN candidate called for legalizing it. “But when they asked him whose neighborhood would get the red light district, he didn’t have the slightest idea,” Rodriguez recalled. The lawyer preferred the PRI’s solution: Put vocational schools in poor districts and give young women alternatives to walking the streets.

Now that the PRI’s monopoly is gone and elections are relatively clean, the lawyer said, “I see no reason to support any party unconditionally. My ideology is alternancia. Let them compete and take turns in power. Let the best candidates win.”

The PRI cannot be so corrupt anymore, he added, because “what officials do is more transparent now, and no one can afford to cover things up again.”

Other voters said the two parties no longer look so different. Gonzalez, the PRI candidate, endorses Fox’s proposal to privatize gas and electricity production, although many in his party do not. After criticizing the practice in which PRI politicians jumped from one job to another “like grasshoppers,” Canales did just that, resigning as governor in January to become Fox’s economy minister.

The PAN has adopted a PRI tradition -- the election-year rush to finish public works.

Maria del Refugio Aguilar noticed this one morning last August when she turned on the 7 o’clock news. Live from Pantheon Robles, a backhoe was taking down the north wall of the cemetery to make way for Mayor Cantu’s most urgent project, the widening of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines Avenue.

Aguilar, 64, was shocked. Her parents were buried in one of two long rows of graves, parallel to the avenue, that were being sealed off by the police for exhumation. “Chunks of the wall were falling on the tombs,” she recalled. “We had no warning.”

Families who thought they owned the plots -- elderly widows and others who had never met before -- quickly gathered and blocked the avenue. Riot police scattered them, arresting several and injuring two. The protesters camped across the street until Cantu, who initially turned them away at City Hall, agreed to a meeting the next day.

The mayor told the families that he had expropriated the plots without notifying them because legally, in the city’s view, the plots belonged to the corporate owner of Pantheon Robles. During the tense meeting, he relayed an offer from the owner to move the 356 bodies to other plots in the cemetery.

Twenty families resisted, demanding perpetual deeds to the new plots. While a court deliberated, the city halted the exhumations and the case became a drawn-out media circus, featuring a priest who prayed over the contested tombs and PRI activists who swirled among them dressed as ghosts. Posters illustrated with little skulls ridiculed the mayor last November on one of Mexico’s most sacred holidays, the Day of the Dead.

The city finally agreed in March to the families’ demands, and the road widening was completed this month.

“It is hard for people to accept that biblical expression ‘You are dust and into dust you shall return,’ ” Cantu said in an interview, acknowledging that he had paid a political price. “People said, ‘No, that’s not dust, that’s my father.’ It was very hard to carry out a simple removal of those graves.”

But the mayor insisted that he had done the right thing. The cemetery was part of a traffic bottleneck, he said, and PRI mayors had avoided the problem for years, shying away from what he called an inevitable conflict over the dead.

“We are not afraid of tackling difficult situations,” he said. “There will be those who say I am insensitive, but others who will say I am sensible because I am meeting the demands of citizens” to unclog traffic.

Seven women who bonded during the conflict and call themselves the Robles Group meet every Thursday afternoon, holding umbrellas against the sun, to visit the relocated graves of their loved ones. Six of them voted for the mayor but say he misread their protest and shattered their faith in his party.

“We were never against their widening the street,” said Blanca Aurelia Meza, 48. “What we opposed was their abuse of authority. We gave them our votes so they could serve us. Instead they assaulted our dignity. We expected a government that is more humane.”