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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | June 2006 
Win Unlikely for Former Ruling Party
 Chris Hawley - arizonarepublic.com
| | Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Roberto Madrazo gives the thimbs up during a rally at Guadalajara's Expo Saturday in Guadalajara City, Mexico. The elections will take place on July 2. (Associated Press) |
Mexico City - With skulls, flames and rifles adorning the walls, there is nothing subtle about the headquarters of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party.
A winged warrior with bayonets instead of feathers charges across a huge mosaic depicting Mexico's bloodiest battles. A six-story-high campaign poster dwarfs passers-by.
Beyond it, the headquarters sprawl across an entire block in downtown Mexico City. This is where elections were rigged, presidents hand-picked and political plots hatched during the party's 71 years of almost unopposed rule. Statues of former presidents attest to the glories.
But outside its iron gates, the PRI, as it is known, is not the monolith it used to be.
Its presidential candidate is trailing in the polls. Its control of Congress is in doubt. Some prominent members are jumping ship. And the party's image as the heir of the 1917-20 Mexican Revolution is looking outdated, many Mexicans say.
"The PRI is all used up," said Juan Hernández, a shoe shiner who works down the street from the party headquarters.
Members of the PRI's Old Guard are known as "the dinosaurs" in Mexico. Editorial cartoonists love to show the presidential candidate, Roberto Madrazo, as a lumbering brontosaurus.
With Madrazo struggling under a 10-point deficit in the polls, PRI Sens. Manuel Bartlett, Oscar Cantón and Genaro Borrego Estrada have expressed support for other candidates and now face possible expulsion from the party.
The party that once dominated all Mexico is about to become a force based more in governors and trade unions than in the federal government, most experts say. One of those poles of power likely will be Sonora, the state bordering Arizona.
"I think we will probably see a PRI closer to its origins . . . as a constellation of regional powers," said Jorge Zepeda Patterson, editor of the Día Siete newsmagazine and author of a book about the candidates.
The PRI was formed in the 1920s as the National Revolutionary Party. Its main goal was to stop infighting in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, the uprising against dictator Porfirio Díaz.
PRI presidents picked their successors in a tradition known as the dedazo, or "finger-tapping." They also chose governors and lawmakers.
Local PRI enforcers then used handouts, fraud and even violence to make sure those people were elected. They sponsored concerts and bullfights, offered free lunches to people who attended rallies, and handed out free cement, grain, beans and even farm machinery to party supporters.
For the PRI, ensuring stability always has been more important than beliefs. The party's agenda has swung from far-left in the 1930s to heavily pro-business in the 1990s and back to center-left today.
"They've never had an ideology. and I can't see they'll have one in the future," said George W. Grayson, an expert on Mexico at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. The party, he said, is "an empty vessel into which a president could pour his ideology."
In the late 1990s, President Ernesto Zedillo was a reformer. He oversaw an overhaul of Mexico's electoral system and gave autonomy to the newly created Federal Electoral Institute.
The institute set up a state-of-the-art voter-registration system and imposed strict rules on candidates.
Thanks in part to the changes, Vicente Fox of the National Action Party became the first non-PRI president in seven decades in 2000. The PRI also lost its simple majority in Congress, forcing it to make alliances with the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party to oppose Fox's pro-business reforms.
Fox is limited to one six-year term by the Mexican constitution. His party's presidential candidate, Felipe Calderón, is in a close race with the left-leaning former mayor of Mexico City, Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
Madrazo of the PRI is in third place with about 22 percent of the vote.
The PRI still controls 17 of Mexico's 31 state governments, including the wealthy states of Nuevo León and Mexico. It also has a good chance of regaining control of Jalisco, the state where Guadalajara is, in the July 2 vote.
It also has 58 of the 128 Senate seats and 204 of the 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the lower house of Congress. Polls indicate the party losing seats on July 2 but remaining a powerful player.
Despite its faults, the PRI brought relative peace to Mexico during its 71 years in power. Because of that, many Mexicans remain loyal to the party.
"The PRI built this country," said Marta Palafox, a PRI congresswoman from Tlaxcala state. "It managed to consolidate institutions that gave life and stability. . . . So we have to keep on fighting, even if it's harder now."
Reach the reporter at chris.hawley@arizonarepublic.com. |
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