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 News Around the Republic of Mexico | July 2006 
Mexico's Other, 'Fundamental' Vote
 Sandra Dibble - Union-Tribune
| | Seferino Zamora, 26, an El Niño neighborhood resident who intends to vote Sunday in Baja California's 4th Electoral District, was stumped when asked about his Congressional choices: "I just want them to be honest, to do good things for the colonia, for Tijuana." | 
| | Campaign posters lined the streets in Tijuana this week. The district has many of the region's neediest urban areas. (Photos: Nelvin C. Cepeda/Union-Tribune) |
Congressional races provide a glimpse into Mexico's future
Tijuana – From its bustling boulevards to its tightly packed hillsides, residents of a sprawling electoral district in the city's eastern reaches have been courted by noisy caravans of cars, fluttering campaign posters, and candidates promising more schools, more pavement, less crime.
It's not Mexico's presidency that's at play, but a seat in Mexico's Chamber of Deputies. And that means speaking directly to the hearts of nearly 237,000 voters in this largely working class district.
While the spotlight is on tomorrow's high-stakes presidential election, voters here and across Mexico are also preparing to replace the entire 500-member Chamber of Deputies and 128-member Senate. Although the races have drawn little attention, their outcome will also be crucial to Mexico's course over the next six years.
“They are fundamental,” said Alejandro Moreno, a researcher at the Autonomous National Technological Institute in Mexico City and a pollster at the Mexico City newspaper Reforma. “Whoever is elected president will depend on the composition of Congress.”
The results will provide a snapshot of the political forces in Baja California as it prepares for next year's gubernatorial, state legislature and municipal elections. Tijuana Mayor Jorge Hank Rhon, a member of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, wants to run for governor, and the vote in the city's four federal electoral districts will be telling for his future.
Talk to voters in Tijuana's 4th District, and many will say they're not quite sure what a diputado does. But they know what they want: “That the country move ahead, that there's an end to crime, that we get all the public services,” said Rubi Reynosa Pérez, 34, a mother of three in El Niño, a new neighborhood at the city's far eastern end, where the streets are not paved and the state is preparing to connect a sewer system.
“People don't care if I'm going to propose a law,” said candidate Ricardo Franco of the National Action Party, or PAN, a former boxer and accountant whose last job was in the state water commission. “They say, 'bring me some services, a concrete action, I want a sports field in my community.' ”
During decades of rule by the PRI, Mexico's Congress was largely a rubber stamp for presidential decisions. The old system began to crumble in 1997, when the PRI lost its grip over the Chamber of Deputies during the second half of President Ernesto Zedillo's term.
When the PAN's Vicente Fox won the presidency in 2000, a PAN coalition for the first time held a plurality in the Chamber of Deputies. But in the mid-term elections of 2003, the party lost its advantage to the PRI.
Without a PAN majority to back him, Fox has failed to push through his proposed reforms in the energy and labor sectors, as well as a vast array of electoral and state reforms.
Whoever wins Sunday's election is likely to face some of the same challenges.
Polls in the last month by Reforma and the Mexico City firm Parametría show that it is unlikely that any party will control Congress. Parametría's survey suggests 34 percent of voters will favor the PAN in both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate races. A party must win at least 150 seats in the lower House as well as 42 percent of the overall vote to win a majority, said Moreno, the Reforma pollster.
The winner of the presidential contest is likely to confront a Congress that's even more splintered than the current one, says analyst Benito Nacif of the Center for Research and Economic Teaching, a think thank in Mexico City.
The new president “will face the greatest opposition that any Mexican has ever faced in Congress,” said Nacif, who has closely followed Mexico's legislative branch.
However, the splintering of parties does not mean that Mexico's next president will necessarily face the same difficulties as Fox, analysts say.
“There have been lessons learned over the past few years, and these will force the president to be more moderate,” Nacif said. But “if you have a president with a plan to introduce rapid changes, then Congress is going to moderate that propensity.”
Baja California has 2.02 million people eligible to vote Sunday – under 3 percent of Mexico's total – for eight of Mexico's 300 electoral districts. Voters will choose one representative for each district, while the remaining 200 seats are assigned on the basis of the share of the total vote count in five regional districts.
The state's voters also will choose three senators: Two of the spots will go to the party that wins the most votes, and one to the party in second place. Their votes will also be included in a national tally that will be used to assign 32 multidistrict Senate seats.
In Baja California, a PAN stronghold since 1989, PAN candidates are favored to win a majority of votes, according to independent polls and political analysts.
In Tijuana's 4th District, the race is between three 35-year-olds: Franco of the PAN; social activist and former Tijuana council member Julio Cesar Vazquez of the Workers Party, which is part of a coalition that supports the leftist presidential candidate; and Eduardo Ledesma, a wealthy businessman who heads the Baja California branch of the tiny Green Ecologist Party, allied with the PRI.
For all their political differences, the candidates aren't arguing over the community's major issues: crime, education and infrastructure. The 4th District includes many of the neediest urban areas of Baja California, newly settled areas that need paved roads, sewage, schools.
“The biggest demand that I hear is for public safety,” Vazquez said. “They prefer safety to public works, there's a lot of vandalism, drug addiction, theft.”
Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Mexican legislators cannot serve consecutive terms. “That is a cause of very distant relationship between them and their constituencies,” Nacif said. “It's a stepping stone to other positions.”
Inside a newly opened laundromat in the Mariano Matamoros neighborhood, manager Guadalupe Díaz, 54, said he had studied the candidates and their proposals.
“I want them to look out for the good of the people,” Díaz said. “The president doesn't do things on his own, he needs Congress' support.”
Sandra Dibble: (619) 293-1716; sandra.dibble@uniontrib.com |
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