CIUDAD VICTORIA, Mexico (AP) — After a Super Sunday of elections
across Mexico that was widely seen as a test for the 2012
presidential race and the nation’s future, the winner turns out to
be — well, not really anyone.
President Felipe Calderon’s party is weak, the left is in
collapse and the Institutional Revolutionary Party that is on a
tentative path to recapture the presidency it held for 71 years was
shown to be vulnerable. Drug cartel intimidation dissuaded many
from voting at all.
The mixed outcome in elections across 15 states showed no party
has won the faith of Mexicans desperate to bring their country out
of a quagmire of economic stagnation and relentless gang wars that
have killed more than 23,000 people since Calderon took office
three years ago.
Calderon’s conservative National Action Party won not a single
state on its own, and lost two it had held, according to results
Monday, and needed desperate alliances with leftists to wrest
strongholds from the old ruling party.
That party, known as the PRI, demonstrated it remains Mexico’s
most important political force, won nine of 12 governorships
Sunday.
Still, that was no change from the number it had before the
ballot. And its defeat in three longtime bastion states indicated
many Mexicans are still repulsed by the party that ruled through
patronage and corruption from 1929 to 2000 — a system that Peruvian
novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once called the “perfect
dictatorship.”
Sunday’s elections also displayed the intimidating power of drug
cartels in the most embattled states. Only a third of voters showed
up in the country’s most violent state, Chihuahua, where drug gangs
hung four bodies from bridges on election day. Less than 40 percent
voted in Tamaulipas, where gubernatorial candidate Rodolfo Torre
was assassinated last week.
It’s not where Mexicans thought they would be when National
Action’s Vicente Fox ousted the PRI in 2000 and promised a new
era.
“I still remember the celebration when Vicente Fox won the
presidential elections 10 years ago. It was as if Mexico had won
the World Cup,” Mexican political scientist Leo Zuckerman wrote
Monday in Excelsior newspaper. “Where are we 10 years after the
historic triumph of Fox?”
“I see multiple threats to democracy, which has not yet
consolidated itself in Mexico. I think organized crime is the
biggest challenge,” he said. “The stamp is very clear: crime has
exercised its veto power over the power of the vote.”
The PRI, a party that was created by the nation’s rulers to tame
the complex forces of the Mexican Revolution, was widely seen as
doomed after its loss to Fox, and it was a battered afterthought in
the 2006 presidential election, when Calderon narrowly defeated a
resurgent leftist Democratic Revolution Party.
Four years later, Calderon’s approval ratings are slumping amid
mass shootings, corruption scandals and kidnappings that remind
Mexicans daily of the resilient power of drug cartels he has vowed
to defeat.
“He has reverse coattails,” said George Grayson, a Mexico expert
at the College of William & Mary in Virginia. “The economy is
quite weak … and the narco-traffickers have been on a binge.”
Democratic Revolution — the PRI’s biggest competitor for the
working class vote — has largely imploded amid internal wrangling,
four years after nearly winning the presidency. It lost the only
state it controlled on its own among the 12 up for grabs
Sunday.
In a sense, the left and right are back to where they were in
the days of PRI rule: forced into uncomfortable alliances to tackle
a powerful opponent. In 1988, National Action joined leftist
parties in protesting the allegedly fraudulent presidential victory
of Carlos Salinas.
On Sunday, neither the left nor the right were able to beat the
PRI alone.
Democratic Revolution joined Calderon’s party to win Sinaloa and
Puebla behind coalition candidates who only recently bolted from
the PRI. A similar coalition won in Oaxaca behind a minor-party
candidate who quit the PRI a decade ago.
Though the results were largely due to local issues and local
scandals, they were a blow to the PRI’s hope that Sunday would help
propel it back to the presidency. The party had ruled those states
for 80 years.
Many saw the result as evidence that voters are skeptical about
PRI promises that it has learned from its past mistakes and
abandoned the strongman politics that kept in power for so
long.
In Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug trafficking, PRI
candidate Jesus Vizcarra long faced allegations of ties to the
cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted drug
lord. The newspaper Reforma recently published a photograph of
Vizcarra attending a party years ago with El Chapo’s No. 2, Ismael
Zambada. Vizcarra, the mayor of state capital Culiacan and a
distant relative of slain drug trafficker Ines Calderon, dodged
questions about whether Zambada is the godfather of one of his
children, saying only that he had never committed a crime.
In the heavily indigenous state of Oaxaca, outgoing Gov. Ulises
Ruiz alienated many voters with his heavy handed approach to a
five-month deadly uprising in 2006 over allegations that he stole
his election victory.
In Puebla, the outgoing PRI official was widely ridiculed as
“Precious Governor” because of a sycophantic comment made during a
leaked conversation he had with a local businessman who complained
about a reporter who was crusading against child molesters. Puebla
police later seized the reporter in another state and hauled her
halfway across Mexico. She was eventually freed.
“To a large extent this gives some breathing room to President
Calderon, who expected to be faced with a resurgent PRI,” said
Andrew Selee, director of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson’s
Mexico Institute.
Voter turnout was robust in Sinaloa and Oaxaca and very low in
two states where the PRI easily won: Chihuahua and Tamaulipas.
National Action leaders touted this as a promising sign, insisting
the PRI can only win where turnout is low.
“We won in places where people came out and voted,” said Jose
Sacramento, the defeated National Action candidate for governor in
Tamaulipas, where the PRI fielded the brother of its assassinated
candidate.
But then, what’s the party plan for states where Calderon has
failed to root out the cartels since launching his drug war at the
end of 2006? In Tamaulipas, party leaders said they couldn’t even
find candidates who dared to run for mayor in some gang-plagued
towns.
“It was an election that began with blood and ended with blood
and that was a factor because citizens were afraid to participate,”
Sacramento said.
___
Associated Press writers Olga R. Rodriguez reported this story
from Ciudad Victoria and Alexandra Olson from Mexico City.
