Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

MEXICO: PRI Lives On in Opposition Parties

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, Jun 2 2006 (IPS) - The almost 80-year-old Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) is destined for defeat in Mexico’s Jul. 2 elections, according to opinion polls. While some analysts say this may send the party into a tailspin, or even drive it into its grave, others note that former party faithful have found a way to keep the PRI’s essence alive.

For even if these dire predictions come true, the PRI is certain to live on in former members, who have found fertile ground in what was once enemy territory.

Several former ministers, advisors and leaders who served in the last two PRI governments, headed by Carlos Salinas (1988-1994) and Ernesto Zedillo (1994-2000), have defected from the party and wormed their way into the hearts of the upcoming election’s leading parties.

Although it still boasts the country’s most expansive organisational structure, and over the past six years it has won several local elections, the PRI is far from a triumphant comeback to national government. The party had a stranglehold on power from 1929 to 2000, when the people voted to hand power to conservative President Vicente Fox.

With only five weeks left until the election, most voter opinion polls show Roberto Madrazo, PRI’s presidential candidate, lagging in third place.

The most recent poll, published Monday by the private Mitovsky company, found that Madrazo’s ratings stand at 28 percent.

In the lead are Felipe Calderón, of the governing National Action Party (PAN), and his opponent from the leftist Democratic Revolution Party (PRD), Andrés López Obrador, neck-and-neck with approximately 34 percent of voter support each.

According to Luis Rubio, director of the non-governmental Centre for Research and Development based in Mexico City, “the PRI’s terminal crisis, which did not happen when it lost the election, is happening now,” and could be the last nail in the party’s coffin.

Ricardo Alemán, an experienced political journalist and editorial contributor for the local daily Universal as well as radio and television stations, sees things differently.

Jul. 2 will not signal the end of the PRI, because “branches of this party have already successfully colonised other groups and the teams of presidential candidates,” he told IPS.

The party will also remain a relatively important legislative force, added Alemán. In July, Mexicans will also elect 300 deputies and 128 senators, as well as several mayors, including the head of the Mexico City government.

Alemán said that “the truly worrisome and even outrageous part is that, before our very eyes, the old corrupt, manipulative and corporate party has managed, despite being trounced in 2000, to score a historical and cultural victory by insinuating itself into the very blood of other parties.”

Former PRI movers and shakers – largely those who were closely involved with the Salinas administration – have become especially influential in the PRD, considered by many observers as a “first cousin” to the PRI.

One of the more influential leaders is Manuel Camacho, who served as foreign minister in the Salinas government and now is López Obrador’s political right-hand man. Another is Arturo Núñez, a former head of the PRI.

The PRD, which bills itself as a leftist party, was founded in the late 1980s by former PRI members – including López Obrador himself – along with small groups of social democrats, communists and socialists.

However, the leftist candidate’s closest advisors – including Camacho – are not first-wave PRI defectors, but rather people who stuck with the party until the late 1990s, even actively going up against the PRD, which they considered a group of traitors.

These PRI leaders jumped on the PRD bandwagon “just because they were not selected as candidates (for senators, deputies or other posts),” according to the director of La Crisis magazine, political analyst Carlos Ramírez, who described them as faux leftists.

But some of López Obrador’s backers are still active PRI members, including Senator Manuel Bartlett, who in the 1980s and 1990s served as interior minister and education minister, and was also governor of the state of Puebla.

Bartlett, who has publicly announced his intention to vote for López Obrador, has been accused of orchestrating electoral fraud in 1988 when he was interior minister, to block PRD founder Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas from the presidency.

PRI leaders have threatened to expel the senator and anyone else who fails to support Madrazo.

“PRI affiliation is a disease that heals over time,” López Obrador has quipped, to justify his close relationships with former members of this party.

Calderón, the candidate for the PAN, a conservative party founded in 1939, also has supporters once linked to the PRI – several former ministers from the Zedillo administration.

Among them is Diódoro Carrasco, former interior minister, and other ex-ministers who held such important portfolios as energy and transportation, including Luis Téllez and Carlos Sacristán.

Although these former officials are not part of Calderón’s inner circle, they have publicly declared their support for him.

Of the PRI militants who jumped ship, those who now back López Obrador tend to be from what was once the party’s “nationalist” wing; those in Calderón’s corner had been part of the “technocrat” branch.

Until the late 1980s, the PRI managed to mesh together a diverse set of ideologies, thus maintaining its hold on government.

Bringing together a variety of interests and doling out public posts were key mechanisms that helped spawn the original party in 1929, following the Mexican revolution, which had cost some one million lives.

The monolithic PRI ensured that Mexico’s political landscape remained all but unchanged until the late 1960s. But with the 1968 massacre of hundreds of student protesters in Tlatelolco square, who were calling for democracy and justice, the cracks began to show.

The PRI was known for governing with a heavy hand, and faced constant accusations of electoral fraud, and of hounding, jailing, torturing and murdering dissidents. But it still goes down in history as the world’s longest-running political dynasty, having governed for 71 years.

For Alemán, the PRI’s DNA is now circulating close to the leading presidential candidates and is well entrenched in their parties, “so, in a sense, it will return to power as of December,” when the government-elect takes over.