PRI likely to hold Chihuahua, PRD Zacatecas
Three states go to the polls on 4 July. In all three states, Chihuahua, Durango and Zactecas, there are gubernatorial and state assembly elections. The most important races are in Chihuahua, which the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) recaptured from the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) last time around in 1998, and in Zacatecas, which was won by the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD).
According to the opinion polls it looks as though the PRI will hold Chihuahua pretty easily, while the PRD will see off the challenge from the PRI in Zacatecas. In Durango it looks as though the PRI will win. Chihuahua is traditionally an important electoral battleground. The Partido Acción Nacional was cheated of victory in the state on several occasions in the 1980s; mostly notably in 1986, when Francisco Barrio, now the PAN leader in the lower chamber of congress, clearly won most votes in the gubernatorial election but was not allowed to become governor. Manuel Bartlett, now a senior PRI senator but then minister of the interior, claimed that what the PRI government had engineered was a patriotic fraud to prevent the triumph of Mexico's three historic enemies. These enemies were, Bartlett said, the Roman Catholic Church (Barrio is a prominent Catholic); the US (Chihuahua is a border state), and the business class (the PAN is pro-business).
Barrio eventually won the governorship in 1992, but the PRI won the 1998 election after Barrio's government preferred score-settling to running the state. It looks very much as though the PRI, now in alliance with two smaller parties, the Partido del Trabajo (PT) and the Partido Verde Ecologista de México (PVEM), will hold the state. Its candidate is José Reyes Baeza Terrazas. He comes from one of the most politically prominent families in the state. His uncle, Fernando Baeza Mélendez, was the PRI governor imposed on the state by the central government after Barrio was deprived of victory. The Terrazas family is a huge landowner in the state: at the time of the revolution, which the Terrazas family patriarch, Don Luis, backed with great enthusiasm, the family owned more land in Mexico than anyone else.
Reyes Baeza, 42, is a federal deputy. He is running at 63% support in the opinion polls. This is 26 percentage points above Javier Corral, who is running on a joint PAN-PRD ticket, Todos Somos Chihuahua. Corral is 37 and has a formidable career, and business, in the media. He owns several newspapers in the state, served as a federal deputy between 1997 and 2000 and is now a senator. The two candidates held a TV debate on 4 June. Neither made a major mistake. Corral has challenged Reyes Baeza to another debate, but the front-runner is unlikely to take up the gauntlet.
Zacatecas
The PRD's candidate for the governorship in this state is Amalia García Medina, a former party president. She is currently a senator and is running at about 52% support in the opinion polls. This is comfortably ahead of José Bonilla, who is running for the PRI, which is in an alliance with the
PVEM.
Zacatecas is one of the rare states controlled by the PRD. The party only won the election in 1998 because it adopted Ricardo Monreal, who had been jilted of the PRI nomination for the governorship by the outgoing governor who wanted his own man to succeed. García, who had intended to run for the governorship for the PRD in 1998 ,stood down in favour of Monreal, who ran a hugely successful campaign and swept to victory. His triumph, incidentally, prompted the PRI to drop its traditional practice of dedazo, under which the outgoing governor or president picked his successor. Now the PRI uses primaries. This system still produces sore losers. Two prominent Priístas, who got nowhere in the primary, have switched to backing García. Bonilla is running at 32% support in the opinion polls. This is well ahead of Francisco López Gracía, who is scoring 14%, and Elías Barajas Romo from Convergencia por la Democrácia, who is running at 2%.
Durango
The PRI candidate for the governorship is Ismael Hernández Deras. He is currently a senator. Durango is a traditional PRI fief, though it is one of the few states in which the Partido del Trabajo (PT) is a significant force. The PT is in alliance with the PRD and Convergencia behind Jorge Campos Murillo. He is a lawyer and former attorney general in the state.
The PAN is also running a candidate for the governorship, Andrés Galván Rivas. He is running on a strong pro-business platform. The PT-PRD-Convergencia alliance, Coalición Todos por Durango, has alreay alleged that Hernández is cheating on campaign finance. The coalition claims that Hernández's campaign is being backed by the PRI administrations in Coahuila and Nuevo León. The coalition also accused Hernández of breaking the bar on foreign finance: the PRI candidate held a dinner in Chicago at the beginning of April for expatriate voters who paid US$30 a plate. Around 300 people attended the function.
Hernández has also been criticised for meeting a company, Desarrollo Internacional Mexicano (DIM), which is interested in bidding for the contract to build a new road from the capital Victoria de Durango to the port of Mazatlán. The president of DIM, Samuel Sanyun Kim, said that Hernández had said that his company was the front-runner: the implication is that Hernández is acting as though he had already won the election.
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PAN whips Cervera Pacheco and
PRI in Yucatán
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| The rightwing Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) did much better than many observers had expected in the first of the state elections, in Yucatán on 16 May. The PAN easily held its bastion in the state, the capital, Mérida, despite being up against one of the PRI's most powerful politicians, Victor Cervera Pacheco. The PAN also did much better in the state assembly elections, picking up 10 of the 15 first-past-the post seats in the 25-seat state assembly. This means that the state assembly will have a PAN majority: previously the PRI and its allies were in the majority. The PAN proclaimed its victory only 20 minutes after the polls closed, claiming that it had won the mayoral race by five percentage points. The PRI retorted that it had won by 10 percentage points. At midnight the PAN claimed to have an unassailable lead, with 93% of the votes counted, and said that it had won Mérida with 128,000 votes to the PRI's 113,000. The elections in the Yucatán are important for several reasons. They are the first of 14 rounds of elections scheduled for this year, and the state is a microcosm of Mexico in that the capital Mérida has been a PAN fief for years while the rural hinterland is controlled by the PRI. What made the election doubly interesting was that the PRI was running the longtime state governor, Victor Cervera Pacheco, as its candidate in Mérida. After an unprecedented (and arguably unconstitutional) 10 years in office, he handed over to a PAN successor in 2003. The new mayor of Mérida is Manuel Fuentes Alcocer. Despite the PAN's triumph in Mérida, the PRI's grip on other bits of the state machinery caused problems. The PAN is objecting to the decision by what it said is the pro-PRI state electoral authority (the TSEEY) to refuse to recognise PAN victories in three municipalities; Opichén, Dzan and Kinchil. |