Posted on 02/23/2002 12:02:31 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
MEXICO CITY -- The party that ruled Mexico for 71 years holds internal elections Sunday to choose the leader many members hope will bring it out of the depression that began with its loss of the presidency 19 months ago.
The duel for the top spot in the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, pits Roberto Madrazo, the relentlessly ambitious former governor of southern Tabasco state, against Beatriz Paredes, the moderate former head of the party's congressional delegation.
Madrazo's huge advantage has dwindled under the challenge of Paredes, who heads an amalgam of factions that share a dislike of the tough and controversial southerner.
Most analysts have been unwilling to predict the result of the contest, in which registered voters regardless of party affiliation can vote nationwide.
"It is all up in the air," political analyst Alfonso Zarate says. "Paredes is way more popular in the opinion polls among the general public who see Madrazo as a traditional political baron. But he has an edge among the PRI activists who want a strong leader."
A diminutive, mustached man with a high-pitched voice, Madrazo has long cast himself as a rebel against the PRI establishment, which he and many other party members blame for leading them to defeat against President Vicente Fox in the July 2000 presidential elections.
"He will recuperate the PRI for the rank and file from the small group that hijacked it," says Samuel Aguilar, a member of Congress who supports Madrazo.
Softening the often harsh rhetoric he used in his unsuccessful bid for the PRI nomination for the 2000 presidential elections, Madrazo has attracted a contingent of technocrats and reformers for the race. But analyst Denise Dresser says this has more to do with Madrazo's media savvy and pragmatism than any change in his views.
"He is a strange mixture of traditional and modern," Dresser says of Madrazo, whose father was a powerful leader of the party in the 1960s.
Paredes, meanwhile, promotes herself as a bridge-building reformer, vowing to steer the party from its corrupt and free-spending past.
She likes to remind voters that Madrazo allegedly spent $70 million in 1994 to win the governorship of Tabasco, an oil-rich state with little more than 2 million residents.
"Beatriz is all about negotiating accords with others, and democratizing the party," says Florentino Castro, a PRI member of Congress who is supporting her.
Not that Paredes, a forceful woman with a taste in flamboyant embroidered smocks, shies away from using her own ties to the PRI's old guard peasant and workers organizations, or to its tradition-bound political operators.
"There are no good guys here," Zarate says of the two candidates, who are both in their 40s.
Fox will be among the closest watchers of Sunday's vote. Its outcome is certain to affect, for good or ill, his already tortured relationship with Congress, where the PRI still holds the largest number of seats in both houses.
Having bounded into the presidency on promises of sweeping change, Fox has watched his reform program stagnate or mutate beyond recognition inside the newly empowered Congress.
Strategists in Fox's center-right National Action Party hope negotiations will become easier when the PRI has a leadership capable of setting, and enforcing, the party's line.
Paredes may be the most willing to compromise, but her ability to bring the party with her is in doubt, given her frustrated efforts to shore up lasting deals while she headed the PRI contingent in the Chamber of Deputies, Mexico's lower house. She resigned that post to run for the PRI presidency.
Madrazo's willingness to make pragmatic decisions and impose his will on the rest of the party is not in doubt. But he is also known for playing much harder political ball.
"Madrazo is one of the wiliest politicians there is, and the Fox camp would have to watch out he doesn't outsmart them," Dresser says.
The other danger is that the two factions will not be able to heal the wounds opened by the elections. Many analysts believe the risk of fissure within the PRI would be highest should Madrazo lose. But they say that festering resentments could obstruct coordination regardless of the winner.
Paredes has more of the PRI's 19 state governors on her side. But Madrazo has enlisted the support of the powerful teacher's union, which has a national presence with lots of activists.
Both candidates have a proven capacity to mobilize the infamous PRI electoral machine, which for decades turned out the vote by busing peasants, factory workers, housewives and residents of poor neighborhoods to the voting booths. That mobilization will prove key Sunday, because only about 10 percent of the normal number of voting precincts will be open for the party election.
The campaign may have been waged on arguments about the PRI's future. But the election will be decided by who can get the most supporters to the polls.
Little wonder then that Mexico's national press has been studiously estimating the number of buses provided by each candidate's powerful backers.
"Of course I'm going to vote," says Joel Hernandez, 53, sitting on a sunny bench in Valle de Chalco, a PRI stronghold in Mexico state, whose governor ranks among Paredes' main supporters.
"Not that I care much who wins, but if I didn't vote, or didn't vote the way they (the workers' federation) said, then I would never get a construction job here," Hernandez says.
.....Both candidates have a proven capacity to mobilize the infamous PRI electoral machine, which for decades turned out the vote by busing peasants, factory workers, housewives and residents of poor neighborhoods to the voting booths. That mobilization will prove key Sunday, because only about 10 percent of the normal number of voting precincts will be open for the party election.
Well, it's over and Madrazo "won" as Paredes claims widespread election fraud.
Analyists say Paredes' large following has no place to go.....I say Fox will get them.
One of the difficult things for Mexicans, however, is the PRI-labor union connection - as one of the people interviewed said, he could simply forget about working in his state unless he voted the way the union wanted.
[Full Text] MEXICO CITY (AP) - Mexico's former ruling party officially declared Roberto Madrazo the winner of disputed internal elections, saying he had won the race for the party's presidency.
Madrazo won with 1.52 million votes compared with 1.47 million votes for congresswoman Beatrice Paredes, Sen. Humberto Roque, who supervised the Feb. 24 elections, said Sunday.
Paredes had disputed the results, charging Madrazo's supporters with widespread fraud.
Madrazo, the former governor of oil-rich Tabasco state, was scheduled to be sworn in Monday as the leader of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
Considered a possible presidential contender in 2006, he has cast himself as a successor to his father, a former PRI leader who tried to open up a party dominated by the nation's president.
Still, the younger Madrazo has been plagued by accusations of fraud. During his 1994 gubernatorial campaign, he was accused of spending $72 million, which he denied.
He was also accused of encouraging fraud and misconduct during elections for his replacement in Tabasco state. PRI candidate Manuel Andrade was declared the winner of elections in 2000, but the federal Supreme Electoral Tribunal later annulled the disputed victory. Madrazo had hoped a win would help him in his then unofficial campaign to lead the PRI.
Madrazo has promised to "recover the party" and make it more democratic after it lost its first presidential election ever to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party in July 2000.
He claims the PRI needs to restore the "social commitment" it abandoned in 1982 with a series of presidents who supported free-market reforms. But he has given no clear vision of how he would pay for new social programs, or in what way they would differ from those of Fox.
The PRI has struggled to find a new direction and keep supporters since losing the presidency to Fox, but it still has more state, local and federal posts than any other party in Mexico. [End]
[Full Text] MEXICO CITY - Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ran the country for most of the 20th century, installed as its leader Monday a critic of closer ties to the United States.
Roberto Madrazo, 49, a self-proclaimed nationalist wary of increasing U.S. investment in Mexico, becomes the key opposition leader to President Vicente Fox, whose election in 2000 ended more than 70 years of rule by the PRI, as the party is known in its Spanish initials.
Madrazo, the former governor of the Mexican state of Tabasco, is a critic of the North American Free Trade Agreement with Canada and the United States, which Fox strongly supports.
He is the first leader of PRI chosen in an open election. For generations, the PRI controlled Mexico through patronage, corruption and backroom deals.
Although Madrazo hopes to change the party's image, his own selection as leader was marred by accusations of fraud. It took a week to confirm his win by a margin of fewer than 50,000 votes out of nearly three million cast, despite a nearly two-year campaign for the post.
Even though it lost the presidency to Fox, the PRI continues to dominate politics in Mexico, where it holds slight majorities in both chambers of Congress and 17 of 31 governorships.
Because of his outspoken opposition to Fox, Madrazo's efforts are likely to bear on Mexico's relations with the United States. Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and an advocate of closer ties to Washington, has been hamstrung by an unruly Congress since taking office 15 months ago. A divided PRI left Fox with no strong opposition leader with whom to negotiate sweeping economic and social reforms. [End]
………..My conclusion: Castro is aiming at Castañeda, because he does not want to burn his bridges with Fox. If Mexico does what it says, and joins all other modern democracies in demanding basic freedoms in Cuba, it will be a marked improvement over its longtime support for Cuba's dictatorship. [End Excerpt]
Monterrey is playing host to the U.N. International Conference on Financing for Development, an unprecedented world summit on how to combat poverty and redistribute wealth around the globe. Fifty-two heads of state are expected to attend, including President Bush and Cuban President Fidel Castro.
U.N. spokesman Tim Wall said Mexican President Vicente Fox chose Monterrey to show world leaders its economic success "rather than a scenic place with great cocktails."
"Monterrey is not what you would call a great town for tourism, it's not a center of colonial architecture, it doesn't have a beachfront, but it's an economic powerhouse," Wall said. "It's the home of Latin America's first steel mill, it has manufacturing, trade, commerce, high-tech industries."[End Excerpt]
"It makes no sense to give aid to countries that are corrupt because you know what happens? The money doesn't help the people, it helps an elite group of leaders," Bush said.
The president will take the message to the U.N. Conference on Financing for Development in Monterrey, Mexico, where he will arrive Thursday night. He also will meet Andean leaders in Peru and Central American leaders in El Salvador before returning to Washington Sunday.
During his talks with world leaders at the conference, Bush will promote his initiative to help poor nations that respect human rights, root out corruption, open their markets, and have education and health care systems. [End Excerpt]
The resolution, expected to be voted on by the U.N. Human Rights Commission later this week in Geneva, recognizes social progress in Cuba but urges the government "to make efforts to obtain similar advances in the area of human, civil and political rights."
The measure also asks Cuba to allow a U.N. human rights representative to visit the island to help officials comply with the resolution - a suggestion Cuba angrily rejected last week.
Mexico, the only Latin American country that ignored U.S. pressure to break diplomatic ties after Cuban President Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, has traditionally abstained from the annual vote.***
Castro, speaking before a national TV audience, insisted Fox lied about the Cuban leader's hasty departure last month from a U.N. aid summit in Monterrey, Mexico. Cuba said at the time that Mexico, working on behalf of the United States, pressured Castro to either stay away from the summit or make himself scarce before President Bush (news - web sites) arrived. Mexican President Vicente Fox and Foreign Minister Jorge Castaneda both denied pressuring Castro to leave. "They were all lying left and right," Castro said.
The Cuban president played a tape of a private telephone conversation he had with Fox on the eve of the summit, in which Fox clearly urged Castro to leave the meeting early and urged him "not to attack the United States or President Bush." On the tape Fox asks Castro to make his presentation at the summit and to return to Cuba on Thursday "so that you don't make Friday complicated for me." Bush was scheduled to arrive on Friday. Making public the tape was a clear break with presidential protocol. Castro said the aftermath "of telling these truths could be that diplomatic relations are severed." ***
Monday night, Castro accused Fox of caving in to U.S. pressure. The harsh words follow last Friday's vote at the U.N. Human Rights Commission in Geneva, where Mexico was one of eight Latin American countries that supported a resolution calling for greater political and human rights in Cuba.
In news conferences and interviews last month, both Fox and Mexican Foreign Secretary Jorge Castañeda denied pressuring Castro. Pro-Cuba opposition legislators in Mexico tried for weeks to make Castañeda testify before congress about Castro's hasty, huffy exit from the conference. Now they want Fox to explain before congress or on national television. ''This demonstrates that President Fox lied to the Mexican people. How can we support a president who lies?'' said Congressman Sergio Acosta Salazar of the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, the second-ranking member of the Foreign Relations Commission in the lower house of Mexico's National Congress.
For more than seven decades before Fox, Mexico was run by the left-leaning Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI, in its Spanish initials), which grew out of the Mexican revolution of 1910-17. Acosta's leftist party splintered off from the PRI, and both parties are assailing the conservative Fox. Sen. Silvia Hernandez, a PRI leader and the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Commission, also called on Fox to explain himself. PRI governments stayed out of Cuba's domestic affairs, and in return Castro did not fund or support leftist revolutionaries in Mexico -- the country from which he launched his own rise to power -- as he did elsewhere in Latin America.
On Tuesday afternoon, the Fox administration began firing back. Foreign Secretary Castañeda denied that he or Fox had lied and said Castro was not pressured. What was asked of Castro, he said, was also asked of the United States: that both countries put aside their rivalries to avoid hijacking the development summit.
In a radio interview, Castañeda suggested that Castro feels threatened at home by his growing isolation in Latin America and by growing global support for universal principles of human rights. ''In effect the isolation of the government of Fidel Castro grows greater every day,'' Castañeda said. ``This resolution in Geneva came not from the Czechs but from Latin Americans.''
Throughout much of Castro's four-decade rule, the United States has sponsored U.N. resolutions condemning the lack of democratic rights in Cuba. In recent years, former communist countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland have sponsored the resolutions, but this year Uruguay took the lead and was backed by six other Latin American nations on the Human Rights Commission; Venezuela voted against and Brazil and Ecuador abstained. Even Chile, led by Socialist Ricardo Lagos, joined the call for democracy in Cuba.
''Castro has pretty much burned all his bridges,'' said Ana Maria Salazar, a former Clinton White House official now teaching at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico (ITAM) in Mexico City. [End]
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