‘Ground War’ Routed PRI in Mexican State

MEXICO CITY —  Days before going to the polls last weekend, tens of thousands of parents in the Mexican state of Guerrero received an unusual campaign giveaway. They were handed a “scholastic insurance policy” purporting to cover their children for up to $3,400 against death or injury while commuting between home and classes or during school activities.

Each document bore the logo of the Dutch insurer ING and a blank space for the name of the student to be covered. The name of the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s candidate for governor, Hector Astudillo, appeared in big red letters. Smaller print said the policies would be honored only if Astudillo won office.

But as election day neared, the rival Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, denounced the documents as a fraud and began harassing Astudillo campaign workers who distributed them door to door. ING announced that it backed no such policy, and the ploy backfired in a widely publicized scandal that hurt Astudillo’s party, known as the PRI.

For 76 years, the PRI used a combination of deceit, handouts, intimidation and violence to control Guerrero, one of Mexico’s poorest states. That era ended Sunday with a 55%-42% win for the leftist opposition in a bitterly fought race that was scrutinized for its potential effect on next year’s Mexican presidential election.

The PRI governed Mexico for seven decades before losing the presidency in 2000 to Vicente Fox and his center-right National Action Party. Sunday’s upset cost the PRI a major southern bastion and slowed the momentum -- built on recent victories in other states -- of its bid to regain national power.

As a result, next year’s race is still a wide-open contest among the PRI, PRD and Fox’s PAN, although Fox is ineligible for reelection. Sunday’s victors in Guerrero had learned the lesson that the PRI, although still Mexico’s best-organized party, could be beaten in an electoral “ground war” -- the competition to get out the vote and prevent the other side from cheating.

The PRI leadership closeted itself in meetings all day Monday, declining to comment on its defeat. The election result was a setback for party President Roberto Madrazo, who campaigned extensively in Guerrero, and it emboldened an alliance of PRI governors who oppose his bid to become the party’s presidential nominee.

Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the PRD’s probable presidential nominee, called Sunday’s vote a “historic triumph” and “an act of justice.”

Guerrero is world-renowned for luxurious beach resorts on the Pacific, but its history has been bloodied by decades of guerrilla fighting and violent government repression of opponents.

In Sunday’s race, the PRD benefited from decades of pent-up protest against the PRI’s autocratic rule. The PRD’s nominee was Zeferino Torreblanca, whose effective, corruption-free record as mayor of Acapulco made him far more popular than the lackluster Astudillo.

Since its 1989 founding, the leftist party has gained control of municipal governments in Guerrero’s largest cities, as armed foes of the PRI regime abandoned a quixotic guerrilla struggle to embrace peaceful politics.

But until now, the PRD in Guerrero had never assembled a statewide organization capable of challenging the PRI in its rural strongholds, home to more than half the state’s 2 million voters. There had been obstacles: About 300 PRD activists, by the party’s count, have died in political violence over the last 15 years.

“We used to be an unruly crowd without much structure,” said Ricardo Monreal, a former governor of Zacatecas who engineered the PRD victory in Guerrero. “We were good at mobilizing for big rallies and marches but not trained to control fraud on the campaign trail and in the polling places.

“This time we were prepared,” he added. “The PRD is transforming itself from a party of mobilization to a party of organization. By winning in Guerrero, we have shown that we have the capacity to win the country.”

That is still to be proved. Counting Guerrero and Baja California Sur, where it retained the governorship Sunday, the PRD governs four of Mexico’s 31 states and Mexico City; it is weak in many of the rest. Eleven states are in the PAN column.

Only the PRI, which governs 16 states, has a nationwide grass-roots organization. After winning seven of 10 gubernatorial races last year, the party had grown increasingly confident of recapturing the presidency in a three-way contest.

But on Sunday the PRI machine looked vulnerable.

Of the three states electing governors, the PRI won only in Quintana Roo, which it has run since the Caribbean coastal territory became a state in 1974.

Though the two contenders in Guerrero accused each other of vote buying, the PRI vastly outspent the PRD on television advertising and rushed numerous state public works projects to completion ahead of the vote. But the PRI found itself under close scrutiny by a PRD organization that penetrated nearly every corner of the state with observers and poll watchers.

Two incidents at the close of the campaign last week demonstrated the PRD’s vigilance.

In Tres Palos, a semirural, coconut-growing suburb of Acapulco, PRD activists rolled up to the municipal basketball court in a sport-utility vehicle Feb. 1 and filmed about 200 women and children lured there by the PRI with free raffle tickets, a giveaway that appeared to violate campaign rules.

As a clown raffled off irons, blenders, a microwave oven, a television set, a stereo and a refrigerator, the PRD activists yelled, “Take whatever they give you, but vote as you wish!”

The following night, PRD campaign workers hijacked two truckloads of cement headed for the rural community of Tlacotepec to promote the PRI campaign. The trucks were held as evidence of a violation of the electoral code, which requires suspension of such public works 15 days before elections.

To prevent vote fraud, the PRD equipped its poll watchers with pens containing lavender, pink, orange or yellow ink with which to sign official vote tallies sent to the state capital. The odd-colored ink, Monreal explained, was meant to discourage the PRI-dominated state electoral machinery from a traditional practice: changing vote counts and falsifying signatures.

“It would have been impossible to find identical pens at midnight on a Sunday,” he said.

The PRD won in 22 of the state’s 28 districts, including a majority of those that are predominantly rural and have been run for decades by caciques, heavy-handed local bosses who dispense PRI favors to the poor in return for party loyalty.

Torreblanca, a wealthy businessman with interests in Acapulco supermarkets, promised in his victory speech to “govern for the poorest of Guerrero.”

“We are going to make a radical change in the way politics is practiced here,” the 50-year-old governor-elect said in a telephone interview. “Instead of dispensing handouts and favors, we are going to train people for productive projects.”