PRI facing charges as vote nears
Mexico party dodging reforms, critics contend
By MICHAEL RILEY

CHALCO VALLEY, Mexico -- With Mexico's presidential campaign entering its final two weeks, federal election authorities are putting the final touches on a $900 million project to ensure that the July 2 vote will be the cleanest this country has ever seen. But it may not matter by Election Day.

Watchdog groups and federal election officials charged that the country's long-ruling party and its allies in President Ernesto Zedillo's government are using public employees and millions of dollars in federal funds to outmaneuver election reforms enacted over the last decade. Some critics said Zedillo's government has flooded the airwaves with commercials designed to boost the image of the governing party, bribed voters with government largess and mobilized tens of thousands of public employees as campaign workers.

The Civic Alliance, an independent election watchdog group, said it has evidence that military officers have solicited ruling-party votes from their subordinates, that school administrators have pressured parents and that case workers have leaned on welfare recipients. "It is much worse than even we imagined," said Hugo Almada, who sits on the Civic Alliance's national council, referring to the scope and organization of the government's campaign.

Officials for the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known widely in Mexico as the PRI, say that much of what its critics have complained about does not violate the law and that more serious accusations are simply untrue.
"We don't need or want any vote won (by means) outside the law," said Javier Trevino, a top aide to Francisco Labastida, the presidential candidate for the PRI, which has controlled Mexico's federal government for 71 years.

But Ines, a 23-year-old homemaker who lives in this impoverished city of 500,000, said she no longer has high hopes for Mexico's new democracy after attending a recent meeting at her neighborhood school.
Ines, who asked that her last name not be used because she fears reprisals from government bureaucrats, said she went to the meeting to pick up a small education stipend doled out by the Mexican government each month to her 10-year-old sister.

She said the official who administers the funds handed out papers to the room full of parents and guardians and instructed them to each collect signatures from 10 friends and neighbors promising to vote for Labastida and other PRI candidates. Though she does not consider herself a PRI supporter, Ines said there was no room to refuse the official's invitation. She recounted that he said their children would lose their school money if an opposition candidate won the presidential election.

Ines said she collected the 10 signatures, as well as the people's addresses and voter identification numbers, which they need to enter the polls on Election Day. Like it or not, she believes she now must vote for the PRI.
"If it isn't obligatory to vote for the PRI, why did they ask for the credential (number)?" Ines asked as she stood at the doorway of her cinder-block house. "I think that those votes are now locked up." She added: "They give us help with one hand, sure, but with the other this is how they charge us."

Some analysts have said the PRI, which has a notorious reputation for stuffing ballot boxes in years past, appears to be fine-tuning its bag of tricks to suit different times. The creation of an independent Federal Election Institute "has virtually eradicated the kind of Election Day fraud that used to dominate in Mexico. In that sense it has done a great job," said Joy Langston, an expert on the PRI at CIDE, a Mexico City think tank.

"The problem is that people aren't stupid and they do adjust," she said. "There are very smart people within the PRI regime who see how to take advantage of this." In the run-up to the July vote, Zedillo's administration has poured millions of federal dollars into Mexico's small towns and villages, the PRI's traditional base of support.

Government spending in the first quarter of the year was running 15 percent above last year's level. The money went to government departments like Mexico's farm support agency, which has a budget this year nearly double that of 1999, according to government figures. Through subsidies, the money ends up in the pockets of Mexico's corn farmers as new price supports or on the tables of consumers as cheap corn tortillas.

Some of money also pays for a splashy ad campaign praising the achievements of the PRI-run government. The sheer number and the timing of the television and radio spots so shocked federal election authorities that they sent a letter to Zedillo requesting the suspension of the ad campaign. Zedillo did not respond, election officials said, and the ads continue to run. "We can scream, denounce, call attention to this, but not much more," said Juan Molinar, who sits on the governing council of the Federal Election Institute.

But it is the conversion of thousands of federal and state employees into campaign hands for Labastida and other PRI candidates that troubles many election experts. The ruling party's use of the same people who dole out welfare payments and give free medical care as campaign promoters carries the veiled threat that anyone who refuses could lose their benefits, said the Civic Alliance's Rogelio Gomez.

And the accounts of the party's collecting names, addresses and identification numbers may convince some skeptical, poorly educated voters that, despite all the assurances and precautions, the PRI may somehow learn how they voted. "There is a strong component of psychological intimidation to all this," Gomez said. The party "is taking advantage of the ignorance and fear of some of the country's poorest voters." In many cases, the practice violates federal election laws, election officials said. But they add that definitive proof of actual fraud remains scarce. "It is just so hard to get proof for this stuff," said Patricia McCarthy, an election official in Yucatan state. "If it were easy to prove, we could stop it. Instead, this activity only seems to be growing."

PRI members react angrily to suggestions that the party manipulates voters with public resources. Zedillo noted recently that, with the support of the PRI, the government is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to make sure the elections are free and fair. Among other things, the public funds finance campaigns and pay for new voter identification cards and even new polling booths that officials said are more secure than those used in past elections.

In Chalco, Miguel Angel Luna, a PRI campaign coordinator, said he had no knowledge of anyone collecting signatures and voter identification numbers among school-stipend recipients. But reports of the practice were widespread and concentrated in the country's poor neighborhoods and rural areas where the PRI maintains its strength.

Miguel Coli, an agronomist for a federal agency in Yucatan state, said that days after the first debate between Labastida and other presidential candidates in late April, he and his colleagues were asked by their supervisor to become campaign promoters for the PRI candidates. "We were to tell the producers that in case another party won, they were going to lose their aid," Coli said in a phone interview. He added that the invitation "came with the clear threat that we would lose our jobs if we refused."

Coli said most of the other 250 agronomists in the state agreed to work for the PRI because they were unwilling to risk losing their jobs. Coli refused and said he is prepared to find work elsewhere. He said the farmers he advises "are human beings who have a need that we as professionals can help meet. With this activity, we are breaking the commitment we have with them and with our profession."

How much such tactics will affect the election remains unclear. But with next month's vote expected to be the closest in Mexico's modern era, even a few hundred thousand ballots could determine the winner.
"The tragedy is that if all this works, you may have a crisis on your hands," Langston, the PRI expert, said of the alleged efforts at voter coercion. "It would give opposition parties a legitimate opportunity to say the election was not fair".

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