News Analysis
Mexican Democracy, Even Under Siege
By MARC LACEY
Published: July 5, 2010
MEXICO CITY — Campaign offices had been bombed, candidates had been threatened and killed, and dead bodies were even hung from bridges on the morning of the polling.
Eduardo Verdugo/Associated Press
Workers counted votes during local elections in Ciudad Victoria in Mexico on Sunday.
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Times Topic: Mexico
Jorge Valenzuela/Reuters
A federal police officer stood guard on Sunday outside a polling station in Durango, in northern Mexico. Many defied drug violence to cast a ballot.
But Mexico’s voters still turned out in relatively large numbers to choose new governors, mayors and state representatives over the weekend and managed to send an inspiring message amid all the violence: Mexico’s democracy, flawed as it may be, endures.
One of the nation’s most powerful factions — the country’s drug lords — had attempted to hijack the process. Through bloodshed, they managed to keep voter turnout down in some states and scare off many poll workers, prompting one former president of the Federal Election Institute, Luis Carlos Ugalde, to lament that this was the first Mexican election in which drug dealers played a visible role in interrupting the process.
But the polling went on and the results were accepted, with voters appearing to steer away from candidates with perceived links to traffickers. In the border state of Tamaulipas, the populace seemed particularly intent on declaring that drug lords should not decide elections, voting in the brother of a candidate who was murdered less than a week before Election Day.
Political analysts had predicted a huge victory for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the P.R.I., which ruled Mexico for 71 years before voters broke its grip on the country’s politics a decade ago. And the P.R.I. did take 9 of the 12 governorships that were up for grabs on Sunday, including in Tamaulipas.
But the clearest messages that voters seemed to send were that no one party rules Mexico anymore and that entrenched party machines no longer have a lock on power. Voters were clearly frustrated with the violence Mexico has experienced, interviews showed, and the fact that they turned out at all in some particularly dangerous areas was noteworthy.
“I’m voting with hope, but also fear,” said Christian Licona, an unemployed high school graduate voting for the first time in Ciudad Victoria, the capital of Tamaulipas. His brother, though, decided it was too risky and stayed home, even though soldiers guarded many polling places to keep the drug traffickers from interfering any more than they already had.
The P.R.I. — a party that represented autocratic rule and is attempting to remake itself as an efficient pragmatic one — hung onto six states and gained three more from the National Action Party, known as P.A.N., of President Felipe Calderón, and the left-of-center Democratic Revolutionary Party, or P.R.D.
Zacatecas, which had been in the left’s column for 12 years, is now a P.R.I. state. So is Aguascalientes, which had a dozen years of rule under Mr. Calderón’s party, and Tlaxcala, which the P.A.N. and P.R.D. have traded back and forth since 1998.
But the P.R.I. was also handed its hat in the states of Oaxaca, Puebla and Sinaloa, where its rule has been as sure a thing as the market opening for business and the tortilla makers opening their stands.
Some considered the results a stalemate. “The results don’t display a victory or a strengthening in positions,” a Mexican political analyst, Fernando Dworak, told Reuters. “We are being reserved on the outlook for 2012, as many things could still come into play.”
But others saw the process as the victor. “Perhaps the greatest takeaway from Sunday’s elections is that democracy is surprisingly healthy in Mexico,” said Andrew Selee, director of the Mexico Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington.
It took an unusual coalition of P.A.N. and P.R.D. candidates, ideological opposites if ever there were any, to knock the P.R.I. off its pedestal. The two parties fought an electoral battle for the presidency in 2006 that was so vicious that both still claim to have rightly won.
It is unlikely, analysts say, that they will join forces to field a single candidate in the run-up to 2012, when the P.R.I. will attempt to move back into Los Pinos, the Mexican White House.
Each state in this election had a different dynamic, Mr. Selee noted, with voters in Oaxaca and Puebla appearing to rebel against P.R.I. governors who were considered corrupt and authoritarian. In Sinaloa, the cradle of Mexican drug dealing, the people withheld their support for a candidate perceived to have links to organized crime, he said.
“Mexico remains an imperfect democracy, like all, but there do appear to be some mechanisms of accountability at work that allowed these elections to be meaningful referenda on local political performance,” Mr. Selee said.
Given how deeply drug traffickers infiltrate many of Mexico’s institutions, it is not unlikely that a candidate was probably elected somewhere in the country on Sunday who has links to them. It might have been a small-town mayor or a local representative. If it was a governor, it would not have been the first time.
Still, analysts said, that corrupt leader is now more likely to know that the people are watching.
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