Frontera NorteSur
While the United States prepares its annual July 4 celebration, Mexico will hold its own date with history on the same day.
In a dozen states, voters will go to the polls to elect local and state officials. Coming one year after mid-term Congressional elections that delivered a stinging defeat to President Calderon’s National Action Party (PAN) and two years before the presidential election of 2012, when some analysts predict a victory of the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), this year’s contests represent an important highway marker in Mexico’s political roadmap.
More importantly, the 2010 elections are an important gauge in the health of Mexico’s official transition from an authoritarian state to a plural democracy in which human rights, transparency and the rule of law are upheld. But if this year’s campaigns are any indication of the country’s political direction, the compass is fast spinning backwards.
The June 28 assassination of Rodolfo Torre Cantu, the front-running gubernatorial candidate for the PRI and two smaller allied parties in the border state of Tamaulipas, plunged the electoral process into a new crisis, prompting President Felipe Calderon to cancel scheduled events and convene an urgent meeting of his national security cabinet.
On Sunday, June 27, a bus load of sympathizers of an electoral coalition including the PAN was shot up in the violence-torn state of Sinaloa, but no injuries were reported. Sergio Ocampo Brito, a PAN leader and mayoral candidate in a Guerrero mountain community notorious for its colorful crops of opium poppy, was not so fortunate. Dragged from his home June 25 by armed men, Ocampo’s bullet-riddled body was found over the weekend.
Widespread violence and threats against candidates, party militants, election officials and the press have been registered. In Aguascalientes, unidentified assailants tossed a grenade at a warehouse used by the state’s election commission, while in Sinaloa, firebombs were tossed at offices of the PRD, PAN and PRI political parties.
Emilio Alvarez Icaza, president of the official human rights commission of Mexico City and a veteran of the civic action organization Alianza Civica, characterized the electoral map as practically on fire. “The alarming thing is that we are returning to those practices of the 1980s and before against which so much was fought,” Alvarez wrote in a recent column.
In addition to violent incidents, reports of old-fashioned vote-buying, systematic political spying, Watergate-style break-ins, illegal use of official positions and programs to promote candidates and other electoral violations and irregularities have flowed in the press.
Accompanying the election process is one nagging question: To what degree are the elections compromised by the involvement of organized crime? In the most dramatic instance of possible criminal infiltration, the expected gubernatorial candidate of a center-left coalition in the key tourist state of Quintana Roo, Gregorio Sanchez, was arrested by federal police on the eve of launching his campaign and accused of protecting drug traffickers.
“We have come to the possibility that organized crime will exercise its political force in the upcoming state elections,” editorialized the weekly publication of Mexico’s still-powerful Roman Catholic Church, “not only by imposing candidates, assuring markets and negotiating financing, but also impeding the realization of them and the right of the people to elect the project and candidate they consider ideal.”
Many of the places where politically-tainted violence has occurred-Sinaloa, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, Durango and others-are precisely the front lines of the so-called drug war.
Political Postcards from the Tamaulipas and Chihuahua Borderlands
Two northern border states, Tamaulipas and Chihuahua, provide important snapshots of the 2010 electoral process. Engulfed in a war between the Gulf and Zetas cartels, Tamaulipas has been in turmoil throughout the election campaign. In a big sense, the Torre assassination, occurring right after the candidate closed his campaign with big rallies, merely marked the tragic culmination of an electoral process defined by violence.
In May, the PAN candidate for mayor of the border town of Valle Hermoso, Jose Mario Guajardo, was shot dead along with his son and another man.
On more than one occasion, other candidates have been trapped in shoot-outs, and on-ground campaigning has proven impossible in some areas.
In the violent “Little Border” across from Texas’ Rio Grande Valley, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) declared conditions did not exist for it to even field candidates, while the center-right PAN announced its candidates would appear on the ballot but refrain from public appearances.
A similar situation prevails in Chihuahua, where the PRD did not postulate candidates in 18 rural municipalities plagued by drug-fueled violence. In areas of the Chihuahua mountains, criminal gangs were even reported to be giving permission for candidates to enter or not enter.
July 4 and Beyond
Mounting tensions surround the July 4 elections. On June 25, the PAN, PRD, PT and Convergencia parties asked the Federal Electoral Institute to step out of its usual mold and monitor the state contests, a job which is normally the responsibility of the state institutes. In several states, the parties have formed an unusual and controversial right-left coalition against the PRI.
Prior to the Torre murder in Tamaulipas, Federal Interior Minister Fernando Gomez Mont declared his agency had reached agreements with a number of states to monitor the voting. Pledging state protection, he urged citizens to exercise their civic duty on July 4.
“Today, more than ever, the act of suffrage constitutes citizenship and patriotism,” Gomez Mont said.
The Calderon administration official’s positive spin was shared by Fernando Herrera, president of the Chihuahua State Electoral Institute, who projected a better-than-normal turnout at the polls in his state next weekend.
Others were not so upbeat about July 4 or the longer-term prospects for Mexican democracy. Beatriz Claudia Zavala, president of the Mexico City Electoral Institute, recently told local legislators that only two in 10 Mexicans believe in the electoral process.
Predicting a “historic abstentionism” due to fear or skepticism, an outgoing PRD lawmaker from Chihuahua criticized this year’s election campaign as so devoid of debate around real issues and so full of promises of special favors it resembled a “multi-colored piñata.” Whether a new political force will emerge from the wreckage of 2010 is an urgent question, wrote Victor Quintana.
Frontera NorteSur (FNS): on-line, U.S.-Mexico border news Center for Latin American and Border Studies New Mexico State University Las Cruces, New Mexico