'There's a lot of interest because we expect a change'

Mexico's ruling party faces a good chance of defeat in today's presidential election.

By SAUNDRA AMRHEIN

© St. Petersburg Times, published July 2, 2000

CUERNAVACA, Mexico -- Try as they might, the college students gathered at a trendy cafe here cannot escape the subject.

"All day we talk about that everywhere," said 22-year-old Maricarmen Zarate, slumping back in her chair with a sigh.

The subject that exhausts Zarate and grips Mexico is today's presidential election, the first in 71 years in which the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, faces a good chance of defeat.

In addition to radio and television news and political advertisements, residents of this town 50 miles south of the capital are bombarded with bullhorns on cars blaring campaign messages and political posters blanketing utility poles, trees and overpasses.

"There's a lot of interest because we expect a change," said Denise Perez, 21, launching into an animated discussion despite her friend's reluctance. "There will be more employment and higher salaries, and that will provide the impulse for better education."

Many of those favoring change are pinning their hopes on Vicente Fox, a former Coca-Cola executive and governor of the state of Guanajuato.

Lourdes Gonsalez, 21, thinks Fox will be a strong supporter of business, trade and higher salaries. "He was a great businessman," she said. "He went from nothing to become president of Coca-Cola (in Mexico). That speaks well of him."

But Fox has turned off some Mexican voters with what they consider to be frank and vulgar jokes about the PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida. And there are fears that his business background would spell trouble for owners of small- and medium-sized businesses.

"If (Fox) is president, he's going to do things for monopolies, that's for sure," said Eugenio Palomares, 32, an assistant director at the Mexican Immersion Center, a Spanish-language school in Cuernavaca.

"(Fox) is just a cowboy with cows in Mexico," he said. "You remember Ross Perot? He's like that: an idiot with money." Palomares plans to vote for Labastida.

Still, nagging social and political problems, along with entrenched corruption, have caused many Mexicans to want to throw off PRI control.

"Slowly you see a sense of people realizing the responsibility they have in voting and taking it seriously," said Eric Olson, senior associate for Mexico for the Washington Office on America, a nonprofit research advocacy group that is monitoring the election.

"I didn't want to vote (in the past), I was pessimistic about the whole thing," said Liza Espinosa, 32, a physical education instructor at a soccer school in Cuernavaca. "But PRI had the power to grab (the ballot) and put an X on it. So those years I did not vote, I did vote."

Espinosa is jumping at the chance to throw PRI out. She's voting for Fox because local candidates from his National Action Party, or PAN, have completed thousands of construction projects and launched education scholarships.

"They have promised nothing they haven't physically done," she said.

The independent Federal Electoral Institute took responsibility in 1996 for monitoring the presidential vote.

"That made a huge difference," Olson said. "The (institute) invested between $1-billion to $2-billion trying to clean up what everybody agrees was a very messy electoral process."

The voter registration list was revamped and is now thought to be 95 percent to 98 percent accurate. The institute also took control of the computerized counting of votes and doled out $100-million to each presidential candidate to level the playing field.

"All these reforms have made the election process much better and cleaner," Olson said. "They've cleaned up any possibility of gross and rampant fraud on election day."

That doesn't mean that corruption has disappeared. The PRI has continued handing out government campaign gifts in the form of food, cement and tools.

The party is running strongest in the poorer, southern districts of Mexico, where social benefits are prevalent.

"Independent pollers say 40 percent of people that receive social benefits belong to PRI and the government and don't understand the difference," Olson said. "I think it's pretty obvious it's having an impact."

But PRI's failure to provide services elsewhere has turned others against it.

In Cuernavaca, taxi driver Primo Figueroa Ayala plans to vote for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the leftist candidate running third in the opinion polls. "(Cardenas) is the most honest man I've ever known in this country," he said.

"The (PRI) government has done nothing to make people here stop going north to the United States to work and to survive," Figueroa added. "These people are ready and willing to work. (PRI) has had 70 years, and they've not come through."

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