July 6, 1998 The New York Times
Elections Seen as Early Test for Zedillo's Party
By SAM DILLON
CHIHUAHUA, Mexico -- President Ernesto Zedillo's governing party coasted to victory Sunday in gubernatorial balloting in one sparsely populated northern state, but more important elections in two neighboring states were too closely contested to determine a winner.
Sunday's voting in Chihuahua, Durango and Zacatecas was viewed as a crucial early test of opposition chances to defeat Zedillo's Instititutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI, in presidential balloting two years from now. Despite their importance, no official results were expected until Monday.
In the mountainous state of Durango, the PRI's candidate, Sergio Guerrero Mier, who is a former federal deputy, was leading opposition rivals by a margin of 10 percentage points and appeared headed for victory, according to exit polls reported by the television networks Televisa and TV Azteca. The opposition vote in Durango was split among three parties, one of which the PRI has funded in the past as a way of dividing its competitors.
In more closely watched elections to the north in Chihuahua, the results remained inconclusive late Sunday evening. According to TV Azteca's exit poll, the PRI enjoyed a small lead there over the opposition National Action Party, or PAN, which has governed the state since 1992. But PAN leaders challenged the Azteca report, and Televisa said this evening that it considered the Chihuahua race too close to call.
If confirmed by official returns, the PRI's victory in Chihuahua would be important not only because the state, which borders on western Texas and New Mexico, is one of Mexico's fastest-growing, but also because the PRI has never before recovered a statehouse previously lost to the opposition.
In Zacatecas, a mining center on Durango's southern border, the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, was leading in early returns, according to the Azteca exit poll. But that report, too, was not conclusive. PRI leaders said their candidate was ahead in Zacatecas, and Televisa refused to predict a winner there.
The PRI has never lost a gubernatorial election in Zacatecas. A PRD victory there would especially painful for the president's party because Ricardo Monreal, the PRD's candidate, was one of the PRI's own top congressional leaders until earlier this year, when he was passed over for the gubernatorial nomination and defected to the leftist opposition.
But the elections in Chihuahua were weighted with the most symbolic importance because Gov. Francisco Barrio is from the PAN, and the PRI poured national resources into the state in an attempt to orchestrate a showcase victory. The Chihuahua elections were the PRI's only possibility before the 2000 presidential vote to recapture a statehouse controlled by the opposition.
In the Chihuahua race the two main candidates were Patricio Martinez, 50, a federal congressman who was mayor of the Chihuahua state capital from 1992 to 1995, and Ramon Galindo, 41, who stepped down as the PAN mayor of Juarez earlier this year to run for governor.
In public opinion polls, Martinez took a strong lead after his nomination in March, and although Galindo reduced the margin during the four-month campaign in the surveys, he was never able to pull past the PRI candidate.
The final pre-election poll by a Juarez newspaper, Norte, in the last week of June, said that Martinez was favored by 38 percent of the voters and that Galindo was favored by 35 percent.
Maria Esther Orozco, 53, an award-winning biologist who represented the leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, was backed by 7 percent of the voters in Chihuahua, according to the Norte pre-election poll. Some 14 percent of Chihuahua voters were undecided.
The PRI has controlled the presidency and most state and local posts since its founding in 1929 by generals who fought in the revolution from 1910 to 1917. In many elections since, including the 1976 presidential vote that Jose Lopez Portillo won, the party's candidates have run unopposed. Many other victories for the party have resulted from skullduggery or outright fraud.
Since 1991, when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari recognized the first opposition gubernatorial victory, by a PAN candidate in Baja California, the opposition has won six statehouses, and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the leftist party was elected last year to be Mayor of the Mexico City Federal District.
The combined votes of five opposition parties constitute a slim majority in the 500-seat Chamber of Deputies, although they do not always vote together against the president's party, which has an outright majority in the Senate.
The importance of the elections in Chihuahua lies partly in the central role of that state -- which borders west Texas and is Mexico's largest in terms of territory -- in the opposition's 15-year struggle to end the governing party's domination.
The election in 1983 of Barrio of the National Action Party as mayor of Juarez, the state's largest city, helped the PAN that year to make the opposition's first broad inroads against the governing party's power in several northern states. Three years later, in 1986, when Barrio made his first run for governor, authorities from the governing party gave the victory to his opponent from their party, ignoring accusations of fraud lodged by international observers.
Barrio led a hunger strike, and hundreds of followers carried out months of protests across Chihuahua, at one point shutting down the international bridge linking Juarez and El Paso. When Barrio ran again in 1992, Salinas recognized his victory.
Many voters credited Barrio Sunday with improving public administration in Chihuahua in his six-year term, which ends this year.
"The PAN has carried on a great war against corruption in Chihuahua," said Gonzalo Solis, a mathematics professor at a local university here, who said he voted for Galindo.
But a civil engineer, Jorge Soto, said he cast his vote for the governing party, faulting Barrio for allowing crime to run out of control.
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