Two paths, but Fox and Labastida share the same goal: the presidency of Mexico. And on July 2, when their momentous, bitterly fought contest finally comes to a climax, voters will be passing judgment not so much on their policies, but on their pedigrees–and by extension, on the wild swirl of forces that’s reshaping this nation of 100 million people. Labastida’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has ruled Mexico since it was formed 71 years ago. But Fox, the candidate of the National Action Party (PAN), stands a good chance of ending that streak. To many Mexicans, the PRI has become synonymous with everything wrong in the country: corruption, crime, poverty and dirty politics. Fox, known for his populist (and occasionally profane) rhetoric, is in a near tie with Labastida. Many people will vote for him simply because he could beat the PRI. Labastida, straitlaced and presidential-looking, says he’s a reformer, too. But voters remain unconvinced, so he has turned to other tactics: raising fears that Fox would be an erratic and dangerous president, and, most important, trying to ride to the top on the party machine.
The question is whether the PRI is still powerful enough to get him there. To the distress of the party’s old guard, the last two presidents have ushered in a free-market economy that has curtailed their ability to hand out jobs and favors. Businesses are thriving and a middle class is emerging, but the benefits of free trade have yet to reach the poor, whose protests have grown louder. The uneven transformation has also exacerbated the economic crashes that routinely occur every six years with each change of president. Now–with Labastida straddling the party divide between the diehards and the technocrats while trying to fend off Fox, the capitalist firebrand– there’s irony in the air. Having modernized Mexico, the PRI is trying to stay in power by returning to its roots. But the party’s staunchest supporters, the rural poor, are becoming less important; fewer than 30 percent of voters now come from rural areas. Says Lorenzo Meyer, a political scientist: “The PRI is riding the shoulders of a Mexico that is disappearing.”
The PRI has come close to defeat before. Many Mexicans believe that a leftist opposition candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, won the presidency in 1988 only to have it stolen after the vote-tallying computers mysteriously broke down. Back then the government ran the elections and the PRI ruled every state. Today the playing field is much more level. An independent body controls the elections, and each of the three candidates gets about $100 million–more than a U.S. presidential candidate has ever spent–in public money to finance their campaigns, buy precious television time and hire image consultants. For the first time the voting booths are small enough that only one person fits, and each voting station has photos of everyone registered there. Opposition parties now govern 10 of Mexico’s 31 states plus Mexico City and have a majority in Congress. Changes that have been building for years may soon produce a historic result–and a great prize for Vicente Fox.
There’s irony there, too. For even though Fox stands 6 feet 6 inches in his cowboy boots, he hasn’t always looked like a man of destiny. Back when he was president of Coca-Cola’s Mexico division, he didn’t even seem cut out for politics. Employees knew him for his introverted style, his awkwardness in presentations and his boots and jeans, which he wore even when executives visited from Atlanta. In 1979 he left the company. He and his wife, a secretary he had met there, moved to his family’s ranch and farming and bootmaking businesses.
Meanwhile, Labastida worked his way up the civil-service ranks. His biggest break came in 1982 with the cabinet job of Energy secretary. He was considered a possible presidential candidate, but cabinet rival Carlos Salinas would eventually get the nod after Labastida was sent back to his home state of Sinaloa in 1986 to run for governor. The race was one of the most bitter Mexicans had ever seen. Labastida won, but Manuel Clouthier, a Sinaloa businessman running for the PAN, charged fraud. His supporters filled the streets, pelting the governor’s palace with eggs. Clouthier decided to take his rebellion national. He began planning a bid for the presidency and urging fellow businessmen to run for office. One phone call was to his friend Vicente Fox.
As governor, Labastida encountered Mexico’s most dangerous problems and escaped with a draw. He is fondly remembered for building a highway from the capital to the beach city of Mazatlan and connecting with the people by driving through town in his own Volkswagen. But Sinaloa, on the Gulf of California, is important turf for many of the country’s most powerful drug traffickers. It would be a mild accomplishment simply to stay off the payrolls of the kingpins. “He was honest,” says Mercedes Murillo, a 64-year-old human-rights activist. “The problem was his party, the people that surrounded him. It’s not easy to be the governor of Sinaloa.”
It was especially tough on April 8, 1989. That was the day the Army descended on the state capital and rounded up 200 policemen and other officials, including Labastida’s director of Public Security and state police chief. The Army held them for a night while they arrested a drug lord in the neighboring state of Jalisco. The federal government had kept the raid a secret from Labastida, who was scuba diving that weekend in Baja. Labastida says (with some reason) the Army was actually trying to protect a competing drug lord.
Labastida also says the drug lords were after him. His security chief and attorney general were assassinated, and Labastida and his second wife, a historian, received death threats and were shot at in their car. The risk was so great, says Labastida, that President Salinas whisked him off to Portugal to be ambassador when his term as governor ended. He returned to Mexico in late 1994 to find his political career in the doldrums. President Ernesto Zedillo made him head of the lowly federal toll roads and bridges commission. But as both an economist and a politician, he came to serve an important role for Zedillo: spanning the gap in the PRI between the old stalwarts and the Ivy League-educated technocrats who liberalized the economy. Zedillo decided to resurrect him.
By 1998 Labastida was Interior minister, a job nearly as hard as his governorship. He was unable to make headway on the armed rebellion in the southern state of Chiapas or head off a nine-month strike at the National Autonomous University. Last November the PRI abandoned its tradition of having the president handpick the next candidate and held a primary election. Despite a fiercely fought campaign, Labastida easily won and began looking ahead to July 2. Buttoned-down and unable to speak English, he’s reminiscent of the party’s past. With the opposition divided, it seemed as though Labastida would coast into the presidency.
But Fox’s political fortunes were rising. It started with that 1987 telephone call from Labastida’s foes in Sinaloa. He won a seat in Congress and by 1995 was governor of his home state of Guanajuato. Residents praise him for luring foreign investment, creating jobs and working well with a PRI-dominated Congress. Critics say he spent too much time traveling abroad and neglected basic problems like infant mortality. He also finished his thesis and got his degree. And he lost his public awkwardness. “At Coca-Cola he listened more than he talked,” says Lino Korrodi, an old friend from the company and now head of fund-raising for the campaign. “Now he talks more than he listens.”
Fox decided to seek the presidency–but he faced an obstacle in the form of his own party. Founded by Roman Catholic businessmen in 1939, the PAN often makes headlines for its attempts to push religion into schools and crack down on the pro-choice movement. Fox, an ardent opponent of abortion but less conservative on other issues, remained on the fringes of the PAN. So in 1997 he launched his presidential bid without the party by forming Friends of Fox, which raised $21 million to start getting his face on television and billboards. By last year his campaign was so strong that the party had little choice but to make him the candidate. Divorced, with four adopted children, he would be Mexico’s first president without a First Lady.
That doesn’t seem to hurt him in the polls. The latest ones give Labastida slightly more than 40 percent of the vote and Fox slightly less. Fox backers are generally educated, urban and young. Labastida draws support from poor, rural and older voters. Cardenas, a perennial candidate, runs a distant third with about 15 percent.
With a folksy style and dreams of toppling the system, Fox evokes images of an extra-large Ross Perot. His campaign slogan is: “We’ve already won.“In a display of irreverence that Mexico has never seen before, Fox has called Labastida “shorty,” “sissy” and “transvestite” and his party a bunch of “bloodsuckers, leeches and black adders.” Even many leftists are pragmatically moving into his ranks, not wanting to “waste” their vote on Cardenas.
Critics, though, say that Fox is a political chameleon. He told a conference of bankers that the government is responsible for the county’s banking crisis and then told small businessmen that the bankers were to blame. Like the PAN he is pro-business, but has also described himself as “center-left” on some issues and even praised Fidel Castro for advances in education and health. And he has flip-flopped on whether Pemex, the national oil company, should be privatized. Some observers say he has contradicted himself so many times that it is unclear what he believes or how he would rule.
The PRI is playing on these fears of Fox and on larger doubts Mexicans have about life after the PRI. Fox is likely to cry fraud if Labastida wins by a narrow margin–which is quite possible–and protests could erupt in the cities. In a speech earlier this month, Labastida suggested that his opponent was trying to destabilize the country–a comment that sent the Mexican Stock Exchange tumbling by 4.6 percent. In fact, most analysts believe that the Mexican economy will weather the change of presidents far better than it has in years past. None of the candidates proposes any major economic changes. But, says Javier Trevino, a top Labastida adviser: “Fox is a bridge to the unknown.”
The Labastida campaign began with the idea that it, too, could represent change. Billboards proclaimed: the new pri, closer to you. Few people believed it, though. The lead that Labastida held at the beginning of the year dwindled with each new poll, despite the efforts of James Carville, the U.S. political consultant advising Labastida. When the issue is change, it’s hard running on 37 years of experience in PRI governments. “The ’new PRI’ was a grave error for Labastida,” says a senior official in the president’s office.
And so the slogan virtually disappeared. In its place, Labastida brought the old political bosses into his campaign. Chief among them is Manuel Bartlett. He was the Interior minister who presided over the disputed 1988 election. Labastida “offered to slam the door on fraudulent practices and corrupt officials,” Denise Dresser, a political scientist, wrote in a recent editorial. “The return of the PRI’s retrograde rear guard, however, shows that Labastida is willing to compromise his principles to revive his political fortune.”
The PRI has also revved up its old-fashioned campaign machinery. In some villages, the party has begun passing out chickens, tortillas and roofing materials. More gifts could flow on Election Day. President Zedillo has been touring the country unveiling new bridges, schools and hospitals at an unprecedented rate. The independent body set up to run elections asked the federal and state governments to stop such promotion, but the president and most governors refused. Bartlett has promised to deliver votes through federal welfare programs. Civic groups have complained of local PRI officials threatening to cut off benefits to anyone who votes against the PRI. The ballot is secret, but history tells many Mexicans the party somehow will find out which way they voted. Media coverage has been more balanced than in the past but monitoring by the electoral commission shows that the PRI still receives more favorable coverage than its rivals. “The party machine is the only thing that might save Labastida,” says political analyst Sergio Aguayo. “The question is, whether it can.” Or whether the reforms of the last decade will ultimately mean its defeat.
