Yesterday, voters in the poor Mexican state of Guerrero went to the polls to elect municipal presidents and local congresspeople. About half the population voted in competitive, multi-party elections, and preliminary results suggest turnover in important contests. For example, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) appears to have lost the mayoralty of Acapulco, Guerrero's largest and most important city, to its main competitor, the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI).
The preliminary results would seem to burnish the state's reputation as a democratic success story. After decades of violent mis-rule by the PRI under a one-party regime, a sordid period of conflict in the 1990s marked by vicious homicides against the nascent PRD, and eventually a democratic opening by the end of that decade, the PRD finally won the governorship in 2005. The state has become increasingly competitive electorally, and is probably the strongest PRD base in the country.
Yet elections in Guerrero this time were marred by a return to the violence of yore, much of it fueled by the narco-trafficking presence in the state. The PRI claimed that 11 of its candidates were told to pull out and threatened with violence if they did not. The party's candidate in Tlapa wore a bullet-proof vest to vote yesterday. Most of the actual partisan violence seemed to be directed at the PRD, however. Several candidates from the party were shot and wounded during the campaign; at least one died.  The violence was not only directed against partisans. Civil society activists have also been threatened; the head of the state's rancher association was attacked during the campaign. Many citizens chosen by the state's electoral institute to participate as volunteer poll watchers dropped out because of fear. There has been speculation that drug money fueled conspicuously well-endowed campaigns, pushing many to break spending limits.  On election day, the military was called out to reinforce state police efforts to protect voters.
In addition to the violence, the elections reinforced the image of the PRD as a broken party, riven by internal factionalism and unable to discipline its own members. At the national level, this factionalism has been on display for months now. Elections to choose new party leaders in March were a fiasco, and a leadership struggle continues between radical and moderate wings of the party. The party's popularity among voters is abysmal: a new poll reported in El Universal finds that if next year's mid-term elections were held today, the PRD would win 19 percent of the vote, compared to 34 percent for the National Action Party (PAN) and 44 percent for the PRI.
In Guerrero, the party has been split, too, with the modernizing governor alienating the party base and imposing candidates of his own choosing. In the elections in Acapulco, a faction of the PRD split with the governor's candidate and voted for a third-party insurgent, apparently allowing the PRI to win easily. The 2005 elections which brought the PRD to power in the state have not helped the party to consolidate; instead, they have brought internal divisions into sharper view and weakened it.
Sadly, then, while Guerrero's relatively peaceful and competitive election day does showcase the progress that has been made toward democratization at the local level in Mexico, it also highlights continuing pathologies. Mexican politics today are hampered by two fundamental weaknesses: the infiltration of narco-related violence and influence, and the crippling of the main leftist electoral option. Both of these realities severely limit the degree to which political competition in Mexico offers meaningful alternatives to dissatisfied voters. Change there has been, but it could be happening a little faster. As Vicente Fox said back in 2000, there is no time like "today, today, today" for political transformation.
Printer-friendly version