Mexico spent billions to assure voters of fairness Sunday

July 1, 2000
Web posted at: 9:40 p.m. EDT (0140 GMT)

In this story: 'Mexico will truly be a democracy' Final step: judicial reform World watching closely RELATED STORIES, SITES

MEXICO CITY (CNN) -- Electoral victories by Mexico's ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party have long been taken for granted, but Sunday's presidential contest may change that.

Authorities, apparently at great cost, have acted to assure voters they will not see the kind of fraud that twisted polls in the past.

"Over the past half-dozen years they've spent almost $2 billion in various kinds of safeguards, to make sure that people are registered correctly, to make sure that there's minimum opportunity for fraud on the voting cards, to have as much of a foolproof conduct of the election as possible," James Jones, a former United States ambassador to Mexico, said Friday on CNN

The reforms at the heart of this national election began in 1994, when Ernesto Zedillo became president of Mexico and vowed to make the democratization of his country his political legacy.

Within months of taking office, he began whittling away at the power the Revolutionary Institutional Party, the PRI, had amassed since it took control of the government in 1929.

In 1997, Zedillo took the unusual step of giving up his constitutional authority to choose the mayor of Mexico City, setting up elections instead.

The opposition won that election, making tangible the long-held opposition dreams.

And now those opposition parties see a chance to win the presidency.

	ElectionWatch
A brief election overview FROM IFES: In-Depth special report

"What President Zedillo has tried to do is to make the campaign and the election day counting both fair and honest," Jones said. "That's what's historic. Mexico will truly be a democracy."

Jones noted that the Mexican president has notably not sided with the PRI in this election. He called this the second step in a three-step process "toward first-world respectability."

"The first step, started by President Salinas, was economic reform," including the North American Free Trade Agreement, he said.

"President Zedillo has strengthened those economic reforms, and signed trade agreements all over the world, including the only single nation to sign with the European Union.

"The second step is democracy: to have freedom not only in markets, but in the political process," he said.

Jones said the challenge for the next president will be the reform of the judiciary. "And when that happens, Mexico will have really leapt forward to first-world respectability," he said.

But charges of vote-buying and coercion by the ruling party abound, especially in Mexico's rural areas where many people are dependent on government assistance.

PRI candidate Francisco Labastida denies those charges.

"I am firmly committed to democracy within the party, and I am firmly committed to the idea that the party be on the side of the people," he said.

The canidates in the presidential race are Labastida, the former governor of the state of Sinaloa who also once served as secretary of the interior; former Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the Democratic Revolution Party; and Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, a former governor of the central Mexican state of Guanajuato who is running in a coalition called the Alliance for Change.

The field of five is completed by Manuel Camacho Solis of the Party of the Democractic Center and Gilberto Rincon Gallardo of the Social Democratic Party.

The election in the world's largest Spanish-speaking nation is being monitored by hundreds of foreign observers, including former U.S. President Jimmy Carter. It is also being closely watched in the United States, Mexico's biggest trading partner, where millions of Mexicans live.

Reuters contributed to this report.

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Federal Electoral Institute
Mexico: Political Parties
PRI (in Spanish)
PAN -- National Action Party (in Spanish)
Party of the Democratic Revolution
DEMOCRACIA SOCIAL
Partido del Trabajo (PT) [Labour Party]
PARTIDO VERDE ECOLOGISTA DE MEXICO [Ecologist Green Party of Mexico]
Frente Liberal Mexicano [Mexican Liberal Front]
Humanist Party of Mexico
PCD (in Spanish)
Mexican history of politics
Internet resources on Mexican politics
CIA Factbook 1999: Mexico
InterWeb Mexico

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