Coercion, vote-buying sully key governor campaign in Mexico

MEXICO CITY (Reuters) -- The party that ruled Mexico for more than seven decades has revived its age-old tricks of voter coercion and bribery in its fight to retain the governorship of a southern oil-rich Gulf state, a citizen's group said on Wednesday.

Mexican civic group Alianza Civica said a survey of voters in Tabasco state showed that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), ousted from the presidency in a July 2 election, was offering gifts, pressuring voters and monopolizing the media ahead of a October 15 vote.

"We cannot rule out that there might be irregularities on voting day," such as a lack of ballot secrecy and vote buying, said Hugo Almada, an Alianza Civic regional advisor.

The Tabasco vote is seen as a key survival test for the PRI after its startling defeat in July at the hands of the National Action Party's (PAN) Vicente Fox. The party also lost in two governor's races in July and last month's gubernatorial contest in the southern state of Chiapas.

The Tabasco ballot is also viewed as a make-or-break race for state governor Roberto Madrazo, a PRI stalwart who hopes to clinch his party's national leadership through a victory of his handpicked candidate for governor, Manuel Andrade.

The survey of 1,005 registered Tabasco voters showed that four percent reported they had been offered gifts, and the vast majority of the offers had been peddled by the PRI, said Alianza Civica. Vote-buying is illegal in Mexico, as is the use of public resources to woo voters.

Two percent of those polled said they had faced coercion, largely by the PRI, to cast their ballot for a specific party, according to the pressure group.

But one of the more striking results of the poll, said Alianza Civic officials, was the low level of voter confidence in the Tabasco electoral process. Thirty-eight percent of those surveyed said they had little or no faith that the election would be clean.

That figure compares with the 80 percent of Mexicans who reportedly felt high confidence levels ahead of the July 2 presidential vote, said Silvia Alonso, executive secretary of Alianza Civica. The presidential ballot was widely praised as Mexico's cleanest vote ever.

The citizens' group linked the low confidence to a distrust of the Tabasco state electoral board, in which thirty-three percent of those surveyed said they had little or no faith. the board acts independently of Mexico's federal election watchdog IFE, credited with bringing transparency to the national vote.

"The responsibility for the election rests entirely with the Tabasco electoral board," said Almada.

Madrazo has been accused by the opposition of spending lavishly during his 1994 run for Tabasco state governor. He has denied charges his campaign cost more than $65 million spent by President Bill Clinton in the 1996 U.S. presidential race.

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