Overview
9/9/99	Mexico's Democratic Reform Threatened By Strongman Politics -- Next year's presidential elections in Mexico could usher in a new era of democratic reform -- or the return to an older era of "caudillo" politics. The key question is whether the leading opposition candidates can temper their personal ambitions long enough to mount a united front against the long-dominant but increasingly weak PRI.
8/12/99	Mexico Party Scarred by Infighting -- While some members of Mexico's ruling party settled disputes with gunfire in the run-up to the last presidential election in 1994, candidates maintained verbal decorum, at least. Not so this year. Verbal attacks among candidates reached an unprecedented level this week when the manager for candidate Francisco Labastida called his opponent corrupt and compared him to Hitler. Roberto Madrazo, the subject of that attack, in turn accused Labastida and President Ernesto Zedillo of failing in public office and of trying to fix the results of the party's first primary.
The PRI
4/28/00	Voters start to think unthinkable: Mexico without PRI president -- With opposition candidate Vicente Fox apparently taking the lead in a tight race for president, Mexicans are starting to think about the unthinkable: Mexico without a president from the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) for the first time since 1929.
11/9/99	Viewpoint on the PRI Primary -- Those who voted in the Mexican primaries without being members of the PRI were recorded as PRI sympathizers and likely to vote for the PRI in the elections for president of Mexico and mayor of Mexico City, scheduled for July 2, 2000. The PRI, and for that matter the PRD, does not know how many card-carrying members it has, but the PRI did manage to come up with a list of voters on whose support it believes it can count.
9/29/99	Ruling Party Gets a Lift in Mexico as Foes Disagree -- Talks among opposition parties to forge a coalition that would back a single presidential candidate collapsed Tuesday, greatly increasing the chances that the party that has controlled Mexico for seven decades will win power once again next year.
9/26/99	Misery, Corruption, Enormous Public Debt: The Catastrophic Legacy of Madrazo in Tabasco -- The idyllic Tabasco portrayed by Roberto Madrazo in his television advertisements is a distortion of reality. The Tabasco of Madrazo -- as they say here -- is one of "saliva," or just pure talk.
9/17	Many uncertain about Mexico's first presidential primary -- The adjectives that Leopoldo Mejia uses to describe his favorite candidate in Mexico's first-ever presidential primary are the kinds of compliments bestowed in elections everywhere: seasoned, intelligent, a fighter. But as Mejia piles one superlative after the next onto the name of Francisco Labastida, a front-runner for the nomination of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, he seems to give one in particular a special emphasis.
6/24	Mexico's Presidential Hopefuls Are All New Breed -- An entire generation in Mexico has been governed by Presidents who had never won office before and who were chosen by their predecessors in part because of their Ivy League credentials and fluent English. These Presidents, foreign-trained economists, have modernized the economy while impoverishing the country's working class.
The possibility of an opposition alliance
10/2/99	The PAN and the PRD are Essentially Different -- On Wednesday the 29th, the news was that talks to forge an opposition alliance had failed utterly. Party leaders had given the talks up for dead, saying "The alliance has split up", "The council of notables has been dissolved" declared La Jornada, "It's good-bye to the alliance", announced La Reforma. But looking at the details, it becomes apparent that relations had soured between the PAN negotiators and the notables. One journalist asked the spokesman of the Citizens' Council, "Will we ever see them together again?" The answer was a resolute, "Absolutely not".
8/5/99	Ruling Party in Mexico could Face 8-party front -- After months of bickering, Mexico's main opposition parties--which embrace widely differing ideologies--are reporting surprising progress in negotiations to form an alliance against President Ernesto Zedillo's governing party in next year's general elections. Politicians of the pro-business National Action Party, the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, and six smaller parties have been meeting intermittently since March to discuss a coalition, without seeming to surmount many of the obstacles to the venture. But in recent days, leaders of all the parties say they have made dramatic advances.
The PAN
5/11/00	Mexican Opposition Has Lead in July Election -- The main opposition challenger in Mexico's July 2 presidential election is ahead of the ruling party candidate by nearly five percentage points, according to a Reuters/Zogby opinion poll published Thursday.
9/13/99	Mexico's Right Nominates Pragamatic Candidate for President -- Vicente Fox Quesada, the lanky former Coca-Cola executive known for his high-shine cowboy boots and down-home style, was chosen Sunday as the National Action Party's presidential candidate in a nationwide primary. The outcome makes him the man for the governing party to beat in the election next year.
The PRD
9/25/99	Third Place in the Polls, Mexican Campaigner Manages to project optimism -- Near the end of one of his last days as Mexico City Mayor, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano was in his office, reviewing a dismal newspaper poll that showed that far more city residents disapproved of his City Hall performance than approved.
9/6/99	Privatization of petroleum and electricity production, Chiapas, and the Fobaproa, among other items -- Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano demanded yesterday that the PAN state once and for all whether it agrees to give adequate attention--in the national interest as well as that of the majority of the Mexican people--to the transcendental issues of the country, like privatization of petroleum and electricity production, the conflict in Chiapas, and the Fobaproa bank bailout.
Misuses of State Resources
9/29/99	The PRI Diverted Resources, says Governor -- The Governor of Southern Baja California, Leonel Cota Montaño, denounced that at least 40 million pesos [US$4 million] were diverted from the Financial Secretariat of Southern Baja California during the period in office of the 'priista' Guillermo Mercado in support of prior PRI electoral campaigns.