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1. Acknowledgements
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The elections to be held on July 2, 2000, represent a historic moment for Mexico. For the first time Mexicans will go to the polls to elect a president according to proceedings agreed upon by all the parties and administered by an autonomous electoral organ, the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). Moreover, the intensifying political competition of the last fifteen years has culminated in an election where there is a real possibility of a change in the party that controls the Presidency. The present report is an attempt to assess the prospects for free and fair federal elections with less than six weeks remaining before that election.
On May 19, 2000, a delegation of academics and professionals with experience in Mexico arrived in Mexico City for ten days of intensive study of the conditions preceding the election. We came from seven countries including the United States, Canada, Japan, and several countries of the European Union. The delegation was organized by Global Exchange, a civic organization based in the U.S., with the help of Alianza Cívica, a Mexican civic organization.
The purpose of the delegation was to demonstrate international support for the Mexican people in their effort to carry out a free, fair, and fully legitimate electoral process, to evaluate the preparations underway for the day of the elections and the conditions surrounding the contest, and to inform the Mexican public and that of our own countries of our observations. We have been scrupulous not to interfere in the electoral process, take partisan positions, or draw conclusions beyond our competence.
Thanks to the diligence of the people involved with Alianza Cívica and Global Exchange, and to the cooperation of many Mexicans ranging from government officials to party representatives to ordinary individuals, we have been privileged to learn a great deal about the electoral process in the course of our short visit. Among others, we spoke with several councilors of the IFE and the Electoral Institute of the Federal District, the Special Federal Prosecutor for Electoral Crimes (FEPADE), representatives of the Special Commission of the Chamber of Deputies for oversight of the use of government resources for electoral purposes, representatives of the PAN, PDS, PRD, and PRI, members of the press, and representatives of labor and other civil society organizations. In addition, members of the delegation visited the following states in smaller groups: Chiapas, Guerrero, the Huasteca region in the states of Hidalgo and San Luis Potosí, Oaxaca, and Yucatán. There we met with government officials, including local officials of IFE; representatives of political parties, the press, and civil society; and members of a number of communities. The delegation also made shorter visits to communities in the states of Tlaxcala and México. A list of the members of the delegation, together with their institutional affiliation and country-of-origin is attached as an appendix.
The Context of the Elections of 2000
Mexico has been governed continuously by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), since that party’s creation in 1929. While a degree of competition has persisted throughout this long history, the PRI dominated the electoral scene up to the 1980s. Electoral reforms in 1977 and increasing social pressure for greater representation outside the traditional channels began to open up the possibility of genuine electoral victories for a growing opposition. The National Action Party (PAN), which dates back to 1939, was the first to enjoy the fruits of these changes. In 1963, the PAN won a single municipal election and controlled 5 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, but by the late 1980s the party had won several important mayoral seats and the governorship of Baja California and controlled 38 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. By the end of 1995, it governed some 35 million Mexicans at the state and municipal levels. The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) was created following the tremendous outpouring of support for the presidential candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988. It quickly emerged as a genuine competitor over the next few years. Following elections in 1997, the PRD was the second largest political group in a Chamber of Deputies controlled by the opposition and Cárdenas had been chosen Mayor (Jefe de Gobierno) of the Federal District in the first election ever held for that office. Clearly, the electoral arena in Mexico is more pluralistic and competitive now than at any other time in the nation’s history.
The competitiveness of Mexico’s elections was enhanced by the Peace Accords that were reached by the political parties in the wake of the Zapatista rebellion of January, 1994. The legislative changes that followed the Accords began a profound transformation of the electoral laws and organs of the state. Electoral violations were made criminal offenses for the first time in 1990, but a Special Federal Prosecutor for Electoral Crimes was only established in 1994. Civilian electoral councilors were appointed by a super-majority of Congress to oversee the electoral process, and new processes were launched to ensure the accuracy of the electoral registry.
The most far-reaching reforms came in 1996 when, for the first time, the Federal Electoral Institute achieved autonomy from the Executive branch of the government. IFE established a new electoral registry along with sophisticated systems for ensuring that the registry could no longer be used to exclude voters or inflate the number of votes for one party or another. A new system for selecting local election officials was devised and provisions for observation of the process on the part of representatives of the parties and non-governmental organizations were clarified. The Tribunal Electoral Federal was incorporated into the Judiciary, with appointments dependent on a two-thirds vote of the Chamber of Deputies. Finally, campaign finance laws were revised in an attempt to curb excessive spending and to level the playing field among parties. The results of these changes were quite apparent in the elections of 1997, the most competitive ever held in Mexico. The victories of opposition candidates in many parts of the country produced a high degree of confidence in the new system and a sense that Mexico’s transition to a fully plural democratic system was well underway.
Still, many problems remain both within the electoral system itself and in the larger exercise of politics in the country. The reforms at the federal level have not always been emulated at the state level where state laws determine electoral procedures for governors, state legislatures, and municipal posts. In this report, we confine ourselves to observations on conditions surrounding upcoming federal elections, though in many cases the experience of elections at the state level colors people’s expectations regarding the national elections.
The political climate in Mexico at the time of our visit was intense. A group of 100 intellectuals had just published their concern at the tone of the electoral contest. With recent polls suggesting that the candidate of the PRI was losing the lead in the presidential elections, that party had stepped up efforts to get out the vote, including marshalling loyalists from within the bureaucracy to participate in the campaign. The PRI candidate urged state governors loyal to that party to make an all-out effort to win the presidential election. Many people, both independent observers and opposition party members, believed that the PRI was stepping over the line between legitimate campaigning and the use of public resources for partisan political purposes. Activists in the PRI and others launched similar charges against state and municipal officials who were members of the opposition parties. Members of the delegation worried that the charges and counter-charges, and the announcement by one presidential aspirant that he would only regard a victory by the PRI as legitimate if its candidate secured a margin of at least ten percentage points over his rivals, might further alienate a Mexican population already deeply disillusioned with politics. Nevertheless, the political atmosphere did not strike us as overly polarized in comparison with electoral contests in other democracies.
The Electoral Institutions
Recent electoral reforms and technological improvements have gone far to render the Mexican electoral system more worthy of confidence than ever before. Indeed, we encountered a high level of confidence in the system on the part of party officials and civil society organizations, especially as regards preparations for the process of voting and tabulating the results. IFE has devoted tremendous resources to ensuring a reliable electoral registry, voters’ credentials to protect against fraud, and procedures for carrying out and tabulating the vote to guarantee a clean and efficient performance on the day of the elections. Nevertheless, we also encountered concerns about specific features of the system, in some cases undermining overall confidence among lower level party officials and the general public. And it was not always clear that the general public shared the enthusiasm and confidence of those directly involved in the process.
A key example has to do with the constitution of the volunteer functionaries who will oversee the polling places on election day. IFE has devised an intensive training program for the approximately 800,000 citizens needed to staff 115,000 polling places throughout the country. Chosen by lot and acting as unpaid volunteers, the vast majority of these citizen officials will undoubtedly perform honestly and competently on the day of the elections, especially given the high percentage of polling places likely to be watched by representatives of two or more political parties and independent observers. Nevertheless, concerns persist that in locales where political power has been highly concentrated and traditionally used to intimidate any opposition, electoral officials may be powerless to stop, or even be complicit in, acts of electoral fraud on the day of the elections. In the 1997 race, there were a high number of substitutions of local volunteers at the voting places just days before the election, allowing little time for proper orientation and suggesting that individuals chosen beforehand had come under pressure to step down in favor of others who had the support of local political leaders. Manipulation of officials at the voting places remains a distinct possibility in many poor, rural communities, where isolation, poverty, and social pressure continue to make outright electoral fraud an important option for those with the will to carry it out.
The change in political culture that many of our respondents hoped for will only come if those responsible for such electoral violations are singled out and punished. Hence, a second, more serious concern, has to do with the adequacy of the legal system to sanction–and thus discourage–electoral crimes of all sorts. The FEPADE has very scarce resources to deal with the problem. With just 65 legal agents, one permanent office in Mexico City and five temporary regional offices, FEPADE does not have the means to pursue every complaint that might be generated. By the same token, the scant presence of FEPADE throughout the country means that those with complaints must find other means to lodge them. Moreover, an interview with the director of FEPADE left our delegation with the distinct impression that the organization took a very reactive rather than proactive approach to finding and prosecuting electoral crimes.
Adding to our concerns over the inadequacy of official institutions to deal with evidence of electoral crimes was the fact that the legal system did not seem to offer many opportunities for individual citizens to seek redress for infringements of their electoral rights. Not only was there no observed pattern of citizen use of legal process to vindicate voting rights, but there seemed to be both widespread ignorance of those rights and a lack of faith in the legal process among those who were aware of those rights. Apart from the natural reluctance that prevents many people from bringing forth a complaint, there is the difficulty of doing so and the possibility that doing so may bring reprisals from the accused. For poor people especially, bringing a complaint involves the intimidating prospect of having to deal with the police, fear of social censure or reprisals locally, and worry that, whatever happens, having done so will affect their access to government programs for the poor. Several respondents, including high-placed officials close to the electoral process, expressed the convictions that bringing a complaint would have no effect, that the sanctions imposed would not prevent future violations, and even that despite sanctions, offenders would likely continue in their offenses. It is little wonder, therefore, that relatively few complaints have surfaced outside of official sources such as IFE and other agencies of the National Attorney General’s Office (Procuraduría General de la República).
The Federal Electoral Tribunal was also criticized by a number of those we talked to. To our knowledge the Tribunal has not shown a clear party slant in recent cases. However many felt that despite the guarantees provided by Congressional approval, members of the Tribunal maintained too narrow an interpretation of their mandate and of the relevant law. The failure of the Tribunal to honor more than 2 of the 320 complaints presented by Alianza Cívica following the 1994 elections lends weight to this charge.
That the chief agencies concerned with electoral infractions–FEPADE and the Tribunal–command little confidence among an important segment of the population is another cause for concern. The rule of law as applied to the electoral system is essential to secure the confidence of the citizenry–and there is extensive evidence that most Mexicans do not share the confidence of their leaders in the system. Lack of confidence in the system is compounded whenever people perceive infractions of the law that go unpunished. Recent efforts to strengthen the rule of law in regard to elections are commendable, but they need to be extended. Some of the laws introduced in recent reforms, moreover, appear to be scarcely enforceable: for instance, those regarding the use of public walls and sites for electoral propaganda. Deeply embedded customs cannot be wiped out overnight. As long as the law remains on the books but is not enforced in the vast majority of cases, the public will rightly draw the conclusion that the electoral authorities themselves do not respect the law.
The Heritage of Clientelism
The deepest concerns raised by those we talked with concerned the continuing effects of a deeply entrenched system of arbitrary power and clientelistic politics, in which the party in power, the government, and the nation were represented as one and the same. Under these circumstances many Mexicans came to think of the PRI as the only party that could guarantee, not only political stability, but their own personal and economic security. Government programs were identified as the work of the party and government officials campaigned openly for the party, promising more and better programs in return for a favorable vote. PRI-affiliated unions guaranteed jobs in return for participation in partisan political events. Urban political bosses offered places for street vendors to market their wares, access to apartments or residential plots, and basic urban services in the growing irregular settlements around the major cities, all on the condition that recipients of these benefits remain loyal to the party. In rural areas, economic elites also managed political power, using fraud and electoral violence where they could not deliver the vote by other means.
The old practices of caciquismo have not yet disappeared though they appear less pervasive. In visits to the municipios of Los Reyes and Chimalhuacán, in the State of Mexico, members of the delegation were told of local economic elites and political bosses (caciques) who controlled the vote of street vendors in the one case and a large proportion of needy residents in the other. In Chimalhuacán, a PRI official testified that the party had split over the tactics of the local cacique, who had employed thugs to beat and intimidate opposition party members. PAN officials in Los Reyes accused this same cacique of having ordered the beating and kidnapping of a PAN militant in Chimalhuacán.
The electoral reforms of the 1990s, as well as changes within the PRI itself, have gone far to break this system of entrenched power, but they have not eliminated it or the expectations associated with it. Thus, the PRI still enjoys the advantages of incumbency in multiple ways, many of them not illegal, others questionable from the standpoint of Mexico’s electoral laws, others more clearly outside the law. Accusations abound that local, state and federal officials have withheld funding for one project or another, or held back dispensing one good or another, until election time, as part of a campaign to persuade voters that only the PRI can deliver. In many cases, there are claims that voters are coerced with the direct threat that they will be denied participation in one program or another if they do not vote appropriately. A thoroughgoing study by the Special Commission of the Chamber of Deputies strongly suggests that such practices were prevalent in the most recent gubernatorial contest in the state of Nayarit. A report by Alianza Cívica provides statistical evidence of the effects which government aid programs are having on the public’s perceptions and political preferences. (See Appendix A.)
Examples of political wrongdoing were not hard for us to find. In the State of Mexico, in the Municipality of Valle de Chalco, a group from our delegation photographed unfinished street works bearing the slogan, "If you would like to see more pavement here, vote PRI." Another group took testimony from residents of Santo Tomás de los Plátanos regarding the storage of cement in a municipal warehouse by a candidate for the Chamber of Deputies who evidently intended to distribute it as a political blandishment to local voters. In Naucalpan, others heard from an employee of the Secretary of Public Education who said that teachers had been offered five days vacation and $500 pesos by their superiors to distribute PRI election materials. In other cases, individuals denounced the pressure to attend PRI-sponsored electoral events that officials managing programs for the poor exerted on them. In the Municipality of Huamantla, in the state of Tlaxcala, we heard from three women who said that the local promoter (promotora) for the anti-poverty program PROGRESA had removed them from the list of recipients for failing to attend a meeting with a candidate for the PRI. At Los Reyes in the state of Mexico, opposition party officials complained that the local PRD government had used public resources to paint a large campaign slogan for the PRD candidate on a public hillside overlooking the area. Although we were unable to confirm any of these accusations, such complaints appear with enough frequency to be matters of concern. As the Los Reyes complaint indicates, there is evidence that such practices are not exclusive to the PRI but occur under opposition governments as well, suggesting that they are deeply embedded in Mexican political practice.
Mexico enters this electoral season, as it has others, with the heavy burden of poverty and economic uncertainty that is a product of decades of skewed development, the all-consuming debt crisis of the 1980s, and the failure of neo-Liberal reform in the 1990s to promote continuous or equitable growth. Some 43 million Mexicans live in poverty according to UN figures and 18 million live in extreme poverty. The number of people classified as functionally illiterate has grown over the last several years. At the same time, the boom of the early 1990s encouraged shoddy banking practices which led to massive bankruptcies among all sectors of the population and prompted a massive and controversial bank bailout.
Thus an enormous backlog of economic challenges faces the contenders in this election. Urgent material needs, the lack of secure employment, and the precarious situation of peasant agriculture make the poor vulnerable to manipulation by government and party officials who possess the power to ensure that this or that aid program continues to serve a given community or individual. Poor women are particularly vulnerable. We met many courageous and outspoken women on our visit, but we also met women who, because of traditional constraints or desperate need, were vulnerable to manipulation by government officials or party representatives.
Despite the considerable advances achieved with the new electoral machinery, the manipulation of the vote on the day of the elections is still possible in many poor, rural communities. We discuss evidence of both possible voter manipulation and the irregular use of public resources for electoral purposes in each of the state reports below. Special attention should be given to ensuring that polling places in poor and more isolated communities, as well as in hotly contested districts, are monitored closely on the day of election by both representatives of parties and independent observers.
Political Violence, Militarization, and Human Rights Abuses
Most of the attempts to influence the vote through government programs occur in poor communities, particularly in rural areas. This is also where the heaviest incidence of political violence of all sorts has traditionally been found. Local caciques have employed violence on their own behalf, in intra-party disputes, and as a means of crushing opposition to the official party. The administrative growth of the Mexican state over the last fifty years has eliminated some of the power of these local elites, but the phenomenon persists in many parts of rural Mexico. And where it persists, we expect that electoral politics will be distorted, despite the admirable efforts at reform undertaken since 1996.
In many parts of the country, particularly in the southern states, the rural poor are also more likely to face a heavy military presence and a recent history of violence and abuse on the part of the authorities. In Chiapas, the Zapatista movement that emerged in 1994 has been countered by large-scale military operations, with permanent encampments more and more the rule. Elsewhere, particularly in Guerrero, Oaxaca, and parts of Hidalgo, Puebla and Veracruz, the sharply increased presence of military and other security forces preceded the appearance of guerrilla movements.
Today, in the rural parts of these states, the military and other forces appear regularly on the highways, mounting roadblocks or searching the homes of peasants in sometimes violent sweeps of the countryside. Often the explanation for such actions is pursuit of narcotics traffickers, sometimes it is the guerilla threat, but charges of human rights abuses have often accompanied the increased military and police presence. There seems little doubt that these activities are intimidating to potential voters who identify the security forces with the ruling party. There is also ample evidence that the presence of security forces has contributed to an atmosphere of polarization in the countryside and to the emergence of paramilitary groups widely seen as allied with the PRI.
The human rights abuses that have accompanied increased security operations in many parts of rural Mexico have often been directed at opposition party members. The PRD claims that some 600 of its leaders and militants have been killed since the party’s founding in 1989. Other parties, including the PRI, have also suffered the effects of political violence. In many cases, an atmosphere of impunity surrounds these killings. To take just one example, in the case of the massacre of peasant members of the Campesino Organization of the Southern Sierras at Aguas Blancas, Guerrero, in June of 1995, the governmental National Human Rights Commission found then-governor Rubén Figueroa Alcocer ultimately responsible for the killings. Yet despite the successful prosecution of lower level officials in the attack, Figueroa has never been brought to court. Similarly, despite the fact that the Commission has referred a large number of cases of abuse by soldiers and military officials to the military courts, no more than one or two officers have been prosecuted. The aura of impunity that surrounds many such crimes may provoke outrage and a "vote of protest" on the part of some, but it is also likely to dampen political militancy and electoral participation among many others.
The Uses of the Media
Mexican electoral observers, starting with Alianza Cívica, have pioneered the analysis of media reportage on political candidates. This work has been taken up recently by the IFE, which has conducted extensive surveys of both press and mass media coverage. Their concern arises from the long association of the major media with the Mexican government and the extensive control the latter exercised over reporters and publishers. Recent reports by the IFE’s media monitoring arm show that national coverage on radio and television has been much more equitable than in the past, both in terms of the time devoted to each major candidate for the presidency and in terms of the quality of the coverage. Nevertheless, a strong trend toward more favorable coverage of the PRI’s candidate emerged in the report for the month of April, just as that candidate’s first place rating in the polls seemed to be slipping. (See Appendix B.) At the local level, as some of the more detailed state delegation reports show, coverage is even more skewed. There, government ads continue to be the major source of revenue for virtually all newspapers, providing a significant source of leverage should government officials choose to use it. Intimidation and violence have also been common, directed especially against writers covering human rights abuses and political violence stories.
Another issue of concern was the refusal of the broadcasters association, the Cámara de la Industria de la Radio y la Televisión (CIRT), to honor the longstanding practice of airing IFE’s civic education spots for free. CIRT offered the rather strained explanation that IFE was no longer a government agency and thus not entitled to free coverage. IFE’s General Council appealed to the Secretary of Government (Secretaría de Gobernación) which oversees media licenses, to intervene, but Gobernación refused to get involved. As a result of their inaction the controversy dragged on for two months without IFE being able to air spots urging voters to resist coercion and vote buying. A partial settlement has allowed the spots to be aired, but final resolution remains in the hands of the courts.
Campaign Finance
Mexico has made significant strides in regulating campaign financing. There is public financing for all registered parties, which gives smaller parties and those with less private funding access to resources, and to the media in particular, that they would not ordinarily have. (IFE also oversees the sale of available media spots, ensuring a degree of equity in media-based campaigning.) The electoral reforms also established both overall limits on campaign spending and limits on private donations. Despite these advances, there remain significant loopholes in the law. Limits for individual donations are quite high–nearly $80,000–reinforcing a situation in which the rich tend to have more access to politicians. Moreover, while the law specifies limits for registered donations to a campaign, candidates may collect unregulated private donations at public events. There is no monitoring of private donations, parties and candidates are required to present their books only after the elections, and sanctions for violations of campaign finance limitations include fines but not removal from office. These appear to constitute serious limitations on the effectiveness of campaign finance regulations. Finally, some see the formula used for allocation of public funds to parties as inequitable in that 70 percent of public funds are distributed to parties according to their proportion of the vote in the last election, while only 30 percent is distributed equally among all contenders.
Besides monetary contributions, political parties derive substantial benefits from control over types of resources. Our delegation found evidence that government personnel and public resources were used for partisan campaign activities in violation of the election laws. For example, at Chalco Solidaridad in the State of Mexico, the Municipal government painted a long dike with multiple advertisements for the PRI candidate. Elsewhere we heard reports of government vehicles being used to take people to partisan rallies. The large cache of cement gathered at Santo Tomás de los Plátanos appeared to involve the use of public resources for partisan purposes.
Electoral Observers
The electoral reforms of 1994 and 1996 recognized the new figure of accredited election observers, both national and, more grudgingly, international. (International observers are officially designated "foreign visitors" rather than "international election observers.") Both national observers and foreign visitors are permitted to monitor electoral practices and to be present at the polling place to observe the process at work. IFE accredits and welcomes both. In the case of foreign visitors, however, the National Institute of Immigration (Migración) must issue special FM-VE visas to permit them "to come to know the electoral process."
Our own experience raised questions about the current government’s willingness to comply with provisions of the electoral reform that make visits like ours possible. While IFE was welcoming and quickly accredited members of our delegation, officials in the consulates and IIN were not always so accommodating. For example, IFE declared the electoral observation period open as of December 20, 1999, but Migración did not have procedures in place to process FM-VE visa applications until April! When we did apply for visas, many of us met with courteous and efficient service, but at a few consulates members of the delegation met with inconsistent demands for information, frustrating delays, and the necessity of multiple visits to complete the process. Three members of the group were forced to cancel their visit and one entered on a tourist visa and only received the appropriate visa in Mexico City thanks to critical newspaper coverage and the efforts of IFE personnel. Most outrageous was the expulsion of the organizer of the delegation, Ted Lewis, when he attempted to enter on a tourist visa to complete preparations and arrange for his FM-VE visa. Despite protests from IFE, Alianza Cívica, and the press, Mr. Lewis was not allowed to return to lead the delegation.
In the remainder of this report, we discuss many of the themes as they appear at the state and local level in the regions we visited. The Conclusion underlines areas of particular concern.