1. John Borrell, Andrea Dabrowski/Dolores Hidalgo, “Mexico Almost a Horse Race,” Time, July 4, 1988
After delivering a short campaign speech in the central plaza of Dolores Hidalgo (pop. 85,000), Cuauthemoc Cardenas walked to the museum honoring the local priest who in 1810 issued the call to arms that sparked Mexico's wars of independence. Adjusting his glasses and removing a pen from the pocket of his tailored white shirt, the left's candidate in next week's presidential elections hovered over the visitors' book. "I pay homage to Don Miguel Hidalgo," he wrote. "His sacrifice inspires us to take up once again the struggle for our independence and freedom."
Those words, to which Cardenas appended a signature every bit as baroque as the facade of the town's main church, embodied the new vigor of Mexico's leftist parties and the hunger for change that holds both right and left in its thrall. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) in the July 6 election that will choose the country's leader for the next six years, is certain to prevail. But the P.R.I.'s 59-year monopoly of political power is being challenged as never before, by Cardenas and also by the right-wing National Action Party (P.A.N.), led by Manuel Clouthier. Says Political Scientist Jorge Castaneda: "No matter what form the democracy of this country will take, the next government will have to take the opposition into account."
In the past, the P.R.I. has not had to worry much about opposition, and Mexico's immediate future depends on how it meets the challenge. The first test will be how fair the election is perceived to be. Salinas, 40, in an apparent attempt to dampen the energies of zealous party stalwarts accustomed to ballot rigging, has called for an accurate count. If that plea is heeded, most analysts believe, Salinas will capture about 50% of the vote; in 1982 President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado received 71%. P.A.N., which collected 16% in 1982, is expected to increase its share to more than 20%. Cardenas' leftist coalition is also expected to top 20%, in contrast to the 5% garnered six years ago. "It is not just the presidency that is at stake, but the electoral system itself," observes Juan Molinar Horcasitas, a political scientist at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Cardenas, son of the populist Lazaro Cardenas, who nationalized Mexico's oil industry during his 1934-40 presidency, is all too aware of how entrenched that system is. A former governor of the state of Michoacan, Cardenas with other top P.R.I. officials attempted in 1986 to democratize the party's method of selecting presidential candidates. When they failed, Cardenas accepted the nomination of the leftist Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution and has since forged an alliance with four left-wing parties. "P.R.I. underestimated Cardenas immensely," says Castaneda. "Now the more they antagonize him, the stronger he gets."
Cardenas, 54, whose sagging jowls and doleful eyes give him the appearance of a bloodhound, is far from a leftist rabble-rouser. His speeches are often as dour as his looks. But his message -- declaring the need for a change of both government and policies -- is popular at a time when Mexico's economic problems slice deep into the purchasing power of its poor. By some estimates, real wages have fallen to the levels of the early 1970s. Particularly well received is his call for renegotiation of Mexico's $103 billion foreign debt.
Change is also the theme of the campaign led by Clouthier, 54. At P.A.N. rallies supporters chant "Si, se puede" ("Yes, it is possible") as if it were a hymn; T-shirts bear slogans like MY STRUGGLE IS FOR DEMOCRACY; and posters call for reforms that include, often on the same placard, the abolition of corruption, the national debt, inflation and pollution. At a recent rally in Mexico City, speakers emphasized that the P.A.N.'s support crossed class lines. But there were few Indian faces among the thousands present, and gold crosses and religious medallions were worn conspicuously along with designer clothes and stone-washed jeans.
Cardenas' constituency is darker and poorer and more likely to be wearing scruffy sandals than well-heeled shoes. They are often a good deal humbler than the thousands of campesinos shipped in by the ruling party to attend Salinas rallies. "All our expenses are paid by P.R.I.," said Maria Hernandez Moreno, waiting to greet Salinas in the mining town of Guanajuato. "We are brought here by bus and get lunch and sodas as well." When several hundred cheered Cardenas at a meeting in the plaza of Apaseo el Grande, an organizer proudly told the candidate, "The promise of neither a sandwich nor a soda has brought these people here. They came to see you."
For Salinas, the challenge from the left is more bothersome than that of P.A.N., an electoral foe since the 1940s. A wage-and-price pact introduced in December cooled inflation to 1.9% in May, its lowest rate since November 1981. But the pact is fraying, and between the election and inauguration day in December, pressures will grow for populist measures. "Before there was no serious organized opposition to policies," said Castaneda. "Now P.R.I. is worried that a strong showing by Cardenas will change this."
Some economists believe that if Cardenas surges at the polls, De la Madrid may declare a partial moratorium on Mexico's foreign debt. This would serve to undermine the left, allow De la Madrid to leave office drenched in public applause, and give Salinas the funds to prime a stagnant economy. Yet just as the Spanish defeat of Hidalgo's revolt against the crown only postponed Mexican independence, such fiscal populism might only delay a more fundamental political reckoning.

2. Brook Larmer, “Mexican vote signals shifting political landscape,” Christian Science Monitor, July 8, 1988
Mexico's ruling party claimed victory early yesterday following the country's most critical elections in more than 40 years. But the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was thrown into confusion by the opposition's new-found electoral strength. Bogged down by computer failure and opposition complaints of widespread fraud, the Federal Electoral Commission failed to corroborate that claim with complete election results.

But in a surprising tally of early returns, the commission indicated that the PRI's 59-year tradition of single-party dominance may finally have been broken: With less than 1 percent of the vote in, PRI candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari had won 41.8 percent, followed by left-leaning Cuauhtemoc Cardenas with 34.9 percent, and pro-business candidate Manuel Clouthier with 16.4 percent. Commission members said they expected further results yesterday. But along with independent analysts closely following the returns, they agreed Mr. Salinas would likely win by the smallest margin in PRI history, far below the previous record low of 71 percent in 1982 set by current President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado.

Early polls suggest that the PRI could also sustain major regional losses, including in Mexico City, the country's all-important political heart. Political analysts here say the hotly contested vote contains two other historic changes: The PRI will probably lose several Senate seats for the first time since it was formed in 1929; and the party will almost surely lose its decisive two-thirds majority in the Chamber of Deputies. ''In purely objective terms, the PRI will come out alive,'' says political scientist Adolfo Aguilar, adding that Salinas could even use the poor showing as ''a lever to reform'' the party. ''But psychologically they don't know how to handle losing anything,'' Mr. Aguilar says.

Losing some ground seemed inevitable. After six years of economic crisis and growing discontent with the PRI's authoritarian control, the opposition had finally found its electoral voice with two strong candidates. All over the country, a heavy turnout of disaffected voters poured into the polling booths. ''All the confusion was created by the fact that the results - scattered as they were - showed Salinas's margin of victory to be considerably lower than anybody in the PRI had anticipated,'' says Aguilar, who is a former government official. ''The PRI did not know how to present the results.'' Indeed, the PRI had to delay its normal election-day fiesta. Unlike in previous elections, results were secretly guarded. Finally, at 1:45 a.m. Thursday, PRI head Jorge de la Vega Dominguez addressed weary supporters. Without giving statistics, he declared the PRI had won a ''crushing triumph that was legal and uncontestable.''

For many, it was a contestable statement. ''What kind of judgment can we give a party that declares victory before any results are released by this commission,'' asked Jorge Alcocer, representative to the electoral commission from the Mexican Socialist Party, which formed a coalition with Mr. Cardenas's National Democratic Front. ''It deceives the Mexican people.''
PRI representative Eduardo Andrade countered that each party has the right to compile its own statistics. Besides, he said, the right-wing National Action Party (PAN) had already claimed victory in seven states.

Three opposition candidates also questioned whether the election was ''legal.'' Two hours before Mr. de la Vega's declaration, the candidates - Mr. Clouthier, Mr. Cardenas, and far-left candidate Rosario Ibarra de Piedra - met with Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett Diaz to demand legal resolution of several hundred reported cases of voting irregularities. While acknowledging the absence of election-day violence, they complained about everything from stuffed ballot boxes to threats against opposition voters to galloping armies of PRI supporters voting whenever and wherever they could. ''If legality is not reestablished,'' they warned, ''we will not accept the results nor recognize the authorities that are produced by these fraudulent deeds.''

Mr. Bartlett said their ''unsupported'' statements ''don't correspond to what the nation experienced today.'' Indeed, both government and PRI officials seemed pleased with the generally smooth voting day. They said the reported irregularities occurred in only a small percentage of the 55,000 voting sites across the nation. But unless the final results are seriously rigged, fraud is not the major issue. ''The question is not irregularities,'' says an analyst here. ''The big question is results.''

3. LARRY ROHTER, “MEXICANS PROTEST DELAY IN RESULTS OF THE ELECTIONS,” New York Times, July 11, 1988
Thousands of Mexicans gathered at vote tallying centers around the country today to protest the delay in announcing official results from the July 6 presidential election. The protesters were responding to opposition calls for a ''popular mobilization'' to defend the vote and to contest the victory claimed by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party. Followers of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of the left-of-center National Democratic Front, who late Saturday night made a victory claim of his own, rallied with supporters of Manuel Clouthier, the standard-bearer of the right-of-center National Action Party, at many of the 300 district offices where results were being counted four days after the election.

The Federal Electoral Commission, which is dominated by the ruling party but which includes representatives of all the political groupings, originally promised to announce complete returns last Wednesday night. Meeting late tonight, the panel announced results from congressional races, but there was no indication of when totals from the presidential vote would be announced. Opposition parties charged that the panel's chairman, a member of the ruling party, was deliberately stalling the count. [With important diplomatic, trade and strategic interests at stake in Mexico, the Reagan Administration has maintained almost complete silence on the election dispute because of Mexican sensitivity to even a hint of Yankee imperialism. News analysis, page A6.] Bridges Blockaded Mr. Cardenas, the son of a revered former President, broke with the governing party only last year. He based his victory claim on partial returns and on what he called ''reliable information from inside the Government.'' He called for a ''popular mobilization'' to keep the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party from stealing the election on behalf of its candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who claimed victory the day after the election, before any vote totals had been announced.

In the northern border state of Chihuahua, a stronghold in recent years of the National Action Party, or PAN, protesters formed an automobile barricade that shut down the Pan-American Highway near the state capital. In Juarez, a center of political ferment on the Texas border, one of three bridges to the United States was also blocked by PAN followers today. In his declaration Saturday night, Mr. Cardenas said any effort by Mr. Salinas and the PRI to thwart the popular will ''would be the technical equivalent of a coup d'etat'' and could cause Mexico to ''fall into a situation of ungovernability.'' Following that statement, Mr. Cardenas met with Mr. Clouthier, who earlier in the evening had led more than 50,000 of his followers in a march on the main plaza here. With the National Palace as his backdrop, Mr. Clouthier announced that the PAN would immediately begin an indefinite campaign of ''peaceful civil resistance'' aimed at protesting what he called ''the most vulgar vote fraud in Mexican history.''

Under Mexican law, the electoral panel must now remain in continuous session until all the results are available. Opposition members of the commission charged that the delay in announcing the presidential results was part of an effort by the Government to gain time to alter the results in favor of Mr. Salinas. They argued that as time drags on, it grows likely that the real vote may never be known.

In one of the two first districts announced this morning, the opposition immediately described as implausible the fact that 5,000 more votes were counted in the proportional representation than had been cast in the direct popular vote. There were also charges that a PAN candidate for deputy was assaulted this morning and that vote tallies were taken from him. As opposition attacks on the legitimacy of the vote grew, the PRI, which has won every presidential, gubernatorial and senatorial election here since coming to power in 1929, responded with accusations of its own. In a statement made public late Saturday night, the party said it ''condemns the calls to civil disobedience, which are nothing more than an illegal recourse on the part of those who know for certain that they lost the election and have no other objective than to injure the whole of the electoral process.'' ''It is neither valid nor moral that candidates and leaders of opposition parties attempt to manipulate numbers, different from those of electoral bodies, for their own benefit and to call themselves victors,'' said Humberto Lugo Gil, Secretary General of the party. ''This is manufacturing an electoral fraud.''

Mr. Lugo Gil said the PRI had in its possession election results that indicated that Mr. Salinas won ''a clear and broad'' victory. He appeared to be referring to figures supplied to all political parties by the Electoral Commission showing that, with 52 percent of the polling places reporting, Mr. Salinas had 48.7 percent of the vote, compared to 29.7 percent for Mr. Cardenas and 16.7 percent for Mr. Clouthier. Newspapers, television and radio were closely following the war of numbers, though mostly with a strong tendency to favor the governing party. Headlines in many newspapers here today stressed the PRI's threat that civil disobedience would not be tolerated, with Mr. Cardenas's claim of victory played down and his call to ''popular mobilization'' ignored by the broadcast media.

There was no comment on the deepening electoral controversy, though, from President Miguel de la Madrid, who has kept an unusually low public profile since voting on Wednesday. In the days before the election, Mr. de la Madrid promised that the vote would be the most honest and fair in Mexican history, and his silence over the last four days was being criticized in political circles as a sign of indecision and weak leadership. But the military, normally reluctant to comment on political questions, Saturday indicated that it would not take sides in the dispute. In an interview with Mexican reporters, the Minister of National Defense, Gen. Juan Arevalo Gardoqui, said that regardless of who wins, the military will act with ''great loyalty to the people of Mexico.'' ''The army is 100 percent apolitical, and there are appropriate authorities which can decide what ought to be done,'' Gen. Arevalo Gardoqui said at an armed forces ceremony at which tons of drugs were burned.

That declaration was viewed as politically important because Mr. Cardenas had in the closing days of the campaign called on the Armed Forces to remain strictly neutral if a political conflict erupted. Some Mexican political experts also interpreted the remarks as an acknowledgment that Mr. Cardenas, the son of a former Mexican president who was himself a general, can also lay claim to some sympathies within the ranks of the military. Throughout the presidential race, Mr. Cardenas had campaigned as the only candidate capable of guiding Mexico onto ''the true path of the Mexican Revolution'' and its principles of egalitarianism and social justice. He called for a suspension of interest payments on the foreign debt and said it might be necessary to halt oil exports.

At the tallying center in District I in the capital, a large crowd gathered to wait for results to be posted. As soldiers stood guard in front of the building, supporters of the two opposition candidates joined in singing the Mexican national anthem and in shouting ''Viva Cuauhtemoc Cardenas! Viva Manuel Clouthier! Viva Mexico!'' ''We're fed up,'' said Juan Manuel Sandoval, a supporter of Mr. Clouthier. ''We want a change in this country, but it is clear the official party does not want to recognize its defeat. The only thing we as citizens can do is to come out in defense of the vote.'' The results being posted showed the PAN winning the presidential vote in the district, as well as the Senate, Chamber of Deputies and local assembly votes. But placard-bearing supporters of the National Democratic Front and Mexican Socialist Party were leading the cheers calling for the popular will to be respected, joined by many people who said they had previously been apolitical.

''I was one of those people who never got involved and always voted for the PRI,'' said Micaela Cuevas, a 36-year-old housewife and mother of three who said she was attending the first political demonstration in her life. ''This time I voted for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.'' ''I feel moved to be here,'' Mrs. Cuevas said. ''We have to say what we feel, or else things will never change.''

4. Jorge G. Castaneda, “The Silver Lining in Mexico's Election,” Washington Post, July 13, 1988 (Jorge G. Castaneda is professor of political science at the National Autonomous University of Mexico).

The problem with holding competitive elections in which the outcome is predetermined is that credibility and legitimacy suffer dearly. That is the moral of last week's elections in Mexico, and that is one of the burdens that Mexico's next president will carry into office. The apparent 53.5 percent of the vote captured by the ruling party's candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, remains a historic event in view of past presidential elections: Mr. Salinas obtained fewer votes than either of his two predecessors, even in absolute terms, and a far lower percentage of the total than anyone would have expected up until a month or two ago.

The number of Senate and Congressional seats given up by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party is unprecedented, as is the resentment and despair felt by dozens of PRI candidates and caciques, or party bosses, who lost their jobs or their confidence on July 6. This refreshing change is due as much to the opposition's strength as to Mr. Salinas's commitment to political reform and economic modernization, and to his enlightened or perhaps resigned acceptance of a major change in the rules of the Mexican political game.

But the outcome cannot be separated from the means by which it was reached. While the voting was essentially clean, the counting seems suspect. Five days of delays and confusion in providing electoral results, as well as the stunning and late-surging strength of the nationalist, left of center, quasi-Gaullist campaign of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, seriously undermined the credibility of the returns, even before they were released. Thus, an outcome that, on election night, would have appeared fair and clean is now becoming a source of incredulity and derision.

When the results finally were made public, the state by state breakdowns brought more doubts and suspicions. In sharp contrast to urban Mexico, where either Mr. Cardenas or Manuel Clouthier, the candidate of the rightist National Action Party, or the PAN, won nearly every city, with the exception of Monterrey, the countryside, north and south, seemed to have held a different, separate election. In rural district after rural district, the opposition faded, and the PRI racked up overwhelming victories. In too many areas of northern Mexico, the PAN, which until recently had made major inroads, was literally wiped off the electoral map. In its place remained scarcely believable PRI landslides. Similarly, the PRI machinery did its job in the southern and gulf states, where Mr. Cardenas should have done well. Ultimately, the Mexican election was a mosaic of paradoxes, the most tragic affecting Mr. Salinas himself. The man who campaigned on a platform of modernization and change, and who may yet lead Mexico into modernity, will in the best of cases owe his election to two of the most backward and conservative sectors of Mexican society - the peasants and caciques.

He is indebted to the votes tallied, though not necessarily cast, in the poorest, most isolated and ignorant parts of rural Mexico where, after much hesitation and doubt, the caciques delivered the vote. The countryside, the small and forsaken towns of fewer than 5,000 inhabitants, where more than 12 million Mexicans (one-third of the electorate) are formally registered, is a slice of the nation that gave Mexico its soul in the past but does not belong to its future. Tomorrow's Mexico, the urban, literate, working and middle-classes, voted overwhelmingly for Mr. Cardenas and Mr. Clouthier, opposite ends of the political spectrum joined at the center by the rejection of the governing party.

Finally, there is a contradiction between the expectations the elections raised and the confusions and tensions they have produced. But, paradoxically again, Mexico is living its most important democratic experience in many decades, and coming through the process with its institutions, stability and calm intact and even strengthened. After years of passivity and resignation, Mexicans expressed their age-old pent-up anger and sadness, and they did it at the polls. Whatever the final verdict on the elections, Mexico could well emerge a happier, prouder and more stable nation.

5. ALAN RIDING, “'Alchemy' Taints Voting In Mexico's Countryside,” New York Times, July 14, 1988
A loud cheer went up last week outside the polling booth installed in the village school here when the results showed that the leftist opposition candidate for the Mexican presidency had defeated the ruling party's nominee by 103 votes to 55. The villagers had been on the alert for fraud in the election July 6. ''We weren't allowed in to supervise the counting,'' Hilaria Chamorro Vazquez, a 60-year-old housewife, said, ''but we watched through the window. That's why the results weren't fixed.''

But four days later and three miles away in the town of Apizaco, when the returns from the second electoral district of the state of Tlaxcala were being announced, the result for Tlacualoyan was given as 155 votes for the ruling-party candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, and 103 for the rival candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the leftist National Democratic Front. The alquimia, or alchemy, as the practice is known here, had been carried out simply by writing in the number 1 before the 55 votes won by Mr. Salinas, but it had not been easy to catch. No paper copies of the returns were made available; instead the results of elections for President, Senate and Chamber of Deputies in Tlacualoyan and 313 other polling booths were read aloud in an exhausting 17-hour session that began Sunday and stretched into Monday morning. Opposition parties in Mexico City charged that a vast array of well-honed fraud techniques were used to secure victory for the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, and they said that what had happened in Tlacualoyan was typical of what took place in much of rural Mexico.

The 100 extra votes given to Mr. Salinas in this village 80 miles east of Mexico City would perhaps have gone unnoticed had it not been for Hortensia Ramos Chamorro. A former member of the PRI, as the official party is known, Mrs. Ramos supported Mr. Cardenas during the campaign. As the daughter of a party official who recalls marking dozens of ballots in favor of the PRI when she was a child, she was also all too familiar with Mexican election traditions. ''I'm good with numbers,'' said Mrs. Ramos, a mathematics teacher. ''I was the only person writing down all the numbers. They tried to distract me but I kept going.'' When she finally returned home early Monday, she began checking the official results against those on some copies of polling booth returns that had been given to her. Immediately, she spotted the discrepancy at Tlacualoyan. Two days later, a reporter at the offices of the Federal Electoral Commission in Tlaxcala confirmed that the records showed 155 votes for Mr. Salinas in the village.

In the handful of returns that she was able to double-check, Mrs. Ramos found no other blatant doctoring of the numbers. But in almost all the polling booths in the districts where observers for Mr. Cardenas had been present, the opposition candidates had won. In contrast, in outlying areas where only PRI representatives were present, the ruling party took almost all the votes. In Tlaxco de Morelos, in five booths the PRI won by a combined 550 votes to 0, in a sixth it won by 1,030 votes to 18 and in a seventh by 580 to 4. In Mexico City, the PRI leadership, asserting that last week's elections were the cleanest in Mexican history, has pointed out that never before has the opposition done so well.

Mr. Clouthier's strength was in states farther north than Tlaxcala. Yet the campaign here, and the results, not only illustrated the enthusiasm stirred by Mr. Cardenas, but also the extent to which the PRI's Government-backed machine can continue to impose its will on much of the Mexican provinces. ''The PRI is run here by a minority of rich, dishonest people who manipulate others,'' said Mrs. Ramos's brother, Raul, who ran for Congress on Mr. Cardenas's ticket. ''The grass roots of the party have been ignored and that's why they turned to Cardenas.'' A small woman who said she had swallowed her fear when she decided to challenge last week's results, Mrs. Ramos noted that it was customary for the PRI to inflate the votes of its candidates here, but in the past this was done to disguise abstentionism rather than to defeat the opposition.

Before last week's vote, however, the local PRI bosses apparently recognized the opposition's determination to monitor voting in urban areas and focused their attention on rural districts where poor, apolitical and often illiterate peasants were unlikely to protest. In the village of Xaltocan, Jose Ordonez Sanchez said he was allowed in to watch the vote because it was raining and he saw that Mr. Cardenas was ahead. ''When the results showed the PRI had won,'' he said, ''my heart felt sad to see what had happened.'' When news reached Tlacualoyan that 100 extra votes had been given to Mr. Salinas, the reaction was one of indignation. Eduardo Paredes Flores, who served as secretary at the polling both, confirmed that Mr. Cardenas had won here and suggested that the fraud was carried out in the municipal offices where the urns were taken.

''I was in the crowd outside the polling booth and we didn't leave until the result was announced,'' Eva Mendoza Herrera, a 26-year-old mother of two, said. ''Now they say that the PRI won. They've always done what they want to here, but this is too much.'' Mrs. Ramos and the Cardenas coalition plan to file a formal complaint about the fraud, though they doubt that the final results will be corrected. When Mrs. Ramos sought a copy of the official returns from Carlos Ixtlapale Perez, the secretary of the district electoral committee, she ran into a wall. ''You did well where you had representatives, didn't you?'' he replied.

6. LARRY ROHTER, “200,000 in Mexican Capital Protest Vote Count,” New York Times, July 17, 1988
Responding to an opposition summons to ''defend the popular will,'' more than 200,000 people marched on the National Palace here today to support their charge of widespread vote fraud in last week's presidential election. The demonstration was called by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the presidential candidate of the leftist National Democratic Front in the July 6 vote. It was a show of strength in what Mr. Cardenas has promised will be a permanent challenge to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary, or PRI, and its 60-year-old dominance of Mexican politics.

In official election results announced Wednesday night, Mr. Cardenas won 31.1 percent of the vote, second to Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was credited with 50.4 percent. But Mr. Cardenas has repeatedly said that a widespread vote fraud effort engineered by the Government and the PRI deprived him of several million votes and first place in the balloting. ''The Government and the president of the republic offered clean elections and respect for the will of the people,'' Mr. Cardenas said this afternoon in a speech to the multitude cheering and chanting his name. ''But since July 6, the people are being trampled, the law is being violated, and now we are in the final phase of the consummation of an enormous electoral fraud.''

That argument found strong support among Mr. Cardenas's partisans here. As they marched from the Monument to the Revolution, one of whose four pillars honors Mr. Cardenas's father Lazaro, a former President of Mexico who helped found the PRI, they chanted slogans such as ''Salinas Lies, Cardenas is President!'' and ''The People Spoke, Cardenas Won!'' At the downtown plaza where Mr. Cardenas and leaders from five left-wing parties spoke, an effigy of Mr. Salinas was hooted and jeered as it was paraded through the crowd. On banners being waved aloft, Mr. Salinas was attacked for ''economic policies that have brought hunger and misery to the people'' and as ''the candidate of usurpation.''

''I don't know anyone in my neighborhood who voted for the PRI, so it seems impossible to me that they could have won if nobody likes them,'' said Esperanza Aranda, a 48 year-old shopowner who brought several of her children to the march. ''They are trying to impose Salinas on us by force.'' The demonstrators appeared to come from all sectors of Mexican society, and the variety of their backgrounds was itself an indication of how deeply Mr. Cardenas's nationalistic and egalitarian message has penetrated. Bearded students from the national university, peasants clutching straw hats, factory workers, and even a few prosperous-appearing young people clad in jogging suits and headbands marched together. Security was heavy for the demonstration, with clusters of policemen at nearly every street corner of the downtown area and helicopters flying above the route of the march. The demonstrators had their own marshals to maintain order, and no incidents of violence were reported. In his speech, Mr. Cardenas called on his followers to ''exercise moral and political pressure'' on President Miguel de la Madrid and the ruling party. But he made it clear that while protests ''should grow and intensify,'' he intends to stay within the letter of the law.

Some of his more ardent supporters from the countryside, however, indicated they favor more extreme measures if the Government does not respond to Mr. Cardenas's demands. They spoke ominously of taking up arms or seizing government buildings to press their claims, invoking the names of national heros such as Jose Maria Morelos and Emiliano Zapata. ''We are willing to die for Cuauhtemoc, if necessary,'' said Rosa Lopez Andrade, a peasant woman from Mr. Cardenas's home state of Michoacan who had come to the rally by bus with more than 100 other people from her farm cooperative. ''We are already suffering so much. We must defend ourselves and Mexico.''

7. Jill Smolowe, Andrea Dabrowski and John Moody, “Mexico Too Close For Comfort,” Time, Jul. 18, 1988
Five hours after the 54,641 polling stations closed and three hours after the first results were expected, the Interior Ministry in Mexico City announced that its new computerized tabulating system was not working. Despite the absence of official returns, the three major campaign organizations had plenty to say last week. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) proclaimed that its candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, had won a "crushing, indisputable, unobjectionable victory" in his race for the presidency. The coalition of leftist parties backing Cuauhtemoc Cardenas claimed that its man was ahead with 39% of the vote, and charged that the P.R.I. had faked the computer breakdown in order to steal enough votes to offset the actual returns. Manuel Clouthier, candidate of the rightist National Action Party, called last Wednesday's vote "the most barbaric fraud in the history of Mexico."
Even without any official returns, there was little question that one way or another, the P.R.I. would emerge on top. But never had a Mexican presidential election been quite so contentious or fraught with emotion. Since the P.R.I. first came to power in 1929, it has won every presidential election with at least 70% of the vote. Yet even the P.R.I.'s own early returns last week suggested a shattering rejection by voters tired of the party's monolithic rule and its inability to solve Mexico's economic problems. While some party regulars described the election as a triumph, the winning candidate was more conciliatory. "We've reached the end of having, in effect, a single party," Salinas declared on Thursday. "We've entered a new political era with a majority party and a very intensely competitive opposition."
Salinas' admission reflected the depth of the P.R.I.'s post-election anxiety; in fact, he had spent a sleepless election night arguing with advisers over how to handle the disaster in progress. By Friday, those close to Salinas were saying that when official returns were released by the Federal Electoral Commission on Sunday, they would show Salinas triumphant with between 49% and 54% of the vote. Significantly, they conceded that Cardenas had won in several P.R.I. strongholds, including Mexico City. They also said that while the P.R.I. will retain a majority of seats in the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, it could fall short of the two-thirds plurality required to make constitutional changes, a mechanism routinely used to create laws. Privately, Salinas aides say their boss plans to use the dramatically lower turnout to drive home to the party old guard the need for change.
Before the voting stations had even closed, charges of fraud swept through several of Mexico's 31 states. By midnight, Cardenas and Clouthier had issued a statement accusing the government of rigging the elections. Citing instances of stuffed ballot boxes, altered registration lists and multiple voting, they complained that such practices "seriously affect the cleanliness of today's balloting," and hinted that they might seek to have the results voided and a new election called.
Although the outcome of the vote was never seriously in question, opponents on both the left and the right challenged the ruling party. By denouncing the P.R.I.'s authoritarian ways and its well-established reputation for election fraud, the opposition forced Salinas into a corner. Political commentators warned that the ruling party had to win by a margin large enough to establish Salinas' authority and credibility but not so large as to trigger charges of fraud. As confusion over the vote mounted, it became evident that while the P.R.I. had gained the presidency, the days of one-party rule were numbered. "This country," predicted Mexican Political Scientist Jorge Castaneda, "will never be the same."
Much of the credit for the turnabout goes to Cardenas. A former P.R.I. governor, he was expelled from the party last fall after he challenged the process of selecting the presidential candidate. Embraced by four leftist parties, Cardenas, 54, the son of a revered former President, began touring the countryside in a donated van. As he spread his heavily nationalist message ) and hinted that he favored suspending interest payments on Mexico's $103 billion foreign debt, peasants, students, intellectuals and members of the middle class rallied to his banner.
Four days before the vote, one of Cardenas' strategists, Francisco Javier Ovando Hernandez, was shot to death in his car in the capital, along with Ovando's private secretary, Roman Gil Heraldez. Cardenas promptly denounced the killings as political assassinations. In an angry letter to President Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, Cardenas warned that the "responsibility will be yours" for any acts of terrorism against the opposition. If the tragedy enhanced the messianic aura that surrounded Cardenas' campaign, it amounted to a disaster for Salinas. Though even Cardenas did not directly accuse the P.R.I. of complicity in the crime, many Mexicans expressed skepticism about the police statement that Ovando had probably been gunned down by criminals he had prosecuted while attorney general in the state of Michoacan.
Salinas, a 40-year-old economist with a doctoral degree from Harvard, campaigned on a platform of reform, promising political and economic modernization. As he stumped the country for eight months, he sounded the themes of pluralism and democracy, staking his reputation on a clean contest. While no candidate charged that Salinas condoned or abetted any of last week's purported irregularities, the allegations threw into question his ability to manage the P.R.I.'s apparatus.
The charges quickly became the centerpiece of the postelectoral furor. In Agualeguas, a small town just 25 miles south of the Rio Grande, P.R.I. officials claimed 3,379 votes for Salinas, but reporters from the Monterrey- based newspaper El Norte who had been monitoring the balloting claimed that only one-third that number had turned out to vote. In the barrio of Colonia Pancho Villa, a brawl broke out after the polls closed when P.R.I. officials physically ejected opposition representatives who were supposed to observe the ballot count. Elsewhere, there were charges that "galloping brigades" of up to 80 people had charged polling stations to stuff ballot boxes. Some poll watchers claimed that the indelible ink applied to each voter's right thumb was washable, allowing for multiple voting.
When he begins his six-year term on Dec. 1, Salinas will have to navigate carefully between the demands of the P.R.I. old guard to maintain the party's hegemony and his own vision of a more democratic future. Throughout the campaign, there were indications that many P.R.I. stalwarts intended to fight any attempt by Salinas to open the system to a vigorous exchange of ideas. Much like the Soviet Union's Mikhail Gorbachev, Salinas knows that political liberalization is imperative if he is to succeed in restructuring a debt- ridden, slow-growth economy. But before Salinas can begin, he will have to convince Mexicans that the job is rightfully his.

8. LARRY ROHTER, “That Was the Mexican Revolution That Was . . . or Was It?” New York Times, August 14, 1988

When Cuauhtemoc Cardenas broke with Mexico's ruling party to run for President in last month's election, he quickly became a nonperson as far as the political establishment was concerned. Now his father, a revered former President, and a founder of that same party, appears to be getting the same treatment. Gen. Lazaro Cardenas, who was President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940, was to have been one of the key figures in the rebroadcast of an acclaimed historical drama on the country's main television network this month. But the last 30 of the 170 episodes originally filmed were suddenly dropped from the series, in what political and media experts here believe is an effort to dampen the growing political strength of the younger Mr. Cardenas.

Running as the candidate of the left-populist National Democratic Front, Mr. Cardenas was officially credited with 31.1 percent of the vote in the election July 6. But he maintains that widespread vote fraud deprived him of millions of votes and has been urging Mexicans not to recognize the victory of the official winner, Carlos Salinas de Gortari. All 30 of the affected episodes from ''Path of Glory,'' a dramatized version of the Mexican Revolution and its immediate aftermath, deal with the period in which General Cardenas was in power. They show General Cardenas taking steps to improve the lot of workers and peasants and to limit the influence of foreign economic interests, positions that his son advocates today and that he argues the ruling party has abandoned. ''I have yet to receive any explanation of why or how this trampling and truncation of my work came about,'' said Fausto Zeron-Medina, a respected Mexican historian who served as historical adviser to the series. ''But whoever did this clearly recognized and understood the relevance of history to current events.'' Mr. Zeron-Medina said ''an obvious but not complete explanation'' for the sudden censorship of ''Path of Glory'' is ''the weight which Cardenismo has in the present political contest.'' Because the younger Mr. Cardenas, with his impeccable revolutionary credentials, has emerged as leader of the political opposition, ''Cardenas the hero has become an inconvenience, and the system which contributed to the sculpting of his monument must now hide him.''

The unexpected termination of the series, whose filming was partly financed by the Mexican Government, has made both the Government and the Televisa network objects of ridicule. In a satirical article entitled ''Chronicle of a Desaparecido,'' a columnist for the newspaper Uno Mas Uno this week imagined a future in which General Cardenas's image has been taken off Mexican currency, his name removed from one of the main thoroughfares in downtown Mexico City, and any mention of his presidency stricken from textbooks. But to Mr. Zeron-Medina and many others here, the controversy also indicates the extraordinary delicacy and seriousness with which Mexicans approach all aspects of their history, a sensitivity probably unsurpassed anywhere in Latin America. The Argentine novelist Jorge Luis Borges once remarked after a visit here that ''I came to Mexico and found the Mexicans contemplating the refuse of their past.''

Though the Mexican Revolution began in 1910, its key battles, leaders and ideological arguments are constantly invoked to justify positions taken in current political disputes. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled uninterruptedly here since first coming to power in 1929, regards itself as the embodiment of the revolutionary tradition and as the final arbiter of how the revolution should be interpreted. ''When I circulated the first draft of the script, I received lots of comments from people asking me if they were reading about history or the present,'' Mr. Zeron-Medina said. ''The issues of presidential succession, democratization and the foreign debt, just to name a few, were in the forefront of a national debate then, as now.''

''Path of Glory'' was first shown, uncensored, on Mexican television last year, while Mr. Cardenas was still a member of the PRI. But when a rebroadcast began earlier this year, according to members of the program's production staff, leading members of ''the revolutionary family,'' as the PRI elite is commonly called here, made known their complaints about various aspects of the drama. Mr. Zeron-Medina, who studied Mexican and Latin-American history here and at Cambridge University, said that earlier this year he met with a Televisa official who told him that President Miguel de la Madrid had personally requested that the network exercise care in the way the drama presented its subject matter. Among the topics mentioned, Mr. Zeron-Medina said, were the role of the military, tense relations between the Roman Catholic Church and the state, and the portrayal of former Mexican presidents.

People involved in the production, who asked not to be identified, said relatives of former Presidents Plutarco Elias Calles and Alvaro Obregon who are themselves prominent political figures were among those who complained about specific episodes. Miguel Aleman Velasco, the head of the network that broadcast ''Path of Glory,'' is also the son of a former Mexican president and a leading supporter of the PRI. The Televisa network did not respond to telephone calls asking for comment about the controversy. The Mexican Institute of Social Security, the Government agency that supplied money and facilities for the filming, also did not return calls requesting comments.

But a letter sent by the Ministry of the Interior to Televisa and made public this week by Mr. Zeron-Medina recommended ''the partial or total elimination'' of scenes a Government historian considered ''inappropriate'' because of excessive violence or deviation from official portrayals of historical figures. The letter argued that ''from the point of view of a state project,'' the objective of the rebroadcasts should be to ''favor our historical knowledge and our pride in the institutions and men who constructed modern Mexico.'' Mr. Zeron-Medina has written to the network urging that the censored episodes be rebroadcast but argues that it is more important in the long run that Mexico come to terms with its own history. ''In England,'' he said, ''they adore the royal family in spite of all the atrocities Shakespeare says they committed.''

9 . John S. Driscoll, “LETTER FROM MEXICO: Hope rises amid despair; Faith in Virgin's message at Guadalupe warms a troubled land,” Boston Globe, December 18, 1988

To fathom the true picture, Mexico had to be viewed on a split screen this past week. On one screen, the new administration's political and economic drama began as President Carlos Salinas de Gortari took concrete steps on wages, prices and currency valuation amid protests from the opposition. On the other screen, there was serenity amid dancing and singing as the Feast of Guadalupe was celebrated early in the week in every hamlet and at the site of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary. The festiveness masked the heightening struggle to make ends meet among the low and middle classes.

Leading Mexicans say you have to understand the essence of Guadalupe in order to understand the essence of the country. "Guadalupe is the co-ruler of Mexico," writer Carlos Fuentes said last week. "I draw a parallel between constitutional law and Guadalupe," said Samuel del Villar, a professor of constitutional law and a political activist. "The constitution synthesizes the history of Mexico. It offers the only way to express oneself (through the one-man/one-vote law), just as the Virgin allows people to express themselves with confidence as Mexicans." "All Mexicans are Guadalupans," said Luis Javier Garrido, a political science professor.

Guadalupe has significance for nationalistic as well as religious reasons. "The only thing we can hang onto is the mother of our orphan country," Fuentes said. "Once told you are children of a whore, now you're the child of a virgin." His reference was to the unwed union of conqueror Hernan Cortes and a young Indian girl of noble family, baptized by the Spaniards as Marina. She was given to Cortes as bounty for his victory at Centla, Tabasco, in 1519.

"It was like taking the country from Babylon to Bethlehem," Fuentes said of Guadalupe. "And every year we go back to our biological mother," he said. Their zeal continues, and this week they came to Guadalupe by the thousands - families, whole villages, walking, riding bicycles or running in relays carrying torches from miles away, huge trucks carrying them in between relays. They rolled themselves up in blankets and slept on the stone plaza, seemingly oblivious to being stepped on or tripped over by the throngs who spent two days inside and outside the new shrine. Some carried bouquets of flowers, others framed paintings of Mary, some banners. Tribal groups broke out in dance in the middle of the crowd, here and there, with flutes and drums and tambourines and bright costumes, even plumes. In one corner of the plaza, sparks flew as the Dance of the Machetes commenced. Women in bridal gowns and men dressed like kings - their crowns fashioned from tin oil cylinders - swung their machetes forcefully together in high-five motion, then swept them together inches from the ground, keeping in tune with the music. Meanwhile, thousands packed the shrine, some approaching from several hundred yards. They ascended the stone stairs on their knees. Amid the joyousness, there seemed to be a resoluteness. Few were aware that 62 people had been killed in an explosion and fire across town in the La Merced Market, where fireworks had been illegally stored for the celebration. Elsewhere in Mexico, the feast was also celebrated for two days with church services, processions, cookouts and soccer games. Outside Morelia, west of here, fireworks exploded overhead Monday night as the band struck up the Mexican Hat Dance.

In the same week, the business of governing had to go on, because President Salinas has labeled 1989 a "year of transition" as he tries to renegotiate Mexico's $104 billion foreign debt and get the economy back on its feet. The country seems divided among those who feel Salinas should get their all-out support, no matter what their politics, and those who feel it is business as usual, meaning harder times for the poor and worsening pressure on the middle class. "Let's give him a chance. He's the guy who knows Mexico's needs," said Antonio Guttierez Cortina, the former president of one of Mexico's largest construction companies who now runs a firm promoting foreign investment in the country. One pro-Salinas economist predicted this week that private investment will grow 19 percent to 20 percent next year. This optimism is somewhat spurred by reports the government may announce as early as January that foreign investments of up to 100 percent in Mexican projects will be allowed. Presently, there is a 49 percent ceiling.

The opposition says that Salinas is promising change but will produce nothing more than "tinkering." "It's not a matter of tuning, it's a matter of radical change in economic policies. That's what we need," said Porfirio Munoz Ledo, a former president of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, and now a supporter of leftist opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Munoz, who became the first opposition senator in Mexico's modern history after July's elections, says the opposition "will contend in Congress, in the unions, in the university, in every space. At the right moment, there will be a movement by the people when they say it is too much." Professor del Villar is less subtle: "Salinas' resignation will be forced by the Congress. The ultimate devaluation of the peso will be the turning point. How long? Who knows? A year? Two? Salinas has no legitimacy," said the former adviser to President de la Madrid, echoing the sentiment of many about fraud in the election.

Businessman Cortina, author Fuentes and others think the legitimacy issue should be set aside. "The question gets us nowhere," says Cortina, a Salinas supporter. "The opposition will not be able to negotiate, because it says the government is illegitimate," Fuentes said. "They are painting themselves into a corner. They are on their feet screaming, grandstanding, but they are not sitting down." Fuentes maintains that he is not political, but a maverick and thinks Cardenas is in touch with the people while the PRI distances itself. Indeed, Cardenas seems even more popular since his emotional campaign and claim to victory.

In Chavinda, an out-of-the-way community near Zamora, some 300 miles west of here, the townspeople know most of the subtleties of the political and economic questions. They know that many among them have to seek employment in the United States, legally or otherwise. And they know that if they stay behind, the struggle is intensifying. Manuel Equihia is the father of seven children, a school principal and a teacher in another school. His full-time salary is $ 5 a day. He winces as he speaks of his plight. "We don't mind being poor. It has its values. What we can't take is misery. Feeding your kids is a basic right." He excused himself to hurry to the town square. It is the feast of Guadalupe, and lots of people are in the streets. He has attended noon Mass, and now he will take his portable hamburger cart three blocks into town, hoping to earn a few pesos for the food he says he has not been able to afford for three days, this man who works two jobs full time, this man of pride. For him and his family, the economic crisis is real. But so, too, is the message of Mary, that she will alleviate the miseries of those who believe. And so he rushes off with a broad smile and says to his American visitors, "While I am gone, this house is your house." He is a Guadalupan.