Into the Daylight

The regulars could hardly believe it. At political conventions to nominate mayoralty candidates in hundreds of Mexican towns last week, local mem bers of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) found that they were free to do the choosing themselves. As a result, the country's next municipal elections will be the first since the party was founded in 1929 that will not be dominated by the tight inner elite in Mexico City that has traditionally bossed P.R.I. and the nation.

At Bayonet Point. Though it is still the only truly effective party in a "guided democracy," P.R.I. has awakened to the fact that its heavy-handed rule is more and more resented by Mexico's increasingly literate (66% ) and prospering electorate. The politicians got the word soon after Gustavo Diaz Ordaz' inauguration as President last December. A stern moralist ap palled by mismanagement and corruption in the government, Diaz picked eloquent, hard-driving Carlos Madrazo, 49, to head P.R.I. and rid it of crookedness and caciquismo (bossism).

A peppery native of Tabasco who proved the most effective governor (1959-64) in his state's history, Madrazo declares: "The party cannot be the government. It should point out objectives -- and demand that the government carry out those objectives." As a first step, Madrazo promises, candidates for every elective office in Mexico will be chosen "out in the daylight." He plans to replace old party hacks with bright young leaders, recently blocked an attempt by conservative P.R.I. office holders to scrap a constitutional provision restricting Congressmen to a single term. To infuse a "new mystique and a new militancy," Madrazo has set up three committees of distinguished citizens to advise P.R.I. on political, social and economic issues. "These groups," he says, "will be the tip of a bayonet pressing against our throats."

Against Time. Madrazo has firsthand knowledge of his party's lethargy and corruption. In 1952, when the government was racked by a scandal over P.R.I. officials who demanded payoffs from Mexican braceros in return for work permits, Bureaucrat Madrazo--as P.R.I. leaders privately admit today --was framed and packed off to jail for eight months. Next week Madrazo will open a national convention at which delegates representing the P.R.I.'s 6,300,000-man membership will be invited to draw up a long-term program of social and political reform. "Politics," warns Madrazo, "is a game against time, in which the danger is to be out of step with time. We have the power to win in clean elections--and this is the way it is going to be."

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