Mean Machine

As Mexico's midterm elections approached, observers began to wonder whether the domineering Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.) might be successfully challenged for the first time in its 56-year history. Voters fed up with a stagnant economy and continuing official corruption might, some thought, help the opposition National Action Party (P.A.N.) knock the P.R.I. out of the governorships in two northern states, Sonora and Nuevo Leon. But the P.R.I. did not even wait for the polls to close last week before claiming a sweep of every office worth winning. The victory was tainted by widespread charges of stuffed ballot boxes and intimidated voters. Said Norberto Corella, a P.A.N. official in Sonora: "I have been involved in elections for 21 years. I have never seen a dirtier one."

P.R.I. claimed to have won the seven state gubernatorial races. Although some P.R.I. officials initially said the party had also swept all 300 contested seats in the national Chamber of Deputies, P.A.N. later announced that it expected to win as many as 37. An additional 100 seats will be apportioned among P.A.N. and other minority parties.

P.A.N. officials charged the ruling party with stuffing ballots and outright altering of the election totals. P.A.N. supporters also faced obstacles as they tried to vote. In the Sonora capital, Hermosillo, where P.A.N. won a 1982 municipal election, the number of polling stations was reduced. In the town of Guaymas, 100 of 180 P.A.N. poll watchers were refused certification. In other places, unidentified men carried off the ballot boxes long before the election was over.

Although P.A.N. officials had warned of violence if the election appeared irregular, reactions were for the most part restrained. A serious incident occurred in the border town of San Luis Rio Colorado, some 17 miles from Yuma, Ariz. There an estimated 1,500 Panistas tried to free 30 supporters who had been arrested for breaking open a ballot box they claimed was stuffed. Some 20 people were injured as authorities dispersed the mob with tear gas and clubs and the protesters burned several police and private vehicles.

The opposition candidates demanded that the elections be invalidated and new ones scheduled, but it was unlikely that the government would accommodate them. P.R.I. leaders, who see their party as the guardian of Mexico's political stability, were indifferent to charges of fraud. Maximiliano Esparza, a P.R.I. functionary sent to Sonora from Mexico City to oversee the voting, called the election "a democratic fiesta. It was a clean process. The people won." Mexican President Miguel de la Madrid was even more offhand. Said he: "I'm not concerned about the confused opinions of the minorities."