The Making of El Presidente

By Michael S. Serrill

The black-masked leader of the insurgent Zapatista National Liberation Army, who calls himself Subcomandante Marcos, summoned nearly 5,000 activists deep into the Lacandon forest in Chiapas state last week to deliver his campaign promise. In an open-air amphitheater hastily erected of logs, as storm clouds gathered overhead, Marcos issued a stern warning to the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari. If there is fraud in the upcoming national election, he declared, there will be an explosion of protest that will shut down Mexico. Just as he stopped speaking, a powerful downpour brought the four-day gathering to a sudden end, setting off a dangerous shower of sparks from the encampment's electric lights.

Though few in Mexico really expect a massive uprising when the winner is announced after next week's presidential vote, the Chiapas declaration touched a national nerve. An anxious Mexico, ruled by the longest-lived one-party system in the world, is about to hold its most competitive election ever. For the first time since 1929, the long tradition of fraudulent elections has given way to a belief that the opposition has a genuine chance of winning. Yet most prospective voters remain to some degree skeptical of government promises that the vote will be completely clean and fraud free. "I don't support any candidate because all I see is corruption and promises that are never kept," said Fidel Lopez Cruz, 67, as he pushed his crude ox-drawn plow across a small plot of land near Oaxaca. If the public concludes the results have been fixed, the new President could face a prolonged period of unrest.

Nevertheless, as many as 45 million out of 87 million Mexicans may turn up at the polls on Aug. 21, eager to register their complaints about corruption, crime, injustice to the poor, unemployment and unfulfilled government promises of a better standard of living. The January uprising by peasants in Chiapas, the assassination of the ruling party's presidential candidate in March, a gradual downturn in the economy, and an outburst of drug shootings and kidnappings have convinced a large segment of Mexico's people that their society needs serious repair. Just a month ago, they appeared to resent the failures of the Salinas government so bitterly that many were ready to turn out his Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.).

The most recent polls indicate that voters may well adhere to their favorite axiom: Better the evil you know than the one you have yet to meet. "Mexicans are torn between their desire for change and their fear of change," says Delal Baer, director of the Mexico Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. In the privacy of the voting booth, she added, they may well choose the certitude of the P.R.I. over the question marks represented by the opposition.

As election day approached, the contest was still considered a race even though the colorless P.R.I. candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, had pulled ahead. A survey two weeks ago by the Center for Opinion Studies in Guadalajara showed him defeating conservative National Action Party (P.A.N.) candidate Diego Fernandez de Cevallos 35% to 25%, with 20% undecided. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, candidate of the leftist Party for the Democratic Revolution (P.R.D.) lagged far behind. But even polling experts do not put much trust in Mexican surveys: voters have long been so fearful of government reprisal that they would rather lie than openly state their preferences.

The election campaign turned surprisingly competitive on May 12, when P.A.N.'s acerbic Fernandez de Cevallos, a cigar-chomping lawyer from Mexico City, demolished his rivals in a televised debate -- the first ever in Mexico and a symbol of how much the political process has opened up. Nearly half the population watched entranced as Jefe, or Chief, Diego, as he is known, chided the wooden Zedillo for flunking democracy and charged Cardenas, for years a P.R.I. stalwart, with only pretending to be in the opposition. Smelling victory for the first time in its 55-year history, the P.A.N., traditionally a conservative party with limited mass appeal, promoted itself as "centrist" and went after Everyman's vote.

The bearded Fernandez hammered away at the need for "honesty" in government and made a virtual mantra of the word change. The once business- oriented P.A.N. emphasized its social conscience, declaring that the government's modernization plans paid too little attention to the needs of the poor. At his booth in the Oaxaca crafts market, rug vendor Antonio Mendoza Martinez pledged his vote: "It gives me great pleasure to hear Diego say, Enough lies." After limited public appearances in June and early July deflated his campaign, Fernandez picked up the pace in the weeks just before the election.

The appeal of Cardenas is harder to assess. Virtually endorsed by the leftist Zapatista convention, which could hurt him with the moderates, and popular in some urban areas, he has not generated the kind of enthusiasm that contributed to his strong showing in the 1988 election. But some analysts say he may well do better than expected if he can tap into the anger of the poor. Nicolas Urbano, a 42-year-old gardener on the outskirts of Mexico City, says he likes Cardenas "because he's different from that gang of thieves who always let us down."

What Zedillo, a Yale Ph.D. in economics and a former Budget Minister with scant charisma, has going for him is his party: the tremendous reservoir of organized support for the P.R.I. based on pork-barrel politics that extends to almost every corner of society. Though weakened by Salinas' efforts to replace the corrupt Old Guard with his own team of Ivy League-educated technocrats, the P.R.I. is still so well entrenched in labor unions, peasant organizations and the Solidarity committees that run public-works projects that millions would not consider voting for any other party. "I've belonged to the P.R.I. since I was a girl," said Carmen Hernandez Tzompantzi, 48, as she enjoyed spicy tamales, quesadillas and coffee at a P.R.I. breakfast in Tlaxcala. "The government always knows how to get us ahead. We don't know how the opposition might act."

Zedillo also owes his strength to the successes of Salinas, who can take credit for raising Mexico out of financial ruins during his six-year term. He has resolved Mexico's debt crisis, tamed triple-digit inflation, privatized < the stagnant economy and ushered in a new era in trade by signing the North American Free Trade Agreement. A look at the economic platforms of the main presidential candidates shows how completely Salinas has altered thinking about Mexico's economic life: all three have committed themselves to continuing his free-market course.

The centerpiece of Salinas' program, NAFTA, will remain untouched. Even Cardenas, who opposed the agreement before it was implemented on Jan. 1, has said he will do no more than study the accord to see which sectors of the Mexican economy may need more protection. Other key Salinas reforms are likely to remain intact regardless of who wins the election: the autonomy of the central bank, the privatization of the country's banks and major industries, and liberal rules for foreign investment.

But Salinas' economic modernization is also Zedillo's biggest handicap. As Oaxacan rug seller Mendoza Martinez notes, "The government says we're moving ahead, but I want to know just who is moving ahead." Though economists are nearly unanimous in predicting that NAFTA and other market reforms will bring prosperity in the long run, the majority of Mexicans have yet to benefit. Unemployment and underemployment reach 30% in some regions as companies slash their payrolls to compete in international markets. Productivity is up, but most workers in the maquiladora industrial assembly plants along the border still earn $5 a day. Mexico's banks are scrambling to reschedule more than $3 billion in nonperforming loans from 25,000 failing small businesses. In a voter survey conducted for foreign banks, 29% said the economy had deteriorated during the Salinas administration while just 24% said it was better.

If Zedillo ultimately sets up house in the Los Pinos presidential residence, it will probably be because the opposition parties and their candidates simply lack the stature to win. "There is some dissatisfaction with the P.R.I.," says Nancy Belden of Belden and Russonello Associates in Washington, which conducted the bank poll. "But Zedillo is holding the lead because of a lack of faith in the alternative. He is benefiting from the idea that no one can do any better." Bonifacio de la Cruz Dominguez barely supports his family of five on his earnings selling soft drinks at a Mexico City intersection. But he will still vote for the P.R.I. "They've always given us help," he says. "We can be sure with the P.R.I. The other parties would trick us."

Yet this election guarantees a major change in Mexico's political life. Even if the P.R.I. wins the presidency, it will probably lose its handsome majority in both houses of the Congress, which will cease to be a rubber stamp for P.R.I. initiatives. For the first time in 65 years, the man at the top will not have absolute power. As if in acknowledgment, Zedillo has promised that he will give up the P.R.I. president's traditional dedazo (big finger) power to anoint his party's candidate for the top job .

Most important, the electoral process has undergone wholesale reform. Salinas' own 1988 presidential victory was widely challenged as fraudulent; on election night the P.R.D.'s Cardenas was ahead when the vote-counting machines allegedly broke down. Only two days later was the count resumed, and Salinas emerged the winner. He denies that he won by cheating, but he initiated a series of reforms that have loosened the P.R.I.'s grip on power. National elections are now organized by a nonpartisan commission rather than by the P.R.I.-dominated electoral body that it replaced. The commission has spent some $730 million compiling new local voter rolls -- the old ones were swollen with the dead and departed -- and issuing 45 million voters plastic identification cards marked with their photo and fingerprint. Penalties have been increased for vote tampering; more than 21,000 Mexican observers and 1,032 foreign "visitors" have been accredited to monitor the vote.

As a consequence, "this is a very contested election that is likely to have credible results," says Lorenzo Meyer, a researcher in political science at the College of Mexico. Even if the P.R.I. wins next week, he adds, "nothing can be like it was before. Not elections, not Congress or the presidency." The P.R.I. may endure in power, but the era of the one-party state is finished.

With reporting by Laura Lopez/Mexico City, Elizabeth Love, Oaxaca and Dick Woodbury/Nuevo Laredo