Mexico's Momentous Presidential Election
Dateline: 06/19/00Updated: 07/05/00
No doubt about it: Mexico's national elections July 2 turned out to be history in the making.
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That's because for the first time in 71 years, the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (known as PRI for its Spanish initials) lost the presidency.
Although the election results were widely seen as a surprise, the outcome did follow the trend of polls shortly before the election. Vicente Fox of the center-right National Action Party (PAN) won the election, defeating Francisco Labastida of the PRI. The leftist candidate, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) trailed badly, partly because he lost support when polls showed he couldn't win, and some leftists openly supported Fox as a way of taking the power from the PRI. Remaining votes were scattered among several smaller parties.
So intense was the campaigning that the major candidates have campaigned even in the United States, hoping that Mexicans living in the U.S. and unable to vote would at least tell their relatives back home whom to vote for. Whereas during most years the PRI candidates has had to do little to subject himself to public scrutiny, this year's campaign has included nationally televised debates and wide-open campaigning of a type unseen before in a Mexican presidential race.
It shouldn't be surprising that the economy was one of the major issues, and it has been one of the reasons that the PAN has made gains in recent years. Although the economy has gained strength in recent years, Mexico remains far, far poorer than its neighbor to the north, and such initiatives as the North American Free Trade Agreement have resulted only in localized gains. And Mexico seems to have something of a grim tradition in relation to presidential elections and the economy: after every presidential election since 1976, in other words for as long as many voters remember, the economy has taken a downturn after the election. Frequently that has included a currency devaluation. Tourists may remember the day about two decades ago when a U.S. dollars would fetch around 8 pesos. That sounds not much different than the exchange rate today of slightly less than 10 pesos to the dollar, but the peso has been replaced by the "new peso," which equals 1,000 or the old ones. Such a rapid rate of inflation has wiped out savings and generally made life less secure for the rich and devastating for the poor.
There were other issues as well in the campaign: government corruption, the guerrilla movement in the southern part of the country, drug smuggling and other factors affection relations with the United States, education and student unrest.
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