Deja vu south of the border

by Stan Gotlieb

On August 1, voters in the state of Oaxaca lined up to mark their ballots—all of which came with a paper trail—for various state offices, especially governor. Governors are not allowed to run for second terms there, and candidates are often selected in secret by their parties, a sort of transition from the old system of “Dedazo” (the finger), in which the outgoing office holder personally names his successor, to a more open nomination process.

In this case, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate was “dedazoed” by the current governor, and his main opposition candidate was “adopted” by an unlikely coalition of parties. If this all seems a little confusing to you, don’t worry; I’ll explain some of it, but a lot of it can be understood in comparison to the U.S. presidential election, coming up next month.

First, the subject of “coalitions.” Ever since the surprise 2000 victory of current governor Pablo Salazar in Oaxaca’s southern neighbor state of Chiapas, it has become fashionable —and perhaps necessary—to form alliances between the two major opposition parties in order to defeat the incumbent party. Salazar did this by dropping out of the ruling PRI, and joining the conservative PAN party; and then making alliances with the left-of-center PRD. Since then, PRD and PRI have formed alliances to defeat sitting PAN candidates in some of the northern states.

The problem with these coalitions is that they have only one “principle”: get elected. To do this, they are reduced to the most banal of platitudes for a program: in the case of the PRD and PAN, for example, they oppose each other on almost every point, so they just didn’t talk about it during the campaign. Elections become—even more clearly than in the U.S., or in Mexico since 2000—merely a battle to see who will get the spoils of victory.

In Oaxaca, this year, a popular mayor quit his job to run for governor on the “Convergence Party” ticket. The Convergence is the brainchild of another ex-governor who used to be—in fact still is—an enrolled member of the PRI. It is made up largely of disaffected PRI stalwarts impatient for more change and openness in their party. Then began the job of selling coalition to the other parties, mainly the left-center PRD and the rightist PAN. Once the coalition “Todos Somos Oaxaca” (TSO: we are all Oaxaca) was formed, the more radical elements of both parties quit in disgust. Many just decided to stay home from the polls, which had only a 50 percent turnout, a record low. One leftist PRD senator decided to run a separate campaign, founding a “People’s Party.”

So the incumbent PRI, with the help of a few splinter parties, opposed a challenger candidate backed by widely disparate and often conflicting interests, and a “third party” candidate with immense appeal on the left. There are “tricolor” towns (PRI), “orange” towns (TSO), and “white” (undecided) towns. The tricolor towns were mostly in the mountains, where PRI had been delivering 110 percent of the votes to the party for more than 70 years through a system of patronage mixed with repression. The orange towns were mostly the larger cities, where a combination of tourism, human rights agitation, and communications had loosened the PRI grip. The white towns were often to be found among the medium-sized municipalities, nearer the major highways. Needless to say, parties campaigned heavily in those towns, far more than was justified by their size. Begin to sound familiar?

Mexico does not have a “winner take all” electoral system at any level of government, one of the many significant differences between how things work here and how they work there. Still, I would maintain that the pattern of forsaking the “won” and “lost” for the “undecided,” while less severe, does exist in Mexico.
The elections were down-and-dirty. Charges of vote buying, coercion, ballot box stuffing and other nefarious activities began well before Election Eve. The descriptions of human rights and international observer groups were, chapter and verse, from the Book of Election Fraud. What surprised them most was how little the perpetrators seemed to care that they were being watched. By far the greatest number of violations was committed by the PRI. There were many eyewitness stories of outright substitution of whole ballot boxes, herding of voters to—and into—the polls by sometimes-armed “voter turnout” aides.

At about 9:20 p.m. election night, I got a call from a friend telling me that the orange candidate was ahead by six points, an amazing statistic considering how close everyone expected the race to be. Twenty minutes later, he called again to say that the computers at the state election commission had mysteriously shut down. Twenty minutes after that, when the computers went on-line again, the PRI had pulled ahead by two points.

“Foul,” cried the orange faction. “Cry-baby,” jeered the PRI. When the results were in, the PRI had maintained its iron rule over Oaxaca by a point and a half. At that point, the orange turned to the People’s Party candidate and said, “we lost because he took 4 percent of the vote away from us.”

But, wait a minute. What about the 50 percent who stayed home? If the opposition had been able to turn out a little more than 10 percent more of the electorate (one-fifth of the 50 percent), they would have won. The PRI had done every dirty trick it could, and could only manufacture a 1.5 percent win. The leftist splinter PRDista had only managed to garner 4 percent. So the question is, who really was responsible for their loss?

This, I think, is the lesson that we can and must learn from Oaxaca: that only by solid, grassroots organizing resulting in high voter turnout, can an entrenched party be beaten. Anything else is just a justification for being a loser.

Stan Gotlieb lives in Oaxaca, Mexico. He maintains a website and a subscriber newsletter at www.realoaxaca.com