| Submit your comments on this article |
| Caribbean-Latin America |
| Leftist Party Triumphs in Mexican State |
| 2005-02-07 |
| For generations, leftist activists have fought the Institutional Revolutionary Party in the southern state of Guerrero through the ballot box and the rifle. After skirmishes, massacres and hundreds of martyrs, they were celebrating victory Monday with dancing and the honking of horns in the state's famous resort, Acapulco. Official state election results showed former Acapulco Mayor Zeferino Torreblanca with a stunning victory, 55 to 42 percent, over the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has run Guerrero for 76 years. "After nearly 50 years of social struggle, we have achieved the miracle of the vote," said Arturo Martinez, a former political prisoner and Communist Party activist. Guerrero's spectacular coastline is dotted with resorts — including Acapulco and nearby Zihuatanejo — that are famed playgrounds for Mexico's elite. But the state's rugged mountains are rife with impoverished, inaccessible communities dominated by violent political bosses allied with the PRI. Many of the battles in Mexico's long struggle for democracy, which led to the election of President Vicente Fox in 2000, were fought in this sweltering state. Sunday's election, too, could help shape next year's presidential campaign. "It gives us a strong push for 2006, without doubt," said Leonel Godoy, president of the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, which finished third in the past two presidential elections. PRD national councilman Cuauhtemoc Sandoval called the victory "a big breath of oxygen" for the party, which won only one of 14 elections in 2004. The vote was a blow to the PRI and the presidential aspirations of its leader, Roberto Madrazo, who has built a reputation on a series of state-level victories during Fox's term. The wins helped the party recover from its loss of the national presidency nearly five years ago. The PRI had single-handedly governed Mexico since 1929 before being booted out of office by Fox's National Action Party. While Guerrero has a well-earned reputation for guerrilla activity, Martinez argued the militants turned to battle only after facing bloody crackdowns on peaceful efforts to challenge authorities. "The principal guerrilla groups in Guerrero were never alienated from electoral activity," he said in an interview. "On the contrary, violence against the people and election fraud led to formation of the guerrillas." A state police massacre of students in 1960 prompted the federal government to throw out the state's officials and call a new election in 1962. Repression of leftist activists in that campaign was so intense, some fled into armed revolt. Guerrero-based rebel leaders including Lucio Cabanas and Genaro Vasquez began as local reformers who were attacked by an often-violent army when they threatened powerful interests. Martinez himself spent three years in prison after a 1968 massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City's Tlatelolco square and a subsequent crackdown on leftists. The federal government's human rights office says that hundreds of suspected leftists vanished after being detained, often illegally, by government forces. Many were apparently tortured and killed. Torreblanca, Guerrero's newly elected governor, has little in common — beyond a distaste for the PRI — with the gun-toting rural schoolteachers who rebelled in the 1960s. Torreblanca is a businessman with interests in Acapulco-area supermarkets whose father made prescient investments in property in the growing port. He attracted so much of the conservative, business-oriented vote that Fox's National Action Party managed to win only 1 percent of the vote in Sunday's election. With extremely rare exceptions, elections nationwide were the exclusive property of the PRI until well into the 1980s. Those who challenged the party's victories tended to be ignored, bought off — or crushed. Opportunities for challenges opened as the government grew more eager for international respectability. In 1988, breakaway PRI Gov. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas forged an alliance with the left that nearly toppled the ruling party. Anger over alleged fraud in that vote led to election reforms that eventually paved the way for Fox and, on Sunday, for Torreblanca. This place has long been ripe for disaster, with starving peasants on one side of the fence, and wealthy Eurotrash on the other side, enjoying themselves at expensive resorts. |
| Posted by:Anonymoose |
| #4 Likely turn it into a flood, along with lots of Chavez's Arab friends. |
| Posted by: Robert Crawford 2005-02-07 8:42:48 PM |
| #3 Hmmm... if that happened, and we ended up with the Peoples Democratic Republic of Mexico, that would pretty well end all travel across the border. Or should end it, anyway... |
| Posted by: Dave D. 2005-02-07 7:50:49 PM |
| #2 that's one way to look at it, TW, I just don't wanna see a Chavez, Jr. in charge..... |
| Posted by: Frank G 2005-02-07 7:45:28 PM |
| #1 Its a start. Good for Mexico! Hopefully Mexico's leftists will mature as they handle actual elective power, and look for pragmatic solutions to Guerrero's problems. |
| Posted by: trailing wife 2005-02-07 7:37:07 PM |