A Fresh Cure for Mexico’s Festering Ills?...Puente News Collaborative/palabra-NAHJ
molly...@gmail.com
In March, candidate Claudia Sheinbaum visited the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez and from the Monument to Benito Juarez promised voters social programs will continue under her presidency. Photo by Luis Torres/Puente News Collaborative
Editor’s note: This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative in partnership with palabra by the National Association of Hispanic Journalists. Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border.
- Words by
- Alfredo Corchado
- @ajcorchado
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- Angela Kocherga
- @AngelaKBorder
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- Wendy Fry
- @WendyFry_
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- Beatriz Límon
- @BetyLimon16
- Edited by
- Dudley Althaus
- @dqalthaus
CIUDAD JUAREZ – The tortuous path toward a more equal and democratic Mexico was first carved decades ago on the gritty streets of communities bordering the United States.
The denied election wins of mostly conservative politicians in Ciudad Juarez, Matamoros, Tijuana and other border cities started a process that eventually led to prying loose the one-party grip on national power in 2000.
Now, after 24 years of men from alternating political parties holding the presidency, many Mexicans say they’ve not yet found what they seek.
That’s why many voters — like Jesús Ávila, an employee of a small business in Ciudad Juarez, across the Rio Grande from El Paso — believe it’s time to give a woman a chance.
“I have faith that she, the next one, will be the good one,” Avila said, referring to Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, a former Mexico City mayor and acolyte of populist outgoing President Andres Manuel López Obrador.
‘As a border resident having an election in your native country and another in my new homeland is close to madness.’
Before this century, Mexico had never known electoral democracy. Its politics through most of the 20th century were dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, a machine that controlled public offices from the presidency to local police commissioners.
This year, Mexico’s national election coincides with the U.S. presidential vote, as it does every dozen.
Manuel Coss, 30, will leave work Friday in El Paso and drive more than 3 hours south to vote in his native Chihuahua City. And then, Coss said, he’ll fret about the U.S. presidential election in November.
Manuel Coss working from his office in El Paso. Photo by Luis Torres/Puente News Collaborative
“As a border resident having an election in your native country and another in my new homeland is close to madness,” Coss said. “On the border we feel the impact from both directions.”
The Puente poll finds that Mexicans favor Joe Biden over Donald Trump as U.S. president, 69 to 11%.
Like many border residents, Coss said he worries about the place that criminal gangs will hold in Mexico’s future.
“We’re on the wrong side of history,” Coss said this week. “Violence is my main concern.”
The most-recent push for democracy began in the early 1980s and resulted in denied victories in Chihuahua, bordering West Texas and New Mexico, and in Tamaulipas, which hugs Southeast Texas and and the Gulf of Mexico.
In 1988, the PRI-held federal government was forced to abort a vote count that many believed would have given the presidency to leftist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari was declared the winner, and soon negotiated a free trade deal with the United States and Canada that has industrialized northern Mexico.
Mexican President Carlos Salinas, back left, President George Bush, center, and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, right, participate in the initialing ceremony of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in San Antonio, Texas. Photo by David Valdez/National Archives and Records Administration
The PRI won the presidency again in 1994, by a slight margin, but its power then quickly eroded as democracy forces accelerated. Later that decade, Cárdenas captured Mexico City’s mayorship and opposition parties gained a combined majority in the national congress.
Vicente Fox, a business executive from Gálvez’s National Action Party, won the presidency in 2000, followed in another disputed vote in 2006 by National Action’s Felipe Calderón. AMLO lost that race by less than half a percent of the vote.
Today, a once imperial-presidency is curbed by fragmented political power and a press comparatively freer than in the days of the PRI’s absolute control. However, Mexico remains a dangerous, often deadly, country for journalists due to the spread of narco violence and political corruption.
But his many critics contend that López Obrador has been trying to gut institutions painfully built through 30 years meant to guarantee free and fair elections as well as checks and balances of divided government.
“López Obrador has already distorted the country’s political system to tilt the electoral playing field in his party’s favor,” political analyst Denise Dresser writes in the U.S. publication Foreign Affairs. “He has shown himself willing to sacrifice anything in order to win, including democracy itself.”
Perla Olivares, a low wage factory worker in Ciudad Juarez, said she has yet to see significant political improvement.
“I remember as a child walking with my parents demanding change,” Olivares said in a recent interview. “My parents are gone. But that Mexico they wanted never came.”
In Tijuana, on the California border near San Diego, Sandra López, 50, said she always votes for the PRI, despite frequent disappointment. She’s now hoping that either Sheinbaum as president might prove more adept than the male leaders of the past.
Molly Molloy
In Mexico’s Historic Vote, Politics are Little Changed
The upcoming Mexican presidential election may determine the fate of Mexico’s 30-year-quest for a full democracy
Editor’s note: This story was co-published with Puente News Collaborative. Puente News Collaborative is a bilingual nonprofit newsroom, convener and funder dedicated to high quality, fact-based news and information from the U.S.-Mexico border. Angela Kocherga, news director at KTEP public radio, contributed to the story.
Haga clic aquí para leer el reportaje en español.
MEXICO CITY — Crossing a historic threshold, Mexicans appear poised to elect a woman as president this Sunday but to otherwise leave politics largely unchanged.
Indeed, the vote won’t reflect hunger for a sweeping shift in the country’s direction that took place six years ago when high levels of corruption from state and federal authorities led voters to elect a new alternative, represented by Andrés Manuel López Obrador and his four-year-old political party Morena, according to a nationwide in-home poll commissioned by Puente News Collaborative, an El Paso-based non-profit organization.
In what will prove the largest election in Mexican history, nearly 100 million people — including millions living in the United States and elsewhere — are eligible to cast a ballot. In play are more than 20,000 local, state and congressional posts.
Supporters of Morena presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum attend the last rally of her presidential campaign at the zócalo on May 29, days ahead of the election on Sunday. Photo by Omar Ornelas/El Paso Times
Claudia Sheinbaum, 61, is a physicist, environmental engineer and former Mexico City mayor who is ethnically Jewish in an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic society. Her likely election comes amid a deepening gangland grip on the country and widespread fears among political analysts and voters of a return to the autocratic rule that governed Mexico until the turn of this century.
In addition to political preferences, Puente’s survey gauges Mexicans’ attitudes toward their solid export-fueled economy, the often fraught ties with the United States and the millions of foreigners who have taken up at least temporary residence here, the most ever.
‘What we're seeing is that the Mexican people are behaving as if they had no power to demand and to expect a better government.’
While concerned by the migrant influx, more than two-thirds of poll respondents said the migrants should be given temporary work permits even as the government tightens control of the borders and the human flow.
Yet, if the Puente poll and an array of others prove accurate, most Mexican voters will opt for the status quo.
GO TO LINK FOR GRAPHIC OF POLL RESULTS AND FULL STORY:
https://www.palabranahj.org/archive/mexicos-vote-historic-politics-little-changed
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