An historic election ends 81 years of one-party rule

By Alfredo Peppard

On the fourth of July the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution -- the PRI -- lost their first ever election in the State of Oaxaca. Eighty-one years of one-party rule came to an end when a candidate for governor, Gabino Cué, won despite the PRI’s usual display of dirty tricks, including two murders and a kidnapping. Eviel, the PRI candidate, was carrying a heavy handicap in the person of the sitting governor, Ulises Ruiz. Ruiz is hated by the people of the state for his stealing of the election in 2006 and for the violent suppression of the 2006 uprising which culminated in the massacre in Zocalo, where 21 people died. The Supreme Court of Mexico recently found Ruis culpable in these deaths and huge banners were strung up in the Zocalo to remind people of that fact.

Gabino Cué of the Convergence Party was the candidate of a coalition that covered a wide range of the Mexican political spectrum. On the left was the PRD, the Party of Democratic Revolution that has been responsible for much progressive legislation in Mexico City and the Federal District. On the right of the coalition was the PAN, the Party of National Action, whose leader Felipe Calderon is president of Mexico.

Weeks prior to the election the Teacher’s Union occupied the Zocalo and surrounding streets with a tarp city where they slept on the pavement vowing to fight any election fraud on the part of the PRI. Unlike free and democratic America, no police riot squads attacked them to preserve the sanctity of free automobile passage.

For weeks the PRI treated the city to elaborate political theater: Airplanes towing banners and haranguing the people below with loudspeakers, attractive young women waving to people on the streets from the back of flatbed sound trucks, more attractive young women at major intersections waving party banners and employing sound systems worthy of Rock ‘n’ Roll concerts -- all failed to convince a majority of the voters that Ruis’ handpicked successor Eviel was the heralding of a new PRI.

With the PAN in the Peace and Progress Coalition. the national government cannot rule in favor of PRI fraud as in the past, and with a serious threat of revolt by unions and farmers organizations if the PRI tried to steal another election, the PRI was forced to back down on some of their more heavy-handed methods. (Not that they didn’t try. The head of the State Electoral Institute, José Luis Echeverría, was caught in a phone tap ordering 70,000 extra ballots for PRI use.) Not only did Gabino Cue’s coalition win the governor’s office, it won the Municipal Presidencies in the larger cities of the state as well Oaxaca has been having a party ever since.

What this election will mean in terms of the burning social issues that face the State of Oaxaca remains to be seen. The wide ideological spread of the coalition poses an interesting question. Although the PRD represented the majority of Cabino Cué’s votes, the ultra conservative position of the PAN may well serve as a counterweight.

The PRI represented the moneyed elite of the state. As a party they originated as an alliance of generals who emerged victorious from the revolution and civil war of 1910-20. Their role in Oaxaca as in most of Mexico was to end the revolution, restoring property forms as they were before the uprising. They did this with the use of pistoleros and police for 81 years and were strongly supported by the great land owners, mine operators and bankers.

Whether the rule of this elite is over, only time will tell