Mexicans Vent Anger Over Economic Crisis Opposition Leader Headed To Landslide Gubernatorial Win

An outspoken opposition leader appeared headed for a landslide victory in the central state of Guanajuato as voters in two states chose governors Sunday. The elections reflect anger with the government over an economic crisis which has slashed the value of the peso nearly in half since December.

Businessman Vicente Fox was winning by a 2-1 margin in early exit poll results compiled by a combined team from the University of Guanajuato and the University of Guadalajara in a neighboring state.

“The vote of punishment” was expected to be a major factor favoring opposition gubernatorial candidates both in the southern state of Yucatan and in Guanajuato, a state from which many Mexicans have fled to work in the United States.

Opposition victories Sunday could be a warning to President Ernesto Zedillo of how greater democracy and growing dissatisfaction with his administration’s economic policies could converge to break the stranglehold on power of his Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which has ruled Mexico for 66 years.

“If the elections had been the first of December, the PRI might have won,” said Jorge Hidalgo, a Guanajuato member of Alianza Civica, a national citizens group that monitors elections. “But not now.”

Thanks to traditional PRI tactics of pre-election threats, bribes and promises, the vote is too close to call in Yucatan, where mayors and state legislators also are running.

But in Guanajuato - the state that voted most heavily for Zedillo in August and which the PRI nearly swept in December’s local elections - a Fox victory is expected to launch his bid to be Mexico’s first opposition party president in seven decades.

Analysts say that much of the 52-year-old Fox’s appeal to voters is that he expresses their fury at government mismanagement that led to the economic crisis, as well as the unpopular measures that followed it.

“I think his proposals for solving our problems are better,” said 19-year-old Leoncio Gonzalez, who voted for Fox’s conservative National Action Party, or PAN, here in Dolores Hidalgo, the birthplace of Mexican independence.

In marked contrast to Fox, the PRI’s gubernatorial candidate in Yucatan is Victor Cervera Pacheco, a 59-year-old hard-liner who served all six years in the Cabinet of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whom most Mexicans blame for the financial crisis. He faces PAN’s Luis Correa Mena, a 35-year-old opposition reformer.

“People want a change,” car-rental agent Jose Antonio said in the Yucatan capital of Merida. “We need a change.”

But in rural areas, voters are cautious about openly expressing their desire to punish the government. In the farming village of Las Casitas in the Sierra Madre mountain range, one of the poorest areas of Guanajuato, armed police watched as voters entered the schoolhouse to vote.

“There is a mixture of anger and fear,” said one man, one of the few who would speak and then only on the condition he not be identified. “Who knows how it will turn out?”