As the year 2000 approached, the Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) faced a task that it had never before confronted—deciding how it would choose its presidential candidate. Between the party’s founding in 1929 and 1934, Calles had personally selected the party’s presidential candidates. After 1934, incumbent presidents had made the selection. However, in his inaugural speech Zedillo pledged, “I will not interfere, in any way at all, in my party’s decision-making process.” In 1997, using the traditional political slang term dedazo, Zedillo reiterated his unwillingness to select his successor when he declared: “This kind of determinism is past. For the year 2000, we want to put forward a candidate who will appeal to the voters. Every vote counts. We have driven away the ghost of the dedazo.”2
Leaders of the PRI decided that the party would hold a primary election to select the party’s presidential candidate. This appeared to be the best alternative to the dedazo since the party had organized ten primary elections to select gubernatorial candidates during the Zedillo administration and eight of the primary victors had subsequently won the general election. PRI leaders had also identified “democracy” as a key demand of voters and felt that a primary would cause the electorate to associate the PRI with democracy. Since the PRI had never had a membership list, any registered voter would be allowed to vote in the primary.3
Although there were four names on the primary ballot, for all practical purposes the PRI primary race was between Francisco Labastida and Roberto Madrazo. Labastida began his government career in 1962 and had served as governor of Sinaloa, as secretary of energy in the 1980s, and in Zedillo’s cabinet as secretary of agriculture and as secretary of the interior. Having held both elected office and cabinet positions, he straddled the two camps within the PRI. One camp contained foreign-trained neoliberal economists while the other was made up of old guard politicians who blamed economic policies of the neoliberals for a drop in the standard of living and thus support for the PRI.4
During the campaign, Labastida faced charges that he had stolen his gubernatorial election, a feeling shared by the 20,000 who had marched in protest the day before he took office as governor. The other charge that confronted him was that he was the “official candidate” supported by Zedillo and that the primary election was merely a smokescreen for an old fashioned dedazo. Labastida never could shake this perception, even though Zedillo repeatedly declared his neutrality.5
Labastida’s main primary opponent was Tabasco Governor Roberto Madrazo. Madrazo first reached national prominence when the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) contested his 1994 victory in Tabasco’s gubernatorial election. Zedillo had tried to ease him out of office, but he had clung to the position, thus helping create what was to become his trademark—a maverick image. Madrazo even remained in office after the federal attorney general determined that Madrazo had far exceeded the state-imposed campaign finance limit. However, since the spending limit was a state law and Madrazo kept Tabasco under tight control, the state courts never took action on this flagrant violation of spending limits.
During the primary campaign, Madrazo spent some $25 million on TV commercials funded by the State of Tabasco. The commercials, broadcast nationwide, supposedly served to boost the state’s image, but mainly boosted Madrazo’s.6
Madrazo’s campaign blended slightly risque humor with the appealing image of the little man against the system. In a televised debate for primary candidates, Madrazo charged that Labastida “just wants to continue the same failed policies we have now.” Madrazo charged that these “failed policies” included economic reforms that left so many in poverty. He declared, correctly as it turned out, that Labastida would be no match for Vicente Fox, the leading contender for the PAN presidential nomination. To cap off what for Mexico was unprecedented negative campaigning, Madrazo accused Labastida of being favored by the then-reviled former president Salinas.7
When the primary was held on November 7, 1999, Labastida sailed to an easy victory, drawing
5.3 million votes compared to the 3.8 million votes for the other three candidates. The primary indicated that the PRI still retained enormous organizational and mobilizational strength as it set up 64,200 polling places and involved more than 450,000 individuals who served as voting officials and poll watchers. Despite charges from Madrazo and others that Zedillo had tipped the scales in favor of Labastida by using his influence over local party organizations, most evaluations of the primary were positive. The losers accepted defeat, remained in the party, and campaigned for Labastida.8
The 2000 presidential election saw several changes from previous practice. One was that governors, in addition to the incumbent president’s cabinet members, had become serious contenders for the presidency. In addition to Madrazo, Vicente Fox, the governor of Guanajuato, cast his hat into the ring. Even though Fox supposedly lost his hotly disputed gubernatorial race in 1991, he won the governorship in 1995 with almost twice as many votes as his PRI opponent. In July 1997, Fox announced that he was seeking the PAN nomination for president. Fox broke with past PAN practices by declaring his candidacy three years prior to the presidential election. He sensed that the traditional wing of the party, which viewed him as newcomer and a populist leader with little attachment to the PAN’s ideological principles, would never allow him to be a candidate unless he built up sufficient political momentum to make himself unstoppable. He commented: “I know that I do not stand a chance of winning the party’s nomination if I leave it to the party apparatus. My strength lies in my capacity to appeal to the public at large.”9
In order to build support for his nomination, Fox organized an independent group known as the Friends of Fox, which raised funds to finance his run for the PAN presidential nomination. He recruited as members a wide variety of people, many of whom had no ties to the PAN. Eventually the Friends of Fox became a bigger organization than the PAN, claiming a membership of 3 million throughout Mexico. Fox spent so much time outside Guanajuato building support for his candidacy that critics charged him with governing the state by fax.10
Fox—a towering figure, over six foot six in his trademark cowboy boots—took the PAN by storm. While touring around the country, he emphasized that he wanted to bring the success he had as governor of Guanajuato to the entire nation. In fact, in 1998, he enjoyed an 86 percent approval rating as governor, a rating above that of Zedillo. The central theme of his campaign was the need for change after seventy-one years of PRI misrule. He courted business by declaring, “The private sector will be completely integrated into the task of governing.” At the same time, he cast himself as a plain talking, no-nonsense populist who had been raised on a ranch.11
His down-home image belied his upper-middle-class background and his having reached the peak of the multinational corporate world before plunging into politics. He was born into a ranching family and grew up on a ranch purchased by his American paternal grandfather, thus his decidedly non-Spanish surname. He left the ranch to study business administration at the Universidad Ibero-americana and then in 1964 signed on as a route manager for Coca-Cola. He was transferred to Mexico City in 1972 and in 1975 became president of Coca-Cola of Mexico. In 1979, rather than accepting an offer to direct Coke’s Latin American operations from Miami, he left the company to manage the family’s two footwear factories and its 1,100-acre vegetable farm.
For almost a decade, he struggled to turn a profit freezing broccoli and making cowboy boots at his family businesses. He blamed his lack of business success on an inept state that had created an unfavorable business climate. Given his frustration with government, he was easily recruited to run for Congress in 1988 by the PAN’s presidential candidate, Manuel Clouthier. He won the election and received national attention at Salinas’s inauguration for having fashioned ballots into giant ears which parodied Salinas’s prominent natural ears.12
After his stint in the Chamber of Deputies, he “lost” his first election for governor and then was elected as governor of Guanajuato in 1995. During his term as governor, he improved schools, attracted foreign investment, and started a bank that granted credits of as little as $50 to 45,000 entrepreneurs.13
While he was president of Coca-Cola of Mexico and while he was serving as governor, Fox formed close ties to the business community. He drew on these ties when he formed the Friends of Fox, which financed his efforts to secure the PAN nomination. Industrialists seeking a personal meeting with him were expected to drum up $300,000 for the campaign.14
When he started his quixotic quest for the presidential nomination, funds were so limited that he relied on free media, constantly endeavoring to make his campaign newsworthy and thus attract coverage. Fox’s self-promotion paid off. In July 1997, fewer than 18 percent of voting-age Mexicans could identify him, while a year-and-a-half later that figure was almost 70 percent. By the fall of
1999, he had built up so much political momentum that no other candidate registered for the PAN presidential primary, leaving Fox as the PAN candidate by default.15
In contrast to Labastida and Fox, who both emerged from relative obscurity to capture their party’s nomination, the PRD’s candidate for the 2000 presidential election, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, had enjoyed extremely high name recognition since his 1988 candidacy. In April 1999, while still serving as Mexico City mayor, Cardenas announced he would seek the presidency for a third time. In fact, he had been campaigning for the presidency virtually non-stop since 1988 and faced no serious competition for the PRD nomination.
World History
