PRI’s Longtime Rural Voter Base Slowly Crumbled Beneath It

KANTUNIL, Mexico — This is the home of the rural vote that Mexico’s ruling party had counted on to once again win the presidency. And Kantunil came through: Three out of every four voters in the village cast their ballots for the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

But such traditional support was not enough. For the first time in its 71-year history, the PRI lost the presidency.

Now party loyalists--from farmers here in Yucatan state to workers in the oil fields of Veracruz state--are stunned and worried about their future.

Union workers and peasants have been--and continue to be--the legs of the long-ruling party. But demographic changes and the reforms pushed through by the highly educated technocrats who have run the PRI for a dozen years have shortened those legs--and left loyalists such as local party chairman Victor Adan Sosa frustrated.

“At the local level, we could not do any more,” said Sosa, who, like his neighbors, has the wide, flat face seen in the relief carvings at the nearby pyramids of Chichen Itza. “The rest was up to high-level party leaders.”

“We have always been PRI supporters,” he said proudly. “Our mayors are always from the PRI. We do not have a single city councilman from the opposition.”

The town has been rewarded for its loyalty with government services that far surpass what these subsistence farmers could afford with earnings from their rocky, clay plots of land. Streets are paved. The village government provides a hot meal each day for children and the elderly.

In addition to a well-lighted, concrete-block library, a high school opened last year on the second floor of City Hall while funds are approved for a new building. Before that, students who finished sixth grade had to travel 10 miles to Izamal to continue their schooling, and many could not afford the bus fare.

All those buildings and programs are provided by federal funds at the request of local government.

Sosa and his family also have benefited from their party loyalty. Sosa, a 33-year-old brick mason, is one of 18 workers refurbishing the nine classrooms of the elementary school. On his previous job, he helped build the municipal baseball stadium. Both projects are paid for with government funds.

Sosa’s wife, Irma Guadalupe, attends a two-year beauty school course in Merida on a scholarship provided by the National Peasants Confederation, which represents farmers in the PRI. On Tuesday, the confederation hired her to style the hair of bus line employees to get them ready for a visit from company executives.

Despite living in Merida, the state capital, during the week, she is a member of the village council. “It was the mayor’s way of thanking me for my work on his campaign,” Sosa said.

Such patronage provides the bolts that have held the PRI machine together for 71 years--and provokes the ire of families such as the Miranda-Gamboa clan, who supported the opposition with “Fox for president” painted on the exterior of a rambling brick home.

“They don’t help the whole town,” said Laura Ya Miranda, 24, one of the innumerable grandchildren of Guillermina Gamboa and Alfonso Miranda. The pair have struggled to support the opposition since they were married 50 years ago, said Gamboa, a mother of 13.

“I am so happy to see this change,” she said with a broad smile that showed her silver-edged teeth. But what pulled off the change was less the fortitude of families such as the Miranda-Gamboas than the evolution of demographics.

In 1930, the year after the PRI was founded, two-thirds of Mexicans lived in the countryside. This year’s census showed that three-quarters of the population is now urban.

The rural vote that the PRI counted on is simply no longer there. Similarly, a restructuring of the government-owned oil monopoly--Petroleos Mexicanos, or Pemex--has caused nationwide membership in the once-powerful oil workers union to drop to 80,000, down from 280,000 in the 1980s.

In the Veracruz city of Poza Rica, that change has been exacerbated by the realization that one of the world’s richest oil fields is finally playing out. Nowadays, Poza Rica has almost as many retired oil workers as it does active union members: 5,000 compared with 5,600.

“There is a lot of anxiety and fear about what will happen,” said instrument operator and union member Miguel Barrios, 34, as he walked off his shift at the petrochemical refinery in downtown Poza Rica. The father of two young sons is deeply worried about his family’s future.

Like many union members, he perceives President-elect Vicente Fox as an “ultra-rightist” who will sell off Mexico’s government-owned oil industry, even though Fox has promised that he will not.

Workers were shocked by the election results, unsure whether changes will be good or bad for them or how soon they will come. Fox was vague about his labor policy during the campaign.

Two years ago, Fox’s National Action Party, or PAN, proposed radical union reforms that would undercut the PRI’s ties to organized labor, but the president-elect has not been clear about whether he supports that proposal. Workers in Poza Rica fear further erosion of the privileges they enjoyed for decades.

Oil workers were once the aristocracy of the nation’s union members, the strongest voice in the Mexican Workers Confederation, or CTM. The union provided them with benefits such as schooling, medical care, recreation, even clothing and shoes.

“Workers once had access to a ranch with cattle, a cooperative for shopping, cheap clothes, emergency medical care,” said Fernando Garcia Zubiris, a 60-year-old retired oil well worker. “All this has disappeared since 1988. The union is in a state of decay.”

In those days, around election time, workers driving trucks belonging to Pemex could be seen putting up posters for PRI candidates along roadways. Their union required them to attend political rallies and make campaign donations, several workers said.

Workers interviewed this week outside the local union headquarters in Poza Rica, a steamy hill town near the Gulf of Mexico, spoke in hushed voices to avoid being overheard. They said the union has always intimidated workers to support the PRI, to toe the union line or face reduced shifts and diminished chances for advancement.

But 12 years ago, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari set out to break the oil workers union, alleging that its leader was obstructing modernization of Pemex. Since then, union support for the PRI has been lukewarm at best.

Ambivalence eventually turned to rejection and a Fox victory. In Poza Rica, Fox outpolled the PRI candidate by 4,000 votes out of 100,000 cast, an unheard-of event.

The union local’s treasurer, Salvador Robles Barrios, said the election shocked him, and he acknowledged that his union didn’t do as well as it had in the past at getting out the vote. “People took revenge on the party. It was a big surprise to us.”

In its efforts to modernize Mexico, the PRI had cut off one of its legs. Oil workers no longer automatically identify with the party, even to the extent that not all union members feel anxious at the prospect of a future without a PRI president.

“I’m not afraid,” said Ediberto Quijo Vincent, a 48-year-old Pemex maintenance worker who has been in the union for 26 years. “It’s not the workers but the union leaders who should be afraid. The workers don’t care about the party.”