Report from Mexico: open primaries for the PRI.

Political murders, drug trafficking, police corruption, and the ongoing civil strife in Chiapas continue to dominate the headlines about Mexico in United States newspapers. It would be foolish to minimize the serious nature of these problems. Still, Mexico is also undergoing a slow but real political evolution that promises to bring more democratic and responsive government to a country that has known only one-party rule for nearly seven decades.

The nomadic Somalis have forty-five names for the camel because of the dromedary's crucial role in their lives. Similarly, Mexicans have a caravan of words to condemn corrupt practices perfected by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) during its sixty-nine-year reign. Dedazo (naming of candidates by party bigshots), alquimistas (election fixers), carrusel (multiple voting by one person), mordida (bribe) - these words glisten in the lexicon of this nation's cynical citizens.

Recent electoral reforms advocated by Mexico's President Ernesto Zedillo have enabled voters to punish the PRI, his own party, for its history of graft, nepotism, and venality. Last July, for instance, Zedillo-backed innovations allowed the people rather than the chief executive to decide upon Mexico City's mayor. They responded by opting for PRI defector Cuauhtemoc Cardenas (47 percent), nominee of the leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) over the standard-bearers of the PRI (25 percent) and the center-right National Action Party or PAN (15 percent). Cardenas is now regarded as a serious threat to defeat the PRI nominee and succeed Zedillo as president in the 2000 election.

Moreover, last July the PRI lost its hammerlock on the 500-member Chamber of Deputies as the PRD, PAN, and minor parties collectively amassed 262 seats. Nonetheless, the PRI managed to maintain a 76-52 grip on the stodgy upper house because only one-fourth of the Senate stood for election.

This year voters in fourteen of Mexico's 31 states will elect governors and/or mayors. Encouraged by the remarkable openness of the 1997 contests, Ricardo Monreal Avila - the PRI's number-two man in the Chamber of Deputies, a former senator, and an attractive progressive with broad intra-party backing - began barnstorming the north-central state of Zacatecas with an eye to capturing the statehouse. His ambition raised the hackles of PRI power broker Genaro Borrego, a former party president and ex-governor of Zacatecas, who now runs Mexico's social security system. Before Monreal knew what hit him, he had mysteriously lost his bid to a so-called "unity candidate" backed by the influential Borrego. To add insult to injury, current PRI president Mariano Palacios Alcocer implied - with no proof at all - that the popular Monreal had ties to narco-traffickers.

Outraged, Monreal bolted the PRI to accept the gubernatorial nomination of the left-nationalist PRD. Although the contest doesn't take place until August 2, recent polls show Monreal as the odds-on favorite. If these findings hold up, the PRD will boast its first state executive. At the same time, the right-leaning PAN, which already claims six governorships, savors the possibility of obtaining several more.

Faced with Monreal's defection and evident popularity, PRI operatives began having second thoughts about the party's top-down nomination process. Amid this soul-searching came the need to select a PRI nominee in Chihuahua, a huge, PAN-controlled state which shares a border with Texas. Artemio Iglesias Miramontes emerged as the candidate of the PRI's old guard. But the hard-living, unsavory Iglesias seemed destined for defeat, particularly if nominated by dedazo. Thus, Jesus Manuel Perez Pinon, a savvy PRI strategist with electoral experience in a half-dozen states, suggested a revolutionary nominating mechanism: an open consulta or primary in which all Chihuahuans could participate! What was there to lose? he reasoned. Fearing defeat, the PRI state leadership agreed, and Iglesias - while privately grumbling about such a process - followed suit lest he admit fear over entering a fair fight.

The PRI National Executive Committee held its collective breath when the polls opened on primary day, March 8; by nightfall, it was celebrating a political coup. Deputy Patricio Martinez Garcia, a moderate, well-liked accountant and rancher from Chihuahua city, had garnered 54 percent of the vote, to defeat Iglesias (35 percent) and a third contender.

Thus, in one fell swoop, the PRI (1) selected a probable winner, (2) involved a quarter-million people from across the political spectrum in its selection process, and (3) conveyed a message both to the country at large and to its own militants that their Tammany Hall-style party could embrace more democratic procedures and still come out on top. Before the open primary in Chihuahua, the PRI acted like a condemned prisoner waiting for the hangman. The Chihuahua results gave the deeply riven PRI a mission - namely, holding open primaries in four PRI-governed states where the party had yet to select its standard-bearers: Sinaloa, Tlaxcala, Tamaulipas, and Puebla.

If conducted honestly, primaries will enhance the legitimacy of PRI candidates in general elections, according to public-opinion surveys. But even if the party suffers a setback or two, allowing the sun to blaze in on its nominating process will affect its future in several positive ways:

* Give greater substance to President Zedillo's insistence that a local version of glasnost complement the economic liberalization that he has championed;

* Weaken further PRI oldtimers or "dinosaurs" - concentrated in the party's labor and peasant sectors - who prefer finagling vote tallies to winning the hearts and minds of the electorate; and

* Set the stage for a wide-open contest for the PRI presidential nomination, featuring a half-dozen aspirants.

In view of the potent impact that primaries could have on the party, it remains to be seen whether current PRI governors-accustomed to treating their states as fiefdoms - will work under the new rules. And even if the primaries are conducted fairly, the now-popular Zedillo and now-unpopular PRI could still lose ground if oil revenues - responsible for 39 percent of the federal budget - continue to plummet. That would dampen Mexico's impressive economic recovery, forcing additional cutbacks in popular social programs. Failure to curb the escalating crime rate could also cost the PRI dearly at the polls.

Although no panacea for the party's fortunes either this year or in the 2000 presidential race, unfettered primaries offer the last best chance for the PRI to recover - in part, at least - from the defections and defeats endured in recent years. Who knows? If the world's longest continuously ruling party actually implements intramural democracy, the use of words, long dormant - for example - legitimidad (legitimacy), esperanza (hope), and credibilidad (credibility) - may reappear in the political vocabulary of Mexicans.

George W. Grayson teaches government at the College of William and Mary. He has just published Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism (Harcourt-Brace) as well as A Guide to the 1998 Mexican Elections (Center for Strategic & International Studies).