Mexican voters going to the polls in historic elections

Country’s democracy marred by vote-buying and violence

MEXICO CITY – A few weeks ago, several political candidates came to Maria Salcedo’s door. They were bearing gifts.

Along with hats and Tshirts featuring the logo of Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, they presented her with a large water tank worth about $100. If elected, they said, her working-class neighborhood would no longer suffer from water shortages. By the time they had left, she had promised them her vote.

Mexicans go to the polls today to elect a new president, 500 seats of the Chamber of Deputies and 128 members of the Senate. There are also thousands of state and municipal positions up for grabs in what officials say is the single biggest election in the nation’s history.

But for all its fanfare – and abundance of attention on the presidential front-runner, Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, who would be the first leftist leader in Mexico’s modern democracy – the election has also been marred by irregularities and even violence.

Dozens of candidates have been killed in recent months. The ruling party is accused of using government institutions to try to sway the results. Opposition parties warn of possible fraud on election day. And vote-buying has been rampant. According to a recent poll, one-third of those surveyed were offered gifts or promised services by political parties this election season. That translates to about 30 million voters like Salcedo.

While most respondents said the gifts – long standard practice in Mexican elections – did not influence their choice in the polling booth, others said the freebies may have made a difference.

“The water tanks help a lot,” said Salcedo, a 41-year-old homemaker in San Mateo Tlaltenango, on the outskirts of Mexico City. “I’m going to vote for them.”

Mexico has come a long way since the PRI held power uninterrupted for more than 70 years. The party was so efficient at keeping a grip on the presidency and Congress while also maintaining the veneer of democracy that Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa famously called it “the perfect dictatorship.”

The PRI, founded in 1929 in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution, was finally voted out of the presidency in 2000, when Vicente Fox and his conservative National Action Party swept into office. The PRI returned to power in 2012, with the election of current president Enrique Pena Nieto – whose administration, which began with high hopes, has been widely viewed as a disappointment.

Many of Pena Nieto’s major initiatives went nowhere, even as corruption and crime soared, fueling an anti-status quo climate that has benefited the populist message of Lopez Obrador, already a twicedefeated presidential contender.

This year’s election demonstrates that Mexico’s democracy is maturing and has created space for a wider spectrum of parties and political actors, said Carlos Bravo Regidor, a professor at CIDE, a public research center in Mexico City. Lopez Obrador’s left-leaning Morena party was formally registered just four years ago but appears poised to win not just the presidency but the largest number of seats in Congress.

But Mexico’s democratic process is still imperfect, as rampant attempts at vote-buying and other election-related scandals make clear.

“This is a democracy with a lot of ifs,” Bravo said. “I think we can be minimally satisfied, but there is a lot of ground to be gained.”