On the surface, Mexico's presidential election looks a lot like modern campaigns in the US, a battle of image makers wielding television advertisements, sound bites and, at times, attack ads with less truth than venom.
But in one crucial respect it is different: Mexico's referee, the powerful Federal Election Institute, has waded into the fray involving the three candidates, ruling that some television spots are too false to be on the air and others simply too rude.
It has also enforced an order of silence on Mexican President Vicente Fox, telling him not to interfere with the campaign, even to help his party's candidate.
"This council must maintain its tradition of saying yes to freedom of expression, yes to the maximum amount of criticism, but yes to criticism based on truth and yes to legitimate questions," Luis Carlos Ugalde, the president of the institute, said recently.
"We must say no to defamation, no to denigration, no to things taken out of context and to misinformation," he said.
Mexican courts have recently interpreted the broad language of the electoral law to give the institute the authority to ban any speech that besmirches a candidate's reputation or could cause a public disturbance.
A result has been the creation of an electoral referee with enormous power. The institute twice voted to cancel advertisements calling the leftist candidate -- Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador -- "a danger for Mexico," saying they were defamatory.
It has also voted to ban ads from Lopez Obrador's camp branding Felipe Calderon, the candidate backed by Fox, a liar.
Earlier this month, the Mexican election board even fined Fox's National Action Party US$14,000 for its part in encouraging Jose Maria Aznar, Spain's former prime minister, to say during a trip to Mexico in February that he would like to see Calderon win.
The Mexican Congress formed the institute in October 1990, passing a new electoral law designed to eliminate the fraud that had marred past elections.
Lawmakers strengthened the institute's power several times in the 1990s, making it entirely independent of the executive branch in 1996. Those reforms enabled opposition parties to make strong gains in Congress that year and helped the first opposition-party president, Fox, to win in 2000, ending seven decades of one-party rule.
Until this year, the institute had been occupied mostly with registering voters, establishing clean balloting practices and preventing fraud. The no-holds-barred campaign, however, has led to court rulings ordering the institute to start policing the debate.
Its rulings have ignited a furious debate here about the extent of free speech and the purview of the government to curb certain electoral practices, like mudslinging.
The debate also underscores that Mexico's transition from a one-party state six years ago to a modern multiparty democracy has a peculiarly Mexican flavor experts say.
Mexicans are used to a high level of decorum from their elected officials, a vestige of a paternalistic state that ruled here for most of the 20th century. By and large, they also chafe at any hint that the president is grooming a successor, since that is precisely what happened every six years under the one-party system.
"We have a work in progress in terms of what our democracy is, and the Federal Election Institute is one of the constructors," said Rosanna Fuentes-Berain, editor of the Spanish edition of Foreign Affairs.
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