Mexican President Felipe Calderon’s allies headed toward some surprising victories in Mexican state elections marred by drug gang violence so severe only a trickle of citizens voted in one state where the leading gubernatorial candidate was slain.
The opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the former long-time ruling party, had hoped for significant gains on Sunday to add momentum to its bid to regain the presidency in 2012, trying to capitalize on discontent over drug violence. However, it appeared the PRI would not significantly improve on the nine governorships it already held among the dozen seats up for grabs.
Despite rising public frustration over drug violence, Calderon’s allies seemed likely to come away with a much needed boost by winning in the southern state of Oaxaca after a campaign for local elections in more than a dozen states where assassinations and scandals emphasized the power of drug cartels and faced the president with his toughest political challenge.
Impoverished and volatile Oaxaca is one of several states in which Calderon’s conservative National Action Party (PAN) formed alliances with leftist parties seeking to thwart a resurgence by the PRI, which ruled Mexico for 71 years and still controls many state governments.
The showing against the PRI in Oaxaca, a heavily Aboriginal state where the party was in power for eight decades, was highly symbolic.
A five-month uprising erupted in 2006 over allegations that outgoing Oaxaca Governor Ulises Ruiz, who was not seeking re-election, stole his election victory. Critics accused Ruiz of strong-arm politics that exemplified the coercion and corruption the PRI used to govern Mexico for seven decades.
“These are historic victories,” PAN president Cesar Nava said in an interview with reporters. “Sinaloa [state] has a fundamental significance when it comes to Mexico’s security. In Puebla and Oaxaca, the victory means a significant break with entrenched strongman politics.”
The official count had alliance candidate Gabino Cue leading with 50 percent of the votes, compared with 42 percent for PRI candidate Eviel Perez, with 17 percent of the vote counted early yesterday.
Calderon’s PAN and its leftist allies led in the PRI bastion of Sinaloa, a northwestern state that is the birthplace of the powerful drug cartel of the same name.
The PRI gubernatorial candidate in Sinaloa, Jesus Vizcarra, had long faced allegations of ties to the cartel led by Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, Mexico’s most-wanted drug lord.
The newspaper Reforma recently published a photograph of Vizcarra attending a party many years ago with El Chapo’s second-in-command, Ismael “El Mayo” Zambada.
Vizcarra, the mayor of state capital Culiacan and a distant relative of slain drug trafficker Ines Calderon, dodged questions about whether Zambada is the godfather of one of his children, saying only that he had never committed a crime.
With about a fifth of the vote counted, preliminary official results gave alliance candidate Mario Lopez 52 percent to 46 percent for Vizcarra. The Televisa exit poll had similar numbers.
Exit polls released by TV Azteca and Televisa predicted the PRI would win in at least nine states, including three that it wrested back from the PAN or the leftist Democratic Revolution Party.
Exit polls indicated the PRI easily won in Tamaulipas, a drug-riven northern state where the party’s gubernatorial candidate, Rodolfo Torre, was assassinated a week before the election.
Officials said only one in five registered voters cast ballots there.
Torre’s brother, Egidio, was picked to run in his place. He voted at an elementary school in Ciudad Victoria wearing a bulletproof vest and escorted by federal police in two trucks.
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