How Mexico's Ruling Party Outflanked Its Opposition in U.S.

Mexican politics is bound to acquire new meaning for Americans, and take a jarring turn for Mexicans, now that millions of Mexican citizens living in the United States will get to vote, for the first time, in their homeland's next presidential election. Mexico's future will not only be contested in states where there are large concentrations of Mexican immigrants, but these voters may also decide who Mexico's next president will be.

To understand how this could happen, you have to follow the path that Mexico's three main political parties took to approve emigre voting. It is a tale of political intrigue reaching into the United States and involving the highest stakes of political power in Mexico.

Since the close and bitterly disputed 1988 presidential election, the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) had demanded voting rights for emigrants. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had stubbornly resisted granting such a franchise, until last spring, when it quietly--and unexpectedly--dropped its objections during closed-door electoral-reform negotiations.

The conservative National Action Party (PAN) went along with the deal as part of a sweeping electoral-reform package passed unanimously by the Mexican Congress last August. At the state and local levels, the PAN governs nearly one-third of the country and is favored by many to knock off the PRI in legislative elections next year and in the presidential contest in 2000.

Though initially suspicious of the left's motives in pushing for emigrant voting rights, the PAN eventually concluded that, given the chance, expatriate Mexicans would turn overwhelmingly against the PRI regime. After all, Mexican emigrants have been, in effect, expelled from their homeland by conditions the PRI government must answer for, PAN President Felipe Calderon has asserted.

Indeed, had Mexican emigrants been able to vote in 1988, they probably would have turned against PRI presidential candidate Carlos Salinas de Gortari, as did millions of Mexicans at home, and would have added to the record support won by the left-coalition candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. In that campaign's aftermath, Cardenas founded the PRD, and the new party organized an extensive network of cells throughout California, where he had campaigned and pushed for emigrant voting rights.