MEXICO CITY — Decades after they left for the United States, 60 expatriates returned home this week to lobby for the ability to vote and run in Mexican elections.
The delegation of migrants came from California, Illinois, Washington state and New York to reignite interest in an issue that has sputtered for years. Its main goal: persuading the government to register between 10 million and 20 million Mexicans expatriates and create polling places for them in the United States and other countries.
"We have been denied rights that are clearly in the constitution," said Antonio Moreno, vice president of the immigrant group Michoacan Federation of California.
"We are contributing to the economy in Mexico, but we have no rights," said Moreno, who left Mexico 30 years and now lives in Huntington Park. "Now we want to vote, we want our own representatives, and we want them to come from our own ranks."
Mexicans abroad send $8.5 billion a year home to family members and pump money into national tourism and real estate, according to the delegation here this week on a lobbying mission dubbed Migrantour.
All of Mexico's major political parties acknowledge expatriates' right to vote here. But an effort to clarify the laws on the matter died in Mexico's Senate in 1998. More pragmatically, no party has had the political stamina to create an international voting system expansive enough to process the votes.
Many countries allow absentee voting by citizens abroad. But no other country has so many millions of expatriates who want to vote in absentia in national elections.
A 1998 report concluded that Mexico's electoral institute could handle the counting of expatriates' votes. But setting up an international polling system could take months, if not years. That delay would spoil Migrantour's bid to secure the vote in 2003 legislative elections, said Ramon Leon Morales, a legislator from the center-left Democratic Revolutionary Party, or PRD, who backs the Migrantour efforts.
On Tuesday, Leon explained the plight of the migrants to the Chamber of Deputies, Mexico's lower house of Congress. A dozen members of the expatriate delegation sat in the audience, chanting, "Si se puede!" or "Yes, it can be done!"
Some opposition figures believe that efforts to extend the vote to expatriates were quashed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which dominated Mexico for seven decades.
