TIJUANA — The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century, was battling to retake Tijuana and cling to the governorship of Oaxaca as voters cast ballots Sunday in state and local elections that could shape the 2006 presidential race.
After an evening of counting, both contests looked too close to call and were generating disputes over alleged irregularities that could take days to resolve.
In Tijuana, both leading mayoral candidates -- gambling magnate Jorge Hank Rhon of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as PRI, and Jorge Ramos of President Vicente Fox's National Action Party -- claimed a narrow victory on the basis of rival exit polls. With 84% of the vote counted, Hank was leading by less than 1 percentage point.
With half the ballots counted in the southern state of Oaxaca, an alliance backed by Fox's center-right PAN led the PRI by a mere 5,000 votes out of 480,000 tallied, with the gap closing as results came in from villages.
Both sides in both races staged tentative victory rallies. In Tijuana, Hank's supporters danced to mariachi and rock bands in the parking lot of the greyhound racetrack he owns. Fifteen blocks away, Ramos' partisans discoed outside the city's bullring.
As the count neared completion, Hank appeared before supporters and said: "Our lead is irreversible now. The PAN's era of domination in northern Mexico is over." Yet the PAN insisted that the race was a technical tie.
With Fox's party losing strength nationwide, the two races were a test of the resurgent PRI's ability to shore up its rural heartland base, which encompasses thousands of poor, indigenous communities in Oaxaca, and its attempts to erode the PAN's urban strongholds in northern Mexico.
Official returns from one of Sunday's other elections showed PAN candidate Luis Armando Reynoso Femat trouncing the PRI in the gubernatorial race in Aguascalientes, a small, industrial state in north-central Mexico that has been run by the PAN since 1998.
For six decades, every state election went to the PRI, by fair means or foul. The party lost its monopoly in 1989, ceding the Baja California statehouse to the PAN. Fox completed the transformation in the 2000 election, ending the PRI's 71-year domination of the presidency.
