Fernando Gutierrez Barrios

Mexico's Revolutionary Institutional Party (PRI) has taken a bold step by opening up the selection process of its presidential candidate to a nationwide primary, but, ironically, the process may backfire because a hard-line, anti-democratic candidate could emerge the winner. The reform is a radical change in the PRI's standard operating procedures, but does not necessarily portend a happy ending to Mexico's democratic transition.

The opposition Democratic Revolutionary Party on Monday charged that 56 of its members and supporters have been killed in political violence during the 18 months since the party's leader, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, ran for president and forged the new leftist force. At least 16 of the victims died in the last month after hotly contested elections in the poor farming states of Guerrero and Michoacan, both strongholds of Cardenas.

For all that is unknown--and may never be known--about the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, it has revealed the Mexican political class at war with itself. The battle over the course of Mexico's future--the choice of a successor to Colosio's candidacy--lasted several days behind closed doors at Los Pinos, the presidential residence.

Pope John Paul II's 10-day visit to Mexico, which ended last week, renewed an emotional debate over the church-state relationship in Latin America's only officially anti-clerical country, and comments in the Mexican media reflected that debate. The Pope, making his second trip to Mexico, pushed for constitutional changes to legalize the Roman Catholic Church, lobbied for Catholic schools and spoke out against birth control, which the government actively supports.

The slaughter of 46 unarmed Tzotzil Indians--most of them women and children--in the remote hamlet of Acteal was not, as the Mexican government has insisted, an aberration. Since Julio Cesar Ruiz Ferro became governor of Chiapas in February 1995, more than 1,500 Indians have been killed in political violence, many by paramilitary groups linked to the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Nor are the killings confined to Chiapas.

Lax security and a violent, affluent drug culture have combined to create a crisis in Mexico's already troubled prison system. Although the surrender Thursday of a drug baron-inmate who had controlled Matamoros prison ended a two-week siege of that border institution, the incident contributed to what has become a pattern of jail uprisings across Mexico. Inmates in Leon, a city in central Mexico, rioted the week after the Matamoros uprising.

Leaders of this nation's ruling party struggled on Friday with a vastly changed political landscape as they sought to come up with a successor for their assassinated presidential hopeful, Luis Donaldo Colosio, who was buried in his hometown. Among other maneuvers, activists for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, as it is known, appeared to be testing to see whether the planned Aug. 21 national election could be rescheduled.

The Mexican state of Chiapas, a traditional province with a large Indian population and strong Roman Catholic roots, has quietly adopted the nation's most liberal abortion law. So quiet was the Chiapas legislature's decision to legalize abortion upon demand two months ago that few residents realized such a law had been passed until it was published and put into effect Dec. 16. But the vote to adopt Gov.

Father Carlos Bravo, a Jesuit theologian who works out of a discreet office in a colonial neighborhood of Mexico City, tells of an exchange he had with a Venezuelan colleague who boasted that the church-state relationship in his country was the most stable marriage in the world. In Mexico, the soft-spoken Bravo responded, the church and state are not married but are participants in "the most stable concubinage there is."