Mexico presidential elections: Socialist Rosario Ibarra challenges ruling party

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Rosario On July 6, when millions of Mexicans go to the polls to elect a new president, there will be only one candidate on the ballot who genuinely represents the interests of the oppressed majority of the population. That candidate is renowned human-rights activist Rosario Ibarra, presidential candidate of the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) coalition.

"Rosario," as she is commonly known throughout the country, will be the only one to seriously challenge the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has been in power since 1929. Her campaign calls on working people to mobilize independently against the capitalists and the PRI government.

Rosario, who is a two-time Nobel Peace Prize nominee and a deputy in the parliament for the Revolutionary Workers Party Mexico. She will be politics and where less than 20 percent of elected officials are women.' Rosario's election campaign will close with a mass rally on June 26 in the downtown Zocalo (main square) in Mexico City. An estimated 50,000 people from all over the country are expected to attend.

A new phenomenon A great deal of media attention has been devoted in recent weeks to the candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of exGeneral Lázaro Cárdenas, the populist president (1934-40) who nationalized the oil industry and extended the agrarian retorm program.

Cárdenas, who is running as the candidate of the Authentic Revolutionary Party of Mexico (PARM), has mounted a significant challenge to the hand-picked PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who is expected to win the election with approximately 55 percent to 60 percent of the vote.

Cárdenas' candidacy is considered a new phenomenon in Mexican politics. He recently won the endorsement of Heberto Castillo, the presidential candidate of the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS), who stepped down to "ensure that a president of the left could finally be elected."

Cárdenas is the former PRI governor of the west-coast state of Michoacan. He and a current of dissidents known as the "Democratic Current" were expelled from the ruling PRI for opposing the "dedazo," that is, the behind-the-scenes selection of the party's presidential successor.

Since his expulsion from the PRI, Cárdenas has cultivated the populist image aws crowd of his father and has sharpened his demagogic oratory skills. But his challenge to the ruling party is extremely limited. He is for reforming and "modernizing" the ruling PRI, not for overthrowing it.

Cárdenas' campaign manager is none other than Porfirio Munoz Ledo, the former general secretary of the PRI. This is the man who was responsible for decades of fraud, corruption, and repression.

Resisting reformist pressures The election campaign of Rosario Ibarra is the only one in the camp of the working class which has not been thrown off course by the emergence of the charismatic Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas.

Rosario and the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT) have been very clear in characterizing Cárdenas as a bourgeois-nationalist politician and an obstacle to the development of an independent, revolutionary movement in Mexico.

"I wouldn't even walk down the street with Cárdenas!" is how Rosario commonly expresses her disdain for a man whom she calls a "fake dissident," a "fake democrat," and a "member of the ruling PRI family, which is an irreconcilable enemy of Mexico's working people." (from her inaugural speech on Nov. 22, 1987)

But Rosario and the PRT have also been sensitive to the fact that Cárdenas is drawing mass audiences to his rallies. They are aware that this represents a rejection of the PRI and a quest for a new political program on the part of the workers and peasants.

Sergio Rodriguez, a leader of the PRT, summed up the PRT's approach as follows in an interview published in the Frenchlanguage Inprecor (May 9, 1988):

"We must take the initiative to reach out to the masses who are looking to Cárdenas, proposing united actions with them and their leadership around concrete issues such as increasing wages, cancelling the foreign debt, etc.

"But we must not forego building an independent, autonomous, and revolution-