By SAM DILLON

          MEXICO CITY -- The governing party won the big prizes in three state elections on Sunday,
          closing out an election year in which it has repeatedly humbled its bickering opposition rivals.
          The results fuel the party's hopes of extending its 70-year domination of Mexican politics into the
          next century.

          President Ernesto Zedillo's party, known as the PRI, elected governors in Sinaloa on the Pacific
          Coast and Puebla, east of the capital. Preliminary returns showed that the PRI might have also
          regained municipal control over three state capitals that had fallen to the opposition.

          A leftist coalition won the governorship of Tlaxcala, a tiny state northeast of here.

          With the Sunday results the PRI has won seven of the 10 governor's races this year, reversing a
          three-year slide that had convinced many Mexicans that an opposition victory in presidential balloting
          in 2000 was all but inevitable.

          Behind the gains, analysts said, were torrents of campaign money and the use of primary elections to
          select some candidates. That is a a dramatic new tactic that has benefited PRI candidates with
          months of free media coverage.

          Another powerful factor has been the opposition's continued division into two rival parties that split
          the anti-PRI vote. The opposition parties have also moved sluggishly to adjust to the PRI's new
          tactics, analysts said.

          "Our opposition parties are still terribly inept," said Federico Estevez, a political scientist at the
          Autonomous Technical Institute who is often critical of the PRI.

          The leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution, or PRD, fared better this year than its ideological
          rival, the pro-business National Action Party, or PAN.

          The leftist party, formed in 1989 as a coalition of PRI dissidents and former socialists, all but
          disappeared in the face of government repression in the early 1990s but has prospered under
          Zedillo's presidency. Last year the party elected Cuauhtemoc Cardenas as the first opposition mayor
          of Mexico City.

          This year the party consolidated its growth into a serious national force by winning its first two
          governorships, in the central mining state of Zacatecas in July and on Sunday in Tlaxcala.

          In both cases the victorious candidates were disaffected PRI leaders who had defected after having
          failed to win the governing party's endorsement.

          The big loser this year was the PAN, a 59-year-old party with roots in the Roman Catholic Church.
          In the first half of the 90s the party won control of so many state and city governments that many
          people had begun to view its electoral momentum as almost irresistible. But the party opened the
          electoral season this year by suffering a stunning defeat to the PRI in July in one of the six states that
          it controlled, Chihuahua, bordering Texas.

          In August the PAN celebrated the election of its candidate for governor of the north-central
          industrial state of Aguascalientes. But this month the PRI again routed it in the northeastern state of
          Tamaulipas. And on Sunday PAN candidates went down to defeat in Sinaloa and Puebla.

          Preliminary returns suggest that the PAN may have also lost municipal control over three of the 13
          state capitals that it had governed.

          "The PAN has had a bad time all year, and Sunday was a disaster," said Rafael Gimenez, chief
          pollster for Reforma, the Mexico City newspaper.
 
 

                     Copyright 1998 The New York Times Company