Past may hurt PRI's chance

 MORRIS THOMPSON AND RICARDO SANDOVAL
 Herald World Staff

 ``People vote in part for political parties, in part for the political effects, and in part
 for the candidates,'' Francisco Labastida said in Spanish. ``I hope I can convince
 the majority of citizens that not only do I have the necessary knowledge, but also
 the personal history of always conducting myself honestly and the personal
 characteristics that would enable the country to progress.''

 But even the former state governor and three-time federal cabinet secretary
 concedes that the July 2 election is more likely to hinge on whether Mexicans
 want his Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI in Spanish) to keep the reins of
 power it has held since 1929. The public's reaction to the outcome has profound
 bearing on the stability of what has become the largest trading partner of the
 United States.

 Labastida's problem is that while the election looks to be the cleanest in Mexican
 history, many Mexicans could still refuse to believe that he won fair and square.
 That's because his margin would probably come mostly from the 27 percent of
 voters who live in the countryside and are overwhelmingly poor. In many rural
 areas, there is no political party other than the PRI, and critics say poor,
 uneducated people have been threatened with losing their meager government
 support if they do not vote for the ruling party.

 According to his own polls, Labastida is 6 percentage points ahead his main rival,
 Vicente Fox, a former governor of the state of Guanajuato who is the nominee of a
 coalition headed by Fox's National Action Party (PAN in Spanish). Former
 Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is running third, with about 16 percent
 of the vote in polls, while three other candidates appear likely to split a smaller
 share of the tally.
 `I'M CONSISTENT'

 Labastida distinguished himself from Fox by saying, ``I don't change my opinion
 every three or four days. I'm consistent in what I say, and it fits with what I do. . . .
 I've researched the things that I promise. I've made too many promises at times,
 but I have been consistent in terms of the financial resources required to carry
 them all out.''

 By contrast, he said, Fox has promised to devote 4 percent of Mexico's annual
 gross national product to education, boost support to its 32 states and federal
 district for science and technology and eliminate many taxes.

 ``It all adds up to about 10 percent of the gross national product,'' Labastida said.
 ``It would bring inflation and fail to generate jobs -- an economic disaster.''

 Labastida, who will be 58 Aug. 14, gets generally good marks for his service as,
 successively, federal secretary of energy, of agriculture and of the interior. A
 native of the working port town of Los Mochis, he was elected governor of his
 native state of Sinaloa in 1987.

 He has an economics degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico
 (UNAM) in Mexico City, and his wife, María Teresa Uriarte, is an authority on
 pre-Columbian history. They have five adult children.
 PROMISES

 As president, he promises, as does Fox, to improve the country's public schools.
 He says he'd root out official corruption, significantly by trying to professionalize
 the country's criminal justice system and especially its police. He promises to
 help build 700,000 housing units a year, mostly for poor workers. He says that his
 proposal to finance the key infrastructure for those new houses would generate
 about 1.25 million jobs.

 He says he'd work with Mexico's states in the fight against drug trafficking and
 other crimes.

 Labastida favors the continued gradual globalization of Mexico's economy, and
 wouldn't seek changes in the North American Free Trade Agreement with the
 United States and Canada. Many Mexican voters seem to question not
 Labastida's sincerity, but the company he keeps. As the race with Fox tightened,
 Labastida has pointed with pride to his 37 years in the PRI, trying to shore up the
 party's traditional bases of support. But many disaffected Mexicans see the PRI
 as having a history of electoral fraud.

 ``In this country where there has never been democracy, many peasants cannot
 even imagine a free choice in their vote,'' said Lorenzo Meyer, a political scientist
 at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City. ``And many of them see no distinction
 between the country and the PRI.''

 He said the PRI's strength is still centered on late 1930s and early 1940s reforms
 that redistributed great estates to peasant cooperatives.

 ``From the beginning, the peasants understood that the payment for the land they
 got was their support for the PRI.''

 Said Rogelio Gomez, the national coordinator for Alianza Cívica (Civic Alliance), a
 nonpartisan group founded to monitor Mexico's elections, ``The problem is to
 know whether the votes of peasants are genuinely free and fair. In most of the
 rural election districts, there won't even be observers from any party except the
 PRI.''