Newspaper Investigation Illustrates Potential for Fraud

                  By John Ward Anderson and Molly Moore
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  MONTERREY, Mexico—With Mexico's Federal Election Institute
                  boasting about how clean the July 2 presidential vote will be, newspaper
                  reporter Meliton Garcia decided to check for himself. With $110, Garcia
                  obtained an official voting credential with his picture and a fake name.
                  Along with his legitimate voting card, he could then vote twice.

                  Armed with his experience, the 29-year-old reporter wrote a two-part
                  series in Monterrey's El Norte newspaper challenging the institute's
                  assurances. But instead of investigating government employees who Garcia
                  said issued the fraudulent documents, Mexican authorities went after
                  Garcia, charging him with falsifying state and federal documents and lying.
                  The charges carry a mandatory prison term of three months to six years.

                  The incident has highlighted mounting concern among many Mexicans that
                  with election day drawing near and the race between the front-runners
                  tightening, the potential for fraud and other abuses--especially by the
                  government's Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI--seems to be
                  growing.

                  With electoral reforms and increased independent scrutiny, most analysts
                  do not believe it will be possible for any party to get away with massive,
                  wholesale vote-rigging. But there are increasing signs that traditional
                  methods the government has used to attract voters and swell the number of
                  PRI supporters are flourishing. Some Mexicans are worried this could be
                  enough to swing the results in a race that many expect will be decided by
                  just a few percentage points.

                  "I think the IFE [Federal Election Institute] can guarantee a fair vote count,
                  but unfortunately it does not have the jurisdiction to oversee whether voters
                  are being pressured," said Rogelio Gomez, head of Mexico's most active
                  citizens watchdog group, Civic Alliance.

                  Interior Ministry officials conceded that some voting irregularities are
                  possible, but said they would not be enough to influence the results.

                  "I wouldn't call it vote-buying anymore--there is real electoral competition
                  now," said Armado Labra, assistant secretary for political development.
                  "What [some people] call coercion, I would call proselytizing, and the
                  different ways political parties find to convince voters."

                  Federal election officials said they are investigating about 10 state
                  governors and other high-level government employees--most from the
                  PRI--for using government resources and influence to help political
                  candidates, including the PRI's presidential candidate, Francisco Labastida
                  Ochoa.

                  And a variety of other recent incidents suggest that more traditional forms
                  of influence on voting are also being prepared:

                  * More than 20 people were injured in a brawl with police that erupted
                  May 13 in the state of Mexico when poor farmers tried to storm a
                  warehouse with 400 tons of cement meant to pay off people for supporting
                  the PRI on election day, according to press accounts.

                  * In the Caribbean coast state of Veracruz and the central state of
                  Oaxaca, hundreds of tons of disaster relief for victims in last fall's massive
                  floods have not yet been distributed, and opposition parties charge that
                  they are being stockpiled by the PRI to buy votes in July.

                  * Earlier this month, opposition officials in the southern state of Quintana
                  Roo raided a warehouse with hundreds of bicycles and other "gifts" that
                  they said were for PRI supporters.

                  "The buying of PRI votes is going to take place," said Lorenzo Meyer, a
                  political analyst who has been a harsh critic of the ruling party. "The IFE
                  made an effort to inhibit that type of traditional behavior, but couldn't.
                  There are still citadels of the old system that are very active these days."

                  Similarly, a recent congressional study found what appeared to be direct
                  ties between a $1 billion anti-poverty program run by the federal
                  government and rural communities that vote for the PRI. In an interview
                  with the newsmagazine Proceso, the president of the commission, Elodia
                  Gutierrez Estrada of the opposition National Action Party (PAN), said the
                  study found that the program gave the ruling party "direct influence over
                  7.3 million voters."

                  In a recent interview, opposition candidate Vicente Fox said he believes he
                  needs at least a 5 percentage point advantage going into election day to
                  account for voting irregularities. "We know that [fraud] is going to happen,"
                  he said.

                  Fox, who said his polls show that Labastida has 50 percent support in
                  rural areas compared with his 32 percent, conceded that it is very difficult
                  to counter the PRI organization: "I can go there today and convince them
                  [to vote for me] and two weeks from now they receive the oil or the food
                  basket, or one week before election day . . . then they go back to the
                  PRI."

                  A second opposition candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the Democratic
                  Revolutionary Party, is running third in the polls.

                  "The probability of electoral fraud in Mexico is zero," Labastida said in a
                  statement relayed by his spokesman, adding that government anti-poverty
                  programs have "no seasonal projects or programs that have regional
                  preferences."

                  In another indication of how the scales can be tipped, the election institute
                  released a report two weeks ago showing that television and radio
                  coverage of the campaign has been strongly slanted in favor of the PRI.
                  The report showed that from Jan. 19 to April 8, the ruling party received
                  39.1 percent of the coverage in news programs compared with 26.5
                  percent for the PAN, the leading opposition party.

                  But for the most recent reporting period, from March 12 to April 8, the
                  results were even more skewed: 49.5 percent of the coverage was about
                  the PRI, 21.3 percent about the PAN.

                  In recent years, the IFE has invested almost $1 billion in upgrading the
                  country's electoral equipment and technology--buying new voting booths,
                  revamping voting rolls, issuing new tamper-proof credentials for the
                  country's 58.7 million registered voters and conducting major advertising
                  campaigns to educate people in the importance of clean and fair elections.
                  Electoral institute officials have said the new voting lists are 97 percent
                  reliable.

                  Against that backdrop, and with Mexico's decades-long history of
                  electoral corruption, reporter Garcia and Monterrey's El Norte newspaper
                  concluded that the ease of obtaining a fraudulent voting credential was
                  major news.

                  "They've been bragging about this system, and it turns out to be based on
                  good faith; I've got no problem with good faith, but good faith does not
                  cost $1 billion," said Alejandro Junco, president and general director of
                  Grupo Reforma, which owns El Norte and other newspapers in Mexico.

                  Garcia said that he conceived the story last November and found a
                  document trafficker a few blocks from his newspaper. He paid the
                  trafficker 1,000 pesos, and in just three hours the trafficker returned with a
                  birth certificate from the Civil Registrar's office of the state of Nuevo Leon.
                  The certificate had a photograph of Garcia, with a fake date of birth and
                  name.

                  With that birth certificate, after several months of waiting for his application
                  to be processed, Garcia obtained a voting credential.

                  "The reaction [of federal election officials] was a surprise because they
                  immediately began to charge me with a crime," Garcia said. "Nobody has
                  said, 'We're going to fix what he found.' Instead, they said, 'We're going to
                  imprison him because what he found was bad.' They are investigating me
                  and not the problem: There are no regulations preventing someone from
                  obtaining a credential to vote twice."

                  But Federal Election Counselor Juan Molinar said that reporters could not
                  be excused for breaking the law.

                  "I don't think we're being too harsh, and I don't think the public benefit was
                  so large," he said. "He's proven that a person can obtain false credentials.
                  We've known that for years."

                  Researcher Garance Burke contributed to this report.