c. 2000 Religion News Service

CUERNAVACA, Mexico _ Despite polls showing otherwise, Salvador Guzman and others affiliated with the Base Christian Community (BCC) movement here remain hopeful that Cuauhtemoc Cardenas can pull off Sunday (July 2) what has eluded him twice before: a victory in the Mexican presidential elections.

To Guzman and others, the sober and upright Cardenas _ who split from the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in 1988 to form his own left-of-center party _ has their support by virtue of his dedication, integrity and support of progressive causes.

At the same time, the activism of the members of the Base Christian Community movement _ something akin to the house church movement in the United States _ is a sign of increased religious participation in Mexican public life, which has long been marked by a suspicion of any entanglement of politics and religion.

Sunday’s election is being touted as a potential turning point in Mexican history because it could spell the defeat, for the first time in 70 years, of the ruling PRI.

To BCC activists, however, a vote for Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN), currently in a statistical dead heat with PRI candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa, is a betrayal, despite Fox’s courting of Cardenas and his progressive supporters.

“Cardenas represents a tradition of democratic struggle,” said Guzman, a political analyst and activist. “Fox is talking like he is a part of that tradition, but he is not. It is the left that has opened the road to democracy in this country.”

Even so, there are anecdotal rumblings that some in the lay-led Christian activist groups who were in the vanguard in the development of liberation theology in the 1970s and ’80s and who remain active in Cuernavaca, a city 50 miles southwest of Mexico City, may cast their ballots for Fox, if only as a protest against the 71-year rule of the PRI and out of questions about Cardenas’ performance as mayor of Mexico City.

As a result, BCC leader Dolores Diaz seemed to be steeling herself for a Cardenas defeat.

“The struggle (for democracy) will continue no matter who is elected,” she said.

But even loyal Cardenas supporters say fractures within his party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), have hurt him, as has a dynamic _ some say overly slick _ campaign by Fox.

Fox, a onetime Coca-Cola executive, is the standard-bearer of a pro-business party whose historical roots are in the conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church. Ironically, Fox now counts among his advisers such well-known left-of-centers figures as the political scientist and writer Jorge Castaneda, who teaches at New York University.

Fox even has the support of a nascent Green (or Ecology) Party, though activists like Guzman and Cuernavaca environmentalist Areli Carreon say they have doubts about the progressive credentials of some of Fox’s well-known supporters.

But Carreon, a PRD supporter, has worked with local PAN and PRI officials on environmental issues, and has said grass-roots activists like herself are prepared to work with anyone “if practical results can be achieved.”

“Democracy doesn’t end with the election, it begins with the election,” she said during the last days of an election campaign in which it seemed every street in Cuernavaca was festooned with campaign posters, leaflets and banners.

Eric Olson, senior associate for Mexico at the Washington Office on Latin America, a church-sponsored education and advocacy group, said Mexico’s seemingly shifting alliances between left, center and right may puzzle outsiders but are easier to grasp once it is understood that the political center in Mexico is “way to the left” of the center in the United States. There is little real disagreement in Mexico, for example, about the need for government to play a role in society.

Given that reality, Fox has had to overcome the tag of “extremism” _ an accusation made in part because of conservative social policies of several state PAN governments, ranging from public pleas to a teen-age rape victim not to have an abortion to banning nude portraits in public.

Earlier in the campaign, Fox rallies prominently featured the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe, the nation’s most potent religious symbol. But after being criticized for that display, and as the campaign wound down before the election, the banner disappeared.

The role of the still-dominant and generally conservative Roman Catholic Church _ always a sensitive issue in Mexico given the bloody history of state-church antagonism in the first half of the 20th century _ has not been a major issue in the campaign, as the church “has been extremely careful” not to appear partisan, Olson said.

In Sunday homilies this week, Mexican bishops did say people should exercise their right to vote and that the government should respect the electoral process.

“There are many Catholics who are realizing that there is no separation between faith and life,” said Bishop Luis Reynoso of Cuernavaca, who added that voting should be “secret, equal, made without form of payment in return (and) entered into freely and directly,” a reference to lingering concerns about possible electoral fraud.

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It is widely assumed here that Cardenas lost the 1988 election to the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, because of massive voting fraud, though electoral observers such as Alberto Arroyo say now that an independent commission is in charge of the voting, whatever problems occur will be vote-buying and influence prior to the election and not ballot irregularities.

“The most serious problems won’t be seen on election day,” said Arroyo, of the Federal Electoral Institute. “The problems will be part of a political culture that has been built up for 70 years, to pressure people to vote a certain way _ what we call the buying of votes: coercion, bribery.”

Besides those concerns, there is skittishness about what may happen if the PRI, whose influence extends beyond government to include all forms of social institutions including labor, education and business, actually loses control of the presidency and the federal government.

Olson likens this to pre-Jan. 1 fears and uncertainty over the Y2K turnover. While chaos in Mexico is possible, “in the end I don’t think the world will fall apart,” he said.

DEA END HERLINGER