Pocketbook Issues Weigh Heavily on Mexican Vote Damien Cave - New York Times
go to original July 1, 2012

A flea market in working-class Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, where prosperity is elusive. Many voters are focused on the economy. (Rodrigo Cruz/New York Times)

CIUDAD NEZAHUALCÓYOTL, Mexico — Fernando García fondly recalls the late 1990s, when all three floors of his factory in a green row house here held employees sewing and tagging the women’s slacks that his family has been selling for decades.

But those days are gone, killed off by extortion and a 70 percent drop in sales, and Mr. García’s views on government and politics, like those of many Mexicans, have dimmed with his fortunes.

“We were all hoping for real change with Fox,” he said, referring to former President Vicente Fox, whose victory in 2000 ended seven decades under the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. “It didn’t happen.”

Twelve years and another president from the National Action Party later, Mr. García said, “The rich are richer, the poor are poorer; the rest of us in between, we’re just surviving.”

The results in Mexico’s election on Sunday, in which voters are widely expected to give the PRI another shot at the presidency, could represent a significant rehabilitation of a party dismissed as so corrupt and authoritarian that it amounted to a dictatorship in democratic clothing. It was a party regularly accused of rigging elections, striking secret deals with criminals and collecting bribes so proficiently that piles of pesos were said to fill the pockets and the briefcases of its standard-bearers.

The possible return of the PRI shows the disenchantment many Mexicans feel toward the post-PRI leadership. The explosion of drug-related violence over the past few years is high on the list of concerns, of course, for Mexicans and American policy makers, who say they expect to work closely with the next president to strengthen justice institutions and reduce crime. But voters are equally or more focused on the economy.

It has performed unevenly. Although the currency and debt crises of the 1980s and ’90s have given way to fiscal stability and steady growth, which reached almost 4 percent last year, many areas of Mexico — including working-class cities like this one — have yet to experience reliable prosperity.

“There has been a deterioration in the quality of employment,” said Gerardo Esquivel, an economist at the Colegio de México. “We have a dynamic where we have a modern sector that is experiencing a bonanza and other sectors that are much less dynamic.”

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