Mexican elections: Ruling party faces challenges from left and right in key states

Reporting from Mexico City —  Mexico’s ruling party is seeking to consolidate its dominance while opposition blocs on the left and right are hoping for gains as Mexicans go to the polls Sunday in state and local balloting.

Voters will be choosing governors in 12 of the nation’s 32 states, along with hundreds of mayors and local lawmakers across the country.

The elections are widely seen as important indicators for the presidential elections of 2018, when the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party will probably face a tough challenge to extend its hold on the reins of power.

The contentious run-up to the elections in several key states has featured rough-and-tumble bouts of name calling, leaks of tapped telephone conversations and allegations that some candidates are linked to drug trafficking cartels.

There have been scattered reports of pre-election violence as authorities beefed up security for the vote.

The nastiest electioneering has been in the southern state of Veracruz, where a pair of cousins is facing off for the governor’s seat amid allegations of pedophilia, ill-gotten riches and secret deals, among other asserted bouts of skullduggery.

On Saturday, the Mexican press reported that a human head was found in front of a school that will serve as a polling place Sunday in a town in Veracruz state. Molotov cocktails and bullets targeted buildings associated with several opposition figures in the state, the press reported, but no serious injuries resulted.

Overall, Sunday’s contests involve 14 states — two of which are not electing governors — that are home to slightly less than one-third of the Mexican population. Voters in Mexico City are electing members of an assembly to write a new constitution for the capital.

The ruling party, known as the PRI, holds the governor’s seats in nine of the 12 states that are choosing new chief executives. Key losses on Sunday could weaken the party’s positioning for presidential balloting two years from now, analysts say.

“The elections of tomorrow are an opener for 2018,” said Lorenzo Mayer, a longtime political analyst here. “What’s in play is 2018.”

Among the closest-watched races are gubernatorial contests in a pair of violence-plagued gulf states — Veracruz, an oil-producing hub that is also rife with corruption, crime and drug-trafficking; and Tamaulipas, a smuggling corridor and organized crime bastion along the U.S. border with Texas.

Tamaulipas and Veracruz have been historic strongholds of the PRI, which has ruled both since the post-revolutionary era in the early 20th century. The PRI’s robust electoral machinery and unrivaled ability to lure masses of voters with promises of gifts, money and jobs make it a formidable foe.

However, widespread discontent with a sluggish economy, rampant corruption and unchecked violence has chipped away at the PRI’s once-monolithic status. The party’s current standard-bearer, President Enrique Peña Nieto, now more than halfway through his six-year term, is battling falling approval ratings.

Current polls show opposition gubernatorial aspirants making strong runs in Tamaulipas and Veracruz.

In Veracruz, outgoing incumbent Gov. Javier Duarte, a PRI stalwart, has been widely accused of mismanagement, corruption and failure to curb violence. A least 15 journalists have been slain in Veracruz during Duarte’s term. He is widely unpopular, the embodiment of the worst of the PRI’s retrograde “dinosaur” wing to his many critics.

The incumbent’s tattered image has complicated matters for the PRI’s current gubernatorial candidate, Hector Yunes Landa, the ruling party’s designated successor to Duarte. The candidate has fought off allegations that he has made a secret pact not to prosecute the current governor or his cronies if he is elected.

Yunes Landa has gone on the offensive against his chief rival — his cousin, Miguel Angel Yunes Linares, candidate of an alliance of convenience of the National Action Party, or PAN, and the left-wing Democratic Revolution Party.

The PRI candidate publicly accused Yunes Linares of being a “pervert” and a “sexual deviant,” citing alleged complicity in a child pornography network. He has denied the various charges and painted the invective as desperate ruling-party smears.

“This is about the most disgusting dirty war that has been mounted against anyone in this country,” Yunes Linares said during a news conference.

Polls have shown a tight three-way race in Veracruz involving the Yunes cousins and a sleeper candidate, Cuitlahuac Garcia, of the National Regeneration Movement, a relatively new leftist party known by its Spanish acronym, Morena.

Morena is the project of one of Mexico’s best-known opposition political actors — Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, former Mexico City mayor and twice-defeated presidential candidate. A victory or even a strong challenge by Morena candidates in Veracruz and elsewhere, analysts say, could be a boost to an expected 2018 Lopez Obrador presidential bid as the vanguard of the left.

In Tamaulipas, which has won notoriety as Mexico’s kidnapping capital and home turf for the Gulf cartel and the Zetas trafficking gang, allegations of various candidates’ links to drug trafficking have been a major theme.

Connections between politicians and traffickers have long been an issue in Tamaulipas. A pair of former governors are fugitives from U.S. money-laundering charges.

Just days before the voting in the last gubernatorial election, the ruling-party candidate and front-runner was shot dead by masked gunmen, a killing attributed to the Gulf cartel.

Recently, Tamaulipas made international headlines when a star Mexican soccer player, Alan Pulido, was kidnapped after attending a club in Ciudad Victoria, the state capital. He was freed within 24 hours when he managed to secure a cellphone from one of his captors and call police, authorities said.

The unusual circumstances — kidnappings seldom have such quick and felicitous endings in Mexico — led some analysts to suggest the episode was a pre-election political set-up.

Polls show Tamaulipas as a tight two-man race in which the PAN hopeful, Francisco Garcia Cabeza de Vaca, a senator and former mayor of the border town of Reynosa, is running close to his PRI rival, Baltazar Hinojosa. Each candidate has accused the other of being in cahoots with the cartels. Both have rejected the charges.

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Cecilia Sanchez of the Times Mexico City bureau contributed.