PAN Pioneers Went From Shadows to Day in the Sun

For decades they campaigned in vain, ignored by the media and hassled by the police. Lawyers, businesspeople and housewives, they financed shoestring campaigns with pocket money and waited for cover of darkness to post fliers. Some ended up in jail, others were shunned by relatives and associates.

During those dark years, members of Mexico’s opposition National Action Party, or PAN, knew only one thing for certain: Come election day, they would lose again.

So among the most joyous celebrators since the PAN’s candidate, Vicente Fox, won Mexico’s presidency Sunday are the party’s oldest members. The long-awaited triumph, which unseated the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, after a 71-year reign, is vindication for a feisty opposition group that for six decades has been the most stubborn voice for fair elections in Mexico but never won much notice outside the country for its efforts.

Capturing the presidency is the final piece in a strategy in which the PAN took aim at state and local government posts during the past 20 years as a way to convince people that it could eventually lead the nation. The party now boasts seven governorships and nearly 300 mayoralties, many of them in major cities.

For party stalwarts baptized in defeat and later heartened by wins here and there, the Fox victory caps an arduous and largely unheralded trek.

“I still don’t believe it,” said Maria Elena Alvarez, a PAN senator who recalls the days in the 1950s when she and her husband waited until the dead of night to post fliers in order to avoid police. “I had almost thought that I was never going to see this.”

These are heady times indeed for a small, right-leaning party that, during much of its history, was characterized by detractors as little more than a bankers’ club and a tool of the Roman Catholic Church.

Swept into power years after a global democratic wave toppled the Berlin Wall and ended one-party dominance in a host of nations, the PAN benefited from pent-up economic discontent, Fox’s personal charisma and a series of electoral reforms that made the ruling party’s long practice of vote-rigging difficult to continue.

Since the mid-1980s, said Julio Faesler, a PAN congressman, “there were new winds in the Mexican political atmosphere. Since then, our struggle for respect intensified more and more.”

In 1989, 50 years after its founding, the PAN won its first governorship. The victory in Baja California presaged wins in other states, including Guanajuato, where Fox became governor in 1995.

Police Harassment Marked Early Years

But for most of the earlier decades, victory for the PAN was nearly as unlikely as a snowstorm in the resort city of Cancun. PAN candidates ran afoul of police, who would show up at meetings and unplug microphones or detain candidates and their aides on grounds that they were creating social disorder. When the PAN became a more formidable foe in later years, the PRI stuffed ballot boxes and, in some cases, stole them.

“It was practically impossible to win at the polls,” said Luis H. Alvarez, an 80-year-old PAN senator from the northern state of Chihuahua.

Alvarez said he got “not a single minute” of radio coverage when he ran as the PAN candidate for president in 1958. Newspapers refused to carry the party’s statements.

Alvarez was jailed briefly in the central state of Zacatecas after police turned up before a campaign meeting and started tearing down microphone wires. “The crime: being a candidate of the opposition,” Alvarez said.

Carlos Castillo Peraza, who ran for various posts in the state of Yucatan in the 1970s and 1980s before becoming the party’s national president, said that while he was campaigning in 1979, his wife received an anonymous telephone call at home.

“They said: ‘Mr. Castillo was in an accident and he is dead. You can get the body tomorrow,’ ” Castillo recalled. Another time, a caller warned, “We know very well where your children study--pay attention.”

“It was not an exception, my case,” said Castillo, who is now a consultant and writer. “There were hundreds, thousands.”

Suspicions linger in PAN circles about the death of Manuel J. Clouthier, who ran for president under the party’s banner in 1988. Many, including Clouthier’s children, suspect that he was assassinated when he and another party official died in a car crash in 1989. The crash occurred in the Pacific state of Sinaloa a year after Clouthier finished a distant third in a race that is widely believed by Mexicans to have been won by leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas but stolen by the PRI.

Whatever travails the PAN suffered during those years, it suffered alone. It got little support abroad and was odd man out in the Cold War: The United States preferred the stability of the PRI government, and the Soviet Union found nothing appealing in the PAN’s free-market ideals and emphasis on self-reliance and the individual. The party, composed mainly of middle-class Mexicans, lacked a dynamic leader capable of grabbing world attention in the way the country’s leftists did.

Vikram Chand, an expert on the PAN who has written on Mexican politics, said the party’s long march did not achieve the global following of movements elsewhere in part because the PRI, which offered significant social improvements as it kept down its foes, did not fit the profile of a brutal dictatorship.

“We’re dealing with a party that had major achievements and a major importance in Mexico,” Chand said. “We’re not dealing with a party that was explicitly evil.”

And many people remained wary of the PAN’s ties to the Catholic Church, still the object of suspicion because of its dominant role in Mexico’s economy and politics in the 18th and 19th centuries.

“Most people on the outside, intellectuals in the United States, perceived the PAN as it was described by the ruling party--and that is a party of elites, rich, conservatives and ‘clericists,’ ” said David A. Shirk, a UC San Diego scholar.

Party Leans Toward Conservative Views

To be sure, the party has espoused socially conservative views on matters such as abortion, which is illegal in Mexico in most cases. PAN officials in some municipalities have cracked down on prostitution and the number of bars. But scholars dismiss stereotypes of the PAN as an agent of zealots as a gross distortion. “It is unjust, undeserved, inaccurate,” Chand said. “It underestimates the PAN profoundly.”

The party was founded by Manuel Gomez Morin, an economist and intellectual with a fondness for classic verse, as a brake on the ruling party. The PAN gained the backing of student activists, disaffected businesspeople and Catholics opposed to government curbs on the clergy.

A turning point for the party came in the 1980s, the result of a growing urban middle class and of reforms in the late 1970s that guaranteed opposition parties seats in the Congress, even though the presidency remained a far-off target.

And Alvarez won international attention in 1986 when, as mayor of the city of Chihuahua, he went on a hunger strike for 40 days to protest vote fraud. Complaints of fraud escalated after the 1988 presidential election, during which voting was marred by a suspicious breakdown of the ballot-counting computer.

“In the rest of the world there was a climate of democratization, and in Mexico there was massive and scandalous voter fraud,” said Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, the PAN’s current president.

In 1988, the controversy prompted Mexico’s newly elected president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, to institute voting reforms and recognize the election a year later of PAN candidate Ernesto Ruffo Appel as governor of Baja California.

Despite the PAN’s growing profile in the 1990s, Fox relied less on the party than on his own political action committee, called Friends of Fox, in pursuing the presidency. Some PAN leaders resisted his candidacy, fearing that he was too independent.

But exultant PAN loyalists say he could not have triumphed without the help of the party, which has about 150,000 dues-paying members and more than 200,000 listed sympathizers.

Now preparing to take power, PAN leaders said they must find ways to expand the party beyond its middle-class base in the cities and the northern border region. In the face of criticism that the party is too clubby, Bravo Mena said officials will loosen requirements for newcomers, who now must be nominated by two members and take classes in PAN beliefs before being admitted. The party held its first-ever primary to nominate Fox, though he was the only candidate. Bravo Mena predicted more changes.

Other veterans of the prolonged struggle expressed hope that the winners will not forget the movement’s pioneers.

“I am not angry or envious of the people who can win,” said Castillo, the former PAN chief. “But I think they should be grateful publicly for the people who fought before in very, very difficult and dangerous conditions.

“Democracy in Mexico did not begin this Monday.”