Faults seen in Mexico's democracy: Many citizens' hopes tempered as election nears

By DUDLEY ALTHAUS

SAN LUIS POTOSI, MEXICO - Like many thousands of Mexicans, Guillermo Pizzuto spent decades struggling to bring democracy to his country: marching in countless protests, enduring beatings by police, winning office as an opposition candidate.
Democracy finally is grabbing hold here.

Elections are mostly clean, and political parties unmolested. Local and state governments enjoy greater autonomy. Congress and the courts have been unleashed from presidential control. And this July's presidential elections might well be the most evenly balanced, wide open and unpredictable in Mexican history.
So Pizzuto feels vindicated, right?
Not even close.
Like many millions of Mexicans, Pizzuto thinks that democracy has come up far short. He and many others complain that the country's politicians are out to help themselves, not Mexico's poor majority.
"Democracy, such as it is, exists because there were a lot of people pushing for it from below," said Pizzuto, 61, whose family-owned foundry employs hundreds of workers in San Luis Potosi, a colonial city and industrial center in the high desert 250 miles north of Mexico City.
"It was an effort by many people, for many years," he said. "It wasn't about going after an election victory. It was about creating a space for society and government to work together."
"Seeing how things are now, who wouldn't be disappointed?"
Expectations overflowed nearly six years ago when Vicente Fox won the presidency, ending the seven-decade grip on national power held by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, an autocratic machine born of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
Many thought fair elections that alternated power between political parties would be enough to quickly end corruption, force rulers to heed the ruled, create more wealth and divide it more fairly.
"We held wrong assumptions," said political scientist Sergio Aguayo, an early leader of the democracy movement that sprang from the bitter 1988 presidential elections, which many think were stolen by the PRI.
"We expected that with electoral democracy there would be a trickle down of positive effects," Aguayo said. "That did not happen."
Today, corruption and abuse of power continue to plague Mexican public life. Gangland violence, drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime are as rampant as ever.
The Mexican economy ambles along much as it did when the government was less-than-democratic, failing to provide enough jobs for a growing population. With many wages barely above desperation level, hundreds of thousands of people illegally migrate to the United States seeking a future.
Things have changed, certainly. But they've stayed all too much the same.
"All Mexico thought that it was enough to overthrow the PRI and substitute it with another party for politics to work," said political analyst Luis Aguilar, a top political operative in the last PRI presidency in the 1990s.
"It was a terribly simplistic position in which the intellectuals and politicians participated. The PRI political system fell, but a democratic political system wasn't constructed."
Voter frustration was blamed for the abysmal participation in the July 2003 midterm elections, in which only 42 percent of voters turned out. Though interest is naturally higher in the coming presidential elections, none of the candidates this year has generated the excitement Fox did in 2000.
Former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, leads handily in most opinion polls on presidential preferences. He's followed by Felipe Calderon of Fox's center-right National Action Party, or PAN, and the PRI's Roberto Madrazo, who trails badly.

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