The “Stolen” Election of 1988

There is an intriguing story of the breakdown of the PRI’s legendary election machinery that begins with the events of the election of July 6, 1988 when the carefully orchestrated process of presidential succession nearly collapsed. It was this near-breakdown of that selection process on the eve of the transfer of power from President Miguel de la Madrid to his presidential appointee, that put the legitimacy of the regime in a state of crisis. The events of the election night would expose the Party’s use of electoral fraud at a time when it faced its most important electoral challenge, and would subsequently create a split within the Party over electoral and economic reform. Salinas would use that crisis to make difficult and unpopular changes in Mexico’s economic and political system.

Free democratic elections were among the rights the new Constitution granted to Mexican citizens, but as with the Constitution’s list of economic rights, what was guaranteed in theory was denied in practice. In practice elections were engineered in advance by the ruling Party so as to guarantee a sufficient number of PRI votes in a sufficient number of precincts to keep PRI candidates in office. Working through the ministry of the interior and the state election commissions, the PRI would simply fail to purge the names of deceased voters from voter registration lists, and then bring in people to each precinct to vote in place of those non-existent voters. The whole system was an elaborate ritual to preserve the façade of a free election, but it was common knowledge that campesinos and loyal PRI members would get on busses on election night and spend the evening riding to various precinct polling places to vote. At each location, a PRI member would issue false identification badges to members of these “floating brigades” and they would vote under fictitious names. When sufficient votes had been cast to assure PRI victories in key precincts, the brigades would return to the countryside for an evening meal and drinks in appreciation for having done their part for their government.[i]

Once the votes were cast, the election process was a more straightforward – usually just a matter of tabulating and posting the results. Civilian election volunteers would monitor the collection of voting cards at each polling place. The cards would be tallied in the presence of representatives from rival parties, and placed in ballot boxes. The vote totals would be recorded and sent along with the ballot boxes to the department of the interior in Mexico City, where they would be archived. This raises the question of why opposition parties acquiesced in a process that was almost sure to exclude them. The regime would not tolerate a threat to its existence, but it would bend to accommodate or to co-opt dissent as an alternative to repression. Opposition parties could influence the regime, though they could not threaten the regime.

Manipulation of elections was a matter of careful demographic analysis beforehand and a projection of each district’s PRI membership. The outcome of Mexican elections depended on almost perfect knowledge of which districts needed additional PRI votes in order to achieve an electoral success. They were remarkably good at doing this, as Jorge Castañeda, author of a book on Mexican presidential succession, observed:

The authorities – the minister of the interior, the director of the National Voter’s registry, the director of political and social investigation at the ministry of interior – negotiated the election district by district. Nothing was left to chance. Attention to detail was deservedly legendary. This and other factors enabled the PRI to win all elections in which it participated by large and acceptable margins.[ii]

The PRI had always managed a large majority of the popular vote, and the Party’s vote-gathering and vote-producing machine paid great attention to each district’s PRI membership, and had the ability to calculate the expected vote from each precinct. Where additional votes were needed, the Party had elaborate and time-tested mechanisms in place to deliver the extra votes needed for a majority. Sometimes “floating brigades” of party loyalists were bussed from precinct to precinct, voting under different identities each time. Sometimes voter registration lists were manipulated. Sometimes the locations of polling places were changed at the last minute. In every case, the electoral outcome was calculated in advance, and every PRI governor and district representative had a part to play in delivering the expected results. In order for the system to work, everyone in the Party hierarchy had to do their part, but in 1988 no one did. Salinas’s election staff pursued the usual upper-level contacts without the additional effort and attention to detail that would insure the precinct-level votes on which the election depended.[iii] An administrative failure, coupled with an unexpected level of grass-roots opposition would nearly cost the Party the presidency, and put its legitimacy in question for the remainder of Salinas’s six-year term – the presidential sexenio.

The opposition to the PRI in 1988 was more formidable than it had been since the 1920s. A leftist coalition of parties called the Frente Democratico Nacional (FDN) emerged to challenge the PRI openly. The FDN was led by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, a former PRI governor of the state of Michoacán, and grandson of Lázaro Cárdenas. His coalition won wide popular support in the 1980s by promising a combination of democratic reforms and a resumption of government spending. Manuel Bartlett, Salinas de Gortari’s campaign manager, had acceded to a request by the FDN and the more traditionalist Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) that election returns from the Federal Election Commission’s new computerized system be broadcast as they were received. The opposition parties on both the left and the right recognized that the election of 1988 could be close, and they hoped to reduce the PRI’s opportunity to juggle election returns before reporting them. The computer system that tabulated the votes from the precincts was installed in the basement of the Ministry of the Interior, and Bartlett arranged for the election results to be selectively displayed on monitors at the Insurgentes Sur – the offices of the Voters Registry. He convinced the officials at the Federal Election Commission to release partial returns for the presidential election as votes came in to Mexico City – returns that would be filtered by Party officials before being displayed. The entire scheme would unfold in an unexpected way, leading to an election-night fiasco that would leave the incoming president without a clouded mandate to govern, and the PRI with the legacy of having “stolen” the 1988 election.

The government assured rival parties that they would have direct access to voting results as the ministry of the interior received them. This was not true. Voting results received by the Federal Election Commission would be fed directly into the department of the interior’s computers, and then a PRI official would feed the results to monitors set up for the press and the opposition parties. This seemed an adequate safeguard in case the election returns did not go well for the PRI, but as one election commission official put it to a deputy minister of the interior, “I’m going to send them the most convenient information I get at the SNIPE (National Political Electoral System). The rest stays here. You’ll have a problem on your hands if it doesn’t work. Either they’ll turn on the machine and there will be no data, or compromising information will get out.”[iv] Despite the warning, Bartlett had little choice but to go ahead with the plan. He had already agreed to the opposition’s demand for release of election returns, and to renege would be a tacit admission of fraud on the eve of a very important presidential transition. Salinas de Gortari already was saddled with the reputation of being the architect of Miguel de la Madrid’s economic policy, and would also have to carry the legacy of six years of austerity. 

When the polls closed on July 6, election returns from the various precincts began to come in to the Ministry of the Interior, and the officials at the election commission began releasing data to the terminals at the Voters Registry. At around 5:00 p.m. the first results from the system in the Ministry of the Interior were transmitted to the monitors in the Voter’s Registry. The opposition party members and the press were watching the terminals, believing that they were seeing results sent real-time through a secondary computer system that collated the data gathered by the election commission. The PRI was winning by its expected margin when an unanticipated thing happened. One opposition party member used a password to open a “closed” file at his terminal in the Voters Registry, and he accessed the votes from the losing precincts that the PRI had intended to hide or manipulate prior to release. The real vote tallies from the losing precincts flashed on the terminals in front of the press and the opposition party members. Precincts that should have returned solid PRI majorities showed vote totals indicating that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was winning. This was the case in precinct after precinct. Author Jorge Castañeda describes the events that followed:

Suddenly the screen flickered, and results from the “bad” precincts in Hidalgo appeared. The PAN technician printed the list and attempted to get further information. One of the PRI representatives removed him almost forcibly from his terminal, contacted de Lasse at the Ministry of the Interior and seven minutes later the system “crashed.”[v]

After the PRI announced that the system had “crashed,” no more electoral results were posted. That evening the press and the opposition parties began protesting that the PRI had reneged on its promise, and was withholding election data. Bartlett made the decision to release no more election data until he could either confirm or engineer a PRI victory. As Cárdenas supporters launched a demonstration in the streets outside, Salinas’s managers spent a long night trying to save the election. By 9:00 p.m. they knew they had lost Mexico City and the states of Mexico, Michoacán, Morelos, and possibly Guerrero and Baja California.[vi] With the flow of information to the other parties cut off, President Miguel de la Madrid tried to convince Salinas to go downstairs at PRI headquarters and make a victory speech. Despondent, Salinas refused.

Miguel de la Madrid later described the events in an interview with Jorge Castañeda. He said that the PRI party president repeatedly tried to get Carlos Salinas to go out and announce his victory, as was the custom on election night. Salinas replied, “The problem is I have no grounds to do so.” His Party advisor insisted, saying, “Listen, Carlos, this is going to give people cause for suspicion, because the PRI candidate traditionally appears around 11 p.m. or midnight to proclaim his victory. If you don’t there will be problems.”[vii] Salinas would not leave to face the press and the television cameras. Finally outgoing president Miguel de la Madrid sent the PRI president himself out to declare the Party’s victory, while the president-elect remained inside at Party headquarters.

The following day, Salinas appeared in public to announce both his own victory and, curiously, the “end of the era of the virtually single party” political system in Mexico.[viii] As he began his speech to the assembled legislators, members of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’s coalition walked out of the Chamber of Deputies in a bold protest against the regime and the election. With that inauspicious beginning, the Salinas administration embarked on a series of radical economic reforms that would end the nationalistic, state-development model as it had been practiced since World War II. Decentralization of economic power would sever decades-old ties between “corporate” political elites and the government, reduce the power of the state bureaucracy, and lead to meaningful reform of the electoral system. Economic reform would accelerate the pace of political reform, and allow opposition groups such as the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) and Partido Revolucionario Democratica (PRD) a greater presence in the government. The reform movement would culminate in the election on July 2, 2000 of the PAN presidential candidate Vicente Fox whose victory marked the first time that an opposition candidate had been elected to office since 1928.[ix] To appreciate the significance of Fox’s election, one must be familiar with the political structures that had perpetuated the hegemony of the PRI since the 1930s. In the following chapter, I will examine the beginnings of Mexico’s political model and the mechanisms that comprised the inclusive-authoritarian state.