On July 2, Mexicans will elect a (one term) president, as they do every six years. This year, for the first time in over 50 years, a candidate from a party other than the (PRI) Partido Revolucion Institucional (Party of Institutionalized Revolution), may assume the presidency.

It's not necessarily the first time that an opposition candidate received the majority of votes. The PRI has maintained their hold on political power through the decades, in part (to say the least), by institutionalizing corruption. Stealing a presidential election, should it prove necessary, was no big thing. It seldom proved necessary. Dispensing favors, access and contracts, and outright vote buying stole most elections long before the ballot box. Not to mention ready use of political violence up to and including assassination, as elements of the PRI apparently used against their own presumptive candidate Donald Collosio, in 1996.

Collosio was hand-picked by the outgoing president, Carlos Salinas. This is the way PRI candidates were traditionally chosen, picked by the outgoing president, then invariably elected. After being selected to carry the PRI's new banner of reform, Collosio showed dangerous signs of independence and real reformist zeal. He looked to be going beyond the PRI's intention of reform as a flag to be waved or occasionally to drape oneself in. Elements of the PRI, including apparently, Carlos' brother, Raul Salinas, arranged for Collosio's assassination at a rally in Tijuana. This scandal, as high reaching as it ran, didn't really unveil anything that wasn't widely known. While further damaging the party's already waning credibility, it was just one more horrifying scandal with the PRI at the center. In the meantime, former president Salinas lives in exile as the result of another scandal involving misappropriation of several billions of the government's pesos and the collapse of the national economy.

The Salinas debacle, at least, bolstered the reform elements of the PRI. Ernesto Zedillo, picked by party bosses to replace the murdered Collosio, while not exactly a champion of far reaching reform, is at least not a racketeer. An Ivy League educated engineer, he's got neo-liberal policy wonk written all over him. Visualize Gary Locke as President.

The current PRI candidate to replace the outgoing Zedillo, Francisco Labastida was selected in a fractious primary last November, the PRI's first primary in forever. It demonstrates how much Mexico's politics have changed in the last decade, and yet underlines how much time, struggle and bloodshed must be expended to bring about such changes.

In the election of 1988, Cuautemoc Cardenas ran as the presidential candidate of the opposition Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). As John Ross writes in The Annexation of Mexico (Common Courage Press, 1998) "Cardenas' stormy exit from the PRI--he had been the PRI governor of Michoacan from 1980 through 1986--attracted popular attention to his left coalition candidacy, and his critique of a corrupt, corporate political system that his own father had played a definitive role in shaping, struck a chord."

Ross further recounts that three hours after the polls closed, with early results showing Cardenas outstripping the PRI candidate, Salinas, the Federal Election Commission's computers "crashed." A week later, Salinas was declared the victor with 39% of the vote to Cardenas' 37%. Later, activists dumped sack-fulls of partially burned pro-Cardenas ballots on the floor of the electoral college's convention that ratified Salinas' election. Prominent opposition leaders began to disappear. Rumblings began to roll through the civil society.

The general unrest got a face--that of the masked Zapatistas--on January 1, 1994. Although in many ways closer to a direct action group than a credible national army of liberation, the Zapatistas' influence on the opening of Mexican politics cannot be underestimated. If their influence has waned, it is in part because of the general increase of volume from quarters previously silent. Other armed, indigenous groups began operating in other parts of Mexico, activists and opposition politicians were energized, new action groups formed almost every day. And the PRI suddenly found itself answering a lot of questions.

Not from the U.S. government. We sent helicopters and military advisors, provided intelligence and arranged a bailout of the corruption-depleted economy. The PRI are our guys.

A lot of the questions came from Europe. Inquiries emanated from the U.N. Mary Mcarthy, the U.N. high commissioner on human rights visited Mexico last November. Her mission focused on two areas. Chiapas, and interestingly, Tijuana, where she focused on the human rights implications of U.S. border enforcement policies and practices.

The political equation has changed in the twelve years since Cardenas had the election stolen from him. In 1997, he was elected mayor of Mexico City, arguably the most prominent elected office in the country after the presidency. (Imagine the mayor's office of a city that is New York, D.C., and Los Angeles rolled into one). He became the first non-PRI mayor of the city in decades. Slowly but steadily, opposition parties gained inroads on the PRI's political monopoly.

Things are changing in Mexico, but the political landscape remains largely controlled by the usual powers. The election process itself, while getting cleaner, is not without irregularities. During the PRI's primary, the party's machinery was turned against the rivals of Labastida, the elites' favorite. In some districts, there were more ballots cast than voters to cast them; in some places, more votes than counted ballots. National media ran photos of "labastidista" PRI officials hijacking ballot boxes at gunpoint.

With three candidates representing three parties, campaign season is in full bloom: Labastida, Cardenas, and Vicente Fox, the candidate of the rightist PAN, (Partido Accion Nacional).

Part two of this article will focus on the candidates, the campaigns and their effects, on both sides of the border.