There are three main candidates in Mexico's current presidential campaign. There are three additional candidates, probably the ones who most deserve mention, but that's not going to happen now.

This article was intended to be about the three main contenders. As it turns out, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), and their candidate Francisco Labastida Ochoa, filled up all the allotted space. This sort of usurpation is not unusual for the PRI. They have taken up all the political space in Mexico for 70 years.

Labastida is the PRI's new face on their neoliberal, international development, corruption-as-usual program. At the same time, he is also an old familiar hand in the party's machineworks. He is, by virtue of being PRI, the anointed front-runner. It's his and the PRI's election to lose.

Since the immolation of President Carlos Salinas and his NAFTA dreams of a "first world" Mexico, foreign educated technocrats have fallen out of favor. With Labastida, the PRI hasn't changed it's goals, but they have changed their shirt.

Unlike the traditional technocrat's career of bureaucratic appointments, Labastida is a veteran of the political battlefields. Born in Sinaloa in 1942, he joined the PRI in 1964 and worked his way through the party ranks. He served as governor of his home state of Sinaloa in the late 1980's. Labastida is an economist, but a Mexican one. He was educated at UNAM, not at Harvard. He's seen as the PRI's best hope to keep neoliberalism palatable to Mexicans.

While not in the mold of a typical PRI president, his campaign literature sounds a lot like neoliberal science fiction. The centerpiece of his campaign, an agriculture reform program, could have been designed by Walmart. He envisions "developing" 200,000 small communities to "concentrate the services required in order to live better ... Then, from these towns he wants to extend the services to nearby towns." Labastida's "main pledges towards agriculture" include: "encourage industrialization of products as well as the diversification of crops towards more intense cultivation" (I think Clinton said exactly the same thing recently), and attend to "irrigation systems, tractors, and biotechnology." Another main agricultural pledge is "recapitalization with tax incentives, restructure of the unpaid debts, and access to credits and legal security for the investments." Labastida is unmistakably, a neoliberal candidate.

He's also old school PRI. The party that doesn't believe elections are won at the ballot box, they are won in spite of it. A Labastida slogan is "Exercising power for the benefit of the people." It's no coincidence that, as Labastida has slipped in the polls, the PRI affiliated TV and radio networks have increased coverage of Labastida in proportion. Labastida's director of international affairs dismissed allegations that PRI pressure influenced the increased coverage. She says it simply reflects stepped up campaigning by the candidate. "I think that all this hysteria has to do with the fact that for the opposition, the only way that they can disqualify the PRI is by saying we resorted to the practices of the past .. that the PRI can only win because it is aided by the government."

These practices of the past are illustrated by a tape recording of the PRI governor of Chiapas which was made in April. The governor was recorded describing official pressure on local newspapers to announce Labastida as winner of a televised debate. Independent polls showed otherwise. Newspapers in Chiapas went along with the governor's direction.

While serving on Zedillo's cabinet as head of the Interior Department from 1995-98, Labastida headed a national crime prevention program, his main success being the creation of the Federal Preventive Police (PFP). Christened "Mexico's FBI", they have been described by Subcomandante Marcos as "specializing in students." Like the FBI, the PFP are Mexico's political police. This force remains his legacy.

Another of his main priorities as Interior Secretary was quelling the social unrest in Chiapas. This program, continued by his successor, has lately involved the attentions of the PFP. PFP agents have descended upon the state to join thousands of Mexican soldiers already active in indigenous communities. It is widely reported that the PFP is being used to target political opponents of the PRI. State officials assist in this official harassment by cutting the electricity, water and basic services of opponents. PRI-associated paramilitaries conduct terror raids while the authorities stand by.

Labastida presided over his own campaign against the Zapatistas while Interior Secretary. While he is no longer a government official, as the PRI's presidential candidate, Labastida cannot be considered out of the loop by any means. That Labastida's creation, the PFP, is focused on political opponents of the PRI is business-as-usual for the party.

More of the same is what we could expect from a Labastida presidency. Labastida is the candidate of the PRI, of NAFTA, of the WTO, the World Bank, of Oil companies, mining companies, timber companies, upscale coffee companies, and of the Maquiladoras.

But he's not the only candidate; he has some formidable opposition both from the left and the right.

Recently, an opponent, the PAN's Ernesto Fox, has moved ahead in opinion polls. More about Fox and the PRD's Cardenas in a forthcoming article.

Labastida's English language web site is at www.labastida.org.mx/english.