MEXICO: SIGNIFICANT CHANGES TO PRI PARTY POLICY

Описание: (22 Sep 1996) Spanish/Nat

Reforms are in the pipeline for Mexico's ruling party.

The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) passed a series of changes at its party assembly in Mexico City.

Those changes include rules that its presidential candidates must have electoral experience, an implicit slap at the country's last five heads of state.

A packed house as a majority of the four thousand plus delegates moved to change the party rules of Mexico's long-term ruling party.

Behind the hawkers selling party pins and the brass bands playing music there were serious changes in party policy, including tougher requirements for candidates and a stance on economic policy.

A newspaper headline reading "death to Salinas" sums it up as the party put the brakes on its growing embrace of free market economics, dumping the slogan of "social liberalism" associated with former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari's free-market policies.

Salinas, Mexico's last president, barely escaped being expelled from the PRI. He has been severely criticised since ending his term in December 1994 just days before a drastic devaluation of the peso plunged Mexico into severe economic crisis.

And fed up with years of technocratic rule, leaders of Mexico's ruling party on Sunday agreed that its presidential candidates must have prior electoral experience.

Delegates in the rules meeting voted overwhelmingly to require that candidates for president, governor and senator have a history of elected office as well as 10 years membership in the party.

Under that rule, no president since Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, who served from 1964-70, would have qualified as a PRI candidate.

PRI activists, long trained in loyalty to officials, rebelled Saturday night in frustration after years of watching political veterans be passed over in favour of so-called technocrats for many top posts.

That and other rules were passed quickly in a business-like fashion by leaders of the PRI in sharp contrast with a sometimes bitter, nearly violent debate that erupted Saturday night during working sessions of the party assembly.

President Ernesto Zedillo addressed the assembly's closing session later Sunday.

SOUNDBITE: (Spanish)
"All of you have decided to reform today's PRI so that we can have tomorrow's PRI. Unlike any other national assembly, this time around the party's consensus is the exclusive result of the members' decisions."
SUPERCAPTION: Ernesto Zedillo, President of Mexico

Zedillo took office in December 1994 vowing a hands-off attitude toward the party, which has often served as a tool for carrying out presidential will since it was created in 1929.

SOUNDBITE: (Spanish)
"Unlike any other national assembly in the past, this time around there have been absolute freedom to participate, to propose, to decide. With great pride, with great pride (repeat), I state that this time, the official line of the party is that there is no official line.
SUPERCAPTION: Ernesto Zedillo, President of Mexico

The national assembly of the party offered a window on the infighting within the organization that has ruled Mexican politics since it was founded in 1929.

After 67 years in power, it was plain that the PRI is unhappy about the present and
worried about the future.

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