Mexico Trucker Online

CHIMALHUACAN, Mexico — Tempers were flaring in this mud-choked slum on the outskirts of the nation’s capital, where rival party representatives traded allegations of vote-buying and fraud Sunday.

The competition to be Mexico’s next president is particularly fierce in this sprawl of cinderblock shacks that’s a historic bastion of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. But in recent years, the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, has built a strong following among the working-class residents.

The PRD candidate, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, needs the vote of places like Chimalhuacan to beat his conservative rival, Felipe Calderón. But the PRI, whose candidate is Roberto Madrazo, wasn’t giving up easily.

“Do something! You’re the one in charge,” shouted a PRD representative after an electoral official sent away one of his party’s election observers on a technicality.

“He’s already done his job,” snapped a woman from the PRI.

Jesus Campos, the local resident appointed to run the voting booth, looked like he might cry.

“Nobody prepared me for this kind of thing,” he said. “Why do they have to get so ugly?”

The party observers are there to catch irregularities, such as voting booth representatives handing out more than one ballot to voters, or failing to mark their finger after voting. But they also are keeping an eye out dirty tricks by their rivals.

“The PRI has been paying people 100 pesos (about $10) per vote, and they want to make sure the people they’ve bought actually show up,” said Horacio Gatica, the PRD official.

“Ask them where they keep the storehouses for the food they are handing out to their voters,” shot back the PRI’s Ricardo Alejo.

Such practices are supposed to be a thing of the past in Mexico, which held its first free and fair presidential elections in 2000.

Since then, Mexico’s Federal Electoral Institute has invested millions in training citizens to man the polling stations and has armed them with fat rule books.

But party rivalries run deep in Chimalhuacan.

In August 2000, the slum was the scene of a bloody clash between rival factions of the PRI, one of which was aligned with the PRD. More than nine people died, and several people were jailed.

However, election officials and residents said Sunday’s voting was far more peaceful than in the past.

“People no longer use violence. We’re more civilized these days,” said Ignacio Reyna, 67, a federal employee waiting in line to vote at a local primary school.

He said he planned to vote for the PRI in hopes of regaining benefits abolished under the cost-cutting measures of President Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, or PAN.

But other voters said they were tired of the PRI, which ruled the country for 71 years until losing power to the PAN in 2000.

“We’re ready for a change,” said Emilio Antonio, 31, a bricklayer who said he planned to vote for López Obrador and the PRD.

“There is so much we need here — running water, decent roads, sewage,” he said, pointing out a menacing lake of water threatening to flood the dirt road outside his polling station.

His brother Carlos Antonio, 29, agreed.

But he preferred to give the PAN another chance in office.

“We Mexicans are too impatient,” he said. “Six years is too little time to expect much change.”