Mexico's vanquished ruling party stages a comeback

MEXICO CITY — Raul Enrique Trujillo was 6 years old when voters kicked Mexico's long-ruling party out of the presidency after decades of rule by corruption and coercion. Now 18, he'll cast his first vote to bring back them back.

It's a comeback many thought impossible. But the 2012 presidential race, which officially begins Friday, is the Institutional Revolutionary Party's race to lose.

PRI candidate Enrique Pena Nieto starts the 90-day campaign, set by electoral law, with more than a 10-point lead in most polls over Josefina Vazquez Mota of the now-governing National Action Party, or PAN. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the leftist Democratic Revolution Party, known as the PRD, trails in third.

Though the PRI lost the presidency in 2000 after ruling 71 years with an iron fist, it has maintained the political machinery of eight decades, not to mention two-thirds of Mexico's 31 governors.

The hope for democratic change that swept the PRI's opponents into the presidency has evaporated. People are weary of President Felipe Calderon's bloody assault on organized crime after 47,000 deaths and many are nostalgic for a party that, for all its faults, brought Mexico into the modern era without the coups, revolutions and civil wars that plagued the rest of Latin America.

The party has been fast out of the blocks this election season with the charismatic, Kennedy-handsome Pena Nieto, 45, who carries the message of a "new PRI" that has learned from its mistakes. Party leaders say it has a whole new slate of young candidates who are more democratic and didn't work under the old regime.

"The best thing that could have happened to the PRI, in a certain sense, is to have lost in 2000," said Francisco Guzman, Pena Nieto's chief of staff. "A loss makes you see what you have to do, how you have to adapt to change."

But the comeback has been helped by the shortcomings of rival parties as much as a yearning for the return of the PRI.

The young Trujillo initially wanted to vote for Mexico City Mayor Marcelo Ebrard, a moderate member of the PRD whose term has seen the capital become safer and more environmentally conscious. But the party instead went with Lopez Obrador, an old-style politician who narrowly lost the presidency in 2006 to Calderon.

Like many Mexicans, who share enormous cynicism when it comes to their political class, Trujillo says he will support the "menos peor" — the lesser evil among the choices.

"When the PRI governed Mexico, it worked. They maintained social stability," Trujillo said.

He said it was a mistake for Calderon to go after organized crime. "You can't attack an organization that large ... it's attacking the people. Now it's out of control."

Pena Nieto is the young face of a party long known as the "dinosaurs," surrounding himself with thirtysomethings and running a tightly controlled campaign with a message that he will end drug violence and create jobs. His proposals lack details, as do all candidates', who say the law hasn't yet allowed them to campaign with specifics.

As governor of Mexico state, the country's most populous, Pena Nieto operated with very little ideology and focused on tangible public works like new roads and hospitals — 608 commitments that he promised and then completed.

Critics say they were mostly superficial and some were already in progress before he took office.

The candidate took a media drubbing earlier this year when he struggled to name three books that had influenced his life. He didn't know the minimum wage in Mexico or the price of a kilogram of tortillas, the mainstay of Mexican diets, saying, "I'm not the woman of the house."

So far it hasn't hurt him in the polls.