PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : Clear the Air for a Clean Election : Chiapas exposes Salinas’ shortcomings. If he’ll admit them and make amends, the risk of turmoil is reduced.

MEXICO CITY —  The peasant rebellion in Chiapas has produced no more fighting since early January, but its political effects continue to reverberate throughout Mexico. Negotiations between the indigenous insurgents and the government of Carlos Salinas de Gortari are just beginning, but talks between officials and the national political opposition have been under way for several weeks and may come to fruition before the Chiapas talks do. It may well be precisely because the problems in Chiapas are so intractable, and the need for the government to show some results and good faith so great, that authentic electoral reform in Mexico may be finally forthcoming.

The reasons for the Salinas administration’s new, apparent flexibility, are evident. First, it has to come up with something in the way of addressing the Zapatista National Liberation Army’s demands, and clean elections are certainly one of them. Second and most important is the unprecedented risk of turmoil and strife if the Aug. 21 presidential election is perceived as fraudulent. This time around, unlike 1988, arms are involved, and the Zapatistas’lesson of how much a little violence can achieve is telling. Moreover, opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is gaining ground, if only slightly, and he surely will do better than the lowly third place and a humiliating 10% to 15% of the vote that was predicted a few months ago. Thus, if Cardenas contests an electoral result that does not grant him victory, Mexico’s famed stability will come to an end. Finally, there is the foreign factor: Stealing an election in broad daylight, or being deservedly accused of doing so by a significant share of the electorate, is bad for business, bad for NAFTA, bad for those in the United States who have bet on President Salinas.

What will constitute electoral reform? The broad agenda is well known, but the devil is in the details. The rolls have to be audited and cleansed so that the dead stop voting and the living start. Electoral bodies must be restaffed in order to become independent; for now, from the very top all the way to the most remote polling booth, the government and the ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) have a built-in majority. Limits must be set on campaign financing and spending, both to avoid incidents like last year’s $750-million shakedown dinner attended by Mexico’s business magnates and to sever the umbilical cord between the PRI and government. Access to the media must be assured, and television coverage--the major source of news for most Mexicans--must be made fair and equitable. Finally, the issue of national and foreign election observers must be addressed.

All of this must be fleshed out in detail by all three main political parties: the PRI, the PAN (National Action Party) and Cardenas’ PRD (Democratic Revolutionary Party). Cardenas’ agreement is critical, for he would have to be satisfied that the vote was fair if he were to accept a negative result for himself.

Given the circumstances in post-Chiapas Mexico, were elections free and fair, the PRI might lose them. The economy experienced zero growth in 1993; the distribution of income has continued to deteriorate, along with the job market; the uprising in Chiapas has left much of the country feeling guilty over its mistreatment of the indigenous people throughout Mexico. The PRI is divided between factions favoring Luis Donaldo Colosio and Manuel Camacho. Colosio is Salinas’ anointed successor, Camacho the lonely runner-up. Now, as Salinas’ peace negotiator in Chiapas, Camacho’s popularity grows by leaps and bounds as his influence within the PRI wanes. Insurrections are breaking out across the Mexican countryside, the public sector growing increasingly contemptuous of a political system seen as corrupt, anti-democratic, ineffective and no longer synonymous with stability.

Can Cardenas win if elections are clean and the process is equitable? It depends largely on the type of campaign that develops, and this in turn hinges on what President Salinas decides to do. If the campaign focuses on his administration and the election becomes a referendum on it, the opposition’s chances are good. It is easier to criticize a flawed regime than to propose remedies. Cardenas has found his sea legs in his daily attacks on the government, and Colosio seems ill at ease defending Salinas’ record--which is not, after all, his record.

If the campaign is to be more than a judgment of Salinas’ record, someone other than the opposition will have to do the judging. And that someone is Salinas himself. Only he can spell out clearly the profound, substantive mistakes of his administration: where things went wrong, what the erroneous decisions were, who made them and why, not just in Chiapas, but in the entire course of his term. By taking on the past himself, he would force those who would succeed him to talk about the future. That would free Colosio to present his own ideas instead of having to defend Salinas.

Self-immolation has for years been a fixture of Mexico’s political system. Virtually every president has engaged in it; they have had no choice. The system that Salinas will live and die by has its traditions. Political, if not human, sacrifice is one; he, too, may have no choice.