mexnews: YUCATAN SEETHES AS DEADLINE NEARS 

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The News
Mexico City, February 10, 2001.

YUCATAN SEETHES AS DEADLINE NEARS

Electoral Dispute Is Becoming States Rights Issue

By LIAM WHITE

The News Staff Reporter

Tensions on Friday heightened in the peninsular state of Yucatan, with both
sides in an ongoing electoral dispute refusing to back down.

The federal government and the state's leadership are deadlocked over a
federal order to turn over offices to a federally appointed team of election
watchdogs.

The state government, dominated by the former ruling Institutional
Revolutionary Party (PRI), has vehemently objected to the order, and its
supporters on Friday massed outside the watchdog agency's headquarters in
the capital city of Merida.

=46ederal authorities have given state officials until Saturday to
capitulat= e.

The PRI-dominated state Congress had appointed its own electoral watchdog
panel and refuses to recognize the federally appointed body.

On Thursday, Interior Secretary Santiago Creel reportedly was considering
the use of federal police to retake the agency's offices.  Creel on Friday
maintained the dispute would be "resolved punctually and scrupulously" but
as of late Friday night no action had been taken.

Yucatan Gov. Victor Cervera Pacheco, considered by many an archetypal
old-style PRI leader, on Friday said the state "will never give up its
sovereignty to traitors" from the "centralist, imperialist" federal
government.

Cervera and his party have painted the dispute as a state defending its
rights from bossy federal authorities. Federal electoral authorities, on the
other hand, accuse the Yucatan PRI of attempting to rig the May 27
gubernatorial election by naming its supporters to oversee the voting and
refusing to accept federally appointed observers.

Creel dismissed Cervera's contentions, saying, "personal opinions don't
count. The law will be upheld."

During his visit to Chiapas on Friday, President Vicente Fox sounded a more
conciliatory note.

"There is still time for a negotiated settlement," he said. "Nobody needs to
lose face over this if we do things with sensitivity, tolerance and
democracy."

Nevertheless, he called on state leaders to obey a federal court order to
hand over the electoral offices.

Cervera, however, seemed in no mood to negotiate when he addressed massed
ranks of PRI supporters in Merida.

"Do you want us to back down? Should we negotiate from our knees," he asked.

"No!" the 15,000 PRIistas replied.

Yucatan is considered one the last strongholds of the PRI, which lost the
presidency last July 2 to the National Action Party's (PAN) Fox.

Last year the PRI also lost the governorships of the states of Morelos and
Chiapas, and its victory in the Nov. 11 election in Tabasco was overturned
after fraud allegations.
 
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