Battle threatens PRI party split
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MEXICO CITY, Mexico (AP) -- The leadership of Mexico's largest party voted Tuesday to oust the powerful head of its congressional delegation, despite warnings the action could split the party.
The move to dismiss Elba Esther Gordillo, a conciliatory leader who has worked with the administration of President Vicente Fox to bridge differences over legislation, could delay passage of key economic reforms.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party's Political Commission voted early Tuesday morning to oust Gordillo as the legislative leader of the party, known by its Spanish acronym as the PRI.
Questions, however, remain as to whether the commission had the power to remove Gordillo. Gordillo defiantly acted as floor leader Tuesday and some speculated her party supporters may not recognize the vote.
Gordillo's supporters walked out of Tuesday's meeting. Congressman, Miguel Angel Yunes said in a news conference that the action had split the party, though there was no formal declaration of a breakaway.
"We're witnessing an attempted coup d'etat inside the legislature," Yunes, a Gordillo supporter, said. "Today we started down on a road of no return. Today the seed has been sown for the division of the PRI."
Yunes said such a split would help the Fox's National Action Party, or PAN, by effectively making it the largest bloc in Congress. The PRI lost the presidency to Fox in 2000 ending its 71-year rule, but it holds 222 of the 500 seats in the lower house of Mexico's Congress compared to the PAN's 151 seats.
But political columnist Sergio Sarmiento said that ousting Gordillo would hurt a Mexico in dire need of economic reforms.
Gordillo has worked to break legislative deadlocks that have slowed many of the president's proposals, including a planned tax reform.
"Elba Esther, while despised by many of her colleagues right now, is a woman who understood the need for reforms and who wagered her political career on achieving them," Sarmiento wrote Tuesday in the Mexico City newspaper Reforma. "The attempt to fire her as coordinator of the PRI appears to indicate the party's return to saying 'no' to everything."
PRI Congressman Jorge Romero said legislative negotiations would be put on hold for "at least three days" due to the conflict.
Mexican Central Bank Governor Guillermo Ortiz testified last week that confusion in the PRI had contributed to volatility in financial markets. But the peso opened stronger against the dollar Tuesday despite the infighting.
Gordillo has been a powerful force whose influence in Mexico's massive national teachers' union was a key element in many of the party's electoral campaigns. Leaders of that union have suggested they might even quit the PRI over the Gordillo dispute.
Gordillo will remain at her post as the PRI's secretary-general, just a notch below her chief rival, PRI president Roberto Madrazo, who took a more combative role with the Fox administration.
On Tuesday, Gordillo, without mentioning Madrazo by name, told reporters that "the PRI was betrayed, and at the risk of fracturing the party."
The rift between Gordillo and Madrazo, a potential presidential candidate for the 2006 elections, came to a head over Fox's proposal to reduce the national sales tax from 15 to 10 percent, while taxing food, medicine, books and other previously exempt items.
PRI leaders say the plan would hurt Mexico's poor. When Gordillo drafted a compromise proposal, Madrazo and other party leaders claimed the idea had come from Fox's administration. Gordillo responded by calling Madrazo a liar on national television.
Apparently worried about 10 state elections next year, 15 governors and PRI union leaders recently urged Madrazo and Gordillo to heal their differences, saying they were splitting the party.
PRI leaders planned to meet Wednesday to choose Gordillo's replacement. Possible successors include former Sonora Gov. Manlio Fabio Beltrones, who lost to Gordillo during party elections in July.
Copyright 2003 The
Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
