Getting Out the Cross-Border Vote

TIJUANA — Captivated by a neck-and-neck presidential race in Mexico, thousands of Mexicans living in the United States are expected to stream south across the border Sunday to cast votes the candidates have been chasing for months.

An unprecedented get-out-the-vote push targeting Mexican voters who live north of the border has borrowed U.S. campaign tactics: television spots and newspaper advertisements, sidewalk leafleting, direct mail--even Internet pitches. The prize is an estimated 1.5 million migrants nationwide who hold Mexican voting cards. California is home to roughly half of the voting-age Mexicans in the United States.

Turnout for a border vote is a big unknown. Many eligible voters are unlikely to cross because they lack U.S. immigration papers that would allow them to return legally. Few are thought to have crossed the border to vote in the last presidential election, in 1994, but election officials have no reliable count.

Mexican citizens living in the United States have always been able to vote in their home country. But this is the first time Mexicans abroad have been so actively wooed, or so feverishly involved, in a political campaign south of the border. The reason: Expatriates, many of whom are critical of the party that has ruled Mexico for decades, could play a role in ending its long string of electoral victories.

Activist groups are organizing caravans of buses and cars to take voters to border points from as far away as Washington and Chicago. Members of several Mexican rodeo clubs from Washington are hauling horses in hopes of riding the final leg for dramatic effect.

Adding a truly binational touch, some voters are taking advantage of the Independence Day long weekend in the United States to travel home to vote in Mexico. “They’re trying to get there on time,” said Gloria Hernandez, a San Diego travel agent who has been booking flights for voters. “Luckily, the Fourth of July is good for them.”

Felipe Aguirre, a Los Angeles organizer who is coordinating California efforts for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, predicts a substantial turnout--perhaps 20,000 at border polling stations. “It’s going to surprise a lot of people,” he said.

Cardenas and Vicente Fox of the right-leaning National Action Party have stumped in California and have well-organized networks of supporters. Francisco Labastida, the standard bearer of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, has not campaigned in the United States. But he wooed leaders of U.S. Latino groups at a Tijuana rally last week during the homestretch of a race that could end the party’s 71-year reign.

Labastida drew cheers and applause by vowing a staunch defense of the rights of Mexican migrants in the United States. He promised to curtail excessive charges in Mexico on money transfers from the United States and said he would get rid of some highway checkpoints south of the border, which many returning migrants complain are an excuse to extort money from them.

Labastida also carefully chose symbols of U.S. Latino life, joined on stage by longtime Chicano activist Bert Corona and Fernando Chavez, son of Cesar Chavez, the late farm workers’ leader. (A spokesman for the United Farm Workers said the union is taking no position in the election.)

Among the Labastida supporters were two busloads of representatives of Los Angeles-area social groups that provide charity to hometowns in Mexico. “His political platform is the most committed to making changes in Mexico,” said Pablo C. Ramos, a South Gate resident who plans to drive to Tijuana to vote in a Mexican presidential race for the first time since 1976.

Mindful of the heightened interest, Mexican officials along the 2,000-mile border have increased the number of polling places set up for Mexicans who are away from their home districts. The special stations were originally intended to serve residents who have moved within Mexico but have not re-registered and Mexicans traveling inside the country for work or other reasons.

The Federal Electoral Institute, an independent agency running its first presidential election, plans to install 110 such sites, the maximum allowed by Mexican law, according to the institute president, Jose Woldenberg. Fifteen will be set up in Tijuana, one of them near the pedestrian crossing. Nine others will go up elsewhere in Baja California.

But election officials warned that, even with extra stations, they will be unable to cope with a huge influx. Voters heading to the border can expect lines and may face a ballot shortage. To prevent vote fraud, each site is limited to 750 ballots, so Tijuana will be able to handle no more than 11,250 voters at the special booths.

The only way to be guaranteed a vote, said Matias Chiquito Diaz de Leon, who oversees one of Tijuana’s three voting districts, is to “go to your home district. If you are from Zacatecas, you should go to Zacatecas. If you are from Aguascalientes, you should go to Aguascalientes.”

Short of that, he said, the best advice is, “Arrive early.”

Mexico has no mail-in absentee ballots. Many immigrants were angered when Mexican legislators let die a proposal to set up polls at Mexican diplomatic facilities in the United States. Immigrants, who generally are seen as sympathetic to Mexico’s opposition, instead have thrown themselves into the effort to get voters to the polls in Mexico.

Voters must be Mexican citizens, with proof of Mexican residency at the time of application, to receive the identification cards that allow them to cast ballots. People who hold dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship are ineligible.

Those who lack documents or cannot travel to Mexico are being urged to lobby relatives back home. Ben Garza, a San Jose activist who writes a pro-Cardenas Internet magazine, is promoting a push to get Mexican voters to cast their ballots the way their loved ones in the United States--who often support them financially--wish.

Links Still Strong to Land Left Behind

The interest level is a sign of the closeness of the race, which polls indicate is a dead heat between Labastida and Fox, with Cardenas trailing. And it reveals the enduring links between immigrants and a homeland that many of them left years ago.

“We didn’t empty our veins of our Mexican blood when we crossed the border,” said Martha Real, president of a nationwide immigrant organization called Mexican Migrants for Changes, based in Los Angeles, which has endorsed Fox.

Real said living in the United States has inspired some to vote in their homeland. “We’ve had the opportunity to see democracy at work,” she said. “We’re finding out in Mexico we don’t have that.”

Immigration scholar Wayne Cornelius said the turnout will be a test of how keenly Mexican immigrants view their home ties politically.

“To the extent they are still in close touch with their relatives in Mexico, to the extent they still feel they have a stake in what happens in their hometowns, they are more likely to want to have a voice in who governs,” said Cornelius, research director at the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego. “The quality of life in the hometown can be affected by who governs at the federal, state and local levels.”

Some immigrants will sit out the election. Maria Guadalupe Espino, who has lived in the Los Angeles area for 20 years, said she won’t vote, even though she is a lifelong supporter of the PRI and has a voter card.

“I don’t have any more family in Mexico--they’re all in the United States,” Espino said, on her way out of the Labastida rally. “The people should choose their own government. If you are not there, you should leave it to those who are.”