Mexican opposition parties want immigrants in U.S. to vote

http://www.azstarnet.com/public/dnews/UK4916.html

The Seattle Times
SUNNYSIDE, Yakima County - From inside his bare-bones office, adorned with photographs and posters of Pancho Villa and other Mexican rebels, David Silva is taking part in a revolution.
But his is not a revolt against the U.S. government or American political traditions. Silva and other Latino activists in this country are trying to unseat the ruling party that has governed Mexico for 70 years.
This month, two leading opposition parties are inviting Mexicans in Washington state's Yakima Valley, Seattle and other American communities to vote in their presidential primaries - a proposition that, regardless of voter turnout, will make international history.
Voting booths will be set up outside churches and inside people's homes. Thousands of Mexican immigrants, many of whom have maintained close ties between the Pacific Northwest and Mexico, will be encouraged to influence the political future of a country they never really left behind in spirit.
Besides Washington state, voting booths will be set up in Los Angeles, Dallas and Chicago, areas with the largest concentrations of Mexican immigrants.
``They have wanted to participate and know they should participate in the future of the heartland,'' said Silva, a 50-year-old native of Guanajuato, north of Mexico City.
Two Mexican parties are trying to drum up support in the United States for their candidates as part of a broader, more elusive, goal: to win the legal right for Mexican citizens abroad to cast ballots in the 2000 presidential elections and to remove the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) from power.
PAN, the conservative National Action Party, will hold its primary Sunday. PRD, the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, will follow Sept. 30.
In the United States, only first-generation Mexican immigrants will be eligible to vote at designated polling sites and via the Internet. Vote 2000 Mexico, an L.A.-based organizing group, estimates 52,000 Mexican nationals in the Yakima Valley, including many who are U.S. citizens, are eligible. Silva believes there are 200,000 eligible statewide.
But the prospect of having people in the United States cast ballots for presidential hopefuls named Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Vicente Fox, rather than Bill Bradley and George W. Bush, is drawing skepticism from both sides of the border.
Mexico has long been suspicious of American interference, and Anglos are leery of seeing Mexico import its politics here. Others question whether Mexican immigrants will participate in an election fight thousands of miles away.
``The numbers are going to be dinky,'' predicted Antonio Gonzalez, president of the William C. Velasquez Institute, a non-profit research arm of the Southwest Voter Registration Project in Los Angeles.
Political passions about Mexico, nonetheless, run deep in the Yakima Valley.
Inside a Mexican bakery and outside a farm worker health clinic in Grandview, people expressed great interest in the invitation to participate in the Mexican presidential primaries.
Though their families and jobs are firmly rooted in eastern Washington, many keep up with Mexican politics through Spanish-language television, radio and newspapers. And those media outlets are just as likely to report on the latest proposals by the PAN in Mexico City as they are of GOP presidential hopefuls in Iowa.
Ricardo Garcia, manager of a Spanish-language radio station in Granger, predicts the PRD will draw more local voters because of the support for Cardenas, whose father, Lazaro Cardenas, served as president of Mexico in the 1930s and is still revered by many Mexicans for his support of the poor.
When Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, now mayor of Mexico City, came to the Yakima Valley in 1989, 2,000 people showed up to shake his hand at an impromptu public appearance, Garcia said. Garcia has invited the presidential candidate to return in October.
Supporters of the ruling PRI, however, are downplaying the notion that Mexican-Americans are more likely to vote against the Mexican government than their counterparts in Mexico. The Mexican consul general in Seattle, Mariano Lemus Gas, said the PRI has shown its willingness to open the political process and allow more internal debate.
While the PRI is not allowing Mexican citizens abroad to vote in its first presidential primary this November, Lemus predicts they will be allowed to participate in the future.
But some ruling-party officials don't like the idea of letting Mexicans in America vote at all. Mexico's consul general in Los Angeles recently told the Los Angeles Times that the specter of high-visibility campaigning by Mexican candidates in the U.S. could unleash new anti-immigrant sentiment.