PRI holds lead in race for mayor

SAN LUIS RIO COLORADO, Son. - With votes from all but 6 percent of precincts counted in Sunday’s election, the party that has held the mayorship of this border city is on the way to being unseated, according to unofficial returns.

Manuel Baldenebro, the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI, was leading the National Action Party’s Angel Ruiz by a vote of 25,784 to 24,798, according to returns released by the Federal Electoral Institute.

Manuel Santeliz of the left-leading Democratic Revolutionary Party and Santos Gonzalez Yescas of Convergence Party followed in distant third and fourth place, respectively.

If Baldenebro holds his lead, once votes from all 154 polls in the San Luis and surrounding areas are counted, his victory will represent a setback for the National Action Party, a rightward political party known in Mexico by its Spanish acronym PAN.

For most of the 20th Century, Baldenebro’s party was Mexico’s reigning political party, but the PAN captured the mayorship of San Luis Rio Colorado, a border city of more than 200,000, in 1982. In 1985, 1988 and 1991, it lost mayoral races that were marred by allegations of voter fraud on the part of the PRI-led government, but from 1994 until Sunday, its candidates won successive races for three-year mayoral terms.

The PAN had stunned Mexico in 2000 when its candidate, Vicente Fox, won the presidential election, and then the 2006 race was won by current President Felipe Calderon, also of the PAN.

Observers were expecting the PAN to lose ground in elections across Mexico on Sunday, owing to voter discontent over the economic problems and violence stemming from Calderon’s war on drug cartels.

On Sunday, Joel Aguirre Yescas, the PRI’s party president in San Luis Rio Colorado, was predicting that with returns counted from 94 percent of the polls, Baldenebro’s lead in the mayoral race was irreversible. The PAN, however, was predicting that Ruiz would win.

The Federal Electoral Institute is expected to release complete, final returns later this week.

The PAN, however, was having success in other races, according to Sunday’s official returns.

Guillermo Padres was poised to become the first PAN candidate to win the governorship of Sonora, according to incomplete returns from the Federal Electoral Institute.

He was leading with 420,914 votes to 385,601 over the PRI’s Alfonso Elias.

In the race for San Luis Rio Colorado’s seat in the Sonora state Legislature, the PAN’s Leslie Pantoja Hernandez was leading the PRI’s Marco Antonio Ramirez Wakamatzu, by a vote of 16,043 to 15,079.

The PAN and PRI were splitting the difference in the races for federal congressional seats in two districts that bisect the San Luis Rio Colorado area.

The PRI, Gerardo Figueroa Zazueta was leading the PAN’s Ernesto Portugal in the race for the Second District seat in the federal Chamber of Deputies, Mexico’s equivalent of the U.S. House of Representatives. Figueroa led by a vote count of 21,082 to 20,292, with votes from 95 percent of the precincts counted.

But in the race for the First District, the PAN’s Leonardo Guillen Medina was leading the PRI’s Carlos Daniel Fernandez Guevara by a vote of 38,086 to 35,426, according to initial returns.