Mexico's ruling PRI fights for a comeback in Baja California

Striving to recapture Baja California, the national leadership of Mexico’s ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) gathered in Tijuana on Saturday in a dramatic show of political muscle three weeks before the state’s gubernatorial election.

The gathering at a hotel in the city’s Río Zone brought together 10 PRI governors and the party’s leaders in the Senate and federal Chamber of Deputies for a meeting of the PRI’s Permanent Political Commission.

The main purpose was to endorse Fernando Castro Trenti, gubernatorial candidate for a PRI-led coalition, and other candidates in the state’s July 7 elections.

“We came to make Baja California our cause,” said César Camacho, the PRI’s national president. “The PRI didn’t come to settle, it came to win.”

The PRI, which ruled Mexico for seven decades before losing the presidency in 2000 to the National Action Party (PAN) made a comeback last year with election of Enrique Peña Nieto.

In Baja California, Castro Trenti is squaring off against Francisco Vega de Lamadrid, a former Tijuana mayor who is the candidate of a PAN-led coalition. The PAN first triumphed in Baja California in 1989 and since then has not lost a gubernatorial election in the state.

The contest has become an increasingly fierce showdown between the PRI and the PAN in Baja California, with the parties accusing each other of corruption and dirty campaigning.

Fueling the fires has been a constitutional reform approved last week by Baja California’s PRI-dominated Legislature creating a special prosecutor for electoral crimes, opposed by the state’s PAN governor, José Guadalupe Osuna Millán.

Fourteen states are holding elections across Mexico this year, but as the only one with a gubernatorial race, Baja California has been capturing much national attention.