Tabasco sauce
MEXICO'S long-predictable politics has suddenly become grippingly uncertain. On August 1st, the “Fantastic Four”, the four presidential hopefuls in the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), officially began their campaigns for a primary election due on November 7th. Not only is the primary itself an historic event in a country whose past ten presidents have simply designated their successors. But the man leading the polls is not Francisco Labastida, the former interior minister generally assumed (despite denials) to be the choice of President Ernesto Zedillo; it is Roberto Madrazo, a former governor of the state of Tabasco.
This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline “Tabasco sauce”
From the August 7th 1999 edition
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