When Luis Echeverría Alvarez won the presidential nomination of Mexico's Partido Revolucionario Institutional (P.R.I.) last October, he was as good as elected. The P.R.I, has ruled with only token opposition since it was formed in 1929. Nonetheless, Echeverría, 48, conducted a remarkably strenuous campaign. In the last eight months he visited 900 towns and villages and traveled more than 35,000 miles, most of them in his campaign bus, the Miguel Hidalgo, which he named for the father of Mexican independence. Asked why he was working so hard to win an election that he was extremely unlikely to lose, Echeverría replied: "The campaign has given me a detailed panorama of what is happening in the country."
No Machine. The P.R.I., the first party created after Mexico's 1910 Revolution, has won every national election in the past 41 years. Successive P.R.I, governments have given Mexico one of the most prosperous urban economies in Latin America. During the past decade, the country's economic growth increased almost 62%.
Despite such progress, however, previous P.R.I, governments have been criticized for failing to improve the life of the Mexican peasant. The regime of outgoing President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz has also been attacked for its handling of the Mexico City riots that preceded the 1968 Olympic Games. When police and soldiers shot at least 33 people to death and wounded 500 others, Diaz Ordaz's enemies charged that the President's "guided democracy" was really a dictatorship. More than 100 students arrested for rioting are in prison, some still awaiting trial.
Echeverría, who served as Minister of the Interior throughout Diaz Ordaz's six-year term, promised a government that would be "neither to the right nor to the left, but upward and onward." Initially, he struck observers as a competent machine politician. Now they are not so sure. His tireless stumping, plus the fact that he is the father of eight, persuaded many Mexicans that Echeverría possesses what might be called "macharismo"—the requisite Latin American machismo mixed with political charisma. Dressed casually wherever he went, he dined with peasant families, spoke informally about national problems and debated with students whenever he could. Defending the jailing of rioters, he said: "Not one was arrested for writing a novel or a poem or for his way of thinking." The students were not always prepared to listen. In Chihuahua, they dug a moat to bar his entourage from campus.
Style Change. During the long campaign Echeverría spoke eloquently about the problem of government corruption. "When we see bad officials who use their posts only to build their own power," he said, "we are reminded of the conquistadors. When we find an official who serves the people, we think of Zapata." He concentrated on the country's main problem, the need to develop its agricultural economy. "By the end of this decade," he promised, "Mexico will be one of the most electrically developed countries in the world." Foreign investors were welcome, "as long as they complement our national capital."