Mexicans select all 500 seats of congress

MEXICO CITY -- Voters were choosing new lawmakers Sunday for all 500 seats in Mexico's lower house of Congress, an election key to determining whether President Vicente Fox can deliver on the many promises he made after his historic victory three years ago.\nSunday's elections were the first nationwide vote since Fox's win in 2000. Polling began relatively peacefully, although campaigns were filled with allegations of misconduct -- including complaints about vote buying and Roman Catholic priests and bishops who urged Mexicans to vote against parties favoring abortion and gay marriage.\nJust as during the 2000 elections -- billed as the first truly democratic vote in Mexico's modern history -- observers were being dispatched across the country to prevent and report any instances of abuse.\nVoters also were to select governors in six states as well as candidates for countless local offices.\nConcepcion Marquez, 71, was among two dozen voters packed into a small Mexico City ballot station Sunday. She folded her vote into white boxes reading: "The vote is free and secret."\nMarquez, who supported Fox three years ago, acknowledged that Mexicans expected more from the new president. But she still believes throwing the former ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, out of the presidency was good for Mexico.\n"You can't expect to change in six years what they spent 70 years ruining," she said, referring to Fox's six-year term.\nFox, while casting his ballot, gave reporters a thumbs up and urged voters to head to the polls despite clouds that threatened rain.\nPolls showed the PRI holding a slight lead in Congress, but no party was expected to win a majority.\nStill, PRI officials declared Sunday's vote a national comeback for their party.\n"We see a party that has taken off little by little in some districts, where we were down," PRI President Roberto Madrazo said this week in the Pacific resort city of Puerto Vallarta. "And we are prepared to have the largest number of lawmakers, mayors and governors."\nFox spent his first three years in office fighting with an often hostile Congress, where no party holds a majority but the PRI has the most lawmakers. He failed to push through his version of an Indian rights bill and several key reforms, and was even blocked from traveling to the United States by lawmakers who said he was spending too much time out of the country.\nAlthough the president's National Action Party has urged voters to "take the brakes off change" and give the president a majority in Congress, Fox appears to be headed for three more years of gridlock.\nAs for the governors' races, polls predicted National Action would lose the wealthy, industrial state of Nuevo Leon, while gaining the central state of San Luis Potosi from the PRI. National Action also should hold onto Queretaro state, while the PRI will remain in control of Campeche and Colima.\nThe gubernatorial race in the border state of Sonora, currently ruled by the PRI, was too close to determine a solid front-runner.\nPerhaps the biggest potential loser in the elections is Mexico's developing multiparty system. Three years after Fox became the first presidential candidate in 71 years to defeat a member of the PRI, polls show voters already are jaded about the democratic process.\nThey complain about increased political infighting and show signs of disinterest in all parties.\nIn a recent commentary published in the Reforma newspaper, former Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda pointed out that without the notoriously fraudulent practices of the past, "elections have become banal, which is to say that we have fully entered into the normal dullness of democracy."\nThere was some violence during Sunday's voting. Protesters in the troubled town of San Salvador Atenco, just west of Mexico City, shut down polling stations with fist fights and threats against election workers. A year ago, farmers with machetes took several people hostage in the town and forced the government to scrap plans to build an international airport on their land.