Mexico City – The woman who heads Mexico’s powerful teachers union said Friday she feels “honored” to have been kicked out of the once all-powerful PRI in the wake of the party’s dismal showing in recent elections.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party, which ruled here for 71 years straight before being ousted from the presidency in 2000, expelled on Thursday former deputy leader Elba Esther Gordillo, party secretary Rosario Green said.
Gordillo – once described by a political analyst as “Mexico’s Jimmy Hoffa in a dress” – was drummed out of the PRI because she helped start a new centrist party that put forward its own presidential candidate to challenge PRI nominee Roberto Madrazo.
Green denied in a telephone interview that the expulsion was political payback from Madrazo, who was pummeled in the July 2 election that had a leftist and a rightist as its two protagonists.
Addressing some 600 supporters of the nearly million-strong SNTE teachers federation, Gordillo said that she will not challenge the decision to throw her out of the PRI.
She called it an honor to have been expelled by a “bunch of yes-men who brought the party its greatest discredit and led it to its worst failure in its history,” in allusion to Madrazo’s supporters.
The woman known as “la maestra” (the teacher) said that “I’d been expecting what has now happened for a long time,” adding that the PRI leadership “lacked the courage to (expel her) before.”
Gordillo defended the role she played in the party and said she had passionately fought for years with “absolute loyalty” to transform, modernize and democratize the PRI.
She added that the PRI’s current leadership had led the party to the verge of ruin and noted that in the July 2 presidential and legislative elections “millions of Mexicans abandoned the formerly dominant party.”
“From being the first to becoming the third political force,” she said, the PRI was unable to win a single state under the leadership of Madrazo, not even the nominee’s native Tabasco, “where they know him very well.”
She also said the PRI picked up only eight of 64 Senate seats up for grabs in the July 2 balloting and just 62 of the 300 available lower-house seats and was defeated in three gubernatorial contests – in the states of Jalisco, Guanajuato and Morelos – as well as the Mexico City mayoral race.
Election authorities have yet to offer specifics about the make-up of the next Congress, and some media estimates give the PRI more seats than the figure cited by Gordillo, but the party’s role in the legislature is sure to be much-diminished.
Gordillo said that “all the members” of the PRI committee that expelled her from the party lost their races on July 2, an outcome she termed “political justice.”
She said that from this day forward she would be “in the trenches” fighting for the best causes, for the teachers’ demands and the transformation of the public education system.
Although she said she feels no need to join any political party, Gordillo added that she would seek “accords and alliances that help Mexico progress.”
A long-running feud between Madrazo and Gordillo over the presidency of the party ended last fall with Madrazo obtaining a victory that in some sense proved Pyrrhic.
But since giving up her senior party post in September 2005, Gordillo, 60, has used her position as boss of Latin America’s biggest union to keep up the battle with Madrazo.
Supporters and critics of Gordillo have been at odds for months over the push by Madrazo loyalists to expel her from the PRI, with some partisans of “la maestra” threatening to follow her out the door.
Last Saturday, in a speech before more than 200,000 in Mexico City’s main square, leftist presidential candidate Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador played an audiotape of a telephone conversation between Gordillo and the PRI governor of the northern state of Tamaulipas.
Speaking after the polls had closed on July 2, Gordillo is heard suggesting that PRI governors in the north should hasten to proclaim conservative Felipe Calderon, of the governing National Action Party, as the victor in the presidential contest.
She tells her interlocutor that given the certainty of Madrazo’s defeat, the PRI should pledge its remaining political capital to what she expected to be the winning side in order to ensure a viable future for the party.
Accused for some time of political ties to incumbent conservative President Vicente Fox, Gordillo has made no secret of her personal friendship with the head of state.
Gordillo said last year that her quarrel with Madrazo stemmed from the latter’s failure to abide by agreements the PRI reached with Fox aimed at winning congressional approval of far-ranging overhauls of Mexico’s tax system, energy sector and labor laws.
“Never, never have I betrayed anyone, much less my country and my party. A traitor is not someone who opposes the personal project of Roberto Madrazo; a traitor is someone who turns his back on Mexico,” she said, answering critics within the party who accused her of being too close to Fox.
Gordillo said Madrazo was seeking to expel many activists and to revive the corrupt, authoritarian ways for which the PRI became notorious during its decades-long dominance of public life in Mexico.
Though Gordillo’s own image is far from squeaky-clean, given her mysterious transformation from poor schoolteacher to millionaire power broker, she has recently allied herself with forces urging change.
Electoral authorities said last week that Calderon, of Fox’s party, won the presidential election by a margin of less than six-tenths of one percent.
But leftist Lopez Obrador has filed a legal challenge to the result, which he alleges is fraudulent, and has demanded a manual recount of the 41 million ballots cast.
