Mexico City Mayoral Slate Shapes Up

MEXICO CITY â€”  Mexico’s largest opposition force, the National Action Party, nominated a conservative, longtime party leader Sunday to battle for one of the nation’s biggest political prizes--the mayor’s post in Mexico City, to be decided by election for the first time.

Carlos Castillo Peraza, who steered the conservative party, known as the PAN, to major state and local election victories two years ago, was chosen at a Mexico City convention by a majority of the more than 2,000 delegates.

About 60,000 members of the left-leaning Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) also were selecting their nominee, but results from the party’s 300 polling booths throughout this sprawling city were not expected to be known until late Sunday night. Two-time presidential candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas was challenging former party leader Porfirio Munoz Ledo for the nomination.

The two opposition candidates will run against Alfredo del Mazo, who was nominated by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) on Feb. 19.

Opinion polls indicated that the race, considered by most analysts a harbinger of the next presidential election in 2000, will be close. If the PRI loses the July 6 election, it will be the first time in seven decades that a party member will not be the capital’s mayor. Mexico’s president appointed the mayor until President Ernesto Zedillo relinquished that power as part of a reform package two years ago.