MEXICO: Shutdown Treatment

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Is Mexico, after 25 years of one-party rule, ready for a real two-party election in 1952? Not if what has happened to Independent Presidential Candidate Miguel Henriquez Guzmán is any indication.

General Henriquez, 53, is a strong, silent Old Revolutionary from the Rio Grande border who made $50 million building roads on government contracts. Last month, without waiting to see whom President Aleman would name as candidate of the all-powerful Party of Revolutionary Institutions (PRI), the general launched his campaign. He plastered the capital? with posters proclaiming, "Henriquez Guzmán—Candidate of the People," and set out to canvass the country.

When he arranged to visit his old army stamping grounds in Nayarit and Colima, he ran straight into the same old trouble that has dogged independents, left, right and center, since the days of the revolution. The merchants of Tepic, the capital of Nayarit, took ads in all Mexico City newspapers to proclaim: "On the day of your visit we have agreed to shut down all transport, restaurants, hotels and everything else. Placing gratitude to the regime of Miguel Aleman above our private interest, we repudiate agitation."

Undaunted, the general set out for Tepic. Some 3,000 came to hear him, but they had a tough time finding even so much as a tamale for lunch. When members of the general's party posed as tourists in the town market, Indian stand-keepers refused to sell to them. In outlying villages, the general's men found restaurants unprovisioned, inns full. Explained one restaurant-keeper: "Governor Flores Muñoz told us yesterday that we were to be out of food, so, sefiores, I'm out of food today or else I'll be out of food the rest of my life."

As an oldtime PRI stalwart who has dished out stern treatment to political irregulars in his time, Henriquez took the punishment quietly. Things were not likely to get much easier. He still had 26 states to visit, all of them PRI-ruled.