MEXICO: The Expected Landslide

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By tradition, Candidate Adolfo López Mateos of the invincible Party of Revolutionary Institutions could not vote for himself for President last week—but most other Mexicans did. Running ahead of his party, the personable former Minister of Labor got at least 80% of more than 10 million votes, to assure himself six years in office. Women, voting for the first time, made the election the biggest in Mexican history; it was also the most peaceable, with only one party worker killed during the campaign and one on election day.

The opposition National Action Party (P.A.N.) and its candidate, Textilemaker Luis Alvarez, had hoped that the new women voters would swing to the pro-Roman Catholic P.A.N. Instead, the women looked carefully over their husbands' shoulders to find the right place to make their mark; the men were as fervently convinced as ever that P.R.I, allegiance and patriotism are one and the same thing. The only glimmer of hope for P.A.N. was in a few tight, undecided local races that might boost the P.A.N. total in Congress (from the present six seats in the House of Deputies, none in the Senate).

The next President of Mexico is the kind of affable, efficient man who might just as easily have wound up running a big corporation as a booming country. He is as far removed from the fiery revolutionary generals who founded his party as modern Mexico's well-scrubbed Sears. Roebuck stores are from a battlefield commissary. An attorney, ópez Mateos moved up smoothly in the P.R.I.'s inner circle after going to work in 1930 as secretary to General Carlos Riva Palacio, then the party's titular head. As Labor Minister, López Mateos settled 13,382 disputes with only a handful of strikes. A hard worker, he took his smooth, noncommittal speeches and pleasant grin to 480 towns during a campaign that he could have won by staying home.

After casting his own vote last week (a write-in for a friend. Diplomat Isidro Fabela), López Mateos went to inspect a new wing on his walled home in the expensive Pedregal district of Mexico City. He chatted with newsmen, looked in at the garage, where a 1958 Lincoln and 1957 Chrysler have replaced his old, modest Fiat. He promised a "down to the peso" accounting of his assets before entering office Dec. 1 and again upon leaving it. For Mexico he promised only a smooth bossing of the current combination of state and private enterprise. If he does as well as Incumbent Ruiz Cortines (who has seen the gross national product rise 40% and so far has ridden out the U.S. recession with scarcely a dip), Mexicans will be satisfied.