In the Shadow of the Giant: The Americanization of Modern Mexico

12. The Evangelical Challenge

220 In an era when the once omnipotent PRI finds itself outnumbered by two parties in the national congress and its candidate finished a distant third in the country’s most recent presidential balloting, the central state of Hidalgo lives on as a steadfast bastion of Mexico’s erstwhile ruling party. The state’s voters elected the PRI’s gubernatorial candidate in 1999, only a year before Vicente Fox ousted the party from power, and the PRI maintained a solid majority in the Hidalgo legislature throughout Fox’s six years as president. The PRI reaffirmed its domination of the state’s politics in February 2005 when its nominee for governor, Miguel Ángel Osorio Chong, trounced his rivals from Fox’s National Action Party and the left-wing Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).1 But the PRI’s grip on power in Hidalgo finally showed signs of slipping a few months later in statewide municipal elections. The PRI won only thirty-seven of the eighty-four city halls at stake, while the PRD emerged as the big winner , posting a net gain of thirteen municipalities won by its candidates.2 Some political analysts in Mexico City attributed the PRD’s strong showing to the coattails of its presidential candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who had been campaigning nonstop since resigning as Mexico City mayor in the summer of 2005. López Obrador was still the front-runner in the polls when municipal elections were held in Hidalgo that November, but there were other forces at work behind the voting in c h a p t e r 1 2
The Evangelical Challenge Ch012.qxd 11/27/08 2:03 PM Page 220 the evangelical challenge 221 some of the towns where the PRI came up short. One of those places was Ixmiquilpan, a dusty, unprepossessing town of 35,000 that dominates the fertile Mezquital Valley. There, voters shifted their allegiance in massive numbers to the PRD ticket. Best known for the ayate cloths woven by Otomi women from the fiber of maguey plants, Ixmiquilpan has been a flashpoint of friction between Roman Catholics and Mexico’s growing population of evangelical Christians in recent years. One in six residents of the town and its surrounding villages practices a Protestant faith, and tensions flared in 2001 when some local Catholic militants threatened to destroy the homes of dozens of families who had joined evangelical churches. In August 2005, a prominent member of the town’s evangelical community who had passed away was denied burial in the cemetery of a village outside Ixmiquilpan called San Nicolás, ostensibly because he had refused to donate money toward its upkeep. A month later Catholic residents of San Nicolás used a bulldozer to block the road leading to a private residence where evangelical Christians gathered for religious services.3 The PRI-controlled neighborhood council vetoed the evangelicals’ existing plans to erect a new temple in San Nicolás, even though they had obtained the necessary building permits from the appropriate government office in the state capital of Pachuca. In the weeks leading up to the November 13 municipal elections, the evangelical community in Ixmiquilpan appealed to both state and federal authorities to intervene on their behalf with the intransigent officials of the San Nicolás neighborhood council. But their requests for a meeting to plead their case fell on deaf ears, and frustrated members of the community ended up taking matters into their own hands on the eve of the statewide municipal balloting. Hundreds of evangelical Christians erected a blockade along the main highway linking Ixmiquilpan to Pachuca and brought traffic to a standstill for five hours. A contingent of officials from the state capital arrived at the scene to beg the demonstrators to go back home, but the evangelicals refused to budge. “Our people unanimously vowed not to move until we had assurances that this situation would be Ch012.qxd 11/27/08 2:03 PM Page 221 222 in the shadow of the giant resolved and we would have a meeting with the governor,” explained Alejandro Nepomuceno, a pastor from the Independent Pentecostal Christian Church in Ixmiquilpan.4 Desperate to lift the impromptu roadblock , the state government officials who had rushed in from Pachuca promised the evangelicals an audience with Governor Osorio Chong to discuss their grievances after the municipal elections. When the results of the November 13 balloting...