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Shortly before midnight on August 1, 2004, Jorge Hank Rhon, millionaire casino owner, accused smuggler, and (at least for some) suspected assassin, came out on stage in front of his supporters to declare victory in the mayoral race in Tijuana, Baja California.1 His claim was supported by the official electoral results, which gave him a slim lead of one percentage point over hisopponentfromtherulingNationalActionParty(PAN).Hank’sfollowerswent wild. After fifteen years in the opposition, the PRI was finally returning to power in Tijuana, Mexico’s largest and most modern city on the northern border. To many observers, Hank’s victory seemed startling. Tijuana had been the greatest urban bastion of the center-right PAN for the past decade and a half. In 1989, it had become the first city of its size—then close to a million inhabitants —to throw out the long-ruling PRI and keep them out in subsequent elections . In the same election, Tijuana supplied the votes to elect a PAN governor in Baja California, the first opposition governor in Mexico since 1929. National politics certainly influenced the outcome of the election: then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was looking to boost his legitimacy after a contested presidential election and burnish the country’s image internationally. Recognizing an opposition victory in a distant border state seemed like good politics.2 However, 5 Tijuana: Liberal Democracy? 1. It should be noted that Hank has never been convicted of any crime and was only charged once (and later cleared) with smuggling rare animal skins across the border. However, accusations against him have been legion in the city, and two of his bodyguards were convicted of killing the city’s most popular journalist, Héctor Gato Felix, co-editor of the Zeta newspaper. Since the killing in 1988, the paper has run a weekly statement asking Hank to clarify whether he ordered the assassination. 2. A few months later, Salinas would pursue a free trade agreement with the United States. At the time of the 1989 elections, he was already looking at his options for expanding Mexico’s commercial relationships , hoping originally for a trade agreement with Europe. unquestionably, Tijuana’s particular characteristics also played a role in creating a margin of victory for the PAN that even the president felt obligated to respect. Tijuana’s motto is “the fatherland begins here,” and city residents are proud of being the entry point to the nation. However, for many people in Mexico, including the country’s political leaders, Tijuana was always a distant city and one of the hardest to control. Rapid demographic and economic growth further complicatedpoliticalcontrol.Inonlyfourdecades,Tijuana’spopulationincreased seventimes,leapingfrom165,000inhabitantsin1960tomorethan1.2millionby 2000. Although this rapid growth led to a dramatic deficit in urban infrastructure, it was fueled by economic opportunities in tourism, trade, and foreign-owned factories , as well as in the construction boom that these activities generated. As a result, a chronic shortage of basic urban services coexisted with a comparatively well-off population that felt it had real opportunities to get ahead economically. The right-of-center PAN, which advocated individual rights, efficient government , and free markets, seemed ideally suited to this individualistic, dynamic city. The party consistently won one-quarter to one-third of the votes in municipal and state elections starting in the late 1950s—at the same time that it barely registered significant votes elsewhere in the country—and the PAN almost certainly won the municipal elections of 1968, although the PRI-controlled state legislature canceled the election. So it was hardly surprising that as Mexico took its first steps on the path to democratic opening, Tijuana, in 1989, would become the first major city to elect a PAN government and then reelect it three years later.3 The new PAN governments set about to destroy the legacy of corporatism implanted by the PRI and to create a new model of democratic governance based on individual citizenship, civic participation, and transparency. Carlos Montejo, the first PAN mayor of Tijuana, summed up his party’s commitment to these values in his inaugural address: “I understand that true politics should be directly oriented toward organizing social activity, but never absorbing it. Political realities should always be at the service of society. That is why every citizen has the right to have his voice heard by the authorities, to express his opinions freely, to monitor the actions that the government engages in, and to know the real results of the government’s performance.”4 This...

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