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INSTITUTE OF SOCIAL ANTHROPOLOGY — PUBLICATION NO. 2 



with the new officials and the betterment of the 

 town. He stressed especially fixing up the 

 plaza and planting trees. His remarks drew 

 more handclaps than did those of the mayor. 

 This concluded a remarkably tame and peace- 

 ful affair. 



On the surface, all the rumors had come to 

 nothing and an uninformed visitor might have 

 thought the talk had been nothing else. But 

 the mayor who was inducted at this ceremony 

 was not the elected mayor. In fact, he had not 

 even been a candidate. The same was true of 

 the suplente for the sindico. Obviously, ex- 

 planation is called for. 



Actually, the matter was simple. The talk 

 and complaints had resulted in action. Appar- 

 ently no one, on sober thought, wanted the 

 elected mayor. So the ayuntamiento picked 

 out someone they thought would be satisfactory 

 and installed him as mayor. The choice seemed 

 actually an excellent one. The new mayor was 

 one of the best-educated men in town, a sober, 

 honest, and conscientious man, fairly prosper- 

 ous but not rich. None of the investigators 

 found any objection or any tendency to question 

 the action. According to the retiring mayor, 

 one man, an Almazanista (that is, a follower of 

 Almazan, the defeated presidential candidate) 

 with little following had raised some objections. 

 But the retiring mayor pointed out that the 

 objector had never bothered to come to the 

 nominating junta or to vote, although the mayor 

 had personally invited him to do so and had 

 asked him to make a house-to-house visit to all 

 his followers, urging their attendance. Legal- 

 ity was to be maintained, however, and the 

 State authorities received proper election re- 

 turns certifying the election of the men installed. 



Did this represent corruption and the break- 

 down of democratic methods as would be the 

 interpretation of legalistic minds deeply steeped 

 in the proprieties of parliamentary procedure? 

 None of the staff of the investigation in Cheran 

 felt it was. The persons finally inducted into 

 office were capable men. They seemed highly 

 acceptable to the bulk of the population, where- 

 as the duly elected candidates were not. 

 Rather, it seems that a truly democratic result 

 had been obtained for a people who are un- 

 familiar with and distrustful of parliamentary 

 procedures. 



Persons who are shocked at the procedures 

 at Cheran should seriously contemplate the 

 difficulties in carrying out a formal election 

 with written ballots with a population which 

 is very largely illiterate. In this case economic 

 limitations and lack of imagination prevented 

 carrying out the system used in national elec- 

 tions where the candidates each select a color 

 and separate ballots are printed in the different 

 colors. The voter then asks for his ballot by 

 color and drops it into the ballot box. Not 

 secret, and lending itself to ballot box stuffing, 

 the method is at least an attempt to deal with 

 the problem of an illiterate electorate. In a 

 town such as Cheran the method followed in the 

 election described seems equally efficacious — as 

 long as the officials are responsive to public 

 opinion. 



That unconventionalities are frequent in elec- 

 tions is further illustrated by the presidential 

 elections earlier in the same year. Many 

 months before the election a group of Almazan 

 followers organized and began an active cam- 

 paign in the town. The followers of Camacho 

 (the PRM group) remained inactive. At the 

 end of 2 or 3 months a PRM delegation waited 

 on the Almazan followers and pointed out that 

 there had been no interference with their cam- 

 paign but that nevertheless the bulk of the town 

 favored Camacho. The facts were apparently 

 indisputable, and when the PRM group stressed 

 the fact that further campaigning could only 

 result in creating divisions and dissensions in 

 the town, the Almazan group ceased its cam- 

 paign. At the election, Cheran cast a unani- 

 mous ballot for Camacho. 



Two things of interest emerge from this 

 account. The first is the power of the argu- 

 ment against disunity in the community. 

 Particularly in the Indian community, unity is 

 prized almost above all else. Sophisticated in 

 some ways as Cheran is, this argument is still 

 one of the most potent that can be made. The 

 second point of interest is the bearing this 

 sequence of events has on interpretation of the 

 national election returns in Mexico. What 

 happened in Cheran probably happened in 

 hundreds of other towns in Mexico and helps 

 partly to explain the one-sided results usually 

 reported in Mexican elections. 



