Unofficial Official Results

Through the streets of Mexico City, in a beating rain, a gloomy procession wound one day last week. Three thousand black-clad mourners, almost all of them wearing little green badges, marched along with six rough coffins. In the coffins were the corpses of three boys, one stripling, two men--just a handful of the 350 casualties of Mexico's elections, victims of a tragicomic burlesque of democracy.

The mourners were supporters of the anti-Administration candidate, Juan Andreu Almazan. As they slowly trudged past the offices of the Partido de la Revolution Mexicana, which supported the Government's candidate Manuel Avila Camacho, marchers silently and sullenly raised their fists. General Avila Camacho was indifferent to their threat. He was, he declared, "completely satisfied with the low number of dead and wounded among the 20,000,000 population of Mexico. I am taking into consideration that in the U. S. thousands of persons are killed or wounded when a railroad train is derailed or wrecked."

By the middle of the week, no one was as much interested in casualties as in the election results. Official results would not be announced until September, but it was expected that after meeting last week the juntas computadoras (vote-counting boards) would let the public have a preview peek at the count. As if the opposition candidate had any hopes of winning in spite of the preposterously fixed election, the Government assembled truckloads of pistoleros to keep Almazanistas from getting nosy. One Government spokesman was admirably frank. Said he, apparently in English, to Jack O'Brine of the New York Herald Tribune: "If they approach any of the vote-counting places with arms tomorrow, we will shoo them away with a 't' on the end of the 'shoo.' "

The counting was peaceful--and absurd. "Unofficial official results": General Avila Camacho, 2,265,199 votes; General Almazan, 128,574 votes. Impartial observers were unanimous in denouncing this count as unashamedly rigged. Somewhat more modest, but no more dependable, was the opposition claim that General Almazan had carried 150 out of 172 electoral districts. The result as both sides stuck to their figures and fingered their triggers, was a deadlock. As tension mounted, Federal police raided General Almazan's Mexico City offices and seized his personal and business papers. The Attorney General's office later claimed that all the documents were returned. This week the General's campaign headquarters charged that business men who had had the brass to support his campaign openly had paid dearly for their pains. The Government, it was alleged, had raised tax assessments on their properties and ventures as much as 49%. The General, who had threatened revolution if swindled in the election, quietly announced he was going on a "vacation." His destination was thought to be his mountain stronghold in Monterrey, possible starting point for very possible trouble.

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