Mexican Democracy, Even Under Siege, © The New York Times, July 5, 2010, by Marc Lacey, excerpt quoted verbatim:

MEXICO CITY — Campaign offices had been bombed, candidates threatened and killed, and dead bodies were even hung from bridges on the morning of the polling. But Mexico’s voters still turned out in relatively large numbers to choose new governors, mayors and state representatives over the weekend and managed to send an inspiring message amid all the violence: Mexico’s democracy, flawed as it may be, endures.

One of the nation’s most powerful factions — the country’s drug lords — had attempted to hijack the process. Through bloodshed, they managed to keep voter turnout down in some

states and scare off many poll workers, prompting one former president of the Federal Election Institute, Luis Carlos Ugalde, to lament that this was the first Mexican election in which drug dealers played a visible role in interrupting the process.But the polling went on and the results were accepted, with voters appearing to steer away from candidates with perceived links to traffickers. In the border state of Tamaulipas, the populace seemed particularly intent on declaring that drug lords should not decide elections, voting in the brother of a candidate who was murdered less than a week before Election Day by a wide margin.

Political analysts had predicted a huge win for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the P.R.I., which ruled Mexico for 71 years before voters broke its grip on the country’s politics a decade ago. And the P.R.I. did take nine of the 12 governorships that were up for grabs on Sunday, including in Tamaulipas.

But the clearest message that voters seemed to send was that no one party rules Mexico anymore, and that entrenched party machines no long have a lock on power. Voters were clearly fed up with the violence Mexico has experienced, interviews showed, and the fact that they turned out at all in some particularly dangerous areas was noteworthy.

Election Day in Mexico