TIJUANA Two candidates for mayor in the border city of Tijuana appeared to be in a near tie in exit polling Sunday night for an election pitting the ruling National Action Party (PAN) against a flamboyant gambling company owner. An exit poll by the Tijuana newspaper Frontera slightly favored Jorge Ramos, the candiate for President Vicente Fox's PAN party. But the newspaper declared the election too close to predict based on its polling, after the end of voting Sunday night in this Pacific coast city of more than a million residents across the U.S. border from California.
Both candidates declared themselves victors in the race. Final results will not be available until Wednesday.
Ramos had been favored to win in pre-election polls. But Jorge Hank Rhon, running for the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) mounted a late surge in the weeks leading up to the election, pouring some of his reported US500 million net worth into the campaign.
Hank Rhon enjoys the backing of PRI President Roberto Madrazo, but the PAN has held both the governorship of Baja California state and the mayorship its largest city, Tijuana, since 1989, when Baja California state became the first to elect a governor who was not from the PRI.
Hank Rhon is the son of the late PRI power broker Carlos Hank Gonzalez. He also is the father of 18 children and owner of hundreds of animals at a private zoo near his Tijuana racetrack.
In 1988, two of his employees were convicted of killing a Tijuana journalist who had reported on corruption for the crusading weekly Zeta.
Meanwhile in the governor's race in the north-central state of Aguascalientes, preliminary results from the state's electoral commission indicated that National Action had won, as expected.
With 60 percent of the vote counted, National Action's Luis Armando Reynoso Femat held a commanding 61-38 percent lead over the PRI's Oscar López Velarde.
