Mexico's referendum on drug war yields mixed results | McClatchy

McClatchy, Mexico City, 05/07/2010, excerpt/extracto.-

The political party that ruled Mexico for seven decades before voters threw it out a decade ago showed its strength in state elections Sunday where the dominant issue was the country's skyrocketing drug violence.

By Monday morning, preliminary results gave the opposition Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, victory in nine of the 12 states where voting took place.

But it also suffered surprising losses in the southern state of Oaxaca and the central state of Puebla, near the capital and was trailing in the Pacific coast state of Sinaloa. The PRI has governed all three states for more than eight decades.