Sergio Aquayo Quezada

In 1994 an unprecedented civic movement emerged in Mexico committed to insuring the integrity and transparency of the national elections. Called the Civic Alliance, this movement was founded by human rights and civic activists who took on the daunting task of mobilizing Mexican citizens to monitor a process most had come to view as hopelessly corrupt.

Yet in just a few months the Civic Alliance grew into a coalition of more than 400 organizations and thousands of citizens. Together they conducted civic education campaigns throughout the country, urging people at the grassroots level to defend their rights as citizens by resisting corrupt and unlawful practices. For the first time, the Mexican political process was subjected to the scrutiny of civil society. Rallying people with the demand for a "jeugo limpio" (clean game), the Civic Alliance democratized election technology and information, giving previously passive local groups the ability to perform very sophisticated monitoring processes. They conducted opinion surveys, exposed biased media coverage of the campaign, documented cases of vote-buying and other forms of abuse, and hosted hundreds of international visitors who came to observe the voting. On election day they deployed more than 12,000 trained election observers at some 7,000 polling places and were able to conduct their own independent "quick count" which served as a powerful deterrent to ballot-stuffing and tampering with the results.

The Civic Alliance not only opened the electoral system, but it empowered Mexican citizens as never before. With its broad base and nonpartisanship, it functioned as an authentic representative of Mexican society - a society newly insistent on openness and fairness, and armed with the knowledge and technical skills that enabled it to act effectively. As such, the Civic Alliance has been able to build on the foundation laid in 1994 to become an enduring force for honesty and accountability in public life: a watchdog against corruption and a spur to the democratic transformation of the country.

Sergio Aguayo would be the first to say that it is the Civic Alliance and not himself that should be honored. But more than any single individual, he became its voice and its Leader. Threatened with assassination, often reviled as a radical, he pressed forward patiently and quietly to build the Alliance and to fulfill its mission, which was to foster the discovery by Mexicans of their rights as citizens.