Mexico’s educated elite lose clout

Like soccer stars and Roman Catholic saints, intellectuals have long held a prized status within Mexican society.

Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize-winning poet and diplomat who died in 1998, is more revered than most former presidents. Illuminati such as writers Carlos Fuentes and Carlos Monsivais, historian Enrique Krauze and journalist-novelist Elena Poniatowska are constantly being quoted in the newspapers, feted with official honors and solicited for their views on a smorgasbord of subjects.

In Mexico, where the term “intellectual” usually connotes a person possessing mental gravitas, serious literary chops and at least a few friends in high places, intellectuals have enjoyed a degree of name-brand recognition that’s rare in all but a handful of countries -- France comes to mind -- at least among the educated chattering classes. Along with that acclaim, intellectuals reap other rewards: generous government stipends, cultural and academic sinecures, ambassadorships and access to those wielding power.

But lately something funny has been happening on the way to the symposium. Mexico’s powerful mass media, particularly television and radio commentators, are steadily usurping intellectuals’ power to shape public opinion. Scrappy outsider voices are beginning to emerge on Internet blogs and other alternative outlets, competing for attention with the cerebral old guard.

Some analysts believe that Mexico’s bitterly contested presidential campaign, which culminates with Sunday’s vote, has further undermined intellectuals’ stature -- and that this may benefit the country.

“This election has made even clearer the big divide in Mexican society and just how elitist a country Mexico is, and intellectuals are part of that elite. For years they’ve lived with their hands outstretched,” says Denise Dresser, a columnist for the Mexico City daily newspaper Reforma and a professor at the Autonomous Technical Institute of Mexico.

In a country where nearly 50% of the population lives in poverty and relatively few people read newspapers or receive more than a grammar school education, intellectuals’ influence has always been disproportionate to the size of their audience. Now there are signs that their privileged position among the nation’s elite also may be undergoing a transformation.

“I think it’s kind of overrated, this subject of the role of intellectuals,” says Leo Zuckerman, a political science professor at the Center for Economic Research and Teaching in Mexico City. “I believe that those who most believe that they have influence over public opinion are the intellectuals themselves.”

Zuckerman thinks that the role once played by intellectuals is now being filled by television news show conductores (anchor-hosts) who frequently inject opinion into their news reports. “In reality the people in Mexico are informed through radio and television, fundamentally,” he says. “And in this sense we can see in the last six years that the big conductors, the big personalities of radio and television, converted themselves into the formers of opinion.”

Jorge Castaneda, one of the country’s best-known intellectuals and a former foreign minister, has referred to this new elite as the “conductorcracia.”

Some intellectuals have become talking heads on these television shows, which frequently blur the line between news and opinion. Dresser says the power of television and other mass media are converting Mexico’s intelligentsia into an American-style punditocracy, in which snappy sound bites trump scholarly verbosity. “We’re becoming more Americanized, for better and for worse,” she says.

The presidential race also has rewritten some of the ground rules of commentary. In the past, intellectuals backed principles but typically avoided endorsing particular candidates for office in Mexico’s then-one-party system. They argued more with each other than directly with politicians.

That tradition has eroded during this campaign, as Poniatowska and Monsivais came out early and publicly in support of Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, the left-leaning former Mexico City mayor who according to most opinion polls holds a slim lead over his rivals.

But those endorsements may have come at a price. In the future, intellectuals may find it harder to maintain that they are detached observers. Earlier this year, Poniatowska was publicly criticized and ridiculed by Lopez Obrador’s opponents in the ruling National Action Party, or PAN, after she made a TV advertisement on his behalf.

That, in turn, led a group of Latin American and Europeans artists, including the Portuguese and Spanish writers Jose Saramago and Juan Goytisolo, the Nicaraguan poet Ernesto Cardenal and the Colombian novelist Laura Restrepo, to rally to Poniatowska’s defense by denouncing the criticisms of her as “macho aggression.”

“Criticism is elementary,” says her friend Monsivais, widely regarded as Mexico’s preeminent living man of letters. “But not insults, not sexism and the macho attitudes of the PAN.”

Yet some here insist that the function of intellectuals should be to act as critics, not to make endorsements or otherwise align themselves with politicians, lest they sacrifice their independence. “[T]he intellectual ethic obliges the one who adopts it to leave his political preferences outside the lecture hall and of his writings: the intellectual critic ought to be the most objective and broad possible,” wrote Isabel Turrent in Reforma. (Turrent is married to Krauze, one of Mexico’s best-known right-leaning intellectuals.)

The tradition of an intellectual class in Mexico dates to the Aztec empire, whose emperors surrounded themselves with priests and wise men. The colonial court of the Spanish Empire and its allies in the Roman Catholic Church later cultivated a subservient intellectual caste system. These authoritarian, top-down regimes suppressed the development of a culture of wide-open public debate, Turrent says.

During the seven decades that the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, ran Mexico, intellectuals were courted, coddled and largely co-opted by the political establishment. The PRI tent was large enough, and ideologically ambiguous enough, to accommodate intellectual dissent so long as the intelligentsia didn’t directly challenge the PRI’s monopoly on power.

That cozy arrangement began to crack in 1968, when Paz resigned as ambassador to India to protest a government massacre of student protesters a few days before the opening of the Olympic Games in Mexico City. Many of today’s leading intellectuals forged their political consciences in the crucible of that era.

Since the election of President Vicente Fox of the National Action Party in 2000 effectively ended the PRI monopoly, Mexico’s fledgling democracy has grown more competitive and sharp-elbowed. The country’s media, particularly its newspapers, are far more independent and critical than in the past.

Political campaign attack ads have mushroomed. Blogging and alternative-media websites, though somewhat restricted to middle- and upper-class Mexicans with regular Internet access (estimated at about 16% of the population), have opened other opinion channels. The facade of mannered courtliness and rhetoric-laden, abstract debate that has marked intellectual life here for so long is crumbling.

Blogger Jose Alvarez, for example, poses this question, at

dixo-josealvarez.spaces.msn.com/PersonalSpace.aspx: “Does Lopez Obrador live in the here and now? or does his mind inhabit the past, or the future? The future are ambitions, the past are resentments, and finally can a politician be a happy man?”

While their influence appears to be waning, Mexico’s intelligentsia, like a number of other social institutions, are simultaneously being caught up in this increasingly pluralistic and polarized environment.

“Lopez Obrador is not the most perfect candidate in the world for Monsivais or Poniatowska to get behind,” says Linda Egan, a professor at UC Davis and author of a book on Monsivais. “And yet, because of this being the first really plural campaign, they have to pick a candidate and they have to support him, otherwise the whole system will break down, otherwise the one-party thing will just walk away again.”

From the right, Krauze, editor of the magazine Letras Libres, has been blasting Lopez Obrador as a “messianic” populist whose economic policies could ruin the country. Years ago, Krauze helped define Mexico’s intellectual left-right division with an essay he wrote criticizing the left-leaning Fuentes as a “guerrilla dandy.”

Although intellectuals still are powerful, some believe they will need to adapt if they are to remain relevant to public life. Egan thinks that intellectuals need to ally themselves with issue-oriented volunteer and nongovernmental organizations, come out of their think tanks and engage with the practical issues that still bedevil the country: human rights, agricultural policy, immigration, birth control, medical rights, inadequate postal and telecommunications systems and so on.

“I don’t think it’s occurred to them,” Egan says of intellectuals as a group. “I think they are as much victims of the way the country has organized itself and run itself for centuries and somebody needs to have a little brainstorming session with them.... They have to be more involved with their country, with their society, with the well-being of their own people. That’s what’s been missing.”

For his part, Monsivais believes that rather than intellectuals, a new class of public figures will dominate Mexico’s next presidential election in 2012: movie stars and entertainers. “I believe that in the next elections the major role is going to be the figures of the spectacle, like in the United States,” he says.