As Term Nears End, Critics’ Shadows Loom : De la Madrid Seeks to Ensure His Image

In a ritual that grows especially earnest in the dying days of political power in Mexico, the government of President Miguel de la Madrid is trying to ensure a favorable place for itself in history and avoid the scorn that is almost always heaped on Mexican presidents once they leave office.

Although De la Madrid’s six-year term runs until December, 1988, he is expected to choose a successor--as the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party--this month or next. Given the party’s domination of electoral machinery, the chosen heir will win elections scheduled for next summer. From the moment that candidate is selected, the spotlight will begin to shift away from the incumbent to the future president.

Hand-picking a successor does not ensure that De la Madrid will be treated kindly when he leaves office. On the contrary, new presidents traditionally blame every ill possible on their predecessors.

‘Form of Cannibalism’

“It’s a form of cannibalism,” said economist and columnist Jorge Castaneda. “The new president eats the old one.”

So like ancient Mayan kings who used to carve accounts of battle victories in stone so that their glory would last forever, the De la Madrid administration is beginning to tailor its public relations campaigns to show off his administration’s successes.

Last week, De la Madrid toured Mexico City inspecting completed public works projects: two highway overpasses, two subway stations, a subway engineering building and three newly landscaped parks.

Such inspection tours are not unusual; Mexican presidents commonly inaugurate just about every public work in sight. De la Madrid has been known to dedicate single traffic lights in small towns.

Messages With a Point

Much of the tour went according to a venerable script. Fanfare greeted the arrival of De la Madrid’s big, white official touring bus at each stop. Out he popped as soldiers presented arms, party workers clapped and schoolchildren shouted soccer-style cheers. A local functionary would then begin a discourse on the progress or completion of the project, adding no small amount of praise for the role played by the president, for his foresight, his tirelessness.

But the messages had a special focus: Despite five years of economic difficulties, they say or imply, De La Madrid has kept Mexico moving forward.

“This is the key point,” said presidential spokesman Manuel Alonso.

It is expected that De la Madrid will make much the same point during part of his state-of-the-nation address Tuesday.

An Easy Target

Nonetheless, the short-term chances of De la Madrid staving off criticism after he leaves office are slim. Unemployment is high and he has presided over Mexico’s longest stretch of double- and triple-digit inflation since the early part of this century. For those reasons alone, his six-year term will be an easy target.

In the long run, even De la Madrid’s historical legacy may not be his to mold. Many of his principal programs are merely now taking form, and it will be up to his successor to make them permanent.

Six candidates of the ruling party, known by its Spanish initials PRI, have been named as possible successors. All are close associates of De la Madrid: Alfredo Del Mazo Gonzalez, the secretary of mining and natural resources; Manuel Bartlett Diaz, secretary of the interior; Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the planning and budget secretary; Atty. Gen. Sergio Garcia Ramirez; Miguel Gonzalez Avelar, the public education secretary, and Ramon Aguirre, the federally appointed mayor of Mexico City. Each has promised to carry on De la Madrid’s policies.

But to the practiced Mexican ear, these promises mean little. Candidates always agree with the president; their selection, after all, depends on good relations with the incumbent.

Exploited Home Market

“The problem is, one never knows what the successor will do. They never show their true face until they are in office,” said Lorenzo Meyer, who heads Colegio de Mexico, a think tank on Mexico City’s outskirts.

Most observers interviewed in recent days by The Times agreed that De la Madrid will be remembered for at least three things: for trying to change the direction of the Mexican economy, for keeping the lid on potential political violence and for restoring respect for the office of president.

Mexico’s economy has for the past three decades attempted to grow mainly by exploiting its home market: Mexico sold to itself. Oil, the country’s leading export, was the exception. But as the economy stagnated in the 1980s and oil prices fell, De la Madrid tried to push Mexico’s industries to seek markets abroad and thus tie Mexico to the world economy.

The drive has met with some success; non-petroleum exports increased by more than half in the first six months of this year. But because the opening to the outside has just begun--Mexico only last year joined the General Agreement on Trade and Tariffs, the world trade oversight organization--it will be up to De la Madrid’s successor to carry on.

Pressure Is Building

Already, there are indications of pressure to reverse or alter the policy. Some industrialists are complaining that while Mexican industries are being encouraged to export, the country is also being exposed to foreign competition from imports that, when Mexico begins to buy from abroad again, will drive Mexicans out of business. Leftist politicians argue that depending on international trade puts Mexico at the mercy of foreign powers, especially the United States.

While De la Madrid has led an economy that has failed to produce new jobs for a growing labor force, Mexico has known little political violence and certainly none of the kind that afflicts its southern neighbors in Central America.

Social peace is a subject about which De la Madrid frequently speaks. When he came into office, he warned that Mexico faced the prospect of a grave “social and political breakdown.” In an interview with The Times last year, he said proudly that “catastrophic predictions” about chaos in Mexico have proven “groundless.” His advisers, when asked about his accomplishments, almost always include the maintaining of public order.

Crisis Averted

The reasons that Mexico remains relatively peaceful are due to a variety of factors, observers say. Mexico’s own violent revolution is only 75 years in the past. Mexicans are aware of the chaos in Central America and elsewhere in the hemisphere and seem acutely proud that Mexico avoids such conflicts.

De la Madrid’s administration has been agile enough to act quickly to cool potentially violent situations. For example, for several months following the Mexico City earthquakes of 1985, there was fear that the homeless, impatient with the slow pace of reconstruction, would riot.

In response, De la Madrid shook up a slow-moving department of housing renovation and mobilized city functionaries to be available for complaints from the homeless at the city’s many refugee camps.

The results: Pressure diminished, construction got under way and by this past summer, almost all of the homeless were in permanent shelters. The crisis had passed.

Veered From Controversy

Sometimes, De la Madrid has simply dropped a program he deemed desirable if it produced too much controversy. For example, earlier this year, his administration tried to impose reforms on the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Latin America’s largest university. The reforms included new matriculation fees and more rigorous academic standards for the government-run university.

But organized groups of students protested and shut down the campus. Rather than face further resistance and possible violence, De la Madrid’s representatives formed a joint committee with the students aimed at creating a congress to discuss the reforms. In effect, the compromise killed any chance for major changes at the university under this administration. Time is running out; the committee has been bogged down in procedural debates since the spring.

A change in style may be De la Madrid’s other lasting legacy. In office, De la Madrid, 52, has been low-key, a contrast to his two more flamboyant predecessors, Luis Echeverria and Jose Lopez Portillo. In a remark taken as a jab at the previous administrations, he told reporters last year that “we don’t assume that the history of Mexico begins and ends with us.”

De la Madrid is uncharismatic and speaks in a monotone accented by mechanical gestures, and his speeches never produce any emotion among listeners. While some observers consider him to have offered little of the strong public leadership expected of Mexican presidents, others believe that his flat style has given the country a welcome respite from bouts with megalomania.

No Lurid Tales

“He has avoided the insanity that seemed to come with the office,” said Adrian Lajous, a columnist and author of books on the presidency.

There have been virtually no lurid tales about De la Madrid’s private life, no accusations of wild nepotism or full-blown corruption of the type that marked the term of Lopez Portillo. Nor has he embarked on any bombastic and costly campaigns to promote himself as a Third World leader as did Echeverria, who preceded Lopez Portillo.

“De la Madrid has reintroduced a sense of dignity in public administration,” said economist Rogelio Ramirez de la O.

The Mexican president and career bureaucrat has fared less well in other projects that he undertook when he came into office. His anti-corruption campaign, known as “moral renovation,” has resulted in closer scrutiny of government budgets but failed to wipe out payoffs in everything from law enforcement to garbage collection.

Recently, De la Madrid indicated that he is satisfied with modest progress. In answer to persistent reports abroad that Mexico is still rife with corruption, De la Madrid told reporters, “I deny categorically that Mexico and its political and administrative system have excessive levels of corruption in comparison with the averages we observe in other nations.”

No Surprise May Be Best

De la Madrid also presided over some changes in Mexico’s political system, although they are generally considered measures that do not threaten the supremacy of the ruling party.

Early in his term, he seemed willing to permit opposition parties to take office as a result of municipal elections that went against the PRI. However, when the PRI began to lose frequently in northern states, De la Madrid reversed himself. Elections last year and in 1985 featured incidents of open ballot-box stuffing that indicated the PRI would mobilize all the resources needed to ensure victories in municipal races, not to mention governor and congressional campaigns.

The latest and perhaps final innovation of the De la Madrid administration came in mid-August when, by introducing six possible successors, De la Madrid opened the presidential selection process to more public scrutiny than usual. However, there is little likelihood that the choice will be made any differently than before. The president’s “big finger,” as the mechanism is known here, will be the deciding factor.

With more than a year left in office, there is still time for De la Madrid to make some dramatic gesture that would place him more spectacularly in the history books. Lopez Portillo, for instance, nationalized Mexico’s banking system during his last months in office. Echeverria expropriated major landholdings in northern Mexico.

Most observers consider similar unexpected moves antithetical to De la Madrid’s measured nature. And after previous unpredictable finales, for Mexico, no surprise may be the best surprise.