A New Society Tests Mexico’s Old Politics of Unity

Charles de Gaulle once remarked of France that it was impossible to govern a country producing 400 varieties of cheese. The French president had little patience with multiparty politics, so after his visit to Mexico in 1963, he sent a team of politologues to study Mexico’s Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), which since its creation in 1929 has never lost a single presidential, senatorial or gubernatorial election.

The French academics came back with a crestfallen response: The PRI could not be exported; it was purely Mexican, as indigenous to Mexico as Camembert is to France.

One can sympathize with De Gaulle’s pipe dream of a French PRI. The Mexican system, whether it be seen as a “one party” or, better still, a “one-power,” or better and better, an umbrella for competing sectors and pressure groups, is the result of a peculiar Mexican political tradition. This tradition is so far removed from Anglo-American practices that U.S. opinion either does not make the effort to understand it or condemns it outright. Even worse: It demands of the Mexican system that, in order to become democratic, it reproduce the political system of the United States, in itself a peculiar, not universal, product of North American traditions.

This is hardly possible, if you consider that the roots of Mexico’s political system are, first of all, in the theocratic authoritarianism of the Aztec empire, which was conquered and substituted by Spanish royal absolutism. The Spanish royal families, Hapsburgs and Bourbons, governed Mexico for longer than the PRI or anybody else--from 1521 to 1821. Their brand of absolutism was tempered by Hapsburg paternalism first, and then by the Bourbonic idea of the state as the promoter of development. All of Latin America, for three long centuries, went to the political school of St. Thomas Aquinas, and there it learned that unity is the supreme political value, not pluralism, and that collective goals (“the public good”) supersede individual rights.

Latin America tried to shake off this legacy after it achieved independence from the Iberian monarchies in the 19th Century. St. Thomas was hastily replaced by John Locke and Montesquieu; we copied the progressive laws of England, France and the United States. But the laws did not change social and economic reality; they merely disguised it. The void between law and practice was filled by anarchy and dictatorship.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 assimilated all of these lessons. It attempted to reconcile modern democratic values with historical traditions. It gave Thomism a left-wing, nationalistic makeup and imposed unity and a strong presidential system through the activity of a centralized state, creating what Mexico had never had before: public health, public education, modern communications, social services, dams, electricity, social security and public development and financial corporations. The political party of the Revolution preempted revolutionary rhetoric and nationalist issues. It taught what it did not practice: The virtues of clean elections and partisan pluralism.

As Mexico goes through a severe economic crisis, it should not be forgotten that this system, during almost 60 years, transformed an extremely backward, agrarian, illiterate country into Latin America’s second, and the world’s 13th, largest economy. It did so, besides, with political stability and a wide margin of respect for individual freedoms. This was no mean achievement in a continent plagued, during those same six decades, by military coups and political repression.

A new presidential election is now coming up in Mexico and the system is facing a challenge, paradoxically, of its own making. The Revolution urbanized and industrialized modern Mexico; it sent millions to school. The result is a new civil society, literate, energetic, middle-class, with professionals, bureaucrats, technocrats, tradesmen, entrepreneurs, intellectuals, women. The new civil society is demanding of the system what the system taught it to believe in: social justice with democratic freedoms; progress and reform.

That same fortunate civil society is acutely aware that the other half of the country--peasants, villagers, city marginals--have not benefited from the big transformations, and that they run the risk of being paralyzed by demographic presures: 1 million Mexicans are born every year, the country now has 83 million people, half of them 15 years old or less, and 1 million Mexicans enter the labor market each year, clogging the arteries of job opportunities from Mexico City to Los Angeles.

The Mexican system has survived for so long because it has usually been capable of negotiating with its opposition, even co-opting it and, if need be, corrupting it. From the factious army of the 1920s to the rebellious students of the 1970s, the system has proved extremely flexible at the game. It had enough to go around. Today it hasn’t: The oil boom of the 1970s has been followed by the debt bust of the 1980s. The insufficiencies of the system have become apparent. But so have its successes. Mexicans, by and large, are simply demanding that political institutions now adapt to society, and not vice-versa.

The PRI’s response to this challenge could be negative, but then the system would be digging its own grave; its successes have depended on its capacity to negotiate. Once it starts answering political challenges with armed repression, as it did in 1968, it precipitates a national crisis.

The next president of Mexico is sure to be the PRI’s candidate. The opposition parties--the National Action Party (PAN) on the right, and the Mexican Socialist Party (PMS) on the left--while steadily gaining strength, have yet to pose a challenge to PRI at the national level. But their local gains must be respected; the PRI is at a stage where it will win by losing.

But whoever the next president of Mexico is, he cannot be the president only of the PRI; he must become the president of all Mexicans and listen to the two demands coming from the gut of Mexican society: greater democracy and renewed development with greater social justice.

If Mexico manages to blend its old, organic politics of unity (a necessary shield against an unpredictable U.S. political future) with the modern, multiparty demands of the civil society, it will have a better chance of entering the 21st Century on its own two feet. What Mexico will never be is a reproduction of the United States, and if the public or the government of the United States demands this of Mexico, that will only stall our own democratic development. Let France have its Camembert, the United States its hot dogs and Mexico its enchiladas.