In the Fields of REFORM : One Country’s Crisis

The number of voters taking part in the July 6 elections in Mexico was extraordinary. I am 74 years old and I had never seen anything similar. The results were no less surprising. The first to be surprised must have been the opposition parties. Did they expect so many votes? And the “Pristas”--all of the Old Guard members of PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party--could they have imagined the magnitude of their losses?

In one day, the Mexicans’ secret and free vote ended the one-party system. The PRI’s own candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, recognized that fact shortly after the election. We are now beginning to take our first steps on unfamiliar territory: the regime of pluralist parties.

After having peacefully finished off a political tradition that lasted more than half a century, are we capable of living together in an open democracy with all its risks and limitations? Pluralism is relativism and relativism is tolerance. In modern democracies there are no absolute truths nor parties endowed with those truths. Absolutes belong to the realm of private life; they are the domain of religious beliefs or of philosophical convictions. In open societies, defeat is provisional and victory is relative.

The relativism of modern democracies contradicts our political tradition. The contradiction is twofold: In our history, neither the conqueror nor the vanquished has ever accepted the fact that triumphs or defeats were relative and provisional. All or nothing, a formula that is more religious than political.

A glance at our recent past demonstrates that, with the exception of Francisco I. Madero (1911-13), the legitimacy of our presidents has been, at the very least, doubtful. Some were obviously imposed upon us, others won elections but their triumphs would have been less one-sided and more contested if they had not counted on the resources and power of the PRI. The party has been, since its founding in 1929, the political branch of the government, just as the army and the police have been its military branch.

In all these cases, the victories were total and absolute: The victors never shared their power with their adversaries. The other face of the coin is no less deplorable--all the losing candidates argued that they had been victims of fraud and many among them took up arms to defend their rights. Every four years there was an uprising. The party was founded by Plutarco Elias Calles (president 1924-28) precisely to end these procedures. He ended them, but he also finished off democracy. The lesson of the past is clear.

Within the attitudes of the opposition parties there is more than an echo of that terrible past that I have just summarily evoked. Since election day itself, the denunciations have not ceased: They have been victims of a colossal fraud. I have carefully read their arguments and I must confess that I am not convinced.

I am not going to start an analysis of the numbers presented by one or the other. That is a matter for the public domain and the press has been giving daily attention to election statistics. I think that anyone who impartially and dispassionately examines the matter will arrive at conclusions similar to my own. Undoubtedly, there were irregularities: furthermore, blunders and errors. That is natural. Aside from the unhealthy persistence of our past in the habits of the PRI and in the spirit of its opposition, one must remember that these are the first elections of this type ever held in Mexico. No one had the necessary experience, not the government, not the PRI, not the opposition--not the people themselves,

Democracy is a political philosophy but it is also an apprenticeship and a technique. Certainly, blunders and errors can be explained, but irregularities? Of course; we all insist that the Electoral College examine each case clearly and rigorously and under the scrutiny of the public. It is not impossible for the opposition to have won in more districts that those already conceded to it. But it is one thing to formulate legitimate reservations and protests and another to demand that the elections be declared invalid and to self-proclaim oneself president.

Is this dispute on the elections’ validity a reflection of our political immaturity? Yes and no. It is clear that our past and its tendency to confuse the absolute and the relative, the religious and the political is still alive and expresses itself in many of our attitudes. We are not yet--for better or worse--an entirely modern society. Since independence, our institutions, our ideas and our customs have varied: Today we travel by plane, we’re interested in molecular biology, the Marxist crisis and “punk,” but have our deepest beliefs and fundamental attitudes really changed?

It would be unpardonably foolish to attribute our disputes about the credibility of these elections solely to the persistent presence of our past. There are those who are directly responsible also. In the first place, the government and the PRI. On the one hand they are heirs to a half-century of manipulations, underhandedness, abuses and violence; on the other, many of the PRI’s leaders in their attitudes and in their vain and high-sounding language, continue to play their timeworn games of power. They don’t convince anyone but they irritate everyone.

The gravest error was committed three years ago in Chihuahua: By taking the election away from the National Action Party (PAN), the government’s credibility was damaged. The attitude of the foreign press is largely due to this blunder. Moreover, an opportunity to begin democratic reform, not in the center of the country but on its periphery, was lost. It would have been the beginning of political decentralization.

The responsibility lies in no less measure with the two current opposition candidates, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Manuel Clouthier. Cardenas (the son of Lazaro Cardenas, president from 1934 to 1940 and revered for giving land to peasants and expropriating foreign oil companies) has proclaimed time and time again that he has won the elections and will do everything to prevent the “fraud” from being carried out: marches, parades, strikes, power outages, etc. He has openly said that he intends to do everything to block Salinas’ governance if he is indeed declared president. Clouthier does not demand to be named president: He wants the elections declared invalid and he wants them held again. Cardenas’ presumptions are senseless: How is he to prove that he won the election? With demonstrations and marches, especially in Mexico City, where he has the support of large groups, including the militants from the university movement? Clouthier’s presumptions are not only inordinate, they are also unrealistic.

What the two candidates demand is the unconditional surrender of their adversaries. In a wink of an eye, they want to tear down the PRI and bring the government to its knees. Once again, all or nothing . Possessed by the phantoms of our past, the opposition leaders seek a total conquest, the political annihilation of their antagonists. They do not support a transition or a gradual and peaceful evolution, such as some of us have been seeking since 1969, but rather an abrupt and instant change.

What is curious and most disquieting is that neither of the two can seriously prove that the popular majority supports either of their aims. To ask for the unconditional surrender of the enemy is very risky and can be suicidal when, as in this case, the opponent is strong and ready to do battle. What I am saying is applicable to the government as well as to the opposition: The former should resist these provocations and the temptation toward violence; the latter, if it wishes to survive, should abandon the politics of “all or nothing.” The proverb says that God blinds those he wishes to lead astray. What is worse is that in this case all of us would be the lost souls.

We do not know what will happen in the days ahead. Yet we can say what we would like to see happen. To accept political relativity would mean, first of all, that the opposition would keep, maintain and extend its enormous gains in the Legislature as well as in public opinion. The loss of an absolute majority in one of the houses of Congress should not be a major concern for the PRI. But all of this belongs to what could be called “the political kitchen.” What is most important is to go forward toward the constitution of an authentic plural-party regime.

In order to survive, the PRI should change, radically and substantially. Above all, it must become independent of the government--only then can it become what it should be, a social-democratic party of the center-left. The PAN can and should take advantage of the moment and grow. It should take up the Mexican conservative tradition, still alive today after a century and a half of improprieties and intolerance by both Jacobins and revolutionaries. It is a tradition that is part of our history and which possesses some admirable traits and personalities. The PAN should modernize and revitalize that tradition.

Finally, Neocardenism is confronted with a formidable challenge: to become a true party, not based on a name alone, but on some ideas and a program. Neocardenism is not a modern political movement, although it is many other things, some of them worthy, others objectionable and noxious. They include popular discontent, democratic aspirations, unbridled ambition among several leaders, demagoguery and populism, an adoration of the terrible father--the State--and finally, a sentimentality for a respectable historical tradition embalmed into a pious legend after 30 years of incense-burning by the PRI and by the government: Lazaro Cardenas.

It is difficult to define the Neocardenist movement. It is less difficult to enumerate some of its distinctive characteristics. In the first place, its heterogeneous nature. It is an alliance of parties that are very different and that have contradictory programs. In one of its extremes are the groups of the traditional left, survivors of the successive disillusions and crises Marxism-Leninism has undergone. Some among them, a few years behind the times, have finally discovered that democracy is not incompatible with socialism. (This is something they should say more frequently to Fidel Castro and to Daniel Ortega.)

On the other extreme, the PRI’s “Ditchdiggers,” consisting of various parties grouped under a very Mexican expression and now pushed aside by their protectors. In the center, the Neocardenists. The nucleus consists of those affected and threatened by the economic and social “modernization,” that is the members and the profiteers of the corporations and other sectors of the great official bureaucracy. Beside them the intellectuals, longing for the good old days. Down at the base, a large and much more respectable conglomerate, the victims of the politics of austerity. The soul of the movement, its agitating spirit, is composed of a group of leaders who have broken with the PRI because they want a return to the past.

I think these groups need to modernize their vision and their language. They should also repudiate totalitarian socialism if they want us to take their invocations to democracy seriously. And above all, they have to throw off their populist provocation.

One last observation on the leftist groups of Marxist origin. Among them there are intellectuals who have stopped believing in “real socialism.” In Europe, other intellectuals who have passed though the same terrible experiences and deceptions today collaborate with their governments and socialist and democratic parties in France and in Spain. Is that not an honorable course?

There will soon be elections in Jalisco and in Tabasco; they will provide the real test. I am convinced that the dual tasks of the new generation can be condensed in two words: democracy and decentralization. Democracy will return to a society what has been taken away from it; decentralization will change the millenary course of Mexican history.

A long, immense task. A task that will require a true change if it is to succeed, not only in political, economic and cultural institutions and organizations, but in the whole of society: in individual and familial morals, in public and private attitudes, within each of us and in our collective soul.