Posters Clarify Mexican Politics

The thug looks comfortable as he reclines in his bed under the American flag, exposing a dollar sign tattoo on his arm and an intravenous tube running to a skeletal figure beside him.

The symbol of the United States feeding off Mexico appears on a poster that the leftist party known by its Spanish acronym of PPS distributed before the Mexican presidential election July 6, urging the cancellation of the national debt and the election of the nationalistic Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

The poster targets the impoverishment blamed on the plan of the Mexican ruling party, known by its Spanish acronym as the PRI, to pay back the debt, which is primarily owed to U. S. banks.

Despite such opposition to its policies, the PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the Mexican presidency in what many observers called the country’s first multi-party election--but by the slimmest margin ever achieved by a PRI presidential candidate. Confusion lasted well past the announcement of the results of the election, which many Mexicans said was rigged to preserve the PRI’s unbroken half-century of dominance in Mexico.

To make the events of the election clearer, the Centro Cultural de La Raza is playing host to a show of political posters and memorabilia such as the PPS’s propaganda. The 40-piece show, running until Oct. 16, represents the viewpoints of 10 political parties active in the July 6 election.

The memorabilia range from the austere blue and white posters of the conservative PAN’s Santa Claus look-alike candidate Manuel Clouthier to the left-wing PRT’s vivid white hammer and sickle on red cloth. Photographs of election-time political activity put some of the posters in context. English translations and explanations also accompany most of the objects on display. In addition, the Centro Cultural is keeping files on the political parties available to people interested in learning more about them, said acting director Victor Ochoa.

“I think our main purpose is to flesh out some vague ideas that people interested in Mexico might like to know, to fill them in with some names and issues,” said Joe Barry, a bilingual education teacher at San Diego Community College who, with Ocean Beach Elementary School teacher Peter Brown, collected the posters.

“There are a lot of myths about Mexican government,” Barry said. “That they don’t have a democracy, that they don’t have free expression, that most people can’t read and write, that people can’t vote,” he said.

Barry came up with the idea for an exhibit that would challenge such ideas

and clarify the events of the election while viewing his friend Brown’s extensive poster collection, he said. Several weeks after the Mexican elections, he and Brown visited Mexico to request posters from the headquarters of the major political parties.

“We found them extremely re ceptive to people up here,” Barry said. “They wanted people to know about what is going on in Mexico. People were much more open and willing to talk about their politics.”

Several representatives of each of the parties appeared at the opening of the show last Friday to explain their views, Ochoa said.

“I have the impression that Mexican democracy is not doing too badly,” he said. “This (election), people were actually feeling hopeful. They all seem to believe very strongly in the democratic process. They were almost naive.” Mexican posters “try to say more than American posters,” Barry said. “They have more punch. Imagine trying to get some Jesse Jackson and Bush posters. You’d run out of steam.”