Castro and Ortega Fire Up Mexico’s Political Stew

Squabbles within the Latin American left are so common that they seldom make news. An exception has arisen here, a disagreement that is bound to be debated for a long time.

It all began when President Carlos Salinas de Gortari broke with precedent and had Latin American heads of state attend his inauguration. Among them were Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Nicaragua’s Daniel Ortega. Mexican leftists were infuriated. After all, they were still challenging the official returns of the July 6 election that gave Salinas victory over their candidate, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

Salinas’ strategy was intelligent. The idea was to beat Cardenas in the political game of appearances. By having Castro and Ortega here to witness the inauguration, the leftists’ claim of the illegitimacy of Salinas’ government was buried in a mountain of Realpolitik.

When the two comandantes landed in Mexico, they found themselves in a most unusual, perhaps even an uncomfortable, situation. Celebrated and cheered loudly by the political Establishment, they were ignored by the masses that had voted for Cardenas.

Castro was the first to react to the uproar, but with moderation and realism. Several times he said that Mexico’s political stability was the most important in the hemisphere and had to be preserved. He implied that his presence at the ceremonies somehow helped Mexico maintain that stability.

In Tuxpam, Veracruz, Castro’s Mexican launching port in 1956 for the Cuban revolution that triumphed three years later,he went a little further: It would have been an incongruous and cowardly act not to have come to Mexico, he said. Once back in Havana, he reiterated his hope that he had not hurt his Mexican friends.

Daniel Ortega was not as gracious as Castro. His answer to the local left’s criticism was harsh, although based also in long and pragmatic postulates. In sum, he argued that there are two ways to change a political reality. If you want a profound change, the only way to achieve it is to take up arms and fight your way into power. The best example of this kind of struggle, he said, is in El Salvador. If, on the other hand, you decide to follow the electoral game, you should follow the rules until the very end. If you lose, as was the case in Mexico, you have to accept it. He suggested that refusal to accept a loss is childish. Ortega recalled that the opposition had had experience in electoral politics and should have known what it was getting into. The limits and risks of electoral participation are obvious, he said.

Finally, Ortega questioned the right of the Mexican left to question Cuba’s and Nicaragua’s presence at the inauguration.

Told of Ortega’s statements, Cardenas did not back down. He repeated his criticism that Castro and Ortega were lending moral and political support to a government that lacks both among its own people.

More emphatic, Samuel Del Villar, a prominent member of the opposition, argued that political legitimacy is something to be established domestically. He went on to compare Salinas’ most unusual invitation to foreign heads of state with the invitation extended by dictator Porfirio Diaz to the Fiestas del Centenario in 1900. That celebration also gathered many foreign dignitaries in Mexico, which Diaz used to enhance his own standing.

Whatever the case, this squabble among natural allies shows a qualitative change in the Latin American left. It does sound childish to believe that Cuba and Nicaragua would risk losing Mexico’s international support in order to express solidarity with the claims of the local left.

The situation also raises some questions of Realpolitik within the context of Latin American unity toward common goals. One has to wonder how tight is the ideological bond between the left that is in power, like Cuba and Nicaragua, and the left that is out of power.

The Cuban and Nicaraguan left certainly seems to have a political sophistication far beyond that of the Mexican left. To dramatize his point, Ortega said that if he had gone to El Salvador he would have been praised by the revolutionary army, the guerrillas.

Perhaps the Mexican left wasted a magnificent opportunity to use the situation to its advantage by receiving both Castro and Ortega with massive demonstrations of support, thus advancing a dialogue among allies.

Or perhaps Cardenas does not want to associate himself with the radical left of the continent.

Whatever the case, by playing coolly and intelligently, Salinas scored big in his contest with the opposition.