Cracks in Mexico Opposition Threaten to Derail Cardenas

At dusk, as the church bells rang and clouds threatened rain, hundreds of farmers crowded into the central square of this mountain town to cheer leftist leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

Weathered faces peered earnestly at the makeshift stage where Cardenas was about to speak. Suddenly a gray-bearded man grabbed the microphone and shouted questions at the former presidential candidate:

“What is it you want for Mexico? What should we expect from you?”

Cardenas called the interruption a “provocation” but answered the questions.

“‘We are building the Democratic Revolutionary Party, an independent party of the Mexican people,” he said. “And we are determined not to make alliances with the government that is responsible for fraud, for paying the foreign debt and for keeping the people in misery.”

Cardenas, who used to be a member of the party that has governed Mexico for 60 years, shook the foundations of the Mexican political system last July by uniting disparate leftist groups and winning an unprecedented 31% of the votes cast for president. Afterward, his followers charged that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party had stolen the election, casting doubt on the political legitimacy of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

But since that heady showing, Cardenas has faced political troubles of his own. The National Democratic Front, a coalition of four parties that supported Cardenas for the presidency, has failed to work together in several state elections and has lost.

Cracks in Coalition

One of the parties, the nominally Marxist-Leninist Socialist Workers, has returned to an association with the PRI, as the ruling party is universally called. When two other parties in the front refused to condemn the Socialist Workers’ “betrayal,” as Cardenas called it, he withdrew from the coalition. As a result, the original bloc of more than 130 Cardenas votes in the 500-seat federal Chamber of Deputies has disintegrated.

Amid this disarray, Cardenas candidates may have lost the advantage they were believed to have in forthcoming elections in Michoacan and Baja California, states that Cardenas won last July.

Cardenas attributes the problems to the difficulty of converting a social movement into a political party and to the PRI’s historic ability to co-opt its opponents. He charges that the ruling party bought off Rafael Aguilar Talamantes, leader of the defecting Socialist Workers Party.

“Everyone has his price,” Cardenas said in an interview. “For some it is high and for others it is low. They couldn’t buy us off, because our price is the government.”

In the 10 months since the election, Cardenas has not stopped campaigning. He spends at least half of every month touring the country in a station wagon, holding meetings in towns like this one, about 80 miles southwest of Mexico City, where he walked around the plaza in blue jeans and work boots, shaking the roughened hands of farmers.

Sign-Up Campaign

At a street corner, a hand-painted sign was draped on the side of a white station wagon, saying, “Cuauhtemoc Cardenas invites you to form the PRD”--the initials of his new party. The tailgate of the car was open, and a man was on hand to sign up members.

Cardenas says he has collected the 65,000 voters’ signatures needed to enroll the PRD as a legal political party, and the party held its founding convention over the weekend in Mexico City.

The leftist Mexican Socialist Party is giving up its name and is being incorporated into the PRD. Cardenas and those who abandoned the PRI with him have failed to persuade the other, less radical parties to incorporate with them and now are vulnerable to charges that the PRD is too far to the left for most Mexicans.

Cardenas won at least 4 million more votes than the leftist parties had ever received in a national election.

Seeks Multi-Party System

The new party’s founding convention worked on a party platform, which Cardenas says calls for a multi-party political system for Mexico with free elections and an end to government corruption.

Cardenas said the party will press for reform of the electoral laws, for reducing the power of the presidency and for stopping payment on the foreign debt. Cardenas personally opposes any weakening of the foreign investment law, which requires that at least 51% of all companies in Mexico be owned by Mexicans.

Herberto Castillo, of the Mexican Socialist Party, said that the PRD does not define itself as socialist and that “no one in the PRD has proposed the annihilation of private property.”

Cardenas said that unions and farmers groups must be independent of political parties. Most of the country’s major unions now belong to the PRI, but some leaders of the independent teachers movement, which has led a three-week school strike, would like to affiliate with the Cardenas party.

“The first lesson of the teachers strike is that the movement should be independent,” Cardenas said. “That’s what gives it its strength and that’s what gets a response from the government.”

Cardenas followers deny that Salinas, who was a weak presidential candidate, has been a more formidable opponent as president than they had expected. They say his spectacular arrests of Oil Workers Union leader Joaquin Hernandez Galicia, reputed drug lord Miguel Angel Felix Gallardo and financier Eduardo Legorreta represent a “settling of accounts” by PRI officials and have not gained him popularity.

“The people are worried about food prices and housing,” Cardenas said.

Optimistic on Upcoming Vote

Publicly, Cardenas and his followers say that despite the collapse of their original coalition, they are optimistic about scheduled July elections for governor and mayors in Baja California and for the state legislature in Michoacan.

Privately, they say that even if they lose these elections, they are better off in the long run with their own party, independent of the “PRI satellite parties.” They have their sights set on national congressional elections in 1991.

PRD leader Porfirio Munoz Ledo says he believes the original four-party alliance was a mistake. The small parties that have traditionally supported the PRI, he said, grew stronger in membership and federal deputies with Cardenas votes.

Cardenas says he had no choice at the time the alliance was formed, because he had no party of his own.

“The other parties were independent at that moment,” he said. “If they were independent now, we would still be together.”

Francisco Ortiz Mendoza, whose Popular Socialist Party was a key element of the National Democratic Front, blames Cardenas for the split. Cardenas condemned Aguilar Talamantes of the Socialist Workers for inviting the PRI to celebrate the 51st anniversary of Mexico’s nationalization of its oil industry, a step taken in the late 1930s by Cardenas’ father, the late President Lazaro Cardenas. Ortiz says Cardenas had no right to make such a condemnation. Aguilar Talamantes has since met with President Salinas and is expected to side with the PRI in the future.

“Cardenas made a serious mistake,” Ortiz said. “He had the opportunity to become not just the leader of a party but a national leader, even a leader for the continent, as (Chilean President Salvador) Allende was.”

Grass-Roots Support

Cardenas insists that divisions that split the Democratic Front at the top have not filtered down to the base, and this seemed to be true in Tejupilco, where farmers appealed to Cardenas for help in seeking credit and government-sold fertilizer.

The farmers seemed to have an almost mystical attachment to Cardenas, who is dark-skinned as they are, and whose father was revered for his agrarian reform and public works projects.

“We have beautiful watermelon, radishes--big radishes--corn and onions, all because his father built us a dam,” one of the farmers, Juan Lopez, said. “His father is dead, but we trust in the one who is still alive.”