Quest to Reform Mexico Moves Across Border

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the leader of an opposition movement in Mexico, told an overflow crowd of students and faculty members at Cal State Los Angeles recently that there has been “an outburst of anger” among Mexicans clamoring for a new political order.

An unsuccessful candidate for the Mexican presidency last year, Cardenas was in Los Angeles to tap into a newly discovered source of support for his “pro-democracy movement”--the millions of Mexican-Americans and Mexicans living on this side of the border.

Cardenas and his Democratic Revolution Party are challenging the 60-year monopoly of power by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, known as the PRI.

During a four-day tour in mid-November, Cardenas was presented to the Los Angeles City Council by Councilwoman Gloria Molina, spoke at Roosevelt High School, was the speaker at a fund-raising luncheon and appeared at several colleges.

“Voters (in Mexico) are demanding a new political order,” he said as students and others sat in the aisles and poured out of the Student Center meeting room. “Mexicans know this change is not going to happen easily and recognize the risks in demanding it. . . . But most Mexicans are determined to avoid violence.”

He also said: “It is real important to our struggle to have the understanding of the people in this country.”

The campus audience reflected the wide range of support he encountered in Los Angeles. There were Chicano students who introduced him in halting Spanish, Anglo political science professors, Chicano studies professors, students from Latin America and people from the community who had heard that the son of revered former President Lazaro Cardenas would be appearing at the university.

“I think he creates a political awareness,” said Martha Rico, an officer in the student Chicano student group MEChA. “People are not aware (of Mexican politics), but we should be because we’re all descendants of Mexicans.”

In a speech he delivered in English, Cardenas spoke of the links between Mexico’s dire economic crisis and its political discontent. Mexico is rich in a number of resources, “but above all it is rich in young, energetic and hard-working men and women,” he said. “The problem with Mexico is not its people.”

Mexico’s ruling party has not done enough for the country’s poor, Cardenas said, and that is why millions of Mexicans migrate to the United States.

“The country has abandoned them in the past and now owes them a future,” he said. “These young Mexicans for which the country has no place today . . . are the crux of the relationship between Mexico and the United States.”

The Cardenas tour was a departure from the tradition of Mexican campaigning. It has long been considered political suicide for Mexican politicians to court “Yankee” approval, but Cardenas made it clear he was here to appeal to grass-roots support.

“In the future, you’re going to see more and more Mexican politicians pressing the flesh over here as they do over there in Mexico,” said Raul Ruiz, a Chicano studies professor at Cal State Northridge, who helped organize Cardenas’ tour.

Businessman Joe M. Sanchez, who helped organize the fund-raising luncheon for Cardenas, said it is time that Mexican-Americans take an active role in the affairs of Mexico, much the same way Jews in America take an interest in Israel, and blacks have taken up the anti-apartheid struggle for South Africa.