Culture : Salinas Accused of Doctoring the Books on Mexico’s History : New school texts cast villains and heroes in a different light. Critics say the president is distorting the past for political gain.

In Mexico, it is often said that the past is never past, that Mexican history is as alive as the Mexican present.

This is, after all, a country that continues to grapple with its 16th-Century conquest, a country where government officials sign public documents with the 1910 revolutionary slogan, “Effective suffrage; no reelection.” And where schoolbooks, free to students for more than 30 years, are still hailed as “free texts.”

Today, it is a country in an uproar over its official history, recently rewritten in new texts issued to fourth, fifth and sixth graders upon their return to classes earlier this month.

On the front pages of newspapers, in public forums and even Congress, Mexicans are in heated argument about the virtues and shortcomings of 19th-Century dictator Porfirio Diaz, revolutionary heroes Emiliano Zapata and Francisco (Pancho) Villa and other historical figures.

The debate has excited the same liberal and conservative passions that provoked so much of this country’s violent history--only now, they are called liberal and neo-liberal.

Critics charge that free-market reformer President Carlos Salinas de Gortari has hired his intellectual buddies to ideologically revise--or distort--Mexican history to justify his own neo-liberal economic program.

Historian Paco Ignacio Taibo II accuses the government of undertaking “a Stalinist process of whitewashing black characters of Mexican history, of putting in some and taking out others.”

The government is trying to bury Mexico’s revolutionary past, critics say, glorifying the repressive but economically prosperous “Porfiriato,” as the Diaz regime was called, while minimizing social reformers Zapata and Villa.

At the same time, the president has allowed the private television network, Televisa, into the National Palace to film a series on Diaz, “The Life of Don Porfirio.” And the government has restored several rooms in the Chapultepec Castle that were Diaz’s domain.

The government rejects the charge of revisionism and says the new books attempt to put “meat and bones” on historical figures. Rather than divide them into heroes and villains, they are all shown to be more multidimensional.

The books “abandon much of the old Manichean vision of the Porfiristas as bad and the revolutionaries as good,” newspaper columnist Roberto Blancarte wrote in favor of the texts.

The Education Ministry has defended the texts, but in light of the controversy agreed to organize public forums to review the books and a commission to rewrite them for the 1993-94 school year. Prominent author Hector Aguilar Camin, editor of Nexos magazine, and historian Enrique Florescano, who oversaw the writing of the new texts, insist they are balanced.

Moreover, Aguilar Camin says the raging debate has accomplished one of the primary goals of the texts: “The reanimation of the study of our history at a time of world recomposition.”

Supporters of the new texts note that they include previously taboo subjects such as the army’s massacre of student demonstrators in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco plaza in 1968 and the country’s plunge into economic crisis in the 1980s.

But even some supporters criticize the government for including a glowing assessment of the Salinas administration--which has a six-year term ending in 1994--in the history books.

Political cartoonists have had a field day with the new texts. One La Jornada cartoon shows Zapata next to the revolutionary slogan, “The land belongs to the one who works it.” The word “land” has been crossed out and “history” written in its place.

Another shows Porfirio Diaz with a copy of a new text, which is entitled, “My Book of the History of Mexico.” It simply says, “His.”

The new books are less nationalistic and less critical of the United States, which grabbed half of Mexico’s territory. Critics assert that the books go too far. They accuse the government of trying to appease the United States in order to secure a North American Free Trade Agreement. A cartoon in El Universal newspaper shows President Bush with a textbook saying, “I liked the new Mexican history books.”

Political scientist Luis Javier Garrido wrote in La Jornada newspaper that the texts “confirm that what is in dispute is the very essence of the nation. . . . The history of Mexico has been a continual struggle for independence, social justice and popular sovereignty through democracy, and this leitmotif is absent from these texts, which only attempt to legitimize the ‘system.’ ”

The system to which Garrido refers is more than 60 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, called PRI, and a presidency with nearly absolute power.

The new texts replace social science books written in 1973 during the liberal, nationalistic--some would say leftist--administration of President Luis Echeverria.

In the old sixth-grade social science text, the Porfirio regime and the Mexican Revolution led a chapter on 20th-Century revolutions that also dealt with World War I, the Russian Revolution, fascism and Nazism. Of Diaz, the book said: “In 1877 Porfirio Diaz occupied the presidency for the first time and proposed to pacify and modernize the nation; to achieve that, he repressed all popular demonstrations against him and jailed his political enemies, thus establishing the so-called ‘Porfiriana peace’ or ‘peace of the sepulcher’ and converting his government into a dictatorship.

“As for the economy, Diaz gave concessions to foreigners--principally English and North Americans--so they would invest capital in our country. As a result, the most important branches of the national economy were in the hands of foreigners, at a cost to the majority of Mexicans who were displaced from management positions and could only work as employees or peons.

“Diaz governed for more than 30 years. In this period . . . the dominant class was made up of large landowners . . . industrialists, bankers and businessmen, while the majority of the population was peasants without land and workers who lived in deplorable conditions. . . .”

The book told how Diaz ran as the only candidate in several elections. In 1908 he promised a fair vote, but when Francisco I. Madero ran against him on the slogan “Effective suffrage; no reelection,” Diaz had him jailed and stole the vote. Madero called Mexicans to arms, setting off the revolution on Nov. 20, 1910. In 1911, Diaz fled to France, where he died in exile in 1915.

The new book, on the other hand, paints a rosier view of Diaz over three chapters, each summarized at the end in yellow boxes that say “principal ideas.”

The first says: “The long government of Porfirio Diaz achieved pacification of the country through alliances with different groups and interests. A good administration achieved economic recuperation and attracted foreign investment that sparked economic development. Culture flourished, and there were good historians, painters and poets.”

The second says: “The railroads were one of the principal means of economic development during the Porfiriato. The railroad made contact between previously isolated regions, allowed the circulation of men and merchandise, diminished the costs of transportation and promoted the export of Mexican products.”

And finally: “The long government of Porfirio Diaz created a climate of peace and promoted the economic development of the country. This government diminished individual liberties, concentrated power in a few hands and halted the development of democracy.”

One of the last chapters of the sixth-grade text, “End of the Century Changes,” explains that the country accumulated a huge foreign debt in the 1980s and suffered an economic crisis. The government adopted “necessary but unpopular measures to put its own house in order,” and the demand for free and clean elections rose.

But the circumstances surrounding Salinas’ own election in 1988 are dramatically understated. The book says Salinas won a hard-fought election with “a little more than half the votes” but omits widespread charges that the election was stolen.

It also fails to name the man who challenged Salinas--Cuauhtemoc Cardenas--in a dramatic split from the ruling party.