Mexico Covets Order--and Finds It in Rumor

Rumor swirled through Mexico last week. Following the assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party’s presidential candidate, Mexico was filled with rumor.

Rumor thrives in uncertain times as the least-enlightened tool of reason. Rumor feeds on chaos, even as it attempts to understand chaos, to detect a design. For though the rumor may be, almost always is, of dark conspiracy, there is within rumor a hope that the core of chaos is comprehensible and worldly, even expected. Greed. Pride. Love.

We Americans understand something of what Mexicans are going through. In the aftermath of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, rumor has become a permanent part of our political life. Whether or not Mark Lane and his fellow conspiracy theorists uncovered what “really happened” that November afternoon in Dallas, they have made us disrespectful of any official version.

Mexican colleagues, Mexican friends, were on the phone last week. I hear that the Mexican army is on the move in southern Mexico. I hear that the accused assassin is a Jehovah’s Witness--enraptured, visionary. I hear that the accused assassin is part of a Los Angeles brigade of leftists. I hear that the assassination of Colosio was orchestrated by the old guard within his own party, those unhappy with changes wrought by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

For most of the century, Mexico has purchased civic peace with a one-party political system. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, has provided stability at the price of corruption. Mexicans are apt to complain now about the PRI, describing it as something imposed upon them. But the PRI was a Mexican invention, and true to the authoritarianism and paternalism within the culture.

Every six years, the Mexican president would emerge from a political conclave to announce his successor. Thus was democracy rendered as theater. Everyone understood that the candidate would, despite token opposition, become president.

In Mexico, they never bothered to conceal the strings that made the puppets dance, and that was comforting, in a way. Corruption is comforting, in a way. And rumor, in old Mexico, was simply a matter of remarking on the visible strings.

Mexicans are beginning to say publicly that the PRI has outlived its usefulness. Some Mexicans will even say publicly that Salinas, the international symbol of modernity, stole his election.

But there are Mexicans who will tell you, to this day, that the PRI has worked because there is a distinctly Mexican genius to the system of party chieftains who take care of their own more efficiently than the new breed of politicians--technocrats (many with Ph.Ds from the United States)--who think that a country’s destiny can be charted and graphed, like some Harvard Business School case study.

It is odd that technology has restored rumor to realms of mystery and occult in Mexico. For all the wires have gone underground. You needn’t actually steal a ballot box--in the grand 19th-Century manner; you need only alter the electronic tabulation. The result has the quality of miracle: The PRI wins again!

This week, Salinas stepped forward to name the new PRI candidate for president. He named Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de Leon, a Yale-educated economist.

Rumor has it that the old guard within the PRI is displeased with the choice. Zedillo has been in disfavor since his days as education minister, when he tried to disengage fact from fable in Mexican history books--sensitive subjects like the Mexican-American War or the 1968 slaughter of Mexicans by the army.

Traditionally, Mexico, as a country, has been wedded to myth. In Mexico, there are only four roles: the Indian, the Spaniard, the Virgin and the gringo .

Last January, when Indians in the state of Chiapas revolted against Mexico City, Mexicans were immediately interested in the narrative possibilities posed by the insurrection. Here again was the 16th- Century myth of the Indian versus Cortes. Only this time, the Mexican government was cast in the role of Spain.

Talking to Mexicans last week, I had the sense that Chiapas and the consequent sympathy for the Indian (a sympathy that momentarily put aside anti-Indian racism throughout Mexican society) gave Mexicans an opportunity to complain about the PRI and its corruption.

An interesting rumor circulating throughout Mexico since January has it that Subcommandante Marcos, the phantom behind the Indian rebellion, is, in fact, a Jesuit priest. A Portuguese Jesuit priest. Lawrence of Mexico. (The Virgin.)

Last week, two ex-presidents issued fatherly advice to their Mexican children. Miguel de la Madrid spoke darkly of the “participation of the Mexican clergy in politics” (the Spaniard). And Jose Lopez Portillo, the man who, not so many years ago, brought Mexico to the brink of economic ruin, emerged from his luxurious disgrace to warn of “outside forces” threatening Mexico (the gringo ).

Within the Mexican soul is the fear of disorder, a fear shaped by counter-reformation Spanish Catholicism as it was honed by anti-Catholic politicians of modern Mexico. Order . I have heard it all my life. My own Mexican father looks at America’s chaos on the TV screen and prescribes the Mexican solution: What the United States needs is order.

Mexico has had order for seven decades.

Even as Mexicans were in a frenzy wondering why Colosio was killed, Americans last week were busily speculating about Vincent W. Foster Jr.’s relationship to Hillary Rodham Clinton, and did he really kill himself in his car or was his body transported to the park? And who was that mysterious man who phoned the park rangers?

In the United States, for the last three decades, rumor has left us a politically passive people, cynical, skeptical of the possibility that the individual can make a difference. Such could be the fate awaiting Mexicans. On the other hand, true democracy might be born from this dusty season of rumor in Mexico.

More inadmissible than any rumor heard on the streets is the possibility that no one is controlling the chaos. And: If history is not the manipulation of cabals or Jesuits or Masons or PRI loyalists or leftist cells or the CIA, then what? Then maybe history is the responsibility of individuals to shape. Then Mexico will have entered the modern era.