PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : ‘Trickle-Down’ Reform Won’t Do : Anticipating skepticism about the Aug. 21 vote, some are proposing an interim government to establish true democracy.

Serious people in Mexico fear that the elections on Aug. 21 will be followed by widespread civil war. The Defense Ministry has bought anti-riot armored trucks and four attack helicopters from the United States, and has deployed several thousand troops to about 10 states, allegedly to pursue drug dealers. The weekly Processo reports that independent guerrilla groups are operating in the states of Puebla, Vera Cruz, Oaxaca, Michoacan and Guerrero. The Zapatista National Liberation Army in Chiapas has warned that it has guerrilla forces throughout Mexico and will resume fighting unless a peaceful mechanism is set in place for an immediate transition to democracy.

To the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has run the government for 65 years, that mechanism is already in place: namely, the Aug. 21 elections, to be conducted under reformed procedures and the scrutiny of nonpartisan witnesses. The election mechanism, however, is not likely to satisfy the guerrillas, nor even the Mexican public; 46.5% expect dishonest elections, according to an independent opinion survey.

The PRI’s electoral reforms were too little and too late to establish a level playing field. Moreover, the fraud that is likely to occur will take place where poll watchers cannot see: in the voter registration list and in the computerized vote count. Complaints are already pouring in about thousands of dead, fictional, duplicate or lost names on the registration list. And a Mexican computer expert has sought political asylum in Britain, alleging that he is under death threats for discovering government lies about the computer count from the last election.

Would the PRI be so brazen as to rig the most closely scrutinized elections in Mexico’s history? That would be only a small rabbit to pull out of the hat. The PRI has had 65 years of practice in fraudulent elections, and it is widely believed that a faction of the party assassinated presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio before the eyes of the world and got away with it. With enough smoke and mirrors on Aug. 21, and the certain support of a jittery Wall Street and the Clinton Administration (which could get a political lift from the anti-immigrant constituency by rushing troops to seal the border), the PRI could claim victory on Aug. 22.

Then what happens on Aug. 23?

Journalists, academics and politicians in Mexico are worried. Political scientist Jorge Castaneda recently gathered about 30 of them from across the political spectrum for private discussions in his home about how to save Mexico from violence amid the ruins of a fraudulent election. They seem to be thinking of a coalition government of all the major parties, with respected independent politicians like Manuel Camacho Solis and Jorge Carpizo MacGregor playing important roles.

This “rescue by intellectuals” could work, but it smacks a little of a traditional back-room deal among elite power brokers. Ironically, it is the Zapatistas who have proposed the most legally and democratically legitimate way out of Mexico’s troubles. They have called for all sectors of “civil society,”--meaning “non-governmental organizations, peasant and indigenous groups, workers, teachers, students, housewives, squatters, artists, intellectuals and members of independent political parties”--to come together in a “national democratic convention” to form a transitional government and draft a new constitution to establish democracy. There is at least one noteworthy precedent for this idea: It occurred (though with much narrower interest-group representation) in Philadelphia in the summer of 1776.

Surprisingly, analysts have missed the profoundly conservative nature of the Zapatista revolution. It has been called a “post-modern” revolution and “the first revolution of the 21st Century.” In fact, it is a textbook 17th- or 18th-Century revolution and is justified under Mexican and international law.

From the start, Zapatista Subcommander Marcos rested the rebellion on Article 39 of the Mexican constitution, which states: “All public power emanates from the people and is established for the benefit of the people. The people have, at all times, the inalienable right to alter or modify the form of their government.” That provision is rooted in the 1690 “Essay on Government” by English philosopher John Locke. Locke wrote that it is the rulers who break the social contract and dissolve the government and who are guilty of rebellion when they hold fraudulent elections, coerce the legislature, fail to enforce the laws, take the people’s property or reduce them to slavery. Sovereignty then “reverts to the society, and the people have a right to act as supreme, and continue the legislature in themselves, or erect a new form, or under the old form place it in new hands, as they think good.”

To disagree with Locke is to disagree with the English Revolution of 1688 and the American Revolution of 1776, for he was the intellectual father of both. Article 39 of the Mexican constitution follows Locke. International law follows Locke. Evidence of election fraud and human-rights violations is so abundant in Mexico that it would be an easy case to argue that the government is violating with impunity the Mexican constitution, the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Inter-American Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, Convention 169 on Indigenous Peoples’ Rights and customary international law. Under principles of international law established at Nuremberg after World War II, officials in the Salinas government could theoretically be prosecuted and Mexican citizens could be held to have not only a right but a duty to disobey the sitting government. Mexicans who covet peace and the rule of law should take quite seriously the proposal from the Zapatista National Liberation Army.