What Mexico Needs Is a Shared Vision : Politics: Ghosts of the past prey on voters’ fears, but the hypotheses are wrong--the road to democracy is open and clear.

On the eve of the most competitive elections in Mexican history, voices from the past are playing up voters’ fears, insinuating that their ballots will decide whether the country falls into chaos or transitions into democracy. That is not just simplistic; it is plain wrong.

Mexico has made tremendous gains toward democracy over the past decade. What the country needs now is to arrive at a common ground and define the rules for coexistence after the election, regardless of the outcome. The unexpected competitiveness of this election and the perception that, for the first time, nobody knows which of the three main candidates will win the presidency has actually raised hopes that, finally, Mexico is on the verge of becoming a full-fledged democracy.

Of the three presidential hopefuls, the most demonized is Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Opponents warn that a victory by the Revolutionary Democratic Party candidate would cause massive capital flight, a severe decrease in foreign investment, a depletion of dollar reserves and devaluation of the peso, all resulting in the ungovernability of Mexico.

As for Ernesto Zedillo, candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the opposition argues that no one believes the party can win without cheating, so a PRI victory would provoke intense, unmanageable civil disturbances and more armed rebellions in other states besides Chiapas.

The National Action Party’s candidate, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, is handicapped, it is said, by lacking the resources, members and experienced public servants to govern effectively. Most important, he would lack the backing of the state political apparatus that, intertwined with the PRI, has governed the country for decades and will remain in place regardless of who wins the presidential election this Sunday.

All of these hypotheses, founded in fear, are exaggerated and, therefore, inaccurate. The crisis Mexico has faced since the beginning of the year is not the first one in its convulsed history. Nor are the Zapatistas in Chiapas and their leader, Subcommander Marcos, a unique phenomenon.

The 1950s and ‘60s saw the precursors of Marcos, insurgents--now largely forgotten outside folklore--such as Ruben Jaramillo, Lucio Cabanas, Genaro Vazquez, Carmelo Cortes, and David Sarmiento. One-time peasant leaders, rural teachers or university students, all became guerrillas because of the prevalent injustice in society. All were either killed in combat or ambushed by government troops on presidents’ orders.

A big difference of the Chiapas guerrilleros, of course, is their taking advantage of the global information age, speaking to the world via CNN from hidden corners of the jungle. But they are also fortunate that they had, in President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a receptive interlocutor who chose to engage in dialogue rather than relying on repression.

While this election year has seen some notorious political kidnapings, this is not a new phenomenon either. Among the most famous victims of the recent past: Julio Hirshfeld Almada, secretary of tourism under President Luis Echeverria in the 1970s, and Jose Guadalupe Zuno, that same president’s father-in-law; U.S. Consul Terrence G. Leonhardy, kidnaped and released in 1973; Hugo Margain Jr., son of the Mexican ambassador to the United States, who was kidnaped and murdered in 1978. The kidnapings of business leaders Alfredo Harp Helu and Angel Losada earlier this year struck a nerve because they coincided with the Chiapas uprising and the murder of former PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio.

But although Mexico will remain largely the same no matter who wins next Sunday, the country is shedding its old skin in one important respect. Traditional institutions such as the Catholic Church, the political parties, the mass media, labor unions and armed forces are not evolving as quickly as civil society has in the past decade.

Grass-roots organizations founded in Mexico City after the 1985 earthquake have become activists devoted to protecting the environment and social renovation. The vast majority of these groups crystallized their rejection of the old PRI regime during the 1988 election.

So the impulse for a new and more democratic Mexico is well-established, and it comes from the bottom up. What is needed now, whoever wins the presidency, is for political leaders at the top to arrive at a shared vision of the country that can encompass the grass-roots progress of the past decade. Without a common vision of the future and a new sense of trust, there can be no true peace nor governability.