Paranoids, Ghosts and The Disappeared : It Was Certainly Mexico’s Freest Election Ever, but for One of the Country’s Leading Novelists, a Longtime PRI Foe Who Served as a Poll Observer for an Opposition Party, It was Politics as Usual--PRI Politics, Corrupt, Intimidating, Eternal

I once exchanged definitions of the word paranoid with my friend, mystery writer Andreu Martin. He said a paranoid is essentially a citizen who has common sense; I added that a paranoid Mexican is someone who is sure he is being followed and about to get screwed, and he is right.

That is the way I feel.

That is what we are.

We are citizens chased by ghosts.

The election that will be held in five days is the most important since Francisco Madero fought to overthrow Porfirio Diaz in 1910--the elections that sparked the Mexican Revolution. Already blood has been shed--147 people have died in Chiapas, the original candidate of the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was assassinated in March. The PRI has been in power 1929, 65 years now, changing only names and faces. They have prepared for this election since 1988, when a coalition of small parties joined to support Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and won. The electoral fraud that kept Cardenas from power generated a strong popular resistence that lasted a couple of years. Now, Cardenas is back.

I travel in the first seat on the election campaign bus with Cardenas, this peculiar figure who has become the moral symbol of the stubborn opposition in Mexico, the candidate of the Democratic Revolutionary Party, the PRD. In front of us stand the never-ending pine forests of the countryside. He is on his way to a campaign stop where he will meet with almost 10,000 peasants who came down from Sierras Negra and Zacapoaxtla.

During the last three weeks, he has attracted large crowds wherever he goes. Since a tumultuous showing at the University of Mexico and Mexico City’s bullring at the end of July, he draws feverish, even anxious, multitudes wherever he passes. He has summed up the dissidence against the all-powerful political system of the one-party state.

“How do you see the upcoming election?” I ask.

“They will be long elections,” he answers. “One day to vote but many more to defend the vote. There is an enormous fraud in place. It has been prepared for months.”

“Do you think you can win?”

“We have to raise an avalanche of votes to bury the fraud. Will it be possible to raise a tide of votes to annul the fraud?” This he asks himself.

I return to the back of the bus. I feel like Wyatt Earp in the OK Corral--alone with my doubts and my brothers.

I try to stick my nose into the huge kitchen where they are cooking the electoral fraud. It’s not easy. It’s a different edition of the same show, but now the forms are guarded, appearances are under scrutiny. The name of the film is “Honey, I Shrunk the Frauds.” The fraud is there but cannot be seen. But the dwarfs populate our streets. They appear in all of our conversations, they slide through our daily lives.

Three days until the elections. We are eating at my father’s home in Mexico City. He is a journalist and a democrat, and he says in a whisper: “We have an insurrection in the kitchen. One of the maids is going to vote for the PRI.”

Paloma, my wife, gets angry. Everything is backward. The poor people vote for their executioners! Paloma asks her: “Cande, who will you vote for?”

The girl is overwhelmed with shyness. She lives in a small town in the state of Mexico, one hour and a half away by bus. She was taught to read in my parents’ home by my friend Susana a few months ago.

“I’m embarrassed.”

“You can vote for whomever you want.”

“Well, it’s just that the mayor of my town told us that if we don’t vote for the PRI, we would be thrown in jail.”

“So, who will you vote for?”

“For the PRI.”

I flee from the conversation with my hands on my head.

I have become familiar with threats like that. In Oaxaca, an army major told the organizer of a rural cooperative to be careful because he could end up in an early grave. The real horror came when “they” spread the gossip that voting credentials include a photo so they can be used to discover whom you vote for. It is absurd, but . . . . Vultures flying over our weaknesses.

It does not end there.

A new word has been incorporated into the national electoral language: shaved. It means “erased from the voting lists.” Rumors of people being shaved abound. Samuel del Villar, representative of the PRD to the Federal Electoral Institute, the agency in charge of the elections, announced the existence of half a million cases in which “suspicious” citizens, mostly young people, had applied for their credential to vote but had not received it.

Daniel Dominguez paints naive art--defeated angels, magicians surrounded by serpents and birds. He holds the brush and complains that although he has visited the electoral institute offices 11 times, his credential never arrived. Because of his persistence, an official told him, in confidence and with shame, that he was one of those missing from the electoral lists, that in the Valley of Mexico an estimated 500,000 people, mainly students, professionals and peasants (the sectors the government found to be less reliable), had been banished.

I don’t know if this is true. In a land full of lies, God treats us to rumors. The point is that Daniel will not be able to vote in these elections, left only with an apologetic letter from the authorities. He will save it as testimony to the humiliation. There is no consolation.

IT IS RAINING. IN THESE LAST FEW DAYS, RAIN PERSISTENTLY ACCOMPANIES Mexico City. It is dirty rain, contaminated, rain that stains white clothes hanging out to dry and descends from black clouds gathering in the corners of the city.

There is a Cardenista rock concert in Coyoacan and I am chosen to read a text between performances by Botellita de Jerez and La Santa Sabina, two of the most popular bands in the nation. Cardenas will close the event.

A huge, bright yellow tent covers part of the town plaza. The rain flows off and on for three hours. About 5,000 kids attend.

Novelist Juan Hernandez Luna, who accompanies me, gives a brief description of the varieties of Cardenismo. Several groups and social sectors with extremely different interests have come together under Cardenas. A few days before, he was in Tlaxcala among the poorest peasants in the country, and today amid punks and preppy kids, young radicals and rockers.

“Cardenas is the sum of all the offenses,” Hernandez Luna tells me. All kinds of people feel that the Mexican state has hurt them.

We sit in silence, listening to a song by Botellita de Jerez that grabs our soul. It is a song about the Virgin of Guadalupe: “Virgin of the disappeared, Virgin of the destitute, come with us.”

Will it be possible to win the election?

IN MEXICO, WE LIVE WITHIN A WELL-DIRECTED LEGAL SYSTEM, PROgrammed to liquidate the opponent. The legal impediment to forming coalitions, which deprived Cardenas of support from one of the mini-parties that formed part of his Frente ‘88, is a rule that smaller parties must register their own candidate or else lose their registration. This is one legal venom.

Denying Mexicans living out of the country the right to vote is another. We remain one of the few countries in the world that does not allow our citizens to vote at consulates and embassies. But taking away the vote of Mexicans living in the United States has a logic--the government does not want to give the vote to those it cannot control.

Thirteen million invisible beings, from Los Angeles and Chicago to Ft. Worth and Santa Fe, contemplate us.

OF ALL THE DIRTY STORIES, THERE IS ONE THAT PARTICULARLY IRRITATES me. Banners and signs from the Workers Party are everywhere. There are so many that they create suspicion. Where did they get the money? Their dues are a tenth that of the PRD, and Cardenas’ campaign is truly poor.

Their candidate is Cecilia Soto. Previously a worker for Lyndon LaRouche, later an elected official with the PARM (a small party, almost marginal) and, finally, one day before her nomination, a member of the Workers Party. She is there to take leftist votes away from Cardenas.

When asked about the party’s funding, she responds: “We have saved our money,” causing expressions of stupor among the media.

Someone, whose name I promised to conceal, told me in April that a state agency gave the party money to construct a bridge over a river that does not exist and that the money was funneled directly to the campaign. That same person said this was but one of many similar “distributions.” I do not know if this is true.

THE MEN OF THE SYSTEM, WHO ONE MINUTE ARE PUBLIC OFFICIALS, THE next minute militant Priistas and at the same time industrialists and financiers, change character behind the stage: dragon masks, Santa Claus sacks and beards, shawls from Manila and Armani ties.

The play is called “From Here to Eternity.”

The players are transvestites of power. They sell each other public industries, exchange lovers, dine with narco-millionaires, organize electoral fraud, construct roads on land they bought the day before, deprive peasants, create heirs, reorganize the future.

They believe in something, something that has allowed them to remain at the top since 1929 as they transformed themselves from revolutionary generals to attorneys who would rule over the old generals to degree-holders in economics from American universities.

They believe in eternity.

They have not even learned the lesson from lemming Soviet bureaucrats--that political eternity does not exist.

That is what I think, that is what I would like to believe, but the myths transcend the men.

Even those of us who believe this country will not enter the 20th Century until it is freed from the last corrupt remnants of Priismo have been infected by this sensation of chameleonesque immutability.

Could they be eternal?

All of my adolescent and adult life, I have lived under Priista governments. Somewhat sinister, somewhat corrupt, always authoritarian, always fraudulent. In 1968, I participated in the student movement; I was a union organizer in the ‘70s, a journalist in the ‘80s; I worked in an investigative center dependent on the Department of Labor and at the Office of Publications of the Secretary of Public Education.

I know the monster.

Are these sons of bitches eternal?

THE PRE-ELECTION FRAUD IS DIRECTED AT CARDENAS. HE IS, OUT OF ALL the opposition candidates, the one who obsesses the men in power. He is the only one who can put them in jail for the thousand-and-one types of acts of corruption they have committed. The other candidates will negotiate. It is possible to negotiate with the other party, the conservative National Action Party, PAN, whose candidate, Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, is jokingly referred to in Mexico as the Squirrel (because he “wanders through Los Pinos”--the Pines, a clear allusion to the presidential residence). A pact can be formed with Diego because, in the last three years, he has made not very clean deals in the conflict-ridden regional elections of Guanajuato, Chihuahua and Baja California.

But Cardenas is the subject of the Priistas’ nightmares. Because, among other things, he beat them in ’88.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas is 60 years old, the child of the only president remembered lovingly by the people. He has the name of the last Aztec emperor, who led the resistance against the Spanish conquerors, and a face of strong mestizo features. An anti-charismatic leader with quiet speech, an enemy of phrases, accused by friend and foe of aloofness or shyness. A man who came from the system (he was senator and governor of Michoacan during his Priista days), obsessively dedicated to a democratic rupture with the past.

Catcher of all dissidence, concentrator of all hatred, seen by millions as the corrector of all injustices.

Cardenas’ program, which groups together an enormous array of political proposals from the center-left to the most radicalized movement of neighborhood organizations, is supported by the majority of intellectuals, progressive Christians, social democrats, ecologists, small industrialists, honest ex-officials. It is relatively simple: End the corruption, rechannel the funds toward education and the countryside, open up the mass media . . . not much more.

Too much.

THE MOMENT OF GLORY FOR THE CARDENAS MOBILIZATION OCCURRED eight days before the elections and somehow it established the scale with which to measure the illusions and the fears, those of the populist democrats and those of Panistas and Priistas.

In my home, we spent two hours the previous night discussing the size of the Zocalo, Mexico City’s main plaza--how many people fit, if there was a need for half a million citizens to completely fill it. It almost became a cause for divorce or fratricide. We were speaking of the emblematic plaza, the heart of darkness, the symbolic center of power for Mexican society.

Plaza of buried Aztec pyramids, its royal cathedral sinking in the swampy subsoil, it was the central flag post of the motherland, presidential palace and gathering point for all demonstrations for the past 26 years, since the student insurgency in 1968.

The easy symbols are there. The walls of Aztec skulls, the memories of student repressions and the lines of citizens buying bonds to pay for the petroleum expropriation in the 1930s. The presidential seat that Villa and Zapata did not want.

All three major candidates had announced public meetings in the Zocalo that weekend: Cardenas on Saturday morning, Diego and his Panistas in the afternoon; Ernesto Zedillo and the PRI’s transported crowds, forced to attend, on Sunday morning.

The multitudes called on the multitudes. The Cardenista bastion arrived on Saturday morning--a varied mix of the urban middle class, the generation of ’68 and their children; university professors, teachers and doctors and women in their 50s from the periphery of the Distrito Federal, the central part of Mexico City.

The Zocalo was bursting with people, not only the central platform, but the side streets as well. Even the scaffolding the PRI had placed for its meeting, still lacking the boards to stand on, was filled with people. The Zocalo had never been as full as this.

Cardenas made his key speech there. A speech about government. Simple: We will return to the lost legality, we will reconstruct the republic for the citizens, we will achieve democracy.

We left the Zocalo in human streams praying to Tlaloc, the Aztec rain god, to ruin the Panista act that afternoon.

With a base of support from the upper middle class, much less militant, the PAN could not accomplish a concentration of people similar to the PRD.

On Sunday, the PRI demonstrated its strength and its weakness in filling the Zocalo. Many stories have spread of how bored citizens tried to leave but were blocked by groups of armed security guards; of how unions forced their workers to attend, punishing those who did not obey by docking them three days’ salary and offering one day of vacation to those who did; stories of taxi drivers threatened with the loss of their license plates; communities blackmailed with promises that public works would not be completed if they were not registered on the attendance list at the Zocalo; public vendors threatened with losing their licenses.

The PRI filled the Zocalo, but using the old customary methods. Even so, the Zocalo showed a few empty spaces.

Symbolically, Cardenismo had won. That is what we told ourselves.

BUT BENEATH THE PRI’S above-ground mobilization there was a subterranean one formed by a state secretary and a government program called Solidaridad. Created to convert a state obligation into a negotiable charity, Solidaridad had been generously handing out public moneys to buy votes, blackmail and apply pressure across the country:

Solidaridad officials asked for the Priista vote while they gave away mattresses in the Distrito Federal; they handed out irons in Colonia Escandon, raffled refrigerators in Mixcoac. They offered to pave roads in Veracruz, threatened to deny irrigation projects in isolated communities in Tabasco and handed out water tanks in Saltillo. They threatened to end work on public projects in Puebla if the community vote did not go for the PRI. Like a diabolical magician-king, the state, to force the Priista vote, would give and take bonds for tortillas, illusions, powdered milk, hope, schools, tractors, dreams. My friend Margarita tells me that in the zone of La Villa, to the north of Mexico City, voters were offered about $30 if they deposited a PRI-marked ballot. Public moneys turned to Priista votes. Massive vote-buying mechanisms for Mexicans turned helpless by their misery. Birds of prey, vultures flying over our hunger and our weaknesses.

DURING THIS LAST MONTH, the debate on homonyms has inundated the newspapers.

It turns out that an unusual number of homonyms--citizens with the same first name and the same two surnames--were found on the electoral lists.

I read the complaints of the PRD and learned of the electoral authority’s refusal to run a computer program to verify names or to cross-check fingerprints and photo IDs to see if the homonyms were real or were actually Priistas with four or five photo IDs falsely registered in different towns. The homonyms surpassed a million in the electoral listings of the Valley of Mexico, an average that skyrocketed above that found in the telephone directory. Nobody can convince me these are real. Nobody can convince me that a legion of Priista ghosts, voting in different booths, does not exist. People of the same name and different addresses, protagonists in another variant of fraud, nowadays immeasurable.

NONETHELESS, SOMETHING has been gained in the electoral campaign. In a society characterized by the way the state controls the media, cracks have appeared. The government hands out concessions to radio and television chains, and these concessions operate like favors, to be paid back in other ways. The majority of newspapers survive only with governmental money given under the table in black envelopes; that is easily verifiable in at least three of the national dailies (Excelsior, El Dia, Uno Mas Uno).

In this paradise of control, a legion of young journalists is rejecting pressures and bribes, telling the stories. Sometimes the headline and the story are contradictory. Censorship has been cracked open.

And it is something to be proud of--how these young colleagues with miserable salaries resist the envelope, the pressure, and tell their stories, try to evade control, how they pressure the system.

My great uncle, spiritual guide of my voyages through journalism, told me one day that this is a profession where the heroic and the contemptible meet. He was right once again.

ON ELECTION SUNDAY, I ARrive, still groggy, at the booth I am to monitor in Colonia Condesa, an upper-middle-class area in the center of Mexico City.

I am one of the many citizens representing a party who are manning balloting places to observe the voting in the Valley of Mexico and elsewhere in the country. We are sure that this will help stop the fraud.

I am, of course, representing PRD. I have two sandwiches, one huge Coke and the firm conviction that, in my corner at least, blatant fraud will not triumph. There is little I can do against the pre-election fraud: I don’t have the means to detect electoral phantasms so I am a slave to the electoral listings that the authorities have placed in my hands.

I encounter the same attitude in other officials and opposition party representatives. For me, in this middle-class neighborhood, it is a routine election day, full of tension.

Within the first hour of the voting, young people come in with their photo IDs but their names do not appear on the lists. We send them to the special voting precincts created especially to resolve these supposed “extraordinary” cases. They return protesting because they were not allowed to vote there either: The precincts had run out of ballots; policemen and soldiers had voted there before.

Who knows how many are suffering this same last aggression?

Toward 11 p.m., we finish counting the ballots. In my precinct, the PAN wins, with the PRI close behind and Cardenismo a distant third.

Later in the night, with added hours of exhaustion, I run to district committees, campaign centers, early press conferences. The trend is clear: The PRI will win the election with more than 40% of the vote.

Did they beat us? Did the fear of change dominate society? Or did we lose to a combination of pre-election fraud (buying of votes, shaving the lists, threats), institutionalized fraud (no votes outside of Mexico, elimination of coalitions, information control) and election day fraud (electoral ghosts, final shaving of the lists, electronic tricks, ballot thefts)?

How much did manipulation of electoral listings affect the final numbers? Who could measure the bought vote? Who were the ghosts? Who were the missing?

Who would have won under legal conditions and without playing dirty?

I cannot sleep.

WITH THE FIRST ELECTION results at our back--PRI candidate Zedillo won with almost 50% of the vote and Cardenismo drew less than 20%--we head for a meeting called by the PRD.

We gather in the public square, the heart of our darkness, the unoccupied ceremonial center in Mexico City, once again the Zocalo. Overinflated clouds are disturbed only by the flight of doves, the usual helicopter hovers above us and the rabid chanting of the multitudes repeats in chorus the name of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Today is the 22nd of August. The day after.

Faces of defeat, sadness, massacred hope. Were we dreamers who thought the avalanche of the popular vote could destroy fraud, trapped by a sophisticated machine that guards appearances like never before and annuls the democratic game?

In the Zocalo, Cardenas has the decency to declare himself neither the winner nor the loser. He refuses to dance the terrible waltz of figures that the state has orchestrated. Not triumphant, but not defeated. Who won? Who knows? The multitude radicalizes, disillusionment becomes anger, anger creates anger. When the PRD candidate calls for a gathering the following Saturday, he is only echoing the slogan that comes from the bottom and tells him: “Mobilize.” From the microphone, Cardenas produces one of his most memorable phrases: “If they could not count us in the ballot boxes, let them count us in the streets.”

In the next weeks, maybe months, more information about the fraud will emerge, from small towns, from journalists, from people inside the government who will tell the inside stories.

What will happen?

Social tension is increasing in the country, in the southern zones of Veracruz, Tabasco, Guerrero, Oaxaca. News of fraud will be gasoline on the fire.

At the same time, the PRI has proven that it is stronger than we expected.

It is not very easy to have a cool mind when it is filled with anger.

I am 45 years old, and I do not have a commitment only to victory. I did not want to be an official of a democratic regime; I am just a citizen enlisted in the infantry. My illusions are mine, my nightmares are mine. Change is not around the corner, or maybe it is, but the road is long once again. The owners of this country, the owners of power, will not convince me, nor will they defeat me.

This is what I tell myself as I take my wife and my daughter’s hands and introduce myself into the crowd.