The New Congress Is Out for Bear

As President Ernesto Zedillo stood before the nation giving the annual state of the nation address last Sept. 1, a legislator from an opposition party stood below the podium and donned a pig mask. He then unfurled a series of placards with cutting jibes at the country’s economic policies and corruption among the political elite.

This year, something a little more dignified ought to be in order, though no one is counting on it.

A political firestorm has erupted over the format of the Informe, as the president’s speech is known, so that opposition members don’t have to put on pig masks in order to be heard. The question is whether the opposition parties, which will now form a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, will publicly address the president after the speech, something they’ve never been allowed to do.

The protocol surrounding the speech would seem to be a small issue, more symbolic than substantive. But these days in Mexico, small and symbolic issues have a way of illustrating much larger themes. What’s really at stake in this dispute is the redefinition of the relationship between Congress and the once all-powerful executive.

In the past, the president decided economic, social and foreign policy. His decisions were rubber-stamped by an acquiescent Congress, always dominated by the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). The newly pluralistic Congress’ first step toward changing that relationship is to attempt to tone down the trappings of the presidency.

The Informe has historically been the annual consecration of the president, the maximum figure of Mexico’s authoritarian system. On Sept. 1, the banks would close. Television cameras would follow the president from the National Palace, through Mexico City to the Chamber of Deputies. There the president, again on national television, would thunder on for hours about the duty to the Revolution and about what he’d done in the last year, pausing to regally accept the applause of assembled legislators and dignitaries. He would also sprinkle in pieces of important news about what he had in store for the country. Jose Lopez Portillo, for example, announced in his 1982 Informe that he was nationalizing the banks. Some PRI congressman would then be called on to extol the president’s virtues.

Sept. 1 was a day for the legislative branch to prostrate itself before the executive, not a day for critical voices. But Mexicans have in recent years shown themselves less willing to submit to authority, whether it’s the president’s or the PRI’s. The Informe has come to mirror that change.

In 1988, just weeks after elections in which Carlos Salinas de Gortari won the presidency from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas through what many believe was widespread fraud, Cardenas supporters stood up and for the first time heckled a president, lame duck Miguel de la Madrid, during the Informe.

Denied any official response time, opposition members, primarily of the center-left Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), have protested each subsequent Informe. Salinas would give his speeches while below him stood PRD members with signs reading “Salinas Lies” or “Peace in Chiapas.”

These practices reached their culmination last year with the pig mask incident by PRD legislator Marco Rascon, a kind of Mexican Abbie Hoffman more given to political theater than politics. The scene caused a furor; even as Zedillo kept speaking, members of the center-right National Action Party demanded that Rascon take the mask off.

The demonstration was the topic of newspaper columns and cartoons for weeks afterward, overshadowing the real change Zedillo has brought to the presidency, exemplified by his Informes. A straightforward, simple man not much given to the use of political symbols, Zedillo has virtually eliminated the traditional bombast and florid rhetoric from the address. Last year, he even ended without one “Viva Mexico” and rarely raised his voice throughout the 90-minute discourse.

As for this year’s Informe, Zedillo has indicated openness to change, saying that he’ll abide by whatever Congress decides. Even if his party prevails in its opposition to a formal response by the opposition parties, that the matter was publicly debated should begin the realignment and real division of power among the branches of government that Mexico so urgently needs.