After Living in a Bad Novel, the Voters Write Their Future

There was a time when Mexico was taken for granted by the United States. The Mexican system was authoritarian but stable. Corruption was widespread but swept under the rug. Mexican flights of independence--notably, solidarity with Castro’s Cuba--were tolerated with a wink. The revolutionary reforms that soured relations with the U.S. after 1910 had peaked by 1940, and when Franklin Roosevelt met Manuel Avila Camacho in Monterrey during the war years, a new era of mutual understanding began. Mexico provided a secure southern border, the authoritarian system delivered stability and constant, if badly distributed, growth. It was called, without a trace of irony, “the Mexican miracle.”

Beginning with the debt crisis in 1982 and culminating in the fateful and still ongoing events of 1994, when the New Year was welcomed with a peasant uprising in Chiapas, which was followed in March by the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, the sense of Mexico as a place of stability vanished, gone with the wind that laid bare the corruption, political assassinations, economic crisis, drug traffic and the blatant decrepitude of the old political system.

All of this, furthermore, was accompanied by events so incredible and at times even grotesque that, as I have often said, they make the novelist’s task redundant. The writer’s imagination can not surpass this tale of family vendettas, political rivalries and tragicomic scenarios in which conspiracies, vanishing politicos, corpses discovered by soothsayers in the garden of a former president’s jailed brother, followed by further discovery that the bones in the garden had been planted by the medium in cahoots with the special prosecutor in the case of the vanished politico, presumably murdered by the former president’s brother who was in jail accused of also murdering his sister’s former husband who . . .

Do you follow me? Who can keep up with this tragic farce and this frantic pace? Add to it the corruption of drug dealing covered up by high-ranking generals serving functions normally reserved for the police, and add to this the hypocrisy of the U.S. “certification” process, which ignores the root of the problem, U.S. demand, and you have a scenario that can defeat the writer’s imagination. And yet .J.J. have not some of the best Latin American novels come out of the outrageous excesses of history? I think of “The Autumn of the Patriarch” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, “Santa Evita” by Tomas Eloy Martinez and “I, the Supreme,” by Augusto Roa Bastos. In each of these books, fiction manages to conquer history.

Now there is something profound going on in Mexico that transcends the bloody burlesque of the past few years and gives us hope for the country’s future: It is the nation’s determination to achieve a democratic system peacefully.

The Chiapas rebellion of early 1994 gave us notice that armed insurrection would be the price of continued political backwardness. That same year, the unchallenged election that brought Ernesto Zedillo to power gave proof that the people were determined to avoid bloodshed and strengthen democratic procedures.

Today, Mexico moves toward a fateful political date. On Sunday, the election of six state governors, all of the Chamber of Deputies, one-third of the Senate and, for the first time ever, the mayor of Mexico City will test the electoral reforms introduced in recent years by the combined action of opposition political parties, the citizenry and a reluctant government and its appendage, the long ruling PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party).

These reforms consist, basically, of a Federal Electoral Institute wholly independent of the government and the PRI, a largely reliable electoral register, exit polls and early reporting of results, access of the opposition to the media (unthinkable 10 years ago) and, unfortunately, campaign financing rules that are not yet totally equitable or transparent. (We are not unique in this regard, however.)

The result has been that during Zedillo’s almost three years in power, Mexico has celebrated 29 local and federal elections, the results of which have not been challenged by any of the parties. Today, more than 40% of Mexico’s population is governed by opposition parties. If this trend continues Sunday, Mexico will have a truly pluralistic, political composition at every level--municipal, state and congressional. This is no mean achievement for a country where, since 1929, one party has dominated all offices.

If Sunday’s election takes place in peace and within the rules of democracy, Mexico will bound forward in the solution of its many problems. If the PRI old guard, the so-called dinosaurs, decide to strike back and retain their now frantic and rapacious hold on power, all bets are off. Pain, chaos, an unimaginably catastrophic scenario would follow.

I doubt that this will happen. Deep down, the PRI knows that its time has come and that its only hope for survival is to become just one more party in a pluralistic rainbow.

Whatever happens in official politics, there is the ongoing political revolution at the very roots of Mexican society: It is the appearance of a dynamic constellation of nongovernment organizations, agrarian co-ops, independent unions, women’s movements, sexual minority and human rights groups, universities, voluntarism, neighborhood and religious associations. All of this, what is called the civil society, offers the best continuing hope that Mexican democracy is not only inevitable but broadly based and intimately linked to the desires and the workings of society. Where authoritarianism coupled with savage capitalism has been the rule, the civil society is out to demonstrate that democracy is not only a question of the state, the parties or the corporations, but of the university, the factory, the farm. Here is the best hope for a widely and deeply rooted Mexican democracy, whatever the results of the political deadline we have set for ourselves, the election of Sunday, July 6, 1997.