Power Play

Today, July 6, tens of millions of Mexicans will vote in congressional and local elections. Because the elections will be more widely observed than ever by Mexico’s neighbors and trading partners, the governing Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in power for nearly three quarters of a century, cannot so easily resort to its traditional electoral chicanery. Whether Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the leftist candidate, will succeed in his bid to be mayor of Mexico City is a question that will soon be settled by voters in the nation’s capital. But whatever the outcome, Mexicans still will have to grapple with the legacy of a bloody and complicated past that, for better or worse, continues to haunt its present. Understanding the forces--economic and psychological--that underpin Mexico’s history is a project vital for both Mexicans and Americans.

Here is a Tolstoy-sized book that explores Mexico’s past to understand the country’s present predicament and likely future. Much in the manner of Richard Hofstadter’s tour de force “The American Political Tradition,” Enrique Krauze has sought to tell the remarkable history of Mexico through the men who made it. (Except for the account of La Malinche, Cortes’ Aztec concubine, described by Krauze as “the traitor to her race, without whom Spanish victory would have been impossible,” women play only minor roles.) Krauze explores Mexico’s political past by threading “the lives of the most important leaders during the last two centuries into a single biography of power.” He underplays the economic determinism and class obsessions of what could be described as the Rivera-Orozco-Siquerios Mural School of Mexican History and instead devotes his efforts to weaving the twin strands of Indian and Spanish traditions into one potentially unifying but elusive culture.

Krauze, who is co-editor of Vuelta, one of Mexico’s leading intellectual journals, wrings his hands over the series of scandals currently buffeting Mexico and prays that his countrymen and -women will understand that national salvation lies in embracing mestizaje, the mixing of races, which he believes will allow Mexico to “reconcile [itself] with its origins.” Hoping that a kind of genetic and cultural integration will solve the nation’s historical racism--as if by accepting “Montezuma’s insecurity and Cortes’ arrogance,” Mexicans could achieve social harmony and understand that these two founders “created a new nationality at the instant they met”--he gives us an anatomy of the series of bizarre misunderstandings between the indigenous and the conquerors that forever changed the destiny of the Indian people and created the New Spain. He is particularly acute on the misreadings between the men of different and colliding cultures and on how notions of race would endure. But he avoids class analysis, which in Mexico is so obviously tied to race.

Relying on the accounts of Mexico’s great historians, Krauze gives us fascinating portraits of the dozens of characters that make up the vast and sprawling canvas of Mexico’s history, from Cortes to Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla to Gen. Emiliano Zapata, to name only a few. Of the theologically driven independence leader Father Hidalgo, Krauze writes that he “was part of an old tradition of Creole patriotism common to all of Spanish America.” His zeal was matched only by the tragedy of his betrayal: Before he could see his goal of Mexico’s becoming independent of Spain, he was ambushed by a Royalist officer, Ignacio Elizondo, and taken prisoner so he could be tried and hanged.

A century later, the revolutionary peasant, Zapata, proposed a radical agrarian reform to guarantee the independence of Indian farmers from land-grabbing speculators. But Zapata too fell as a result of treachery. But unlike Hidalgo’s opponents, Zapata’s enemies did not intend to try the great hero of the Mexican revolution. They simply assassinated him.

Krauze’s gallery includes other insurgent priests and caudillos, the other fathers of Mexican independence. Men like Jose Maria Morelos y Pavon who, unlike Hidalgo, “did not confuse war with theological raging.” Morelos was ultimately defrocked and executed and yet lived “to see the government pass from the hands of the Europeans to the Creoles.” We also meet the mercurial Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who “loomed over his time like a melodramatic colossus: the uncrowned monarch.” Santa Anna represented the last of the Creole leaders before the rise of Benito Juarez, the Indian shepherd and the man who organized mestizo and Indian armies to oust Maximilian von Hapsburg, the French-imposed emperor.

Juarez, Krauze observes, became president of a Mexico that was “a strange compromise between the past and the future: a monarchy in republican clothing, which guaranteed civil rights and freedoms inconceivable during the colonial period. To achieve this form cost years of bloodshed.” Juarez is “the central figure in a bitter conflict that tore Mexico apart in the 19th century,” but before he fell, he “inaugurated an era and an irreversible historical tendency, a fundamental centralism employing federal forms. But he had also given a powerful impulse to the creation of a we beyond localities, regions or states--a we that was a nation.”

In the longest and most satisfying literary passage of the book, Krauze tells marvelous stories and anecdotes about the Porfirio Diaz era, when Mexico’s imperial president believed he had brought “peace, order and progress” to his chaotic country, but instead had laid the foundations for one of the world’s bloodiest revolutions. Along the way, we encounter Pancho Villa, Venustiano Carranza and Alvaro Obregon. In the 1920s and 1930s, we meet up with Plutarco Elias Calles and Lazaro Cardenas, who realized Zapata’s dream by delivering communally held land to 2 million peasants and by helping to build “the corporatist state” model that coexisted paradoxically with the “broadest civil liberties.”

Then comes modern Mexico and more biographies of men struggling for power and grappling to hold on to it. Krauze’s story flames to life when, in the late 1960s, student revolutionaries, many inspired by Castro’s Cuba, began to challenge the Mexican state. The key event, of course, was 1968. Prior to Mexico’s hosting the Olympic Games, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz ordered the army to fire from helicopters on protesting students in Mexico City’s Tlatelolco Square. “The massacre was more like some acts of the conquistadors,” Krauze concludes, “Cortes closing off all exits to the great square and, while Indian nobles were dancing in his honor, ordering his gunmen to massively slaughter as a mode of terror and control.” But true to his Great Man theory of history, Krauze regards the atrocity as having been prompted by Diaz Ordaz’s personal insecurity, his “deeply rooted inability to love other people” and his perpetually “sour stomach.” Krauze doesn’t connect the impulse to conquer with the desire to dominate of the light-skinned wealthy elite.

The trouble with the Great Man theory of history isn’t that such men don’t affect the course of events. Obviously they do. Such a theory doesn’t explain the sudden appearance of other actors on history’s stage--actors who are unknown and waiting (in the wings, as it were) to stride into the limelight. Krauze is, of course, smart enough and erudite enough to know this. He even acknowledges at one point that his mestizaje theme as a way of understanding the dynamic force of Mexican history would have failed to predict the dramatic seizure of eight towns in Chiapas on Jan. 1, 1994, by thousands of armed Maya peasants, led by the ski-masked Subcomandante Marcos. Behind their “declaration of war” and their 10 demands for, among other things, land, jobs and housing lay a deeper challenge. For the Zapatistas, as they called themselves, represented a history that preceded the conquest by Cortes. They were descendants of a people whose culture had somehow managed to survive, albeit in a much debased form, the battering of 500 years of contempt and exploitation.

If the Zapatista drama was Act I in the contemporary Mexican melodrama, surely the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio was Act II. Krauze sympathetically portrays the man slated to become president after Carlos Salinas, a thinly disguised caudillo, had hand-picked him. But Colosio, the candidate, courageously defied Salinas. Shortly before an assassin penetrated his ring of guards and placed a pistol to his temple, Colosio had publicly decried “a Mexico that was still impoverished, beaten down, still a Third World country.”

But it would be a mistake, especially for Americans, to somehow regard Mexico’s recent history of assassinations, financial scandals, narcotics trafficking, massive corruption, human rights abuses and seemingly intractable poverty and pollution as merely the history of another benighted Third World nation. Mexico also is inextricably and intimately a part of the history of the United States. There are about 25 million people of Mexican origin living in the United States, plus millions more seeking jobs here. Yet how many can name the last five Mexican presidents? The antidote to such widespread ignorance--but not to national peace--is contained in Krauze’s richly informative book. He offers an appealing voyage that will familiarize readers with the key names and events in the exciting and bloody past of our neighbor to the south. With luck, readers will join with Krauze, who hopes that knowledge of the past will bring about a truly democratic and prosperous Mexico. To do so, however, requires, as Krauze writes, releasing its people from a “past that is only weight and sickness.”