A Transformation for the Millennium

It would be necessary to have lived in Mexico for the past 20 years to realize that there are now three things that did not exist before: free voters, competitive political parties and independent public opinion. It would take a historian to know that these three elements exist now for the first time in Mexico, that they never existed together at the same time at any moment in the past and that their nonexistence largely explains the mixture of unexpected explosions and authoritarian stability that have characterized the country’s political history during the past century and a half.

At the beginning of the 19th century, Mexico defined itself legally as a federal, democratic republic, in the very image and likeness of the United States. But reality did not coincide with the law. Mexicans were able to copy the “letter of the law,” but not the “spirit which gives it life,” as Alexis de Tocqueville summed it up in his “Democracy in America.” Oscillating between “military despotism and anarchy,” Mexico only found political stability in regimes that respected the form of the law but not its content. Such regimes were those of Porfirio Diaz (1876-1910) and the presidentialist regime of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), which has maintained its hold on power since its creation in 1947.

During the long periods of stability, Mexico was formally a federal republic with a division of powers, but in reality the executive branch dominated over the rest and the federal government centralized all the major decisions regarding the states. There were always elections, but they were, without exception, controlled by the public apparatus that “legitimized” the victories of previously designated candidates with the votes of fictitious voters. Political parties were small, almost invisible, or invented by the government itself to create the appearance of democratic competition. An independent and critical spirit in the media could be found in some marginal areas, but only on exceptional occasions did it invade the mainstream of large national newspapers, television and radio, which were operated by government concessionaires or by the government’s political and financial backers.

The legacy of Mexico’s judicial fiction, too, can hardly be exaggerated. From the depth of its culture to the height of its political sensibility, Mexico is not a law-abiding society, and this fact is the country’s greatest obstacle to becoming a truly modern political society. But in spite of this obstacle, over the course of the past 25 years, as a result of the economic failures produced by PRI governments, a bit of the vivifying spirit of democratic life about which Tocqueville wrote has taken on an institutional form in Mexico.

Elections have become transparent, monitored by a Federal Electoral Institute in which the government does not participate, and voters have become real, the expression of an urban, educated and participatory society. Political parties have stopped being the cover for a power faction, a caudillo or a disguised governmental maneuver. Today, political parties are true “bodies of public interest,” just as they are defined by law, and their candidates receive impressive numbers of votes. (In the 1994 presidential election, almost 80% of registered voters went to the polls, and the losing party, the PRD, received more than 6 million votes; the winning PRI, 17 million.) And finally, a critical, independent tone no longer characterizes a mere minority of the media, but rather has become a condition for the credibility and influence of them all, and they have become demanding judges of public acts.

Mexico has spent a quarter of a century demolishing its authoritarian political system in order to construct a democratic system in its place. The news at this turn of the century is that the three fundamental pillars of this new regime have finally been created. Together they form an institutional framework capable of leading political change to a safe port, the port of democratic governability. Everything that once guaranteed political stability is crumbling: the presidentialist system, with its total lack of effective checks and balances; the single, hegemonic “revolutionary” party; corporatist control on society; the centralization of public affairs. This situation carries with it a very clear risk: that the new actors may not be able to contain and channel the final reactions of the world that is on its way out.

Mexicans tend to believe that the stories of corruption and bloodshed, violence and crisis that have filled the national and international press during the past few years are part of the Mexico that is dying. This perception contains a good dose of wishful thinking, a democratic “Pollyannism” that expects too much of change while ignoring the risks. It is a historical fact that every attempt at democracy in Mexico has ended in dictatorship or rebellion. The historical news as this century ends is that for the first time, there are institutional forces capable of avoiding a repetition of the past: We now have free elections, real voters, competitive political parties and a demanding public opinion, all of which carefully watches and limits governmental actions.

It has been almost two centuries in coming, but the chances are greater today than ever before that Mexico may soon be reborn as a true democratic republic.