Francisco Labastida

In early November 1999, nearly 9 million Mexicans made history. For the first time, they, and not a sitting president, chose the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) by voting in an open primary. More than 5 million voted for Francisco Labastida, giving him a legitimacy hitherto unknown in Mexican presidential campaigns.

Labastida’s persona in Mexican politics depends on the eye of the beholder. Technocrats regard him as a politician; politicians insist he is a technocrat. Others see him as a gray bureaucrat. His supporters describe him as a pragmatic, nonideological politician, ever ready to negotiate solutions to problems. Whatever the perception, there is no doubt that, as the PRI candidate, he is the odds-on favorite to be the next president of Mexico.

Labastida, 57, is a patrician whose family has played a leading role throughout Mexican history. His ancestors fought in the 1810 war of independence and also during the French intervention in 1864. His grandfather was a senator, a governor and a member of the Congress that wrote the 1917 constitution. Labastida has served in the administrations of six presidents, was elected governor of his state and served as Mexico’s ambassador to Portugal.

In spite of a heated campaign among the four candidates vying for the PRI nomination, once the primary results were in, the party united behind Labastida. There are, of course, still major problems. For example, nobody is saying where the money for the primary came from or how much each candidate spent. But, overall, the victory was impressive for a political organization that has been declared dead for almost a decade.

Come July, Labastida will face the most open presidential election in Mexico’s history. Never before has the center-right and center-left opposition been as strong. But no one should underestimate Labastida as a campaigner, or the PRI’s resilient organizing skills. In fact, Labastida is leading in the latest polls.

Labastida sat down to talk recently in his office in Mexico City, where he lives with his wife, Maria Teresa Uriarte, a historian and author. Together they have eight children, three from her earlier marriage and five from his.

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Question: The last three Mexican presidents studied in the United States, but you did not. In fact, you studied in Chile, with Raul Prebisch, the famous Latin American economist who pushed for a regional view of economies in the Southern Hemisphere. Does this explain something about the kind of presidency you would have if elected?

Answer: I studied economics, and I did study at the [United Nations] Latin America and Caribbean Economic Commission, an institution that helped me see my country in more than macroeconomic, finance and monetary terms. I learned to see it in social terms, to see the people and the need for structural changes in the nation. But I don’t see a conflict between these two visions because they complement each other. We need to fix the monetary and banking policies in the country, but that is not enough; we also have to improve the lot of the people. Just remember that in Mexico, one out of every four people lives in extreme poverty.

Q: Previous Mexican presidents have said the same, but things have not improved for the people, and with every new administration there is a crisis. Will it be the same this time?

A: Let me put it this way. I’ve been watching the economy for over 20 years, and I sense that this time the chances of an economic crisis are very remote.

Q: Even if the opposition wins the presidency?

A: Yes, regardless of who wins the presidency.

Q: There are contradictory reports about your term as governor of Sinaloa in the ‘80s. Some say you ran the drug cartels Sergio Munoz is an editorial writer for The Times.

out. Others claim you simply looked the other way and allowed them to grow.

A: I am proud to say that, in the words of Mexico’s attorney general at the time, no governor had a better record fighting drug cartels than me. The reaction of the drug lords was brutal, and I lost a lot of good men in my team: 40% of the top people in my team were murdered.

Q: During your tenure as secretary of government from 1998 to last year you were responsible, among other things, for dealing with the ongoing crisis in Chiapas. How did you handle that?

A: We sent a bill to Congress that incorporates 85% of the [1996] agreements of San Andres, [and] we worked out a strategy to concentrate the budget assigned to Chiapas to favor the poorest municipalities there. We are spending mostly on education, literacy programs, building schools and health centers and roads.

Q: But isn’t that what former President Carlos Salinas did? He spent a lot of money in Chiapas in his six-year term--to what end?

A: There is one difference. We are concentrating our effort in the poorest 42 municipalities in Chiapas. We have focused our efforts on reducing the marginalization of the poorest, the cause of a large part of the problems in the state.

Q: What have you accomplished with your new program against crime?

A: We changed the Constitution, and now we can fire corrupt or inept policemen. We have changed laws and codes to make the penalties against criminals harsher.

Q: But there still seems to be a feeling that crime is rampant.

A: We gave more economic resources to the state’s governments. The states have to fight 95% of the crimes. We created a new federal police force, which has about 2,000 members and should grow to about 10,000. From 1991 to 1997, the number of crimes reported nationally grew every year. This year, we reversed the trend, and saw a reduction in crime from one and a half million crimes reported in 1997, to a million and a quarter in 1999.

Q: You are talking now about a new PRI, but many of the old undemocratic methods still seem to persist.

A: This is the most important transformation of the PRI in its 70-year history. But the new PRI is just being born, and some of the old tactics refuse to die. To me, it is perfectly clear that the democratization trend is irreversible.

Q: Mexico has a serious educational problem. What will you do about it?

A: We have a problem with the quality of education. We have made a lot of progress building schools and taking children to school. Schooling has increased, and now the average number of years at school is almost eight.

Q: OK, assume you are elected president: What are you going to do to improve the quality of education?

A: I would start by providing food to pregnant women and to children under the age of 5 who live in poverty. I want to increase one more year of schooling in preschool. I would aim to modify the curriculum in elementary schools, to reinforce the teaching of math and Spanish-language proficiency. We have to teach values to our children and devote more time to sports at school. I would push for four additional hours of classes at school--they now study four and a half hours daily, but I would make them stay at school all day long and offer them lunch there. I would add foreign language and computer-science workshops.

Q: Can you do all this in six years?

A: It will take longer, [and] we can’t think in terms of a six-year plan. In that time we won’t be able to implement the changes the country needs in education. And education is the one lever we have to pull the country up and to advance in social justice. The children of wealthy families are well educated. But the grandparents and the parents of poor children were poor and uneducated. Poverty will continue to be hereditary if we don’t reform the educational system in the country.

Q: What is Mexico’s worst problem?

A: I would say we have two big problems: the economy and public safety.

Q: You want the economy to grow at a 5% rate annually. Where will you get the resources needed to grow at that pace?

A: To grow at 5% we require an investment of 30% of GDP. If foreign investment continues to come at a 3% rate annually, we have to grow our internal savings to 27%: This is about four points above what we have now. That is between $16 billion and $20 billion above the current $90 billion.

Q: How are you going to do that?

A: I will work in three areas: aiding small and mid-size businesses; inducing savings through home ownership; and promoting tourism. Big business has proven it can take care of itself. They and the maquiladora industry will continue their growth.

Q: In this campaign, people in Mexico seem obsessed with attacking what they call neoliberalism. Isn’t that what the rest of the world calls free-market economics?

A: No, I don’t think so. I am for a free-market economy because the country needs it to create jobs and grow. Neoliberalism in Mexico was a formula to fix up everything, and that did not work because you have to invest in the people, in their education. The people have not felt the benefits of neoliberalism, and the state has the constitutional responsibility to ensure equity. For 20 years, we have been suffering one economic crisis after the other. In a night of crisis we destroy what we build in a day of prosperity.

Q: Will you continue privatization?

A: I haven’t made up my mind yet. As secretary of energy, mines and state industries, I was charged with downsizing the number of companies owned by the state. Now, we have only a handful of companies in the public sector, like electricity and oil. I am convinced we must revitalize them, but I have not decided yet how we will do that.

Q: Petroleos Mexicanos, the national oil monopoly, needs investment badly. Will you privatize some parts of it?

A: Pemex is the main industry in the country, and we cannot think of Pemex as an economic problem. It is an issue of principles and politics that most Mexicans do not want the privatization of Pemex because we have had a few bad experiences with privatization. We privatized the banking system, and now we have to bail it out and the people wonder how did that happen.

Q: Are you saying there was a problem in the way the privatization was handled?

A: Yes. The privatization of some public companies, like the banking system, for example, was done before a regulatory framework was established. Banks do not handle the money of the bankers but that of the people, thus it is the obligation of the government to oversee the public’s interest.

Q: How do you see the current relationship between Mexico and the U.S.?

A: Good, in general terms, but I want to deal with the U.S. from a long-term perspective. Meaning that the better we understand each other, the more we’ll both benefit from the relationship. We have now a trade agreement with the U.S. But if we look at the European Union from a historical perspective, we’ll see that what began as an agreement on steel and coal evolved into an agreement about tariffs and investments and labor mobility. We could enhance NAFTA [the North American Free Trade Agreement] to include, perhaps, an agreement on temporary workers. We should contemplate these options because we can complement each other.

Q: Would a temporary guest-worker program stop illegal immigration to the U.S.?

A: It could help, but that won’t solve the issue. The real solution will come when Mexico’s economy grows at a faster pace and creates more jobs with better wages in Mexico.

Q: What kind of economic growth, for how long and at what pace would be needed to seriously reduce the illegal immigration of Mexicans to the U.S.?

A: If the economy grows at a 6% annual rate, and we can create 1.25 million jobs a year, and these jobs pay about 5 points above inflation, then we could see a significant reduction in the immigration of Mexicans to the U.S. That would benefit not only the U.S., but Mexico, because, right now, we are losing our greatest asset, the Mexican people. *