Mexico’s Diplomats Mull Future in Post-PRI Era

It was supposed to be a celebration of Mexico’s beginnings. But the expatriates who gathered on their country’s Independence Day could not stop thinking about the end.

The end of what, they could not--or weren’t quite ready to--say. But the irony was not lost on the diplomats sipping tequila under the glittering chandeliers at the Washington headquarters of the Organization of American States.

Here they were, joining together for their annual toast to the glories of their country--and the dazzling power of the political party that has ruled it for 71 years. But suddenly the ruling party had lost the presidency, and its power looked as insubstantial as the red and green crepe bunting bedecking the hall.

For Mexican diplomats in Washington, for whom the dominance of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, back home has been a given, it was like no Independence Day in their lifetimes.

“Everyone at the embassy is suddenly calling themselves a PANista now,” confided one diplomat, referring to the National Action Party, or PAN, that dethroned the PRI in July’s historic presidential election. “No one knows what this is all going to mean for our future. How could we? It’s never happened before.”

With Mexico preparing to inaugurate Vicente Fox on Dec. 1 as its first opposition party president, life for Mexicans posted to coveted jobs in Washington has turned upside down. Gone by Nov. 30 will be the ambassador, his top aides and the Mexican attorney general’s envoy to Washington. Also gone will be the political appointees immediately beneath them.

Left to wonder about their future will be the bulk of the 200 or so people who staff the Mexican Embassy and Consulate, the Mexican Cultural Institute and the Mexico section of the Organization of American States. Not all are members of the PRI. But those who are say they are keeping quiet about their politics.

“This is a very unique moment,” said Ambassador Jesus Reyes Heroles, heir to one of the PRI’s most prominent families. “. . . You have to change your way of thinking. We are in the opposition now. It’s a new world.”

Throughout the government bureaucracy, stocked for generations with the beneficiaries of PRI patronage, officials high and low are wondering and worrying about their future. Fox has promised not to engage in wholesale dismissals. His transition team has been quick to suggest that it wants many of the best and brightest of the current administration to join the new one.

But that hasn’t stopped the worrying. In Washington, where Mexicans posted to jobs at their country’s embassy enjoy significant salary and benefit perks, the concerns have been especially vivid. Add to that the questions about who the new ambassador will be and what direction Mexico’s foreign policy will take toward the United States, and you have a particularly unsettling brew.

“The real change is psychological because in the same way that Mexicans had to overcome their fear of change in order to put Fox in office, now they’ll have to overcome their fear of change in terms of what Fox’s administration will mean when he actually takes office,” said Roderic Ai Camp, a professor of government at Claremont McKenna College and author of a series of books on Mexico’s political class.

“There’s absolutely no experience with that kind of change in Mexico, so the impact of it is so much more than we could possibly experience or understand in the U.S.”

Reyes Heroles, a prominent economist with a PRI pedigree that stretches back to the Mexican Revolution, will not be around to oversee the changes at the embassy. He leaves Nov. 30, flying back to Mexico and a job search in the private sector.

At the Independence Day gala Sept. 15--a lavish affair held in the ornate halls of the handsome OAS building in view of the White House and the Washington Monument--he flitted from one person to another, greeting invited guests, urging invitees to partake from buffet tables. But he acknowledged that he felt nostalgic knowing the party would be his last as ambassador.

Reyes Heroles, 48, was appointed ambassador to the U.S. in October 1997. While he has been associated with the reformist wing of the PRI, his father, as interior minister and head of the state oil monopoly Pemex, was a guiding intellectual force in the PRI for a generation. His grandfather helped write the Mexican Constitution.

That PRI history made Fox’s team openly wary of Reyes Heroles, and the ambassador struggled to keep his staff from getting involved in the fierce political fight.

In an interview in his office a few weeks later, the ambassador said he was leaving his job confident that he had done his best, not for his political party, but for the country. Still, he was preoccupied with the effects of the coming change.

“When I was a kid, I was living in this framework that Mexico was a very prosperous country. Every day, Mexico was slightly better than the day before,” he said.

“Since I started my professional life, I have been handling crisis after crisis. Now I am able to live what had to happen sooner or later. . . . I didn’t choose my date of birth. I never imagined I would be ambassador to the United States in the year 2000, this year of such change.”