Its Own Transition Grips Mexico

A new Mexican revolution is brewing.

When President-elect Vicente Fox is sworn in Friday, the 71-year reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, will come to a close--and so will a system that defined Mexico for most of the 20th century.

What could change in Mexico’s new era? Unions. Media. Congress. Governors. Peasant groups. The church. Once tightly controlled by a near-imperial president, they suddenly face new rules and freedoms.

Like the decline of Soviet-bloc communism, the new era could produce real democracy--or chaos. The outcome is of extreme importance to the United States, whose economy and criminal problems are increasingly intertwined with Mexico’s.

Some predict that the very nature of Mexicans could change with the PRI’s downfall.

“It’s basically altering [their] psyche,” said Roderic Ai Camp, a political scientist at Claremont McKenna College. “They could become participatory citizens.”

To glimpse the New Mexican Man, look no further than Delfino Toledano. For years, the 40-year-old farm veterinarian was a cog in the great PRI machine. As a member of the National Peasants Confederation, a giant PRI-affiliated union, he obediently organized fellow farmers to attend party election rallies. When the PRI government made decisions, the peasants toed the line.

“As my father always said, to go against the PRI was a sure loss. It was fighting in vain,” declared Toledano, a tanned fireplug of a man.

The subservience paid off. The government allowed the Peasants Confederation to help distribute agriculture subsidies and gave its members tax breaks. To peasants like Toledano’s father, a sorghum- and corn-grower with a first-grade education, the assistance was critical: He was able to send his son to college.

But Toledano’s office in central Morelos state, where he heads the Peasants Confederation, suggests how the once-mighty group is now struggling. The clock is frozen at 1:55, and stuffing pops from the gold-upholstered chairs. The water has been cut off.

“Things are very different,” a worried Toledano said.

Since July, when Fox won the presidency and his conservative National Action Party, or PAN, took the local governorship, official support for the peasant group has dried up. Worse still, the governor no longer seeks Toledano’s input. Some peasants have already abandoned the union.

“The reaction when the people here saw we lost the presidency was of incredulity, of doubt about what will happen. How will they treat us?” said Toledano.

That question is on the minds of tens of thousands of members of PRI groups.

Imperial Presidency Already Extinct

In the PRI system that grew out of the 1910-17 Mexican Revolution, society was organized into groups that clustered around the president. He was the great negotiator and referee in a system in which laws were routinely disregarded. The president dealt with governors, peasant groups, union members, teachers, judges--nearly every facet of society. In exchange for his help, he got obedience.

But the imperial presidency, which had already been weakening, is now dead. Unlike most PRI presidents, Fox does not have a majority in Congress. And the PAN is not omnipresent like the PRI, able to carry out the president’s whims around the country.

Sensing the loosening of controls, different groups are already beginning to act with greater independence--from judges, who have ruled against the president, to Roman Catholic bishops, who have disregarded restrictions on their making political pronouncements.

“It’s like taking the spinal cord of the system out,” said Adolfo Aguilar Zinser, a top official in the Fox transition team. “The unions are there, the PRI governors are there, the structures of caciquismo [local power bosses] are there, the impunities, organized crime--all of the components of this old system that were articulated around the spinal cord of the presidency are still intact. But the spinal cord is gone.”

Like many PRI members, Toledano is struggling to find his new role.

On a recent day, he joined a group of peasants meeting at an open-air distillery set amid fields of spiky blue-green agave cactuses in the town of Miacatlan.

The speaker was the new state agriculture secretary, ex-businessman Victor Sanchez. His message: The system has changed. No longer will authorities exchange assistance for political loyalty.

“I’m not interested in putting conditions on the aid. I’m interested in producing,” the official told the men, who were wearing straw cowboy hats and clutching blue plastic cups of mescal, the liquor made from agave.

In his seat, Toledano slowly tore his cup into strips. What to do? On the one hand, he wants to woo the secretary of agriculture, to find solutions to his constituents’ problems. On the other hand, he is emboldened by the idea that he longer needs to kowtow to the government.

“Before, we couldn’t mobilize. Now, we can. And we’re restless,” he said.

The erosion of controls over the PRI’s vast organizations is one of the most sensitive issues in Mexico’s political transition. While the PRI organizations have weakened over the years, they can still cause chaos--as residents of Mexico City recently discovered.

In an unprecedented move last month, federal bureaucrats belonging to a PRI union bucked President Ernesto Zedillo’s decision not to pay traditional end-of-term bonuses, worth a month’s salary. For two weeks, thousands of bureaucrats took over key streets, causing giant traffic tie-ups. They even threatened to cut off the capital’s water supply, before the government gave in.

The strike showed the potential for tumult in the post-PRI era. It also underlined a second change: how the PRI’s loss of the presidency is transforming the top-down nature of Mexican society.

“There is a rank-and-file revolution out there,” said Antonio Ocaranza, a former presidential spokesman. “The specific role of everyone in a leadership position has suddenly changed.”

The revolution is already claiming victims.

Publisher’s Downfall a Case in Point

Regino Diaz Redondo still holds court at a corner table in La Chiminea, a power-breakfast haunt in an elegant Mexico City hotel. “At this table, who pays?” the silver-maned publisher demands of the waiters, as he snatches the check from a reporter. “Always you, Don Regino,” they murmur, ducking their heads.

But Diaz Redondo’s world of power and prestige has been shattered. Last month, employees of his pro-PRI newspaper, the Mexico City daily Excelsior, unceremoniously dumped him.

“These days, people think that if you don’t change the established order of things, you’re not democratic,” fumed Diaz Redondo. “It’s change for change’s sake.”

Diaz Redondo had long benefited from the PRI governments’ cozy relationship with the press. In 1976, he led a group that took over Excelsior, with the support of then-President Luis Echeverria, from a government critic.

Diaz Redondo says his paper’s blatant pro-government line simply reflected an editorial philosophy. But former government officials say privately that Excelsior essentially sold its content for money and favors.

On Oct. 20, the post-PRI era dawned at Excelsior. The cash-strapped newspaper, which is a cooperative, held an assembly at which Diaz Redondo planned to propose its sale to a private investor. But the employees rebelled, ejecting him amid shouts of “Get out!” and “Thief!”

The journalists acknowledge that the PRI’s loss of power gave them the courage to oust the publisher. But some critics say this was not a simple case of journalistic heroism but a recognition that Diaz Redondo could no longer deliver the goods from the government--the barometer of power in yesterday’s Mexico.

The type of effervescence that swept the Excelsior newsroom may well bubble up in other institutions, forcing leaders to be accountable to their followers--or be removed. Average citizens, empowered by their ability to change the government, may also become more demanding, altering a pillar of the country’s stability: the traditional resignation of poor citizens living under authoritarian rule.

Now, you can fight city hall--as citizens found out this fall when they revolted against a new national car-registry program, helping force the government to scrap the idea.

“We will see an explosion of assertive attitudes,” predicted Aguilar Zinser, the Fox advisor.

Some of the most fundamental changes in the post-PRI era, though, may not appear so dramatic.

Mexico’s government machinery, for example, is about to be transformed. For decades, legislators and governors, nearly all PRI members, were virtual puppets of the president, who held the purse strings in Mexico’s highly centralized system. And since reelection was banned, politicians looked to the president for their next jobs.

The new president faces a vastly different situation. No party has an outright majority in Congress; Fox’s PAN holds only seven of the 31 governorships.

PRI Governors Now a Force for Change

If the 18 PRI governors are now more independent, however, they are also less secure. No longer can they count on special treatment. In fact, they have joined forces as the new champions of decentralization and of explicit rules to limit the president’s discretion in spending.

The repercussions of such new rules could be enormous.

“There will be checks and balances,” said Luis Rubio, head of a Mexico City-based think tank. “We could have real laws.”

But there are many risks. One is that governors in less-developed areas, previously kept in check by the president, may run their states like fiefdoms. Congress could get stuck in gridlock.

Jesus Silva-Herzog, a former treasury minister and ambassador to the United States, recalled how he dealt with the members of Congress in the 1980s when he renegotiated Mexico’s crippling foreign debt: He ignored them.

“It was more comfortable governing then,” he said, grinning.

Those days are over. The new Congress, with the PRI now in the opposition, will be about as subdued as a lion cage at feeding time. The government in Mexico “will appear every day more like the United States,” Silva-Herzog said. Facing such a complicated panorama is a new administration with many relative political neophytes.

Still, for all the possible turbulence ahead, the post-PRI era could offer Mexico a historic chance to attack many of its deepest problems. Greater democracy could provide more channels for citizens to express frustration--possibly leading to a decline in political violence, like the 1994 rebellion by mostly Maya rebels in the southern state of Chiapas.

Mexico could end its devastating cycle of economic crises as Congress and citizens scrutinize the kind of economic decisions the government once made privately, sometimes with disastrous results. And a stronger justice system, with less political manipulation, could lead to declines in crime, drug trafficking and human rights abuses.

The transition “might result in a very rapid process of maturing as a democracy, or it might result in a series of political conflicts,” said Aguilar Zinser, the Fox aide. “We are in for a very big ride--and a very bumpy ride.”

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WEDNESDAY: An array of vexing human rights issues will test Fox’s ability to turn Mexico into a lawful nation.