Fox Should Hold PRI’s Violent Past Over Its Head

Instead of ignoring Mexico’s troubled past, President Vicente Fox seems poised to delve into it: Instead of allowing impunity to run rampant, he has decided to face it head-on.

Fox’s decision to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the cases of hundreds who disappeared or were tortured during the reign of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, is the right one and could save his presidency from political paralysis.

Upon taking office, Fox made the strategic decision to pursue a policy of appeasement toward the PRI. For the sake of obtaining the once-ruling party’s support in Congress, he promptly discarded the idea of a “truth commission” that would reveal past abuses.

Fox naively believed that the playground bully could be bought with candy. So he offered more resources to PRI-controlled states in exchange for the party’s legislative support.

Fox foolishly thought that his former enemy could become a friend, with the right incentives. So he proposed burying the past to obtain PRI votes for fiscal reform in the future.

Instead of waging a necessary war, he sought to sign an artificial peace. The results of this miscalculation have become painfully obvious. A year after Fox’s heady victory, his track record is beset with failure.

Today the rancher from Guanajuato faces the worst of all worlds: an emboldened PRI, no fiscal reform in sight, a squandered political honeymoon and a paralyzed government.

The PRI is laughing behind Fox’s back and with justification. The party got what it wanted--no scrutiny of the past--and gave nothing in return. Its hands are not clean, and Fox only sullied himself by shaking them.

The time has come for the president to play hardball against the PRI.

Fox must understand that the PRI is a wily adversary and not a willing collaborator. He needs to relentlessly pursue the party instead of treating it with kid gloves.

And the most powerful instrument in his grasp is precisely the information he possesses about the past.

Mexico’s perfect dictatorship did not kill thousands, but it did cause hundreds to “disappear.”

The PRI didn’t bury bodies throughout the Andes, but it did torture peasants and harass political opponents.

Unaccountable former presidents didn’t shoot students, but they did order their seconds in command to do so.

The bravest and most important war that Fox has to fight in Mexico is the war against impunity. He can wage key battles and win them if he uses the law in his favor and gives the special prosecutor enough autonomy, resources and power to get the job done.

All the victims of state-sponsored violence deserve to know that the Mexican political system has truly changed. They need to know that those who repressed them--in the army, the police and the security forces--are part of the past.

Those who bore the brunt of arbitrary arrests need to be treated like citizens with the right to obtain information about a government that mistreated them. They deserve to see the perpetrators punished.

Fox himself won’t be able to take control of the future until he deals with Mexico’s past.

He won’t truly distinguish his government from those that preceded him unless he shows what they did wrong and pledges, “Never more.”

The weapons for this task are at his disposal: He can, at the very least, use the past to cajole the PRI into supporting presidential initiatives; he can use information about abuses to entice the party’s legislative collaboration.

George Orwell was right: Whoever controls the past controls the future.

If Mexico’s president sheds light on what the PRI did, he can establish a moral order in which lies are lies, truth is truth and government misdeeds do not go unpunished. If he uses what he knows strategically, he can domesticate his principal foe and recover the reins of his presidency.

If he takes a chance and unburies the past, he can combine what is morally necessary with what is politically indispensable.

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Denise Dresser is a senior fellow at the Pacific Council on International Policy in Los Angeles.