Mexican evolutions

I began to know something of Mexico in the late 1980s when Murray Rossant, then director of the Twentieth Century Fund (now known as the Century Foundation), asked me to write a study of what I thought should be the United States’ policy with Mexico. I traveled all over that country for the first time and wrote a report of which I was inordinately proud. My key suggestion was that American cities should adopt and cultivate a Mexican town of comparable size to their own. The foundation chose not to publish this masterpiece (as I supposed it) largely because my charming sponsor in that institution, Rossant, had died but also because I think the text praised Carlos Salinas de Gortari, then president of Mexico, as an innovating modernizer.

Yet on this matter I think I was right. After all, had Salinas not radically changed the relation of Mexico with the Catholic Church, moving for a reconciliation between the government and the latter after decades of official anti-clericalism dating from the revolution? Had not his trade agreements with the United States transformed the relationship of Mexico with its powerful neighbor? Did not Salinas’ arrest of the oil trade unionist La Quina mean the beginning of a more orthodox, less corrupt trade union movement? And surely Salinas’ privatization program was as promising as anything proposed at that time by Margaret Thatcher.

But the ancillary benefits of my travels in Mexico were enormous: I came to be very friendly with a host of clever and imaginative Mexicans, and they remain very close friends to this day. I also realized that William Prescott’s splendid “History of the Conquest of Mexico” had been published 150 years before and was calling out for replacement. This led to a complete transformation in my intellectual life and a switch of attention from the 20th to the 16th century and to a book on Cortes’ conquest that even Mexicans seemed to like.

When I was traveling in Mexico in 1988 and 1989, the PRI, the extraordinary official political party that had been in power under one name or another since the 1920s, still seemed able to maintain its authority without too much difficulty. Elections, for example, were won (including, it now seems, by Salinas) by the use of “alchemy,” a word used to indicate the innumerable ruses designed to secure victory -- such as “loss” of voting papers, closing of election booths too early, physical prevention of voters from reaching the ballot box.

If one were to suggest that something was wrong to friends who were supporters of the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, they would amiably explain that a fair election would certainly lead to the victory of a priest, a bullfighter or a singer, and a fraud was the best way to ensure that presidents of high seriousness were elected. (It is just to say that the majority of PRI presidents were men of remarkable ability.)

At the same time, the PRI was very clever in persuading intelligent people to give them either acquiescence or support by all kinds of little bribes: a car, a chauffeur, a bodyguard, even an embassy. After all, the PRI had its achievements -- it had kept Mexico internationally neutral, it had a serious social policy, it had the rhetoric at least of enlightenment, it had controlled political violence: There had been no coup d’etat and there were no serious political murders between 1928 and 1993. Generals were no longer in power after 1946.

Now Mexico has changed the old electoral arrangements, and an opposition candidate, Vicente Fox, was elected president in 2000 by a substantial and unquestioned margin. Two experienced journalists from the New York Times, Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon, have collaborated on an interesting book that investigates the history of this triumph. They traveled a lot, they talked to everyone relevant, they received grants and had the dubious benefit of research assistants. Their prose never quite escapes from jargon -- friends are often “buddies” and a murder is a “hit.” But the result is a good if rather heavy introduction to the subject.

How do they explain the success of the Mexican transformation? First, the scale of the PRI’s election fraud began to seem more outrageous in a Latin America that in the 1980s said goodbye to most of its dictators and that was on the edge of democratic revolution. The arrival in Mexico of international assessors of the fairness of the 2000 elections must have been a positive element.

Then the horrifying growth in crime in the 1990s, including kidnappings, fueled a national rejection of those authorities who were ultimately responsible, especially when it became known that police were conniving to their financial advantage. The authors of “Opening Mexico” are particularly informative about this side of the story. The use of Mexico as a trampoline for the drug trade between Colombia and the U.S. also cast a shadow over the PRI in its last years because senior generals and ministers turned out to be involved.

Another shadow was caused by the increasing realization that the protesting students killed in the Plaza de Tlatelolco in 1968 on the eve of the Olympics in Mexico City had been shot not by armed dissidents but by the army. Tlatelolco was a turning point in modern Mexican history, there can be no doubt about it. The mysterious Subcommander Marcos in his black balaclava, with his fine eyes and cultivated prose style as the leader of Indian rebels in Chiapas, has been a most peculiar challenge to the system too. The good name of Marcos has even survived his unmasking as a onetime professor of communications.

“Opening Mexico” is also right to give attention to the campaign that Homero Aridjis, the determined poet and novelist, began in the 1980s to try to clean the skies of Mexico -- it was not something to which the PRI had given attention.

Finally the drive for a free press, beginning with Siglo 21 in Guadalajara, El Norte in Monterrey and later La Reforma, as well as Julio Scherer’s newsweekly magazine, Proceso, made a great difference. So too in quite different circumstances did the intellectual reviews the literary magazine Vuelta inspired by magnificent poet and essayist Octavio Paz, the reticent Gabriel Zaid and historian Enrique Krauze, and Nexos, the brainchild of Hector Aguilar Camin. The fact that Vuelta and Nexos were for a long time at daggers drawn did not hamper the liberalization of Mexican intellectual life. This side of Mexico is particularly well treated by these authors. Mention of these names, like that of wonderfully gifted novelist Carlos Fuentes, is a reminder that there is no other country in Latin America that has had such sparkling literature in the last few generations.

I took part in two of Paz’s famous conferences: one on Mexico’s history, one on the end of Eastern European communist dictatorships. The latter is discussed by Preston and Dillon, for it was then that Mario Vargas Llosa, sitting at a table with me, Czeslaw Milosz and Enrique Krauze, spoke of Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship.” It was a phrase immediately rejected by Paz, who said that Mexico was not a dictatorship but the dominance of the country by “a single hegemonic party.”

A word should be devoted to the role of the most recent ex-president of Mexico, Ernesto Zedillo. Lacking the brilliance of Salinas, he nevertheless helped the political liberation (glasnost) of his country more -- though Salinas’ economic liberation (perestroika) should not be forgotten. His insistence on having a primary for the selection of his successor as PRI candidate in the election was far more important than it seemed to outsiders.

For here was the voluntary abandonment by a president of what had always been his predecessors’ last ace: the “dedazo,” the nomination of his successor. Zedillo, it should be remembered, was not Salinas’ first choice to succeed him, but when that first choice, the most agreeable Luis Donaldo Colosio, was mysteriously killed during his campaign in early 1994, Zedillo seemed the best candidate.

Julia Preston and Samuel Dillon are critical of the actual achievements of President Fox: He has not fulfilled his promise. There are still many bureaucrats, extravagance is normal, crime has not much diminished. The position of the president is still too great even if the powers of state governors have grown because of Fox’s weaknesses. The main parties are in a state of upheaval while crucial reforms (fiscal, energy, labor) seem to have fallen by the way. All the same, the election of Fox did mark a sea change in Mexican history, and both the authors of this book, and I too, feel that, in the future, there is a good chance that the intelligent, naturally good mannered and often brilliant Mexican people should be able to fulfill themselves more completely than they have in the past. *