Reading the
news from Mexico today, it becomes more clear than ever that the country is in the middle of a very significant process of historical change. While the outcome is not clear, the potential for a new kind of democracy there is huge.
As I diaried last week, Mexico City mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador has pretty much won his political confrontation with rightist president (and erstwhile Bush ally) Vicente Fox. At the moment, AMLO (as the Mexican press refers to Lopez Obrador) is facing no real obstacle to an easy win in next year's presidential election, yet his victory would be much, much more than just a win for his political party, or even a win for the Mexican left. Because of the specific social movement backing Lopez Obrador, a PRD win next year has the potential to fundamentally reshape Mexican politics.
More on the flip...
The modern political history of Mexico begins with the 1968 social movement in Mexico City, which culminated in the massacre of some 2000 students in Tlatelolco square on October 2, 1968. (A brief reflection on the massacre can be found
here, the events of the day are well documented in Elena Poniatowska's
oral history, and the social movement is beautifully remembered in Paco Ignacio Taibo's memoir
68.) Many Americans remember the 68 massacre, because it coincided with the
Summer Olympics held in Mexico City that year, but the significance of the year -- looking back now -- is not so much the massacre, but the social movement that led to it. As Taibo describes so well, for a few brief months in the summer of 68 Mexico began to live the illusion of direct democracy, the illusion that mass numbers of people in the streets were sufficient to bring down an authoritarian government, the illusion that the people really do have the power. 68 in Mexico relates well to 68 in Paris, to 68 in Prague, to 68 in the United States. It was a time of hope, that ended in a great tragedy. Mexicans who lived through that time are marked by it; it is a formative part of their experience.
The heart of 68 was the student movement, and the heart of the student movement was the students at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City. This is a massive system, with some 250,000 students probably the largest institution of higher education in the Western Hemisphere. Traditionally, it is also the institution that trains the Mexican governing elite.
Some graduates of the UNAM, and of the student movement, moved into government jobs, and slowly worked their way up the ruling hierarchy until they came to occupy positions of substantial power. Others went into the political opposition, formed splinter parties of their own, brought their parties together into coalitions, and eventually (in the early 1980s) put together the Mexican Unified Socialist Party (PSUM). Still others went into the armed opposition, forming rural guerrilla groups in the highlands of Guerrero and other remote areas. While most of the guerrillas were tracked down and arrested or killed, some survived to play prominent roles in contemporary politics -- the most famous, undoubtedly, is subcomandante Marcos, who led the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas in the 1990s.
Following the 1968 massacre, Mexican politics became more corrupt and more repressive, following a pendulum swing between pseudo-populism on the left and outright pro-business statist intervention on the right. The governing kleptocracy -- the PRI -- may have continued forever, but the forces of nature conspired to demonstrate the fundamental hollowness of the Mexican state. On Sept. 19, 1985, a massive earthquake destroyed large sections of central Mexico City and killed as many as 20,000 people. The government, whose weak enforcement of the building codes was largely responsible for the destruction, failed to respond in a timely manner to the natural disaster. Much of the rescue work in the first hours and even days after the quake was conducted by passersby who simply chipped in and started removing rubble with their bare hands. (Poniatowska has prepared another admirable oral history of the quake rescue, called Nothing, Nobody in English.)
The 85 quake destroyed the credibility of the governing party, and led directly to the democratization of Mexico. In the 1988 presidential elections, a reform movement ran Cuauhtemoc Cardenas for the presidency against the PRI's candidate. Cardenas, the son of a hero of the Mexican Revolution, had remained within the governing party until drafted by the opposition to run for president. Leaving the PRI with Cardenas was an entire reform wing of the party, composed in large part (although not entirely) of veterans of the 1968 student movement. Running in alliance with the leftist PSUM, also made up of 1968 veterans, Cardenas almost certainly won the 1988 presidential elections. The PRI, however, refused to acknowledge his victory, and published fraudulent election results that gave their candidate the victory.
Following 1988, Mexico has undergone a gradual process of authentic democratization, leading in 2000 to Vicente Fox's election as the first non-PRI president of Mexico since the party took control in the 1940s. Yet while Fox's victory represented a substantial opening of the political process, it also signified a defeat for the social movement that had arisen in 1968 and then coalesced into a viable political party in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That party, representing that social movement, is the PRD, and it is currently led by Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador.
AMLO is a very different kind of political leader from Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Cardenas, essentially, ran on name recognition -- his dad had nationalized Mexico's oil industry and railroads, and had distributed more land in the agrarian reform than any other president in Mexico's history. His campaigns (he ran three times for president) promised "democracy," but weren't particularly clear on how to get there. His style was that of a mainstream politician, and his approach could often be somewhat wooden. A Mexican Al Gore, if you will. Each time he ran for president, he got less votes than the time before.
AMLO is an extremely competent manager, but he is also a gifted politician. As profiled in the New York Times (free subscription required), he got his start in politics in the PRI leading a successful political movement of marginalized Indians for basic urban services like electricity and clean water. He has developed over time a political style that relies on honesty, direct communication, and mass mobilization.
AMLO won his confrontation with Fox after hundreds of thousands of average Mexicans participated in a series of massive demonstrations supporting him. Although the PRD leadership claims to lead this movement, it appears to have an element of the spontaneity that characterized 1968 and 1985. The difference today is a political system that actually holds open electoral contests, and a political party that knows how to compete effectively in them.
AMLO will win.
Will he control his base? Or will his base control him?