On Mexican politics
Krauze, Enrique
Ten years ago I tried to interpret Mexico for Ilan and Irving Howe in a single day. I took them to Aztec ruins and to markets where indigenous customs live on virtually intact. We strolled...
...Daniel Cosio Villegas, one of our great—and rare—liberal thinkers, described it as an "absolute, hereditary, horizontally moving, six-year monarchy...
...After a few moments, Irving turned to leave, confessing to me, kindly, his discomfort: "I can't understand all this...
...To crown it all, the autonomy of regional and local power centers that was consecrated in the Constitution has become a dead issue: Governors are picked and controlled by the central authority...
...The press has only occasionally suffered governmental coercion, but over the years it has not been noteworthy for critical professionalism or for its defense of democracy...
...It applies the categories of Marx, our most radical rationalist, to what is actually the realm of Thomist scholasticism...
...It is true that Europe is America's past, and its future may well lie in the East, but its ideological headaches and the silent encroachment of demography come from the South...
...Octavio Paz best described this political structure in 1969 when he called it a pyramid with the president reigning from its apex...
...The most obvious proof is the endless debate over the Central American crisis, about which even liberal opinion is off course...
...Mexicans have always enjoyed real civic liberties, unrestricted except in cases that might threaten the perpetuation of the system...
...Nicaragua today seems much more like an extreme, intolerant version of this Neothomist model than like the Eastern "Socialist" states...
...One of the most entrenched mistakes of intellectual life in the United States is its turning towards the Atlantic—now towards the Pacific as well—without deigning to look North or South...
...I'm only a Jewish rationalist...
...Oddly enough, the American historian Richard Morse was the first to show that politics in Mexico—and in Latin America generally—does not function like an open forum where individuals air their differences in orderly fashion, but rather like an architectural monument "made to last," not to change...
...Very few, unfortunately...
...How many analyses and counteranalyses of the theme have taken this political and historical perspective into account...
...The true historical explanation is quite different, and lies in the South, in a political theology that took root many years ago, and that profoundly affects the ideas, practices, and institutions of Spanish America, namely Neothomism...
...This is why the intellectual debate in the United States over Central America and Mexico makes no progress: it begins from false premises, then oscillates between paternalism and rejection...
...Yet despite all this, Mexico has never known a totalitarian regime...
...I gave them a canned version of our nineteenth-century liberal tradition and our twentiethcentury social revolution...
...Think of Mexico, for example...
...Translated from the Spanish by RACHEL PHILLIPS BELASH q SUMMER • 1989 • 303 Reports from Abroad Les Stone/IMPACT VISUALS 304 • DISSENT...
...One could even claim that Mexico's political system has not been particularly authoritarian...
...By which I do not mean that Mexico is indecipherable, nor that Dissent's readers can allow themselves the luxury of ignoring it...
...Actually, the State of Mexico has always been a monarchy in republican clothing, a centralized, antidemocratic monarchy of only one party...
...Since 1917 the legislative and judicial branches, though formally recognized in the Constitution, have remained subordinate to the executive...
...Because I too am a Jewish rationalist, I have no intention of repeating this experiment with the readers of Dissent...
...For better or for worse," I told them, "What Max Weber called the `continuous desacramentalizing of the world' has still not happened here...
...The Constitution grants the president almost unlimited power...
...Cosio Villegas used to say that it is "a free press that neither knows how nor wishes to use its freedom...
...This is why many things are misunderstood (Fidel Castro's political and mental resistance to perestroika, for instance...
...The inner altar is a gilded, exuberant overgrowth...
...We strolled through the center of Mexico City, heart of our Spanish heritage...
...What kind of system is it...
...But above all, their intellectual neglect of the South is politically costly...
...a corporate political structure, a hierarchic, coherent, and especially organic entity in which the will of the governing body and the will of the masses must be harmonized in the name of "civic felicity...
...For Americans to refuse to learn about the life and history of the countries south of their border is, at this time, a refusal to learn about themselves...
...In such circumstances the natural counterbalance to an omnipotent presidency should be the intellectuals, but with a few exceptions they have 302 • DISSENT Reports from Abroad traditionally been coopted by the establishment...
...Looking across the Atlantic as usual, theorists have tried to find the historical explanation for these states and their revolutions in Marxism, interpreted either as salvation or death sentence...
...This concept of a beneficent, protective, and paternalistic state that reconciles within itself—or, if this is impossible, suppresses—all dissidence, is the work of the Spanish sixteenth-century Neothomists, especially Francisco de Vitoria and Francisco Suarez...
...The first article of the Constitution of 1917 declares that Mexico is a representative, democratic, and federal republic...
...I remember overwhelming them with long exegeses on Mexican life: its religious syncretism, its aesthetic sensibility, the intense feeling of community in our small towns, neighborhoods and families...
...Later that day we visited one of the most extraordinary examples of Baroque architecture, the temple of Tepotzotlan, built by Jesuits in the eighteenth century...
Vol. 36 • July 1989 • No. 3
