Mexican democracy

...Perhaps some kind of negotiated solution can be reached, but we may look back and see the 1994 governor's race as a historic missed opportunity for peaceful political change in Mexico's most authoritarian region...

...In the aftermath of the Chiapas rebellion and Cardenas's meeting with the Zapatistas, the regime's image managers proved especially adept at painting the PRD rather than the government itself as the source of violence (almost three hundred PRD activists have been murdered since the party was founded five years ago...

...He defined himself as a candidate from civil society and was drafted to run on the PRD ticket because of the Chiapas crisis (the Mexican government does not allow nonparty candidacies...

...In 7.5 percent of polling places, the indelible ink was not applied to all voters...

...The PAN's gradualist strategy has paid off politically, in that it has learned how to govern in practice at the municipal and state levels...

...They did not find any single obvious "smoking gun" in terms of election law violations...

...First and foremost is the importance of building a broad multiparty coalition behind the most credible candidate possible...

...Voter fears of change were explicitly encouraged by the semi-official media monopoly, with television ads where a child was asked, "Why are you crying...

...For most citizens, the progovernment television monopoly is the main link to national politics, and television is an arena where the PRD was unable to take advantage even of the little space available...

...The Alliance's main emphasis was to produce a "quick count," in case the ruling party 30 • DISSENT Politics Abroad tried to change the results after the voting, and to document election law violations on the voting day itself...

...This fear of instability was actually well founded, in the sense that the threat of a capital strike by big business in response to an opposition victory was very real...

...In 1994, not only did the candidate of the government's Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI) clearly come in first with almost 50 percent, but Cárdenas slipped far behind to third place with 17 percent, trailing the center-right National Action party's (PAN) 26 percent...

...In no "founding election" in transitions to democracy has a divided opposition won over entrenched authoritarian incumbents...

...As a result, the Civic Alliance did not challenge the PRI presidential victory, but it did claim that the sum total of irregularities, whatever that was, certainly affected the PRI's margin of victory, many congressional races, and the Chiapas governor's race that took place the same day...

...Many prodemocracy activists —mostly urban middle-class—felt predestined to win, and then the people let them down...

...Elements of the 1994 campaign strategy may also have backfired...

...Most indicative of the regime's crisis of governability—transcending the electoral arena— is that both murdered national leaders bridged reformist and hard-line factions within the ruling party (and therefore may have been especially threatening to corrupt vested interests...

...Finally, the election revealed a gaping political chasm between the intelligentsia and much of the electorate...

...The PRI's victory can be explained by simply noting that the opposition was deeply divided...

...There are precedents— pluralist coalitions behind democratic "good government" candidates for governor at the state level —but so far Mexican politics has not produced a unifying figure at the national level...

...the president seems all-powerful and arbitrary, while few congressional representatives channel constituent demands upward...

...It remains to be seen whether incoming President Zedillo will cave in to his authoritarian political allies or whether he will be willing to negotiate the next stage in Mexico's slow and far from steady political transition...

...The Alliance election observation effort was able to quantify the percentage of polling places affected by election law violations, though not the number of votes presumably affected by the violations...

...Before the selection process, the PRD promised half of its proportional representation seats to nonparty candidates from civil society, but these candidates tended to end up on the bottom half of the list, guaranteeing that party leaders would get most of the seats actually won...

...The head of the Mexican Bankers' Association made explicit threats of capital flight in the press...

...Remarkably, the PRD emerged from the process much more unified than before...

...Local political battles are also widely seen as worth the risks they involve because there is more of a chance of winning something...

...New York Times editorials spoke of the reformers' victory over old-fashioned hardliners within the ruling party, but promarket technocrats are not necessarily political reformers...

...The PRI swept the congressional races as well, preventing the rubber-stamp legislature from becoming an effective counterweight to presidential power...

...Its advantages of money, media, and coercion were overwhelming, and it did not take any chances...

...Because my father is afraid...

...We are therefore facing a provocation that affronts the millions of Mexicans who hoped . . . that this election would be a means to achieve peace in Chiapas...

...The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, certainly has promarket credentials, but he made a pact with his party's hard-line "dinosaurs" in order to get elected...

...instead, they found a diverse array of mechanisms that tarnished and distorted the process in different ways, so diverse that they found it impossible to quantify the overall effect on the electoral outcome...

...This means that Avendatio got twice the percentage Cardenas did nationally, in spite of the lack of media access and the widespread violation of basic elecWINTER • 1995 • 31 Politics Abroad toral freedoms in most of the state...

...Although the Civic Alliance did not observe the local elections . . . the high levels of irregularities in the federal elections also affected the elections for governor...

...The Zapatistas found themselves more isolated than they expected and took a prudent posture, focusing on the illegitimacy of the Chiapas governor's election...

...Progovernment foreign observers proclaimed this Mexico's cleanest election ever, but that was not saying much...

...For many Mexican citizens, however, grass-roots mobilizations 32 • DISSENT Politics Abroad around local issues like social programs and municipal elections are often more engaging than national elections...

...There are limits to the Alliance data on the violation of ballot secrecy...

...To sum up the point about the second version of the "fear vote" interpretation, many rural voters, especially in indigenous regions, had good reasons to fear individual reprisals if they voted for the opposition...

...The nonpartisan Mexican election watchdog coalition Civic Alliance brought together nongovernmental organizations and individual citizens from center right to center left, fielding over twelve thousand Mexican election observers and hundreds of international election "visitors," as they were officially called...

...Many Mexican political analysts explain the PRI sweep with the "voto de miedo" hypothesis— the "fear vote...

...In retrospect, it is not surprising that the WINTER • 1995 • 29 Politics Abroad ruling party won the August elections...

...His official 1988 tally of 31 percent was an unprecedented challenge to the ruling party-state, and many observers suspect that he actually won...

...In 13.1 percent of polling places, ballots were annulled for only one party (presumably an opposition party...

...Instead, Cárdenas's campaign strategy emphasized old-fashioned rallies in the plazas, which are fine for energizing the party faithful but not so good at reaching the fearful or undecided...

...Zedillo's transition team assigned low-level politicians to the negotiation process, while sending threatening military signals to the Zapatistas...

...Bishop Ruiz came out with a balanced proposal, but the government attached conditions that ended up weakening the bishop, who in turn came under renewed attack from anti–liberation theology elements within the church...

...The micro version of the "fear vote" interpretation of the PRI's margin of victory focuses on how individual voters feared reprisals for supporting the opposition...

...Across the spectrum, Mexico City elites were surprised at the PRI's high margin of victory...

...One can only guess as to what happened in those Chiapas polling places where independent observers were not present...

...Against this backdrop, Ernesto Zedillo campaigned as the "peace candidate...

...The number of troops in Chiapas reportedly doubled after the election, and the Zapatistas went on red alert...

...This figure ranged from 25.4 percent in the largest cities to over 51 percent in rural areas nationally, reaching 68 percent statewide in Chiapas, 58 percent in Veracruz, 55 percent in Michoacan, and 53 percent in Oaxaca...

...On the political side, the Colosio murder and the apparent lack of a serious investigation were understood by many as a message that "premature" democratization would not be tolerated by the hard-line elements within the regime...

...Most notably, the electoral process in rural areas was qualitatively different from the urban process...

...They were not able to address the flagrant violations of weak campaign spending laws, nor did they have the capacity to check the validity of the controversial official voter rolls...

...And thanks to the skill with which the progovernment television managed images of the Chiapas rebellion and the assassination of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, political change was widely associated with open-ended violence and economic crisis...

...The dominant groups in the PRD took the position that Mexico faced a national crisis and were willing to engage in a broad multiparty dialogue over future political reform...

...The PRI's margin of victory in the governors' race was 50 percent to 35 percent...

...By fall, the government and the Zapatistas had still not reached a negotiated settlement...

...This phrase actually conflates two distinct arguments that need to be disentangled—a macro version and a micro version...

...The Alliance was not able to quantify what fraction of voters were denied ballot secrecy in each polling place...

...There were dramatic differences in the nature of the electoral process between Mexico City and the northern states, and the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Veracruz...

...Direct pressures on voters were witnessed in 25 percent of the polling places, rising to 35.6 percent in rural areas...

...For example, when PRD propaganda called for clean elections to avoid post-electoral political unrest, the government claimed this was a threat rather than an argument...

...Most of these pressures were actually exercised before election day, and therefore not systematically measured by observers...

...But all this does not explain why the PRI won by such a large margin...

...National politics, in contrast, is quite remote...

...WINTER • 1995 • 33...

...The most obvious vote-buying tool was the remarkably blatant political manipulation of millions of government crop subsidy checks distributed only days or weeks before the election—through a program designed to buffer the political cost of the NAFTA-related fall in the price of corn...

...And why are you afraid...

...Here are a few of their conclusions, limited to procedural problems visible on election day: • In 7.7 percent of polling places observed, voters without credentials were permitted to vote...

...The one place where the micro version of the "fear vote" explanation might have affected the actual election outcome (and not just the margin of PRI victory) was in the Chiapas governor's race (the only governor's race that coincided with the national election...

...In 3.8 percent of polling places, people with ink were allowed to vote...

...The shock of the 1994 election results catalyzed a major rethinking on the left end of the democratic opposition...

...The Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which includes center-left ex-members of the ruling party and most of both the old and new lefts, had hoped that 1994 would be a replay of Cuauht6moc Cárdenas's surprise 1988 triumph...

...When the Alliance's numbers were first published it had not yet quantified the number of people denied the vote, but in the latest report it calculated an average of only four voters turned away per polling place—much less than earlier PRD estimates...

...We'll never know who would have won a clean race for governor, but it is clear that the national government's unwillingness to ensure that the process was clean and credible in Chiapas makes continued instability and political violence in the state very likely...

...In the argument's macro version, fear is associated with the widespread perception that a transition to a non-PRI government, even to an opposition party as tame as much of PAN, would provoke instability...

...The PRD has such weak links with its own base that the leadership decided to choose its 1994 congressional candidates through backroom negotiations rather than open party primary elections...

...Where this occurred, the average share of ballots annulled was 9 percent of the total...

...In 69.5 percent of polling places observed, voters with credentials were not listed on the rolls, and were therefore not allowed to vote...

...But the PAN is known as the "asphalt party," never leaving the paved road network, while the PRD has not been able to engage with many of the non-party grassroots movements that one would think are its natural constituencies...

...The Civic Alliance observed a statistically representative stratified sample of over 1,800 polling places for their national quick count (out of more than 90,000...

...In Chiapas, the main opposition candidate was one of the few on the PRD ticket who actually had a broad popular following...

...The PRD has a weak track record in helping citizens to solve local problems, while that is precisely the PRI's speciality: solving specific material problems in exchange for political subordination...

...In 4.8 percent of polling places, the ink was easily removed...

...It is not difficult to guess where most of the United States observers were...

...It involves unpacking the election in terms of geography, class, and ethnicity...

...Both the PRD and the PAN have well-organized bases in a few regions and states...

...On the campaign trail, Avendaiio barely survived a suspicious head-on collision in which three associates were killed...

...At the national level, the presidential election suggests several lessons for future movements for electoral democracy in Mexico...

...The ruling party's true political reformers were trying to separate the party from the state, but have had little impact so far...

...Radical groups inside and outside the party advocated trying to block Zedillo's accession to power with open-ended mass protest, but they generally failed to inspire much support...

...The national Civic Alliance concluded that "the case of Chiapas is most worrisome because of the high level of conflict in the region...

...Second, the partisan opposition needs to sink stronger roots in society to offset the ruling party's media domination and extensive network of clientelist controls...

...Indeed, the murder of the ruling party's number two official reminded Mexicans that the dinosaurs are far from extinct...

...Because I'm afraid...

...Third, the PRD needs to find campaign strategies that convince the electorate that it has the capacity to go beyond criticism and govern effectively...

...The secret ballot was violated in 38.6 percent of polling places observed nationwide...

...Meanwhile, the second assassination of a top ruling party official struck fear in the hearts of Mexico's political opposition: if that is how ruling party factions solve their internal disputes, then no one on the outside is safe...

...This approach involves taking a "voter's eye view" of the process, looking at the combination of carrots and sticks that the ruling party-state used to try to influence individual decisions...

...In the aftermath of organized civil society's successful veto of the government's military response to the Chiapas rebellion, expectations of change were high...

...Instead, Mexico escaped the worldwide wave of democratization one more time...

...One Mexican opposition leader, PRD president Porfirio Mufloz Ledo, made hopeful preelection comparisons to the Chilean plebiscite vote against Pinochet, but he neglected to recall that the democratic opposition only won there because of its unusual unity across the political spectrum—and even then Pinochet got 43 percent of the vote...

...Amado Avendaiio is a public interest lawyer and journalist who had worked for years with indigenous groups, and is trusted by both the Church and the Zapatistas...

...Reprisals were also possible regardless of ballot secrecy, as in the rural community of Jaltenango la Paz, Chiapas, far from the region in revolt, where a local schoolteacher—the municipal leader of the PRD—was shot down while bicycling to town in September, apparently because the PRD won in his district...

...The PRD, in contrast, has governed many small towns but has won only one state capitol and no governorships...