CONTESTING MEXICO
As the citizens of Mexico suffer through the twenty-fifth month of the country's worst economic depression since the 1930s--and the twentieth year of continually falling real incomes-a still...
...Since the late 1980s, in the midst of growing poverty and displacement, three related phenomena have shaken-though not yet broken-the PRI's hegemony, changing Mexico in the process...
...This popular opposition, which is remaking the country's political culture, is the subject of this report...
...In all these cases, disputes were resolved within the PRI, and-there being no other option-a wide range of political positions came to be represented within the ruling party itself...
...A new Mexico is being defined by the confluence of these two powerful forces: the hegemonic, culturally destructive project of Mexican neoliberalism, and the popular struggle to survive...
...A third key phenomenon has been the ceding of considerable political power to forces outside the country...
...In 1987, a powerful center-left faction within the PRI left the party to contest the 1988 presidential election behind the candidacy of one of its members, Cuauht6moc Cirdenas...
...As the citizens of Mexico suffer through the twenty-fifth month of the country's worst economic depression since the 1930s--and the twentieth year of continually falling real incomes-a still inchoate opposition to the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its globalizing project is bubbling up from below...
...This erosion of the sovereign decisionmaking ability of the Mexican government has gained the ruling faction the enmity of other factionsprogressive and reactionary alike-of the PRI...
...The rise of the PRD created a parallel phenomenon: the rise in power of the conservative, long-marginalized National Action Party (PAN...
...The PAN has overtaken the PRD as the nation's second electoral force and, as 1997 begins, it governs four of Mexico's 31 states as well as dozens of major cities...
...It expects to seriously challenge the PRI for dominance in the congressional elections to be held later this year...
...Until perhaps ten years ago, the only political activity that mattered in Mexico took place within the confines of the ruling PRI...
...To keep Cirdenas from winning, and to put its own candidate, Carlos Salinas, in the presidency, the PRI engaged in its most obvious vote tampering in decades...
...Treasury have assumed primary importance in shaping the governing institutions of the country...
...The forces behind the Cdrdenas candidacy formed what quickly became the country's second political party-the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)-only to suffer official repression that has been severe and relentless...
...With the ascent to power of a technocratic faction within the PRI led initially by expresident Carlos Salinasnow in self-imposed exile on an Irish horse farm-and currently by President Emrnesto Zedillo, political negotiations with international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S...
...As the PRI weakens, some of most powerful forces of the Mexican opposition are now mobilizing from below-and from outside the party-principally among neighborhood, ethnic and interest groups in what Mexican activists refer to as "civil society...
...The party has documented the violent deaths of over 300 of its members in just the last three years...
...Although this mobilization still lacks a unifying vision, it can be seen, in large part, as a collective attempt to contest the neoliberal project being imposed from above...
...Together, they are reshaping the country...
...Newsworthy politics pretty much consisted of interfactional maneuvering for power and privilege, as well as the struggles of the party's incorporated groups-unions, campesino groups and urban popular organizations-for extensions of their rights, benefits and protections...
...This not only damaged its legitimacy, it created the idea that an opposition force might actually be able to win a Mexican election...
...The PAN, never able to seriously contest for national power, took advantage of the opening created by the events of 1988, and began to seriously fight the wounded PRI-and the nascent PRD-for political position...
...This ongoing assault, combined with internal divisions, has demoralized the party in its infancy, even as it struggles to re-create itself as a powerful national force...
Vol. 30 • January 1997 • No. 4
