Taking Note
Ortiz, Irene & FR
The Rise of the Aztec Sun When the governor-elect of Mexico's Federal District, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, was asked how he cast his ballot on July 6, he said he had voted for Carlos Monsivafs,...
...The Rise of the Aztec Sun When the governor-elect of Mexico's Federal District, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, was asked how he cast his ballot on July 6, he said he had voted for Carlos Monsivafs, Mexico City's widely read political journalist and cultural critic...
...C rdenas takes office this December in an unbreathable city plagued by high levels of poverty, underemployment, corruption and crime...
...With one foot in the Mexican business community, the PAN strongly supports neoliberal reforms, and with its other foot in the ultra-conservative Opus Dei, PANistas have campaigned against abortion, birth control, condom use, condom ads, homosexuality, public displays of affection, miniskirts, public underwear ads and so on...
...Retrograde and corrupt as the ruling PRI has been, Monsivais wrote, the PAN is not the Mexican opposition we want...
...Playing the legitVol XXXI, No 2 SEPTIOcr 1997 imacy card, he says it is now time for extraparliamentary opposition groups to halt their demonstrations, lay down their arms, and incorporate themselves into the "institutional life" of the country...
...The Mexican Ecological Green Party (PVEM) won a surprising eight seats, and the small Workers Party (PT) four...
...He knows that radicals (or "center-leftists") who have come to municipal power have gained in stature by providing honest, efficient, participatory governance...
...He takes over a municipal government in financial arrears, and with a deep "social debt" to its own citizens...
...Heavier than expected voter turnout and the PRD's replacement of the PAN as the country's "second force" were big election stories, though the biggest story was in the Federal District-Mexico City-where the party swept the governor's race as well as the races for municipal council, winning in 28 of the 30 districts...
...Cirdenas won 47% of the vote, some 20 points ahead of his nearest rival, the PRI's Alfredo Del Mazo...
...Indeed, he is already assuring both national and transnational capital that he means no harm to their interests-in fact, that he needs their partnership to run the largest city in the Americas...
...The PRI is still Mexico's ruling party-at least for three more years...
...Ya se vi6 que si se puede" (now it's clear that it can be done), was the post-election rallying cry of the election's big winners, C.rdenas' "Party of the Aztec Sun," the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD...
...It was Monsivais who, in a series of columns in the daily paper La Jornada earlier this year, broadsided not the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which was slowly collapsing under its own weight, but the conservative National Action Party (PAN), which over the past few years had staked out a convincing claim to be Mexico's principal opposition party...
...He now declares himself a member of the "Generation of '68," the radical generation whose defining moment was the massacre of student protesters at Tlatelolco Plaza in October, 1968, just before the start of the Mexican-hosted Olympic Games...
...The PAN, wrote Monsivais, would attempt to bring little economic change, but plenty of social change to Mexico's increasingly beleaguered population...
...After years of losses, Morelos had animated the party faithful for this next round of elections...
...President Ernesto Zedillo put a gracious face on his party's loss...
...His columns turned the tide, not against the PRI-that tide had already turned-but in the race for principal "contender...
...For the first time, however, the country will have a genuinely multiparty legisature...
...He is being told by the fonts of conventional wisdom that he must "keep his radicals under control," go easy against the old authoritarian structures and accept the dominance of "the markets...
...In this last campaign, his party adopted a toned-down profile, keeping its nationalist, anti-neoliberal discourse under wraps, or at least quieter than usual...
...He will confront the PRI's entrenched corporate, clientist structure, which will not be easy to dislodge...
...He has promised to try...
...He has publicly congratulated the man who will surely be an opposition presidential candidate in 2000, and announced that he will be happy to work with whatever "national opposition front" emerges in the new Congress...
...The outcome was heartening to people who have been struggling against the PRI machine (and PAN moralism) for years and typically coming out losers...
...The PRI will have 238 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, with the PRD and the PAN taking 125 each...
...Where 75% of the population can't afford a "basic basket of goods," how long can that go on...
...Daunting as the task in Mexico City may be, the challenge is infinitely greater at the national level, where his party confronts transnational capital-a tad more powerful than the PRI's old urban coalition of street venders, cab drivers and sex workers...
...press, Zedillo is now the Alexander Dubcek of Mexico, having permitted his long-ruling party to lose-or at least not sweep-an election...
...In the U.S...
...The PRD's hopes had been nurtured three months earlier in the state of Morelos where, for the first time, it had won legislative power...
Vol. 31 • September 1997 • No. 2
