Looking for an Alternative in Mexico

...Today PAN fares a lot better...

...In recent pronouncements, Cárdenas has so divested himself of Marxist baggage that even a political enemy like the current President, Ernesto Zedillo, has expressed doubts that he is a Socialist...

...The horrifying December 1997 massacre of 46 Tzotzil Indians, mainly women and children, in Acteal, Chiapas, was one more example of PRI'S determination to hold on at all costs...

...If a big dealer is busted, the general belief is that the arrest came about through collusion between a rival trafficker and an ambitious PRI politico— who can then masquerade as an anti-drug crusader...

...Even when good deeds are done, there is a persistent pattern of too-little-toolate...

...PRI'S menacing reputation has been earned over the years by its T. rex ferocity in dealing with such opponents as inquisitive journalists, independent labor leaders and peasant farmers sympathetic to rival political organizations...

...EYES RIGHT AND LEFT Looking for an Alternative in Mexico By Addison De Witt Guadalajara For its longevity and resistance to change, Mexico's dominant Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) has frequently been compared to a dinosaur...

...Bartlett is also one of six state governors recently accused by the left-wing weekly Proceso of links with drug barons...

...Most notable were the slayings of the PRI presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio in March 1994, and of the PRI party chairman José Francisco Ruiz Massieu in September of the same year...

...In the mayoral race, Cárdenas won 47 per cent of the vote, with the PPI candidate garnering 25 per cent and the PAN nominee a woeful 16 per cent...

...But the ballots were seized and a big PRI victory was declared...

...In the old days, when Cosio Villegas described panistas as individuals who '"circled in the shadow of churches," PRI could win elections without stealing ballot boxes...

...Though theories about these killings are numerous and varied, few of them exclude PRI rivals and/or drug dealers from their calculus...

...The main Right-wing opposition group, the National Action Party (PAN), was founded in 1939 by the former rector of Mexico's National University, Manuel Gómez Mortin...

...Cuauhtemoc Cardenas heads the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), PRI'S strongest opposition on the Left...

...If Cardenas does passably well in his present job, there is little doubt that growing numbers of anti-PRi voters will be looking toward the neoBlairism of the PRD rather than the neoThatcherism of the stumbling and striferidden PAN...

...If it was fraud," he shouted, "it was patriotic fraud...

...Increasingly, therefore, voters are focusing attention on another Cardenas—Cuauhtemoc, son of President Lázaro Cardenas (1934-40), the most radical (and honest) chief executive in Mexican history...

...Should Zedillo's successor manage to conduct his 2000 campaign without a Jurassic albatross around his neck, then the PRI has a good chance of extending its domination over Mexico into the 21st century...

...Adolfo Christlieb, leader of the seculars, denounced the ultraclericalists as "pissers of holy water...

...The victims were accused of links with the Zapatista rebels, and the "Red Mask" paramilitary unit that executed the attack is reputed to have been armed and directed by a local PRI mayor...

...The Cárdenas of the late '90s has clearly emerged as a representative of the "soft" (as opposed to the "loony") Left...

...How PRI fares in 2000 will obviously depend on which of its contending factions gets the upper hand...

...But not of the Barney variety...

...In 1956 a split developed between ultraclericals and business-oriented secular panistas...

...Initially, PAN had close ties with the Catholic hierarchy and many of its leaders were pro-Franco during the Spanish Civil War...

...A neopanista candidate defeated in an August 1997 Jalisco primary subsequently made a plea for party unity, warning that if PAN members did not stick together "the same thing will happen to us that happened in Chihuahua...

...Born on December 1,1928, during the administration of President Plutarco Elias Calles, the ruling clique originally called itself the National Revolutionary Party...

...Encouraged by the infighting, the PRI magnanimously permitted PAN six seats in the Chamber of Deputies...

...He was the Interior Minister during the 1982-88 term of President Miguel de la Madrid...

...It won 25.94 per cent of the vote in the 1994 presidential election and six of Mexico's 32 states have PAN governors...

...Soon afterward pamphlets boldly titled "NarcoPAN" began circulating...

...Although he admits to misgivings about NAFTA, Cárdenas is not prepared to reject it—putting him, on that issue anyway, to the right of Pat Buchanan...

...Daniel Cosio Villegas, the eminent historian, has described the country's political structure over the past seven decades as an "absolute monarchy, hereditary through collateral transfer...

...Cárdenas' moderation undoubtedly helped his party in the July 1997 Congressional elections...

...The PRD now has eight Senators, as opposed to nine for PAN, but outnumbers PAN in the lower house by a 124-122 margin...

...It became the Party of the Mexican Revolution in 1938, and in July 1946 adopted the oxymoron Institutional Revolutionary Party as its designation...

...The leading PAN figure is Guanajuato Governor Vicente Fox Quesada, who is widely regarded as the party's likely presidential contender in the 2000 election...

...These allegations were bolstered by an embarrassing news photo showing Sergio Lupercio Serratos, a reputed leader of the Ciudad Juarez drug cartel, among the well-wishers when the party's State Secretary, Raul Espinoza Martinez, celebrated the opening of his beauty salon...

...The latter refers to the destape (unveiling), where an incumbent president quietly chooses his successor and then sees him named officially amid a fanfare of publicity...

...But he did himself damage in a May 13, 1996 speech to the Americas Society in New York when he advocated privatizing the sacrosanct state petroleum monopoly, Petroleos Mexicanos...

...But his eyes are fixed on the year 2000 and another opportunity to seize the prize stolen from him in 1988...

...Two of the Front's components, the Mexican Socialist Party and Popular Socialist Party, were openly Marxist, pro-Castro and pro-Sandinista, but less than seamless adherents to the Soviet line...

...Cárdenas was the candidate of a Left-wing coalition called the National Democratic Front...

...With the next presidential election only two years away, Mexicans anxious to finally end PRI'S reign are looking both to the Right and to the Left...

...They were seen as noisy, trouble-making Marxists who zealously supported anti-American rebel movements throughout Latin America...

...One man who embodies everything PRI reformers detest is Manuel Bartlett Diaz, currently the Governor of Puebla...

...That many Mexicans are fed up with one-party rule is hardly a secret...

...Then, on July 9, 1995, PRI recaptured the Legislature in Chihuahua, where the PAN Governor was drawing fire from a segment of his own party because he belonged to a relatively liberal group known as neopanistas...

...With a previous victory in Baja California Norte, and triumphs in Guanajuato and Chihuahua, the party held power in four states...

...Rival politicians howled with outrage, and even advocates of privatization recoiled in horror from what they perceived as an unacceptable assault on the nation's "patrimony...

...High-level PRI reformers have repeatedly found themselves in the position of locking the stable door after the horse is stolen...

...Charges of links between PAN officials and drug traffickers in Jalisco have further damaged the party...

...The logo of the PRD is yellow and brown, with not a trace of red to be seen...

...It swept the important state of Jalisco in the February 1995 gubernatorial and mayoral contests, electing as governor a 36-year-old engineer who had been a rural mayor, Alberto Cardenas Jimenez...

...As the discussion grew more heated, Bartlett banged his fist on the table...

...Second, PAN has benefited from outrage caused by PRI'S theft of elections...

...Then there are the ongoing murky celebrity murders with perceived political/drug overtones...

...Its main problem might be described as Jurassic schizophrenia...

...Since Zedillo, unlike Salinas, won in what was widely considered a fair election, however, the PPI'S potential for extending its rule over Mexico beyond the millennium certainly cannot be discounted...

...PRI supporters cite economic progress, the establishment of a human rights commission, the prosecution and jailing of such influential priistas as Raul Salinas de Gortari, the former President's brother, and continuing efforts to achieve apolitical solution to the rebellion in Chiapas...

...A month earlier another PRi-affiliated paramilitary group (ironically called "Peace and Justice") unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Samuel Ruiz Garcia, the reform-minded Catholic bishop of Chiapas...

...On February 12, Garcia was fatally shot just minutes after attending a press conference held in the Federal Attorney General's office...

...This terror continues...

...His model, Cárdenas insists, is the 1910 Mexican Revolution rather than any import from Russia or Cuba...

...First, the shedding of the "pissers of holy water" image...

...The hidden but all-pervasive influence of drug lords has induced a vast collective cynicism among the Mexican man and woman in the street...

...The influential daily El Informador accused him of spending too much time on a witch hunt against former PRI officials and too little on fulfilling his campaign promise to solve Jalisco's outstanding problems...

...Like many Latin American Leftists, they condemned the USSR's adventure in Afghanistan...

...The action was so outrageous that Bartlett agreed to meet with a group of 21 journalists and intellectuals, some of whom were liberals and Leftists...

...Unlike the 70year-old PRI and the 59-year-old PAN, the PRD was formed in 1989, in the wake of the presidential election Cárdenas surely won but had stolen from him through a brazen act of computer fraud that gave PRI standard bearer Carlos Salinas de Gortari the office...

...Buendia and his successor victims were strong critics of PPJ corruption and of the clandestine terrorism—widely believed to be government sponsored—that ended their lives...

...Rubén Figueroa, the Governor of Guerrero, was removed from office—but only after the June 28, 1995 Aguas Biancas massacre of 22 unarmed peasants by local police, who then planted weapons on the corpses and tried to make the carnage look like an act of selfdefense...

...Nor does he wish to declare a debt moratorium or take any measures that might scare off foreign investors...

...But with the moderate, nonclerical PAN, the situation has changed radically...

...For Mexicans who want no part of the PRI under any circumstances, the big news is that the opening to the left is getting wider every day...

...In 1986, polls favored a popular PAN Mayor named Francisco Barrios to become governor of Chihuahua by a 3-1 margin...

...Moreover, Buendia was one of a principled minority who refused to accept the embute, or under-the-table salary, paid regularly by the government to tame reporters and columnists...

...There are two reasons for its surge from barely tolerated political outcast to legitimate contender...

...Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, the PAN presidential candidate in 1994, was an antigovernment activist during the savage 1968 repression of students at Tlatelolco...

...The job is a daunting one, for it places him in charge of the world's largest and reputedly most polluted city—although some say the second "honor" now belongs to Bangkok...

...The most celebrated case was the May 30,1984 shooting of Manuel Buendia of the Mexico City daily Excelsior...

...Cardenas took office March 1 and by June he was under heavy attack from the media...

...A good example is the continuing campaign of unofficial repression against determinedly independent journalists...

...After so many years in the cold, PAN has performed erratically where it has gained control...

...Addison de Witt, is the pseudonym of a freelance journalist and new contributor to The New Leader who lives in Mexico, and would like to stav there...

...Bickering between this faction and PAN'S old guard has alarmed party members in other parts of Mexico...

...From the '60s through much of the '80s Cárdenas and his allies were anathema to the United States...

...Both the murderous Chiapas PRI Mayor and the Federal Interior Secretary were ousted by the Zedillo government—but only after the Acteal butchery...

...Last December 5 he was installed as the Mayor of the Mexico City Federal district...

...In Jalisco, though, the honeymoon was brief...

...Zedillo is strenuously attempting to refurbish PPJ'S image—and there have been some kinder and gentler stirrings within the party...

...Yet prehistoric skeletons continue to rattle in the PRI closet, and well-meaning party leaders appear unable to control these retrogressive and rogue elements...

...This slaughter resulted in the creation of the Popular Liberation Army, a small, militant guerrilla group now operating in the primitive sierra of Guerrero and Oaxaca...

...Internationally, he identifies with today's European social democratic leadership and its de-emphasis of the class struggle...

...The latest victim is Mario Luis Garcia, a reporter for the Mexico City evening paper La Tarde...

...While this cynicism may be disheartening, such events as the arrest of General Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, supposedly Mexico's drug czar, certainly make it understandable...

...All that has changed...

...The new Mayor has vowed a tough, no-nonsense approach to Mexico City's present explosion of street crime...