Will Mexico Move Right?

...But since the purpose was to convince Mexican leftists that Echeverria was a sincere advocate of change—as evidenced by his praise for Allende in Chile and his warm relations with Castro in Cuba—ideological stances were more important than concrete facts...

...Of the official opposition parties, two—the Popular Socialist Party and the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution— are controlled by the government, while the ultra- Catholic National Action Party collects protest votes without offering a serious alternative...

...He has sought to improve living conditions in the countryside, where 45 per cent of the 57 million population lives, by channeling more government resources for irrigation, access roads, social services, and price supports...

...Having largely achieved this, the Right is now concentrating on securing through political pressure and threats to the economy, a truly conservative government between 1976 and 1982...

...Candidates for governor in state elections in 1973 and 1974, for example, were imposed by regional bosses—caciques—or by the central government, bujt were never selected by the voters...

...Luis Echeverria, forty-nine, a little-known bureaucrat of unknown political inclinations, inherited this explosive situation on December 1, 1970...

...But despite their close ties with the United States, their interest is more the Mexican presidential succession than the 200th anniversary of American independence...

...The misfortune of this policy, however, was that, while his choice of political allies did succeed in earning him new enemies on the Right, he failed to convince the Left of his revolutionary credentials...

...New leftist opposition groups, on the other hand, have been blessed by the president and have lacked popular appeal precisely because they are accepting the system's rules of the game...

...ALAN RIDING Conservative forces in Mexico are already imbued with the Spirit of '76...

...Its basic objectives—to reduce Mexico's economic and political dependence on the United States and to identify Mexico with the Third World—cannot be faulted...

...As younger officers are promoted to replace corrupt old "revolutionary" generals, the army high command is taking more interest in the affairs of state...

...Thus, in both domestic and foreign affairs, government action succeeded in upsetting the Right without winning over the Left...

...Today, there is a mood of disappointment and even anger among younger officials who feel that little has been achieved...

...He was in fact a typical Mexican apparatchik: Throughout his political career, his ideology was that of his immediate superior, so he was expected to be a hard-liner when he came to power...

...In fact, Mexico's 55,000-man army, purposefully weakened and de-politicized by successive civilian administrations, is being given new responsibility for the stability and, in effect, the survival of the system...

...But the " n e w " extreme Left, the young middle-class students and former students who have taken up arms for essentially national and even regional reasons, has won widespread support among the population and has sharpened tensions between reformists and reactionaries within the elite...

...The movement ended with the jailing of more than 200 leaders, but its impact continued to be felt as awareness of the need for change filtered through the country...

...His administration has therefore been characterized by fervent expressions of the need for reform and difficult struggles against entrenched conservatives in the private sector and bureaucracy...

...Their pverriding concern is that the Mexican Spirit of '76 should produce a blatant right-winger as the country's next "dictator for six y e a r s . " The struggle to put Mexico back on her traditional conservative tracks erupted as soon as President Luis Echeverria began displaying signs of reformism in 1971...

...Politics have moved from the personality and party level to the larger arena of ideological conflict...

...Embassy are not members of the PRI, but they too play an important role in the selection of a widely acceptable candidate...

...And as Chileans have learned, the Right is prepared to destroy the system—economically and militarily—in order to " save " it from change...

...Faced by the real threat of economic sabotage, Echeverria backed down, the tax reform was shelved, and the foreign investment law emerged toothless...

...Without complementary political and economic reforms, few of the ambitious social projects have made headway...

...They have economic and political muscle which they have learned to flex during this administration...

...So he has assumed a new political risk by asking the armed forces to fight the guerrilla groups...

...Conservatives are reportedly backing Moya Palencia, and he is known to maintain close ties with the private sector...

...It was, of course, much easier to visit Moscow and Peking and to pose beside President Allende and General Peron than actually to reduce imports or loans from the United States or to control foreign investment...

...The failure of Echeverria's call for labor democracy is well illustrated by the fact that not one independent— that is, anti-government—union has been legally recognized since 1970...

...The front runner is the current interior minister, Mario Moya Palencia, who benefits from the tradition that most holders of that post subsequently become president...

...It was reported that in a rare burst of independence against the United States, he told Ford that if the United States wants some of the new oil production it will have to pay the world market price of $11 a barrel which Mexico now receives...

...The Right has one eye on the army and its changing attitudes...

...To underline its demand for "an end to the terror" and "adequate internal security," business in Monterrey, a right-wing provincial stronghold, even held a "bosses' strike" and threatened to withhold tax payments to the federal government in mid-1974...

...The big names of banking and industry warned the president that the economy could not survive such a blow and that hundreds of millions of dollars would flee the country...

...As minister and even as candidate, he will generally reflect the views of the president...

...The final choice of the PRI nominee to the July 1976 "elections" will be made by Echeverria, but he must respond to the principal forces both inside and outside the party...

...Now elections continue as formal endorsements of PRI nominees who, in turn, continue to be chosen by political whim rather than popular preference...

...To carry out this job, the army is seeking a larger budget, new weaponry, and better training...

...Yet if they lose out, they cannot be expected to watch impassively as Mexico is modernized and reformed...

...Ambassador to Mexico, Robert H. McBride, chipped in with his "definite concern'' that the rules of the game for foreign investment might be changing...

...And to emphasize the point, wealthy conservatives began panicking and changing their pesos into dollars...

...At a press conference in Tabac, Arizona, following the recent borderstraddling talks between Echeverria and President Ford, the Mexican president would not comment directly on the size of the new find...

...But guerrilla actions continued and, after a powerful Mexican senator, Ruben Figueroa, was kidnapped by the rural group of former schoolteacher Lucio Cabanas in the state of Guerrero last May 30, repression of the peasants of the region escalated...

...he spent the previous decade behind a desk in the ministry of the interior, first as deputy then as minister...

...Ironically, the main success is that the current crisis of direction is possible: there is new freedom of expression which allows the country's problems to be identified publicly, possible solutions to be discussed, and even opposition to be voiced...

...For more than a year, the likely names have been in the bag and speculation grows daily as to who will be El Destapado—the candidate...

...The country's peasants are largely abandoned, but those "representative" bodies that exist, notably the National Peasant Confederation (CNC), are corrupt and governmentcontrolled...

...As a result, many political myths—such as the "successful" Revolution and the "successful" agrarian reform—have been debunked, and a coldly realistic view of the state of the nation is now officially encouraged...

...And as political problems and guerrilla activities grow, some observers feel the army will slowly move toward the front of the political stage to fill the growing vacuum of authority and order...

...Echeverria has also had the courage to reverse the dogmatic position of successive administrations and launch a massive official family planning program to reduce Mexico's 3.6 per cent annual population growth rate, a phenomenon that was wiping out social advances as soon as they were made...

...The President is in a dilemma...

...While moderate groups pressed for greater freedom, the extreme Left prepared for direct action "because nonviolent change is imposs i b l e . " The Mexican economy, which had grown rapidly for two decades, was also showing signs of strain when Diaz Ordaz left office...

...He took over at a time when the system was in crisis, politically and economically...

...And the scenario may be repeated...

...on the ideological level, polarization has been inevitable...

...The government itself, shaken from side to side for three years, is now hanging loose somewhere in the center, held up by the momentum of a one-party system that has survived half a century but lacks the support of both established and new political forces...

...In 1971, for example, Echeverria was forced to slow down the overheated economy just as he was announcing his ambitious plans for economic and social reform...

...But he said that more than one-third of Mexico's current daily production of 635,000 barrels "comes from only a few wells" in the area of the new strike...

...But even if he is known to be more liberal or more conservative, this is no sure indication of his behavior in office...

...Public opinion was prepared by months of heady rhetoric about redistribution of income and foreign penetration of the economy, while the Right was given ample time to mobilize its forces against the proposed reforms...

...In politics, for example, an attempt to democratize the ruling party and its labor, peasant, and "popular" sectors ran up against conservative opposition and obstruction and was virtually abandoned...

...Massive government spending, therefore, only began in 1972...

...But while President Echeverria is attacked from Left and Right, his performance merits more measured analysis...

...The army and the bankers and industrialists and even the U.S...

...After all, Echeverria was expected to be a hard-liner, yet he emerged as a moderate...

...Yet events have escalated and politics deteriorated so rapidly that the government's successes have been quickly forgotten...

...But during his "campaign"—a sexennial ceremony of showing the next president to the population since no serious electoral opposition ever exists—he traveled throughout the country, perhaps for the first time in his life, and was apparently impressed by the level of political frustration and outright misery that he encountered...

...One of the Right's principal short-term objectives is to force the government to unleash massive repression of extremist and even moderate opposition groups...

...What most polarized the Right against the government, however, was the polarization of the Left against the entire system...

...The first stage, of course, was to torpedo all attempts at real domestic reform and neutralize the so-called democratic opening, the phrase used by the government to describe its encouragement of press freedom and internal democracy...

...By then, however, businessmen were so wary of the President's reformist ambitions that new investment fell far short of levels needed to satisfy expanding demand...

...For example, the emergence of numerous urban guerrilla groups—notably the nationwide "23d of September Communist League"—and the government's apparent inability to wipe them out, have led conservatives to take their own measures of self-defense...

...The main feature of the Echeverria administration so far has been the violent polarization of political opinion...

...At the end of 1972, however, the government decided on its first f&ce-to-face confrontation with the conservative private sector: it proposed a major tax reform and a law to control foreign investment...

...The size of the population and the complexity of the problems had grown so dramatically that more people would have to be brought in to support the system...

...Perhaps because he recognizes the near impossibility of reforming Mexico peacefully and therefore seeks a diversion, or perhaps because he wishes his role in history to be heralded beyond Mexican borders, Echeverria has launched a highly energetic foreign policy...

...From a social point of view, Mexico's "stabilizing development" process remained highly distorted in favor of a tiny minority of bankers, industrialists, and foreign investors and to the detriment of millions of workers, peasants, and unemployed...

...But, as is so often the case with Mexico's foreign policy, the strategy has been dominated by demagogy and propaganda rather than realism and action...

...Efforts to transform the economy have been hindered by its fundamental weakness...

...The new oil finds in southern Mexico should strengthen the economy...

...At the traditional level, political definition proved impossible...

...The government's search for political stability has also led it to encourage the formation of opposition movements in the hope of channeling popular resentment along legal and malleable avenues...

...Yet he knows that continued guerrilla activities only further antagonize the Right and make reform even less likely...

...In other words, the system would have to change in order to survive...

...After a well-known industrialist was murdered during a kidnap attempt in September 1973, hundreds of people were rounded up, including some genuine guerrillas...

...Mexican officials have denied as exaggerated the early newspaper reports of a field with eighteen to twenty billion barrels of oil, twice the reserves of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska...

...In his broader aim to redistribute wealth more equitably, Echeverria has created a National Housing Institute and obliged all employers to pay 5 per cent of wages toward it, although so far few houses have, in fact, been built by the new organization...

...Presidential trips to foreign countries and international conferences play an important role in the policy...

...At the same time, there is growing demand—the result of three years of polarization—that the next president should "define" himself, in ideology and action, more clearly than Echeverria...

...But Echeverria set his sights—the liberalizing of politics and the rationalizing of the economy—so high that his failures have been on a similar scale...

...Many of those participating in this constructive though potentially inflammatory debate are students and intellectuals from the 1968 movement who were released from jail by Echeverria...

...Two years earlier, in October 1968, President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz had resorted to a massacre of some three hundred people by the army in the capital's Plaza de Tlatelolco in order to crush a massive anti-government movement, which had begun with students but had spread rapidly to the middle classes...

...But its main immediate concern is to ensure that its economic and political interests are better represented in the administration that will assume power on December 1,1976...

...Echeverria's modest reforms face a crucial test in 1976 Will Mexico Move Right...

...In the cities of Guadalajara and Monterrey and, to a lesser extent, Mexico City, prominent businessmen as well as government officials and diplomats now have a bevy of gunmen protecting them from possible kidnapping...

...A massive trade deficit and a growing foreign debt burden cried out for a slowdown in the growth rate from the 7.5 per cent annual average, while stagnant agricultural output was feeding new inflationary pressures...

...Three years ago, before the myth of the all-powerful president was undermined by his inability to tame the Right, it all seemed so simple and Utopian...

...In other words, the Right wants a conservative, the moderate Left wants a genuine reformer—and neither seems interested in a compromise figure to help preserve the stability of the system...

...Even the then U.S...

...The orthodox Left—the Moscow-line Mexican Communist Party and the multiple Marxist, Trotskyist, Maoist, Leninist, and other factions in the country's universities—remains badly divided and largely irrelevant...

...For the moment, though, the powerful conservatives of Monterrey, Puebla, Guadalajara, and Mexico City are playing the succession game in the right Spirit of '76, mobilizing their forces in the traditional "democratic" way...

...But in the complex oriental dance that precedes the choice of Mexican presidents, there is always one unknown factor: how the choice will behave once he is president...

...The plight of Mexico's forgotten Indian groups is being emphasized, both economically—with the National Indian Institute's budget being increased—and culturally— with the Indian way of life and art being promoted by the president himself...

...Despite his choice as candidate of the longevous Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—it has been in office without interruption since 1929—he had run for no previous " e l e c t e d " post...

...Some rightists have seen the best defense as attack, and they have formed their own armed bands to strike back at the Left...

...And should this attempt fail, an alternative plan of action is already being devised...

...But Finance Minister Jose Lopez Portillo, Labor Minister Porfirio Munoz Ledo, Presidency Secretary Hugo Cervantes del Rio, and others are frequently mentioned...

...He seems aware of the dangers that indiscriminate repression holds for his government's carefully nurtured reformist image and ambitions...

...He also recognized, according to his closest aides, that the entire political formula that had shaped stability out of chaos after the Revolution was in danger...

...Instead of being provided by new taxes on wealth, the money needed for the government's social projects had to be borrowed abroad, swelling the foreign debt and further weakening the economy...

...At the regional level, above all, the traditional political style of intimidation and repression remains intact...