Mexico’s July 2 elections yielded three significant results: the victory of the modern conservatives headed by President-elect Vicente Fox of the National Action Party (PAN); the decisive defeat of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and the dissolution of its tight connection with the state; and the defeat of the Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), which now positions the PRD as Mexico’s democratic left opposition.
The PRI regime was not defeated by the democratic left, as happened in 1997 in Mexico City, but by the modern heirs of Mexico’s nineteenth-century conservatives. For the first time since the Reform government of Benito Juárez, Mexico will have a president who expressly denies the liberal tradition of Juárez and embraces instead that of the Cristeros, the counterrevolutionary, pro-Church rebels of the 1920s.
The main reason for Fox’s victory lies in the movement of a significant part of Mexican society toward conservativism and the political right. The 1988-1994 reforms of the Salinas Administration, like similar reforms elsewhere within the “Washington Consensus,” contributed to both socio-economic and cultural changes. This is evident in the strong youth vote for Fox, not only from the gold-plated youth who appeared at his rallies, but also from those for whom the Mexican Revolution and the rituals of the revolutionary state, emptied of almost all meaning by the PRI, have lost their appeal.
Vicente Fox takes power with a program the Washington Consensus calls “second generation” reforms—coming after the deregulation of finance and trade and the big privatizations of the Salinas period. These include putting education at the command of the market, a final dismantling of social protections, regressive taxes, the “flexibilization” of labor relations, the elimination of labor rights and the final destruction of collective contracts—and, in passing, the corporate unions of the PRI.
The golden rule of Fox’s government will be to give private capital easy access to all that is left of the nation’s common patrimony: cultural goods, oil reserves, communal lands, public forests. If nobody stops him, we will have a nation of country clubs, gated communities and a few wealthy people being chauffered around in late-model armored cars. That nation had already started taking shape under Salinas, the great historical—if not political—winner of this election.
As Fox said some time ago, his macroeconomic policy will be identical to that of Salinas and Zedillo. He has promised to include some prominent representatives of that policy in his economic cabinet, and in the coming months his chosen cabinet ministers will work closely with the members of Zedillo’s team. There will be no change, but instead firm continuity on the economic front. The urban poor and the campesinos who live on fixed incomes—the 70% of the population who earn three to ten dollars a day—will continue to pay the price.
Fox will have to dismantle—or perhaps recycle for his own use— the print, radio and television empires that the PRI always kept under its control. It will be harder to do the same with the regional party bosses of the PRI. With them, Fox will have no other option but to negotiate, make pacts and even include a few in his “plural government.”
The big news is that on July 2 those regional bosses lost their source of power and basis of unity: the federal government’s identification with the PRI. It is too early to tell how the political apparatus will be recycled, along with its crew of politicians, operators and foot soldiers. But having been such an important part of Mexican reality, it won’t disappear. Maybe the PRI will drift toward a semblance of its early days—a confederation of political bosses and conspirators, constantly warring among themselves—even though the world, with its economic empires and drug cartels, is now a very different place.
The biggest immediate losers are the campesinos who, according to government statistics, make up 25% of the population, but probably number more since many of them are disguised as urban dwellers. Fox’s victory signifies the final break of the Mexican state’s longstanding pact with the campesinos, a pact whose final and perverse form is a clientelist program called Progresa. Neglect and dispossession, however, will soon turn into protest and organization, because in the 70 years that Fox says were nothing but dictatorship and oppression, Mexico’s campesinos did learn how to organize themselves.
The Fox reforms will encounter resistance from the Mexican people. The resistance will come from those who filled the plazas and streets during the Cárdenas campaign and voted for the PRD; from those who by force or by habit voted for PRI candidates; from those who did not vote at all because they did not believe in any candidate; and from those whose lives and hopes embody a country and a program diametrically opposed to the one represented by Fox, the PAN and their current companions.
If Cárdenas and the PRD had withdrawn, as some wished them to do, to make room for the so-called “useful vote” against the PRI, they would have made the most useless of gestures: melting into the Foxist majority, sharing responsibility for what the new government will do, going with the party of the modern conservatives, the rich, the Thatcherites and the neoliberals, and abandoning the poor and their own supporters. They would have hindered the organization of the coming struggle and demoralized those who in any case will resist, because to survive they will have no alternative. Had this happened, those with the greatest chance of reaping the inevitable discontent would have been the bosses and gangsters of the PRI, presenting themselves as defenders of the people, much as the corrupt chiefs of the Russian Communist Party did when the people began to resist the excesses of Boris Yeltsin.
The victory of Fox and the neoconservatives is a decisive defeat for the PRI. But it is also a strange defeat for the PRD, which for the past 12 years has fought steadfastly to weaken the power of the PRI, even as the PAN played the role of accomplice. It is a strange defeat because Cárdenas achieved his objective of doing away with the party of the state, but at the price of a victory that brought to power and legitimized those who will continue the policies of Salinas and Zedillo. Now the PRD must decide how to face the PRI’s disintegration and fragmentation, as well as the risks that the old network of mediations will be ripped apart before the new elites know how to replace them.
The night of July 2, Cárdenas made a vow. In recognizing Fox’s victory, he declared that he and his party would form the opposition to the new government. That promise, it seems to me, is the culmination of the last three months of his electoral campaign, the response to those who throughout the country filled the plazas and the streets with fervor and enthusiasm, to those who voted for his candidacy and his program, and to those throughout the Republic who will be the heart and will of the future resistance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adolfo Gilly is a professor of history at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. He is the author of Chiapas: La razón ardiente (ERA, 1997) and is a regular contributor to La Jornada. Reprinted with permission from the July 4, 2000 edition of La Jornada. Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
