The Prelude to Mexico's 2006 Presidential Election by George W. Grayson
International Health, Vol. 27 (1) - Spring 2005 Issue
George W. Grayson is the Class of 1938 Professor of Government at the College of William & Mary, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic & International Studies, and an Associate Scholar at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. He is currently completing a book on Mexico City Mayor Andrés Manuel López Obrador.
While the US government fights an inconclusive war 6,200 miles away in Iraq, social controls continue to erode in Mexico, which shares a 2,000-mile-long border with the United States and whose uncertain fate is intertwined with the United States’ own. Several events late in 2004 epitomize the progressive fraying of Mexico’s social fabric during the administration of Vicente Fox, whose failed presidency has weakened institutions crucial to the advance of democracy, the rule of law, and stability south of the Rio Grande.
On November 23, 2004, hundreds of people watched as an angry mob seized, beat, lynched, and burned to death two Mexican federal agents in San Juan Ixtayopan, a neighborhood of poor urban peasants in southeast Mexico City. TV camera crews managed to film the Dantesque executions. However, municipal and federal authorities behaved like perverse Keystone Kops, who neither cooperate nor communicate with each other. They played the blame game to justify why it took them several hours to reach the scene of the atrocity. This horrible crime revealed the disdain of Mexicans—especially the “have-nots”—towards law enforcement officers. Their sentiments confirm the findings of Transparency International (TI), whose 2004 Global Corruption Barometer identified Mexico’s police as among the most corrupt in the world.
After the November 2004 incident, authorities found Enrique Salinas asphyxiated in his automobile, a plastic bag tied around his head. The deceased was the younger brother of despised ex-chief executive Carlos Salinas, whose actions precipitated an economic crisis in December 1994. Meanwhile, his brother Raúl is serving a 27-year sentence for masterminding the killing of their former brother-in-law, an official of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). Enrique’s murder, which followed Proceso magazine’s exposé of the Salinas family’s ill-gotten fortune, bore all the earmarks of a gangland slaying. Ever the Cassandra, Fox found nothing “political” about this macabre incident.
On New Year’s Eve, a fellow inmate murdered the younger brother of narco boss “El Chapo” Guzmán inside the La Palma maximum security prison near Mexico City. In retaliation for a federal crackdown on cartel operations, six employees of a maximum-security prison in Matamoros were killed and their bodies dumped outside the facility.
Just as these lynchings and murders burst into the headlines, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development placed Mexico last among its 14 members in education and 37th of all 41 countries surveyed. The country’s political parties fared only slightly better on TI’s barometer. They scored 4.5 on a scale that runs from 1 (not at all corrupt) through 5 (extremely corrupt).
Amid these disquieting developments, Mexico’s pampered elite conducted business as usual. Members of Congress, who prefer posturing to policy-making, voted themselves healthy year-end bonuses of US$12,380, which lofts their annual legislative income above US$100,000. This windfall is a bagatelle compared with the Croesus-like wealth of private sector moguls.
Why have conditions deteriorated under Fox, who promised root-and-branch changes? How has he fared with the United States? What are the prospects for his National Action Party (PAN)? Can the PRI, headed by “dinosaur” Roberto Madrazo, recapture the presidency in 2006? Or amid the fracturing of political parties are people ready to jettison conventional politicians in favor of Mexico City’s messianic mayor, Andrés Manuel López Obrador?
The Marlboro Man Takes Power
Headlines hailed Fox’s triumph in 2000 as signaling a “New Era in Mexico.” Fox, known as the “Marlboro Man” because of his 6-foot-5-inch height and craggy good looks, inflated expectations. He pledged to create one million jobs per year, attain seven percent growth in gross domestic product, boost investment, revamp the educational and healthcare systems, combat poverty and corruption, clean up the environment, gain legal status for his countrymen living unlawfully in the United States, and accomplish sweeping economic and judicial reforms.
More than four years after his inauguration, Fox, who cannot run for reelection, is not simply a lame duck, he is a dead duck. His ineptness has weakened the country’s fragile political institutions and laid the groundwork for either a PRI comeback or the election of a populist successor. How did he go astray?
Although a superb vote-getter, Fox turned out to abhor politics and politicians. In 1988 he joined the PAN, more as a convenient vehicle for his aspirations than as a repository of his values. He cast his lot with the “Northern Barbarians”—a group of hard-charging businessmen determined to drive the PRI from power rather than to strike compromises favored by the PAN’s social-Christian “orthodox” wing. During three decades in the private sector he had encountered hundreds of sticky-fingered PRI functionaries as well as business-smothering regulations implemented by the payola-seeking party.
Anathema to PAN traditionalists, the Marlboro Man obtained his party’s presidential nomination thanks to the Amigos de Fox, more than one million independents and businessmen who shared his loathing of the ancien régime. Fox lambasted the PRI as the devil incarnate and correctly highlighted its autocratic, venal, and election-rigging past.
At the same time, he refused to give a scintilla of credit to the so-called “revolutionary party” for having achieved 71 years of stability, exerting civilian control over the military, constructing a sophisticated economic base, modifying anti-clerical tenets in the Constitution, liberalizing the economy, solidifying the North American Free Trade Agreement, gradually allowing press freedom, and peacefully transferring power.
After his July 2, 2000, victory, Fox believed that a “democratic bonus” derived from defeating the odious PRI would propel his formidable agenda through Congress. As a result, he showed scant interest in involving the PRI, the PAN, the leftist-nationalist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), and other power contenders in revising the rules of the political and economic game to reflect the system’s surging pluralism.
A wiser man would have pursued a variant of the Moncloa Accords hammered out in post-Franco Spain. In this pact, the once-antagonistic left and right negotiated a political, economic, and social covenant that propelled the country from authoritarianism to democracy. Needless to say, Spain in the 1970s differed from Mexico in 2000. Unlike Franco, who passed away, the PRI— while suffering from shock—lived on. Despite losing the presidency, the PRI remained the country’s best organized party and dominant office-holder. It continued to boast remnants of its deteriorating corporatist structure, which organically link trade unions, bureaucrats, and peasants to the party.
