In the Mexican Labyrinth: The Elections, the Left, and the Fight for the Mexican Soul

The election was not about particular policies, as has normally been the case in American elections; nor was it about party agendas, as in most European elections. It was about the soul of Mexico. Although issues and policies were sometimes discussed, their impact was marginal. What was at stake in the minds of many was nothing less than Mexico's destiny. To understand the ideological debate taking place in Mexico today one has to go back to a different time and place. The situation is not very different from that of the discussions that divided Slavophiles and Westernizers in Russia under the reign of Nicholas I. The tale of Mexico's last fifteen years might be read as a dramatic poem by Pushkin. In "The Bronze Horseman," the Russian poet set a scene where modernizers and Slavic melancholics are fighting to win the soul of poor young Yevgeny. The Tsar's statue, with its arm reaching out toward the future, was a symbol of modernity for many in St. Petersburg. In Mexico the end of the myth of revolution and the opening up of the country to the world—with NAFTA a key symbol—require a rejection of what many people, mostly from the left love dearly. But the time has come for Mexicans to escape from what anthropologist Roger Bartra has shrewdly called "the cage of melancholy" and embrace not an allegedly glorious past but a risky yet unavoidable future.