The End of the Conspiracy: Intellectuals and Power in 20th-Century Mexico

To Gabriel Zaid

The Conspirator and the Bootlicker

In Mexico intellectuals and the politically powerful have long been linked by mutual fascination, suspicion and even hatred. Dozens of historians have studied the bonds that have held this pair together in their complex symbiosis throughout the twentieth century and particularly over the last 70 years. Like a quarrelsome old married couple who after years of living together can no longer find reasons to separate, intellectuals and the powerful in Mexico remain joined by habit and custom. And also by their troubling ignorance of each other.

Although we would have to go back to viceregal times to find the origins of this relationship, it could be argued that the relation between intellectuals and power began to assume its contemporary character during the late nineteenth-century dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz. The powerful have always held a certain fear and reverence for those strange figures who watch what they are doing, judge them, criticize them or, in the happiest of cases, justify them. However irrationally, the powerful seek out the opinions of intellectuals, convinced that the latter are the possessors of dangerous influence and wisdom. As the powerful see it, however, intellectuals can be divided in two simple categories: if the ideas expressed by an intellectual are favorable to the powerful person's politics, then the intellectual is a bootlicker, a kind of officious employee whose services must be reimbursed through subsidies, honors or money (or all three). If, on the other hand, the intellectual questions, invalidates or even challenges the actions of the powerful one, the latter does not hesitate to consider the intellectual a conspirator, a potential delinquent in the service of obscure interests and who must therefore be seduced, intimidated, persecuted or, in extreme cases, eliminated (the cheapest of the options).

For their part, intellectuals maintain an equally ambiguous position. Although some have managed to resist official pressures, opposing themselves to power or even falling victim to it in defense of their ideas, in most cases intellectuals have preferred to seek prosperity in the uneasy balance between criticizing power, on the one hand, and yielding to power's seductions, on the other. In a country built on the notion that a single party—or a single individual—should dominate the entirety of the social sphere, not many options remain for intellectuals. They can either exercise a no-holds-barred critique and thereby risk imprisonment (or worse), or they can moderate their criticism in order to curry the favor and recognition that allows them to carry out their work with a certain freedom, under the condition that they not exceed the limits that have been imposed on them.

With their precarious exchange of suspicions and threats, intellectuals and the powerful in Mexico have thus parlayed through the twentieth century, waging a hidden war which has barely allowed them to know or understand each other. However, given the orderly transfer of power and the consolidation of democratic institutions during the recent elections, the time is ripe for a review of the role that intellectuals have played in the national life up to this point. If Mexican society has finally managed to complete its difficult divorce from the PRI party, then perhaps it is time for something similar to take place between Mexican intellectuals and political power. As with any separation process, the terms of the new relation must be clearly set forth in order to ensure that it is a more distant, healthy and advantageous one for Mexico.

The Resentful Opposer and the Decorated Sycophant

"Intellectuals are writers, artists or scientists who express opinions on matters of public interest with moral authority among the elite," wrote historian Gabriel Zaid in a now-classic article ("Intelectuales" 21). By negative extension, they are not intellectuals who do not participate in public life or do so defending interests that contradict their own convictions. In his essay, "Cuatro estaciones de la cultura mexicana" (Four Seasons of Mexican Culture), Enrique Krauze suggests that twentieth-century Mexico has been marked by...