Palace Politics : How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico

Introduction: The Politicians’ Testimony

the politicians’ testimony Introduction Palace Politics: How the Ruling Party Brought Crisis to Mexico actually begins in the early 1950s, when the Mexican political elite resolved a perilous internecine struggle over the presidency and consolidated what the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called “the perfect dictatorship .” For two decades it was a remarkably stable political system—no mean accomplishment in a nation not yet ready for democracy. The old Mexican regime outlived all other authoritarian regimes of the twentieth century except the Soviet Union, and although it occasionally resorted to repression, it was not a police state. The Mexican economic “miracle” of sustained, rapid economic growth was spoken of in the same terms as South Korea’s economy in the 1980s or China’s in the 2000s. The success went far beyond macroeconomic statistics. Millions of Mexicans whose fathers had been peons laboring on vast haciendas now tilled their own fields, while a steady stream of migrants to the city found jobs in burgeoning industries. Palace Politics follows that once perfect dictatorship through the 1990s, as it tore itself apart in ever-bloodier political struggles and perhaps—so President Carlos Salinas and other members of the political elite claimed—actual assassination. The former economic miracle now emblematized economic failure. Mexico’s 1982 crisis launched the “lost decade” of the 1980s, a period worse than the Great Depression in much of Latin America. Mexico’s 1994 crisis led the Asian, Russian, Argentine, and other crises, the first of a new wave in this time of expanded global financial speculation. I based my research for Palace Politics largely on extensive interviews with the former Mexican political elite: presidents, finance ministers, interior ministers, and other high officials who held sway during the second half of the twentieth century. People often ask how I managed to get interviews with these former high officials. Were they living in mansions like mafia dons? Did they tell me the truth? And does not interviewing politicians at the top seem a distorted way of charting a nation’s 2 palace politics history? Does my very method not regress to the old “great man” theory of history (and nearly all my interviewees were men) at a time when we increasingly recognize the importance of social movements, as well as gender and ethnic politics? Let me start with how I got the interviews and what I found the managers of the once perfect dictatorship to be like before taking on more substantive questions. To begin with, I undertook my research, originally for a Ph.D. thesis in political science at MIT, at a fortunate historical moment. I spent two years as a visiting researcher at the Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas (Economics Research Institute) of the National University of Mexico, first the academic year 1996 to 1997, then the calendar year 2000: the very years when the old political system officially crumbled and collapsed. On July 6, 1997, I watched (as a sort of political tourist, not an official observer) the voting in a precinct in Tlalpan, a former colonial town in the southeastern hills of Mexico City where I was living. Citizens lined up at the neighborhood market with their credentials, which representatives of the independent Federal Electoral Institute—as well as of the half-dozen political parties in the race—checked against the established voter list. The secret ballot was still so novel that older people had to be shown how to step into the ingenious cardboard booths, mark their ballots unseen, fold and deposit them. In the evening, representatives of each party watched as deputies from the Federal Electoral Institute tallied the totals at the precinct. Election results were reported not just in aggregated numbers but also precinct by precinct, so party representatives at the precinct level could verify the count. The left-leaning Party of the Democratic Revolution won in a landslide , capturing the Mexico City governorship, often considered the second most powerful political post in the nation, as well as the city’s legislature. The news prompted a rise in the Mexican stock market. Finance and big business had abandoned their long-standing support for the old political machine; they now saw a functioning democracy as in their best interests. The machine had all but self-destructed. My second year in Mexico, 2000, coincided with the old regime’s official demise. Oversized posters of Francisco Labastida, candidate of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutional Revolutionary Party), or PRI, were draped from treetops around the...