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Chapter 2. The Strange Mexican State
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the strange mexican state Chapter 2 For most of the twentieth century the Mexican ruling party seemed eternal. Elections came and went, but they did not determine political succession because the PRI always won. It controlled the presidency, the Congress, and the courts. It did not even lose an important state office until 1988. The ruling party was the arena within which the real contest over political succession occurred. If the Mexican state had been different—if it had been like almost any other twentieth-century state—elite politics at the heart of it would still have mattered, but might not have been so decisive or stood out so vividly. A clear picture of this former state is therefore essential. Many Mexican scholars have drawn this picture, differing only in details . The main thing some have missed is how strange it looks if viewed afresh. It must seem strange even to those who played roles within it. Mexicans are, arguably, a revolutionary people: since Spanish rule, Mexico has seen three full-scale revolutions and more lesser uprisings than could reliably be counted.1 Labor insurgency for democratic governance has repeatedly erupted despite terrible costs: death, jail, impoverishment. Peasants have repeatedly invaded private estates to claim some land, also sometimes at terrible cost. Against this backdrop, how did the ruling party incorporate within itself and control major social organizations? How were political elites forged? How did grupos of political elites emerge as an essential political structure in a state where few formal rules counted for much? How did the president come to stand atop a virtual Aztec pyramid of power? centralization of power The Mexican president for his six-year term, and the national bureaucracy directly under him, virtually were the government. Though called the ruling party, the PRI per se—its National Executive Committee and the rest of its apparatus—had no independent power. As Octavio Paz wrote 32 palace politics in a 1985 essay, it gave “blind obedience to each president in turn. . . . The party has not produced a single idea, not a single program, in [all its] years of existence!” The corporatist sectors—labor unions, peasant associations, and even middle-class groups such as the College of Architects , all legally incorporated in the party—were also dominated by the president and bureaucracy and had as their mission “the control and manipulation of the people.” As for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, they “have been, and still are, two groups of chatterers and flatterers who never offer any criticism whatsoever; . . . the judicial power is mute and impotent; . . . freedom of the press is more a formality than a reality.”2 No serious observer disputes how centralized the old Mexican state was.3 Even if revisionist scholars question the conventional account as to how the central bureaucracy dominated society, they do not question that it did. For example, Jeffrey W. Rubin writes that “while social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the post-revolutionary Mexican regime as authoritarian and hegemonic, they were wrong about the nature of that hegemony.” There was no single “triumph of state building.”4 In studying Mexicans’ struggle to defend grassroots interests rather than be manipulated by the state, Jonathan Fox notes that, even as late as the 1990s, the overall system remained “still largely dominated by an authoritarian corporatist brand of machine politics.”5 Two historical legacies begin to explain why the Mexican state was able to concentrate so much power in the national administration and president. First, although all Latin America experienced centralized Spanish rule, in Mexico it overlaid a centralized Aztec empire. The Mexican president’s authority has rested in part on “the Aztec archetype of political power: the tlatoani, or ruler, the pyramid,” to quote Paz again. “The tlatoani is impersonal, priestly, and institutional—hence the abstract figure of the president corresponds to a bureaucratic and hierarchic corporation like the Institutional Revolutionary Party. . . . The president is the Party during his six-year term; but, when it ends, another president appears, and is only another incarnation of the Party.”6 (The “party,” in this sense, is a common but somewhat confusing shorthand for the entire political system, not the subordinate electoral apparatus.) The second historical legacy was the 1910 Revolution—always with a capital “R”—bequeathing, on the one hand, broadly shared ideals, and, on the other, deep-seated fears of societal violence. Wayne A. Cornelius and Ann L. Craig write: A residue of the widespread violence of [the 1910 Revolution...