Foretelling Failure: Questioning the Mexican Political Left From Within

The presidency of Vicente Fox Quesada, for better and for worse, will guarantee the continued dominance of neoliberal ideology in Mexico. A political cartoon in La Jornada by Helguera, printed soon after the election, alludes to what the future might bring: Fox, with a caricaturized mustache, carries a sign in trademark Coca Cola lettering that reads "Enjoy Petro-Química" (a reference to the petrochemical industry). Other cartoons refer to the plight of the poor under Fox, confirming through parody the victory of neoliberal ideology in Mexico. If 1988 represents the fraud-ridden, unjust loss of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and the political left, the 2000 election represents the failure of the left to respond to the challenge of neo-liberal ideology. Carlos Monsiváis, in an essay in La Jornada, notes:

The left [ . . . ] lost voters, forgot its national identity, became fractured and bureaucratized. If Vicente Fox won with 43 percent, it was not solely because of his brilliant marketing or because of the weakening of the three campaigns of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. It was also because the political left was "left" only in name, because it has not learned how to compensate, with new projects, the disappearance of the socialist ideal, because its programs consisted of elevating, as abstractions, its demands. To whom does one refer when using the term "neoliberalism" and how does one present alternatives?¹

The left in Mexico still has a place on the national stage (with Andrés Manuel López Obrador as the mayor of Mexico City), yet the question remains: how has the "fracture" within the left promoted the victory of Fox's Partido de Acción Nacional (PAN), creating a new—but still contradictory—combination of influential opposition parties: the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)?

Vicente Leñero's play Todos somos Marcos (We Are All Marcos), staged in 1994 as part of "T eatro Clandestino" at the Casa de Teatro in Mexico City, exemplifies the divisions among people who identify with the political left in Mexico. Specifically, the play presents the Chiapas revolt as a watershed for Mexican politics. The events in Chiapas are shown to divide, as might be expected, the left and the right. What Leñero underscores, however, is the necessity for the left to define political ideas in the wake of the neoliberal reforms that have swept Mexico since 1982. Instead of focusing on the heated left-right debate about the ideological future of Mexico, Leñero shows the crisis in Chiapas to be a crisis for the left that has further splintered Mexico's traditional opposition to the status quo. In addition, Todos somos Marcos exposes leftist conservatism regarding gender roles and ethnic boundaries, highlighting the disparity between theory and practice among the leftist protagonists of the play and suggesting that the political left in Mexico has shown itself to be impotent in the face of sweeping reforms.

In Todos somos Marcos, the stage becomes a battle of opposing scripts, destabilizing the status quo and exposing the political rift among those who identify with the political left. Laura, one of the protagonists, is empowered by a massive demonstration in support of Subcomandante Marcos and against the hegemonic, official narrative espoused by the PRI. After witnessing the spectacle, she returns home with a new sense of justice, only to see in the dialogue and actions of her boyfriend, Raúl, a re-enactment of the official effort to reestablish the patriarchal order. The title, "Todos somos Marcos," was the chant at the Zócalo after the identity of Marcos was exposed by the Mexican government in 1994. The trademark black facemasks, or pasamontañas, of the Zapatistas were worn by thousands in Mexico City. The massive show of support for Marcos and his followers was different from other demonstrations. The pasamontañas and bandannas erased ethnic variation among members of the crowd, creating mass mestizaje, in a demonstration of visual solidarity. Just as the masked mestizo Marcos and his mostly indigenous followers blurred ethnic barriers among themselves, the masked demonstrators...