Iconography Past and Present: Visual Constructions of Power in Post-PRI Mexico

1. Between Memory and the Present: the Final Years of the PRI

Sunday, July 2, 2000 will be remembered as the day democracy triumphed in Mexico. At precisely 11:02 that night, President Ernesto Zedillo appeared on television to announce the national election results and to congratulate his successor-to-be Vicente Fox on his victory. For days after, the Mexican media would insist almost obsessively on the hour of the pronouncement. Through its relentless repetitions, the phrase veintitrés horas y dos minutos (23:02 hrs.) would come to mark the country's political history as the moment when the ruling party's 71-year reign came to an end. In the country's post-election delirium, the repeated insistence on the specific time and date of Zedillo's pronouncement would invest it with an almost sacred temporal function. But beyond this deep historicizing of the hour of Zedillo's television appearance, the visual rhetoric of that appearance was equally significant. The particular conflation of discourses and images in Zedillo's staging shows the ways in which the Mexican power system was regenerating, in his announcement, the same grand political, religious and social imaginaries with which twentieth-century official Mexican history had originally been constructed. Through this regeneration, a new foundational myth was being established which would serve to legitimize the political transition into the new century. In a word, beyond the circumstances of the opposition's electoral triumph on July 2, 2000, it is also important to analyze the rhetoric of the image with which the Mexican state broke with its power history and legitimized, with its own signature, the birth of democracy in Mexico.

Zedillo's television announcement signified the construction of a myth that was new and old at the same time: the democratizing reform of the Mexican state as a particular repetition of the reforms of Benito Juárez a century and a half earlier. In what follows, I would like to suggest a reading of the visual and textual composition of Zedillo's announcement at 11:02 p.m., Sunday July 2, 2000 as a particular intersection of political, cultural and mythical-biographical imaginaries. Such a reading demonstrates the (almost perverse) play of power with which the symbolic value of this act was constructed. A reading of the visual rhetoric of the new Fox presidential regime demonstrates symbolism just as heavily charged.

When analyzed carefully, the conjunction of historical memory and the presidency in Mexico is highly complex. Perhaps a first description of the visual and textual discourse of Zedillo's staged announcement would serve as an initial orientation to this complexity. At precisely 11:02 p.m. on Sunday July 2, 2000, the chief executive appeared on television immediately after the head of the IFE (Instituto Federal Electoral or Federal Electoral Institute) announced that the voting trend heavily favored Vicente Fox. The composition of Zedillo's televised image set up a play of signifiers whose emphasis could not fail to be noticed (see Fig. 1). In the foreground was an object that immediately evokes its own presidential symbolism independently of the individual who happens to be president: the official presidential podium. Immediately behind the podium was the figure of Ernesto Zedillo. With a solemn and even severe bearing, Zedillo addressed the Mexican people, informing them of the irrevocable pattern in the popular vote and also congratulating the citizenry on its maturity:

Today, both in Mexico and abroad, it has been demonstrated that ours is a nation of free men and women who believe only in measures of democracy and law for the achievement of progress and the solution to our problems. I congratulate all the citizens who by voting followed through on their commitment to democracy and to Mexico. . . . Just now the IFE has comunicated to all Mexicans that it possesses preliminary but sufficiently reliable information, that the next president of the Republic will be the honorable Vicente Fox.

(Los Pinos, July 2, 2000)

In the background of the image, to the left of Zedillo appears the national flag...