Salinas hoped that political change would flow smoothly from economic reform. Instead, pent-up demand for democracy will erupt on Aug. 21 in what may be a historic presidential election. In the days that follow, Mexico could irreversibly become a truly modern, civil society. Or the country could start a descent into political chaos and bloodshed. And since Mexico shares a leaky, 2,000-mile-long border with the United States, such chaos could spill north: the stakes, in other words, could hardly be higher.
For Mexico, 1994 has been the year of living dangerously, and the dangers are not over. In January hundreds died in a peasant uprising in the southern state of Chiapas – an uprising that shattered Mexico’s boasted stability and exposed the inequities in Salinas’s free-market economic reforms. In March, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the presidential candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), was assassinated in Tijuana. In May, after Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, the candidate of the conservative National Action Party (PAN), squashed Colosio’s successor, Ernesto Zedillo, in a TV debate, Mexicans started to think the unthinkable – that the PRI, which has been synonymous with the state for 65 years, might actually lose power. And recently Subcomandante Marcos, the leader of the Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas, told Newsweek that his army is ready to attack again if Zedillo “wins” a fraudulent election. Marcos claims that he has allies around Mexico. “They’re in the north as well as the south,” he says. “Even if we’re annihilated here . . . we’re no longer the only problem.”
Despite the unexpectedly strong showing by Fernandez, recent opinion polls suggest that Zedillo will indeed win the election, with Fernandez second and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the candidate of the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD), third. Will the voting be clean? Mexican officials are eager to describe the lengths to which they have gone to ensure that it is – snazzy ID cards, sophisticated computers, “audits” of the electoral roll by management consultants. What a pity that none of this may matter: even if every well-groomed consultant declares the voting to be spanking clean, a close election may well lead to protests and violence.
Why? Because for many Mexicans, of both right and left, the acid test of the country’s political maturity is for the PRI to lose power. If Zedillo were the warmest, most charismatic politician in the country (and he emphatically is not), he would still be tainted as the candidate of the PRI – the corporatist apparatus that for years distributed favors and stole votes from its opponents. Party insiders say, almost pleadingly, that they have changed. “The party has to live not as part of the government,” says PRI president Ignacio Pichardo, “but independent of it.” To which the opposition reply is simple: “Prove it. Give up power.”
This year, that’s unlikely to happen. Fernandez, unlike Zedillo, is charismatic, but his policies are confused. Sometimes he hardly seems to want victory. “I have no idea where this campaign is going,” says an exasperated aide. Cardenas was a populist messiah in 1988, when he says he was robbed of victory; but he is dour and untelegenic and looks more this year like a left-wing anachronism. But if Zedillo does win, and if Mexicans believe that he wins cleanly – if Fernandez and Cardenas concede graciously, if Marcos slips back into obscurity – then those with an eye on history will set out to apportion (or grab) credit for the outcome.
Salinas will undoubtedly say that a clean election, universally accepted, is his doing. After the uprising in Chiapas and the assassination of Colosio, Mexican public opinion dismissed Salinas as irrelevant. But at a recent meeting with foreign reporters he was back to his old confident self. He is campaigning hard to be the first head of the new World Trade Organization – and it would not hurt if he convinced the rest of the world that he is a great democrat. That is a title he doesn’t deserve. His government’s economic reforms were often brilliant and brave. But if Mexico is truly on the edge of democracy it is less because of Salinas than because a changing Mexico forced the PRI to change, too. Political violence shocked even skeptical or complacent Mexicans into embracing the idea of reform. Individuals can take credit, as well: Mexico’s new honest journalists, its eloquent intellectuals, the scores of panistas and cardenistas who for years have fought to reform the electoral laws, the thousands of Mexicans who will be watching for irregularities at the polling booths. Indeed, history may even thank Subcomandante Marcos, not for taking up the gun but for the fierce language with which, from January to this month’s “national democratic convention” in Chiapas, he damned the PRI’s monopoly of power. A broad coalition of Mexicans are determined to win the honest, accountable government that they have never been given. Making history, the hard way.
