Chronicles Newsletter of the UCSD Emeriti Association November 2006 Volume VI, No. 2 Legacy Of Failure: The Meaning Of The Election In Mexico By Ramon Eduardo Ruiz to open avenues of opportunity for dissi- In 1996, Salinas signed NAFTA, the free Professor Emeritus of History dents, mainly the Partido de Acción Na- trade agreement with the United States cional (PAN). This is a party launched and Canada, agreeing to eliminate all tar- Not since the 1860s, when the Lib- in 1939 by businessmen, the Catholic iffs, including duties on imports of corn, erals ousted the Conservatives from the clergy, and middle-class conservatives the life support of the campesinos – the National Palace, has Mexico held an frightened by land reform and particular- subsistence farmers. election as critical and revealing as that ly by Lazaro Cárdenas’s expropriation of The PAN did not contest the spuri- in July 2006. Although the challenge the petroleum properties of Standard Oil ous election of 1988, preferring a con- of Andrés Manuel López Obrador fell and Royal Dutch Shell. Beaten in every servative Salinas to Cárdenas, who, like short – by an eyelash – the campaign laid election until the 1980s, the PAN finally his father, championed the cause of the bare the utter failure of the ruling oligar- won the governorship of Baja California campesinos and workers. In Congress, the chy’s dogged efforts to impose the neolib- Norte, and from then on triumphed in PAN worked closely with Salinas and his eral economic orthodoxies of its imperial other northern states, the most conser- majority party. During his six-year term neighbor to the north. vative of Mexico’s provinces. Salinas not only showered benefits on This election can best be understood In 1988, to forestall a looming vic- business and the rich but also followed by recalling what led up to it. For a full tory by Cuauhtémoc Cardenas, the the lead of Washington in diplomacy. seven decades, one political party, the leader of a breakaway leftist coalition Under Salinas, poverty grew at an Partido de la Revolución Institucional soon to become the Partido de la Revo- alarming rate: half of Mexico’s 100 mil- (PRI), ruled the roost unopposed. Led lución Democrática (PRD), the Priistas lion inhabitants were officially consid- by a gang of politicos, the PRI handpicked simply stole the election. Through that ered poor, and some 20 million were the president, along with state governors, hocus pocus, Carlos Salinas, a neoliberal destitute, stalked by hunger. Especially the congressional deputies and senators, icon, became president and proceeded to hard hit were many campesinos, who as well as sundry municipal officials. This sell off nearly all the paraestatales (gov- watched helplessly as cheap corn from was the result of a pact concocted in ernment-run enterprises), among them highly mechanized American farms re- 1929 by the generals, state caudillos, and the national telephone system, to friends placed their home-grown product in the Plutarco Elias Calles, president from and cohorts for bargain-basement prices. marketplace. To make matters worse, Sa- 1924 to 1928, to put an end to turmoil linas and his henchmen, among them his caused by a bitter struggle to succeed him brother, were hardly models of rectitude. v v v v v v among his underlings. The pact stipu- Inside Official corruption flourished while the lated that presidential elections were to Mentoring Program . 3 narco-trafficking “capos” became mil- be held every six years. Until 2000, the lionaires. PRI won every one of them. So well did Preuss School . 3 Then, in 1994, just as Salinas was this balancing act perform that in 1976 Blowback Trilogy . 5 bragging that Mexico had become a first- no rival candidate even entered the race. world nation, the country went bankrupt, As the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Anecdotage. 6 largely because of the foolish economic Llosa observed, it was the “perfect dic- Are You in Good Standing. 7 policies pursued by Salinas and his U.S.- tatorship.” trained technocrats. At the same time, Embarrassed by their own baldly dic- Mark Your Calendar . 8 the Indians of Chiapas, calling themselves tatorial lock on power, the Priistas opted – Continued on p.2 UCSD Emeriti Association Page 2 November 2006 v Chronicles – Ruiz, from p.1 had promised to settle in fifteen minutes contin- Zapatistas (after the legendary Emiliano ued to fester: they were Zapata and his revolutionary followers) left to fend for them- revolted, capturing a small city and three selves, as abandoned as towns. The army put down the uprising, before. Fox even proved wantonly killing some 150 of the rebels. to be an inept politician, Foreign investors, their faith in Mexico’s a charlatan who never stability shaken, took their money home. tired of giving rousing Salinas, the darling of American media speeches but left the pundits and academics, left it to his suc- poor as neglected and cessor to clean up the mess – with the exploited as ever. As help of a $50 billion loan from Washing- for the labor unions, ton and American banks. their old corrupt leaders The economic crisis of 1994-1995 – baptized charros (liter- gravely jeopardized the investments of ally cowboys but Mexi- the country’s banks and devastated mil- can slang for sell-outs) Ramon Ruiz at the White House in 1998 on being lions of ordinary Mexicans, but Ernesto – went on being charros awarded the National Humanities Medal in recog- Zedillo, Salinas’s successor, bailed out the beholden to big busi- nition of an illustrious record of scholarship. bankers, who were equally responsible for ness and the politicos in the mess, and partially repaid the bailout the capital. posed economic blueprints faced each by a sales tax on food and medicines. Re- Grand economic nostrums, an Amer- other. López Obrador had the support of covery came slowly but left Salinas and ican pundit has observed, last no more millions of underdogs, particularly in the his technocrats with more than egg on than a few decades. Those programs in central and southern states, the poorest their faces. tune with technological or political de- of the Republic. Felipe Calderón, the That near debacle opened the doors velopments may make it to half a century, PAN candidate, had the backing of the to presidential power for the PAN in but others can only be sustained by force rich, big business, the TV monopoly, 2000. Its candidate was Vicente Fox of arms. Neoliberalism, with its market and much of the northern middle class. Quesada, once head of Coca Cola’s em- idolatry and technological determinism, Although Fox was banned by law from pire in Mexico and later governor of the has been held up as a panacea for thirty campaigning on behalf of Calderón, he small, conservative state of Guanajuato. years, but is now suffering death agonies, did so brazenly, using public funds to pay A charismatic candidate, Fox won the judging by its current rejection in much for TV ads depicting López Obrador as a presidency with the help of the voto util of South America. Only in Mexico does dangerous radical, an ally of Venezuelan – the hope that he would put an end to the ruling oligarchy, especially those of its firebrand Hugo Chavez, and warning seventy years of PRI chicanery – and the members with commercial and financial that his victory would bring tyranny. In support of big business and the middle ties to the U.S., continue to dance blindly a huge turnout, some 45 million voted, class. On the campaign trail, he held up to the tune of free trade and globaliza- and the official count showed Calderón democracy as the Holy Grail, and prom- tion, the gospel music of Western imperi- the winner by a microscopic margin. ised to clean up politics, reinvigorate the alism. Lopez Obrador and the PRD refused to economy, and settle the Zapatista prob- But the 2006 election has made it accept the result, demanding a recount lem in “fifteen minutes.” apparent that the oligarchy has altogeth- and declaring the election riddled with Unfortunately for Mexico, Fox and er lost touch with the goals of the Mexi- fraud, but the national electoral commis- his Panistas left things more as less as can Revolution of 1910 and the current sion rejected the challenge and declared they had been. The conservative PRI aspirations of millions of Mexicans. As Calderón the winner. was replaced by a conservative PAN. Octavio Paz, the poet and Nobel Laure- As a result, after being put into of- Fox’s cabinet even included a U.S.-edu- ate, mused some years ago, one Mexico, fice in 2000 to rid Mexico of the domina- cated Priista as minister of Hacienda, the the more developed one, “imposes its tion of the PRI and plant democracy, Fox key ministerial post that sets economic model on the other, without noticing leaves behind one of the biggest political policy. Under Fox, control over inflation that the model fails to correspond to our crises in the nation’s history, along with took precedence over spending for public historical, psychic, and cultural reality, a bloated informal sector, economic stag- needs. His school budget ranked among and is instead a … degraded copy ... of nation, and staggering social inequities. the lowest in Latin America, at a time the North American archetype.” Calderón, his hand-picked successor, when public education was on the ropes. In this election, for the first time, now takes office – and inherits the wind. As for the Zapatistas, the problem Fox two candidates with diametrically op- v v v UCSD Emeriti Association Chronicles v November 2006 Page 3 Expanding the Emeritus Mentoring Program By Mel Green, Professor Emeritus of Biology In over 40 years as Professor of Biology at UCSD, my greatest sense of reward and pleasure has come from close interactions with students.