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| Felipe Calderon |
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The future
lies ahead
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| Lopez Obredor |
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Felipe Calderón, an apparent conservative, defeated Andres Manuel López Obrador of the openly leftist Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) in the presidential election on July 2, 2006. From the outset, López Obrador challenged the outcome, declaring that he was the legitimate President of Mexico while Calderón was a usurper. Prior to the Dec. 1 inauguration, PRD supporters camped out on the main streets of Mexico City, snarling traffic for more than a month while they demanded a recount. They never got it and on Dec. 1, PRD members of Congress attempted to seize physical control of the Chamber of Deputies where the president-elect must take the oath of office. They failed when Calderón entered through a back door.
A former member of Congress and a lifelong politician, Calderón came from the same party as his predecessor, Vicente Fox, and served briefly in the Fox cabinet. He was not, however, a Fox favorite and, once his presidential ambitions became clear, Calderón was forced to resign from the cabinet. Short, slender, fond of three-button suits and rimless spectacles, Felipe Calderón might be a casting director’s idea of a minor banker or principle of a small high school, yet he won a hotly-contested primary to become his party’s nominee.
More surprising was the Calderón victory – narrow though it was – over López Obrador, the charismatic mayor of Mexico City from 2000 until 2005. An outspoken populist, AMLO, as he is known, apparently frightened many with the radical programs he proposed. In the end, he won the support of the center of southern part of the country, including Mexico City, while the majority in the northern states voted for Calderón. As his protests continued into 2007, López Obrador appeared to be losing much of his original support.
Calderón, for his part, moved toward the left, announcing support for many social programs. Most spectacular, however, was his calling out the military to battle narcotics-smugglers who had been openly defying local, state and federal authorities in many areas. The struggle to follow, Calderón warned, would be long, costly and bloody, and that prediction has proven to be correct.
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| The Millennium: A new era is born |
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| Vicente Fox |
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The new millennium began with a new party in power. Vicente Fox, candidate of the National Action Party (PAN) and its allies, won a plurality in July, 2000, and took office the following December. Technically, the new millennium began one month later (we start counting with the number one, not with a zero).
Fox won only by a plurality and not a majority, a fact frequently overlooked. Three candidates took part, Francisco Lambasitda, a former governor and cabinet official who won the first primary ever held by the PRI, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, also former PRI governor who helped found the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) when his advancement in the PRI appeared thwarted, and Fox. Had there been a runoff between the two leaders on the first balloting -- as required in some countries -- my guess is that Labastida would have won.
That President Ernesto Zedillo announced Fox had won infuriated many veteran members of the PRI. Some demanded that Zedillo be expelled from the party. That never happened. The PRI defeat might have been predicted. What surprises is that it was not more devastating.
In 1976, President José López Portillo had won the presidency without even token opposition. Embarrassed, the PRI set out to encourage its opponents, up to a point. Among other things, proportional representation was combined with district representation both in the federal congress and state legislatures. Other barriers came down. This, combined with a disastrous management of the economy, cleared the way for Cárdenas to break from the PRI, form what became the PRD. By some accounts, Cárdenas actually won the 1988 election. Only after the PRI-controlled government announced that there had been a “crash” of the computerized vote counting system was Carlos Salinas de Gortari declared to be the victor.
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| Cuauhtemoc Cardenas |
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Although Cárdenas protested, he discouraged any attempts to foment any kind of uprising. One gathers that he preferred to be a critic, not an actor. As a critic, he remains in the spotlight; former presidents become almost non-persons. The same appeared true of PAN candidate Diago Fernandez. Six years later, after he trashed Zedillo along with Cárdenas (who was running again) in a televised debate among presidential candidates, Fernandez all but stopped campaigning. He, too, seems not to have wanted to actually become president.
Did Fox, when he copped the PAN nomination in 2000? A handsome, towering 6’4 rancher (actually he had headed the Coca Cola company in Mexico, quit to manage his own boot-making company and later served as Governor of tiny Guanajuato state), Fox was easily the most charismatic candidate to stand for the presidency in years. Yet, considering the promises he made, one wonders whether he really expected to win. That he did surprised even most of his supporters.
He went on to disappoint many of them. Forgotten is that most presidents, perhaps all of them, prove to be disappointments, and not only in Mexico.
At the outset, Fox pointed out that presidents propose but Congress decides. For seven decades the PRI monopolized Congress as well as the presidency, meaning that Congress would decide in favor of whatever the president wished. During the Fox years, no party dominated Congress. PRI and PRD lawmakers might agree in little else, but they were united in their effort to make Fox look bad. Next time, they hoped, voters would yearn for a return of the PRI, or decide to give the progressive PRD a chance. Fox, in turn, stumbled on his own. He turned to executive recruiters to fill his cabinet with leaders from the private sector. Few could cope with such jobs. Dealing with bureaucrats defeated them. Turnover became constant. Fox was viewed as weak. With a new election on the horizon, even the PAN candidate campaigned with the slogan, “Government with a firm hand.”
Yet the election itself was an indication of the changes Fox had wrought. Now votes counted. The PRI itself proved this. The party, which many pundits counted as dead after the Fox victory, went on to gain many state houses and city halls. Many, but not all. Mexico had turned from being a one-party country to a three-party nation. Indeed, there were five presidential candidates in 2006, and even more parties. Several of the smaller parties joined with the big three, forming alliances, hoping to share in the spoils of victory.
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| Ernesto Zedillo |
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To me, Fox’s greatest accomplishment was creating a sound economy. Is that important? Bill Clinton’s words come to mind: “It’s the economy, stupid.” Far from dynamic, the Mexican economy grew only about one third as fast as the seven percent Fox had promised, but inflation was almost non-existent and, for the first time in the lifetimes of most Mexicans, the peso had not been devalued. Zedillo began his administration by devaluing the peso from three to the dollar to nine to the dollar. In the weeks that followed, banks went bankrupt, bankrupting many of their debtors in the process. Emergency loans from the United States managed to save the economy from complete disintegration. In the end, most Mexican banks ended up in the hands of foreign banks. Zedillo blamed this disaster on his predecessor, Salinas de Gortari.
Many, you may remember, believe that Salinas lost the 1988 election. He became president anyway. Short, bald, big-eared, the man was a walking caricature, anything but loved when inaugurated, he ended his term as perhaps the most respected chief executive in recent history. Within months, he was the most reviled.
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| In 1988, one thousand Mexican pesos, which had been worth eighty U.S. dollars twenty years before, was worth about twenty-five U.S. cents. Back in 1988, I was a millionaire. Salinas, with no objection from Congress, ordered three zeros to be lopped off the peso. He also set about selling back to the private sector the hundreds of companies, including banks, his predecessors had turned into state corporations. This not only ended a drain on the treasury (few state corporations earned a profit), but brought in funds to a previously cash-strapped government. Going on to do the unthinkable, Salinas had his people negotiate a free trade agreement with the United States and Canada (NAFTA) while emphasizing exports, replacing the system of import substitution.
The last of the Salinas years was the worst. It began with a brief but violent uprising in Chiapas, which lies on the Guatemala border and is the poorest state in Mexico. The Mexican army probably could have crushed this insurgency and killed its suddenly-famous leader in a ski mask, Sub-Commander Marcos, but that would have been bloody. Salinas, conscious of his image and hoping to move on to the international stage, ordered restraint. Parts of Chiapas, parts that few outsiders cared about anyway, were left under rebel control.
Less than three months after that uprising, an apparently mentally-disturbed individual shot and killed Luis Donaldo Colosio, the individual Salinas had selected as his successor. The election was only months away. The Colosio assassin was seized moments after he fired his shots, but rumors flared immediately about a plot of some kind to kill him.
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| Salinas, suspected by more than a few, had to find a replacement for Colosio. The PRI always chose its candidates from within the cabinet, but the law required any cabinet member from standing for the presidency unless he had resigned his cabinet position at least six months before the election. Even the PRI could not get around that.
Ernesto Zedillo, however, had quit as Education Minister to serve as Colosio’s campaign manager. A bland, colorless economist, he might best be described as a nerd. Zedillo was able, however, to convince the world that Salinas was to blame for the economic disaster on 1994. He went in to order the arrest of a Salinas brother for involvement in a murder and to see Salinas himself go into self-imposed exile. Even so, for months after his inauguration, speculation raged about when he would resign. Zedillo denied that he planned to quit and when, at a press conference, a reporter asked about the rumors, the president’s office called the reporter’s employer and asked that he be dismissed. He was. Zedillo later personally requested that the journalist be given back his job. And Zedillo held no more press conferences.
Fox never tried to be like that. This is one of the changes that have gone unnoticed. Columnists who frequently criticize Fox for accomplishing so little never would have dared to criticize a PRI president at all. Now we wait to see what will happen next.
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