Jurassic fallout in Mexico.

AuthorRoss, John
PositionThinking Politically - The rise of the Institutional Revolutionary Party

Ten years ago on a sultry July morning, Mexicans woke up and discovered to their great amazement that the Dinosaur that had hunkered down at the foot of their beds for 71 years was gone. On July 6, 2009 when Mexicans rose in the morning, the Dinosaur was back.

In the famous short poem by Augusto Monterroso, the Dinosaur is the PRI--the Institutional Revolutionary Party--once the longest-ruling political dynasty in the known universe that controlled the destiny of Mexicans from the cradle to the grave for seven interminable decades until it was dislodged from power by the right-wing PAN (National Action Party) party in the July 2000 presidential elections. In its unslakable thirst for power, the PRI committed unspeakable crimes against the Mexican peoples, stealing elections from the most humble city hall to the presidential palace, jailing and torturing and executing those who stood in its way, and emptying out public treasuries in an unmatched kleptoc-racy that was a legend throughout Latin America, "the perfect dictatorship" Latin American novelist Mario Vargas Llosa once dubbed it (for which the PRI had him tossed out of the country).

The depth and breadth of the PRI victory July 5 is nothing short of stunning. From a distant third place finish in the 2006 presidential fiasco in which the rightist PAN stole the election from Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador (AMLO) and his left-wing PRD (Party of the Democratic Revolution) party by .57% of the popular vote, the PRI ("proven experience and a new attitude" is its current campaign slogan) took 37% of the total ballots cast, nearly doubling its votes three years back, and taking control of congress for the first time since 1997. The once-upon-a-time ruling party's alliance with the so-called Mexican Green Environmental Party (PVEM) will give it 259 seats out of 500 in the lower house, an absolute majority. In 9 out of 31 states, the PRI won every office up for grabs--federal congressional representatives, local congresses, and municipal officials, a "carro completo" or "full car" in the Institutionals' curious lexicon.

The Dinosaurs also proved triumphant in 5 out of 6 governors' races, winning two statehouses in which the PAN had resided for 12 years. Only in the northern border state of Sonora where the PRI governor was seen as complicit in the tragic incineration of 48 babies in a Hermosillo day care center a month before the election, was the PAN able to squeeze out a victory in an election in which the PAN and PRI candidates were cousins.

Moreover, the PRI won cities like Naucalpan, an upper middle class Mexico City suburb the right-wingers have controlled since the 1980s, and the nation's second city, Guadalajara, which the PAN has owned since 1995. In alliance with the Mexican Green Environmental Party, the PRI won its first elected office in Mexico City since 1994. Although...

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