What happened to the Mexican left?

• Author: Reavis, Dick J.
• Position: In recent presidential vote

It's unthinkable, but many officials of the Mexican government, many academics with expertise in Mexican affairs, and most of the American press are saying that a rightward drift has emerged from Mexico's present economic condition. Don't believe a word of it.

Promoters of the theory credit the neoliberal economic reforms of the Carlos Salinas regime for the shift. Mexico's economy is in great shape, they say. It is--when they're talking about the abstraction that goes by that name--an uninhabited planet measured by Gross National Product, earnings-to-investment ratios, and the rate of capital influx. But at ground level, Mexico is gasping for breath: Real unemployment is too extensive to define, purchasing power has plummeted by 60 per cent during the last two presidential terms, emigration is unabated, and there's no uptick in sight.

Advocates of the onward-and-upward Mexico thesis point to the August 21 presidential election to confirm their claims. According to official statistics, when Mexican voters went to the polls to choose the figure who will lead them for the next six years, slightly more than half--50.4 per cent--opted to stay with the status quo. They gave their support to Ernesto Zedillo, the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, which has monopolized the presidency for sixty-five years.

Even more surprisingly, some 27 per cent of the voters supported Diego Fernandez, standard-bearer of the centerright Partido Accion Nacional, or PAN. Only 17 per cent favored Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, nominee of the center-left Partido de la Revolucion Democratica, or PRD.

During the last presidential election in 1988, even by the government's count, Cardenas outpolled the PAN nearly two-to-one. Under Mexico's proportional-representation system, that meant a bevy of congressional seats. In this year's balloting, however, the PANistas and Cardenistas switched places, and the PAN became the leading opposition bloc.

The key to the claims of the usual experts is that victory or loss is beside the point. The election was a sham. But, with few peaceful means of protest left, Mexicans are hesitant to challenge it. The election's results are probably going to be accepted--out of fear of greater uncertainties.

As his campaign opened last fall, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas found that his image was gone. There is little doubt that, by an honest cont, he would have won the 1988 election, but his officer corps did not respond to the theft of his victory in a decisive way. Though Cardenas branded the government of Carlos Salinas as "illegitimate" and personally refused to meet with Salinas or members of his government, that alone was not enough.

Candidates in his coalition who had been allotted congressional posts, for example, took their seats instead of refusing to participate. In the streets, people said that Cardenas "no tiene pantalones"--literally, that he had no pants, but figuratively, and rudely, that he had no balls. Pegging him as just another compromising politician, they didn't flock to his rallies in this year's campaign.

The party Cardenas leads, only six years old, was a recurrent problem, too. It has been faction-ridden from the beginning, having been formed from a merger of Mexico's socialists (including its Communist Party) and elements drawn from the more liberal, economically interventionist wing of the PRI.

In desperation, and to show democratic loyalty upon entering the PRD, most of the country's socialist groupings, which had polled about 15 per cent of the vote in the 1982 presidential election, dissolved themselves and even closed their publishing houses. And the liberal leadership, for its part, never forgot that it...