Democracy Is in the Streets (Page 4)

In December 1994, Mexico's next president, Ernesto Zedillo, inherited an overvalued peso, a staggering $25 billion of short-term, dollar-pegged debt, foreign reserves that could cover only half that debt and lingering stock-market jitters provoked by the Zapatista uprising and the two assassinations earlier in the year. The new administration's plans to maneuver the country out of this precarious situation began to unravel when--after a nearly yearlong cease-fire--the Zapatistas struck again. News that the guerrillas had occupied thirty-eight villages (although they had in fact only occupied one, and briefly at that) prompted the Mexican stock index to plunge, which in turn prompted the finance minister to devalue the peso, which led investors to panic and, within a few days, the economy to crash.

It was clear to Zedillo that the old PRI system was crumbling and could no longer provide the stability (not to mention social welfare) that had been its central promise. While he shared Salinas's neoliberal worldview, he also identified democracy as a prerequisite for flourishing markets. Moreover, Preston and Dillon write, "with the economy in ruins, more political freedom was all Zedillo had to offer opposition leaders to win a minimum of their cooperation for the harsh fiscal recovery program" he pursued to address the country's economic woes. So he pushed additional electoral reforms through Congress that consolidated the independence of the elections agency and made it virtually impossible for the PRI to steal another election.

This story lends some credence to the free-marketeer mantra that economic liberalization promotes democratic change. But if neoliberals helped make Mexico's democracy, they did so in response to circumstances that were not of their own choosing. Salinas's democratic reforms were necessary to attract foreign investment; Zedillo's, to clean up the mess after the investors fled. What is perhaps most ironic is that--by facilitating the flow of capital in and out of Mexico--the neoliberals helped make it possible for a band of poorly armed indigenous peasants from the rainforests of Chiapas to hit them where it would actually hurt: Wall Street.

Preston and Dillon have done a very skillful job of weaving together a wide cast of characters and complex series of events into a single story about the PRI's slow surrender to Mexico's democratic forces. It would have been interesting had they delved more into what "democracy" really meant to the diverse actors in their story, and what was at stake for the most marginalized sectors of Mexican society (especially those likely to worry more about their next meal than the next election). Still, in their recounting of the Tlatelolco massacre, the 1985 earthquake and many other crises, they provide a powerful portrait of what was wrong with the PRI and why its defeat in the 2000 election was so thrilling for so many.

The question the book leaves largely open is how much Mexico's vote for change would actually change Mexico. What sort of democracy had Mexicans made?

As Preston and Dillon point out in a short but sobering epilogue, the exhilaration of election night would not last long. Mexico had a new head of state--but not a new state. Fox would have to work with the institutions the PRI had created. And, although it is not the subject of their book, Preston and Dillon provide a vivid sense of some of the problems he would inherit as president.

The most basic problem was the longstanding and habitual subordination of law to politics. It was a problem that predated the PRI, to the centuries of caudillo rule, in which a ruler "could not be on the wrong side of the law, since he was the law." The PRI had merely added a veneer of justification by using its revolutionary pretensions to justify its authoritarian methods. Thus, for instance, officials who fixed elections could argue (and even believe) that, as "a revolutionary regime," the PRI had "a historical obligation to retain power."

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