Deja Vu

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elections,

Latin America,

Mexico,

Octavio Paz,

politics

“In Mexican Vote, Nostalgia for Past Corruption,” by Elisabeth Malkin, The New York Times, July 7, 2009.

MEXICO CITY — “The PRI comes back” shouted the front page headline of the daily newspaper El Universal on Monday, the day after the political party known as the PRI swept midterm elections.

But the story was all in the photograph, a shot of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari as he left a voting booth. He was not running for any office, but the photograph seemed to ask why Mexicans were returning to power the party identified with Mr. Salinas, who left office 15 years ago amid political scandal and economic chaos.

His party, the PRI, or Institutional Revolutionary Party, governed Mexico with a blend of patronage and corruption for more than 70 years before it was voted out in 2000. But on Sunday, the PRI won effective control of the lower house of Congress and a broad swath of the country’s largest cities, as well as five out of six gubernatorial races.

The results were a blow to President Felipe Calderón, whose conservative National Action Party, or the PAN, failed to hold on to even its traditional strongholds.

“Yes, I admit the PRI is corrupt,” said Luis Osorio, a juice vendor in Mexico City, on Monday as he discussed election news with customers stopping by his stand. “So we voted for the PAN, and they turned out to be just as corrupt. They turned everything into their personal business.”

“Development and Other Mirages,” from The Other Mexico: Critique of the Pyramid, by Octavio Paz, 1972.

In 1938, President Lázaro Cárdenas changed not only the [National Revolutionary Party’s] name but also its composition and its program. The social base of the Party of the Mexican Revolution was wider than that of the National Revolutionary Party and it brought together four groups: the workers, the peasants, the popular sector, and the military. It was an attempt to create a functional democracy rather than a political democracy. The party became an efficient instrument: it was the eyes and ears of a fine and generous president Lázaro Cárdenas. Although its slogan was “For a democracy of workers,” the Party of the Mexican Revolution was not democratic either. If no one remembers its debates, that is because there were none; its policies never were the product of public deliberation but rather of what was dictated by President Cárdenas. Even the inclusion in the party of the worker and peasant groups, far from strengthening them, contributed to their eventual servitude. According to most historians, the Revolution as such ended in the decade between 1940 and 1950. Since then, economic development and industrialization have become the immediate and primordial objectives of the regime. This policy was initiated by Miguel Alemán, a president no less energetic than Cárdenas. In 1946, Alemán changed the name of the party once again, to that by which it is now known, a name that courageously illustrates the paradoxes of politics rather than those of logic: the Institutional Revolutionary Party.

The three names of the party reflect the three stages of modern Mexico: creation of a new state, social reform, and economic development. But none of the tendencies that characterize these three stages arose from the party; they came down from above, from the president and his advisors. The party has produced not a single idea, not a single program, it its forty years of existence! It is not a political organization in the proper sense of the term; its recruiting methods are not democratic, and it develops neither programs nor strategies for realizing them. It is a bureaucratic organism that performs political-administrative functions. Its principal mission is political domination, not by physical force but by the control and manipulation of the people through the bureaucracies that direct the labor unions and the associations of the peasants and the middle class. In this task it has the support of the government and the benevolent neutrality or outright partisanship of almost all of the information media: political monopoly entails control not only of popular organizations but also of public opinion. At the same time, the party is an organ for exploring the conscience of the people and their tendencies and aspirations. This is a prime function, one which, in the past, gave the party flexibility, vitality, even popularity, but which now, because of its hierarchical organization and the sclerosis that for some years has paralyzed it more and more, it performs with increasing inefficiency. The party’s deafness increases in direct proportion to the increase in popular dissent.

In its ways of functioning and its immoderate use of revolutionary jargon, the party could be thought to resemble the Communist parties of Eastern Europe: both it and they are political bureaucracies affixed to the national economy, although the economies of those countries are state economies and ours is mixed. But the party is not an ideological party, it is one of groups and interests—a circumstance which, if it has favored venality, has also saved us from the terrors of any sort of orthodoxy. The variety of tendencies that exist within it—I should say, that until recently existed within it—could make it resemble the Congress Party of India, except for this important difference: the Mexican party has no internal democracy and is dominated by a group of hierarchs who, for their part, give blind obedience to each president in turn. This has been especially unfortunate because the diversity of currents and opinions within the party—a reflection of those that divide the nation and make up its political and social reality—would have allowed it to attempt an experiment which, besides vitalizing and regenerating the regime, would have offered a solution to the crisis in which the country has been living for more than ten years: initiating democratic reform within the party itself. But perhaps now it is too late: the [Tlatelolco] massacre of October 2, [1968], wiped out that possibility with blood.

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