Volume 41, Number 19 · November 17, 1994
The Mystery of Mexican Politics
By Sarah Kerr
One night shortly before the Mexican elections in August, El Fisgon, a cartoonist for the left-wing daily La Jornada, one of the few credible sources in Mexico for news, tried to sketch for me what the events of 1994 had revealed to be the true condition of his country. It had been a tense and see-sawing year. A guerrilla uprising in the poor southern state of Chiapas, a string of kidnappings of businessmen, and the assassination of the favored presidential candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, suggested that the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which had ruled Mexico for sixty-five years, was about to implode. On the right half of a clean sheet of paper El Fisgon drew a brand-new high-speed train, carrying only a couple of dozen passengers. Mexico's outgoing president, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, was on board, he said. So was Ernesto Zedillo, the candidate who had replaced the murdered Colosio and would most likely succeed Salinas as president, and so were the rest of Mexico's technocrats—a tiny elite generation of men in their forties and fifties who, like Salinas and Colosio and Zedillo, had taken Ph.D.s in government or economics at American Ivy League schools, and then risen in the past decade to direct policy in the PRI. On the left half of the sheet of paper El Fisgon drew an enormous steam locomotive, which looked to be scraping along, stopping and starting and letting out a foul smoke. This was the train the real Mexico was on: the Mexico of 87 million people, of peasants, workers, guerrillas, and the old colossal PRI itself. In the drawing, both trains were headed straight for a crash at the center of the page.
Feature, 7036 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |