An Eternal Struggle: How the National Action Party Transformed Mexican Politics : How the National Action Party Transformed Mexican Politics 9780313057328, 9780275978310

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An Eternal Struggle

An Eternal Struggle HOW THE NATIONAL ACTION PARTY TRANSFORMED MEXICAN POLITICS Michael J. Ard

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ard, Michael J., 1962– An eternal struggle : how the National Action Party transformed Mexican politics / Michael J. Ard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–275–97831–1 (alk. paper) 1. Partido Accio´n Nacional (Mexico) 2. Political parties—Mexico. 3. Mexico—Politics and government—20th century. I. Title. JL1298.A3A73 2003 324.272⬘04—dc21 2002037064 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available. Copyright 䉷 2003 by Michael J. Ard All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, by any process or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 2002037064 ISBN: 0–275–97831–1 First published in 2003 Praeger Publishers, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc. www.praeger.com Printed in the United States of America

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Contents

Acknowledgments

vii

Introduction: A Democracy Is Born

ix

Chapter 1

Mexico’s Democratic Transition

1

Chapter 2

The Great Party Struggle and the Catholic Response to Revolution

21

Chapter 3

The Emergence of the System Party

57

Chapter 4

The Great Party Regime in Crisis, 1968–1988

95

Chapter 5

Transition in the Great Party, 1988–1994

129

Chapter 6

The Triumph of the System Party, 1994–2000

165

Chapter 7

Lessons of the Mexican Transition

195

Bibliography

203

Index

217

Acknowledgments

In preparing this work on the role of the National Action Party in Mexico’s democratic transition, I made several lengthy stays in Mexico between 1992 and 1997. In 1994, I served as an official election observer in the important presidential contest of that difficult year for the Salinas legacy. This book results from these experiences. Along the way many fine people helped me, but I would like to single out those who inspired this project in the first place. Two professors at the College of William and Mary, Judith Ewell and George Harris, instilled in me an interest in our southern neighbor. Another source of inspiration came in an unlikely place; when I was a naval officer deployed in the Mediterranean, Alan Riding’s Distant Neighbors, one of the few worthwhile selections in a sparse ship’s library, served as my “rackside” reading. This book helped me decide my area of focus when I left the Navy for graduate school. Next, my professors at the University of Virginia, and especially David C. Jordan, showed me the true meaning of liberal education. Graduate student friends Robert Stacey, April Hahn, John Jordan, and Jonathan Rice, and Timothy Goodman of Georgetown University, always stood ready as sounding boards for ideas and as wellsprings of encouragement. Finally, I dedicate this book to my parents, James and Joan Ard, and to my wife, Jean, whose love, patience, and understanding never waver.

Introduction: A Democracy Is Born

“Ya, ya, ya. . . . Hoy, hoy, hoy!” July 2, 2000: a delirious Mexico City crowd filled Paseo de la Reforma, chanting and partying into the night. “Now, now, now. . . . Today, today, today!” Mexico had just elected a new president. But not the same old “new” president. For the first time since 1929, the ruling party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)—went down in defeat. Most observers thought that by fraud, or, if necessary, by force, the PRI would pull one more win out of its hat. Not this time. Indeed, the PRI accepted its historic defeat not with a bang, but with a whimper. The creation of the triumphant chieftains of Mexican Revolution (1910– 1920), the PRI existed to manage, not compete in, elections to keep the “Revolutionary Family” firmly in power. Along with the all-powerful Mexican president, the party exercised a Leviathan-like control over Mexican society in a sort of liberal dictatorship. The party exulted in myths, such as the nobility of the Revolution, the perfidy of the United States, and the glory of the pre-Christian, Aztec empire. In this system of “liberal authoritarianism” most things were permitted, except real challenges to political authority. But seven decades of power left the PRI worn down by scandal, cynicism, and mismanagement. By the July 2 vote, even its extensive political machine could no longer salvage victory. After President Ernesto Zedillo announced the result of the election, Vicente Fox, the tall mustachioed business executive from Guanajuato State, addressed the admiring throngs and reveled in the goal that had been in his sights for almost a decade. Few Mexicans, including some of those in his own National Action Party (PAN), had given Fox much more than an outside

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chance of winning. Still, he had convinced nearly 43 percent of them that he could oust the PRI. Now Mexican politics would be changed forever. The defeat of Mexico’s one-party state by Fox and the PAN meant more than just the displacement of one ruling clique for another. More profoundly, Fox’s stunning victory closed the book on a persistent political–religious conflict—a “great party” conflict—that had dogged Mexico since its break from the Spanish Empire. This election represented the end of a long conversion process, a reconciliation between Mexico’s Catholic and Revolutionary political traditions, and the forging of a new national political consensus. This book examines Mexico’s long transition to democracy in which the PAN, an opposition “system party” inspired by Catholic social doctrine and dedicated to democratic values, played a vital role. From the point of view of this work, the chief problem of Mexican democratization is that the nation’s political culture had been deeply divided for nearly two centuries. Many scholars used to presume that both the Mexican Revolution and the Constitution of 1917 essentially resolved the cultural divide of Mexican politics, despite the remnants of reactionary elements in the society.1 However, a “great party” struggle determined the nature of political conflict in Mexico and prevented the development of political democracy. Reflecting on the breakdown of democracies that precipitated World War II, the philosopher John Hallowell spotted the danger of the great party phenomenon: “The breakdown of democracy comes when this community of values and interests disintegrates, when common agreement on fundamental principles and purposes no longer exists, when partisans no longer endeavor to work through the state, but to become the state.”2 Great party politics is a problem that political thinkers have grappled with this the dawn of party government. In his “Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents,” Edmund Burke, considering the question of Great Britain’s political stability, announced that the “great parties which formerly divided and agitated the kingdom” were entirely dissolved.3 These great parties—the Whigs and Tories prior to the Glorious Revolution of 1688— fought over the fundamental issue of a Catholic king ascending to the throne. By Burke’s time, the two great parties, after years of bitter conflict, had long since resolved their fundamental differences by means of the Religious Settlement, which allowed them to coexist within a constitutional order. As Harvey Mansfield has argued, the disappearance of great parties and the settlement of the religious issue made parties respectable and led to the founding of party government.4 The reconciliation of Mexico’s own great parties is a fundamental theme of the Mexican democratization process. Of the main structural cleavages that political scientist Stein Rokkan identified in political systems, the church-state cleavage dominated the Mexican political system.5 The so-called Revolutionary Family and its political instrument, the PRI, established order after a period of conflict but failed to end the great party competition between them-

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selves and the Catholic social forces. The PRI and the PAN stood on opposite sides in this great divide. The labels “Catholic” and “revolutionary” refer more to the cast of mind of some political actors than to clearly defined groups. Mexico has been, and still is, an overwhelmingly Catholic country, and, as scholar Roderic Camp has indicated, those identified as practicing Catholics are distributed fairly evenly among the adherents of all the major political parties.6 What is clear, however, is that the PAN saw itself as a party emanating from a distinctly Catholic worldview, while the PRI saw itself as part of an opposing liberal and revolutionary tradition, despite members of both parties having, on occasion, knelt in the same pews. It is important to understand the nature of this long-lived authoritarian, great party system in order to grasp the magnitude of the challenge in converting it into a political democracy. In their seminal work on democratic transition theory, Schmitter and O’Donnell assumed that the normal authoritarian regime is a right-wing military dictatorship.7 In Mexico’s case, however, the authoritarian regime was a civilian, “revolutionary,” one-party state, under which the military loyally served. As a great party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party acted as an instrument to monopolize political power. British political scientist George Philip aptly describes Mexican government under the PRI as a “Hobbesian bargain,” in which the only accountability in the system passes from below to above.8 It has been said that the Constitution of 1917—the Magna Carta of the PRI’s governmental system—derived its framework not only from Rousseau’s notion of popular sovereignty, but also from Montesquieu’s and Madison’s contributions on the division and separation of powers.9 Yet this constitutional form lacked substance due to the ruling PRI’s privileging of order and stability over political liberty. Under such an arrangement, the explicit form of the Mexican constitution—which allowed for federalism, checks and balances, and popular sovereignty—was rendered meaningless. The seventy-year rule of the PRI—three different names representing three reorganizations—is a testament to the adaptability of the Revolutionary Family, the term party founder General Plutarco Calles used for the ruling elite. The Revolutionary Family represented those who established the Constitution of 1917 and emerged victorious after the internecine violence of the 1920s. The Family encompassed those war veterans, plus their descendents and any of those rising to leadership positions within the party’s corporate elements.10 Family members professed loyalty to certain ideals and institutions [especially those] enshrined in the Constitution of 1917. They identified strongly with the liberal movement of the nineteenth century, especially that of Benito Juarez and the framers of the Constitution of 1857. In the beginning, the Family often bragged that theirs was the world’s first “socialist” constitution. Among the heroes of the Revolution were the “Red Battalions” formed by associate members of the anarchosyndicalist Industrial

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Workers of the World. Though pragmatic and adaptive, Revolutionary Family members often embraced leftist currents or belonged to Marxist or socialist parties. Like any durable ruling elite, the Revolutionary Family developed a sophisticated political formula that served as the legal and moral basis of its justification to rule.11 Among other things, this formula included: the Constitution of 1917; the single governing party; the strong presidential form of government; the monopoly on certain symbols, like the national flag as the banner of the party; the historical mythology of the march of liberalism and the revolution; the belief in xenophobic nationalism; and the ideology that their one-party regime was the only safeguard of revolutionary goals against the forces of reaction.12 PRI ideologue Enrique Ramı´rez y Ramı´rez once wrote that the party was the “instrument for the conservation of power, above all else . . . and it is obliged, because of its historical responsibilities and constitutional mandate, to fulfill the immense task of social transformation.”13 Even more sternly than their predecessors in the nineteenth century, these new revolutionaries placed themselves in opposition to the Catholic Church and the business sectors in the middle class. Besides an allegiance to the myth of the revolution and certain ideological proclivities, loyalties to other institutions helped bind the Revolutionary Family together. Not to be discounted, in this regard, was the role played by Masonic lodges. Although its influence has waxed and waned, Freemasonry has played a significant role in Mexican politics since the era of independence. For many Mexican politicians in the Revolutionary Family, it has acted as almost a “party within the party;” important leaders such as La´zaro Ca´rdenas even founded their own lodges to strengthen their power base.14 Freemasonry certainly helped shape the Mexican constitution and accounted in large part for the ruling elites longtime hostility to the Catholic Church and its defenders.15 Unlike other Latin American political parties, the PRI system was rarely dominated by a single important figure after its founding period. Nevertheless, Family members often gathered around certain important party leaders: Plutarco Calles and La´zaro Ca´rdenas, Miguel Alema´n and Luis Echeverrı´a, Carlos Hank Gonza´lez, and Carlos Salinas. The camarillas—groups aligned with a powerful individual—served to assist careers and preserve loyalty to the system.16 Compromises were often struck among these competing factions to determine candidates for office, and especially in the selection of the president.17 Concerning the Revolutionary Family’s more formal arrangements, the Mexican historian Daniel Cosı´o Villegas described its system as supported by the twin pillars of the party and the presidency.18 Due to the discords of the 1920s, the Revolutionary Family under Calles’s leadership founded what would eventually be called the PRI to control the succession process, preserve the goals of the revolution, and channel political ambitions. Party members

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were identified by their allegiance to the party’s corporate elements: the peasant, labor, or public service sectors. What resulted was an extensive nationwide organization that penetrated down to local levels and succeeded in incorporating, or co-opting, most of Mexican society. To borrow a phrase from contemporary democratic theorists, the party was, in short, “a system for processing conflicts” within the Revolutionary Family. Even though the party has been at the center of their political machine, not all members of the Revolutionary Family have belonged to the PRI. For example, the socialist Vicente Lombardo Toledano founded his own Popular Socialist Party (PPS), which also claimed allegiance to the principles of the revolution. From the anticlerical right, ex-Villista generals, loyal to the famous revolutionary Pancho Villa, were entitled to do the same, in the form of the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM). Even the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the PRI’s competitor and alter ego, derived from and in some sense remained a part of the greater Revolutionary Family. Outside the official party, the revolutionary system also controlled important sectors of civil society. For example, by means of the Chambers Law, businesses were forced to join two grand confederations corresponding to industry or commerce to control their political involvement.19 Television and to a great extend the print media, while not under the government’s direct control, cooperated with official policy in return for kickbacks or special favors.20 Parties like the PAN, however, were considered reactionary and outside the Revolutionary Family circle. The same holds true for the Mexican Communist party and its variants, which were sometimes outlawed depending upon the fancy of the current PRI administration. The Family thus excluded from its ranks both the democratic right and the totalitarian left. The PRI monopolized violence and had the entire state security apparatus, including the Army, at its disposal. Even after the army was formally removed from the official party structure, it remained a close associate of the PRI and even participated in electoral functions. Civilian intelligence, such as the notorious Directorate of Federal Security, also served a political role. However, the regime resorted to violence against political opponents only occasionally and, after 1940, violence sometimes hurt the regime more than it helped.21 Besides the PRI, the other supporting pillar of the revolutionary system noted by Cosı´o Villegas was the presidency. Numerous scholars have called attention to the long shadow the presidency threw over the Mexican political system. The president acted as both the chief lawgiver and law enforcer. He was chief of state, head of government, and leader of the ruling party. Although the constitution recognizes both the separation and division of powers, little happened in Mexican politics without the president’s approval during the heyday of PRI power. Judges rarely challenged his will, and the Congress rubber-stamped his initiatives. State governors were selected or removed from

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office at his whim. The president also largely controlled economic policy.22 Adding to his constitutional and metaconstitutional power, the presidency of the revolutionary system, for much of its history, had about it an almost sacred quality, in Durkheim’s sense of the term. “It commands a special reverence and respect,” not to be criticized or joked about.23 To maintain the revolutionary regime’s democratic fac¸ade, frequent elections were held more as referenda on the revolution than as competitive contests.24 Democratic trappings may have remained, but the revolution concerned itself with economic and social justice, not political liberty for all. As one party theorist put it: “Elections in the Mexican political regime do not have the condition of being a legitimizing source of power. The power of the state is legitimate, politically and doctrinally, by reason of its popular revolutionary origin.”25 According to political scientist John J. Bailey, “the very meaning of democracy given in the Constitution’s Article 3 and the PRI statutes and ideology subordinates votes and elections (or formal democracy) to the protection and advancement of society’s weaker groups. When the PRI does lose elections the temptation grows to ignore formal democracy in favor of the populist version. This is especially the case when it loses to the PAN, which many priistas view as anti-national and anti-revolutionary.”26 Beginning with its first major election in 1929, the revolutionary regime imitated more Machiavelli’s fox than the lion; that is, it preferred fraud to force. Moreover, electoral fraud in Mexico was nothing new. Mexican political scientist Jose´ Antonio Crespo said that manipulating the vote was common even under the relatively enlightened Benito Juare´z during the nineteenth century and that the only “clean” vote, that which elected Francisco I. Madero in 1911, resulted in an unstable government.27 As the Mexican scholar Silvia Gomez Tagle noted, electoral manipulations came in two varieties: alchemy, which involved inflating the vote total to demonstrate a mandate, and fraud, which meant actually stealing a victory. One PAN analyst, to describe the PRI’s tactics, paraphrased a Mexican expression known as the Jalisco Clause: The PRI never loses, but when it does, it takes it away.28 Besides more formal arrangements, a web of unwritten rules preserved party unity and cemented loyalty to the PRI system. The most famous of these rules were those governing the presidential selection process. To begin with, aspirants for the presidency did not make public their ambitions.29 Instead, the president reminded the party that his unwritten authority to designate a successor—called the dedazo—is legitimate, thus doing away with the old fiction, maintained between 1929 and 1976, that the party itself forces the president to confer the nominee.30 A sham consultation process was still carried out to make the process appear democratic. Then the president supervised the destape, or unveiling, himself, and this was made in unequivocal terms, without brooking any dissent. The PRI’s national convention legitimated the decision after the fact to reduce the risk of a challenge to the decision. The unveiled one then shared power with the president for the

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remainder of his term, for example, by cooperating in the selection for the deputies and senators for the next legislature.31 Although hardly democratic, the PRI’s “perfect dictatorship” should be given its due. Because of Mexico’s conflictive political history, the decadesold authoritarian system of “presidentialism” and the one-party state answered the pressing need, much like Hobbes’s Leviathan, to preserve “peace, order and economic progress.”32 Despite the political monopoly, Mexicans were allowed to enjoy a fair range of civil and economic liberty. Opposition parties were tolerated because they helped legitimize elections and created the illusion of pluralism. Free speech and free association were permitted so long as they offered no real challenge to the power monopoly. Indeed, after World War II, the party oversaw a twenty-five-year period of economic development unknown to Mexico since the revolution began in 1910. But the authoritarian system, impressive though it was, suffered its share of vulnerabilities. The Revolutionary Family’s preservation of its power monopoly, and its manipulation of the economy for the interests of its members, prompted one scholar to refer to it as the “Cosa Nostra.” At its best, it perpetuated a system of “honest graft,” and the resentment many Mexicans have felt toward these corrupt practices accounted for the growing strength of the opposition movement. Ruling for decades, the PRI alienated many Mexicans from politics and instilled in them little respect for democratic institutions.33 As an ex-priista, Juan Jose´ Rodrı´guez Pratts—one of the few who later joined the PAN—commented, the PRI was a machinery to win elections, not to compete in them. It preferred to overwhelm the public, not win it over. The system also worked that way for its own members. Competition for positions within the party was not open, and internal bylaws were not clearly established. This was a major vulnerability of the PRI system. It was clear in 1995 to ex-priista Pratts that, if electoral reforms were enacted that established a transparent system, the PRI would find it difficult to adapt and would lose the presidency in 2000.34 One could also venture to add that the PRI’s great party authoritarian state, successful and popular though it was for most of its run, never enjoyed complete legitimacy. To apply a definition suggested by Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, the regime was only “quasi-legitimate”: popular support had to be supplemented by corruption, fraud, and force to keep itself in power. The PRI would permit opposition parties, but not full-fledged electoral challenges.35 Moreover, in a nation overwhelmingly Catholic, the state instituted constitutional decrees that banished the Catholic faith from public life. The PRI evolved from its initial great party conception very slowly. After World War II, the regime transformed from a dictatorship to a type of dictablanda, soft dictatorship, allowing limited space to opposition groups. Then a series of political and economic crises beginning in the 1970s forced the revolutionary regime to implement modest reforms designed to quell growing dissent. By 1977, with constitutional reforms to give more space to opposition

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parties, the regime moved from dictablanda to democradura, hard democracy— one that often deprives its citizens of basic rights, but still maintained firm control over the political system.36 One scholar notes that the PRI’s engagement in a program of liberalization—a purely procedural strategy—was to maintain itself in power, not to initiate a true democratic transition.37 But the revolutionary regime’s quasi-legitimacy and the upward pressure from civil society in the form of the opposition parties forced it to make concessions to democratic pressures. Conventional wisdom long held that the PRI would never leave power willingly. As labor leader and PRI loyalist Fidel Vela´zquez once said, “The revolutionaries got here with bullets. Whoever wants to get rid of us can’t do it with votes, but will have to use bullets also.”38 But an extraordinary and peaceful democratic transition did occur and can be understood only by taking a long view. A one-party state as well-rooted, sophisticated, and successful as that of the PRI does not fall quickly. No snapshots of the 1980s and 1990s will suffice to explain its peaceful transition to a new political formula—that of pluralistic democracy. One lesson that we can gain from Mexico’s democratic transition is that, in some hard cases, a strong, democratic value system needs to develop first. As we will see in this case study, until at least one side of the “great party” divide embraced these democratic values, no real transition was a possibility. The presidential victory by the PAN in July 2000 will long be remembered as one of Mexico’s—and Latin America’s—most important elections. It will doubtless inspire students of transitions to democracy for years to come. Since Fox’s victory, some books discussing the PAN’s role in this transition have appeared—notably Mexico’s Political Awakening by Vikram K. Chand and Mexico: The Struggle for Democratic Development by Daniel C. Levy and Kathleen Bruhn. By conceiving of the PAN as a product of a “great party” struggle, this study hopes to complement their contributions to understanding Mexican democratization. There were of course many other factors to account for this complicated historical process besides the key contribution the PAN made to Mexico’s democratization. Economic development and the growth of a middle class, the emergence of independent media, the development of the democratic left, the external influences of the international “democratic wave,” and the influence of the neighboring United States all contributed to Mexico’s political transformation, but these factors will be left for others to explore in depth. The first chapter of this book will offer a theoretical framework to understanding the Mexican transition, with emphasis on the importance of conciliation, political liberties, and the democratic opposition party. Chapter two addresses the fundamental church-state cleavage and how it shaped Mexico’s great parties. Next, chapter three deals with the founding of the National Action Party, a reforming “system” party that broke out of the “great party”

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mold. The remaining chapters, four through seven, discuss the details of the political transition and the challenges ahead for Mexican democracy.

NOTES 1. Robert E. Scott, Mexican Government in Transition (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1959), 99–102; Howard Cline, Mexico: Revolution to Evolution 1940–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1962), 149; also see Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 317. 2. John Hallowell, The Moral Foundation of Democracy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 36. 3. Edmund Burke, Works Vol. I. (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, 1881), 437–38. 4. Harvey C. Mansfield, Jr., Statesmanship and Party Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 6–16. 5. As described in Angelo Panebianco, Political Parties: Organization and Power (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 269. 6. Roderic A. Camp, “The PAN’s Social Bases: Implications for Leadership” in Opposition Government in Mexico, edited by Victoria E. Rodriquez and Peter M. Ward (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1995), 77. 7. See Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe C. Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 62–63. 8. George Philip, The Presidency in Mexican Politics (New York: St. Martin’s 1992), 13. 9. Pablo Gonzalez Casanova, Democracy in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 11. 10. Peter H. Smith, The Labyrinth of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 319–26. 11. See Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw Hill, 1939), 20. 12. Official Mexican history tends to reduce all figures not associated with liberalism and revolution to nonperson status. For example, Agustı´n de Iturbide, who secured the country’s independence from Spain and who gave it its national flag, is remembered only by one lonely statue in a small town in Guanajuato. As for Mexico’s xenophobic nationalism, one only has to visit Mexico City’s extraordinary Museum of Interventions to see this expressed in full. 13. Quoted in Luis Martı´nez Alca´ntara, Salinas juega solo en la sucesio´n presidencial (Mexico: Periodismo Integral, 1993), 46. 14. Frank Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 193–204. 15. Remberto H. Padilla, Historia de la Politı´ca Mexicana (Mexico: EDAMEX, 1992), 72. Padilla argues that freemasonry reemerged in Mexican politics during the 1970s, especially under the leadership of Interior Secretary and party ideologue Jesus Reyes Heroles. 16. Smith, Labyrinth of Power, 50. 17. For an overview of how responsive the system is to its members, see Carolyn and Martin Needleman, “Who Rules Mexico? A Critique of Some Current Views on the Mexican Political Process,” Journal of Politics (XXXI 1969).

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18. Daniel Cosı´o Villegas, El Sistema Polı´tico Mexicano (Mexico: Cuadernos de Joaquin Mortiz, 1982), 22–51. 19. Yemile Mizrahi, “La nueva oposicio´n conservadora en Me´xico: la radicalizacio´n polı´tica de los empresarios nortenos” Foro Internacional (Vol. 32, No. 5, October– December 1992), 749–50. 20. William A. Orme Jr. ed., A Culture of Collusion: An Inside Look at the Mexican Press (Miami, FL: North-South Press Center, 1997), 23–24. 21. As of this writing, the Fox government has formed a commission to investigate those “disappeared” during the 1970s. Interest in finding the truth about the infamous Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 also revived after its thirtieth anniversary in 1998. 22. John J. Bailey, Governing Mexico (New York: St. Martin’s, 1988), 31–32. 23. Quoted in Maurice Duverger, Political Parties (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1962), 122. Although evidence of its erosion was evident under both Presidents Lopez Portillo and de la Madrid, this near sacred quality broke down considerably under President Salinas. 24. Ann Craig and Wayne Cornelius, “The Political Culture in Mexico” in Almond and Verba, The Civic Culture Revisited (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989), 365. 25. Quoted in Martı´nez Alcantara´, Salinas juego solo en la sucesio´n presidencial, 47. 26. Bailey, Governing Mexico, 90. 27. Jose Antonio Crespo, Urnas de Pandora: partidos politicos y elecciones en el gobierno de Salinas (Mexico: CIDE, 1995), 8. 28. Interview with PAN senator Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, Mexico City, August 27, 1994. The expression “Jalisco Clause” comes from a song by the singer and film star Jorge Negrete. 29. A famous quote attributed to labor leader Fidel Velasquez summarizes this neatly: “He who moves first doesn’t show up in the photograph.” 30. Dedazo means, roughly, “pointing the big finger” at the chosen candidate. Ironically, the dedazo was one of the surviving undemocratic practices from the despised Porfiriato. 31. “‘Unwritten Laws’ Affecting Choice of PRI Candidate,” Proceso (No. 558, July 13, 1987), 10–13. 32. Philip, The Presidency in Mexican Politics, 13. 33. Roger D. Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1971), 124, 187. 34. Interview with Juan Jose´ Rodrı´guez Pratt, Mexico City, August 28, 1995. 35. Guglielmo Ferrero, The Principles of Power: The Great Political Crises of History (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 217. 36. Interview with Bravo Mena. 37. Stephen D. Morris, Political Reformism in Mexico (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 223. 38. Quoted in Alberto Aziz Nassif, “Neopanismo y neopriismo en Chihuahua” in Ricardo Pozas and Matilde Luna, coord., Las empresas y los empresarios en el Mexico contemporaneo (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1991), 232.

CHAPTER 1

Mexico’s Democratic Transition

In their brief classic on transition theory, Guillermo O’Donnell and Philippe Schmitter asserted “that there is no transition whose beginning is not the consequence—direct or indirect—of important divisions within the authoritarian regime itself, principally along the fluctuating cleavage between hardliners and soft-liners.”1 Without denying the importance of divisions within the regime itself, this work investigates another path to democratization.2 In Mexico’s authoritarian political culture, in which a single “great party”—the PRI—monopolized political power for decades, the seeds for a democratic transition were sown with the creation of an opposition “system party” inspired by democratic values. The National Action Party’s (PAN) fundamental commitment to democratic values helped transform Mexico’s “great party” politics and bring about a democratic transition. Founded by Catholic intellectuals and liberals during the 1930s, the PAN adopted Catholic social doctrine as a counterpoint to the revolutionary elite’s ideology and political formula. Rather than discard the radically anticlerical Mexican Revolution root and branch, the PAN’s leaders believed that many revolutionary principles were compatible with liberal and Catholic thought, and that by competing in elections, no matter how rigged against them, they could educate the public about the virtues of political democracy. Thus the PAN rejected the road taken by “great party” Catholics who had either fought a guerrilla war against the state or had rejected politics entirely. Democracy, as Larry Diamond wisely wrote, is a developmental phenomenon, and Mexico’s democratic transition has been a lengthy historical process.3 It took decades for the PAN to develop as a strong, system party capable of assuming power. Indeed, this system party had to overcome several times

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An Eternal Struggle

its own “antisystem” tendencies, which opposed political participation and cooperation with the one-party state. But as the PAN developed, it forced the ruling PRI to act defensively; to gradually develop a moderate, reforming element; and to liberalize the political system. By the time of President Carlos Salinas’s sexenio, or six-year term (1988–1994), an open alliance between the PAN and regime moderates had occurred. A transition of the “great party” regime was underway, setting the stage for a turnover of power in 2000.

DEFI NING T H E D E M O C R AT I C T R A N S I T I O N Part of the genius of the PRI was that it preserved many democratic characteristics despite ruling in an authoritarian manner. With a definite egalitarian bent, it incorporated the masses into a nationwide party system. It steadfastly upheld the form of the constitution and elections, if not caring much for their substance. In the system’s heyday, these qualities even prompted one prominent scholar to judge the Mexican system as an experiment in “single-party” democracy.4 Another student of the Mexican system believed that the nation’s progress toward democracy itself began with the formation of the ruling party.5 The later generation of Mexican analysts, such as Kenneth Johnson, would characterize the Mexican system as an experiment in “esoteric democracy,” a carefully preserved democratic fac¸ade.6 In discussing the democratization of a country under such a system, therefore, it is necessary to be precise about what democracy would mean in this context. As Giovanni Sartori warned, “wrong ideas about democracy make a democracy go wrong.”7 In the beginning of the 1990s, Samuel Huntington declared economist Joseph Schumpeter’s procedural concept of democracy—“that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote”—the most widely accepted definition in the political science profession.8 Proponents of procedural definitions stress their realism because they reject a definition of democracy associated with achieving normative values such as “the common good,” in favor of one that acts as a system of processing conflicts. Democracy’s end is simply to provide a value-free dispute resolution mechanism; its merit lies in the democratic process itself, which, they maintain, represents its greatest attraction for competing groups. Procedural theory advocates hope to fashion a theory of democratization that would work regardless of a nation’s political culture or historical development. In contrast to classical or liberal democratic theories with their emphasis on commonly held democratic values, O’Donnell and Schmitter have maintained that “contingent consent” underlies modern political democracy. “Contemporary theories of democracy place the burden of consent upon party elites and professional politicians (sporadically subject to electoral approval)

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who agree among themselves, not on ethical or substantive grounds, but on the procedural norm of contingency.” Other contemporary theorists like Adam Przeworski and Guiseppi DiPalma follow the O’Donnell-Schmitter model. Przeworski defines democracy as “contestation open to participation,” a procedural definition that, he suggests, means that democracy is a system in which parties lose elections. In and of itself, democracy has no goal other than to resolve conflicts and keep outcomes open-ended. It defends no transcendent good, thus precluding any need to discuss the value-systems of its participants. Political parties, from Przeworski’s point of view, are only necessary evils that allow the masses some indirect control of the democratic process.9 For his part, Guiseppi DiPalma offers a “microapproach” to transition, arguing that the process of crafting itself determines to a great extent the success of the democratic consolidation. While rightly insisting that all major political actors should be represented in the crafting process, DiPalma offers no guide as to what interests—or political ideals—they should represent.10 There are some virtues to these procedural theories. For instance, their aggressive realism is a welcome alternative to utopian definitions of democracy, and they are often persuasive at describing the dynamic between ruling party reformers and the democratic opposition. Nevertheless, the Schumpeterian school of procedural democracy has some serious drawbacks. Democracy’s first principle—rule of the people—seems to get brushed aside by the theorists’ emphasis on elite negotiations. Mechanisms like political parties and constitutional frameworks that put into operation “the rule of the people” are not given sufficient consideration in their analyses. And the proceduralists’ insistence that the main actors in democratic transitions act not on the basis of a deep commitment to democratic values, but instead on the basis of rational self-interest, risks being nonfalsifiable.11 Mexico’s authoritarian oneparty state for decades may quite justly have been called an efficient dispute resolution mechanism. For a majority of Mexicans, it was arguably a rational approach to political challenges, although hardly a democratic one by today’s standards. As political scientist Ian Schapiro notes, political culture, which often determines a nation’s susceptibility to democratic practices, generally has little or no place in these procedural theories. History, which shapes a people’s value systems, interrelationships, and worldview, is also put aside. In short, the procedural theories do not account for the historical consciousness of the key actors and social forces that may cause a democratization project to succeed or fail. As will be argued here, understanding the main political tendencies in Mexican history with their accompanying values systems is critical to understanding Mexican democratization. Without a strong accompanying value system, “contingent consent” can hardly serve as a self-sufficient principle for democratization. In December 1997 two articles warned about the two opposites of liberal, constitutional

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democracy: “liberal authoritarianism,” which lacks political liberties like Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore, and “illiberal democracy,” which lacks legal guarantees like Alberto Fujimori’s Peru.12 Another journalist warned of the emergence of a new type of regime, particularly relevant to Mexico, called the “narcodemocracy,” a criminal state in which the forms of democracy endure but “politicians are at the service of drug traffickers.”13 In short, although democracy is the legitimizing political principle of modern times, it has many corrupt forms. Contingent consent could lead a democracy to decay as well as to progress. Without a basis of shared values, unresolved, destabilizing conflict may be transferred into a democratic format with nothing to check or contain it. This is especially true when regime-monopolizing “great parties” emerge in a political system. Concerning the famous case of Weimar Germany, historian Kurt Sontheimer reflected that “democracy knows and supports the principle of opposition, that is, opposition to a certain policy within the framework of principles enjoying the common support of all, but not resistance to the state and its basic constitutional principles. To a great extent, the opposition to the Weimar Republic was opposition to the Republic and democracy as such.”14 Authoritarian great parties, such as the Nazi and the Communists, and similar tendencies even within the traditional parliamentary parties themselves, made democratic norms untenable. Without resolving great party conflict, a newly formed democracy could become a civil war by other means. The breakdown of the Weimar Republic and other failed democratic governments strongly suggests that preliminary acceptance of democratic values is important for a successful democratic transition. Tellingly, O’Donnell and Schmitter could not dismiss intrinsic democratic values completely. They acknowledge that a transition depends “on subjective factors as the degree of mutual trust, standards of fairness, and the willingness to compromise.”15 And along with these subjective factors, a transition requires the objective means to bring it about. As Ferdinand Hermens, a diligent student of the breakdown of democracies prior to World War II, reminds us: “Any discussion of values is, however, likely to go astray unless it is combined with an analysis of the means to be used for their realization.”16 This study proposes, therefore, three necessary elements, all interrelated, that form the basis for Mexico’s democratic political transition: the conciliation of the great party political culture; the development of political liberty in a constitutional framework; and the founding of an effective opposition movement that promotes democratic values and forms the basis of a stable and representative party system.17 THE FIRST C O N D I T I O N : C O N C I L I AT I O N O F T H E GREAT PART I E S Some writers on Latin America’s political culture have doubted its compatibility with democracy. Glen C. Dealy, for example, rejects the notion of

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a Latin American disposition to democratic pluralism, believing instead that the tradition emphasizes unity through corporatism.18 Alfred Stepan adds that the “organic-statist” tendency is useful in dealing with Latin America because it derives from Aristotle, Roman and canon law, as well as Catholic social teachings.19 It follows, then, that a state organizing civil society according to corporatist principles, much like the corporatism of the Mexican state under the authoritarian PRI, would correspond closely with the political culture of Mexico. But these views give a misleading picture of political culture. Tocqueville himself remarked that it is better to speak of “political cultures” than of an all-encompassing political culture.20 Rather than defining Mexico as an authoritarian political culture, it is more useful to think of two Mexicos with competing social forces and worldviews.21 Richard Morse noted that both missionaries and conquistadors founded Mexico, one group operating in the Thomistic worldview, and the other in the Machiavellian. These two tendencies became the dominant and recessive characteristics of the Latin American political culture.22 Another observer described Mexican political culture as “a fragmented one in which the violence of internecine struggle has appeared again and again in the absence of consensus on fundamentals as to the way government should operate—its relationship to citizens, their relationship to government, and the overall goals toward which policy should be directed, that is, the basic purpose of government.”23 Out of this fragmentation eventually emerged the Mexican one-party state, which dominated the nation for most of the twentieth century. To overcome cleavages and construct a democratic society, a metanoia, or conciliation, was needed by both Mexico’s ruling, revolutionary class and the predominantly Catholic opposition to end the great party struggle.24 This must come about both from the democratic aspirations of the opposition and from the reform-minded tendencies of elites in the ruling class to forge a new political formula. Without this conciliation, the forging of a democratic social consensus cannot take place. The nature of Mexico’s political divisions suggests that the communal basis for Mexican democracy needed to rest on something deeper than the procedural norm of “contingent consent.” The members of the two great parties need to acknowledge obligations to each other that go beyond electoral rules. They must learn some degree of mutual trust so they can all share in the good life that democracy can provide. Respected Mexican commentators, such as Samuel Ramos, have long noted that distrust is the most striking aspect of the Mexican character.25 But the political accord beginning in 1988 between the PAN and the PRI demonstrated that this culture of distrust could be overcome. By the 1990s, Mexican attitudes led two political scientists to conclude that trust in other people has risen, pride in political institutions has increased, and people have reported being less alienated from politics. “Mexicans had shifted to become one

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people, and a more politically attentive one in the process.”26 Through the course of this narrative, signposts of great party conciliation as part of the democratic transition include: • Acceptance of the constitutional order and a common frame of political reference. In this case, it means reconciling with the fundamental legitimacy of the Mexican Revolution. The Catholic social forces made this concession most notably in the 1930s, when the PAN was founded as a system party opposition and when the Catholic Church began openly to cooperate with the revolutionary government. Catholics were putting aside their own great party aspirations. • Cross-cleavage cooperation between political groups. This means the opening of dialogue between the opposition and the ruling party to cooperate on reform. This would also occur in both elections and in legislatures in which opposition parties such as the PAN joins forces with “revolutionary,” but nonruling, parties such as the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) to achieve a common goal. This indicates growing levels of trust and cooperation, key values for a democratic community. • The breaking of long-held taboos, such as for the revolutionary state to reconcile its relationship with the Catholic Church and overcome the Church-State cleavage. The most telling indication of this was the reform of the 1917 Constitution in the early 1990s to allow more freedom to the Church. In many ways this brought the PRI government to terms with the nation’s past and bridged its “political cultures.” • Liberalization and the recognition of opposition victories. This would include recognizing victories of the nonrevolutionary, “Catholic” party and surrendering— willingly—the monopoly of rule of the Revolutionary Family. The circle of those accepted as legitimate within the corridors of power widens. Liberalization as seen here may be a defensive, delaying tactic, but it also contributes significantly to opening up the political system to facilitate deeper reforms.

THE SECON D C O N D I T I O N : P O L I T I C A L L I B E RT Y The next necessary element for Mexican democratization is political liberty. Authors of the realist political tradition support political liberty as the vital norm of democracy. Aristotle, for example, considered the aim of every democracy to be liberty, with equality acting as the means to attain it. He added that political liberty is “the interchange of ruling and being ruled” in contrast to civil liberty, which is “doing what one likes.”27 In giving substance to political liberty, Montesquieu depended upon his famous balancing of powers, both within the institutions of the national government and between the national and regional governments. He observed that when political liberty exists, moderation and restraint prevail in society, which he called a “tranquility of spirit which comes from the opinion each has of his security.”28 As a concept embodying the separation and division of powers, rights of the opposition, and governmental accountability to the people, political liberty is the sine qua non of individual liberty.29 Tocqueville underscored its

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importance when he said, “to give the democratic epithet to a government where there is no political liberty is a palpable absurdity.”30 As Pierre Manent later explained, Tocqueville believed that political liberty allowed the social classes to relate better to one another in public life. It helps ameliorate the disruptiveness of pure democracy by reconciling inequity. The class struggle breaks out when political liberty disappears.31 In Mexico, the key tenets of political liberty, both constitutional and electoral, have long existed in form, if not in practice. The following are some basic mileposts for progress in this story of democratization: • Free and fair elections within a competitive party system must be ensured. The first challenge in Mexico’s democratic transition was the struggle to achieve a just electoral environment and allow opposition parties to compete within it. In this case, it entailed the development in 1990 of the Federal Electoral Institute, which eventually acted like an independent fourth branch of government. • Mexico’s political overcentralization began to be reversed by recognizing the federal system of government as framed in the constitution, especially the separation of powers between the legislative and executive within the federal government and the division of powers between the federal and state governments. More power would also be devolved to the states, and they would have more control over their revenue base. The “free municipality” would return as a truly functional instrument of government. • The PRI relinquished its aspirations as the only governing party and transformed itself from a great party into an electoral competitor within a pluralistic party system. Without a peaceful turnover in power, no transition in Mexico would have had legitimacy.

THE THI RD CO N D I T I O N : T H E O P P O SI T I O N PA RT Y The effective opposition party is the third necessary element for democratization. For Italian historian Guglielmo Ferrero, liberalism’s great achievement was a political party representing the minority and preserving the spirit of opposition, especially in light of the attacks on minority interests conducted by the totalitarian states of the 1930s. “In democracies,” Ferrero believed, “the opposition is an organ of popular sovereignty, as vital as the government.”32 An opposition party—itself a smaller version of a democratic community— can play an essential role in determining the course of the democratic transition. The party, which both articulates and shapes the groups’ interests, may provide a legitimate outlet for opposition to the regime.33 Parties also interact with other parties, thus influencing their opposite’s behavior. As Tocqueville understood, the party may check the tyranny of the majority by acting as a persuasive force both by organizing minorities and by penetrating the intellectual and political majority.34 “The task of an active democratic opposition,”

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as contemporary theorist Alfred Stepan observed, “is to change the relations among all the component parts of the authoritarian system in such a way as to weaken authoritarianism while simultaneously improving the conditions for democratization.”35 But purely procedural definitions of democracy often lead to purely pragmatic definitions of the political party. Schumpeter, for example, refuted Burke’s famous definition of the “principle-based” political party: “Party is a body of men united for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest upon some particular principle in which they are all agreed.”36 Instead, he proposed that “a party is a group whose members propose to act in concert in the competitive struggle for political power.”37 Because competing parties often adopt the same issues or platforms, it is therefore improper to make ideology a distinguishing characteristic. Many theorists have rejected Burke’s definition in favor of Schumpeter’s more pragmatic one.38 But the Schumpetarian definition of politicians operating in accordance with only narrow self-interest makes it difficult to imagine how conciliation could develop between two great parties. Indeed, if its members were guided only by pragmatic concerns, it is likewise difficult to imagine how an opposition party like the PAN could form in Mexico’s authoritarian political environment. For decades there was no material reward for its political participation, but the PAN’s commitment to democratic principles kept it in the field. THE PAN AS A D E M O C R AT I C “ S Y S T E M PA RT Y ” In contrast to the PRI’s “great party” system, the PAN was founded as a “system party”—that is, one committed to democratic principles and electoral competition in a pluralistic environment. The PAN’s founders were determined to end the PRI’s political monopoly, mold public opinion, act as an accountability mechanism to the government, and get its members into positions of power.39 The opposition, in the words of one of the PAN’s past presidents, is not simply a counterweight, but a social force that represents the demands and aspirations of the entire country.40 Indeed, the PAN saw its mission in broader terms: to change Mexico’s political culture, through the civil society, to one more conducive to democracy and respect for the common good.41 One of the PAN’s founding generation, Luis Caldero´n Vega, described his understanding of the political party: “I believe, with Burke, that a party is an association free and voluntary, with a permanent organization . . . with a minimum of principles and whose object is the common good. And in this sense the party [the PAN] is the only one in Mexico that fulfills these elements of Burke’s definition.” In contrast, Caldero´n described the PRI as nonvoluntary, founded by the state, and without principles other than a defense of its constitution.42 In the end, the PAN’s persistence and dedication to peaceful

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transition succeeded. By insisting on political reform and not regime upheaval, the PAN demonstrated the importance of both the strategy and the temperament of the opposition in determining the characteristics of the democratic transition. The PAN has been described by scholars Franz von Sauer and Soledad Loaeza as a “loyal opposition.” Certainly the PAN fulfills the ten criteria for a loyal opposition laid out by political scientist Juan Linz, which boil down to a commitment to maintaining a legal constitutional order, following parliamentary procedure, and rejecting other political actors who refuse to do so, but these are not sufficient in describing the PAN’s role.43 Linz’s definition applies to a legitimate, democratic political system. The PAN, however, differentiated between the constitutional order, which it regarded as a legitimate product of the Mexican Revolution, and the great party regime, which it believed had illegitimately monopolized the nation’s political life. Therefore, the PAN should be defined more precisely as a reforming system party because it assumed the goal to educate the Mexican public in the practices of democratic government and to open up the political system to democratic competition. PAN founder Manuel Go´mez Morı´n rejected the idea of his party as both a “great party” and as a “loyal opposition.” As he stated in an extensive interview in the late 1960s, “We are still in the classic situation of a party of opposition. Not of ‘Her Majesty’s loyal opposition’ that can occupy political positions the day following the government’s departure, but in the position of a Latin opposition: a party that is pointing out errors, that is indicating new ways, that is trying to clean up the administration, improve the institutions, program a collective effort for reform and mold citizens and persons capable of occupying public positions with rectitude and efficiency.”44 Throughout its history, many commentators have underestimated PAN’s importance in the Mexican political system. From the standpoint of Revolutionary Family hard-liners, the PAN stood for the reaction and merely continued the policies of the nineteenth-century conservatives who waged open war against the ultimately victorious liberals.45 Critics on the left sometimes portrayed the party as practically fascist because it has represented elements in reaction to the Mexican Revolution.46 Indeed, one lengthy study regarded the party as the instrument of the bourgeoisie, as the “party of bankers.”47 A well-known book on Christian Democracy in Latin America refers to the PAN as a “right wing, clerical” party.48 On the other hand, some critics on the right have considered the party as too acquiescent to the wishes of the Revolutionary Family.49 The dean of Mexican liberal historians, Daniel Cosı´o Villegas, offered this appraisal of the PAN during the PRI’s golden age: There is one undoubted merit that the men in Accio´n Nacional do possess, [party founder] Manuel Gomez Morı´n more than any of the rest, of course. They were the

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first to shake off the political apathy so characteristic of Mexicans; they were the first to preoccupy themselves as a group with some of the problems facing the land, and to propose solutions different from the official formulas. In sum, they have sacrificed part of their well being (be it large or small) in opposition to the government.

Cosı´o Villegas concluded by giving the PAN a negative assessment that in many ways became the standard interpretation of the party: “But their defects are much greater than their merits; they represent, they are instruments of, not Catholicism but an ecclesiastic hierarchy which has no moral superiority of any sort; they represent or they play up to questionable plutocratic interests.”50 Underestimating the PAN’s role in Mexico’s democratic progress continued well into the 1990s.51 Analysts tended to overlook it as a real option to the PRI due to its third-place showing in the presidential election of 1988.52 One prominent scholar in the mid-1990s regarded the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) as the true democratic opposition because of its populist ideology and its intransigence in negotiating with the PRI, despite many of its members’ being scions of Mexico’s Revolutionary Family.53 Part of the reason for the underestimation of the PAN may be attributed to PAN leaders themselves, who sometimes stopped short in defining their party’s goal as the conquest of political power. For example, PAN president Adolfo Christlieb once spelled out the duties of his party thus: “Accio´n Nacional realizes . . . a service of criticism and vigilance of public power; orients opinion in the face of official information, with the presentation of points of view that identifies mistaken tendencies, errors of government and correct solutions, in the judgement of our party, about national problems, and looks to organize citizens in order to prepare them to share or exercise the responsibilities of power.”54 Even Go´mez Morı´n’s own description of the party as “a pressure group” has been interpreted that the PAN’s founder never saw it as true alternative to the PRI.55 These views have led some scholars to identify the PAN’s essential function as to raise civic consciousness or as an “institutionalized” opposition that serves as one of many organizations the ruling party employs to legitimize its position.56 A broader perspective is needed on the PAN as the reforming “system” party. The PAN long survived its contemporaries of its founding era, parties such as the Revolutionary Party of National Unification (PRUN), which had also sprung up to oppose the revolutionary party but then quickly disappeared, or the Popular Socialist Party (PPS), the creature of Revolutionary Family member Vicente Lombardo Toledano.57 By rejecting great party aspirations and by persisting as an opposition party in a one-party state, PAN brought back into Mexican political life the concept of political liberties. It established itself as a clear ideological alternative to the regime. It committed itself to the peaceful transition of Mexican politics within established democratic norms.

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Moreover, it attracted to its ranks leaders with the talent and persistence to follow through on a democratizing strategy. The PAN’s founders believed that they were introducing a new element into Mexican political life. As some of its later ideologues explained it, “in a country without the tradition of broad, autonomous and competitive political parties, National Action introduces, for the first time in Mexican history, the idea and realization at the same time of the modern political party in the western sense, permanent and of national inspiration, that acts in a open and legal manner.”58 Other panistas ascribed to the party a more mystical role: “Politics is the most elevated human activity in the temporal plane. Its dignity is equal to that of religion because it attempts to create better conditions for the completion of human destiny. Before the ideological chaos of our times, it raises the hope for a restoration upon the foundation of permanent principles: this is the work of Accio´n Nacional.”59 Without the PAN on the scene, Mexico’s democratic transition may have had a profoundly different character—or may not have happened at all. Several distinguishing characteristics of the PAN helped it make a significant contribution to Mexican political life. The PAN represented Catholic social forces excluded from political power. The National Action Party was founded in 1939 by both Catholic activists and disgruntled ex-revolutionary liberals to legitimately challenge the great party hegemony of Mexico’s revolutionary political elite. In itself, it helped reconcile the country’s Catholic social forces to the legitimacy of the revolution and to political democracy. It was one of the first major steps in overcoming the Church–State cleavage that had divided Mexico since independence. The PAN helped put an end to Catholics’ own great party aspirations, even though antisystem tendencies would linger within the party for decades after its founding. Though bearing the philosophical imprint of the international Christian Democracy movement, the PAN rejected the “confessional party” label. Scholars of Christian Democratic parties typically describe them as “confessional,” thus emphasizing their religious origins and Catholic-derived principles.60 Indeed, some PAN leaders, such as former party president Carlos Castillo Peraza, acknowledged that his party is akin to “social Christianity,” or Christian Democracy.61 Nevertheless, one prominent party official and ideologue well versed in Catholic social doctrine took issue with calling the party “the Catholic response to revolution,” the subtitle of Donald Mabry’s study of the party.62 Reflecting political realities in Mexico, PAN leaders often sought to distance the party from anything resembling “clericalism” and tended to reject the “confessional party” label. Soledad Loaeza, in her recent history of the party, maintained that the relations between the “confessional” PAN and Catholicism have been “ambiguous and contradictory.”63 Certainly the PAN adopted Catholic social thought without becoming, strictly speaking, a “confessional party” like its

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An Eternal Struggle

predecessor during the revolutionary years, the National Catholic Party. The PAN was founded and run exclusively by the laity and, by both necessity and conviction, kept itself distant from clerical influence. During the 1960s, to keep the party tolerable to the ruling PRI, the PAN leadership even expelled some members who wanted the party to align itself directly with the Christian Democratic movement. After all, the Constitution of 1917, specifically Article 130, forbade Christian parties from participating in politics. The founding mission of the PAN helped guide its political outlook and trajectory. Founder Go´mez Morı´n, a brilliant young technocrat in government service, had been intoxicated by the promise of the revolution, but he soon attacked its shortcomings. During the 1920s, he believed that the revolution contradicted itself by elevating an “ignoble military oligarchy.”64 Gomez Morı´n drifted away from the revolutionary ranks and gradually identified more with the Catholic resistance to the dictatorship. Gomez Morı´n developed a plan for constructing a political party that would proselytize, organize, and study to develop a platform. This organization— not subordinated to the goals of a single caudillo-like leader—would try to awaken public opinion and even put off immediate electoral victory in order to build for the future. Acting in the short term as a “constructive critic,” it would have the goal, “as is natural for all political enterprises, for the future conquest of power.”65 According to former party president Luis H. Alvarez, “The PAN was not conceived as a party of opposition, but as a party with its own proposals, that we considered viable. . . . We believe in a constructive attitude, because we are convinced of the benefits of our doctrine, our propositions and our governing projects.”66 The PAN leadership’s concentration on forming a comprehensive worldview runs counter to the Schumpeterian approach that sees political parties as little more than organized elites competing for votes.67 Indeed, the PAN’s message probably did much to sustain its faithful during its wilderness years when electoral victories were few and far between. The PAN’s ideological profile made it a clear alternative to the “revolutionary” party. Ideologically, the PAN is not easily categorized. Few of its leaders have called it a party of the right, or even a “conservative” party, preferring instead “centrist” or even a “center forward” party.68 During the mid-1990s, its president, Carlos Castillo Peraza, stressed PAN’s centrist position between the PRI’s right and the Party of the Democratic Revolution’s left. In brief, the PAN called for restoring the rights of the human person, and the rights of the family, as inalienable rights and not as privileges granted by the state. As for the state, its role was to oversee the common good and to intervene to ensure social justice. Central to the PAN’s political agenda was the restoration of the civil rights of the Catholic Church and the rights of parents to have religious education for their children. Subsidiarity is the key idea of the PAN’s concept of good government. Go´mez Morı´n believed that good government began with the lowest political

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unit, the municipality. The municipality would serve both as a building block for responsible government and as a means to exercise genuine political liberty.69 Through the years, the emphasis on certain aspect of PAN’s “political humanism” changed—it took on a more radical tinge during the late 1960s— but the core message since the party founding endured. Rejecting the PRI’s corporatist and oligarchic methods, the PAN set out to create a democratic and representational party organization. Its membership consisted of people who made a solid commitment to the party and, unlike the ruling party, were not accepted into the party rolls by virtue of their membership in labor unions or other groups. To discourage penetration by the government, prospective party militants had to undergo a period of indoctrination. The PAN also had a lower category of membership for sympathizers who did not participate in party decisions. For a political party, its official membership tended to run low, belying the party’s electoral strength. Some scholars have made the point that the PAN, following Duverger’s definition, has been a “party of notables,” and not a mass party, for most of its existence. Abraham Nuncio commented that power in the party was concentrated in the hands of a few people.70 But one scholar on the PAN, JeanFrancois Prud’homme, noted that the party has had a high degree of institutionalization since its founding: “the National Action Party consolidated around an organizational model which was defined in opposition to the personalization of political activity and the spontaneous character of popular movements. The organized party was perceived as an instrument of political action that was technically superior. This conception of the technical superiority of the party organization would be of great importance in the party’s existence, especially with reference to the definition of internal procedures and the consolidation of an organizational culture.”71 After the PAN’s founder, Go´mez Morı´n, resigned from the presidency, no one man ever dominated the party’s leadership. Moreover, the party never nominated a presidential contender twice. In this way, the party kept itself from being the instrument of one man’s personal ambitions. Despite its restrictions on membership and its tendency to favor established personalities for leadership positions, the PAN attracted new blood into the party. Indeed, throughout the PAN’s history, it was not unusual to see new members ascend to high positions fast. New recruits, however, tended to come from either Catholic activism or from business groups. With few exceptions, the PAN did not appeal to disgruntled PRI elites, which is a striking testament to Mexico’s natural political divisions. Party delegates selected the president, who in turn appointed the National Executive Committee to handle the party’s day-to-day affairs. Candidates for office were selected by party conventions. In the past, a candidate had to receive 80 percent of the ballots to win the nomination—another safeguard to prevent a PRI-backed “Trojan horse” candidate—but in the 1990s this rule was liberalized to a simple majority vote. In the 1999 presidential nominating

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An Eternal Struggle

process, the PAN allowed its members to directly choose the presidential candidate, a decision made after the PRI itself adopted an open primary. The PAN founders knew that it was critical for the party to be financially independent of the government. Besides membership dues and tithing by elected officials, the PAN for years used auto raffles as its biggest moneymaker. Especially in its early years, most of its candidates had to finance their own political campaigns, which contributed to the party’s reputation as the mouthpiece for economic elites. But contributions to the party from businessmen were often unreliable. Especially after the 1940s, business tended to throw in its lot with the PRI. Once the PAN garnered more electoral successes, it naturally attracted more funding. The decision by the party in the late 1980s to accept public financing, though controversial with many of the party old guard, kept the party in the black without sacrificing its independence. Through the years, the PAN employed a consistent strategy of electoral competition and political dialogue. Rather than proposing radical change, the PAN’s strategy for most of its history has been essentially pragmatic in its willingness to work within the political situation as it existed.72 Go´mez Morı´n and his colleagues saw that the revolutionary party could not be easily uprooted. The only solution was to chip away at its power at the margins and, when opportune, push for electoral reform. Its long-term strategy, in the words of political scientist Jose Antonio Crespo, was that “little by little, and in the indeterminate future, the regime would be obliged to accept the opening [it created] and permit authentically competitive elections.”73 The grand electoral design of the party might be termed a “periphery to the center” strategy. This was characterized as a patient approach, building support at the local level, then gaining strength to challenge in municipal, then state, races.74 Other opposition parties or movements that tried to challenge the PRI opted for a popular referendum strategy, in which a charismatic leader, such as Jose Vasconcelos in 1929, Juan Andreu Almaza´n in 1940, and Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas in 1988, failed to oust the ruling party in one electoral blow. Another aspect of the PAN’s strategy was selective dialogue with the PRI government. The relationship that party president Adolfo Christlieb established with Interior Secretary Gustavo Diaz Orda´z enabled the electoral reform of 1963, which instituted proportional representation for the first time. Even more noteworthy was the ongoing dialogue and cooperation that PAN’s leadership carried on with Presidents Carlos Salinas and Ernesto Zedillo on electoral reform. The PAN sometimes accompanied this approach with protests following electoral disputes. Often these applied enough pressure to the government to force concessions, as in the aftermath of Guanajuato’s state election in 1991. Finally, the consistent participation in elections was another of the PAN’s strategic principles. It began with municipal and state races and built from the ground up. It conducted its first presidential election in 1952 and, with

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the exception of 1976, fielded a candidate in every national election thereafter. This strategy paid off: in the official count, the PAN gained a bigger national percentage in virtually every presidential election. Despite being conceived as a system party after Catholic “great party” responses to revolution had failed, the PAN frequently had to cope with “antisystem” elements within its own ranks. While not precisely a “great party” tendency, “antisystem” refers here to a rejection by party activists of both electoral politics and dialogue with the “great party” regime. For example, the trend to align the party with Christian Democracy in the 1960s threatened to convert the PAN into an unacceptable antisystem party. Another significant countertrend in the PAN to electoral participation occurred during the 1970s and 1990s. At the root of this were some party traditionalists who envisioned the PAN as more of a critic of government than an adversary in the struggle for power.75 This was perhaps a natural reaction after thirty years in opposition with no possibility of holding office or seeking redress for electoral fraud. With the rise of the neopanistas in the 1980s, however, this trend began to fade, and the PAN intensified its electoral participation. While understanding the PAN’s role in the Mexican political system, it pays to bear in mind what Angelo Panebianco identified as two prejudices: the sociological, which holds that parties are nothing more than manifestations of the social order in the political arena, and the teleological, which holds that the stated goals of parties are what determines their behavior.76 The party institution itself is a variable, and occasionally in the PAN’s case institutional considerations won out over its professed mission. For example, survival of the PAN outweighed even its stated principles when the party withdrew from participation in the 1976 presidential election. Likewise, the goals of its own factions sometimes took the party in different directions. The PAN stood in opposition for sixty-one years. The PAN founders sometimes referred to the party’s work as la brega de eternidad—the eternal struggle. The PAN, at times, could be accused of growing comfortable with its status as the permanent opposition or, as in the presidential election of 1994, of missing important opportunities to make gains. Looking back over its history, it appears that the party had diagnosed the political problem in Mexico correctly and employed a sound strategy to change it. But there was nothing inevitable about the outcome. To contextualize the PAN in Mexican political life, the next chapter discusses the great party conflict between the revolutionary and Catholic social forces that impeded democratic development and led to the founding of both the PRI and the PAN.

NOTES 1. O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Tentative Conclusions about Uncertain Democracies (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1986), 19. Soft-

16

An Eternal Struggle

liners are differentiated from hard-liners by their “increasing increasing awareness that the regime . . . will have to make use, in the foreseeable future, of some degree or some form of electoral legitimation.” Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, 16. 2. Tocqueville offered a definition of great parties as those that “attack the actual form of government and the general course of society.” He contrasted these with “small parties,” which are “broken up ad infinitum on questions of detail.” Instead of using the term “small parties,” this study prefers the less disparaging term “system parties.” Democracy in America (New York: HarperPerennial, 1969), 177. 3. Larry Diamond, Developing Democracy (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 18. 4. Cline, Mexico: Revolution to Evolution 1940–1960, 149. 5. Scott, Mexican Government in Transition, 295 6. Kenneth F. Johnson, Mexican Democracy: A Critical View (New York: Praeger, 1984), 116. 7. Giovanni Sartori, The Theory of Democracy Revisited Vol. I. (Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers, 1987), 3. 8. Samuel P. Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 6–7. See also Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 27. Definition quoted in Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (New York: Harper & Row, 1950), 269. 9. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Market (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 10–13. Przeworski also uses this formulation: “Democracy is a system of processing conflicts in which outcomes depend on what participants do but no single force controls what occurs.” 10. Guiseppi DiPalma, To Craft Democracies (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), 111. 11. Ian Schapiro, Democracy’s Place (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 88–107. Along with the philosopher Alistair MacIntyre, we might ask, “Whose rationality?” 12. Robert D. Kaplan, “Was Democracy Just a Moment?” The Atlantic Monthly 280 (December 1997), 55–80, and Fareed Zakaria, “The Rise of Illiberal Democracy” Foreign Affairs 76 (December 1997). Later Zakaria continued developing this theme in The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 89–118. 13. Silvana Paternostro, “Mexico as a Narco-democracy,” World Policy Journal 12 (Spring 1995), 43. 14. Fritz Stern et al. The Path to Dictatorship 1918–1933 (New York: Praeger, 1966), 36. 15. O’Donnell and Schmitter, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule, 59. 16. Ferdinand A. Hermens, The Representative Republic (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1958), 148. 17. Mexico’s progress in corresponding to all democratic norms is beyond the scope of this work. For an effort to establish universally accepted democratic norms, see The Copenhagen Meeting of the Conference on the Human Dimension of the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe (CSCE) 5 to 29 June 1990. 18. Glen C. Dealy, “The Tradition of Monistic Democracy in Latin America” in

Mexico’s Democratic Transition

17

Howard Wiarda, Politics and Social Change in Latin America (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), 54. 19. Alfred Stepan, The State and Society: Peru in Comparative Perspective (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979), 40. 20. James Ceasar, Liberal Democracy and Political Science (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 144–45. 21. Kenneth M. Coleman and Charles L. Davis, Politics and Culture in Mexico (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for Political Studies, 1988), 4–5. 22. Richard Morse, “Toward a Theory of Spanish-American Government,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15 (1954), 71–75. 23. L. Vincent Padgett, The Mexican Political System (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1996), 9. 24. Metanoia, according to Dante Germino, as a concept of theocentric humanism, is a change of attitude or orientation by man toward existence. In contrast, the metastasis of messianic humanism is belief in the change of existence. See Beyond Ideology: The Revival of Political Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1967), 31, 221–22. 25. Samuel Ramos, Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1962), 64. 26. Jorge I. Domı´nguez and James A. McCann, Democratizing Mexico (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 24, 35. 27. Ernest Barker, ed. The Politics of Aristotle (London: Oxford University Press, 1958), 258. 28. Baron de la Bre`de et de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 174. 29. Tocqueville remarked that Voltaire and the physiocrats’ failure to realize that political liberty was the prerequisite to individual freedom helped determine the nature of the French Revolution. The Old Regime and the French Revolution (New York: Anchor Books, 1955), 157–61. 30. Quoted in Ceasar, Liberal Democracy and Political Science, 218 n. 14. 31. Pierre Manent, Tocqueville and the Nature of Democracy (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1996), 113–16. 32. Ferrero, The Principles of Power, 174. 33. Scott Mainwaring and Timothy R. Scully, Building Democratic Institutions (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 3. 34. Jack Lively, The Social and Political Thought of Alexis de Tocqueville (Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1961), 134. 35. Alfred Stepan, “On the Tasks of a Democratic Opposition,” Journal of Democracy 1 (Spring 1990), 42. 36. Burke, Works Vol. I., 530. 37. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 283. 38. Jack Lively, Democracy (Oxford, UK: Basil Blackwell, 1975), 125. 39. Antonio Delhumeau, Mexico: Realidad polı´tica de sus partidos (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Estudios Politicos 1970), 155. 40. Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola, La Oposicio´n (Mexico: Ediciones de Accio´n Nacional, 1978), 12–13. 41. “Reforma del Estado y nueva cultura polı´tica,” La Nacio´n 50 (18 February 1991), 46–48. 42. Candida Fernandez Banos y Ana Marcovich de Kozlowski, “Un dialogo con los

18

An Eternal Struggle

hombre de Accion Nacional,” El Partido Accion Nacional: Ensayos y Testimonios (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericano, 1978), 174. 43. See Juan J. Linz, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes; Crisis, Breakdown and Reequilibration (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 36–37. 44. James W. Wilkie and Edna Monzo´n de Wilkie, Mexico visto en el Siglo XX (Mexico: Instituto Mexicano de Investigaciones Economicas, 1969), 219. 45. See Alejandro Carrillo, Genealogica polı´tica del sinarquismo y de accio´n nacional (Mexico: 1944), 4. 46. Roger Batra, “Viaje al centro de la derecha,” Nexos 6 (April 1983), 17. 47. Abraham Nuncio, El PAN (Mexico: Nueva Imagen, 1986), 24, 31. 48. Edward J. Williams, Latin American Christian Democratic Parties (Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1967), 14. 49. See Jesus Guisa y Azevedo, Accio´n Nacional es un equı´voco (Mexico: Editorial Polis, 1966). This theme was later repeated by Pablo Emilio Madero and other PAN defectors in the early 1990s. 50. Daniel Cosı´o Villegas, American Extremes (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1964), 25–26. 51. Miguel Angel Centeno, Democracy within Reason (University Park, PA: Penn State University, 1994), 241; Ann L. Craig and Wayne A. Cornelius, “Houses Divided: Parties and Political Reform in Mexico” in Mainwaring and Scully, Building Democratic Institutions, 272. 52. Soledad Loaeza, “The Role of the Right in Political Change in Mexico, 1982– 1988” in Dougles A. Chalmers et al., The Right and Democracy in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1992), 130. 53. Wayne Cornelius, “Mexico’s Delayed Democratization,” Foreign Policy 95 (Summer 1994), 41. 54. Christlieb, La Oposicio´n, 15. 55. Delhumeau, Mexico: la realidad polı´tica, 194–97. 56. Vikram Khub Chand, Politicization, Institutions and Democratization in Mexico: The Politics of the State of Chihuahua in National Perspective (Harvard University dissertation, 1991), 10; Laura N. O’Shaughnessy, Opposition in an Authoritarian Regime: The Incorporation and Institutionalization of the Mexican National Action Party (University of Indiana dissertation, 1977), 7–8. 57. Nuncio, El PAN, 76. 58. Fernando Estrada Samano et al., “Democracia para la justicia en la libertad” (unpublished party document, 1995), 85. 59. Delhumeau, Mexico: la realidad polı´tica, 189. 60. For example, Stathis N. Kalyvas, The Rise of Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), 1, n. 1. 61. Roberto Zamarripa, “El proyecto de reforma del PRI, aceptable; ‘pone las bases para un cuarto poder, el poder electoral’: Castillo Peraza,” Proceso 875 (9 August 1993), 23. 62. Interview with Fernando Estrada Samano, Mexico City, July 20, 1995. 63. Soledad Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional: la larga marcha, 1939–1994 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999), 106–07. 64. Enrique Krauze, Caudillos Culturales en la Revolucio´n Mexicana (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1976), 194. 65. Krauze, Caudillos Culturales, 275–78.

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19

66. Gerardo Galarza, “El gobierno de Salinas va a la zaga en la democratizacio´n del paı´s y el tiempo se agota,” Proceso 852 (March 1, 1993), 9. 67. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, 269. 68. Philip L. Russell, Mexico under Salinas (Austin, TX: Mexico Resource Center, 1994), 87. 69. Alonso Lujambio, “Dos Padres Fundadores y Una Idea: Los Orı´gines de la Estrategia Municipal-Federalista del Partido Accio´n Nacional” (unpublished manuscript), 5–8. 70. Nuncio, El PAN, 37. 71. Jean-Francois Prud’homme, “The National Action Party’s (PAN) Organization Life and Strategic Decisions” (Mexico: CIDE, 1997), 12. 72. Franz Von Sauer, The “Alienated” Loyal Opposition (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1974), 3. 73. Crespo, Urnas de Pandora: partidos politicos y electiones en el gobierno de Salinas, 22–23. 74. Interview with Senator Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, Mexico City, August 27, 1995. 75. Interview with Pablo Emilio Madero, San Pedro Garza Garcia, May 13, 1997. 76. Panebianco, Political Parties, 3–13.

CHAPTER 2

The Great Party Struggle and the Catholic Response to Revolution

A great party struggle impeded the development of Mexican democracy since the country’s independence from Spain in 1821. This chapter focuses mainly on the uncertain situation of the Catholic Church and the social forces that were committed to defend it, especially during the revolutionary period, which began in 1910 and lasted until the 1930s when the ruling party consolidated. The history of these Catholic social forces defines the central political cleavage during this era of conflict between Church and State and provides the background for understanding the founding of the National Action Party in 1939. “Catholic social forces” broadly refers to those organizations—social, political, economic, and even military—that were inspired to some degree by Catholic social doctrine and that were intent on defending the rights of the church, securing freedom of worship, defending private education, and even promoting a “Christian social order.” These forces engaged in a variety of strategies, including electoral participation by the National Catholic Party during the early years of the revolution, guerrilla warfare by the cristeros during the 1920s, and mass mobilization by the sinarquistas in the 1930s and 1940s. In striving for their objectives, these organizations were often guided by their own lights in interpreting Catholic doctrine and church policy. As Roderic Camp states in Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico, “the Catholic Church has operated in a political world that, for the most part, has been hostile, if not overtly, at least in terms of its culture, its premises, and its rhetoric.”1 Despite decades of Liberal and Revolutionary governments that officially denigrated the country’s Catholic traditions, Mexicans continued to identify overwhelmingly with the Catholic faith. According to historian

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An Eternal Struggle

James W. Wilkie, the Catholic identity of Mexicans remained at well over ninety percent even during the most anticlerical years of the revolutionary period.2 In this deeply Catholic culture, even “revolutionary” social forces could not completely avoid some influence by it.3 Many Mexican Catholics accepted the new political outcome, but others found it impossible to make common cause with the anticlerical ruling class. As Rene´ Capistra´n Garza, a Catholic activist of the 1920s, starkly put it, Catholics were forced to choose between “liberalism”—his term for these revolutionary trends-—and their faith.4 Although Catholic social forces would bear a resemblance to the discredited Conservative party of the nineteenth century—as members of the “Revolutionary Family” often hastened to point out—its adherents themselves took pains to distinguish themselves from the earlier movement.5 With the exception of a common goal to restore the Catholic Church’s legal recognition and a promotion of its cultural project in Mexican political life, these new conservatives actually reversed much of the past agenda. Without casting a great party strategy completely aside, the social forces eventually came to promote political liberty within a constitutional order and accept the separation of Church and State as the best arrangement for Mexico. Their struggle represents the Catholic world’s eventual conciliation with the spirit of nationalism and democracy, which dominated the politics of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. THE GREAT PA RT Y P R O B L E M I N T H E N I N E T E E N T H CENTURY An established church was a key principle of Mexican independence and the short-lived empire of Agustı´n de Iturbide (1822–1823). After Iturbide’s fall, and despite being urged by the Pope to resubmit themselves to a monarchy, Mexicans opted for a republic.6 A liberal constitution in 1824, bearing a strong resemblance to the American model, still maintained the established Catholic Church and managed to create a brief period of political calm.7 The new nation divided politically between the Liberals, representing a democratic and federalist government, and the Conservatives, supporting a centralized administration and an aristocratic adherence to the traditional social order.8 The Conservatives dominated the geographical center of the country, and the Liberals challenged them from the periphery.9 They also divided over other great issues: a disestablished versus an established church, free trade versus protectionism, republicanism versus monarchy. The Liberals and Conservatives constituted the opposing sides in the great party phenomenon of Mexican politics. Early on, both parties were influenced by competing Masonic lodges: the York Rite was associated with the Liberals and was aided by the United States, and the Scottish Rite with the Conservatives and Great Britain.10 The significant presence of Freemasonry in Mex-

The Great Party Struggle and the Catholic Response to Revolution

23

ican political life suggested the waning of Catholic political influence in the period after independence.11 Efforts to reconcile the fundamental conflict between the two parties by prohibiting the secret societies went for naught.12 An era of shifting fortunes between the Liberal and Conservative parties was interrupted often by the opportunistic despotism of Antonio Lo´pez de Santa Anna and the army. Commenting on the failure of the Mexicans to establish an effective constitution, Tocqueville remarked in Democracy in America that “at present Mexico is constantly shifting from anarchy to military despotism and back from military despotism to anarchy.”13 The Catholic Church’s position deteriorated during this chaotic period. The Church found itself increasingly vulnerable to Liberal attacks on its large property ownership, its separate courts, or fueros, and its monopoly on education.14 Church supporters countered that this wealth and privilege was required to support the country’s schools, hospitals, and relief for the poor.15 The Liberals began to confiscate church land often without regard for its impact on the country’s social stability.16 Under the Plan of Ayutla in 1855, the Liberals overthrew Santa Anna and cleared the field to carry out their political program, which, besides inaugurating political democracy, included the secularization of the country.17 They dominated the constituent assembly for a new constitution in 1857, which disestablished the church, prohibited its fueros, and limited its right to hold property. This constitution elicited a fierce reaction from the Mexican clergy and was publicly condemned by Pope Pius IX.18 Thereafter, the Liberals’ Reform Laws also stirred up controversy by trying to prohibit religious orders and recognize civil marriages.19 While offering the Mexican people many important rights and redress, the Constitution of 1857 advanced the cause of reform further than many Mexicans were willing to tolerate. The Conservatives, now a military–clerical alliance, pledged to restore the church’s land and privileges, and the ensuing conflict had the character of a religious war. After defeating the Conservatives in this “War of the Reform” in 1860, the Liberal Jua´rez government broke relations with the Vatican, and this diplomatic rupture would endure until the Salinas era one hundred thirty years later.20 With the overthrow of Juarez and the imposition by the French of the Archduke Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, the Church saw a new opportunity to restore its former privileges. The country suffered another civil war, pitting the Maximilian-supporting Conservatives and the Church against the Liberals under Jua´rez. But Maximilian provided little solace to those desiring a restoration of the church’s privileges and thus undermined his political backing.21 The United States lent its support to Jua´rez’s forces, and by 1867 Maximilian and the Conservatives had suffered their final defeat. Maximilian’s execution in Quere´taro, along with the Conservative generals Miguel Miramo´n and Toma´s Mejı´a, disposed of any opposition the Liberals had left to

24

An Eternal Struggle

encounter. No Catholic party would emerge as an alternative to the Liberals until 1911. The eight-year period after the defeat of the Conservatives impressed the historian Enrique Krauze as the high point of Mexican politics during the nineteenth century. Although competition between parties did not exist, the country was finally governed by constitutionalism and the rule of law, and Mexicans enjoyed a measure of political liberty.22 Jua´rez insisted on the maintenance of a bicameral Congress and oversaw the passage of the amparo law, which checked the power of the executive and helped establish an independent judiciary.23 He even made peace with the defeated Catholics.24 Yet Jua´rez abandoned the old Liberal position of federalism by centralizing the government and keeping tax revenues from the states.25 After Jua´rez’s death in 1872, Liberal president Sebastian Lerdo de Tejeda provoked another conflict by incorporating the Reform Laws into the Constitution of 1857. The Catholic religioneros, precursors to the cristeros of the 1920s, pinned down Federal armies for two years. Spurred by the success of this guerrilla campaign, Porfirio Dı´az, a disaffected Liberal and hero of the war against the French, staged a coup d’etat.26 Dı´az succeeded in overthrowing Lerdo de Tejeda and instituting a Liberal dictatorship that endured until 1910. Although they were initially heartened by Dı´az’s success, the Conservatives remained in political oblivion. Likewise Dı´az retained the Constitution of 1857 and left the Reform Laws on the books as a sword of Damocles over the Church. Despite initiating his revolt under the slogan of “effective suffrage, no reelection”—not the last time this slogan would be heard—Dı´az ruled as a dictator. Although in Mexico Catholics had remained in the Conservative camp during the era of Liberal ascendancy, in Europe a growing Catholic acceptance of liberalism had begun in the first half of the nineteenth century. French Catholic intellectuals took the lead in arguing that these new forms of representative government—despite the anti-Catholic turn of the French Revolution—were compatible with the faith. The idea developed that democracy was the surest guarantee of the Church’s security and that lay Catholics especially had to create their own political organizations.27 Political movements, notably in Ireland and Belgium, advanced Catholic aspirations for political and religious liberty. Summarizing the sentiments of the Catholic liberals, Charles Montalembert, who had been greatly impressed by Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Emancipation movement in Ireland, exclaimed: “I look before me and I see nothing but democracy everywhere. . . . In the new order Catholics will have to fight but will have nothing to fear.”28 Yet the Church still set itself against the liberal tide. Pope Gregory XVI condemned liberalism’s spirit of compromise as an indifference to truth. One of liberalism’s most notable Catholic apologists, Felicite´ de Lamanais, was excommunicated. Catholic traditionalists continued to view liberalism as a direct attack on the Church’s rights and privileges, courts, and economic

The Great Party Struggle and the Catholic Response to Revolution

25

structures.29 In their view, the liberal nationalist movements wished either to suppress the Church or to subordinate it to state control. Pope Gregory’s successor, Pius IX, who inaugurated his long pontificate with a liberal spirit, feared a rising tide of intolerance against the Church and turned reactionary when the radical anticlericals of Italy’s Risorgimento movement threatened the independence of the Papal States. In reaction to these troubling events, Pius IX’s encyclicals against modernity and democracy—his Syllabus of Errors—and his non expedit against the secular Italian state, discouraged Catholics in Italy and abroad from participating in political life.30 Afterward, the Paris Commune’s brutal treatment of priests and nuns in 1871, reminiscent of the Jacobins during the French Revolution, and closely followed by Bismarck’s Kulturkampf against the Church in the newly unified Germany, added to the Catholics’ perception that they inhabited a city under siege.31 CATHOLI CS R E T U R N T O T H E P U B L I C S QUA R E After Jua´rez’s final victory in 1867 and the collapse of the Conservative party, Mexican Catholics went about the slow process of restoring their former position in Mexican society. With the encouragement of Pius IX, La Sociedad Cato´lica de Me´xico was established to rebuild Catholic education. Some liberal-minded Catholics even looked to revive the fortunes of the defunct Conservative party based on Spain’s Unio´n Cato´lica. As a practical matter, many favored a return to the federal constitution of 1824, which recognized the Catholic Church as the established religion of Mexico.32 Yet this idea drew resistance from more conservative Catholics who, referring to Pius IX’s blistering attack on modernity, feared that a return to politics would merely prop up a corrupt regime. Many Mexican Catholics still believed that liberalism had undermined the church’s authority, destroyed legitimate political order, and eroded the rights of the family and property. They conceived of the good regime as one ordered under God, not the people. Liberty meant simply the freedom to exercise God’s will; equality was limited to one’s status before the law. Inspired by the Cassandra-like warnings of the Spaniard Donoso Corte´s and the German bishop Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, an early architect of Catholic social doctrine, they warned that liberalism itself would devolve naturally into socialism.33 According to Mexican Catholic thinkers, the Constitution of 1857 fit uneasily with the “social” constitution of Mexico, and the Reform Laws prevented the proper exercise of liberty due to their attack on the rights of the Church. This secularized state led to a literally “demoralized” public. Likewise the land reforms under Jua´rez, regardless of their good intentions, pauperized the countryside by separating too many Mexican peasants and Indian communities from their traditional land holdings. To solve these problems, many Catholics sought a Christian restoration in the country, although what form

26

An Eternal Struggle

this would take remained uncertain. Like their coreligionists in Italy, they remained estranged from political affairs.34 But inspiration soon came from Rome. Beginning with Pope Leo XIII in 1878, the Church began to adapt itself to the modern political crisis and to respond more actively to the capture of the working classes by socialism. Spurred on by the success of the Catholic resistance to the Kulturkampf, Catholic bishops started designing a comprehensive social doctrine based on the Church’s traditional natural law philosophy. These efforts culminated in the encyclical Rerum Novarum in 1891: “On the Conditions of the Working Class.”35 Rejecting the inevitability of the class struggle and promoting an organic conception of society, Rerum Novarum proposed an alternative to socialism by stressing the need for capitalist and worker cooperation. Rerum Novarum defended the rights of the family and urged the state to respect the intermediate institutions of society and the right to private property. It condemned both socialism’s subordination of man to the state and the liberal conception of the “sovereign self.” To avoid the perils of socialism and liberalism, it called on Catholic workers to organize their own associations for mutual protection and support. Rerum Novarum’s “third way” to avoid these two materialistic ideologies helped galvanize “social Catholicism.” Soon Catholics everywhere formed circles to study the social questions and propose legislation to correct them. Summing up this new spirit, one cardinal exhorted a group of Catholic workers to “baptize democracy and make it Christian.”36 Rerum Novarum created the inspiration that returned Catholics to the public square and eventually lay the groundwork for the Christian Democratic movement in the twentieth century.37 This new phrase, “Christian Democracy,” referred to a well-developed and hierarchical organization of all social, juridical, and economic forces cooperating for the common good and especially attentive to improving the lot of the poorer classes.38 Originally, Christian Democracy refrained from politics. Despite the promising example of the German Center party in defending the rights of the Catholics and the Church and promoting political liberty, other full-fledged Catholic political parties had not been organized. Leo XIII himself discouraged attempts to found Christian Democratic parties; he saw Catholics as being best engaged in the social question instead.39 Indeed, he continued Pius IX’s prohibitions on Catholic political participation in Italy.40 In most of Europe, parties organized with an explicitly Christian orientation would emerge only after World War I. CHRISTI AN D E MO C R AC Y I N M E X I C O The Catholic Church’s position with respect to the Dı´az regime improved considerably from its days under the Jua´rez regime, despite the Reform Laws remaining in place. Dı´az’s policy of not enforcing the anticlerical laws allowed

The Great Party Struggle and the Catholic Response to Revolution

27

the Church to recover some of its former social influence. Church officials vastly increased the number of Catholic schools, reinstituted many religious orders, and, according to the Catholic historian Mariano Cuevas, added more dioceses than during the epoch of Philip II.41 During this era of peace, the Church attracted many men and women to religious and secular orders, and a vibrant Catholic intellectual culture returned to the country.42 Rerum Novarum was disseminated widely throughout Mexico after its issue in 1891 and further inspired Christian Democracy.43 One Catholic intellectual remarked that “today the church’s battle is eminently practical, eminently social. . . . It is the great fight of Christian Democracy against Masonic socialism.”44 Although sharing many of the same concerns as the conservative Catholics, a new generation dedicated itself to social action. The Catholic Church now took the lead in urging social reform. A Catholic daily newspaper, El Pais, was started and reached a circulation of 200,000.45 Other Catholic newspapers flourished in Puebla and Guadalajara. To tackle the social questions, the nation’s first Catholic Congress was held in Puebla in 1903, with subsequent congresses in Morelia (1904), Guadalajara (1906), and Oaxaca (1909). These major conferences considered adopting some of the techniques that had been successful in similar Catholic movements in Europe. To ensure the security of workers and peasants, the congresses planned measures like unemployment insurance, credit unions, and rural banks—a proposal by Catholic activist Miguel Palomar y Vizcarra to copy the German Raiffeissen banks that provided cheap loans to small farmers.46 Father Jose´ Marı´a Troncoso in 1908 organized Catholic workers in the Unio´n de Obreros Cato´licos, and along with other Catholic labor confederations pressed the government to establish a minimum wage, abolish child labor, set up dispute arbitration, accident insurance, and other social reforms.47 These measures, however, elicited no sympathy from President Dı´az. Likewise, he rejected a request to establish a Catholic political party in 1904.48 The anticlerical laws remained on the books, and the government continued supporting anti-Catholic newspapers despite this new era of peaceful coexistence between the Church and the State. Some Catholics viewed this “sword of Damocles” over the Church as hardly indicative of a new spirit of goodwill toward the faith. In 1905 the Operarios Guadalupanos was formed to provide the nucleus for a future political party poised for action after the fall of the Dı´az regime.49 NATIONAL CAT H O L I C PA RT Y: T H E I L L - FAT E D SY STEM PART Y The revolution that overthrew the Dı´az government, one of the great political upheavals of the twentieth century, cast a long shadow over Mexico’s political development. The Mexican Revolution (1910–1920) helped forge the

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An Eternal Struggle

Mexicans as a united people and attempted to eliminate years of social injustice and foreign exploitation, while bringing the country up to pace with the modern world. For years afterward, Mexicans would take great pride in the revolution and its accomplishments.50 All the social forces came to define themselves in light of their interpretation of this decisive era. Indeed, the myth of the revolution would especially serve as the legitimizing basis for the Revolutionary Family’s monopolization of political power. The revolution is also notable for what it failed to achieve—the realization of political liberty under a constitutional democracy—despite the good intentions of some of its participants. The revolution may be divided into three distinct phases. First, Francisco I. Madero’s revolt and presidency from 1910 to 1913 sought to establish political liberty and national unity after the thirty-five-year Dı´az dictatorship.51 This was followed by General Victoriano Huerta’s coup in 1913, ostensibly launched to prevent the country from descending into anarchy. The third phase featured the Constitutionalists’ counterrevolt in 1914 against the “usurper” Huerta in the name of the failed Madero government. Venustiano Carranza dominated this phase along with his lieutenant, Alvaro Obregon, and other northerners from the states of Coahuila and Sonora. They effectively ended the political struggle by enacting the Constitution of 1917, although the military struggle would continue against the Madero loyalist Pancho Villa in the north and the agrarian, anti-Constitutionalist followers of Emiliano Zapata in the south. In a 1908 interview with an American journalist, President Dı´az seemed to endorse democracy and expressed the desire to hold open elections, and immediately thereafter political parties began forming around various ambitious leaders. One of these, the Mexican Liberal Party, attempted to reclaim the memory of Jua´rez and his followers. Founded by the Flores Magon brothers, its ideology was anarchosyndicalist, and it received support from the likeminded Industrial Workers of the World in the United States. Francisco I. Madero himself cultivated ties with the Flores Magon brothers as early as 1906.52 Another party grew up around the Porfirian general Bernardo Reyes, who was believed to be backed by Mexico’s many Masonic lodges. Many Catholic intellectuals and the Church intent on asserting their own influence on the new political order viewed both these parties with alarm.53 Madero came from a large landowning family in the northern state of Coahuila. He became interested in pursuing a political career, running for the municipal presidency of a town in his home state in 1904, only to be thwarted by electoral fraud.54 Madero had spent a great deal of time in the United States and believed that Mexico was ripe for a transition to political democracy. After his unsuccessful campaign, he toured both the United States and Mexico to drum up support for a political party that would force open the Porfirian dictatorship. His political goals, however, were far from radical. In his book The Presidential Succession of 1910, widely admired for its courage, he

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criticized Dı´az’s government but modestly proposed only that Dı´az allow open elections and restore the no-reelection principle.55 Madero’s successful rebellion in 1910 provided an opportunity for a Catholic return to the public square. The social philosophy of Leo XIII, though deemphasizing political action, left open the possibility for political participation in the nascent Mexican democracy. Some Mexican Catholics believed they could influence the nature of the new government. One activist stated that if they were invited by the Liberals to participate in a democracy, they would do so sincerely, but if not, “our attitude, sooner or later, will oblige them to become democrats.”56 The Catholic intellectuals who had been organizing Catholic congresses during the waning years of the Dı´az regime started a party of their own. The Jesuit priest Bernardo Bergo¨end had come up with the idea of a Unio´n Polı´tico– Social de los Cato´licos Mexicanos, a prototype party, to incorporate all the diverse social groups into one organization and to “launch ourselves, without fear, into the political battle.”57 In 1909 Gabriel Fernandez Somellera likewise brought together Circulos Cato´licos Nacional as a means to start organizing a new party.58 On May 3, 1911, shortly after Dı´az resigned the presidency, the National Catholic Party (PCN) was founded, with Bergo¨end, Archbishop Mora y del Rio of Mexico City, and future party president Gabriel Fernandez Somellera among the principals.59 Although bearing strong clerical influence, the PCN was a “system” party modeled after the German Center Party of Bismarck’s era. These words from one of the PCN’s early documents capture the party’s spirit: “Without agitation nothing can be gained in public life, declared the illustrious Windhorst; now then, if in some place we need to stir things up, it is in Mexico. For thirty years we have been inactive. . . . Let’s come together in the National Catholic Party. Let’s all work for the social reign of Jesus Christ! Viva la Virgen de Guadalupe!”60 At its peak the PCN boasted nearly half a million members, most hailing from the center of the country—Guanajuato, Jalisco, the State of Mexico, Michoaca´n, and Zacatecas. The party received some support in southern Chiapas, but very little in the northern section of the country.61 The new Catholics were participating in the formation of a modern Mexico, and many, like PCN official and Catholic progressive Eduardo J. Correa, condemned those Catholics who remained loyal to the obstructionist Dı´az regime.62 Although an archbishop and some prominent priests participated in the PCN’s founding, most bishops prohibited their clergy from an explicit alliance with the party.63 The PCN abandoned the Conservative great party objective of establishing a constitutional monarchy and instead stressed a reforming, democratic nature.64 According to one apologist for the PCN, the Catholics of the Conservative party had advanced the agenda that the Church and the State must be unified; the new party, however, accepted the reality of the separation of

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Church and State and acknowledged that Catholic teaching supported such an arrangement. The PCN sought to harmonize the relation between Church and State while rejecting the subordination of the first to the second.65 Another PCN member emphasized that this new movement did not intend to unite the nation under the Catholic banner, even if that should always be considered a Catholic ideal. Instead, the emphasis would be one guaranteeing democracy and tolerance for all in a diverse society. The members of the PCN would accept the framework of the Mexican constitution and looked forward to a time when the Mexican clergy would be able to defend it just as the American clergy defended its own.66 According to one of its founders, “the PCN is not a personalist party, but one of principles; it is a social-political party that desires to apply to the government and regime the principles of Christian civilization.”67 Its platform called for the preservation of national sovereignty, the defense of religious and educational liberty, the restoration of effective suffrage and no reelection, the independence of the judiciary, and the promotion of development for industry and agriculture.68 In the judgment of one historian, “Catholic Party documents of 1911 expressed Catholic determination to forget the past and pledged support to freedom of thought, press, conscience, religion and teaching as God-given rights, but rights within God-given limits of Christian morality and justice. Party leaders accepted popular sovereignty as well, but also within limits. ‘There is no absolute sovereignty except in God and other sovereignties must recognize over themselves the rule of reason, of conscience, of morality and of justice.’”69 Although the PCN’s position on democracy and “independence” of Church and State placed it in the liberal Catholic camp, its members still differentiated themselves from the Liberals who had governed Mexico since Maximilian. As noted in their party newspaper La Nacio´n, Mexican liberalism claimed freedom from a belief in God and, therefore, without an ability to place limits on liberty, brought with it dire consequences for the family and the social order. Despite its efforts on behalf of freedom, liberalism ended the autonomy of the municipalities, deprived villages of their communal lands, took from parents of their right to educate their children as they saw fit, established economic monopolies, and even prohibited political competition.70 Yet despite having endured a long dictatorship, some members of the Catholic hierarchy and the Catholic press remained wary of political democracy. The Catholic newspaper El Paı´s, for example, believed that Madero himself was something of a naı¨f who would be easily dominated by the radicals within his Antireelection movement.71 Also discouraging for the traditionalists was that Madero, a non-Catholic, stood firmly behind the separation of Church and State as established under the Reform Laws, and, accordingly, believed this was an issue that Mexicans best put behind them.72 For many Catholic traditionalists, the evil they knew, the Dı´az regime, was better than the one

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they knew not.73 In short, Catholic support for the Conservative great party was dying hard. Madero himself, as head of the Antireelectionist Party, enthusiastically called the PCN the “first fruit of his revolution” and considered adopting much of its platform in his new government.74 He made an offer to the Catholics to join forces: “your uniting with us will increase the power and prestige of both parties, that although they are of different names, have exactly the same principles and aspirations.”75 Under the motto of Dı´os, Patria y Libertad, the PCN moved rapidly to nominate candidates for state and national elections. Taking advantage of Madero’s movement and ignoring the candidate’s connections to freemasonry and spiritualism, the PCN at its national convention on August 18 nominated Madero as its candidate for the presidential election of 1911, with Francisco Leo´n de la Barra as its vice presidential selection. For his part, Madero wanted Jose´ Maria Pino Suarez, a socialist from Yucatan, as his vice president, which intensified the suspicions of some lukewarm Catholic supporters. Pino Suarez would become the choice of the convention for his ticket despite, as the Catholic El Paı´s reported, the greater popular support for De la Barra.76 After Madero’s election, the PCN participated in the nationwide elections of 1912 and under the proportional representation system took 23 seats in the lower house.77 By 1913, the PCN had won the governorships of Quere´taro, Jalisco, Mexico and Zacatecas, captured numerous municipalities in the country’s center and west, and controlled a few state congresses.78 One revolutionary reformer writing to Madero about the victory of PCN member Jose´ Lo´pez Portillo y Rojas in Jalisco offered guarded praise: “for even though the Catholic party won,” the people had resisted having a governor imposed on them.79 Apparently this was not a common revolutionary view. Some PCN victories for governor were voided by the legislatures of Chiapas, Michaoca´n, and Puebla, and the party was forced to relent to the decisions. Allegations of fraud against the PCN were cited in the Chiapas election especially.80 Alarmed members of Madero’s new Constitutional Progressive Party, moreover, pressured the government to annul seventy-seven seats the Catholic party claimed to have won.81 As Correa recalled, the party’s members were unprepared for the fraud and not aggressive enough in combating it.82 Nevertheless, during this brief, democratic phase of the revolution the PCN promoted its social legislation based on the thinking of Rerum Novarum, especially concerning a mandatory day of rest on Sunday and agrarian and labor reform. In Jalisco, where the party controlled the legislature, it had more success on the social front and included political reforms to recognize the free municipality and permit proportional representation.83 However, the breakdown of the federal government would cut short most of these legislative efforts.

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The rebellion of General Victoriano Huerta during the bloody Decena Tragı´ca (Tragic Ten Days) of 1913 forced the resignation of President Madero and Vice President Pino Suarez. A few days later, the hapless pair was assassinated. This cuartelazo became necessary, as the Madero follower Luis Cabrera said in later years, to avoid an inevitable foreign intervention due to the uncontrollable conditions of violence and insurrection in the country.84 Catholic opinion, at least as represented by El Paı´s, largely supported the coup. As historian Jean Meyer noted, “everybody, or almost everybody, supported Huerta, and the Catholics probably did so less enthusiastically than the others, while the bishops took good care not to become involved.”85 The PCN had already been at odds with Madero.86 Huerta certainly had hoped for PCN support, and some party members did resign the party and joined his cabinet.87 To curry favor, Huerta allowed the Church to consecrate Mexico to Christ the King and conduct a large open-air celebration in Mexico City in violation of the Reform Laws.88 But as party leader Miguel Palomar y Vizcarra declared, the failure of the PCN to give unqualified support to Huerta’s usurpation resulted in the new government’s persecution of PCN politicians.89 Party president Somellera himself refused to permit the cooptation of the PCN by the new regime. After Huerta suspended elections and dissolved the Congress, the PCN set itself in opposition. The government first censured and then suppressed the party newspaper La Nacio´n, which was practically alone among capital newspapers in maintaining a critical stance against the dictator.90 Finally Somellera and the newspaper’s director Eduardo Correa were imprisoned.91 Notwithstanding its political failings, the National Catholic Party represents an important aspect of the Mexican Revolution—the initial aspiration for political liberties by a system party. But the increased radicalization of the revolution after Huerta’s coup and the participation of some party members in his ill-fated regime caused the PCN to be swept away by the tide of revolutionary violence. It would play no further role in the revolution, and an effort to revive it under a new name in the 1920s failed. Great party politics had destroyed Mexico’s nascent pluralistic democracy. THE RISE O F T H E R E VO L U T I O N A RY FA M I LY The “Revolutionary Family,” a phrase later coined by General Plutarco Elias Calles, refers to the social forces that overthrew General Huerta and other competing forces during the revolutionary years, that established the Constitution of 1917, that defeated the cristero counterrevolt in the 1920s, and that established the ruling party by 1929. For the first few decades of its rule, most of the family’s leading politicians drew their support from their relationship with the army, but labor and peasant organizations—notably the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM)—also emerged as important power bases.

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The Revolutionary Family’s ideology was heterodox, ranging from classical liberals to the “Jacobins” of the 1916–1917 constitutional convention. One historian offered this assessment: “the ‘revolutionary family’ could be characterized as men on the make and as serious nationalists, with enough social reformism to season the mixture gently. Radicals in the economic sense they were not.”92 Yet many were influenced by the fashionable leftism of the day. Revolutionary Family members often used to boast that theirs was the world’s first “socialist” constitution. Bertram Wolfe, a Communist organizer working in Mexico, noted the popularity of the Russian Revolution among the revolution’s leaders and how many considered themselves communists in varying degrees.93 This was especially true of important regional strongmen like Adelberto Tejada in Veracruz, Francisco J. Mu´gica in Michoaca´n, Felipe Carrillo Puerto in Yucatan, and Toma´s Garrido Canabal in Tabasco; all were selfdescribed Bolsheviks who implemented policies based on communist principles. The Mexican Socialist Party—later the Mexican Communist Party—also played a role in the Family’s political maneuverings.94 Calles, the Sonoran general who dominated Mexican politics from 1924 to 1934, serves as an excellent example of how a Revolutionary Family politician could both use and be used by left-wing radicalism, without necessarily being the servant of it. After touring Europe in 1919–1920 he came away impressed by the progressive ideas of social democracy and the single-party state.95 Upon commencing his political career, he benefited from the support of the Revolutionary Family’s left wing. Carrillo Puerto, the leader of the short-lived Socialist Party of the Southeast, backed his candidacy for presidency in 1924.96 The secretary general of the CROM, Luis N. Morones, also supported the general.97 Morones had made himself a political force through his leadership of the secret Grupo Accio´n, which had formed within the anarchosyndicalist Casa del Obrero Mundial, and as head of the Mexican Labor Party.98 But Calles was, first and foremost, a nationalist. As interior secretary during President Obrego´n’s term (1924–1928), Calles prevented Carrillo Puerto’s party from joining the Comintern.99 Later in 1930, wary that the Soviets desired to make Mexico their base of operations in Latin America, Calles engineered the government’s severing of relations with Moscow and the crackdown on the Communist party.100 Besides the Bolshevik Revolution, another important influence on many Revolutionary Family members was Freemasonry. At the constitutional convention in 1917, a majority of the 218 deputies assembled were said to be Freemasons.101 Revolutionary Family politician and ideologue Emilio Portes Gil would later explain the importance of this for the country: “In Mexico, the state and Masonry during recent years have been one: two entities that march forward together, because the men in recent years who have been in power have known how to unite under Masonry’s revolutionary principles.”102 Catholic activists would often call attention to the Masonic connections of their most bitter rivals in the Revolutionary Family—especially Plutarco

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Calles—as the source for their anticlericalism.103 According to Catholic Bishop and PCN veteran Francisco Banegas Galvan, “the Masons wanted to make of Mexico another Portugal,” referring to the revolution of 1910 in that country.104 Although many Catholics clearly exaggerated Masonry’s influence and placed it at the center of their devil theory of Mexican politics, it is equally certain that the Masonic principle of the radical secularization of public life contributed to the cleavage in the political culture. Those who organized in defense of the martyred Madero issued the Plan of Guadalupe in 1913, which pledged to resist the illegitimate government of Huerta. These Constitutionalists, led by Venustiano Carranza, also lashed out at the Church for its perceived backing of Huerta. But this was not simply a political stance. According to historian J. Lloyd Mecham, “Those who attacked the Catholic clergy because of their political activities, marched side by side in the Constitutionalist Army with the opponents of Catholicism as a religion.”105 A severe anti-Catholic reaction followed. When the Constitutionalist general Obrego´n conquered Mexico City, he forced the Church to pay a heavy fee to benefit the poor. Other Constitutionalist generals, such as Salvador Alvarado of Yucatan and Francisco Villa engaged in the desecration of churches and relics, although Villa himself would later tone down his anticlerical behavior.106 The only revolutionary movement after the fall of Huerta that remained consistently respectful of the Catholic faith was that of Emiliano Zapata, whose followers protected priests and churches and marched into battle carrying the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Part of the reason for Zapata’s alienation from the Constitutionalists may be attributed to his discontent with their treatment of the Church.107 According to historian Robert Quirk, the Constitutionalist agenda was opposed at the Aguascalientes convention in 1915, but later, the self-described “Jacobins,” led by General Francisco J. Mu´gica and Luis G. Monzo´n, successfully advanced their program in a new constitutional convention at Quere´taro that fraudulently excluded opponents to a more radical regime.108 For many Constitutionalists, the Church’s role as an instrument for social control was obsolete, and now this reactionary relic of the colonial past stood as a serious obstacle to the creation of a new society.109 Vigorous debate accompanied the proposal for Article 3, which would severely curtail the rights of the Church in education by abolishing religious instruction and by prohibiting religious primary schools. Moderate liberals such as Alfonso Cravioto and Felix Palavicini protested the “Jacobin project which . . . crushed the fundamental rights of the Mexican people.” Their position was not so much proclerical as it was a call for individual liberty, although Palavicini did consider the Catholic faith an integral part of Mexican culture that should be supported vis-a`-vis the Protestantism of the United States.110 In response, the Jacobins led by Francisco J. Mu´gica held that “if we allow freedom of education so that the clergy can participate in it . . . we will not

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develop new generations of intellectual and sensible people, but our prosperity will receive from us an inheritance of fanaticism, of insane principles.”111 The debate concerning other anticlerical articles—especially those like Article 130, which deprived the Church of the right to property and juridical personality— proceeded in a similar vein. Although these articles drew upon prior constitutional changes in 1873 and the reform laws of 1874, the convention participants took a giant step from Jua´rez’s Constitution of 1857, which separated Church and State. Their aim now was to subordinate completely the Church to the State.112 Ironically, the Constitution of 1917 did exhibit some influence from the groundbreaking work begun by Catholic social activists during the prerevolutionary Catholic congresses and the propositions of Catholic legislators during the Madero phase of the revolution. Their proposals on the rights of labor helped form the basis for Article 123, one of the pillars of the revolution’s economic rights.113 Catholic politicians, despite their exclusion from the drafting of the constitution, acquiesced to its fundamental legitimacy and attacked only the validity of some of its articles, notably 3, 5, 27, and 130.114 The Church itself considered these articles a direct affront not only to its members’ liberty, but also to its own duties in education and charitable works. Without the property denied it by Article 27, for example, it was deprived of the resources to maintain these vital social functions.115 THE CRI STER O S : T H E G R E AT PA RT Y S T RU G G L E RESUMES Historians normally determine the end of the revolution as 1920 because it marked both a pause in the violence and a political stabilization under the so-called Sonora dynasty of Alvaro Obrego´n and Calles. True political order, however, remained elusive until the formation of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) in 1929. Meanwhile the Florentine nature of Mexican politics flourished during the turbulent 1920s, a decade characterized by assassinations, barracks revolts, and the civil war known as the cristero rebellion. During a brief period of relative calm after 1920, the Church recovered quickly from the revolution and began initiating a revival of sorts. An important step in this restoration was the founding of the Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM) under the direction of Alfredo Mendez Medina, S.J., a veteran of the Catholic labor movement who would coordinate Catholic efforts toward solving the social problems created by the revolution. In 1923 the bishops issued a pastoral statement declaring “that the betterment of Mexico cannot be realized except by means of the implantation of the Christian social order.” The SSM undertook the specific goals of 1) instituting Catholic Action in Mexico; 2) developing a Catholic labor confederation; 3) founding the “School of Social Formation” to teach future activists; 4) laying the groundwork for a

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Catholic university; and 5) establishing funds to finance present and future activities.116 Organizations that executed these ambitious goals were founded: the National Catholic Confederation of Workers (CNCT), which worked to draw the working classes away from the socialist unions, the Association of Catholic Women, and, from the United States, the Knights of Columbus.117 These groups immediately clashed with those groups aligned with the Revolutionary Family—vicious street fighting occurred between the CNCT and the Morones’s CROM—and later backed the cristero rebellion. Other Catholics had been at work trying to organize a common defense against hostile forces. Immediately after the adoption of the Constitution of 1917 and the prohibition on religious education in Article 3, the Unio´n Nacional de Padres de Familia (UNPF) emerged to combat the new prohibitions on Catholic education. Meanwhile the energetic Father Bergo¨end founded organizations to unite Catholic students into study circles. These efforts led to the establishment of the Asociacio´n Cato´lica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM), modeled after Albert de Mun’s youth group in France. The ACJM would play an important role both in opposing the government’s enforcement of the anticlerical articles and in supporting the cristero revolt in 1926. The ACJM managed to spread in membership and influence throughout the country in a relatively short time, but its efforts were especially important in the large western state of Jalisco, a traditional center of Catholic culture but under the control of anticlerical governors like Manuel Bouquet and Jose´ Guadalupe Zuno. The head of the ACJM in Jalisco was Anacleto Gonzales Flores, a charismatic leader inspired by the religious nationalists Daniel O’Connell and Mohandas Gandhi. Gonzalez’s brand of Catholic militancy emphasized more the goal of religious liberty; mindful of the history of the nineteenth century, he happened to distrust democracy and, indeed, admired the monarchist Accion Francaise of Charles Maurras, which was gaining strength and influence in the early 1920s.118 Employing some unorthodox means for a Catholic activist, he founded his own secret society, Unio´n Popular, for the purposes of carrying out a clandestine struggle against the anticlerical government. Especially in Jalisco, Unio´n Popular would serve effectively in organizing the cristero revolts. Gonzalez Flores himself became one of the early martyrs to the cause after being executed by the police in Guadalajara.119 Attacks against Catholics increased during the early 1920s. In 1921 both the archbishop’s palace in Mexico City and the Shrine of the Virgin of Guadalupe were subjected to bomb attacks, reportedly by members of Morones’s CROM. Catholic student groups fought street fights with members of the CGT union. Clashes also occurred in Michoacan, where Governor Francisco J. Mu´gica tried to crack down on the local ACJM.120 After Catholics tried to dedicate Mexico to Christ the King on El Cubilete hill in Guanajuato, Interior Secretary Calles expelled the apostolic delegate Monsen˜or Ernesto Phillippi on the charge that he had violated constitutional Article 33, which prohibited foreigners from participating in politics.121

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When Calles became president in 1924, tensions between Catholics and the revolutionary regime worsened. More radical than President Obrego´n, Calles seemed dedicated to reducing the influence of the Catholic Church in Mexican public life. He backed the formation of a schismatic Mexican Apostolic Church to act as a state church to divide Catholics and buttress the “revolutionary nationalism” ideology.122 In addition, he funded the Communist Party’s agitation campaigns and employed the workers of the CROM as “shock troops” to attack Catholic churches and processions.123 Morones’s cromistas viewed this conflict as a continuation of the old rivalries of the nineteenth century. According to one of its publications: “the so-called religious conflict has really been nothing more than the eternal struggle between light and darkness, between stagnation and progress, the old fight between the traditional conservative party and the old liberal, now revolutionary, party.”124 CROM also had reason to fear the rise of the Catholic CNCT, which counted over 80,000 members by 1923 and threatened the revolutionaries’ monopoly of the labor movement. Responding to the CROM’s attacks on churches in Mexico City and Calles’s seeming determination to enforce the anticlerical articles, Catholic laity and clergy, many of whom where PCN and ACJM militants, organized the League for the Defense of Religious Liberty (LDRL) in 1925.125 Rafael Ceniceros y Villarreal, PCN governor of Zacatecas, served as the League’s first president.126 The League announced that its basic program would be to defend religious freedom and the complete independence of church and state, religious education, political liberty, freedom of the press and association, freedom to own private property, and other civil rights.127 As its initial foray into the struggle against the secularizing state, it declared a boycott against any business supporting the revolutionary regime. The Church hierarchy also spoke out against the perceived threat. Mexican Archbishop Mora y del Rio—one of the PNC’s founders—reportedly told the capital newspaper El Universal in February 1926 that Mexican Catholics needed to resist the Constitution of 1917 as being antireligious: “the Episcopacy, clergy and Catholics do not recognize and combat Articles 3, 5, 27, and 130 of the existing constitution. This decision we cannot by any motive alter without being traitors to our faith and our religion.”128 Other Mexican bishops, especially the influential Francisco Orozco y Jime´nez of Guadalajara and Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores of Morelia, were implacably hostile to the revolution as well, and a national bishops’ conference agreed to combat the offending articles.129 Following the Mora y del Rio interview, Interior Secretary Adalberto Tejeda, who had cultivated ties with the Communists and CROM, labeled the interview seditious and thereby used it as a pretext to raise the volume of attacks against the Church, which included ordering the closings of convents and orphanages, expelling foreign-born priests, and issuing the “Calles Law,” which demanded the civil registration of all the clergy.130 The Catholic

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hierarchy countered with drastic action: it suspended the administration of sacraments throughout the country.131 The churches stayed closed throughout Mexico for nearly three years. The war was on. The so-called cristeros began rising in sporadic revolts starting in 1926. The Unio´n Popular provided efficient leadership and organization to the movement in Jalisco and Michoaca´n. The League itself was somewhat less effective, although it did try to solicit the monetary support of American Catholics. Many cristeros were, in fact, veterans of Zapata’s earlier movement, and as small, independent farmers, may have viewed the government’s land reforms as threatening to their livelihood.132 A few cristeros echoed the slogan of Madero, “effective suffrage, no reelection,” but mainly this was a populist uprising in defense of the Catholic Church.133 According to historian Jean Meyer, “the peasants knew only one thing: they were closing the churches and persecuting the priests.”134 Arising mostly spontaneously, the cristero were never fully under the command of central authorities. The League, which under Rene´ Capistra´n Garza attempted to solicit funds from Catholics in the United States, never gained control over the rebellion in the western states of Jalisco, Michoaca´n, and Colima and often worked at cross purposes with the Unio´n Popular and the women’s brigades that formed the supply network for the guerrillas. Likewise the League was jealous of the “U,” a Catholic secret society formed by future Morelia archbishop—and later, primate of Mexico—Luı´s Marı´a Martinez dedicated to rallying the Unio´n Popular after Gonzalez Flores’s death. Although the “U” was instrumental in recruiting leadership and underground support for the cristeros, the League denounced it to Rome, claiming that, as a secret society, it was banned under the papal encyclical Humanum Genus.135 The cristero revolt was bloody, with 100,000 combatants and civilians losing their lives.136 Both cristeros and government troops committed many brutalities. The ferocity of the fighting was especially evident in Los Altos, the mountainous region of Jalisco, where the federal army, in an attempt to establish a neutral zone, relocated families into concentration camps. As one American journalist observed, army and government officials then proceeded to confiscate much of their farmland.137 Calles’s presidency ended in 1928 without having suppressed the rebellion. Obrego´n, who returned to the presidency, was believed to be interested in a negotiated end to the conflict, but had no time to realize these plans.138 Shortly after taking office, he was assassinated by Jose´ de Leo´n Toral, a member of the ACJM. The fanatical Toral was said to be inflamed by the summary execution of the Pro brothers for an earlier attempt on Obrego´n. One of these victims, Father Miguel Agustı´n Pro, a Jesuit priest, had served as an underground chaplain to some Catholic groups, including the ACJM. The photograph of his execution, with arms outstretched in a Christ-like pose, came to symbolize the revolt.

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Toral met swift execution for his crime after a boisterous trial that some considered legally suspect.139 It was rumored that as many as fourteen bullet holes were found in Obregon’s body, strongly suggesting that Toral had assistance. Miguel Palomar y Vizcarra, PCN veteran and founder of the ACJM and the League, notwithstanding his belief that killing Obregon was a legitimate act of war, maintained years later that Toral was not the killer.140 Indeed Luis N. Morones, one of Calles’s chief lieutenants, retreated into hiding after the event.141 As Emilio Portes Gil later remarked, the weight of Obrego´n’s tomb on their shoulders helped bring about the end of Morones’s CROM.142 These sanguinary events increased the incentive for a cessation to hostilities. U.S. ambassador Dwight Morrow, who had accompanied Calles on a nationwide tour, directed negotiations. Morrow himself realized “that some Catholics would consider my trip an endorsement of the acts of the government.”143 The American Jesuit Wilfred Parsons cited another reason for Morrow’s conciliatory nature to the regime. As Morrow explained to him: “We have this crowd partly ‘educated,’ and we will not start in all over again with another. We are working on them as we are doing with Russia. If you make them prosperous, you make them conservative. That is human nature.”144 Although a determined effort by its 50,000 militants might have overthrown the hated revolutionary regime, the cristero rebellion failed due to an unwillingness or inability to achieve an alliance with disgruntled members of the Revolutionary Family who might have provided valuable assistance. For example, coup plotter General Escobar had vainly solicited Catholic assistance, even to the extent of renouncing the antireligious laws.145 However, the cristero general Ernesto Gorosteita, a former revolutionary himself, considered that Escobar stood for nothing more than his own ambitions and would have done nothing to alter the political status quo.146 Many cristeros backed a more comprehensive program than simply religious liberty, but their zealotry also served as an impediment to broadening the appeal of the insurrection. And of course their position within the Catholic community itself was less than solid, as Ambassador Morrow recognized.147 Despite the initial backing of Archbishop Mora y del Rio, the Vatican itself opposed the armed revolt and forbade priests to participate regardless of its popularity among the lower clergy. The Mexican hierarchy itself was divided on the issue. Bishops Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores and Pascual Dı´az of Tabasco, who represented the Vatican in the negotiations, were persuaded that the revolt would never be successful without significant backing from the United States.148 The arreglos—the arrangements—between the government and the Bishops Ruiz y Flores and Dı´az, brokered by Morrow and representatives from the American Catholic Church, ended the rebellion and reopened the churches. The government was exhausted by the civil war, yet many in the Revolutionary Family wished to finish to the fight against the Church. President Portes

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Gil’s government withstood much pressure from some labor organizations, Masonic lodges, and radicals like Adelberto Tejeda of Veracruz in attempting a negotiated settlement to the conflict.149 No cristero representative attended negotiations to resolve the war. Even so, the cristeros obediently laid down their arms in 1929 under the promise of amnesty, which the government refused to honor. Many unarmed cristeros were soon captured and executed. Due to this betrayal, the scattered seeds of the cristeros lingered in the Mexican soil until the last of the cristero generals, Lauro Rocha, was killed in 1936.150 The bishops unequivocally condemned any effort to renew violence against the state. When Rocha announced his new revolt against the government to “restore the moral order,” he was denounced by the bishops and given no support.151 THE CATHO L I C S R E G R O U P As Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum had inspired an earlier generation of Catholic reformers, so too did Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno of 1931. In order to cope with the general discontent with liberal democracy and the counteraction of collectivism and totalitarianism, the new social encyclical pointed to a “third way” that suggested a kind of “functional” corporatism and, as did the earlier encyclical, the harmonization of labor and capital. The encyclical also stated forcefully one of the most important tenets of Catholic social doctrine: the principle of subsidiarity. “Just as it is wrong to withdraw from the individual and commit to the community at large what private enterprise and industry can accomplish, so too it is an injustice, a grave evil and a disturbance of right order for a larger and higher organization to arrogate to itself functions which can be performed efficiently by smaller and lower bodies.”152 Its message was especially relevant to the situation in Mexico, where the faithful confronted the challenge of the revolutionary state. After the negotiated settlement, the bishops, led by the new primate of Mexico, Archbishop Pascual Dı´az, adopted a new approach. Dı´az represented the new thinking in the Church after the baleful episodes of the 1920s; he believed that new emphasis should be placed on the Catholic faithful’s freedom to worship and to execute its spiritual and charitable endeavors without government interference. In turn, as had been agreed to in the arreglos ending the cristero conflict, the Church would adjure any right to interfere with the political power.153 In his 1926 letter to the Mexican bishops, Paterna Sane Sollicitudo, Pius XI recommended that “in the light of the unfavorable conditions prevailing in your country, it is necessary that you, your clergy and the Catholic organizations, remain as far removed as possible from the passions of political factions so that your enemies may not take religion as merely another political party. Therefore, all citizens, as Catholics, should form no political party or faction which bears the name of Catholic; the Bishops and clergy should

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refrain from identifying themselves with political parties, or writing in newspapers of a distinctly political character, since their ministry is to reach all the faithful and all the citizens.”154 Based on this advice, Archbishop Dı´az and the Church hierarchy resolved to implement a comprehensive plan to reevangelize the country but avoid further confrontation.155 Accio´n Cato´lica Mexicana (ACM) was founded in Mexico in 1929 with a mission to recatecize the nation proceeding from the message of Quadregesimo Anno.156 This involved founding parish associations, study groups, student organizations, and the teaching of hundreds of thousands of children, all operating as if the laws restricting religion no longer existed.157 The ACM consisted of four groups for men and women, including the reconstituted ACJM, which had been dismantled after the cristero rebellion ended. By the 1940s the ACM boasted nearly 400,000 members.158 The laity had to assume the duties of the ACM because the turmoil of the 1920s had deprived the nation of much of its clergy, but the church would try to discipline and channel the laity’s activities in order to avoid further violence. The Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM) organized the ACM and became its controlling body.159 This attempt at reorganization after the negotiated defeat of the cristero rebellion initiated a new chapter in the resistance to the radical dimensions of the revolution. Notwithstanding the modus vivendi in effect after the cristero revolt, the Church remained in precarious position. During the 1930s, many governors, most notably Adalberto Tejeda in Veracruz and Garrido Canabal in Tabasco, attempted to restrict or eliminate the presence of priests in their territories. In some instances they attempted to impose a quota, or, as in Tabasco, statutes decreeing that all priests must be married.160 During the 1933 convention of the ruling National Revolutionary Party, the delegates, directed by Calles, elected General La´zaro Ca´rdenas their presidential candidate for the 1934 election and adopted a “Six Year Plan,” which included, among other things, the amendment of Article 3 to specify that primary and secondary education would be socialist.161 Calles himself had uttered this “Cry of Guadalajara” on July 20, 1934, as a prelude to establish “socialistic” education in the republic. As Calles put it: “we must take hold of the consciences of childhood and youth, because childhood and youth must belong to the Revolution.”162 In response, the government modified Article 3 of the constitution to make this goal explicit: Education imparted by the State shall be socialistic, and in addition to excluding all religious doctrine shall combat fanaticism and prejudices, for which purpose the school shall organize its teachings and activities in a manner to permit the creation of a rational and exact concept of the universe and social life in the mind of the youth. Only the State—the Federation, the States, and the Municipalities—shall impart primary, secondary and normal education.163

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The revolutionary regime rejoined the battle on Article 3. Archbishop Dı´az urged Catholic parents to take action against this socialistic education themselves without making the church a target for government oppression.164 The new government of La´zaro Ca´rdenas imitated the Popular Front approach and was more leftist than that of Calles, with Communists being brought into the cabinet. Many Catholics, especially those in the ACJM, fought street battles against the “Red Shirts” of Agricultural Secretary Toma´s Garrido Canabal.165 Pope Pius XI, at the encouragement of Bishop Ruiz y Flores, issued his encyclical Acerba Animi, which encouraged Mexicans to resist this new round of persecution through coordinated action and not violent resistance to the government. Just as in 1923, the Church’s apostolic delegate was expelled from the country after exhorting Catholics to defend their religious liberty. Although the hierarchy sought to avoid confrontation, some Catholic activists plotted a new great party strategy to oppose the government’s policy. An American observer, Richard Pattee, commented on another effort to reorganize the Catholic movement after the dissolution of the cristero rebellion: “There was only one recourse; the establishment, for the first time at least, of an underground movement which, cautiously and discreetly at first, might gradually form the nucleus of an organized and disciplined public opinion.”166 Manuel Romo de Alba, a former Unio´n Popular member, concluded after the negotiated defeat that the cristeros’ greatest failure was not presenting a political option to violence.167 In 1934 where cristero response had been strongest—especially Guanajuato, Jalisco, Michoaca´n, and Quere´taro—Romo created a semisecret organization known as the Legion to bring together dedicated Catholic elites. His legionnaires were organized in ten-member cells, with each legion totaling one hundred persons representing all social classes. The Legionnaires swore to guard all the secrets and intentions of the organization, to faithfully obey all orders, and to never act contrary to morality and justice. Their mission was to defend Mexico from all attacks by Freemasonry and communism.168 Romo envisioned his national organization to be divided into ten regions, each of which would contain dozens of legions whose directors would comprise a high command.169 Romo’s recruiting efforts began successfully: he claimed ten thousand adherents in Guanajuato alone. But the hierarchy, fearing that it would engage in direct confrontations with the government, condemned the organization. Romo relented to cooperate with two Jesuit priests in Mexico City, Eduardo Iglesias and Carlos Marı´a Heredia, who were determined to preserve the organization but remove the extremists.170 The idea emerged that, instead of the “legion” model, a corporatist scheme was needed to organize Catholics based on class and profession—employers, workers, students, small farmers, and the middle class—to both reflect and confront the organization of the new revolutionary party.171

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The new organization—the Base—was formed in 1935 as a nationwide Catholic network encompassing, it was hoped, all social sectors pledged to resisting the revolutionary political order. Also referred to by the initials OCA (Organizacio´n, Cooperacio´n y Accio´n), the Base lay the groundwork for the next generation of Catholic organizations. According to one Mexican analyst, “one of the factors that contributed most to the consolidation of the Base was the persecuting attitude of the Ca´rdenas government that resulted in the ‘Cry of Guadalajara’ that reverberated within the consciences of those in the movement the necessity of creating an alternative.”172 The Base was directed by two “commands”: the “low command” operated in public, and the “high command” in secret. In organizing their alternative to the revolution, the Base’s leaders attempted to restore the Catholic worldview into virtually every aspect of Mexican life by drafting strategies for farmers, employers, workers, teachers, families, and finally for electoral politics.173 The country was organized by districts, with the south under the command of Salvador Abascal, a fiery organizer tasked with combating Garrido Canabal in Tabasco. Abascal’s father had been a member of the Unio´n Popular, and he himself would emerge as one of the outstanding leaders of the new movement.174 SI NARQUI SM O : T H E C AT H O L I C “ G R E AT ” ANTI PARTY Despite the grand strategy of the Base, not all of its plans bore fruit. An exception was sinarquismo, the attempt to mold a social movement out of the agrarian class. Deeply troubled by the revival of Church persecution during the Cardenas years as well as the sweeping program of land reform that threatened the traditional rural order of Mexico, the sinarquistas launched a nationalist–integralist movement, which rejected the revolutionary order in favor of a Christian social order. Sinarquismo had great party tendencies, but with a twist: it rejected both the revolutionary regime and participation in electoral politics, preferring to act as a pressure group. In this sense, it was “great” antiparty. As the historian Leslie Byrd Simpson observed, the advent of sinarquismo represented “a grave failure of the revolutionary regime. Sinarquismo was plainly the result of frustration. The Revolution virtually disenfranchised a large and vigorous part of the population, the intransigent Catholics, who had no voice in the government unless they accepted doctrines repugnant to their faith.”175 In short, Sinarquismo was a continuation of the cristero war by other means. Sinarquismo has inspired a host of interpretations. One sympathetic observer of the sinarquista movement viewed it as a typically Mexican movement characterized by “an intense devotion to family, to the local community, to the soil and to the Virgin of Guadalupe.”176 From the point of view of the

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Revolutionary Family, since the hierarchical and authoritarian sinarquistas were virulent reactionaries against the goals of the revolution, they deserved the “fascist” label. Various American scholars and journalists of the day who feared a pro-Axis front developing south of the American border on the eve of a European war endorsed this interpretation of sinarquismo.177 FBI investigators, observing Mexico closely for signs of a possible alignment with Nazi Germany, drew similar conclusions. Like its predecessor, the Unio´n Popular of Gonza´lez Flores, sinarquismo bore some resemblance to the Action Franc¸aise of Charles Maurras, and some of its members testified to the French movement’s influence.178 Founded in Leo´n, Guanajuato, in 1937, sinarquismo represented many of the dispossessed small landholders of the Bajı´o region. Its unusual name was derived from the Greek sin arche, meaning “with rule,” to contrast the movement with the disorder they believed had been created by the revolution. Sinarquismo—officially titled the Unio´n Nacional Sinarquista (UNS)—grew rapidly until it numbered nearly one million members by 1944. Its rise was all the more extraordinary because, unlike secular reactionary movements at the time, it enjoyed little financial support.179 Essentially sinarquismo protested three things: 1) the anti-Catholic policies of the revolutionary government under Ca´rdenas; 2) the failure of the Revolution to secure justice and prosperity for the rural areas; and 3) the threat to Mexican nationalism presented by both the United States and international Communism.180 According to Albert Michaels, “the sinarquistas had taken up the government challenge that the Catholic was a traitor to Mexico and had turned this challenge back on the government which they claimed was a tool of Soviet Russia.”181 Devoted to a Christian social order—or “Christian Democracy,” as they called it—the sinarquistas rejected both liberalism, with its atomized conception of civil society, and collectivism, which subordinated the individual to the will of the state.182 In the words of one leader, Manuel Torres Bueno, “the Christian order we intend to set up in Mexico will be a Christian Democracy based on a legally constituted family living on its own piece of land.”183 Its members rejected the entire liberal tradition in Mexican politics with its pantheon of heroes because they perceived politicians such as Jua´rez as vendepatrias, or country sellers, who privileged the interests of the United States above Mexico.184 As one sinarquista phrased it, “Juan Diego means more to us than all the Jua´rezes in our history!”185 This hostility toward the historic agenda of the liberals led the sinarquistas to reject the Mexican revolution root and branch. Instead, sinarquistas emphasized the contribution of Agustı´n de Iturbide, the forgotten hero of Mexican independence, to the formation of Mexican nationality and stressed Hispanidad—the celebration and promotion of Iberian culture—as the key component that gave Mexico its vitality. Yet this social movement, rather than place itself in competition with the regime, explicitly rejected a political solution. According to its own mission

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statement, “we are not a party, and we reject even more the idea of a political party.”186 To establish a Christian social order, however, extreme measures might be taken. In the words of Juan Ignacio Padilla, a leader and chronicler of sinarquismo, “the road to follow was that of civic action, peaceful or violent, according to the requirements of the struggle. If it was necessary to kill, we would kill, provided the conditions of tyrannicide were fulfilled.”187 Notwithstanding this frank reference to medieval Catholic theories of just revolt, sinarquismo’s best results were achieved though nonviolent means as exemplified by Abascal’s popular demonstrations against Garrido Canabal in Tabasco. Most of the movement’s leaders encouraged strategies of passive resistance, and despite the lower class composition of the movement as a whole, the notion of class warfare was specifically rejected. Sinarquistas committed themselves to a peaceful, though aggressive, struggle. In the words of one leader, Alfonso Trueba: The sinarquistas do not today think in terms of armed revolt. We are resolved to combat all ideas of revolution. You need more than a rifle to change the moral and political situation of Mexico; the result of our frequent revolutions has been our poverty and our status as a colonial people. A change of power ought not to occasion another revolution. We do not have arms nor do we need them; our program is no revolution.188

Although sinarquismo saw itself in direct confrontation with the government, it curiously maintained a willingness to “give unto Caesar.” And despite its deep commitment to the Catholic faith, the Church hierarchy wisely detached itself from any direct association with the movement.189 Sinarquismo was hierarchical in organization and directed by a supreme chief aided by a subchief, selected and directed by the Base’s ten-member high command.190 As the movement’s first leader, the high command chose Jose´ Trueba Olivares to carry out its objectives. Not only were the rank and file given no voice in selecting their leaders, but they were likewise discouraged from voting in political elections.191 Largely rejecting the Latin American attraction to strong, charismatic leaders, the sinarquistas adopted as one of their mottoes: “Today’s chief is tomorrow’s soldier.”192 But as sinarquismo gained rapidly in both size and strength, its lack of a unified and single-minded leadership would eventually contribute to its loss of influence. Sinarquismo attracted membership mostly in places where the revolution itself was deemed a failure—especially in western and central Mexico, the battlegrounds for the cristeros.193 Many of its members were ex-cristeros motivated to contest the Revolutionary Family’s monopoly of the social question by reinvigorating the peasantry into a mass movement.194 In doing so, they were responding to the severe crisis in Mexican agriculture that had occurred after President Ca´rdenas’s sweeping land reform. Many small farmers encountered exceptional difficulty in obtaining access to credit.195 Although the

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country had been self-sufficient in wheat and corn at the beginning Ca´rdenas’s term of office, by 1937 the country was importing corn.196 Sinarquista efforts to combat the destitution of the land put them in direct conflict with the governors of states with many ejidos, like Michoaca´n, and resulted in thousands of sinarquistas enduring threats and even losing their land parcels.197 Sinarquista propaganda forcefully argued that the revolution had failed them: The revolution has betrayed you then, peasant. The land is not for him who works it, it is not yours. You are not free. It is not given to you, even though you bought it at the price of your blood. Today the collectivist revolution is directed against you. . . . LAND AND LIBERTY: two words, peasant, which have been abused.198

The sinarquistas’ nonviolent approach, however, failed to prevent violence from being perpetrated against the movement. Violent confrontations during the Ca´rdenas years resulted in the deaths of several sinarquista members. In an important conciliatory gesture, President Ca´rdenas visited a sinarquista rally and expressed his sympathy for the murder of several members in Celaya, Guanajuato.199 Rather than engaging in direct clashes with sinarquismo, the Mexican government adopted a wait-and-see approach and even encouraged sinarquista projects for colonizing the sparsely settled regions of Baja California and Northern Mexico. These colonies of Maria Auxiliadora and Villa Kino, however, were poorly conceived and lacked such necessities as water to make the settlements a success. The failed colonization policy represented a sore spot for the organization’s leadership and led to a split with the colony’s leader, Salvador Abascal, who then bitterly denounced the high command publicly.200 Especially after the outbreak of World War II, the virulent anti-Yankee posture of leaders such as Abascal worried members of the high command, who understood that this would seriously jeopardize their position with respect to the Mexican government.201 Even the Church hierarchy expressed some strong reservations about sinarquismo, especially after the war started. Luı´s Marı´a Martı´nez, the archbishop of Mexico after Pascual Dı´az and a friend of La´zaro Ca´rdenas since his days as bishop of Morelia, Michoaca´n, believed that “the sinarquistas, in opposing Mexican assistance to the United States, indirectly are favoring the Nazis.”202 In sum, sinarquismo makes for an interesting comparison to the other Catholic movement, the National Action Party (PAN), which was founded in 1939. Although both worked toward similar ends, the realization of social justice as exemplified by Catholic social doctrine, their methods were greatly dissimilar, and their relations not particularly cordial. The PAN’s founders, some of whom, like Efrain Gonzalez Luna of the ACJM, would be greatly influenced by Jacques Maritain’s more pluralist conception of the Christian social order, were uncomfortable with the integralist Catholicism of the sin-

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arquistas. Efforts to unite the two movements in the 1940s—essentially grafting the PAN head onto the sinarquista body—were never successful. CONCLUSION Several lessons can be drawn from the activities of the Catholic great party during Mexico’s first revolutionary decades. The first is that, since the collapse of the Conservative party in 1867, these forces were growing in their acceptance of the legitimacy of democratic government. Long before the Second Vatican Council (1962–1965) exhorted Catholics to engage more fully with the modern world, the early “Christian democratic” movement and the National Catholic Party represented an important first step for Mexican Catholics’ coming to terms with democracy.203 Though short-lived and confessional in nature, the PCN offered a prototype for a future Catholic “system party.” It demonstrated how Catholic social doctrine could serve as the basis for a party platform and an alternative to liberalism and socialism. Some Catholic organizations—especially the Unio´n Popular and sinarquismo—still held on to great party strategy that rejected democratic pluralism and united Church and State, but by the end of World War II, the appeal of this position had faded. As for the second lesson, the rebellion of the cristeros in the 1920s and the protests by Catholic organizations in the 1930s proved that Catholics, if motivated and well organized, could check some of the dictatorship’s agenda. Their efforts may have also prevented the most radical elements from increasing their power within the Revolutionary Family, as made evident by Ca´rdenas’s choice of the moderate A´vila Camacho to succeed him in 1940. But social pressure alone proved inadequate to eliminate the regime’s sword of Damocles, the anticlerical articles of the constitution. The cleavage in Mexico’s political culture remained even after the open conflicts abated. The third lesson is that many Catholic activists, even sinarquistas, did identify with at least some of the goals of the revolution. The constitution drafted at Queretaro was not under attack, only its anticlerical articles and the entrenched, single-party state of the Revolutionary Family. In fact, as the sinarquistas made clear, many Catholics protested the failure of the revolutionary regime to fulfill its own social ideals, especially on the agrarian question. Indeed, the qualified acceptance of the revolution and its goals was an important concession by Catholic social forces for a future resolution of Mexico’s problem in establishing democratic community. With respect to the final lesson, these years demonstrated that the Church and the laity often disagreed about the right course of action with the revolutionary regime. The Church, after all, had to tend to its entire flock, irrespective of the political views of its various members. This led leaders like Archbishops Pascual Dı´az and Luı´s Marı´a Martı´nez to reach accommodations that undercut even the goals of lay activists and clerics like the cristeros or

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the sinarquistas, often to their intense frustration. The hierarchy’s sponsorship of Catholic Action and the SSM served to try to control Catholic activism and channel it away from direct clashes with the state. The laity, however, often was not prepared to “give unto Caesar” so readily. Catholic social forces may have drawn inspiration from the Church’s spiritual leadership and papal pronouncements, but they were not so often controlled by them. These Catholic organizations, of course, offer more of a prelude than a final word on how Catholic activists would cope with the challenge of the revolutionary regime. The cristeros demonstrated that direct violence was futile. Sinarquismo took a step backward to the Porfirian era of Catholic abstentionism. However, its sister organization, the National Action Party, was founded to reengage in the political arena by offering a democratic, “system party” alternative to the one-party regime.

NOTES 1. Roderic Ai Camp, Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10–11. 2. James W. Wilkie, “Statistical Indicators of the Impact of the National Revolution on the Catholic Church in Mexico, 1910–1967,” Journal of Church and State 12 (Winter 1970), 91. 3. According to Ilene V. O’Malley, the propaganda of the revolutionary government also featured “Christian imagery and the promotion of Catholic values,” and Catholicism’s encouragement of fatalism, adherence to church teaching, and obedience to authority helped buttress the regime. The Myth of the Revolution (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1986), 113–114, 131. Unfortunately, O’Malley does not reconcile this opinion with the revolutionary regime’s overt anti-Catholic stances. 4. Andres Barquin y Ruiz, Bernardo Bergo¨end, S.J. (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1968), 9. 5. Alberto Bremauntz, La Batalla Ideolo´gica en Me´xico (Mexico: Ediciones Juridico Sociales, 1962), see 229–273. Bremauntz helped draft the “socialistic education” amendment to Article 3 of the constitution. 6. Karl Schmitt, “Church and State in Mexico: A Corporatist Relationship,” The Americas 40 ( January 1984), 359. 7. J. Lloyd Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1966), 343–344. 8. Charles A. Hale, Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821–1853 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1968), 98. 9. Walter V. Scholes, Mexican Politics during the Jua´rez Regime 1855–1872 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Studies, 1957), 24. 10. Jose Bravo Ugarte, Historia de Mexico Vol. 3 (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1944), 113–14. 11. Freemasonry, organized in secret societies and promoting the heresy of “naturalism,” has been officially condemned by the Catholic Church since 1738. For the statement of the church’s case against Freemasonry, see especially Leo XIII, Humanum Genus (New York: St. Paul Editions, 1884).

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12. Alfonso Junco, Un Siglo de Me´jico de Hidalgo a Carranza (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1971), 94. 13. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 165. 14. Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 348. 15. Joseph H. L. Schlarman, Mexico: A Land of Volcanoes (Milwaukee, WI: Bruce Publishing, 1950), 292–93. This book by an American Catholic bishop became a favorite of many Catholic activists and long stayed in print in a Spanish edition. 16. Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 350. 17. Jesu´s Reyes Heroles, El liberalismo mexicano en pocas pa´ginas (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1985), 19. 18. Wilfrid Hardy Callcott, Liberalism in Mexico 1857–1929 (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1965), 6. 19. Scholes, Mexican Politics during the Jua´rez Regime, 48–9. 20. Scholes, 57. 21. Jorge Adame Goddard, El Pensamiento Politico y Social de los Catolicos Mexicanos 1867–1914 (Mexico: IMDOSOC, 1991), 11. 22. Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 203. 23. Scholes, Mexican Politics during the Jua´rez Regime, 127. 24. Karl M. Schmitt, “Catholic Adjustment to the Secular State: The Case of Mexico, 1867–1911,” Catholic Historical Review 48 (July 1962), 183. 25. Scholes, Mexican Politics during the Jua´rez Regime, 173. 26. Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 6–7. 27. Hans Maier, Revolution and Church: The Early History of Christian Democracy 1789–1901 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965), 19. 28. Luigi Sturzo, Church and State (New York: Longmans, Green & Co., 1939), 430. 29. Sturzo, Church and State, 417–428. 30. Sturzo, Church and State, 441. 31. Alberto Methol Ferre, “La Revolucion de la Ruptura,” Nexo (Montevideo: Marzo 1984), 41. E. E. Y. Hales Pio Nono (New York: P. J. Kenedy & Sons, 1954), 273. 32. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico y Social de los Catolicos Mexicanos, 96. 33. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 31–49. 34. Adame, 55–69, 115. 35. Franz H. Mueller, The Church and the Social Question (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1984), 66–71. 36. Maier, Revolution and Church, 278 37. Sturzo, Church and State, 458. 38. Barquı´n y Ruiz, Bernardo Bergo¨end, 17. 39. Sturzo, Church and State, 459. 40. Mario Einaudi and Francois Goguel, Christian Democracy in Italy and France (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1952), 4. 41. Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 377–78. 42. Francesco Galvan Banegas, El Porque´ del Partido Cato´lico Nacional (Mexico: Jus, 1960), 32–33. 43. Jean A. Meyer, El Catolicismo Social en Mexico hasta 1913 (Mexico: IMDOSOC, 1992), 7–8.

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44. Meyer, El Catolicismo Social, 3. 45. Wilfred Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom (New York: Macmillian, 1936), 214–15. This is an impressive circulation figure considering that today’s Mexican dailies rarely boast a circulation much larger than 200,000, even though Mexico’s population is roughly ten times that of 1900. 46. Meyer, El Catolicismo Social, 15 47. Ramon Eduardo Ruiz, The Great Rebellion (New York: W. W. Norton, 1980), 68. 48. Galvan Banegas, El Porque´, 49. 49. Galvan Banegas, 23–30. 50. Frederick C. Turner, The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 10. 51. Turner, The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism, 108. 52. W. Dirk Raat, Revoltosos (College Station, TX: University of Texas A&M Press, 1981), 211–13. 53. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 175. 54. Pablo E. Madero, Paralelo 04–76 (Mexico, DF: Editorial Geyser, 1979), 19– 21. The author is a nephew of Francisco I. Madero and formerly an important leader of PAN who ran for the presidency in 1982. 55. Charles C. Cumberland, Mexican Revolution: Genesis Under Madero (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1952), 60–61. 56. Banegas Galva´n, El Porque´, 48. 57. Barquin y Ruiz, Bernardo Bergo¨end, S. J., 25. Eduardo J. Correa El Partido Catolico Nacional y Sus Directores (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econo´mica, 1991), 12. 58. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 174–75. 59. Wilkie and Wilkie, Mexico Visto en el Siglo XX, 427. 60. Meyer, El Catolicismo Social, 24. Ludwig Windhorst founded the Catholic German Center Party. 61. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 180. 62. Gabriel Zaid, Muerte y Resurreccio´n de la Cultura Cato´lica (Mexico: IMDSOC, 1992) p. 32. 63. Camp, Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico, 27 64. Adame, Bernardo Bergo¨end, S. J. 134. 65. Francisco Barrera Lavalle, En defensa del Partido Cato´lico Nacional (Mexico: Juan Aguilar Vera, 1911), iv–v. 66. Banegas Galva´n, El Porque´, 51–53. 67. Barquin y Ruiz, Bernardo Bergo¨end, 49–50. 68. Vicente Fuentes Dı´az, Los Partidos Polı´ticos en Mexico (Mexico: Editorial Altiplano, 1969), 176. 69. Karl M. Schmitt, “Catholic Adjustment to the Secular State” Catholic Historical Review 48 ( July 1962), 188. 70. Gasto´n Garcı´a Cantu´, El Pensamiento de la Reaccio´n Mexicana II (Mexico: Universidad Nacional Auto´noma de Me´xico, 1987), 264–65. 71. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 182. 72. Ross, Francisco I. Madero: Apostle of Mexican Democracy, 209. 73. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 171–72. 74. Banegas Galvan, El Porque´, 50. 75. Padilla, Historia de la Polı´tica Mexicana, 125.

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76. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 182. 77. Manuel Romo de Alba, El gobernador de las estrellas (Guadalajara: Autoretrato, 1986), 109. 78. Bravo Ugarte, Historia de Mexico, Vol. 3 (Mexico: Jus, 1944), 436. 79. Ruiz, The Great Rebellion, 414. 80. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 184. 81. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 10–11. 82. Correa, El Partido Cato´lico Nacional, 115–16. 83. Bravo Ugarte, Historia de Mexico Vol. 3, 437–38. 84. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 187. 85. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 11. 86. Robert E. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church 1910–1929 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1973), 37. 87. Correa, El Partido Cato´lico Nacional, 180. 88. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 11. See Correa, El Partido Cato´lico Nacional, 180–83. 89. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 216. 90. Zaid, Muerte y Resurreccion de la cultura cato´lica, 37. 91. Adame, El Pensamiento Polı´tico, 188. 92. Robert Freeman Smith, The United States and Revolutionary Nationalism in Mexico, 1916–1932 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 230. 93. Bertram D. Wolfe, A Life in Two Centuries (New York: Stein and Day, 1981), 285. 94. Karl M. Schmitt, Communism in Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1965), 10–11. 95. Jean Meyer, El Sinarquismo: un fascismo mexicano? 1937–1947 (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz, 1979), 20 96. John F. W. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1961), 176. 97. Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth Century Mexico (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 40. 98. J. H. Retinger, Morones of Mexico (London: Labour Publishing, 1926), 24. 99. Schmitt, Communism in Mexico, 8. 100. Donald L. Herman, The Comintern in Mexico (Washington, DC: Public Affairs Press, 1974), 70. 101. Padilla, La historia de la polı´tica mexicana, 71. 102. Felix Navarette, La Masonerı´a en la Historia y en las Leyes de Me´xico (Mexico: n.d.), 177. 103. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 27. 104. Banagas, Galva´n El Porque´, 75. 105. Mecham, Church and State in Latin America, 381. 106. Mecham, Church and State in Latin America, 382–83. 107. Enrique Krauze, Mexico: The Biography of Power (New York: HarperCollins, 1997), 292–300. 108. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 88. 109. John Mason Hart, Revolutionary Mexico (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987), 346–47.

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110. E. V. Niemeyer, “Anticlericalism in the Mexican Constitutional Convention of 1916–1917,” The Americas 9 (July 1954), 33–35. 111. Niemeyer, “Anticlericalism in the Mexican Constitutional Convention,” 36. 112. Niemeyer, “Anticlericalism in the Mexican Constitutional Convention,” 49. 113. Joseph Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden (Derby, NY: Society of St. Paul, 1959), 111–12. 114. James Wilkie, “The Meaning of the Cristero Religious War against the Mexican Revolution,” A Journal of Church and State 8 (Spring 1966), 217. 115. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church 1910–1929, 100. The following are excerpts from the pertinent articles against the church: “Article 3. No religious body, nor a minister of any religious sect, will be allowed to establish or direct schools of primary education. Article 5. The State cannot authorize any contract, pact or agreement which has for its object the loss or the irrevocable sacrifice of the liberty of man, whether through the cause of labor, education or religious vow. The law, in consequence, prohibits the establishment of monastic orders of any denomination, whatever may be the object they pretend to have in view. Article 27. Religious societies, known as churches, of any belief whatsoever, may under no circumstances acquire, possess, or administer real estate or properties, nor mortgages on same; those which they now have, either in their own names or in that of a third person will pass to the domination of the Nation, and it will be the duty of every person to denounce to the Government any properties known to belong to the churches. . . . The temples destined for public worship are the property of the Nation . . . any other building which may have been constructed or intended for the administration, propagation or teaching of any religion, will immediately pass, by inherent right, to the public service of the Nation or of the States under their respective jurisdictions .The temples of public worship erected in future, will be the property of the Nation. Article 130. “The law recognizes no corporate existence in the religious associations known as churches. . . . Only the state Legislatures may determine the maximum number of ministers of religious creeds, according to the needs of each locality. Ministers of religious creeds may not, either in public or private meetings, or in acts of worship or religious propaganda, criticize the fundamental laws of the country, particularly the authorities, or the Government in general; they will have no vote, will not be eligible to office, and may not assemble for political purposes. . . . Any political association whose name bears any word or indication relating to any religious belief, is strictly prohibited.” Cited in Charles S. Macfarland, Chaos in Mexico: The Conflict of Church and State (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1935), 66–69. 116. Manuel Ceballos and Jose Miguel Romero de Solis, Cien An˜os de Presencia y Ausencia Social Cristiana (1891–1991) (Mexico: IMDOSOC, 1992), 80. 117. Ceballos and Romero de Solis, Cien An˜os de Presencia, 57–62. In Diego Rivera’s fantastic mural in the National Palace that surveys Mexican history, a cristero fighter can be seen wearing the emblem of the Caballeros de Colo´n. 118. David C. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey! (Austin, TX; University of Texas Press, 1974), 40–43. For Gonzalez Flores’s attraction to Action Franc¸aise, I am indebted to Professor Manuel Dı´az Cid of the Autonomous Popular University of the State of Puebla, in Puebla, Mexico. 119. Carleton Beals, Mexican Maze (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1931), 312. 120. Antonio Ruis Facius, De Don Porfirio a Plutarco: Historı´a de la A.C.J.M. (Me´jico: Editorial Jus, 1958), 183–89.

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121. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey! 37. 122. Wilkie, “The Meaning of the Cristero War,” 220. 123. Antonio Ruis Facius, Mejico Cristero (Mexico: 1960), 17, 85. 124. Ruis Facius, Mejico Cristero, 93. 125. Later changed to the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty. 126. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 23. 127. Ruis Facius, Mejico Cristero, 164. 128. Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 391. 129. Bailey, Viva Cristo Rey! 46–47; Mecham, 392. 130. Wilkie, “The Meaning of the Cristero War,” 222. 131. Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 396. 132. John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), 8, 345. 133. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 37. 134. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 188. 135. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 81, 128. 136. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 178. 137. Beals, Mexican Maze, 314–15. 138. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 376. 139. Beals, Mexican Maze, 331–32. 140. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 452. 141. Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, 71–72. 142. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 121. 143. Edward J. Berbusse, S. J. “The Unofficial Intervention of the United States in Mexico’s Religious Crisis, 1926–1930,” The Americas 23 ( July 1966), 45. 144. Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, 101. 145. Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 401 146. Jean Meyer, “La Epica Vasconcelista” Nexos 18 ( July 1995), 55. 147. Berbusse, “The Unofficial Intervention,” 54. 148. Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion, 210. One priest, Father Vega, actually led cristero units into combat, earning the sobriquet “Pancho Villa in a cassock.” 149. Berbusse, “The Unofficial Intervention,” 57. 150. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 51. 151. Ceballos, Cien An˜os de Presencia, 106–07. 152. Pius XI, Quadragesimo Anno (New York: St. Paul Editions, 1931), 40. 153. MacFarland, Chaos in Mexico, 162. 154. Quoted in Richard Pattee, The Catholic Revival in Mexico (New York: Paulist Press, 1944), 33. 155. Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, 142. 156. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 81–82. 157. Parsons, Mexican Martyrdom, 145–46. 158. Guillermo Zermen˜o and Rube´n Aguilar, Hacia una reinterpretacion del sinarquismo actual (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1988), 25–26. 159. Peter L. Reich, Mexico’s Hidden Revolution (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995), 97–98. 160. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 90–91. 161. Lyle C. Brown, “Mexican Church-State Relations, 1933–1940,” A Journal of Church and State 6 (Summer 1964), 202.

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162. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 56. 163. Quoted in Mecham, The Church and State in Latin America, 406. 164. Albert L. Michaels, “Fascism and Sinarquismo: Popular Nationalisms against the Mexican Revolution” A Journal of Church and State 8 (Summer 1966), 245. 165. Ceballos, Cien An˜os de Presencia, 104. 166. Richard Pattee, “Sinarchism—A Threat or a Promise?” Columbia 24 ( January 1945), 4. 167. Manuel Dı´az Cid, “El PAN: Un Opcion Politica” 2a. parte Entre Lineas (August 10, 1995), 3. 168. Zermen˜o and Aguilar, Hacia una Reinterpretacion del Sinarquismo Actual, 50–51. 169. Romo de Alba, El Gobernador de las Estrellas, 233. 170. Servando Ortoll, “Las Legiones, la Base y el Sinarquismo” in Jorge Alonso (ed.) El PDM: movimiento regional (Guadalajara: University of Guadalajara, 1989), 19– 21. Dı´az Cid, “El PAN, Una Nueva Opcion?” 4. 171. Pattee, “Sinarchismo,” 4. 172. Dı´az Cid, “El PAN, Una Nueva Opcion?” 3. 173. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 110. 174. Meyer, El Sinarquismo, 40–43. 175. Leslie Byrd Simpson, Many Mexicos (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966), 338. 176. Pattee, “Sinarquismo,” 3. 177. See Harold E. Davis, “The Enigma of Mexican Sinarchism,” The Free World 5 (May 1943), 410–16. 178. Meyer, El Sinarquismo, 146. 179. Meyer, El Sinarchismo, 203. 180. Nathan Whetten, Rural Mexico (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 487–97. 181. Michaels, “Fascism and Sinarquismo,” 249. 182. Meyer, El Sinarquismo, 119, 136. 183. John W. White, Our Good Neighbor Hurdle (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing, 1943), 107. 184. Charles A. Weeks, The Jua´rez Myth in Mexico (Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1987), 123–24. 185. Meyer, El Sinarquismo, 136. Juan Diego witnessed the apparition of the Virgin of Guadalupe in 1531. 186. Quoted in Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 208. 187. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 207. 188. Michaels, “Fascism and Sinarquismo,” 243. 189. Pattee, “Sinarquismo,” 13. 190. Whetten, Rural Mexico, 502. 191. Whetten, 505. 192. White, Our Good Neighbor Hurdle, 105. 193. Michaels, “Fascism and Sinarquismo,” 239–41. 194. Pattee, “Sinarquismo,” 4. 195. The ejido was the traditional Mexican collective farming system reinitiated by the agrarian reformers. 196. Meyer, El Sinarquismo, 196–97. 197. Meyer, El Sinarquismo, 193.

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198. Whetten, Rural Mexico, 490. 199. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 213. 200. Ledit, Rise of the Downtrodden, 237. 201. The sinarquista leadership became especially eager to dispel any misapprehension that the movement represented a threat to the war effort against the Axis powers. The American government feared that it acted as a conduit for Nazi propaganda in Mexico, an opinion held by FBI analyst and Communist sympathizer Maurice Halperin, who had employed CTM leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano as a source for his investigations. See Don Kirschner, Cold War Exile: The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1995), 76, 165. 202. Otell, “Las Legiones, la Base y el Sinarquismo,” 36. 203. See Samuel Huntington The Third Wave, 45. He identifies Vatican II as the end of the Church’s support for the status quo and the beginning of its activism in urging social, economic, and political reform. But this change had begun to take place at least by 1891, as the case of Catholic activism in Mexico demonstrates.

CHAPTER 3

The Emergence of the System Party

This chapter takes up the background, founding, and development of the National Action Party (PAN) from the 1920s until the end of the 1960s. By representing many of the revolution’s excluded groups, the PAN advocated participation in the political system but also helped reconcile many Mexicans—especially Catholics—to some of the principles of the revolution. And by its willingness to engage the great party revolutionary government in a strategy of “limited cooperation,” the PAN’s emergence on the political scene as a democratic “system party” marked a turning point in ending the great party struggle.1 The PAN came into being during a Catholic revival in Mexico, which featured a renaissance in history, literature, and journalism along with an increase in political activity. According to PAN official Fernando Estrada Samano, many party founders embraced the ideas of French Catholic revivalist thinkers such as Leon Bloy, Charles Pegu´y, and Paul Claudel. Some also were attracted to the ideas of an American Jesuit, John Courtney Murray, who employed the American model to influence Catholic doctrine on Church–State separation.2 As a Catholic party, the PAN represented a new phase in the Christian Democracy movement, which had begun during the years of Leo XIII. By the 1930s, former papal admonitions against Catholic political parties were forgotten. During World War II, Pope Pius XII even delivered a Christmas sermon calling for the reconstruction of Europe based on Christian Democratic principles. The first three decades of the PAN’s history reveal many of the dilemmas consistent with an opposition party confronting an authoritarian regime. From the beginning, panistas debated the merits of participating or abstaining

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from electoral races with the revolutionary party. The PAN faced another related dilemma: confront the revolutionary regime as illegitimate, or cooperate with it to achieve incremental gains. Those favoring a participatory and cooperative strategy normally determined policy, but the abstentionist and confrontational side of the PAN found ways to assert itself often enough. During this period, with the revolutionary party at its peak, the PAN operated more as a critic of official policies than as a political threat. Yet it did enjoy some small electoral victories and managed to influence public policy to a degree. It also developed a comprehensive ideology that served as the foundation for the modern party of the 1980s and 1990s. FOUNDING T H E S I N G L E “ G R E AT PA RT Y ” S T AT E The history of the PAN cannot be understood of course without reviewing the context of the consolidation of the revolutionary regime. Through the 1920s, the Revolutionary Family managed to hold onto power despite severe challenges from both disaffected generals and cristero counterrevolutionaries. The many factions of the Family, however, still needed to organize to prevent the revolution from being compromised and to fend off further challenges. Plutarco Calles announced his idea for a new party in his fourth Informe to the Mexican Congress in March 1928. Some future opponents of the PRI believed that U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow suggested this first apparition of the revolutionary party to Calles—part of the black legend of U.S. interference in Mexican internal affairs.3 But after Obrego´n’s assassination in 1928, many perceived the need for institutionalized succession. Besides, some revolutionaries, frustrated by electoral outcomes, were setting up rival governments in states or municipalities. As Emilio Portes Gil noted, instead of the interior secretary arbitrarily deciding the outcome of elections, now a new party could do so administratively. The party would defend the family and the revolution against both the opposition and cuartelazos from ambitious generals like Jose´ Gonzalo Escobar.4 As Calles stated, the mission of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) was “to unite the revolutionary family of the country, facilitating the institutional life of Mexico, for the democratic exercise of this party and the stimulus for the formation and development of other competitive parties, including with respect to doctrine.”5 The new party would incorporate all the elements of the Revolutionary Family and use the myth of the revolution to legitimize the regime.6 But the stated intention was not political monopoly. The manifesto of Calles and the main organizers recognized “that the multiple tendencies and opinions, which presently divide the nation, should be organized into two strong currents: the innovators, reformers, or revolutionaries; and the conservative and reactionary tendency.”7 The PNR was officially founded in the state of Quere´taro in March 1929. Sundry elements of the Revolutionary Family—generals and local bosses, la-

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bor and agrarian groups—joined in. Significantly, Morones’s Mexican Labor Party and the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM) were excluded.8 Because it brought together regional “revolutionary” parties, the PNR was organized not on individual membership, but along territorial lines.9 For its first election, Calles deemed it prudent not to seek the presidency for himself. To select its first presidential candidate, Calles outmaneuvered the obregonistas and put Pascual Ortiz Rubio in place. Thereafter, Calles directed the party from behind the scenes until 1934. As historian Alan Knight points out, this new party was an “exclusionary” elite settlement. “Inasmuch as the settlement of 1928–9 was designed to benefit and consolidate the revolutionary elites at the expense of their non- or anti-revolutionary rivals, the latter could hardly bask in the sun of consensus. For them, the new official party was a corrupt engine of oppression. Indeed, they would have agreed with Lord Halifax (a participant in England’s 1688 elite settlement) that ‘the best Party is but a kind of conspiracy against the rest of the nation.’”10 The new party began to institute order, but its legitimacy remained an open question. VASCONCELO S ’ S 1 9 2 9 P R E S I D E N T I A L C A M PA I G N Jose Vasconcelos, one of Mexico’s most notable liberal intellectuals, initiated the first major challenge to the PNR. A veteran of the Madero campaign, he edited his party’s organ, El Antireeleccionista, and introduced to the campaign Porfirio Diaz’s battle cry: “Effective suffrage, no reelection.” Upon returning to Mexico in 1920 after a period in exile, he served as Obregon’s education secretary to draft a plan for the country’s public education system. Through education, Vasconcelos hoped, a new nationalism could be forged, replacing Catholicism as the cohesive social force.11 Yet disillusionment set in as the revolutionaries preyed upon one another and abandoned more enlightened goals. The bully tactics employed by Morones and his CROM, and the alarming frequency of political assassinations, caused Vasconcelos to resign his post in the Obregon government. Moreover, Vasconcelos criticized the violent means taken against the cristeros, remarking that it was better to fight fanaticism with books rather than guns. After Toral shot Obrego´n, Vasconcelos speculated that Plutarco Calles himself instigated the crime. “The principal guilty one is he who will preside at his funeral,” he darkly asserted.12 Later in his Brief History of Mexico, Vasconcelos commented that Obregon had wished to attract Catholic support by ending the divisive prosecution of the anticlerical laws, and that was what killed him.13 Vasconcelos assumed that the country was fed up with Calles and that he himself represented the best hope for the restoration of the ideals of the revolution and the defense of individual liberties. Returning from exile once again, he entered the presidential campaign at the invitation of the National Antireelection Party under the slogan “With Madero yesterday, with Vascon-

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celos today!”14 As one of his followers would later recall, he “represented the orthodoxy of Madero’s revolution.”15 As such, his candidacy attracted much of the middle class and others disaffected with the Revolutionary Family. His diverse group of supporters— ranging from the conservative Madero family to many ideological communists—included future president Adolfo Lopez Mateos and future PAN founder Manuel Go´mez Morı´n, his campaign treasurer. Witnesses testified to Vasconcelos’s energy and enthusiasm on the campaign trail, although a close associate later wrote that the candidate lacked discipline.16 Vasconcelos advocated a diverse program of reforms, foreshadowing future policy. First, he endorsed economic nationalism, believing that Mexicans themselves needed sovereignty over their own natural resources, especially oil. He defended the rights of the small businessman and opposed corrupt labor unions, such as the CROM. As a progressive, Vasconcelos proposed the establishment of social security and women’s suffrage; indeed, his campaign marked the first large-scale participation of women in Mexican politics.17 Presaging an argument later taken up by the PAN, Vasconcelos defended the concept of the “free municipality,” reflecting both his respect for classical Athenian democracy and for Mexico’s colonial past. The free municipality had a long tradition as an ideal of Mexican self-governance, and its restoration was also one of the goals of Madero’s followers.18 Concerned by Obregon’s elimination of municipal powers in the state of Mexico, Vasconcelos believed that Mexico ran the risk of emulating Mussolini’s Italy. Therefore, he stressed restoring the functions of political sovereignty at the lowest level, as well as revitalizing an independent Congress and court system.19 Despite campaigning throughout the country, Vasconcelos was destined to fail against the new PNR machine. In November 1929 Calles’s stalking horse, Pascual Ortiz Rubio, garnered over two million votes, compared to only about 100,000 for Vasconcelos. U.S. Ambassador Dwight Morrow, anxious to avoid a further round of violence, suggested offering cabinet positions for Vasconcelos and his followers, but Vasconcelos rejected the idea out of hand.20 As Vasconcelos related the conversation in his memoir The Mexican Ulysses, “‘It is going to be hard for you to collect many votes,’ Morrow said at the end of our interview, ‘because, although I don’t deny your popularity, you know the power of the machine. At the last minute the adding machines may have lots of surprises. You are doing something important; you are educating the people in democracy; you will teach them to vote, and although you will lose this election— since the government is very strong—in the next one, four years from now, your triumph is sure unless you make the mistake of stirring up a rebellion.’”21 Vasconcelos’s bitterness at the allegedly fraudulent voting nevertheless incited him to call for an uprising, but an alliance between Vasconcelos’s supporters, cristeros, and disgruntled revolutionary generals never materialized. In a country weary of civil strife, the revolt of the vasconcelistas was quickly

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and bloodily suppressed. Many of these antireelectionistas were later discovered buried in mass graves at Germa´n del Campo. Vasconcelos himself fled the country once again.22 Gomez Morı´n, in a more clear-headed view of Morrow’s agenda, stated that the American position was not necessarily to ensure the victory of Ortiz Rubio, but to promote a stable political environment.23 For Vasconcelos’s campaign treasurer, this defeat proved that what the opposition needed was not a cult of personality, but a political party that would work over the long term to enlighten the public. CARDENI SM O After Vasconcelos’s defeat, Plutarco Calles governed Mexico behind the scenes and reduced civil tensions. But the sexenio of La´zaro Ca´rdenas (1934– 1940) planted the seeds for emergence of a new Catholic reaction. During the 1930s Mexico suffered the effects of the Great Depression, and the ideology of the Revolutionary Family took once again a radical tone. The SixYear Plan adopted by the party convention of 1933 set the country down the socialist path, in the opinion of many Catholics.24 To continue his Maximato, Calles chose his fellow revolutionary General Ca´rdenas, but the new president asserted his independence and developed his own power base among the labor organizations alienated by Calles. Shortly after taking office, he banished Calles from Mexico. Unusual for a deposed revolutionary, Calles later died of natural causes in the United States. Ca´rdenas built Mexico’s modern one-party state. Under the banner of “revolutionary nationalism,” he united the left-wing forces within the Revolutionary Family that were excluded by Calles due to his conservatism on some issues. One symbol of this realignment was the legalization of the Communist party. Ca´rdenas’s major ally became Vicente Lombardo Toledano, the Marxist leader of the newly established Confederation of Mexican Workers, which had supplanted the CROM. By 1938 Cardenas’s newly designed Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) incorporated industrial workers, peasants, public employees, and the army. Additional laws forced business groups to join the corporatist orbit by registering with the state. Bearing some resemblance to other corporativist regimes during the 1930s, including Italian fascism, Ca´rdenas referred to his system as “democratic pluralism.”25 But the Ca´rdenas regime presided over a turbulent era. A disgruntled revolutionary general and the former cabinet member, General Saturnino Cedillo, launched a rebellion from San Luis Potosı´ along with several right-wing groups. However, Cedillo failed to enlist the support of Catholics, who doubtless recalled his determined defense of Calles’s anticlerical policies during the 1920s.26 Although many of the Catholic laity were increasingly better organized to resist his “revolutionary nationalist” regime, Ca´rdenas’s efforts to at least better his relations with the Catholic hierarchy—especially Archbishop

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Luı´s Marı´a Martinez—had paid off.27 The Ca´rdenas government cracked down on the revolt and eventually killed Cedillo.28 The posture taken by Ca´rdenas’s popular front government in international affairs aimed at appeasing the radicals in his government, as evidenced by the refuge granted to Leon Trotsky and the aid and asylum granted to the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.29 This policy antagonized many Mexicans who sympathized with Franco’s Nationalists and disapproved of allowing their country to become a refuge for Communists.30 Another major spur for opposition came from Ca´rdenas’s mishandling of the economy. His distributionist policies helped millions of landless peasants, but they also contributed to a major economic downturn at the end of the 1930s. Ca´rdenas’s government neglected to provide adequate credit and irrigation facilities. The property expropriation—especially of the oil industry and the railroads in 1938—and the frequent strikes during the Ca´rdenas years sapped investor confidence. Foreign investment dropped off, high inflation eroded workers’ gains, and, after 1938, the peso rapidly lost value with respect to the dollar. Food prices rose and Mexico was forced to import corn, its chief stable. In light of all the sweeping changes instituted by Ca´rdenas, many in the middle class grew increasingly restive that their country was well on the road to socialism.31 This sets the stage for the founding of the PAN. THE NEW M A D E R O The indispensable man of PAN’s founding and early years was Manuel Go´mez Morı´n. Born in Chihuahua to a Mexican mother and Spanish father and educated in a Protestant school, Gomez Morı´n earned an early reputation for both his energy and intellect and was labeled one of the “seven sages” of the national university. A lawyer by trade, Gomez Morı´n became a talented adviser on financial matters, serving as a subsecretary of Treasury and Public Credit to the Obrego´n and Calles governments. He drafted the charter for the Bank of Mexico in 1925—he served as the first president of its council— and several laws on agricultural credit and monetary reform.32 And as a young idealist and revolutionary supporter, Gomez Morı´n believed that, out of the chaos of 1915, the revolution had created a new Mexico that fulfilled the promise of justice, liberty, and democracy.33 But Go´mez Morı´n criticized some of the key articles of the constitution governing land and labor reform—especially Articles 27 and 123—as being more sentimental than practical. According to political scientist Alonso Lujambio, the future PAN founder drew inspiration from the ideas of American progressives. Believing that the revolution lacked the technical aspects for its proper implementation, he advocated a fourth branch of government—a technical council—that would be tasked with policy management. The progressive movement likewise shaped his belief that good government began with the lowest political unit, the municipality. The municipality would serve both as

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a building block for responsible government—to help people arrive at practical solutions to administrative problems—and as an exercise in genuine political liberty.34 According to historian Enrique Krauze, Go´mez Morı´n, like many of his generation, was persuaded by Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset’s call for a directing, enlightened minority to handle public affairs.35 Ortega y Gasset had analyzed the reasons for political and social decay in a way relevant to the PAN founder: “When in a nation the masses refuse to be masses— that is, to follow a directing minority—the nation is unmade, society is dismembered, social chaos prevails. . . . In summary, where there is not a minority that acts upon a collective mass, and a mass that is capable of accepting the influence of a minority, there is not a society.”36 The problem of particularism—“that state of spirit in which we believe we do not have to take others into account”—often led to violence and disorder. To remedy this, Ortega y Gasset stressed the idea of an exalted national idea that cut across classes and interests and forged the population as a whole.37 Go´mez Morı´n, noted PAN historian Soledad Loaeza, borrowed from Ortega y Gasset the idea of a philosophy of action in service of an authentic nationalism. Additionally, Go´mez Morı´n believed that political renewal came not just from technical expertise, but also from moral reformation. His favorite aphorism, hay que mover las almas—souls must be stirred—came from the then-influential French poet Charles Pegu´y, who emphasized the need to restore moral vitality to politics.38 Unlike for Ortega y Gasset, Catholicism for Go´mez Morı´n played an important role as a brake on modernity’s advance. “Like other Spanish nationalists of his times,” Loaeza wrote, “Go´mez Morı´n believed that the Catholic tradition was the only legacy of the past that could serve as a base for reconstructing the future.”39 Moreover, Go´mez Morı´n shared many of the tenets of Catholic thought, especially regarding the need for order, authority, and natural hierarchies. In his essay 1915, Go´mez Morı´n called for a recuperation of the spirit and the founding of a new political society based on the family, the key intermediate institution between the individual and the state.40 Reflecting his Spanish parentage, he reacted against the anti-Hispanic tendencies of the revolution. Indeed, he was attracted to the Spanish nationalist writings of Ramiro de Maetzu, a member of Spain’s own National Action Party, who defined hispanidad as a spiritual community rooted in traditional Catholicism.41 After government forces killed two prominent coup plotters in October 1927, Go´mez Morı´n concluded that the government had now become the problem. “The verdict,” he wrote, “was definitive, the nation had been betrayed by the regime.”42 He allied himself with Vasconcelos, convinced that Mexico needed a civic awakening in order to restore the political freedom gained by the revolution. The revolution contradicted itself, he believed, by elevating an “ignoble military oligarchy.”43

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Corresponding with Vasconcelos and other associates in exile, Go´mez Morı´n began to intimate his plan for constructing a political party. “I don’t believe in groups of an academic character, but neither do I believe in suicide clubs,” he trenchantly acknowledged. In his conception, it would start with an organized group that would proselytize, organize, and study to develop a platform. The group would then hold a convention to decide if the time was right to participate electorally, but even if defeated, the party would still continue on. “It is necessary to form a democratic life in Mexico a durable organization and the permanent work of groups that can acquire sufficient force . . . well oriented and capable of lasting.” This organization would try to awaken public opinion and would put off immediate electoral victory, and the risk of losing it all, in order to build for the future. Although it may act in the short term as “constructive critic,” it would have the goal, “as is natural for all political enterprises, for the future conquest of power.”44 Even while working as a fund-raiser for Vasconcelos’s presidential campaign, Go´mez Morı´n doubted the effectiveness of his friend’s personalistic politics. After Vasconcelos’s defeat, Go´mez Morı´n urged him not to plot an insurrection and pleaded for his help to found a political party that would build for the future and honor those vasconcelistas who had died at Germa´n del Campo. But it was Go´mez Morı´n, not Vasconcelos, who had the better temperament to begin the work of “permanent Vasconcelism—civil action as a permanent moral crusade,” as historian Enrique Krauze described it.45 During the early 1930s, Go´mez Morı´n became involved with another contentious issue, education, which added to his ability to start a new party. He was appointed rector of the National University of Mexico and thereafter set out to stem the influence of Marxists, who were led by his former classmate, Lombardo Toledano. There Go´mez Morı´n counted on the support of the National Union of Catholic Students (UNEC), a Jesuit-run group. The UNEC too was determined to confront the growing Marxist presence in the nation’s university system and to protest the lack of government funding directed to the university.46 The UNEC grew out the National Conference of Catholic Students of Mexico (CNECM), a Cristero-era organization formed to counter the “social bolshevitization” of the school system.47 The martyred priest Miguel Agustin Pro had been one of its chaplains. Some of the PAN’s founders—including Luis Caldero´n Vega, Juan Landerriche, and Miguel Estrada Iturbide—were early members of these student groups. These were the “progressive” Catholics who were against the “ghetto mentality” of traditional Catholics such as the sinarquistas.48 Many attended the 1934 meeting of the Latin American Student Congress in Rome, a preliminary event in establishing the Christian Democratic movement, along with the future leaders Eduardo Frei of Chile and Rafael Caldera of Venezuela.49 As a progressive version of the ACJM, the UNEC sometimes came into conflict with its older sister organization.50 It even declared itself for “Ca-

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tholicism and Revolution” at its inaugural meeting and backed President Ca´rdenas in his nationalization of the oil industry. Its radicalism, however, did not endear it to the church hierarchy, which tried to steer it toward the more moderate tendencies of Catholic Action. Divided by internal conflict, UNEC disbanded in 1944 to avoid coming under the direction of the Catholic Action. Many of its members had already joined the PAN at its founding in 1939.51 Loaeza argued that Go´mez Morı´n’s alliance with the UNEC was more a marriage of convenience than conviction; he never intended to defend the rights of Catholics or the Church as such.52 However, according to Salvador Abascal, Go´mez Morı´n was one of numerous professionals who had joined Romo de Alba’s Legion in the 1930s to promote civil and political action.53 Go´mez Morı´n sought the participation of Catholic activists in his fledgling party, not merely as soldados rasos, foot soldiers, but as leaders who helped craft the doctrine of the party. Go´mez Morı´n’s motivation certainly may have been seemed by many as more cultural than religious—“I’ve always been Catholic!” he protested to two of his interviewers, James and Edna Wilkie—but he doubtlessly shared a common cause with Catholic activists on many important political matters, including religious freedom.54 Like Catholic intellectuals and activists, Go´mez Morı´n looked at the history of liberalism in Mexico with a critical eye. For him, a figure like Benito Jua´rez demonstrated the best and the worst of the liberal tradition—both as a defender of political liberty and an instigator of electoral fraud. Revolutionary ideals, too, had their darker aspects. Go´mez Morı´n criticized the anticlerical legislation contained in Articles 3 and 130 and defended the Church’s right to participate in education. But the reform of Article 3 would not be, in his estimation, an “antirevolutionary thing.” “If Mexico today is also the child of the revolution, I say that we don’t want a mutilated history! We want it then with Ca´rdenas and with Calles, and with all that is ours, like it or not.”55 FOUNDING TH E “ S Y S T E M” PA RT Y Beginning in 1938, Go´mez Morı´n started canvassing his associates and forming the rudimentary outline of the doctrine, organization, and method of the new party. He gathered in former maderistas and carrancistas, such as Aquiles Elorduy and Toribio Ezquivel Obrego´n of the Antireelectionist party, and Miguel Alessio Robles, a former minister in the Obrego´n government. Many of the new leaders in the party were predominantly lawyers, bankers, and entrepreneurs from the northern city of Monterrey.56 The PAN’s first committees started in Monterrey and in Go´mez Morı´n’s home state of Chihuahua. But the heart of the party consisted of the Catholic activists from the ACJM and especially the UNEC, whose members constituted about a third of the PAN’s national executive committee in the party’s first year.57 The Base also contributed to the founding of the National Action Party. According to the party chronicler Luis Caldero´n Vega, the Base provided

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personnel to the PAN, usually Catholic “progressives” like himself and Miguel Estrada Iturbide of Michoacan.58 But the PAN had a difficult relationship with the flagship of the Base’s organization, sinarquismo. About the time of PAN’s founding in 1939, Go´mez Morı´n and other PAN founders attended a sinarquista national council meeting. Shortly thereafter, an attempt was made to unite the two movements. At the peak of its power, sinarquismo’s overt leader, Salvador Abascal, turned down Go´mez Morı´n’s offer. However, the head of the high command, Antonio Santacruz, lent the PAN some of its followers to help establish the party in Michoacan.59 Alongside Go´mez Morı´n, the outstanding Catholic activist in the early PAN was Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna of Guadalajara, who was inspired by the social teachings of Leo XIII. An early associate of Anacleto Gonza´lez Flores in Jalisco, this lawyer, insurance executive, and intellectual became an important leader in the ACJM during the religious crisis of the early 1920s and introduced Catholic social doctrine into the party as the basis of its ideology.60 More importantly, in helping shape the nature of the PAN, Gonza´lez Luna departed from the course of both the cristeros and the sinarquistas: He rejected the path to violence and the allure of secrecy that respectively characterized these Catholic organizations. Catholics lacked political organization since the nineteenth century, Gonza´lez Luna lamented. The Porfiriato and the Revolutionary Family had ended politics or instituted “directed” democracy. The PAN, however, represented “a march toward the rehabilitation of public life.” “The hard option for Mexico,” he wrote, “but at the same time the indisputable and obligatory option for Catholics, is the effort for the political rehabilitation of the nation by means of instituting a representative regime.”61 Gonza´lez Luna admired and befriended Jacques Maritain, the French Catholic philosopher whose thought contributed to the Christian Democracy political movement in Europe and Latin America.62 Among other works, Maritain’s Integral Humanism sought to draw Catholics away from authoritarian responses to the political challenges in Europe by stressing that politics needed to concern itself with the whole man, his spiritual as well as material needs. Rejecting the “value-free” political science inherited from Machiavelli, Maritain believed that Christians could regain their influence by reinvigorating their public philosophy.63 Moreover, Maritain stressed that democracy based on constitutionalism and natural law was compatible with Catholic societies. In accordance with the statement on subsidiarity in Pius XI’s encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, Maritain advocated a pluralist society that would offer the most autonomy possible for particular communities.64 Maritain’s work preached a tolerance and openness for a diversity of ideas, even of unbelief, and a faith in the reconstruction of a new temporal order. “It can be found only by going ahead, by accepting the risks of creative freedom . . . by inaugurating, in the full sense of the word, a politics intrinsically and existentially Christian.”65 His “Christian Democracy” both defended the

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culture and sought to eliminate the injustices that aided the Communist temptation.66 On the whole, Maritain and the PAN founders shared a common understanding of the modern political problem for Catholics and the task necessary to deal with it. The diverse founders of the PAN assembled in Mexico City on September 14–15, 1939. The quality of the party founders and the debate at its constituent assembly impressed even a later critic of the PAN like Abraham Nuncio, who stated that “the discussion of September 1939 in the heart of the first assembly of National Action, had not been sufficiently valued. It was a discussion that concentrated lucidity and oratorical capacity. In the era, there was no other example that surpassed it for its ideological intensity and intellectual level.”67 In his address to the party’s constituent assembly, Go´mez Morı´n said: “Never before has been so grave Mexico’s process of disaggregation, the relegation of the national interests, the insolent and repeated lies, the scorn for human values.” He asserted that the clash of two tendencies was occurring: that which enslaves Mexico to political ambition and subjects the indifferent masses to the will of the State, and that which desires that Mexico’s subsistence be integrated into its true tradition, fulfilling its own destiny and internally ordered for the good of all Mexicans.68 He lamented that “in recent years, public life has too frequently been the mere exploitation of power.”69 Echoing some of the tradition of Catholic social doctrine that would come to inform PAN’s ideology, Go´mez Morı´n believed his party should affirm an efficient and hierarchical state with an effective government that could realize the common good, respect the dignity of the human person, and assure the means for him to complete his material and spiritual end.70 The party was to create a generous and well-ordered homeland—para una patria generosa y ordenada—and secure for all Mexicans a better and more dignified life.71 The name “National Action” itself suggested the influence of the Catholic Action movement on the new party. Others have opined that at least the name, if not the ideas, were derived from the Action Franc¸aise of Charles Maurras.72 Fernando Estrada Samano, son of one of the founders, offers that the name was derived from Ortega y Gasset.73 Significantly, the new party’s moniker did not reflect any overt Catholic agenda because the Constitution of 1917 prohibited any clerical references. Indeed, unlike the earlier National Catholic Party and later Catholic movements, no churchmen participated in founding the PAN. Go´mez Morı´n and other founders understood the need for sound organization in the PAN. Along with a national assembly, they created a national council as the party’s senate so it would not be “an amorphous mass.”74 The National Executive Committee directed the day-to-day affairs of the party. The party also organized regional councils—based in Chihuahua, Guadalajara, Guanajuato, and Morelia—that would allow the party to stay in better touch with the local and state leaders. Its first regional council was founded

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in Mexico City in November 1939, and by 1940 the party had committees and regional councils in 17 more states.75 One senator asserted that the PAN’s conception of a corporatist society varied little from the organization of Ca´rdenas’s PRM, but the PAN in fact departed from the corporativist principles.76 Unlike the PRM’s method with its confederations, members of other Catholic groups were not automatically inscribed into the PAN’s roles; indeed, they had to give up their membership before joining the PAN. The encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, considered by many as the inspiration for “social corporatism,” did not advocate forcing society’s members into state-run sectors, but instead exhorted politicians to respect natural, sectoral interests. Gonza´lez Luna, Miguel Estrada Iturbide, and Rafael Preciado Hernandez served on the committee to create the party’s doctrine, borrowing from the teachings of Popes Leo XIII and Pius XI. As Calderon Vega described it, “the proposition of a social doctrine, based on the human person and the common good and inspired by the Christian social thought, represented the only firm position to face the demagoguery and anarchy of the governmental regime.”77 The liberals on the committee—Agustı´n Arago´n, Gustavo Molina Font, and Aquiles Elorduy—though religious agnostics, also admired these teachings.78 The creation of the Principles of Doctrine by the diverse committee of Catholics and liberals demonstrates the affinity between the principles of subsidiarity and solidarity and the dedication to political liberties. Go´mez Morı´n believed that a political party, in order to transcend its origins, needed to avoid explicit religious rhetoric.79 As he said years later in an interview, “As proof that we were not a confessional party, we did not want to become a Christian Democrat party.”80 Caldero´n Vega, who hailed from the party’s Catholic militant wing, also emphasized that the Catholic profile of the party did not signify it as a “clerical” instrument.81 As an organization, the party was to be fundamentally pluralist. Gonza´lez Luna: “Not only is the party not confessional, but its doors are open to those good citizens who, even when they do not profess the Catholic faith, are loyally disposed to sustain the principles and bring about the programs that the organization promotes.”82 Yet Go´mez Morı´n was accustomed to employ quasi-religious language when describing the party’s purpose: “We raise up, immortal, our faith in the essence and destiny of Mexico, and in man redeemed and capable of dignified life here, and of eternal salvation.” Go´mez Morı´n exhorted his fellow party members to have confidence in the force of ideas, and to have faith: “the faith in Mexico; the right interpretation of man and society, of the country; the idea of spiritual values that give life to every man and people, the true reason for being, the only reason for being, because without them neither will it be able to realize material values.”83 In those early days of the PAN, Go´mez Morı´n ridiculed the Ca´rdenas regime. The Mexican president was a “Sexenial Caesar.”84 Addressing the party

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faithful at Chilpancingo in February 1940, he said: “Speaking of the PRM, the president makes it part of the regime, not a representative of the nation.” The nation, indeed, repudiates this “indubitable and illegal appendage of the government.” It is an affront to morality, the constitution, and the national political interests: “no one is fooled by it in Mexico or outside Mexico, only those who wished to be fooled.”85 As for the constitution, it was “liberal and socialist, contradictory and ineffectual.” To the PAN founder, it appeared that the government “was not dedicated to ordering the country, but to organizing disorder.” It was “communist-like,” a popular-front government that tried to maintain a liberal democratic appearance.86 In a speech before the party’s national council, Go´mez Morı´n attacked fraudulent use of the word “revolutionary” by the current regime; it had lost its original, “generous” meaning.87 He distinguished between the “regime” and the “nation,” with the current regime, the Revolutionary Family, running the country solely for its own benefit. Just like in the Porfiriato, “the nation and the government are separate, are antagonists.”88 But the true ideas of the Mexican revolution were not incompatible with Catholicism. According to an editorial in La Nacio´n, house organ of the PAN, “Mexican Catholics do not need to reconcile themselves with the positive elements of the Revolution. They are their own, noble ideals of authentic political representation and social justice.” What is condemned about the Revolution was the “criminal hordes that sullied the noble flag, the antireligious fanaticism unleashed throughout the country, that were able to institute constitutional positions that had monstrous and bloody applications” and, among other things, “the frustration of social reform, the administrative corruption, the complicity or, suffice to say, the servile submission to international conspiracies, the monetary inflation, the general misery, the economic ruin.”89 Another PAN thinker, Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola, later wrote: “This is precisely the drama of Mexico: in first terms, the fascist state, that denies the common good, that assumes an attitude not only polemical, but belligerent, before the people: ‘the revolution does not give up power, except by the force of bayonets. . . . ’ The regime both professes and practices a predatory concept of power. It does not link the destiny of the nation to the common good. . . . The people are born to shut up and obey.”90 Faced with the challenge of the one-party, revolutionary state, Go´mez Morı´n expressed the PAN’s duty in these terms: “our essential proposition . . . is not to win an election, but to fight for the actual salvation of Mexico.”91 This duty was part of what Gonza´lez Luna called the “la te´cnica de salvacio´n.” This technical art is the preeminence of the permanent over the contingent. Therefore, “Accio´n Nacional can never be tied to electoral episodes . . . it cannot risk, it is better to say, the inestimable treasure of the possibilities of the future salvation of Mexico in ephemeral, contingent episodes of the next election.92 That said, the party must not, as its name implied, abandon direct action.

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“Accio´n Nacional would not only betray its name, but its essence, if it abandoned for a single moment action, and not just action in general, but action specifically political.”93 Recognizing that a society undergoing “general decomposition” is one in which political corruption is concomitant with all of the other social disorders, Gonza´lez Luna believed that “the primacy was the political.”94 THE PAN’S P O L I T I C A L T H O U G H T According to Antonio Delhumeau’s perceptive study of the party, there are three elements to the PAN’s ideology: its identity with Catholic Social Doctrine, its theory of the state and democracy, and its moral conception of the role of the opposition.95 The PAN’s Principles of Doctrine outlined the party’s conception of the political based on Catholic social doctrine. The PAN proposed a doctrine that it believed would take a third way as distinct from the PRM or the PRI’s collectivism and the Anglo-Saxon world’s individualism.96 This ideology—“political humanism” in the phrase of Efrain Gonza´lez Luna—attempted to explain man and the state as “manifestations of the same human reality.” The PAN was to act as a link between these “two essential datum.”97 It distinguished its concept of politics from that of the revolutionary party, which considered the people as “the masses and the nation as the patrimony of the state.”98 In the Principles of Doctrine, the PAN affirmed the natural law foundation for individual rights, and the rights of “intermediate organizations” between man and the state. Stressing the “right to the truth,” as one PAN ideologue put it, the party intended to break the PRI government’s “logocracy.”99 The end of the state for the PAN is the common good, the betterment of social conditions to achieve a just, free, ordered, and fraternal society, ultimately for the perfection of “the human person.”100 As Gonza´lez Luna defined it: “The common good is nothing else than the conjuncture of conditions of social life that permit the human person to realize his destiny, fulfill his nature, perfect his being, that is to say, achieve his wellbeing.”101 The PAN’s first political platform of 1946–1952 accused the government of maintaining laws that “impeded or attacked ordered and free human activity and its natural forms of social expression such as the family, associations of labor, culture and faith, prohibiting Mexicans from fulfilling their material and spiritual destiny.” Rather than casting doubt upon the legitimacy of the revolutionary project, however, the document called the regime treasonous to the very principles of the revolution.102 The state remained the genuine representative of the entire collectivity and was tied permanently to the community. In this way, it was illegitimate for it to become associated with only one particular class or interest. As Go´mez Morı´n put it, “that state would have, according to our formulation, the broadest capacity to promote, without being oppressive; the most complete au-

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thority, without being a tyranny; and the most effective and consistent aptitude for justice, without the necessity of being subversive.” Intervention in the economy would be justified, however, only if the state “is genuinely national.” As such, the state was obliged to ensure that the economy not become an end in itself, but remained subordinate to the common good.103 The PAN, therefore, wished to promote private initiative without denying the need for state intervention. “The state has authority, not propriety, in the national economy.”104 But as Go´mez Morı´n understood it, this was primarily a political problem. “It is necessary, therefore, to remember always that the economic problem and the political problem are in a certain manner twins. . . . as much influence the economic order has on society’s public life, it must be proclaimed with equal certainty—because so it is in reality—that the primacy is the political.”105 Referring to the state as “a hierarchical order,” the PAN founders regarded it as composed of “natural human communities,” which include the family as the most important social unit. Gonza´lez Luna placed great weight on the family as the primary institution of his “political humanism.” The family should be the institution par excellence “to give satisfaction to the individual for the necessities of his material, spiritual and economic well-being.”106 But the PAN also stressed the role of other intermediate institutions, like workers’ associations and professional and cultural organizations, which stood between the individual and the state. All these served to defend the dignity of the human person in his social, economic, and political life, but above all, assisted him in realizing his ultimate, more elevated destiny.107 The PAN conceived of democracy as the limitations on the powers and the functions of the state. Theirs was a political definition, combining respect for the vote, division of powers, and decentralization of authority. Naturally, a political system dominated by a single party, which “covered itself in the mantle of democracy” was “an incredible heresy,” in the words of Go´mez Morı´n.108 Describing democracy as a unifying force, Gonza´lez Luna also liked Maritain’s description of democracy as “the organization of liberty.” He believed that democracy could reconcile the contradictions that threaten superior values in common life; it is “what cements and bolsters the social order.”109 Only democracy has the best chance of realizing the common good, which is everyone’s duty—before their own conscience, before the community, and before God. All of us our responsible for our common destiny. But civil society, Gonza´lez Luna thought, had failed in teaching people their social responsibilities.110 The opposition, therefore, plays a critical role in realizing democracy. Christlieb, who led the party during the 1960s, noted that “democratic channels are closed when the opposition is systematically obstructed in an unjust manner from the possibilities of sharing power. When a regime closes off dialogue with the opposition, little by little the confidence in democratic forms are lost, and such regimes tend toward autocracy and produce in their

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citizens an unfruitful desertion from politics, representing an undeniable regression in a people’s life.”111

POLICY PRO P O S A L S PAN leaders realized that the party could not live on political sermons alone. Christlieb, for example, wrote that “a party that limits itself to propagating principles, reduces itself, in the majority of cases, to an academy of political science.”112 The PAN’s “Minimum Program,” introduced in the 1940s, stated that “the most urgent political proposition, in these times, is that which guarantees the free formation and effectiveness of national opinion in the integration and the functioning of government. It is indispensable, therefore, to oppose: a) the existence of an official party; b) the coercion that is exercised over labor organizations in order to decide their political alignment; c) the biased and open intervention of federal, state and municipal governments in electoral activities; d) the partisan use made of the army with damage done to its character and mission eminently national; and e) all of the mechanisms of official propaganda oriented toward the imposition, and toward the disorientation and mystification, of civic opinion.”113 Go´mez Morı´n, with his ample experience with economic development projects during the 1920s, contributed a great deal to the PAN’s positions on economic reform. In line with Article 123 of the constitution and the concept of subsidiarity, Go´mez Morı´n promoted the idea of limited state intervention in the economy, the just family wage, and universal social security. The founder and other members of his party were also attracted to the postwar German experience of the social market economy—the work of President Adenauer’s brilliant minister Ludwig Erhard—as a practical fulfillment of Catholic social doctrine.114 Agrarian reform was one of the PAN’s initial proposals and a pet issue of the party’s first secretary general, Roberto Cossio y Cosı´o. The PAN believed that to solve the problem of scarcity in the countryside—the lack of water and arable land—the campesino population must be allowed mobility.115 Familyowned property must be permitted and technical aid provided to the ejidos. The modification of Article 3 to allow the family more responsibility and the church a greater role in education remained one of the party’s distinct proposals. Many of its members cut their teeth by opposing the “socialistic education” of Calles and Ca´rdenas during the 1930s. Especially on contentious issues such as Article 3, PAN joined in protests with the National Union of Parents and the sinarquistas.116 The party also believed that the government should be spending more on schools and teachers for the country’s growing population. Christlieb attacked the presumption of the state in imposing obligatory textbooks, curtailing freedom of education by prohibiting parochial schools, and failing to realize the educational duties it had assumed to itself.117

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PAN’s proposals on education coincided with its position on religion. The party stressed freedom of conscience on religious matters and advocated the reform of those constitutional articles—especially Article 130—that restricted the rights of religious men and women. In its party platform 1946–1952, the PAN stated its position on the anticlerical articles: “respect and guarantees for the human person, reform of Article 3 of the constitution and the other laws and practices that impede or attack ordered and free human activity and its natural forms of social expression such as the family, the institutions of work, culture, and faith, and enable man in Mexico to complete his material and spiritual destiny.”118 On electoral matters, the party also proposed that an independent legal authority like the Supreme Court would investigate electoral violations.119 In 1951 the PAN devised its own electoral reforms calling for a) the establishment of a permanent registration of voters protected against party manipulation; b) the creation of an electoral institution that would oversee registration, party activity, elections, and vote counting; c) instituting legal penalties to correct electoral abuses; and d) the regulation of the party system, which included doing away with an official party.120 These four points stood as the model for the PAN’s critique of the electoral system until the 1990s. One of the PAN’s most successful legislative ventures was its backing of women’s suffrage, introduced by President Ca´rdenas in 1937 but stalled in Congress because the PRM believed female voters might be unduly influenced by priests. In 1952 the PAN legislators managed to break the impasse, but the final law was sponsored by the PRI.121 An important component to the PAN’s public philosophy was its advocacy of federalism. Here the PAN wished to realize the principles of decentralized authority inherent in the Mexican constitution. For both party founders, Go´mez Morı´n and Gonza´lez Luna, the essence of Mexican federalism was the restoration of authority to its basic unit, the municipality.122 Echoing one of the key proposals of the Vasconcelos campaign, the PAN regarded the municipality as one of the foundations of political liberty and a guarantor of true civic representation.123 As part of its Principles of Doctrine, the PAN called for a reform of Article 115 of the constitution to grant the municipality more control of its own affairs. The PAN’s earliest pamphlet for wide distribution was called “La Ciudad: Necesidad del Municipio Libre,” which considered the municipality to be a bulwark against arbitrary power and as a “school of government and citizenship.” It would also serve as a test case to resolve national problems. In 1947, PAN deputies in the Congress attempted to revitalize the concept of the free municipality by proposing the reform of Article 115, which would revise the fiscal relationship between the federal government and the state and municipal governments, as well as institute popular initiatives and referenda.124 No headway was made on this issue, however, until the party started winning important municipalities in the 1980s.

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Go´mez Morı´n saw the PAN’s activities as permanent and gradualist. The emphasis he placed on the municipality demonstrated the essence of his gradualist strategy for political transformation; democratic change in Mexico needed to proceed from the periphery to the center.125 The PAN would strive to participate in the electoral battles, but, as Gonza´lez Luna liked to point out, its political activity “should not be reduced to narrow limits, such as the ephemeral episodes of electoral events.” Civic action to raise consciousness determined a large part of its mission, along with promoting a “precise and delineated ideology” to differentiate the party from the ambiguity of the official party. This duty was an eternal struggle—una brega de eternidad.126 I NTO THE A R E N A Go´mez Morı´n feared that the PAN could become just an “escape valve” for the regime, a new form of deception.127 He laid out the dilemma: On one hand, it is necessary for the party to intervene in the political life to propose doctrinal and policy positions and to compete electorally against the revolutionary government. This had the disadvantage of legitimizing the regime. On the other hand, the party could abstain and concentrate on actively developing the doctrine and policy without taking part in electoral campaigns.128 This would reduce the PAN’s ability to get its message before the public. While the party was still in its infancy, Go´mez Morı´n favored the latter recourse. He realized the difficulty in obtaining immediate success and how the work of educating the public in PAN’s positions was still ahead of them. But this cautious approach set an unusual precedent, requiring the PAN to decide, at each convention, whether to participate in elections or not.129 The PAN arrived on the scene amid a succession crisis in the Revolutionary Family. President Ca´rdenas’s political mentor, the “Jacobin” Francisco J. Mu´gica, appeared to be his logical successor. But Ca´rdenas’s leftist policies tempted a rightist counterreaction from General Juan Andreu Almaza´n, Mu´gica’s main rival for the nomination. Almaza´n had been a faithful revolutionary general who had helped suppress the Escobar revolt in 1929 and was even rumored to be the candidate to succeed Calles. After Cedillo’s ill-fated rebellion, Almaza´n became the informal leader of the right wing of the Revolutionary Family and began campaigning for the presidential nomination of the PRM. Almaza´n openly courted Catholics by promising to revoke Article 3.130 Because of his favorable stand on Catholicism, many traditionalists, and even the strong Catholic contingent in the PAN, were favorably disposed to his candidacy.131 Ca´rdenas needed to compromise. According to historian Albert Michaels, many of Ca´rdenas’s followers had gotten rich during his sexenio and hoped that a more conservative president would protect their new assets.132 Although Ca´rdenas remained loyal to Mu´gica as a candidate, he could never convince the party’s key sectors—the army, the Confederation of Mexican Workers

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(CTM), and the governors—to back him.133 As with other quasi-legitimate regimes, the election of 1940 demonstrated the vulnerabilities of the singleparty dictatorship to the question of succession. Ca´rdenas tactfully selected as the official party’s presidential candidate his defense secretary, Manuel Avila Camacho, who, as a moderate, could reconcile more Mexicans to the new revolutionary order. Avila Camacho’s military experience was not during the revolution proper, but against the cristero counterrevolt. Nevertheless Avila Camacho had preferred to negotiate rather than fight, in marked contrast to other generals facing the rebel threat. He took this spirit of reconciliation to his presidential campaign as well, publicly stating that he was “a believer,” though not going so far as to say he was a Catholic.134 Go´mez Morı´n perceived that the country was verging on political crisis, but his small party could not yet field its own candidate.135 Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna advocated electoral abstention, arguing that the PAN’s prime mission was to prepare the citizenry for participation and not to involve itself in “the ephemeral feverishness of electoral agitation.”136 Another reason for nonparticipation was that, in its founder’s opinion, there was no mechanism in place to ensure a just vote.137 But for many in the PAN, a vote for Almaza´n was a vote against the government, so they were inclined to participate.138 Those panistas who insisted on involving the infant party in the 1940 presidential election believed that the best means to form the public was to disseminate the party’s message.139 Behind the scenes, the high command of the Base tried to persuade Go´mez Morı´n to desist from endorsing Almaza´n’s candidacy. Go´mez Morı´n replied that he would do what he could, but the party was democratic and the ultimate decision would be in the hand of the party’s council.140 Later he explained the PAN’s ambivalent position with regard to Almaza´n: “Accio´n Nacional came in on the side of Almaza´n, only the support he received was limited. Simply put, he was the only alternative possible of the opposition . . . the opposition must not be divided.”141 Ca´rdenas promised an orderly transition, but violence marred the election. Pistoleros broke up Alamazanista meetings and attacked his adherents.142 Like the Vasconcelos campaign eleven years earlier, the government was accused of committing widespread fraud to ensure the victory of its candidate. The PRM took all the seats in Congress. Although Almaza´n swore he would lead an insurrection if defrauded of victory, he fled the country instead, leaving some of his hapless followers to the mercies of government forces.143 Go´mez Morı´n himself was offered a cabinet post by Avila Camacho, but he refused it.144 The PRM’s president-elect Go´mez Morı´n did relent to the PAN’s right to participate in future elections, but its registration status would depend on the government’s continued permission. The PAN had thought the campaign would add to its membership roles, only to find that after the campaign, both membership and financial support dropped off substantially.145

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Undaunted, the PAN’s national convention elected to participate in the 1943 midterm elections, and, for the first time, the party competed for seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The PAN additionally put up candidates for office in Guadalajara and Monterrey, two important centers of party support. But during these early years the PAN’s participation in municipal campaigns was sporadic because the party’s narrow base limited its ability to compete effectively. Likewise, in district races, the PAN participated in only 14 percent and garnered just 5 percent of the total vote. Nevertheless, the party claimed victory in four contests and demanded that the electoral college annul the results in eight other districts.146 A year later, the PAN offered its first candidate for governor, Aquiles Elorduy, in the state of Aguascalientes. In 1946 the PAN found itself at the center of one of Mexico’s worst electoral clashes—the massacre in Leon, Guanajuato. Here the PAN, in alliance with the Unio´n Cı´vica Leonesa, supported a sinarquista candidate for mayor, Carlos Obrego´n. The vote in December 1945 was marred by extensive fraud, and during the protests that carried into January, the army fired into the crowd, killing or wounding around sixty people.147 This bloody crackdown forced the regime to allow Obrego´n to take office, and it gave impetus to the electoral reforms passed later that year, proving that the PAN, though modest in size, could pressure the government for reform. The succeeding electoral law of 1946 provided for a mechanism to hear cases of vote fraud. It established a commission with the PAN and other minority parties represented, but the PRI controlled all decision making. An electoral college made up of federal deputies ultimately decided matters in federal cases since, according to Go´mez Morı´n, the Supreme Court refused to hear suits in these matters under Article 97.148 That same year the PAN decided to nominate a candidate of its own for the presidency, but because of his Spanish heritage on his mother’s side, Go´mez Morı´n could not run himself. Gonza´lez Luna, in a surprising gesture, asked Luis Cabrera, a traditional liberal and Carrancista, to accept PAN’s nomination. The PAN leadership believed that Cabrera, because of his conservative views and “revolutionary credentials,” could stand as a symbol of “national unity.” Cabrera, however, harbored no illusions about his popular appeal.149 Although declaring himself honored by the nomination, Cabrera turned down the PAN’s offer. For his part, President Avila Camacho selected the pro-business Miguel Alema´n of Veracruz as the party’s destapado—“unveiled one”—for the 1946 election. A new breed of revolutionary leaders had taken over: the cachorros, or “cubs” of the revolution, to use Lombardo Toledano’s term. These were the civilians and technocrats who, through familial and political connections, would dominate the one-party state until 2000.150 Alema´n’s administration included more university graduates—departing from the earlier tendency of relying on revolutionary generals—and the party now included popular sector workers to counterbalance the CTM’s influence. The preferred method of

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advancement was now through the state bureaucracy, rather than through elected office. The revolutionary party, newly christened Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) under Aleman, promoted more business-friendly policies, which undercut the PAN’s support with a large part of Mexico’s business community, although Monterrey elites continued to back the party periodically.151 Alema´n himself was challenged by another Revolutionary Family member, Eziquel Padilla, Avila Camacho’s foreign minister. Although his campaign was quixotic and he never threatened the victory of Aleman, Padilla’s revolt against the official decision again demonstrated the one-party government’s vulnerability in the succession process. This 1946 election also revealed, according to Loaeza, the tendency of the revolutionary party to bump up artificially the vote tally of its presidential contender.152 During the election, the PAN teamed with Fuerza Popular, the sinarquistas’s newly formed political party, and managed to secure four seats in the House of Deputies. The organizations complemented one another in their territorial strength. Sinarquismo was strong in rural areas and in Michoaca´n, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes and Tlaxcala.153 The PAN’s presence was mostly in the Federal District, northern states of Chihuahua and Nuevo Leon, and the Yucatan peninsula. Indeed, the PAN’s electoral strength rested disproportionately in the Federal District, similar to other dissident movements like that of Vasconcelos and Almaza´n. Indeed, in federal elections, the proportion of the vote the PAN received in the capital typically ran well over 35 percent until the 1980s.154 In 1946 the PAN won its first municipality—the small town of Quiroga— thus beginning Go´mez Morı´n’s “slow and molecular” process of social renovation.155 The local officials, including the chief of police, tried to block the victorious PAN candidate, Manuel Torres Sarranı´a, from taking office, but eventually relented. This hardly opened up a floodgate of PAN triumphs at the municipal level; three years would pass before the party tasted another victory.156 Local authorities who imposed onerous requirements for candidate registration typically thwarted participation in these local campaigns.157 Three years later, the PAN presented candidates for 47 percent of congressional seats—in the end winning four seats—and backed a strong candidate, Antonio L. Rodriguez, for the gubernatorial race in Nuevo Leo´n.158 Claiming that fraud decided many of these races, the party filed suit with the Supreme Court, which refused to take any of the cases up. Its opponents in the government regarded the PAN as a clerical party because it severely denounced Article 3 of the constitution, and the party’s own members criticized those panistas, like Aquiles Elorduy, who took an anticlerical stance. But as Donald Mabry judged it, “the 1946–49 PAN legislative program was neither clerical, reactionary, nor conservative.” The PAN sponsored legislation for women’s suffrage and also presented a bill calling for parties with individual membership, rather than the group membership,

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corporatist system employed by the PRI. It demanded an impartial federal election board made up of Supreme Court justices. Additionally, the PAN introduced legislation to grant more fiscal and political autonomy to the municipalities. But PAN proposal survived committee review. Although having little possibility of passing legislation, the PAN’s participation at least ensured the party’s legitimacy as a voice in national politics.159 After ten years leading the party, Go´mez Morı´n retired as president in 1949 and yielded the office to Juan Gutie´rrez Lascuraı´n, a former leader of the ACJM. This important gesture demonstrated that the founder was true to his principles: The opposition was not the instrument of a single individual. He certainly could have directed the course of the party better as its official head, and certainly few would have challenged his right to do so. Until his death in 1972, Go´mez Morı´n would play an important role behind the scenes—often vetting candidates for the party presidency, for example—but it is inaccurate to refer to him, as one author has, as the party’s caudillo.160 Indeed, during the 1950s and 1960s, the party sometimes adopted a more “Catholic” profile that conflicted with Go´mez Morı´n’s image of a secular opposition. NEW LEADE R S H I P The PAN changed significantly between 1949 and 1962, after Go´mez Morı´n’s hand left the party’s tiller. His successors, having served in the Catholic groups of the 1920s and 1930s, lacked political and governmental experience and his proven ability to bridge the Catholic and the secular universes of Mexico. Gutie´rrez Lascuraı´n drew the PAN closer to the Church and sinarquismo. In 1952, Miguel Estrada Iturbide went to Santiago, Chile, to observe the Christian Democracy International convention.161 The energetic Alfonso Itua´rte Servı´n, himself a veteran of ACJM and Catholic Action, became president and renewed Catholic activism as a basis of the PAN appeal. But despite a lack of financial resources—businessmen were less likely to support PAN religious militancy—this period featured even more electoral participation on the part of the PAN.162 Throughout the Go´mez Morı´n presidency, the cause for abstention had been decreasing in popularity. As von Sauer notes, at the party conventions of 1943, 1946, and 1949, the panistas in attendance voted in favor of participation by respectively 61 percent, 90 percent, and 92 percent.163 Still, electoral success continued to be elusive. In 1950 the PAN contested for the governorship of Chihuahua—its third attempt to take a statehouse—and lost in what it claimed to be a fraud-laden race.164 That same year the party won two small municipalities in Michoaca´n. Two years later it won six more— mostly small communities in Oaxaca. Throughout the 1950s, the PAN found that real competition was difficult because the states lacked electoral safeguards. In 1962 the PAN’s fortunes reached a low point. It governed no municipalities.165

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Despite its lack of electoral success, the PAN grew more confident in pushing for reform. The party’s platform for 1952–1958, a model for future platforms, called for, among other things, reestablishing the economy on a sound footing and, especially, providing initiatives for private enterprise; establishing a commission to investigate the problem in the countryside; securing a just family wage; granting autonomy for municipalities and the division of powers within the federal government; reforming Article 3 to respect human rights; and overhauling the electoral system to guarantee impartial results.166 In 1952, for the first time the party launched its own candidate for the presidency. It turned to Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna, former leader of the absentionist faction. In a demonstration of Catholic solidarity, he received the backing of the sinarquistas. Referring to the upcoming campaign as a vı´a crucis, Gonza´lez Luna announced his commitment to offer electoral battle, because only through such sacrifices could the party instill “the reign of God in Mexico.”167 But outsiders were struck by the futility of this crusade. A reporter asked candidate Gonza´lez: “Why does National Action launch a candidate knowing that the regime has prepared to commit fraud?”168 On the campaign trail, Gonza´lez Luna maintained a rhetorical style more of a university professor than a stump politician, but this followed his belief in the PAN’s pedagogical mission. He carried on the tradition of the Catholic social forces in desiring to establish a “new Christian order.” His critique of fascist regimes—among which he placed the Mexican government—boiled down to their emphasis of force over power rooted in authority, and technical expertise over the spirit. “Now we have the insurgence of the technical against the spiritual. The technical without the spirit is nothing more than barbarism. The technical without the spirit is a well-armed bandit.” This technocratic revolution, he claimed, presages totalitarian regimes.169 Moreover, he derided the revolutionaries who identified their government with the revolution and who reserved the right to criticism only to themselves.170 Part of Gonza´lez Luna’s reformist message was to reestablish the municipality as Mexico’s primary political entity. Drawing on their affinity for the Spanish legacy, panistas noted that Herna´n Corte´s had established the first one in Veracruz.171 Lujambio writes that Gonza´lez Luna’s advocacy of decentralization, with the municipalities as its main focus, probably was influenced in part by the emphasis Christian Democrats in Europe were placing on this principle.172 Meanwhile, showing its vulnerabilities during an election year, the PRI suffered another challenge from within the Revolutionary Family. General Miguel Henrı´quez, an adherent to the cardenista wing of the party, opposed Alema´n’s decision to chose another pro-business candidate, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, as his successor. Henrı´quez ran as candidate of the newly formed Federation of the Parties of the People to defend the true Mexican revolution, “falsified” by the official party, which had divided the workers’ movement and “killed the civic spirit by impeding the free elections.” Henrı´quez even drew

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some backhanded praise from the PAN’s president, Gutie´rrez Lascuraı´n, who remarked: “he has recognized the fact that total reform of Mexico’s political procedures is indispensable, and that their monopoly by one faction is the root of all the maladies of the nation.”173 Before the final vote, President Alema´n told the press, “I guarantee to the people of Mexico that the next elections will be clean, as they ought to be in a country that knows how to fulfill and respect its civic duties.”174 Gonza´lez Luna officially captured 7.8 percent of the official tally—approximately 285,000 votes. Although a respectable performance for a first presidential election, the PAN complained of widespread fraud.175 The party presented to the Interior secretary evidence of fraud in 79 electoral districts in order to dispute his claim of “the cleanest possible” election.176 Gonza´lez Luna later declared, “We haven’t been defeated. We’ve been robbed.”177 In his postelection speech, Gonza´lez Luna emphasized that the road to salvation is long and hard, but that the new political order for Mexico is being constructed brick by brick and election by election. “The task of humble and quiet proselytizing is more important than flashy successes in the assembly or applauded speeches.”178 Modest though the results were, the campaign of the former abstentionist Gonza´lez Luna in the campaign was an important milestone in the PAN’s participationist strategy. It was, after all, difficult for an opposition campaign to gain much traction in Mexico during the 1950s. As one PAN activist of the time recalled, the PAN had no access to radio, and poor roads made campaigning difficult.179 Besides, the PRI was in no mood to give ground. In 1956 the PAN waged a competitive campaign for the municipal election in Ciudad Juarez, the important border city in Chihuahua. To secure the outcome of the race for the ruling party, PRI officials annulled the results of one polling place in which the PAN had obtained a clear advantage. The president, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, reportedly justified the vote fixing thus: “Never will I permit a city with that name in the hands of the reaction.”180 After enjoying some midterm successes in 1955 by nearly doubling their share of the vote from three years earlier, the PAN decided to compete for the presidency in 1958. Unfortunately, no candidates were readily available. Finally, the convention nominated a 38-year-old businessman from Chihuahua, Luis H. Alvarez, as its standard bearer. Alvarez had campaigned for governor of his home state two years before. According to the PAN’s official history, this election had featured many of the common PRI fraud tactics: manipulated voter registration, previously marked ballots, soldiers bused in from a neighboring state to vote, and stolen ballot boxes. In protest, the PAN launched a “caravan of democracy,” a drive from Ciudad Jua´rez to Mexico City, to deliver evidence of fraud to the attorney general’s office. Ultimately, both the attorney general and the Supreme Court of the Republic claimed no jurisdiction over the case.181

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Despite the long odds, Alvarez ran an aggressive campaign against the PRI’s Adolfo Lo´pez Mateos, even attacking the legitimacy of the regime. In the view of one scholar, the PAN tried to outpromise and even out— “revolutionize”—the PRI during the campaign.182 Following a scuffle at a rally, a local police chief threw Alvarez in jail for a few hours.183 After speaking before the Federal Electoral Commission to protest attempts made on Alvarez’s life during the campaign, Rafael Preciado Herna´ndez, the PAN’s representative to the commission, quit his position.184 Alvarez had an uphill battle because 1958 was a peak year for the “institutionalized revolution.” Illustrating how the one-party state became the norm in discussing Mexican politics, one respected American analyst at the time judged PAN’s campaign “irresponsible” and “demagogic,” and blamed the PAN’s poor leadership—not the PRI’s one-party state—as failing to contribute to a multiparty democracy.185 The murder of a PAN worker during the campaign was provoked, according to another scholar, by the PAN’s “verbal violence.”186 Years later Go´mez Morı´n judged the 1958 election results “one of the most immense frauds in our political history.”187 The PAN did officially garner 10 percent of the national vote—a slight improvement over the last presidential election—and six seats in the House of Deputies. Because of widespread electoral irregularities, however, the party elected not to take these seats as a measure of protest.188 Embarrassingly for the PAN, four of its candidates ignored the boycott. The PAN’s relations with the government continued to deteriorate after the Baja California gubernatorial election in 1959. The PAN had early on developed a presence in the state, which had recently been elevated from territory status. It clashed often with the governor, “viceroy” Braulio Maldonado, especially after he tried unsuccessfully to arrest two PAN-affiliated journalists. The PAN countered by charging Maldonado of abuse of public funds.189 By 1958, the PAN’s candidate, Salvador Rosas Magallo´n, had legitimately claimed significant electoral support and was prepared for a competitive race. But the PRI was not ready to give up a governorship; eight hundred panistas were arrested in the postelectoral crackdown. Perhaps panistas could be excused if they began to think that electoral participation was fruitless.190 ADOLFO CHR I S T L I E B A N D E L E C T O R A L R E F O R M Jose´ Gonza´lez Torres, a self-described Christian Democrat, became the PAN president in 1959 and held the office for a term. He was known as austere, authoritative, charismatic, and intellectual.191 As a Catholic activist, he had few peers, having served at various times as president of the ACJM’s central committee, of Pax Romana, and of Mexican Catholic Action, but he was lacking direct experience in politics. A representative of the Gonza´lez Luna wing of the party, Gonza´lez Torres’s style was ideological and anti-

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system. Vigorously anti-Communist—he frequently railed against the “procommunist, Soviet-style” PRI government—under his leadership, the PAN had difficulty maintaining its appeal to the secular-minded and the procapitalist.192 By the 1960s, the party saw a need to return to more pragmatic leadership. The president of PAN from 1962 to 1968, Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola, was a talented lawyer and writer who did much to revive the fortunes of the party. Though influenced by Christian Democratic principles, Christlieb prevented the party from aligning itself with that movement—a decision that probably preserved for the PAN its official registration. A devout Catholic himself, Christlieb attempted to move the party away from its militant Catholic posture under Itua´rte Servı´n and Gonza´lez Torres. In this he received the support of Go´mez Morı´n, who was concerned that the party was drifting in a confessional direction.193 Christlieb restated the need for the PAN to distance itself from religious motives. “We understand,” he wrote, “that in Mexico there runs a risk—not extended to other countries—that the activities and principles of a party presented to the public as the Christian expression of politics degenerates the concept and doctrinal development into mere tactics, whose partisan manipulation could bring consequences desirable neither for the Church nor the State.”194 Christlieb welcomed the call for Catholics to care for the social order. But in so doing, they must avoid a fundamental error of “Christian parties.” That is, by “baptizing” their programs, they invite clericalism into politics and, consequently, divide Christians instead of unifying them.195 Christlieb attempted to engage the government in dialogue to achieve meaningful reform. As a representative to the Federal Electoral Commission during the federal elections of 1961, Christlieb earned a reputation as a vigorous defender of the vote. He also made it clear that the participation of his party was conditioned on “true electoral reform.”196 While on the commission, Christlieb struck up a good relationship with Interior Secretary Gustavo Dı´az Ordaz. This connection enabled Christlieb to lobby for the electoral reforms of 1963, a milestone on Mexico’s road to democratization. The new reform called for limited proportional representation that would entitle minority parties to a maximum of twenty seats in the Chamber of Deputies; 2.5 percent of the vote would translate into five seats, with an additional seat for each 0.5 percent more. Christlieb hoped that these new party deputies would take a step forward in revitalizing the chamber.197 The PAN did not ignore the limitations of the reform law. “We point out that the reform that permits minority voices to be heard in the Chamber of Deputies ought to be extended to the Senate, state legislatures, and municipalities. Mexico cannot continue to be governed by one party that does not tolerate a conception of order different from its own.”198 Ultimately, the party accepted the law as a minimal advance because, with the new party deputies, it could raise its image as a legitimate contender by taking some majority

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districts as well. The new electoral reform permitted twenty PAN deputies in the legislature in 1964.199 In subsequent congresses, however, the PAN enjoyed only token success in capturing majority seats.200 As part of the bargain with Christlieb, Dı´az Ordaz promised to acknowledge PAN’s victories at the local level. The PAN followed with several muncipal victories, among them Hermosillo, Me´rida, and Garza Garcı´a, a prosperous suburb of Monterrey.201 Between 1962 and 1967, the PAN gained more municipal victories—seventeen—than in the previous twenty-three years of its history. After Christlieb refocused the party into striving for greater electoral participation, the PAN by the mid-1960s put up candidates for virtually all congressional seats.202 While working for the PAN as a young man, Christlieb had doubted the utility of participating in the “farce” of elections.203 But as president, Christlieb sought to restore the party’s image as responsible opposition instead of the more militant stances during the 1958 presidential campaign. Running against Dı´az Ordaz for the presidency in 1964, the PAN’s candidate, Jose´ Gonza´lez Torres, conducted a restrained campaign, and after polling one million official votes for the first time in party history, refused to charge that fraud had helped determine the outcome.204 Meanwhile, Christlieb was navigating the PAN through its first major internal crisis: the effort by some of its members to transform it into a Christian Democratic party. In 1956, party president Itua´rte Servı´n encouraged the PAN’s Youth Organization to develop a Christian Democratic platform. In 1959, Jose´ Gonza´lez Torres worked to improve party ties to Christian Democrats in Venezuela, Italy, and Germany.205 At the time, many organizations had sprung up professing Christian Democratic principles for all areas of life.206 A Christian Democratic movement grew within the party itself, led by Carlos Arriola Woog, Hugo Gutie´rrez Vega, Manuel Rodrı´quez Lapuente, Francisco Paoli Bolio, and Alejandro Avile´s, the director of the party organ La Nacio´n. The new group forged international connections and allegedly received funding from abroad.207 At the party’s national convention in 1962, Rafael Caldera of Venezuela’s Comite´ de Organizacio´n Polı´tica Electoral Independiente (COPEI) was invited to give the address, “America of Tomorrow, Christian Democrat.”208 Caldera’s call for panistas to join the Christian Democratic movement greatly troubled the party’s older leadership.209 Likewise, an explicit Christian Democratic platform as advocated by the some of the party’s young member would have jeopardized PAN’s existence as a registered party: Article 130 of the constitution prohibited parties associated with religious cults, and the 1946 electoral laws outlawed parties associated with foreign powers.210 Christlieb, who, like the party founders, wished to preserve the PAN’s laical character, forced the Christian Democrats to leave the party. In the case of Hugo Gutie´rrez Vega, the attachment to PAN appeared to be lightly held, and he eagerly accepted an offer by President Lo´pez Mateos to serve in a

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diplomatic position. As for Manuel Rodrı´guez, Christlieb rebuffed him when he tried to align the youth movement in a leftward direction: “In the party there isn’t a left wing or a right wing; the party is a body of doctrine in which we all must be, and if you don’t accept that you must go.”211 Shunned by the PAN, the young Christian Democrats subsequently failed to get a new party off the ground.212 Go´mez Morı´n later recalled the Christian Democrats as “the movement that came closest to an effort to break party unity.”213 He further commented that “this group has posed a serious confessional problem with which we in PAN cannot go along. Christian Democracy is clearly an international confessional movement that does not suit the Mexican experience of deep-seated anti-clericalism. It has met with success in countries such as Chile and Venezuela, but it must be kept in mind that these two countries never did experience the bitter religious wars that have taken place in our country.”214 According to Fernando Estrada, the PAN’s reputation among Christian Democratic parties in South America was thereby adversely affected.215 By removing the Christian Democratic cadre from its ranks, the PAN avoided some of the radicalization experienced by some of those parties in South America, which adopted some Marxist rhetoric and policies during the 1960s.216 Although intending to update the Catholic Church with the modern world, the call at the Vatican II synod (1962–65) for more social awareness pushed Catholic politics leftward. For example, the 1968 Latin American Bishop conference at Medellı´n, Colombia, condemned “institutionalized violence” and supported a “preferential option for the poor,” phrases that became common currency in the radical Christian “liberation theology” and inevitably found their way into the PAN’s own social objectives.217 Earlier in Christlieb’s term of office, the PAN had clarified its ideological positions without deviating from the party’s core beliefs. In the PAN’s national convention of 1965, the new Projection of the Principles of Doctrine was approved. Under this new document, which kept the “social Christian” emphasis of the original, the party placed greater emphasis on integrating itself into the “organs of government” rather than shaping public opinion. Beyond its role as a critic of government, the PAN accepted its duties in the fight for power.218 Three years later, as a sign of the new times, Christieb coordinated with Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, son of Gonza´lez Luna, on the new party platform in the late 1960s—Cambio Democra´tico de Estructuras. Here the party broke from its gradualist strategy, believing this benefited only powerful interests, by pressing for more rapid social change: “Facing the ostentatious and unequal distribution of wealth, revolutionary means are necessary in order to bring about and transform the political, economic and social structures of the country. Facing the divergence between evolution and revolution, toward the end of adjusting and changing these structures, clearly we are inclined for the revolutionary change of the same.”219 This modification of the party’s ideo-

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logical stance later would contribute to the party’s next internal crisis of the 1970s. Meanwhile, 1968 was a year of great internal pressure on the PRI’s government. General protests by students and others, which led to the infamous Tlatelolco massacre in October that year, ended the Dı´az Ordaz government’s tolerant mood. Likewise the short-lived era of good feelings ended for the PAN when victories in municipal races in Baja California and Chihuahua were disqualified by the PRI. Manuel Gonza´lez Hinojosa, party president immediately after Christlieb, later wrote that the electoral authorities, citing “grave irregularities,” secured victory for the PRI in Baja California by a massive nullification of PAN votes in Mexicali and Tijuana. Christlieb submitted an affidavit to the Supreme Court to plead for protection under Article 97 of the constitution, while PAN deputies petitioned the House of Deputies to investigate the intervention of the state governor in the process. These efforts went nowhere.220 Christlieb even took his complaint about Baja California’s election before Interior Secretary Luis Echeverrı´a. He presented copious evidence that fraud had been committed. Echeverrı´a, according to PAN Senator and political analyst Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, replied to this effect: “So? We are here and have the power because we won the revolution.” He suggested that if the PAN wanted to reverse these results and take their place, it would have to win its own revolution.221 Christlieb resigned the party presidency in September—cancer would soon take his life—and ended his personal relationship with President Dı´az Ordaz. A year later, the state race in Yucatan was marred by massive fraud, and intense protests provoked the army to patrol the streets of its capital, Me´rida.222 CONCLUSION The PAN was founded when, for all intents and purposes, the Mexican Revolution was consolidated. The trailblazing National Catholic Party arrived on the scene during a time of political upheaval; the PAN, on the other hand, came during the onset of stability. The PAN could never seriously challenge the revolutionary party in general elections, nor could it convince the public that it offered a realistic governing alternative. The PRI’s rightward turn also drew away much of the PAN’s early backing from the business community, cutting into the party’s ability to grow. During these years, the PAN began to drift away from its moderate reformist message that had been a priority of its founders. But its first thirty years was also a period of significant accomplishment. The PAN went from being a small “party of notables” to being the most important, permanent institution in the political opposition. As a democratic “system party,” it fulfilled Go´mez Morı´n’s ideal as a permanent political organization that did not serve at the whim of a caudillo. Overcoming “anti-

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system” absentionist tendencies, the PAN continuously improved its share of the national, official vote in presidential elections, secured a foothold in Congress, and even won some notable municipal races. It did not shirk from taking on the government in pleading its case against electoral fraud. Its leadership enabled it to press the government for an important electoral reform in 1963 that helped nudge open the political system and exposed the PRI’s contradictions as a “great party” in an ostensibly democratic system. Equally important, it survived a potentially serious rift with some members who wanted to place the party in Christian Democracy’s orbit, thereby provoking a confrontation with the PRI and jeopardizing the PAN’s existence. Perhaps the PAN’s greatest achievement was that it became the institutional leader of the Catholic opposition, channeling Catholic energies into a constitutional and democratic resistance to the revolutionary regime. In doing so, it contributed to closing the cultural divide that had long existed between Catholics and the revolutionaries, thus holding out the possibility in the long run for ending the great party struggle. In her study on the PAN, Loaeza commented that during the period after Go´mez Morı´n’s presidency—the party’s so-called Catholic hegemony—the PAN was reduced to being a ghettopartei.223 She referred especially to the thirtyyear period, from 1949 to 1978, as the “confessionalization” of the party. This assumes that the party’s appeal to Catholic militants prevented it from growing faster. But the PAN was hardly on the verge of becoming a mass movement while Go´mez Morı´n remained at the helm. The implementation of electoral fraud by the PRI and the government during this period—a commonplace occurrence—restricted the PAN’s growth. Also, these postwar decades featured a period of unusual economic growth—the Mexican miracle—that enforced the quasi-legitimacy of the PRI’s rule. The PAN’s strong grounding in Catholic social doctrine and its advocacy of reforming the anticlerical articles probably kept its activists motivated during the lean years and contributed greatly to the party’s survival. One scholar concluded that in its first thirty years, “the history of the National Action Party is that of the fight for political moralization, but not for the conquest of power.” Indeed, the author believed that the countervailing forces within the party were so strong that a more aggressive political posture would break it up.224 As we will see in the next chapter, the PAN would reorient itself and survive the ordeal of internal discord. It would likewise start to attract new leadership that would improve its ability to open the political system.

NOTES 1. Prud’homme, “The National Action Party’s (PAN) Organization Life and Strategic Decisions” (Mexico: CIDE), 2. 2. Interview with Fernando Estrada Samano, Mexico City, July 20, 1995.

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3. See, for example, Edmundo Gurza, “Las alianzas del PAN,” La Nacio´n 52 (April 30, 1993), 26. 4. Emilio Portes Gil, Quince Anos de Polı´tica Mexicana (Mexico: Ediciones Botas, 1954), 240–41. 5. Plutarco Elias Calles, Pensamiento Polı´tico y Social (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1988), 283. 6. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies, 317. 7. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 410. 8. Dale Story, The Mexican Ruling Party (New York: Praeger, 1986), 21. 9. Vicente Fuentes Dı´az, Los Partidos Polı´ticos en Mexico (Mexico: Editorial Altiplano, 1969), 237. 10. Alan Knight, “Mexico’s elite settlement: conjuncture and consequences” in John Higley and Richard Gunther, eds., Elites and Democratic Consolidation in Latin America and Southern Europe (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 134. 11. Quirk, The Mexican Revolution and the Catholic Church, 116–17. 12. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 418. 13. Vasconcelos, Jose, Breve Historia del Mexico (Mexico: Accio´n Moderna Mercantil: 1937), 619. 14. Dulles, Yesterday in Mexico, 419–22. 15. Meyer, “La E´pica Vasconcelista,” 61. 16. John Skirius, Jose Vasconcelos y la Cruzada de 1929 (Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1978), 205. 17. Skirius, Jose Vasconcelos, 45. 18. Alonso Lujambio, “Dos Padres Fundadores y Una Idea: Los Orı´gines de la Estrategia Municipal-Federalista del Partido Accio´n Nacional” (unpublished manuscript), 5–8. 19. Skirius, Jose Vasconcelos, 76–80. 20. Meyer, “La E´pica Vasconcelista,” 57. 21. Jose Vasconcelos, The Mexican Ulysses (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1963), 240. 22. Meyer, “La E´pica Vasconcelisa,” 59–61. 23. Meyer, “La E´pica Vasconcelisa,” 58–59. 24. Carlos Alvear Acevedo, Lazaro Cardenas: El Hombre y el Mito (Mexico: Ediciones Promesa: 1986), 79–81. 25. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 196. 26. Ruis Facius, Mejico Cristero, 46. 27. Brown, “Mexican Church-State Relations,” 221. 28. Hugh Gerald Campbell, The Radical Right in Mexico 1929–1949 (Dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968), 189. 29. T. G. Powell, Mexico and the Spanish Civil War (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1981), 59. 30. Powell, 139–41. 31. Albert L. Michaels, “The Crisis of Cardenismo,” The Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1970), 54–70. 32. Miguel Castro Ruiz, “Go´mez Morı´n: El Hombre, El Universitario, El Politico,” La Nacio´n 10 (September 10, 1951), 12–13. 33. Fernando Estrada Samano, “Democracia para la justicia en la libertad,” 4.

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34. Alonso Lujambio, “Dos Padres Fundadores y Una Idea: Los Orı´gines de la Estrategia Municipal-Federalista del Partido Accio´n Nacional” (unpublished manuscript), 5–8. 35. Krauze, Caudillos Culturales, 225–26. 36. Quoted in Fredrick B. Pike, Hispanismo: 1898–1936 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1971), 116. 37. Pike, Hispanismo: 1898–1936, 255. 38. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 116–17. 39. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 124. 40. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n, 1915 y Ostos Ensayos (Mexico, Editorial Jus, 1973). 41. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 120–126. 42. Krauze, Caudillos Culturales, 249. 43. Krauze, Caudillos Culturales, 194. 44. Krauze, Caudillos Culturales, 275–278. 45. Krauze, Caudillos Culturales, 278–279, 289. 46. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 135. 47. Luis Calderon Vega, Cuba 88: Memorias de la UNEC (Mexico, DF: 1959), 7–8. 48. Interview with Fernando Estrada Samano, Mexico City, August 30, 1995. 49. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 23–24. 50. Caldero´n Vega, Cuba 88, 136. 51. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 24. 52. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 107. 53. Leonor Ludlow, “Formacio´n de una disidencia: el nacimiento de la Unio´n Nacional Sinarquista y del Partido Accio´n National,” Estudios Polı´ticos 8 ( July– September 1989), 12. 54. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 152. 55. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 217–18. 56. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 33–36. 57. Adolfo Martinez-Valle, “Los militantes cato´licos y el PAN: una historia polı´tica, 1939–1962,” Este Paı´s 9 (September 1999), 2. 58. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 26. 59. O’Shaughnessy, Opposition in an Authoritarian Regime, 128–29. 60. Jose´ Bravo Ugarte, Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna: Abogado, Humanista, Polı´tico, Cato´lico (Mexico: Ediciones de Accion Nacional, 1968), 56. 61. Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna, Los cato´licos y la polı´tica en Me´xico (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1988), 61–75. 62. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional. 208, n. 13. 63. M. Susan Power, Jacques Maritain (1882–1973): Christian Democrat and the Quest for a New Commonwealth (Lampeter, Wales: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992), 35. 64. Jacques Maritain, Integral Humanism (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1973), 289. 65. Maritain, Integral Humanism, 164. 66. Power, Jacques Maritain, 32. 67. Nuncio, El PAN, 189. 68. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 147. 69. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen (Mexico City: Accio´n Nacional, n.d.), 12.

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70. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen, 11. 71. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacion y el Regimen, 23. 72. Bravo Ugarte, Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna, 48. 73. Estrada interview, July 20, 1995. 74. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen, 30. 75. Martı´nez-Valle, “Los militantes cato´licos y el PAN,” 3. 76. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 168. 77. Fernandez Banos and Marcovich, coord., El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 85. 78. Estrada interview, Mexico City, July 20, 1995. 79. Maria Marvan Laborde, “La concepcio´n del municipio en el Partido Accio´n Nacional,” Revista mexicana de sociologia 50 (April–June 1988), 161, n. 2. 80. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 211. 81. Martinez-Valle, “Los militantes cato´licos,” Este Paı´s, 2. 82. Gonza´lez Luna, Los cato´licos y la polı´tica en Me´xico, 68. 83. Go´mez Morı´n, La nacio´n y el regimen, 91. 84. Delhumeau, Mexico: la realidad polı´tica,179. 85. Go´mez Morı´n, La nacio´n y el regimen, 94 86. Go´mez Morı´n, La nacio´n y el regimen, 86 87. Go´mez Morı´n, La nacio´n y el regimen, 31. 88. Go´mez Morı´n, La nacio´n y el regimen, 53. 89. Luis Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN Vol. II (Mexico: Epessa, 1992), 256–57. 90. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n et al., La Democracia en Mexico (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1962), 28–29. 91. Delhumeau, Mexico: La Realidad Politica, 191. 92. Gonza´lez Luna, Humanismo Politico, 18–21. 93. Gonza´lez Luna, Humanismo Politico, 32. 94. Carlos Castillo Peraza, “Efrain Gonzalez Luna: Precursor de Puebla” Iglesia y Cultura Latinoamericana (Bogota, Colombia: Consejo Episcopal Latinoamericano, 1983), 313. 95. Delhumeau, Mexico: La Realidad Politica, 169. 96. Maria Elena Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democratica (Mexico: Epessa, 1986), 18–23. 97. Luis Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN (1939–1946) Vol. I (Mexico: Epessa, n. d.), 45–46. 98. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democratica, 23. 99. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democratica, 167. 100. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democratica, 71. 101. Gonza´lez Luna, Humanismo Politico, 142. 102. Ana Maria Garcia Lascurain et al., “El Partido Accion Nacional y sus candidatos presidenciales,” El Partido Accion Nacional: Ensayos y Testimonios, 57 (1998). 103. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen, 76–80. 104. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democratica, 62. 105. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen, 74. 106. Lujambio, “Dos Padres Fundadores y Una Idea,” 15. 107. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen, 74–75. 108. Delhumeau, Mexico: La Realidad Polı´tica, 172. 109. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n et al., La Democracia en Mexico, 14–16.

90 An Eternal Struggle 110. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n et al., La Democracia en Mexico, 30. 111. Christlieb, La Oposicio´n, 12–13. 112. Ferna´ndez, El Partido Accion Nacional: Ensayos y Testimonios, 87–88. 113. Ası´ Nacio´ Accio´n Nacional (Mexico: Epessa, 1990), 178. 114. Bernardo Lo´pez Rios, “Go´mez Morı´n: Precursor de la economı´a con justicia social en Mexico,” La Nacio´n 56 (12 September 1997), 16–17. 115. Delhumeau, Mexico: La Realidad Polı´tica, 172. 116. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 39. 117. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n et al., La Democracia en Mexico, 51–57. 118. Quoted in Nuncio, El PAN, 93. 119. Alonso Lujambio, “Democratization Via Federalismo? El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 1939–1995: La Historia de una Estrategia Difı´cil” (unpublished manuscript), 26–27. 120. James F. Creagan, Minority Political Parties in Mexico: Their Roles in a One-Party Dominant System (Dissertation, University of Virginia, 1965), 72–73. 121. Gustavo Vicencio Acevedo, Memorias del PAN Vol. IV (Mexico: Epessa, 1992), 16–17. 122. Alonso Lujambio, “Dos Padres Fundadores y Una Idea: Los Orı´gines de la Estrategia Municipal-Federalista del Partido Accio´n Nacional” (unpublished manuscript), 3. 123. Marvan Laborde, “La Concepcio´n del Municipio,” 163. 124. Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN Vol. II, 160. 125. Alonso Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 16, n. 19. 126. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democra´tica, 29, 31–33. 127. Go´mez Morı´n, La Nacio´n y el Regimen, 18. 128. Manuel Go´mez Morı´n, Diez An˜os de Me´xico (Mexico: Editorial de Accio´n Nacional, 1983), 3–19. 129. Alonso Lujambio, “El Dilema de Christlieb Ibarrola: Cuatro Cartas a Gustavo Dı´az Ordaz,” Estudios 11 (Fall 1994), 51. 130. Albert L. Michaels, “Las Elecciones de 1940,” Historia Mexicana 81 ( July– September 1971), 127. 131. Hugh Gerald Campbell, The Radical Right in Mexico, 1929–1949 (Dissertation: University of California, Los Angeles, 1968), 269–79. 132. Albert L. Michaels, “The Crisis of Cardenismo,” The Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (1970), 52. 133. Michaels, “Las Elecciones de 1940,” 99. 134. George W. Grayson, The Church in Contemporary Mexico (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1992), 21. 135. Juan Jose´ Rodrı´quez Pratts, La Congruencia Historica del Partido Accio´n Nacional (Mexico: Epessa, 1998), 109. 136. “Cuarto Convenciones Electorales del PAN: 1939, 1943, 1946 y 1949 . . . ” La Nacio´n 11 (November 19, 1951), 10. 137. Go´mez Morı´n, El Nacio´n y el Regimen, 55. 138. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democra´tica, 92. 139. Luis Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN Vol. I, 31–36. 140. Zermen˜o and Aguilar, Hacia una reinterpretacion del sinarquismo actual, 180. 141. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 177. 142. Michaels, “Las Elecciones de 1940,” 81.

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143. Michaels, “Las Elecciones de 1940,” 133. 144. Luis Caldero´n Vega, “Biographia del PAN,” La Nacio´n 12 (May 3, 1953), 13. 145. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 37–42. 146. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 18–20. 147. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 22–23. 148. Go´mez Morı´n, Diez An˜os en Mexico, 282–83. 149. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 113. 150. Jorge Gil, Samuel Schmidt, and Jorge Castro, “La red de poder mexicana. El caso de Miguel Alema´n,” Revista Mexicana de Sociologia 55 (July–September 1993), 103. 151. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 192, 200–01. 152. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 208. 153. Leonor Ludlow, “Formacio´n de una disidencia: El nacimiento de la Unio´n Nacional Sinarquista y del Partido de Accio´n Nacional,” Estudios Polı´ticos 8 (July– September 1989), 5. 154. Jacqueline Peschard, “50 anos de participacio´n electoral del PAN en el D.F.,” Estudios Polı´ticos 8 (July–September 1989), 28–29. 155. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 25. 156. Maria Elena Alvarez de Vicencio, “El PAN al rescate del Muncipio,” Estudios Polı´ticos 8 (July–September 1989), 48–49. 157. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 25–26, n. 34. 158. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 28. 159. Mabry, Accion Nacional, 44–48. 160. Nuncio, El PAN, 37. 161. Estrada interview, Mexico City, August 30, 1995. 162. Martı´nez-Valle, “Los militantes cato´licos y el PAN,” 4. 163. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 103. 164. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 32. 165. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 30–33. 166. Luis Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN Vol. III (Mexico: Epessa, 1992), 78–84. 167. Bravo Ugarte, Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna, 64–65. 168. Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN Vol. III, 97. 169. “Nada puede suplir la verdadera representacio´n polı´tica del pueblo,” La Nacio´n 10 (June 4, 1951), 10. 170. Luis Caldero´n Vega, “Una reforma social mexicana; no una maniobra moscovita” La Nacio´n 11 (December 31, 1951), 14. 171. Luis Caldero´n Vega, “ ‘El Municipio Mexicano tiene raı´ces ilustres,’ Gonza´lez Luna,” La Nacio´n 11 (January 28, 1952), 14. 172. Lujambio, “Dos Padres Fundadores y Una Idea,” 13. 173. “Vida Nacional,” La Nacio´n 10 (August 6, 1951), 4. 174. Caldero´n Vega, Memorias del PAN, Vol. III, 259–60. 175. See for example “El re´gimen se pone levita de apariencias en el DF,” La Nacio´n 11 (July 14, 1952) 10–13. 176. “Vida Nacional,” La Nacio´n 11 (August 11, 1952), 3. 177. “Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna marca el camino de Mexico,” La Nacio´n 11 (October 6, 1952), n. p. 178. “Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna marca el camino de Mexico,” La Nacio´n 11 (October 6, 1952), n. p.

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179. Interview with Senator Luis H. Alvarez, Mexico City, August 23, 1995. 180. Juan Jose´ Rodrı´guez Prats, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (Xalapa, Mexico: El Gobierno del Estado de Veracruz, 1990), 141. 181. Gustavo Vicencio Acevedo, Memorias del PAN Vol. IV (Mexico: Epessa, 1992), 304–10. 182. Creagan, Minority Political Parties in Mexico, 42. 183. Alvarez interview. 184. Lujambio, “El dilema de Christlieb Ibarrola,” 54. 185. Cline, Mexico: Revolution to Evolution, 167–68. 186. Philip B. Taylor Jr., “The Mexican Elections of 1958: Affirmation of Authoritarianism?” Western Political Quarterly 13 (1960), 723. 187. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 229. 188. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 36. 189. Vicencio, Memorias del PAN, Vol. IV, 209–10. 190. Lujambio, “El dilemma de Christlieb Ibarrola,” 37. 191. Mabry, Accio´n Nacional, 51. 192. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 36–37. 193. Lujambio, “El Dilema de Christlieb Ibarrola,” 57. 194. Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola, Las razones de la sin razo´n (Mexico: Epessa, 1987), 29–30. 195. Christlieb I., Las razones de la sin razo´n, 308. 196. Lujambio, “El Dilema de Christlieb Ibarrola,” 59. 197. Christlieb, La Oposicio´n, 23. 198. Creagan, Minority Political Parties in Mexico, 76. 199. Alvarez de Vicencio, Alternativa Democra´tica, 113. 200. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 93. 201. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 38. 202. Jacqueline Peschard, “50 anos de participacio´n electoral del PAN en el D. F.” Estudios Polı´ticos 8 (July–September 1989), 33. 203. Lujambio, “El Dilema de Christlieb Ibarrola,” 53. 204. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 125–26. 205. Prud’homme, “PAN’s Organization Life and Strategic Decisions,” 22. 206. Juan Martı´nez de Leon, “Que´ es la democracia cristiana?” Pensamiento Politico 1 (June 1969), 197. 207. Vicente Fuentes Dı´az, La Democracia Cristiana en Mexico (Mexico: Editorial Altiplano, 1972), 43. 208. Matilde Yan˜ez, “Christlieb: la propuesta de dia´logo PAN-gobierno” Estudios Polı´ticos 8 (July–September 1989), 18. 209. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 123. 210. Prud’homme, The National Action Party’s (PAN) Organization Life, 23. 211. Alberto Antonio Loyola Perez, Memorias del PAN (1960–1962) Vol. VI, (Mexico: Epessa, 2000), 42–43. 212. Fuentes Dı´az, La Democracia Cristiana en Mexico, 75. 213. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 230. 214. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 123. 215. Estrada Interview, July 20, 1995. 216. Williams, Latin American Christian Democratic Parties, 79.

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217. Eric O. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 59–60. 218. Ya´nez, “Christlieb,” 20. 219. Ya´nez, “Christlieb,” 22. 220. Manuel Gonza´lez Hinojosa, Participacio´n y Abstencio´n: La Presidencia del PAN de 1969 a 1972 (Mexico: Epessa, 2000), 26–27. 221. Bravo Mena interview. 222. Lujambio, “Democratizacio´n via Federalismo?” 40–41. 223. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 175. 224. Delhumeau, Mexico: la realidad polı´tica, 20.

CHAPTER 4

The Great Party Regime in Crisis, 1968 –1988

This chapter investigates how the PAN developed as a democratic “system party” during a period of “great party” crisis. While the PRI was not ready to surrender its great party monopoly, a series of political shocks and the strong electoral surge of the PAN helped liberalize the political system and later generated within the ruling party a reformist element. The twenty-year period covered here sets the preliminary stage for the transition alliance between the PAN and the PRI reformers that began in 1988. By the 1960s, Mexican intellectuals were openly questioning the validity of the revolutionary ideology. As Cosı´o Villegas wrote, politicians still talked as though it were 1938, but there was little left of the state’s moral authority.1 From 1968 onward, several events shook the political system and afforded opportunities for the opposition to make inroads. The first event was the Tlatelolco massacre in October 1968, when government troops killed scores of protesters in Mexico City. This catastrophe caused a major defection of Mexico’s intellectual class from supporting the regime.2 The next major shock was the debt crisis, which began in 1982 and lasted throughout the sexenio of President Miguel de la Madrid. This gave a major incentive for the business community to back the PAN. A third shock was literal: the Mexico City earthquake of 1985, which gave birth to revitalized civil society after many Mexicans lost faith in their government’s ability to aid the afflicted. And finally came the shock within the political system itself—the defection of numerous PRI loyalists to the neo-Cardenist National Democratic Front for the election of 1988. In sum, during these two decades, the PRI alienated large portions of the incorporated left, labor, intellectuals, and the business class. The PAN, during this twenty-year period, underwent an internal crisis of

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its own. A generation had gone by since its founding, and many of its early leaders had passed from the scene. Gonza´lez Luna died in 1964, Christlieb Ibarrola in 1969, and Go´mez Morı´n in 1972. No other leader equaled their stature. Meanwhile, changes within the Catholic Church, culminating with Vatican II, encouraged greater Catholic activism in social affairs but also inspired a new wave of progressive Catholic leadership that moved the PAN leftward. By the mid-1970s, this group of PAN leaders faced a challenge from party newcomers hailing from Monterrey’s business elite who pressed for a more aggressive electoral strategy. Although this internal struggle revived the problem of abstentionism versus participation and confrontation versus cooperation within the PAN, eventually a new group, the neopanistas, emerged that furthered the PAN’s development as a “system party.” The PAN weathered its internal conflict, and by the 1980s, a stronger party was finally poised to take the electoral offensive. TLATELOLC O Nineteen sixty-eight was a crucial year for the Mexican political system. The student protests—which paralleled similar disturbances in the United States, Europe, and Japan that year, culminated with the death of hundreds at the hands of the military at Tlatelolco Square in October. According to Mexican analysts Luis Rubio and Roberto Newell, “1968 was a turning point in that the former hegemony of the Revolutionary Family in the civil society began to vanish.”3 Months of student protests before the Olympic games, played in Mexico City, contributed to a climate of political uncertainty. According to one version, President Dı´az Ordaz was indecisive in dealing with the protests, and his interior secretary, Luis Echeverrı´a, was perceived by many to be sympathetic to the radicals running the protests. His own public attempts to moderate the conflict had failed. Faced with indecisive civilian leadership, Secretary of Defense and Army General Marcelino Garcı´a Barraga´n made the decision to move troops into Tlatelolco Square.4 Recent books have cast new light on the events at Tlatelolco. According to Enrique Krauze, soldiers from the Battalion Olympia, formed to provide security for the upcoming Olympic games, took positions in the towers that lined the square and initiated the firing.5 This provoked the army troops to return fire, a conclusion that seems to be supported by a clandestine film of the event. A recent memoir published by Garcia Barragan makes the claim that in fact the sharpshooters were members of the elite Presidential Guard.6 Although no definitive account of what took place at Tlatelolco Square is likely to emerge, recent accounts point to the theory that internal PRI politics may have played a role in provoking the bloody confrontation.7 The PAN had little sympathy with the student protesters as such, although some future party leaders, most notably Jesu´s Gonza´lez Schmall, participated

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in the student movement. PAN leader Manuel Gonza´lez Hinojosa indicated that the movement was made up largely of a variety of communist groups, but its brutal repression was another indication of the government’s lack of moral authority.8 After the disaster at Tlatelolco, the PAN was the only party in the Chamber of Deputies to protest the government’s repressive policy.9 Some of the Catholic right theorized that Tlatelolco reflected a breakdown in the presidential succession process. According to a journalist in the PAN’s weekly La Nacio´n, Echeverria himself was responsible for creating the student movement as an effort to convince President Dı´az Ordaz that only he could ensure stability for another six years.10 This conspiratorial view derives from Echeverrı´a’s leftist inclinations, his conciliatory approach toward the radicals before and after the tragic event, and his willingness to include some of its leaders in his government after 1970. Certainly Echeverria had maintained contacts with the students’ General Strike Council and, on the campaign trail, he riled some PRI audiences by calling for a moment of silence for the fallen students at Tlatelolco.11 More significantly for the one-party state, Echeverrı´a’s candidacy represented a break in the PRI’s tradition because he was the first nominee who had never held elected office before seeking the presidency and was the first ruling party candidate since Calles selected without at least consulting the party. As such, he heralded the emerging dominance of the PRI technocrat who achieved power based on his skill within the bureaucracy rather than his electoral appeal. This new technocratic elite in the PRI would become especially prominent during the next two sexenios. Unfortunately for the PRI, the rise of Echeverrı´a widened the divisions within a ruling party that lacked consensus on how to handle its eroding position.12 The PAN’s candidate for president in 1970 was Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, son of Gonza´lez Luna. He was a European-educated intellectual and progressive Catholic who strongly advocated a return to the original party principles. But his own interpretation of the PAN’s ideology, which he called solidarismo in accordance with nineteenth-century Jesuit thinker Heinrich Pesch, reflected to some extent the leftward trend in Catholic intellectual circles. Gonza´lez Morfı´n, for example, disapproved of the business influence, believing that the party must resist being captured by particular interests.13 As Loaeza pointed out, rather than a return to earlier PAN thinking on the economy, Gonza´lez Morfı´n’s approach contradicted the party’s traditional position on the cooperative nature of labor and capital.14 Yet even PAN progressives like Gonza´lez Morfı´n remained conservative reactionaries in the eyes of the ruling party. During a speech in the African nation of Senegal, Echeverrı´a remarked that the opposition in Mexico did not exist. Moreover, when Gonza´lez Morfı´n called for a campaign debate with PRI rival Echeverrı´a, he was rebuffed.15 Echeverrı´a won the election handily— the election was characterized by a high rate of abstentionism—and Gonza´lez Morfı´n accepted defeat without protest. But the official tally—14 percent and .

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nearly 2 million votes—did grant him the biggest vote total yet for a PAN candidate.16 To recapture the “revolutionary” elements after the authoritarian crackdown at Tlatelolco, Echeverrı´a turned the PRI to the left. He revived the PRI’s traditional “revolutionary nationalism.” The Bank of Mexico came under political control, undoing the work of Go´mez Morı´n, who had founded the institution as an independent central bank.17 Echeverrı´a increased spending on social programs and moved more aggressively to create state-run industries. He oversaw one of the most significant increases in social spending while attempting to encourage more political participation.18 Mexicans of Maoist inclination proved useful to his ends, especially in organizing squatters movements in northern states. In foreign affairs, he adopted an aggressive, Third World line, linking Mexico to the nonaligned movement. Echeverrı´a’s official sanction of radicalism had its limits. An effort to revive the student movement was brutally crushed by special paramilitaries—the Falcons—on the Corpus Christi feast day in 1971.19 His government had little tolerance for loyal institutions that strayed. When the pro-government newspaper Excelsior began publishing critical commentary, the president had its offices sacked and its publisher driven out.20 Echeverrı´a’s government did offer a modest electoral reform in 1973, which granted the parties seats on the federal and state election commissions and access to mass media. It also lowered the threshold from 2.5 percent to 1.5 percent for minority parties to achieve representation in the lower house.21 The PAN, and other opposition parties, took advantage to gain more seats in the midterm elections. In the most important cities that year, the PAN captured nearly 29 percent of the vote.22 But Echeverrı´a unwittingly provoked a reaction that would, eventually, redound to the PAN’s benefit. The seeming affinity between Echeverrı´a’s government and often violent Communist radicals, as well as the leftist economic policies, cost the PRI much of the business community’s support. A critical moment came in 1973, when the Communist September 23 League kidnapped and killed Eugenio Garza Sada, an industrialist and leader of the Monterrey Group. Business leaders angrily accused Echeverrı´a—even at Garza Sada’s funeral mass—of giving haven to these groups.23 Additionally, a new push by Echeverrı´a to recapture the spirit of revolutionary nationalism at the end of his term helped spark the neopanista movement. Spurred on by young PRI radicals, Echeverrı´a allowed for the seizure of hundreds of thousands of hectares of privately held land in the northern states of Sonora and Sinaloa. In Sonora, Adalberto Rosas, the head of a Confederation of Mexican Businessowners chapter in Ciudad Obrego´n, opposed this return to 1930s politics. Eight years later, Rosas joined the PAN and participated in the PAN’s electoral show of force during the de la Madrid years. In Sinaloa, the expropriations spurred another agribusinessman, Man-

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uel J. Clouthier, to become a national figure in the business community and later in the PAN.24 Many mark the assassination of Garza Sada and the land seizures as the turning point during which the PAN began to recover the business support it had lost since the 1940s. Businessmen started looking to the PAN probably more for its inveterate anticommunism than for its free market policies. The PAN, however, was still dominated by Catholic intellectuals and was uncomfortable with this newfound support and with the businessmen’s hard-line, antigovernment rhetoric. This mixture of forces created severe turmoil within the party and led to the contentious national conventions in 1975–76. TH E PAN’S GR OWI N G PA I N S For Mexico’s entrepreneurs, the twelve years of Presidents Echeverrı´a and Jose´ Lo´pez Portillo were, according to Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, “la docena tra´gica.”25 In the view of this traditionalist panista, the “collectivist demagoguery” of the PRI in these years forced the private initiative to look to the PAN as a convenient instrument of resistance, despite misgivings over some elements of party doctrine.26 The neopanista influx of businessmen and civic organizations, characterized by “electoral impatience,” changed the personality of the party into one more aggressive and confrontational toward the revolutionary regime.27 One of the key social institutions contributing to the rise of the neopanistas was the Confederation of Mexican Businessowners (COPARMEX). Founded in Monterrey in 1929, COPARMEX was not an officially sanctioned business organization but one whose membership was strictly voluntary. Moreover, it incorporated members from the entire spectrum of business interests, not particular sectors. Devoted to harmonizing the relationship between labor and capital, COPARMEX’s doctrine was cast in the spirit of the papal social encyclicals.28 It was nevertheless regarded as a hostile and reactionary element by the labor sectors of the official party.29 Although the organization eventually forged a nonagression pact with President Echeverrı´a, COPARMEX emerged as a reinvigorated opponent to government policy after President Lo´pez Portillo nationalized the banking system in 1982. During this period, important leaders of neopanismo cut their teeth in COPARMEX chapters: Ernesto Ruffo in Baja California, Francisco Barrio in Chihuahua, Vicente Fox in Guanajuato, and Manuel J. Clouthier as national president of the organization. COPARMEX’s vitality as an opposition group prompted one free market writer to remark in 1984: “I ask COPARMEX directly: Why don’t you enter the game? Why don’t you dissolve as a nonpolitical association and begin again from the bottom up as a political organization which could revitalize the nearly nonexistent democracy of Mexico.”30 For many businessmen the PAN still had much to prove as an effective opposition.

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Another of the most important—and controversial—groups to influence the course of the PAN beginning in the 1970s was Integral Human Development and Civic Action (DHIAC), founded by Fernando Guzma´n in Guadalajara. For many PAN traditionalists, DHIAC was a Trojan horse for the business class and the neopanistas to take over the party. DHIAC conceived of its mission, however, as not one to transform the PAN, but to make it more competitive. Above all else, DHIAC stressed running competitive elections using modern techniques of publicity and marketing. In the words of one of its leaders, the organization served as a “kindergarten” for political leadership. Some of the most successful PAN politicians of the 1980s and 1990s—for example, Ruffo and Carlos Medina in Guanajuato—started in DHIAC before joining the PAN. DHIAC played a prominent role in the PAN’s presidential campaign of 1988 and in some of its successful state races in the 1990s, including those in Guanajuato and Jalisco. Moreover, DHIAC members, despite coming from the business community, agreed with the basics of the PAN’s doctrine. Where they differed with the PAN was in tactics.31 The National Civic Association of Women (ANCIFEM) also made an important contribution to the PAN’s leadership. Founded in Monterrey, ANCIFEM’s objective was to promote the participation of women in civic and political life. Along with COPARMEX, the group played an important role in mobilizing poll watchers. Although it claimed to be nonpartisan, some of the PAN’s most visible women politicians—Cecilia Romero of Mexico City, Ana Teresa Aranda of Puebla, and Teresa Madero de Garcia of Nuevo Leon— began their political careers by heading ANCIFEM.32 In sum, the neopanismo movement was characterized by a return to probusiness considerations, more forceful government criticism, and more aggressive political activism. But as a rule the neopanistas were not antagonistic to the party’s traditions or fundamental doctrine. Neopanistas, even those closely associated with the Monterrey business community, backed the PAN’s traditional doctrine of state supervision of the economy to provide shelter against the ravages of “savage” capitalism. Where they differed mainly was that the strategy should no longer be “la brega de eternidad”—the eternal struggle—but a fight for power. As a neopanista described the problem: “It is much easier to be in the opposition eternally than to be in power for awhile.”33 According to Pablo Emilio Madero, one of the key events in the rise of the neopanistas was a meeting held in the northern border city of Ciudad Jua´rez in 1982. There, members of DHIAC and key businessmen met to discuss ways to accelerate the political movement against the government. One of the attendees, Francisco Villarreal of Ciudad Juarez, indeed wanted to form a new party. This idea was discarded, and the two groups decided to throw their weight behind the PAN.34 The rise of neopanismo, with its pragmatic instincts and its businessman’s profile, antagonized some of the party’s traditional-minded members. Carlos Castillo Peraza, a PAN functionary from Yucatan with Christian Democratic

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leanings, probably summed up the feeling of many longtime party activists and intellectuals when he said, “Catholicism in Mexico needs a clear and proper political expression and the PAN lacks that. It bothers me, as a Catholic, that the party is not the political expression of my culture as a Catholic.” Recalling a phrase of Efraı´n Gonza´lez Luna that best summed up the attitude of much of the old PAN versus the new wave, Castillo said that “the PAN cannot be a bulwark of capitalism.”35 In Loaeza’s judgment, this period began the PAN’s emergence from a “confessional” party, to a “relatively modern one albeit with severe problems of consolidation.”36 This overstates the case; the PAN’s high decree of institutionalization prevented a serious split. Most neopanistas identified themselves as Catholics, but they were not necessarily Catholic activists as the earlier generation of PAN leaders had been. In a certain sense, their Catholicism was more conservative than that of the PAN traditionalists, who drew their inspiration from more “progressive” forces within the church. The neopanistas, in contrast, appeared more in line with the emphasis placed on religious and economic liberties in the social encyclicals of John Paul II, who became pope in 1978.37 The election of Jose´ Angel Conchello as party president in 1972 foreshadowed the new trend in the PAN to neopanismo. Conchello had been a business executive in Monterrey’s important Grupo Vitro and, as party president, he quickly advanced the business community’s critique of the leftist tendencies in Echeverrı´a’s government. He also had some affinity with the early Christian Democracy movement.38 Abandoning moderate rhetoric, he typically referred to the PRI as la cosa nostra and to PRI party president Jesu´s Reyes Heroles as “the godfather.”39 Conchello moreover desired to “open the doors to all people of good will who want to join us.”40 In the opinion of Loaeza, Conchello seized the moment and allowed the PAN to become the main voice challenging Echeverrı´a’s populism. He spearheaded the neopanista surge. “If there is no Conchello, there is no Clouthier. And if there is no Clouthier, there is no national presence for the PAN.”41 But at this time, the PAN did not readily accept this new outlook. After Conchello served his three-year term, the traditionalists managed to elect Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n to succeed him. Gonza´lez Morfı´n’s short tenure as party president reached its climax with the PAN’s national convention in 1975 to choose a new presidential candidate for the race in the coming year. No candidate stood out from the pack. Conchello himself backed Pablo Emilio Madero, a longtime party member and fellow executive with Vitro. Madero earned the admiration of many panistas in part because his great uncle was Francisco I. Madero and, as such, he represented a living link between the liberal revolutionary reformer and the Catholic PAN. Many traditionalists, suspicious that Conchello’s business clique would take over the party, backed Salvador Rosas Magallo´n, the courageous PAN gubernatorial candidate from Baja California Norte.

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At its 1975 national convention the PAN suffered its worse institutional crisis since the expulsion of the Christian Democratic youth in the early 1960s. Several factors contributed to this: the unsettling ideological mix of northern businessmen and Catholic intellectuals, the differing approaches to electoral strategy and the role of the party in the political system, and the clashing ambition of leading politicians. Meeting in October that year, convention delegates challenged Gonza´lez Morfı´n’s formulation of the political platform. Phrases like “socially productive property” and “the radical transformation of the social structures” did not sit well with conventioneers, who criticized this language as “having fallen into Jesuit-Marxist confusion.” Moreover, the delegates divided over participation in the proportional representation system of the Chamber of Deputies, which many believed permanently relegated the party to minority status.42 During the convention voting, no presidential aspirant commanded enough ballots to secure the necessary 80 percent for the nomination. A third candidate dropped out, with his support passing to Rosas Magallo´n, who nevertheless still lagged behind Madero. Although Madero had, by now, a solid majority, Rosas Magallo´n disregarded party custom and refused to give up the fight. Faced with a hung convention, the party’s national council met to vote for an extraordinary session for January. Pro-Madero conventioneers protested the leadership of Gonza´lez Morfı´n, who was regarded as favoring Rosas Magallo´n’s intransigent position. As a conciliatory gesture Gonza´lez Morfı´n resigned the presidency, blaming the discord on the corruption of authentic party doctrine.43 The new interim president, Manuel Gonza´lez Hinojosa, was of similar mind to Gonza´lez Morfı´n. In the special convention, Madero—who emerged after the sixth ballot with over 70 percent—still could not persuade Rosas Magallo´n to withdraw, and Gonza´lez Hinojosa had no desire to see Madero secure a victory.44 Moreover, the party’s executive committee backed Rosas Magallo´n.45 Gonza´lez Hinojosa announced that the seventh ballot would be the last, which antagonized the Madero supporters, led by the redoubtable Conchello. Gonza´lez Hinojosa failed to restore order. Party discipline broke down and fights broke out. The Rosas backers accused the Conchello people of busing in supporters who did not have proper credentials to attend the convention. Gonza´lez Hinojosa required physical protection to leave the convention site. The result: for the first time since 1946, the PAN had to sit out a presidential election. With no presidential candidate in the race, the PAN’s total vote share for congressional seats dropped significantly in 1976 to 8.5 percent.46 This failure may be interpreted as the reemergence of the PAN’s abstentionist tendency.47 But the decision by the PAN to abstain from participating was less an act of principle than a prudential move to save the party from breaking up. In the end, the institutional strength of the PAN prevailed. Even though forced to take a leave of absence from the party, Conchello, Madero,

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and their followers still returned to the fold.48 Moreover, the conventions of 1975 and 1976 marked the high-water mark of the PAN traditionalists and the growing strength of the neopanistas, who were undeterred by this temporary setback. Traditionalists like Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n would later resign the party altogether in 1978 to protest the influx of Monterrey support.49 Thereafter, all the victorious presidential nominees for the party would be both probusiness and participationist while still supportive of the PAN’s original doctrine as set out by Go´mez Morı´n and Gonza´lez Luna. THE ELECTOR A L R E F O R M O F 1 9 7 7 Because the PAN failed to run a candidate in the 1976 election—Pablo Emilio Madero ran unofficially—the PRI’s destapado, Jose´ Lo´pez Portillo, was virtually unopposed and obtained nearly 94 percent of the popular vote. In his memoirs, Lo´pez Portillo justified the outcome, stating that a near unanimous vote is not undesirable if the process is authentic. “But we can imagine that ideal conditions surrounding an ideal candidate for an ideal vote would not be antidemocratic, since dissidence is not an obligation, but a right. But I insist that what is most important is that the PRI candidate is the one who wins the election.”50 This overwhelming result for Lo´pez Portillo did not lend legitimacy to the process. On the contrary, the lack of an opposition plus a high abstention rate encouraged the PRI to take another try at electoral reform to give an appearance of competition to the proceedings. As Juan Molinar wrote of the political paradox, the absence of the PAN enabled the PRI to recoup some of the losses it sustained in 1973, but this absence also struck a blow at the legitimacy of the party system. “The system would require the maintenance of a well-differentiated and relatively autonomous opposition, but the maintenance of this type of opposition was impossible without developing it, which in turn would end up undermining the PRI.”51 Also, political reform was regarded as a means to cope with the economic crisis ending Echeverrı´a’s sexenio by giving more space to private sector interests.52 Six months after his overwhelming victory, Lo´pez Portillo decided to promote a new electoral reform to guarantee party plurality.53 The Federal Law on Political Organization and Electoral Processes—often abbreviated as LFOPPE—was the brainchild of Interior Secretary Jesu´s Reyes Heroles. It reflected his favorite phrase: “lo que resiste, apoya”—that which resists, supports. Reyes Heroles represented a pragmatic wing of the party that did not fear the consequences of limited political reform. For Reyes Heroles, the reform embodied his ideal of democracia otorgada, or directed democracy.54 The LFOPPE set a “conditional registry” for a party at 1.5 percent of the total national vote, and a “definite registry” if the party obtained a requisite number of members. The LFOPPE increased the size of the Chamber of Deputies to four hundred—three hundred elected by simple majority in

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electoral districts, and one hundred proportionally represented from party lists based on region that were set-asides for minority parties. Political parties were also permitted some modest public funding, tax exemption, postal franking privileges, and limited television and radio access.55 The new law established the Federal Electoral Commission, which included representatives of all the parties, to run the election, but it also ensured that the PRI maintained its dominance over this and local electoral commissions. A new option was offered for “political associations” to exist, which gave space to groups like DHIAC. Finally, the parties were granted permanent access to television and radio.56 As it appeared at the time, the PRI was offering another handout to the opposition without really opening up the system to competition. Gonza´lez Hinojosa, the PAN’s president, believed this another technique for sustaining the government’s power and for keeping the PAN a permanent minority party. The party delegates voted against public money for political parties because they believed it had a corrupting influence. But the neopanistas regarded the LFOPPE as an opportunity to gain ground.57 Meanwhile, in 1978 the PAN took a step forward in bridging the gap between the traditionalists and neopanistas with the election of Abel Vicencio Tovar as president. As former head of the ACJM, Vicencio Tovar had impeccable credentials as a Catholic activist, but he also followed in the Christlieb tradition of taking advantage of the opportunities that the revolutionary regime offered. He continued with Conchello’s open-door policy of party membership and believed that LFOPPE offered PAN a chance to improve its electoral position. By 1979 the party rebounded, capturing four majority seats and thirty-nine more under proportional representation in the lower house of Congress. It also was improving its electoral strength in northern states. Still, progress was slow; the PAN never registered more than 15 percent of the total vote.58 THE CRI SIS U N D E R L O P E Z P O RT I L L O Lo´pez Portillo had become the PRI candidate due to his longtime friendship with Echeverrı´a. He also represented a new tendency: The power in the government was shifting from the Interior Secretariat to the Treasury Secretariat. The liberal spending policies of the Echeverrı´a administration had taken their toll. His sexenio ended with a severe economic downturn. The priority for the next president would be more economic than political. But Lopez Portillo carried on the “revolutionary” tendencies of his predecessors. Seeing this tendency downplayed during the Salinas sexenio, Lopez Portillo would lament in an interview that he was “the last revolutionary president.”59 During his sexenio, a significant event demonstrated signs of reconciliation in Mexico: the 1979 visit by the newly elected Pope John Paul II. The pope had arrived to inaugurate the second Latin American Bishops Conference in

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Puebla, which attempted to alter the course that the Latin American church had taken after the Medellı´n conference in 1968. The Puebla conference tempered the enthusiasm for the Marxist-influenced liberation theology. It also encouraged the many Catholics who were concerned that the church was adopting too many leftist positions on social issues. For officially anticlerical Mexico, the pope’s arrival helped overcome old prejudices. Significantly, Mexico, like his native Poland, was one of the first trips on the new pope’s agenda. The huge turnouts of Mexicans for their first papal visit in history demonstrated that years of secularist education and government propaganda had done little to change religious loyalty.60 Nevertheless, the pope’s visit did elicit angry denunciations from revolutionary politicians. In a contradictory gesture, Lo´pez Portillo dutifully met the pope at the airport and later offered to pay the pope’s fine for wearing clerical garb in public.61 Besides the papal visit, 1979 also marked another important event: the discovery of large oil reserves in the Yucatan peninsula. Prior to this, the state oil monopoly PEMEX had been operating at a loss. Now the influx of revenue helped solve the economic crisis and gave the country a new feeling of prosperity. Lo´pez Portillo increased social spending without fear, and the investment dollars kept rolling in. The oil boom looked like it would usher in a new Mexican miracle, as the economy grew impressively.62 By the end of his sexenio, the bill came due for Mexico’s lavish deficit spending from the oil boom. The fall in oil prices imperiled the government’s oil-dependent budget. Mexico triggered a world debt crisis. In August 1982, Finance Minister Jesu´s Silva Herzog flew to Washington to announce that, by week’s end, his government could no longer service its debt. Because of the flight of money leaving the country, Lopez Portillo decreed the nationalization of the banks, which included hundreds of their subsidiary firms as well. In the opinion of one analyst, even more than Tlatelolco the bank nationalization undermined the middle class’s confidence in its government.63 The business community was outraged over this blatant seizure of private property, as well as the government’s making them the scapegoat for rash fiscal policies. Underscoring the arbitrary nature of the act, six months later the Congress passed a constitutional amendment so that the nationalization would be in accordance with the law.64 As Loaeza noted, the nationalization of the banks was an attempt to revive the spirit of the oil nationalization of 1938, a demonstration of nationalism and populism that united the nation behind Ca´rdenas.65 This time, however, the government gored Mexican citizens, and, for many, the seizure became a symbol of arbitrary government. The first shock to the system, the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968, had demonstrated in stark terms the authoritarian nature of the PRI system. The second shock, the debt crisis of the 1980s, demonstrated its incompetence. In the postwar decades PRI leaders could defend their power monopoly by their successful management of the economy. Now they could no longer do so.

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The PAN took advantage of the antigovernment backlash that followed the Lo´pez Portillo years. THE ELECT O R A L R E N A I S S A N C E O F T H E PA N Returning to competition for the 1982 election, the PAN selected Pablo Emilio Madero as its presidential candidate. This was a firm challenge from the business community to Lo´pez Portillo’s economic policies. Madero never had a chance to beat the PRI’s candidate Miguel de la Madrid, but he still garnered 16 percent of the official tally, easily the best outcome so far for his victory-starved party. The PAN also demonstrated rising strength in important urban centers, taking 27.3 percent of the vote in Mexico City, 35 percent in Guadalajara, and nearly 40 percent in Monterrey. Moreover, Madero’s 3.7 million vote total was twice that obtained by the four leftist candidates in the race.66 De la Madrid, another of the technocratic breed, had inspired little enthusiasm as the PRI candidate. Electoral alchemy was probably used to substantially inflate his vote to a respectable 71 percent.67 During his presidential term (1982–1988) de la Madrid never fully restored the country from the debt crisis that gripped it at the beginning of his term of office. As de la Madrid himself admitted in his last presidential Informe, the average Mexican had suffered a 50 percent cut in his standard of living during the six years.68 By the time de la Madrid became president, the country buckled under the stress of the economic crisis. The foreign debt blew up to $100 billion. Hard currency fled the country and the oil crisis deprived the government of revenue. All these economic problems put the political system under great strain. As the leftist political commentator Jorge G. Castan˜eda then wrote, “The principal challenge the president, and Mexico, face today is the total lack of credibility in the political system.”69 Northern Mexico proved fertile ground for the PAN’s electoral resurgence. Northern states, especially those along the U.S. frontier, felt themselves overtaxed by distant and unresponsive Mexico City. Chihuahua, for example, ranked seventh overall in payment of taxes, but only seventeenth in receipts.70 The economic crises of the 1980s, in particular the nationalization of the banks, also had a disproportionate impact in the north.71 Meanwhile, the business community, led by Manuel J. Clouthier, organized a series of rallies known as Me´xico en la Liberdad to drum up support for their position. These attempted to educate the public that the present nationalization was a step on the road to socialism, but their rallies were often overshadowed by government mobilizations in favor of the nationalization.72 Although these rallies demonstrated that business community’s new activism, they probably fell below expectation in generating popular support. In the end they also showed the considerable moral authority of the Mexican president; his request that the rallies be terminated was respected.

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As president, de la Madrid was initially eager to display his liberal inclinations. He initiated a reform of Article 115 of the constitution to grant more autonomy to the municipalities—the old PAN proposal.73 Sensing that he probably needed to let off steam from the economic crisis, he yielded to opposition parties’ victories in municipal races. The PAN took advantage of this limited apertura. According to John Bailey, the government usually schedules tough elections for the beginning of a sexenio. This proved to be the case for de la Madrid’s first year. Under the slogan Sı´, se puede—yes, it can be done—strong PAN candidates in several states shook up the official party.74 In 1983, the PAN captured six state capitals— including Chihuahua City, Durango, and San Luis Potosı´. Eloy Vallina, leader of the powerful Chihuahua Group of businesses, and alienated from the government by the 1982 bank seizures, provided important backing for the PAN.75 The party captured all the major cities in Chihuahua—70 percent of the state’s population.76 In 1983 the PAN performed strongly in state races in Baja California—the PAN probably took Tijuana and Mexicali, the two major cities, but was deprived of victory77—and Sonora, raising speculation that it might capture the governorships there the next time around.78 De la Madrid allowed these results to stand, but in the governor’s race for Baja California the PRI struck back by inflating its vote total.79 Ricardo Villa Escalera also ran a populist campaign for the municipal presidency of Puebla and claimed the state PRI denied him a victory.80 After a local newspaper published a report that the PAN was defrauded in the Puebla City election, the government pressured the newspaper into firing its editor.81 By 1984 the PAN’s electoral success caused the leaders of the several small leftist parties to announce: “the enemy to beat is the PAN. . . . Only a complete coalition of all the leftist parties will be able to stop the PAN from captivating and tricking the workers.”82 De la Madrid’s “moral renovation” strategy regarding elections was shortlived. As a party technocrat lacking popular roots and still weighed down with economic problems, de la Madrid probably believed he had insufficient political capital within his own party to enable him to grant the opposition any slack. His position was further undermined when, after a devastating earthquake struck Mexico City in 1985, his government’s response was slow and ineffectual. In response to the calamity, hundreds of church-based and other social organizations sprang up and assumed the government’s role in providing relief.83 This not only added to the Catholic Church’s prestige but also encouraged more church leaders to speak out on a host of political issues.84 Interior Secretary Manuel Bartlett Dı´az began to clamp down on the PAN by 1985. Bartlett rejected requests by human rights organizations to invite foreign observers for the elections, replying that Mexico has “its own particular system” and that “no one could give us lessons in democracy.”85 The PRI protest vote grew as disgruntled businessmen severed their attachments to the ruling party and crossed over to the PAN.86 The government held off a strong

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challenge from the PAN candidate, Fernando Canales Clariond, in Nuevo Leo´n with what has been credibly claimed to be electoral fraud. Protests by Canales and other state panistas fell on death ears. Because of his close ties with the powerful Monterrey industrial groups, Canales Clariond’s dubious loss in Nuevo Leo´n provoked more business sector disenchantment with the PRI.87 Jose´ Luis Coindreau, who claimed to have won the mayor’s office of Monterrey in 1985, camped out in the municipal palace in protest for over a month. This strategy of protest, however, was rarely effective. Since the PAN candidates were part-time politicians, the PRI could simply wait their protest out until the panistas were forced to return to their day jobs.88 In Sonora, the PAN candidate, Adalberto Rosas, believed that his party would win the election outright, but he added to a reporter: “no way the PRI is going to cede power.” Despite the PAN’s growing strength, the PRI’s candidate in Sonora probably summed up the prevailing belief in his party when he stated that a “two-party system would prove highly dangerous for Mexico.”89 Meanwhile, municipal elections in San Luis Potosı´ resulted in clashes with the government. In January 1986, after believing themselves defrauded in the San Luis Potosı´ mayoral race, many panistas participated in violent street protests, which resulted in one person killed and dozens injured and sacked the municipal palace.90 The PAN’s accusations must have been credible; in a strange twist, numerous state PRI officials, including the state party’s secretary general, resigned in support of the opposition’s claims.91 After the 1985 midterm congressional election, one analyst estimated that fraud counted for about 9 percent of the vote cast. The PAN, meanwhile, complained formally of electoral fraud, but the PRI still declared victory in all 300 congressional districts.92 CHI HUAHUA The most celebrated case of fraud occurred in Chihuahua’s gubernatorial election in 1986. After a rash of municipal victories, the PAN finally had a chance to take the statehouse in the home state of Go´mez Morı´n. The political awakening of the Catholic laity in the state, including groups such as Catholic Action, the Christian Family Movement, and the U.S.-inspired charismatics, provided an impetus for greater political participation.93 The PAN nominated Francisco Barrio, a prominent local businessman and Catholic “charismatic” who was the mayor of Ciudad Jua´rez. Barrio ran a strong campaign—“like a holy war,” according to historian Enrique Krauze—and, by many accounts, probably won the race.94 Interior Secretary Bartlett, who reputedly referred to his machinations as “patriotic fraud,” believed that the PAN had to be held off because it represented the interests of the old enemies of the revolutionary regime: the business class, the Catholic Church, and the United States.95 Many panistas took to the streets in protest of the results. Some blockaded the bridges between

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Ciudad Jua´rez and El Paso, drawing international attention to the protests. But some members of the PAN, notably Pablo E. Madero, disapproved of these provocations, a sign that the party was still divided over the confrontational approach.96 One of the most significant developments during this time was the role played by Catholic Church leaders. In 1985 the Catholic bishops had issued a statement entitled “Pastoral Orientation to the Proposition of Elections,” in which they set out a number of political objectives. For example, the bishops called for the reform of constitutional Articles 3 and 130 because they did not represent the interests of Mexican Catholics. In addition, the document criticized the de la Madrid regime’s disconnect between words and deeds on the issue of “moral renovation” and called for the end of the one-party system.97 Three days after the Chihuahua results, the state bishops, led by Archbishop Almeida, issued a nonpartisan statement declaring that fraud had occurred and that civil disobedience was justified if the people had no legitimate recourse to gain restitution. They condemned no party by name, but denounced fraud in the strongest terms: “The church will not guard its silence or complicity before electoral fraud because it pertains to a sin as grave as stealing or abortion.”98 After state authorities failed to respond to the fraud charges, Almeida announced from the pulpit his intention to cease all masses in his diocese, an echo of the cristero period.99 Interior Secretary Bartlett and the Mexican government responded with a media campaign featuring the pope admonishing priests for entangling themselves in politics. Behind the scenes, Bartlett contacted the Vatican delegate, Monsen˜or Jeronimo Prigione, to ask him to intercede with the archbishop. Prigione chided Bartlett for the Chihuahua fraud, remarking, “They could have won by any amount, even a small percentage of votes, as long as the election itself was clean. They can’t continue with this policy. . . . [T]hey won the battle but not the war.” But Prigione also wanted to avoid a showdown like that which happened in 1926. He arranged a meeting between Bartlett and the bishops in which the secretary warned that “blood will run in Chihuahua” if they followed through on the boycott plans. Bishop Almeida backed down from canceling the masses only when Vatican officials warned him that his actions went against Canon Law.100 The Chihuahua neopanista wing, led by Francisco Villarreal, resurrected the political career of Luis H. Alvarez, who had left politics after his presidential campaign in 1958.101 Alvarez had won the mayoral race in Chihuahua City in 1983. He then regained national prominence by leading the “Caravan for Democracy” to protest electoral fraud in the state, a protest he punctuated with a forty-day hunger strike. The public attention gained from that strike vaulted Alvarez to the forefront of the new wave of PAN leaders, exemplified by Barrio, Canales Clariond, Adelberto Rosas, and Manuel Clouthier. Alvarez represented a return to the Christlieb tradition within the party and served as a crossover figure for the PAN at a critical time. His history in

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the party was respected by all, and his business background and willingness to confront the regime appealed to neopanista new arrivals. But as one of the party elders, he possessed the virtue of moderation toward traditionalist sensitivities. In 1987, he defeated Pablo E. Madero to become new president of the party. Although his election initially signaled that the party would adopt a more confrontational attitude toward Mexico City, Alvarez would later spearhead cooperation with the PRI after the election of 1988.102 Alvarez’s National Executive Committee was dominated by neopanistas but kept in sight the need to refortify party ideology and doctrine. Former president Abel Vicencio Tovar, a PAN traditionalist sympathetic with the neopanistas’s more aggressive electoral strategy, took over as secretary general. As a result of the influx of new members during the 1980s, the PAN’s Executive Committee in 1987 initiated some internal reforms to improve the party’s organization. The proposition of the neopanistas, many of whom hailed from northern states, was to decentralize much of the decision making in the party. Meanwhile, the party’s National Council changed the party statutes to make municipal committees the basic organizing unit and permitted wider participation in the lists for proportional representation seats.103 One member of the council in charge of ideological formation, Carlos Castillo Peraza, came from that wing of the party distrustful of business and even defended the bank nationalization.104 Castillo Peraza, Fernando Estrada Samano, Felipe Caldero´n, and other panistas pushed to revive the party’s ideological identity during Alvarez’s tenure as president. The quarterly journal Palabra was founded to concentrate on themes of Christian humanism and the Catholic social doctrine and acted as a counterweight to La Nacio´n, which had come to reflect a more neopanista line. As the party’s journal of ideas, Palabra revived the ideas of the founders and tried to reach out to the intellectual community at large, even publishing a guest column, “How They See Us.” This provided succor for the traditionalist wing. Likewise, the party became more open to Christian Democratic parties again, now officially sanctioned by the party’s hierarchy. Under the influence of Castillo, who had many European and Latin American contacts, the PAN gained observer status in the Christian Democracy International, a worldwide association of Catholic influenced political parties. THE UNHAP P Y FA M I LY In June 1986, de la Madrid invited PAN representatives to participate in consultations for a new electoral law that would help defend the legitimacy of the upcoming election. The PAN took this opportunity to press its demands for limiting the government’s influence over the electoral process. The party also wanted proportional representation extended to the Senate. The new Federal Electoral Code (CFE), enacted in 1987, increased the number of proportional representation seats to two hundred and created an

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electoral dispute tribunal—a PAN proposal—that would replace the Supreme Court as the final word on deciding electoral matters. More controversially, the CFE also enacted a “governability clause” that stipulated that the majority party could have no more than 70 percent of deputies, but no less than 50 percent of the total. The PAN, not satisfied with some minor gains, protested that the CFE still placed the conduct of the election in government’s hands and that the governability “padlocks” ensured the PRI’s grip on power.105 As a fallout from the Chihuahua affair, the new electoral code also imposed a severe penalty of fine and imprisonment on any priest who induced people to vote for any candidate or engaged in any kind of political activity. Church officials vigorously protested this punitive article as a violation of their basic human rights.106 Besides the dealing with the opposition, de la Madrid had to face rumblings within his own party. Although he employed party “dinosaurs,” like Manuel Bartlett, as part of his familia feliz of key advisers, the economic crises that vexed the regime placed the real power of the cabinet in the hands of the secretary for programming and budget. Technical expertise became the ticket to power in the party. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, a young Harvard Ph.D., along with other American-educated technocrats, engineered the neoliberal reforms. Soon Salinas was being regarded as a presidenciable. Without abandoning the unwritten rules of PRI politics, de la Madrid saw the need to make the candidate selection process in the PRI look more open. In 1987 he took an unusual step by allowing six presidenciables make public statements before the candidate was selected. The de la Madrid regime made significant economic reforms that tested the loyalty of some of the party’s left wing. Economic necessity—and pressure from the United States and international creditors—dictated most of the moves. The government began selling off the nationalized banks and other parastatal firms. Agreements between the government and labor were put in place to hold down wage increases and fight inflation. In a move away from the traditional import substitution strategy, the fundamental development model of the regime since World War II, Mexico joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1986. As Kathleen Bruhn wrote in her study of the Party of the Democratic Revolution, “This decision was the last straw for the left wing of the PRI. The traditional progressive, social-nationalist faction inside the PRI strongly objected to all the main elements of the de la Madrid plan: wage restrictions, cuts in government investment and social spending, privatization, repaying the debt, trade liberalization, and deregulation of foreign investment.”107 Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas had served as governor of Michoaca´n in the 1980s, and as the son of Lazaro Ca´rdenas he was believed by many to eventually be the destapado for the presidency. Ca´rdenas was a firm adherent of his father’s leftist line. In the 1950s, as a young man, he participated in General Henrı´quez’s campaign against Ruiz Cortines. In 1961, along with his father,

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Cuauhtemoc helped found the National Liberation Movement, a group within the PRI influenced by the Cuban Revolution that espoused a return to the revolutionary tradition. According to one political scientist, “he began to feel increasingly alienated from the group that had taken control of the party and the government.”108 In contrast to the party’s current leadership, Ca´rdenas wanted the PRI to return to the revolutionary principles of land redistribution and economic nationalism. Although he was a state governor, Ca´rdenas failed to secure a cabinet position, traditionally the real steppingstone to power in the PRI’s system. In 1987, together with like-minded priistas in the echeverrista camp, Ca´rdenas formed the Democratic Current (CD) within the PRI. His partner— and the intellectual author of the CD—was Porfirio Mun˜oz Ledo, a one-time party up-and-comer who had fallen out of favor. Under Echeverrı´a, Mun˜oz Ledo held a variety of important posts, including party president, secretary of education, and permanent representative to the United Nations. After returning from New York in 1985, Mun˜oz Ledo began to recruit personnel for a new political party, along the lines conceived by Carlos A. Madrazo, a former PRI president and advocate for party democratization who died in an airplane accident in 1968.109 The Democratic Current, echoing party reformers like Madrazo, argued for opening up the internal nominating process for the presidential candidate and succeeded in attracting many party leftists dissatisfied with the de la Madrid government.110 The PRI seemed little inclined to take away the presidential dedazo. Its experience since the 1960s of holding nominating processes for public office— experiments held at the local levels—tended to create more tensions than they alleviated. Although the presidential prerogative was undemocratic and often arbitrary, it did succeed in distributing rewards and quelling dissent. The rapid accession of Ca´rdenas as a challenge to the regime caused many to speculate as to who was really behind it. One columnist, Margarita Michelena of Excelsior, the pro-government newspaper, believed that ex-President Echeverrı´a himself had helped mastermind the break.111 For their part, many panistas saw the sudden formation of a leftist opposition party as a clever PRI maneuver to draw antigovernment votes away from the PAN.112 MANUEL J. C L O U T H I E R By the mid-1980s, the new PAN leader was Manuel J. Clouthier, often known by his childhood nickname of Maquı´o. The newsweekly Proceso described him thus: “Businessman, Catholic, dynamic, vain, efficient, boastful, humorous, foulmouthed, aggressive, forthright, controversial.”113 As both a Catholic activist and a successful businessman, this quintessential neopanista—he joined the party only in 1984—succeeded in spanning both major tendencies within the party. In his short political career, he earned a party following hitherto enjoyed only by the founder, Go´mez Morı´n.

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Clouthier took pride in his participation in “intermediate structures.” “I was a student leader, I was leader of the farmers of Sinaloa, I was leader of the ejidatarios . . . I was director of the Christian Family Movement, I created the University [of Sinaloa], I created the Sinaloa seminary, I created the Monterrey Technological Institute of Sinaloa.”114 The founder of numerous agribusinesses in Sinaloa, Clouthier’s interests suffered during the 1970s when PRI politicians organized land squatters to take over private property. Clouthier joined the ranks of many businessmen who protested Echeverrı´a’s policies, and he rose to leadership within the national business organizations like COPARMEX and president of the Business Coordinating Council (CCE). But the nationalization of the banks got Clouthier into politics. “Lo´pez Portillo turned me into a politician when he did that,” he later recollected. “I saw the power and the rigidity of the presidential system and I decided to struggle to change that.”115 In 1987, Clouthier competed against Francisco Labastida, a party bureaucrat in de la Madrid’s cabinet, for the governorship of Sinaloa. Clouthier’s candidacy received favorable backing in the local press despite the PRI’s extensive influence over media outlets. Clouthier stressed economic reform during the campaign, advocating that campesinos should be given proprietary status of ejido lands and labor unions should have true independence from the ruling party. He compared his record as a founder of dozens of businesses to Labastida’s; Labastida, he claimed, presided over the ruin of many staterun enterprises during the 1980s. Clouthier even charged that the PRI authorities in Sinaloa were “complacent or complicitious” in the growth of narcotrafficking in his state.116 After Clouthier lost the campaign, many panistas believed that the election was rigged and vigorously protested the results. Clouthier suffered little from the loss, and later that year challenged Jesus Gonza´lez Schmall and Eugenio Ortiz Gallegos to be the PAN’s presidential candidate for 1988. Gonza´lez Schmall, a former Christian Democrat, represented the party’s traditionalist wing in the race. Some party members like him resented new arrivals like Clouthier for having benefited, until very recently, from the PRI’s paternalism.117 But after Clouthier obtained over 70 percent of the first ballots cast in the party’s national convention, the contest was conceded to him. At the party’s convention in November to elect the candidate, Alvarez had intoned that the party would not be a “symbolic opposition” but would fight to obtain power. After accusing the PRI of most of the ills that beset Mexico, he had reminded the 5,000 conventioneers that the party was the true representative of “the ideals of Francisco I. Madero: effective suffrage and no reelection.” Yet for some, the election of Clouthier symbolized a new radicalism of the PAN—a right-wing populism, lead by the ba´rbaros del norte.118 Clouthier’s principal policy adviser, Luis Felipe Bravo Mena of COPARMEX, defined his candidate’s position as that of “the new right.” He distinguished it from the “old right” of the cristeros and other Mexican

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anticommunists. Now the message was broader. “We are using the political discourse of the party’s doctrine, that at its time proceeded from the thesis of social christianity and the liberal anti-reelectionism of the revolution.” The party encompassed a broad range of views, and, despite its appeal to the middle classes and businessmen, hoped to embrace a broader class base. Indeed, the party was not American-style capitalist, but “a third option, that for some time we have defined as ‘solidarismo’ and identify with the regime of the Federal Republic of Germany, that came close to this ideal. Our model for the nation is the social market economy.”119 Clouthier’s tough rhetoric and impressive ability to draw people to his rallies caused one commentator to remark that his provocations of the government “faithfully reflect the courage and desperation of the Mexican middle class” that had been impoverished by a seemingly endless economic crisis. Others in his own party were less appreciative. According to former party president Manuel Gonza´lez Hinojosa, Clouthier represented “the intellectual decay of the party . . . such as a marked tendency toward messianism and violence.”120 As evident by his rapid rise through the party—and the overwhelming first ballot response in favor of his candidacy—Clouthier had the capacity to unite disparate elements of the party. Party loyalists recall that he preached a message of unity, especially to the Catholic “tribes” in Mexico who often spent more time opposing one another than confronting the PRI. In Jalisco State, for example, some sinarquistas traditionally preferred voting for the PRI instead of the PAN. The sinarquistas’s new political wing, the Mexican Democratic Party (PDM) had managed to obtain 2.3 percent of the vote in 1982 and a fair bloc of seats in the chamber of deputies.121 Lacking deep party roots, Clouthier was well positioned to reach out to other Catholic groups to join him under the PAN banner, and thereby he succeeded in keeping the PDM from drawing votes off from the PAN.122 Clouthier also helped introduce to the PAN the civil disobedience tactics employed by groups such as ANCIFEM.123 Like other Catholic activists in the mid-1980s, Clouthier was emboldened by the example of the Philippines, in which civil society employed civil disobedience tactics against the Marcos regime. The PAN’s secretary for national affairs, Norberto Corella, met with Filipino leaders who had used these tactics to help oust Ferdinand Marcos, and the Catholic Church also flew some Filipino church leaders to Mexico to conduct a seminar on peaceful civil disobedience.124 Early in 1988, a group called Active and Peaceful Civil Resistance (RECAP), claiming 200,000 adherents and led by PAN strategist Rube´n Raymundo Go´mez, joined Clouthier’s campaign. Meanwhile, the PAN distributed its own manual, The Non-Violent Political Struggle: Criteria and Methods. On the campaign trail, Clouthier sometimes invoked Gandhi and Martin Luther King and even called for civil resistance at the close of his campaign.125 This lent his campaign a more radical flare than past PAN presidential efforts.

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It also provoked the PRI to decry Clouthier’s methods, claiming that he deliberately created uncertainty, provoked confrontation, and hoped to destabilize the political system. To these accusations, Clouthier replied by quoting Don Quixote: “They are barking, Sancho, while we are galloping.”126 Ending the authoritarian revolutionary regime became Clouthier’s main campaign theme. As part of his rhetoric, Clouthier reiterated some of the same themes on economic development from his Sinaloa campaign and fired broadsides at the abuses of the PRI’s political system in his campaign manifesto: 1. The republican formulas of a balance of powers have been abandoned; the legislative and judicial powers have been turned over to the command of the executive. 2. Authentic federalism that gives autonomy to [state and municipal] entities has been persistently denied. 3. Representative democracy has been made permanently into a farce. 4. The Marxist manipulation of our constitution has created the idolatry of the state, reducing the ethical, juridical and economic freedom that the drafters enshrined in 1917. 5. It has superimposed the interests of a small group over the needs of the nation. Today the concepts of state, government and the PRI have been conflated in favor of the governing group.127

Clouthier exhorted the government to “nationalize” politics—that is, make it more representative of the people—and not to monopolize production and services. Railing against the government’s inflationary policies, he insisted that under his presidency the Bank of Mexico should become fully autonomous.128 Saying that “democracy is the balance of power,” he said that when the PAN took power, the comptroller would be placed within the attorney general’s office. On the present system, in which the president chooses his own comptroller, Clouthier commented: “I don’t believe that Ali Baba can control the 40 thieves.”129 Denying that his party was forming a new alliance with the Catholic Church, Clouthier nevertheless defended as nonpartisan a church official’s statement that Catholics should end voter abstentionism. “I read,” Clouthier said, “that what it is was an exhortation to the effect that people vote, and it is logical that if the people vote, they will vote against the PRI.”130 Notwithstanding the opinion of some of the party’s old guard, Clouthier did make a strong appeal based on the PAN’s traditional ideology. During the campaign he emphasized the need to promote subsidiarity by empowering the municipality and putting into effect real separation of powers. In education, he stressed the need to get rid of the “uniform and free textbook,” which panistas had long considered a mechanism for political indoctrination. Rejecting the labels such as conservative and populist, he called his own ideology “solidarist,” a nod to the ideas of Gonza´lez Morfı´n.131

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THE ELECT I O N O F 1 9 8 8 Mexico was headed for its most contentious election year since 1940. De la Madrid’s selection of Carlos Salinas, strong evidence that the next government would continue along the neoliberal path, provoked the most serious split in the PRI’s history and a real challenge from Ca´rdenas’s new National Democratic Front. Meanwhile, the PAN, with Clouthier as its standardbearer, seemed ready for a strong campaign. Clouthier proved to be an effective campaigner, and his rallies attracted large, enthusiastic crowds. His goal was to hold rallies in 100 cities in six months.132 Salinas, in contrast, did not have personal magnetism, and he needed to rely on party stalwarts busing in people to attend his meetings. When both Clouthier and Salinas arrived for campaign stops in Merida, Yucatan, on the same day, the PAN crowd easily surpassed the PRI acarreados— those bused in for the rally—which prompted Clouthier to challenge Salinas to another same-day appearance in panista Ciudad Jua´rez. This time the PRI turned out 100,000, a sobering reminder to Clouthier and the PAN that the ruling party still commanded enormous resources and sector loyalty.133 But Clouthier suffered other problems—for example, the blocking out of his campaign ads by radio and television stations.134 He was allowed one fiveminute television interview on April 28, which made headlines simply because giving airtime to an opposition candidate was such a novelty.135 During the campaign he often protested the media lockout by holding silent rallies, in which he appeared with his mouth taped shut. He and his followers also initiated a boycott against Televisa’s news program 24 Hours because of its bias against the opposition.136 In addition, the proliferation of polls running up to the election, many of which gave Salinas a substantial lead, were attacked as being influenced by the government itself.137 Both Clouthier and Ca´rdenas complained of harassment by PRI officials who disrupted their meetings by having loudspeakers playing music to drown out speeches.138 The rival opposition candidates cooperated by participating in the Asamblea Democra´tica para el Sufragio Efectivo, a civic organization to defend the vote. “The creation of this organization,” Go´mez and Klesner wrote, “suggests that the dynamic of the Mexican party systems turns not on the traditional left-right axis, but rather on a system-antisystem axis; what unites or separates the parties is not so much policy issues as whether they oppose or support PRI’s rule.”139 But neither the National Democratic Front nor the PAN felt inclined to join forces to unseat the PRI. Both groups recognized that their policy agendas were incompatible. The election had some violent incidents. Two of Ca´rdenas’s campaign workers were killed shortly before election day. The PAN claimed that some of its activists died in Ciudad Jua´rez and Oaxaca. The PAN additionally charged that numerous old practices were still in evidence. For example, early deadline for voter registration seven months before the election, inaccurate

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voter lists that included the elimination from the rolls of known PRI opponents, undelivered registration cards that were then passed out for use to PRI supporters, and the abuse of public funds for campaign purposes. But the party acknowledged that it and other opposition parties failed to have election observers at 27 percent of the nearly 55,000 polling places around the country, and thus were unable to inhibit ballot box stuffing on major scale.140 Despite the odds, the PAN leaders were optimistic. Their privately commissioned polls showed that all three candidates appeared to be dividing up the electorate equally.141 They anticipated that Clouthier would easily surpass the vote tally of 16 percent registered by Pablo Madero in 1982. Even winning the presidency outright seemed not out of the question. As the first results came in, Interior Secretary Bartlett was surprised to see the such good returns for Ca´rdenas and Clouthier. In the Federal Electoral Commission, a PAN official accessed a computer file that revealed the true returns and, when discovered, was forcibly evicted from the premises. Shortly thereafter, the computer crashed, and the final results were withheld for a week.142 The rumor was that before the crash, Ca´rdenas held a commanding lead over Salinas. When the official tally was announced, however, Salinas emerged victorious with 50.4 percent of the vote—a 20 percent drop in the vote total since de la Madrid election in 1982.143 Ca´rdenas finished with 31 percent, despite having done especially well in Mexico City, taking nearly 50 percent of the vote there. He also won Michoacan and, surprisingly, Baja California Norte. Clouthier, whose strong campaign had evoked such optimism in PAN ranks, ended up with about 17 percent, scant improvement over Madero’s mark six years before. The PAN’s distant third finish was a shock to party loyalists, who expected that Clouthier would outpace Ca´rdenas to maintain their position as the second electoral force in the country. According to party president Luis H. Alvarez, internal polling showed a three-way tie prior to the July vote.144 Citing the conclusions of a private opinion research group taken two months prior to the election, one PAN analyst argued that both Clouthier and Ca´rdenas each registered about 30 percent of the intended vote, with Salinas taking about 35 percent.145 At the time, the PAN believed it was as much, if not more, of a victim of electoral fraud as Ca´rdenas’s FDN. The official numbers did not jibe with the strong support the PAN had been registering in northern states throughout the 1980s. For example, the PAN registered only 38 percent in Chihuahua, 24 percent in Baja California Norte, and 17 percent in Nuevo Leo´n. The party won merely four federal deputies in the north.146 Some explained this by pointing out that some of the PAN’s notable leaders like Barrio and Canales Clariond declined running for Senate seats, and that the PRI ran a good northern campaign by selecting attractive candidates for local offices.147

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Jose´ Luis Salas, the PAN’s campaign coordinator, described what he believed to be two fixes: “Ca´rdenas’s people fixed the ballot boxes; Bartlett fixed the count.”148 Ca´rdenas, he claimed, could prove fraud in only 131 polling places in Mexico City, and not nationwide. Luis H. Alvarez related that one study commissioned for the PAN concluded that the official count may have shortchanged Clouthier by 1,800,000 votes.149 Raising the PAN’s suspicions, the large vote received by some of the FDN’s member parties, notably the PARM, the PPS and the PFCRN, greatly exceeded their normal electoral strength. Likewise, the PAN found it odd that FDN leaders Porfirio Mun˜oz Ledo and Ifigenia Martinez both won Senate seats in the Federal District. Gonza´lez Schmall spearheaded an effort to get the PRI and the FDN to open the ballot boxes for these elections, but both parties refused.150 Two weeks after the election, the “Democratic Assembly,” consisting of members from DHIAC, ANCIFEM and RECAP, published its own statement about the election. In its opinion, only the results in 127 of Mexico’s 300 electoral districts were trustworthy. Of the rest, 83 were “doubtful” and 90 “incredible.” The PRI’s vote came mainly from the doubtful and incredible districts. Moreover, the study concluded that Ca´rdenas benefited from fraud associated with the three “parastatal” parties of his coalition: the PARM, the PFCRN, and the PPS. In sum, the PAN supporters concluded a double fraud occurred in favor of “revolutionary bipartisanship.”151 In his own complaint, Ca´rdenas claimed that his organization estimated the total vote as 38.8 for himself, 32.9 for Salinas, and 25.2 for Clouthier.152 Another team of Ca´rdenas supporters later conducted their own study, which estimated 42.3 percent of the FDN, 35 percent for the PRI, and 22.6 percent for the PAN.153 But the PAN disputed Ca´rdenas’s figures. During a mass protest rally, Clouthier disavowed his rival’s claim to have won, stating only that the great number of irregularities meant that no winner could be declared.154 As Clouthier himself testified before a congressional committee, “[I]t is necessary to annul the July 6 elections since the legal framework in which the whole process developed, as well as the conditions existing prior to election day, the irregularities committed of the results, impede the full exercise of the people’s sovereignty.”155 While conceding his own defeat, Clouthier refused to recognize the results. His rally to protest the vote drew an estimated 200,000 in Mexico City.156 He demanded new elections and called on his followers to civil disobedience, which many did in northern cities but without the effect such actions had in 1986. Clouthier exhorted the throngs in Mexico City’s Zo´calo to ostracize the perpetrators of the fraud: “avoid them in restaurants . . . avoid their businesses, avoid their social clubs . . . isolate them completely.”157 In his forceful insistence that new elections be held, Maquı´o was joined by 1,600,000 who signed a petition to that effect.158 As Clouthier remarked: “Now I can feel that Mexico is changing, everything was worth the effort. Nobody can stop this now. Mexico will change with us or in spite of us.”159

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The panistas tried to make a deal with Ca´rdenas to denounce the fraud and solicit a new election. This was symbolized by the three opposition candidates—Clouthier, Ca´rdenas, and Rosario Ibarra Piedra—marching in protest to the Secretariat of Interior. But Ca´rdenas thereafter insisted that, instead of an unknowable outcome, he had in fact won. From the PAN’s point of view, his position wrecked the concerted effort by the opposition to force the government’s hand.160 The Federal Electoral Commission, widely discredited by the proceedings, prohibited access to the tainted ballots and refused to release the results of nearly 25,000 ballot boxes. The PRI, which controlled the Congressional Commission on Government and Constitutional Matters, prohibited the opposition parties from viewing the ballot boxes under guard in the basement of the Chamber of Deputies. The PRI bloc in the lower house, along with three deputies from leftist parties, themselves validated the results. As PAN federal deputy Jose´ Antonio Ga´ndara described it, “the candidate from the official party was elected president by 263 out of 500 deputies, and not by the majority of the Mexican people. The PAN voted against the ratification while the other opposition parties abandoned the assembly before the voting.”161 Curiously, although this election appeared to be hotly contested, with two strong opposition candidates challenging the official party, the abstention rate remained high. The Federal Electoral Commission acknowledged that ballots were cast by only 19.1 million voters—4.5 million fewer than in 1982—out of 38 million registered voters. Journalist Daniel James noted the discrepancy: Five million more voters registered than in 1982: 38 million, compared to 33 million. But if 4.5 million fewer persons voted on July 6, there appears to be an inexplicable disparity of 9 million votes, between the lower official 1988 total of those who actually voted and the higher total of those who registered. Equally bewildering are the official statistics for abstentions in the two Presidential years. In 1982, nearly 17.5 million, 49.5 percent of the electorate, did not vote; in 1988, the figure is 19.1 million, or about the same proportion: 49.6 percent. But if eyewitness accounts agree that the 1988 contest did arouse the voters more than the previous one, how could the abstentionist rate be identical?162

James reports that the PRI may have inflated the registration lists to prepare for boosting up the vote; FDN leader Mun˜oz Ledo, the PRI president in 1976, acknowledged that his old party had inflated its vote totals in 1970, 1976, and 1982. Without the confessions of the principals involved, getting to the bottom of 1988 vote was impossible. Besides tinkering with the final count, fraud probably also occurred at ballot box sites. Go´mez and Klesner averred that the government probably inflated Salinas’s vote total in rural areas to push him above the 50 percent margin: “Of course, the 50 percent margin is critical for the PRI since perhaps its firmest ideological tenet is that it represents the majority’s wishes.”163

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Besides fraud, the PAN’s disappointing showing in the 1988 election can be attributed to other factors. According to Daniel James, the persistent loyalty of the business community to the PRI, Clouthier’s sometimes abrasive posturing, and the PAN’s unwillingness to incorporate more young, dynamic neopanistas into campaign leadership roles, probably all contributed to the outcome.164 One can add that the party still lacked a significant presence in many parts of the country, including rural areas, which weakened a national campaign. The PAN did, however, make historic gains in congressional seats. The PAN took 38 plurality seats, enjoying special success in Mexico City, Jalisco, Guanajuato, and Mexico State—the party’s electoral base started to shift from the north to the more populous center of the country—and earned 101 seats overall. The FDN won 29 plurality seats, with 11 of those coming from Ca´rdenas’s native Michoaca´n, and earned 139 overall.165 Together, the opposition parties garnered 240 congressional seats to the PRI’s 260, placing them within striking distance of controlling the lower house.166 CONCLUSIO N During the twenty-year period just surveyed, the PAN became the main rallying point for those Catholic groups discontented with the revolutionary regime. Although tensions would remain, the neopanista faction supplanted the antisystem traditionalists and offered the party an infusion of strength. Moreover, the PAN’s organization allowed it to take advantages of the political reforms designed to restore the legitimacy of the system. While steadily improving its share of the national vote, the party managed to capture a number of important cities and majority-elected seats in the Chamber of Deputies, and it also continued to demonstrate that, under certain conditions, it was a threat to win a statehouse. Despite being overshadowed by Ca´rdenas’s FDN for the time being, Clouthier’s campaign marked another step forward for the PAN as an electoral force. He garnered over 20 percent of the official tally in eleven states, and 30 percent or more in Guanajuato, Jalisco, Yucatan, Sinaloa, and Chihuahua.167 Within the next ten years, the PAN would win the governorships in six of these eleven states. Carlos Arriola, a critic of the PAN from a Christian Democratic perspective, believed that the neopanistas did little to move the populace to a more confrontational posture with respect to the PRI government and instead created dissent within the PAN itself.168 This conclusion takes the 1988 results at face value and ignores the advances neopanistas had made in the years before the election. Indeed, it overlooks the fact that neopanismo would become the party’s dominant tendency during the Salinas years. Many new, dynamic members of the party pushing to expand the PAN’s electoral base proudly called themselves neopanista.169 More importantly, the neopanistas

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would spearhead the strategy to negotiate with the PRI reformers and help transform the “great party” into a “system party” of its own. For the first time since 1940, widespread questions were raised about the true victor in a general election. At de la Madrid’s last Informe before Congress that September, delegates shouted “fraud” and held up tainted ballots. Ten days later, all FDN delegates stalked out of the chamber while PAN delegates voted against ratifying Salinas as the president-elect.170 Fraud, it appeared, had been used not simply to augment the results, but to steal the election. The image of the PRI’s invincibility was shattered. Carlos Salinas entered office in probably worse shape politically than any candidate in his party’s history. The election results placed a great deal of pressure on the new administration to enact meaningful political reform. Now with the ruling party holding only a scant majority in the lower house, he and his reform-minded allies had to bargain with the opposition to enact constitutional reforms. After 1988 the PAN was in a good strategic position as the balancer between the official party PRI and the schismatic National Democratic Front. Manuel Clouthier could have become the charismatic leader in opposition that the PAN had long lacked. But in October 1989, while speeding to an campaign stop in his native Sinaloa, Clouthier’s driver lost control of his car, which skidded into oncoming traffic and collided with a truck. Both men were killed. This shocking accident raised immediate suspicions within PAN ranks that Clouthier’s death had been arranged by the government. Francisco Labastida, governor of Sinaloa, Fernando Gutie´rrez Barrios, the new secretary of the interior, and President Salinas himself were all denounced as possible culprits. PAN leaders, however, called for calm and urged that the deaths be treated as a highway accident. According to Alvarez, the clamor for an investigation into Clouthier’s death died down when his widow decided that she did not want Maquı´o’s sons seeking revenge.171 Jose´ Luis Coindreau, Monterrey leader and a close friend of Clouthier, believed that it was a simple mishap and not an assassination.172 Despite these assurances, many panistas, accustomed to Mexico’s culture of political violence, were distressed by the party leadership’s haste in waving aside the possibility of foul play.173 Clouthier’s violent and “mysterious” death would foreshadow those of other prominent figures during the eventful Salinas years.

NOTES 1. Daniel Cosio Villegas, “The Mexican Revolution Then and Now,” in Is the Mexican Revolution Dead? ed. by Stanley R. Ross (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1966), 123. 2. Coleman and Davis, Politics and Culture in Mexico, 25.

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3. Luis Rubio and Roberto Newell, Mexico’s Dilemma: The Political Origins of Economic Crisis (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1984), 122. 4. Roderic Ai Camp, Generals in the Palacio (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 28–30. 5. Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power, 718–19. 6. Carlos Montemayor, “Rehacer la historia (I)” Proceso 1187 (1 August 1999) Internet version. Retrieved June 14, 2003, from http://www.proceso.com.mx/regis trado/hemeroteca_interior.html 7. Jorge G. Castan˜eda, Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen (New York: New Press, 2000), 8–15. 8. Gonza´lez Hinojosa, Participation y Abstencio´n, 30–38. 9. Felipe Calderon Hinojosa, “Los jo´venes en la historia del PAN,” La Nacio´n 51 (7 September 1992), 22. 10. Martinez Alca´ntara, Salinas juega solo en la sucesio´n presidencial, 51. 11. Castan˜eda, Perpetuating Power, 18. 12. Rubio and Newell, Mexico’s Dilemma, 124. 13. Carlos Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 34. 14. Loaeza, El Partido Accion Nacional, 300. 15. Interview with Fernando Estrada Samano, Mexico City, August 30 1995. 16. Von Sauer, The Alienated “Loyal” Opposition, 127. 17. “Reflexiones” La Nacio´n 52 ( June 11, 1993), 18. 18. Dan Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy in Mexico (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 99–101. 19. Samuel Schmidt, The Deterioration of the Mexican Presidency: The Years of Luis Echeverria (Tuscon, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 85. 20. Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy in Mexico, 105–06. 21. Kevin Middlebrook, “Political Liberalization in an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Mexico” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America, ed. Guillermo O’Donnell et al. (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 135–36. 22. Arriola, Ensayos Sobre el PAN, 30. 23. Schmidt, The Deterioration of the Mexican Presidency, 87, 108–09. 24. Nuncio, El PAN, 23. 25. “The tragic twelve years,” a play on the “tragic ten days” that brought down Madero’s government. 26. Interview with Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, secretary of education of Jalisco State, Guadalajara, July 27 1995. 27. Leonor Ludlow, “El ‘Feno´meno Panista’: Rasgos y Ritmos (1982–1988),” in Carlos Bazdresch et al., Mexico: Auge, Crisis y Ajuste (Mexico: FCE 1992), 344. 28. Interview with Francisco Javier Huesca, COPARMEX chapter in Monterrey, May 12, 1997. 29. Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, “COPARMEX and Mexican Politics” in Government and the Private Sector in Contemporary Mexico, ed. by Silvia Maxfield and Ricardo Anzaldu´a Montoya (San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, UCSD, 1987), 89–91. 30. Bravo Mena, “COPARMEX and Mexican Politics,” 91–93. 31. Interview with Jesu´s Go´mez, president of DHIAC’s Jalisco chapter, Guadalajara, July 26, 1995.

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32. Interview with Teresa Madero de Garcı´a, San Pedro Garza Garcia, Nuevo Leon, May 12, 1997. 33. Interview with the PAN president of Nuevo Leon, Jose´ Luis Coindreau, Monterrey, May 14, 1997. 34. Pablo Emilio Madero interview. 35. Nuncio, El PAN, 20. 36. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 249. 37. Particularly Centessimus Annus. I am indebted to Dr. Manuel Dı´az Cid of the Popular Autonomous University of the State of Puebla for this observation. For this characterization of the John Paul II’s encyclicals, see Michael Novak, The Catholic Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Free Press, 1993), 88. 38. Fuentes Dı´az, La Democracia Cristiana, 63. 39. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 32. 40. Octavio Rodrı´guez Araujo, La reforma polı´tica y los partidos en Mexico (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1979), 132. 41. Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti, “Accio´n Nacional no es un partido sino una federacio´n de organizaciones locales unidas por su anticentralismo: Soledad Loaeza,” Proceso 969 (May 29, 1995), 26. 42. O’Shaunessey, Opposition in an Authoritarian Regime, 260–61. 43. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 39. 44. Pablo Emilio Madero interview. 45. O’Shaughnessy, Opposition in an Authoritarian Regime, 266–67. 46. Prud’homme, “The National Action Party’s Organization Life,” 26. 47. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 310. 48. Prud’homme, “The National Action Party’s Organization Life,” 26. 49. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 320–25. 50. Jose´ Lo´pez Portillo, Mis tiempos: biografı´a y testimonio polı´tico (parte primera) (Mexico: Fernandez Editoriales, 1988), 405. 51. Juan Molinar Horcasitas, El tiempo de la legitimidad (Mexico: Cal y Arena, 1991), 81. 52. Middlebrook, “Political Liberalization in an Authoritarian Regime: The Case of Mexico,” in Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Latin America, 131. 53. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 314. 54. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 254. 55. Middlebrook, “Political Liberalization in an Authoritarian Regime,” 135–36. 56. Silvia Go´mez Tagle, “Electoral Reform and the Party System, 1977–90,” in Neil Harvey, ed., Mexico: Dilemmas of Transition (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 1993), 68. 57. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 254, 319–21. 58. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 323–25. 59. Elı´as Cha´vez, “El paı´s vive cambios que ‘van a contrapelo de nuestros antecedentes revolucionarios’: Lopez Portillo” Proceso 836 (November 9, 1992), 8. 60. Hanson, The Catholic Church in World Politics, 59–60. 61. Camp, Crossing Swords, 217. 62. Jonathan Heath, Mexico and the Sexenio Curse (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1999), 20–21. 63. Brian Latell, Mexico at the Crossroads (Palo Alto, Calif.: Hoover Institution, 1986), 22.

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64. Sol Sanders, Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep (Lanham, MD: Madison Books, 1986), 24. 65. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 339. 66. Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 110. 67. Keith S. Roseann, “Corruption in Mexico: Implications for U.S. Foreign Policy” California Western International Law Journal 18 (1987–1988), 100. 68. Daniel James, “De la Madrid’s Swansong—Amid Heckles, He Reports Crisis Worse,” Mexico–United States Report (September 1988), 1. 69. Quoted in Latell, Mexico at the Crossroads, 1. 70. Latell, Mexico at the Crossroads, 19. 71. Latell, Mexico at the Crossroads, 6–8. 72. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 50–51. 73. Victoria E. Rodriguez, Decentralization in Mexico (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 73–74. 74. Nuncio, El PAN, 17–18. 75. Riding, Distant Neighbors, 110. 76. “Hasta priistas y comunistas reconocen que los triunfos del PAN son un adelanto civico,” La Nacio´n 42 (August 10, 1983), 14. 77. Riding, Distant Neighbors, 110. 78. Steven E. Sanderson, “Political Tensions in the Mexican Party System,” Current History 82 (December 1983), 404. 79. Leopoldo Go´mez and Joseph L. Klesner, “Mexico’s 1988 Elections: the Beginning of a New Era of Mexican Politics?” LASA Forum XIX, No. 3 (Fall 1988), 3. 80. Interview with Ricardo Villa Escalera, Puebla, August 21, 1995. 81. Sanders, Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep, 27. 82. Carlos Lugo Chavez, Neocardenismo: de la renovacion politica a la ruptura partidista (Mexico: IPE, 1989), 13. 83. Denis Goulet, “The Mexican Church: Into the Public Arena,” America 160 (April 8, 1989), 318. 84. Camp, Crossing Swords, 31. 85. Sanders, Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep, 28. 86. Graciela Guadarrama S., “Entrepreneurs and Politics: Businessmen in Electoral Contests in Sonora and Nuevo Leon, July 1985” in Arturo Alvarado, ed., Electoral Patterns and Perspectives in Mexico (San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, 1987), 93. 87. Dale Story, “The PAN, the Private Sector, and the Future of the Mexican Opposition,” in Mexican Politics in Transition, ed. by Judith Gentleman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987), 261. 88. Coindreau interview. 89. William Orme, “Fire in the Pan: Mexico’s One-party Democracy Feels the Heat,” The New Republic 192 (May 6, 1985), 19. 90. Sanders, Mexico: Chaos on Our Doorstep, 29. 91. Latell, Mexico at the Crossroads, 15. 92. Rosann, “Corruption in Mexico,” 101; Silvia Go´mez Tagle, “Democracy and Power in Mexico: The Meaning of Conflict in the 1979, 1982, and 1985 Federal Elections,” in Gentleman, ed., Mexican Politics in Transition, 165. 93. Enrique Krauze, Por una Democra´cia sin Adjetivos (Mexico: Joaquin Mortiz,

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1986), 125. Also, Chand, Politicization, Institutions and Democratization in Mexico, 247–58. 94. Krauze, Por una Democracia sin Adjetivos, 130. 95. Enrique Krauze Mexico: Biography of Power, 768. 96. Chand, Politicization, Institutions and Democratization in Mexico, 136. 97. Nuncio, El PAN, 90. 98. Krauze, Por una Democracia sin Adjetivos, 124. 99. Camp, Crossing Swords, 64. 100. Camp, Crossing Swords, 65–66. 101. Interview with Juan Jose Rodriguez Pratts, fellow at the Fundacio´n Miguel Estrada Iturbide, Mexico City, August 23, 1995. 102. Stephen Morris, Political Reformism in Mexico (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 66. 103. Alejandra Lajous, ed., Las Razones y las Obras: Las Elecciones de 1988 (Mexico: FCE, 1988), 31–32. 104. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 437. 105. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 409–13. 106. Camp, Crossing Swords, 67. 107. Kathleen Bruhn, Taking on Goliath: The Emergence of a New Left Party and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 74–75. 108. Dan A. Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy in Mexico (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1994), 161. 109. Chavez, Neocardenismo, 1. 110. Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy in Mexico, 162. 111. Daniel James, “Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Begins,” Mexico–United States Report 2 ( July 1988), 3. 112. Interview with Pablo Retes, panista strategist and legal counselor at the Mexican Embassy, Washington, DC, October 10, 1996. 113. Quoted in Daniel James, “Who Is Manuel J. Clouthier?” Mexico–United States Report 2 ( January 1988), 1. 114. James, “Who is Manuel J. Clouthier?” 2. 115. “In Memoriam: Manuel J. Clouthier” Mexico–United States Report 3 (October 1989), 8. 116. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 75–76. 117. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 443. 118. Lajous, Las Razones y las Obras, 82. Many of the PAN “northern barbarian” politicians wore beards. 119. Guillermo Zamora, “Clouthier precisa como su mejor arma la desobediencia civil” Proceso 587 (February 1, 1988), 22–23. 120. Lajous, Las Razones y las Obras, 104–05. 121. Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy, 169. 122. Two PAN regidores in the city of Guadalajara—both from sinarchista families— and PAN state president Herbert Arthur Taylor emphasized Clouthier’s capacity to appeal to desparate groups against the PRI. Conversation with author, Guadalajara, July 25, 1995. 123. According to Alicia Garza de Navarro, daughter of slain industrialist Eugenio Garza Sada, and members of the ANCIFEM chapter in Monterrey, these techniques

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date back to their protests against education textbooks during the 1960s. Interview with author, May 16, 1997. 124. Matt Moffett, “Mexican Opposition’s Filipino Advisers Help It Battle Entrenched Ruling Party,” Wall Street Journal (May 10, 1988). 125. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 447–8. 126. Manuel Robles, “Se radicaliza la pugna PRI-Clouthier; candidatos del PAN a diputaciones,” Proceso 588 (February 8, 1988), 10. 127. Enrique Nanti, El Maquı´o Clouthier: La Biografia (Mexico: Planeta, 1998), 151. 128. Francisco Parra, “Econo´mico, no Polı´tico, el Campo de los Organismos Empresariales: Clouthier,” El Financiero (October 21, 1987), 12. 129. Daniel Alder, “PAN Calls for an Autonomous Central Bank,” The News (October 21, 1987), 6. 130. Alder, “PAN Calls for an Autonomous Central Bank,” 6. 131. Lajous, Las Razones y las Obras, 140. 132. Interview with Clouthier’s campaign coordinator, Jose Luis Salas, Monterrey, May 13, 1997. 133. Armando Ayala Anguiano, Salinas y su Mexico (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1995), 37. 134. “‘El boicot a la campan˜a del PAN, muy peligroso,’ advierte Luis H. Alvarez,” Proceso 585 ( January 18, 1988), 12–14. 135. Larry Rohter, “Extra! Extra! A Race You Won’t Hear About,” New York Times A (May 13, 1988), 4. 136. Lajous, Las Razones y las Obras, 152. 137. David Gardner, “Mexico’s First Opinion Polls Fall Short on Credibility,” Financial Times ( June 28, 1988). 138. Daniel James, “Who Is Manuel J. Clouthier?” Mexico–United States Report ( January 1988), 2. 139. Go´mez and Klesner, “Mexico’s 1988 Elections,” 4. 140. Jose´ Antonio Ga´ndara Terrazas, “The Political Future as Viewed by the PAN,” Sucecsion Presidencial, ed. by Edgar W. Butler and Jorge A. Bustamante, (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991), 206–07. 141. Salas interview. 142. Castaneda, Perpetuating Power, 82. 143. M. Delal Baer, “Mexican Presidential Elections: Post-Electoral Analysis,” Center for Strategic and International Studies, Washington, DC (August 15, 1988), 1. 144. Alvarez interview. 145. Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, “Leccio´n de las elecciones,” Palabra 4 ( January– March 1989), 36. 146. Daniel James, “Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Begins,” Mexico–United States Report ( July 1988), 7. 147. Baer, “Post-Electoral Analysis,” 7. 148. Salas interview. 149. Alvarez interview. 150. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 468. 151. Miguel Ayala Ortiz, “Politico,” Entorno (August 1988), 8. Entorno is published by COPARMEX. 152. James, “Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Begins,” 1.

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153. Jose´ Barbera´n et al., Radiografı´a del Fraude (Mexico: Editorial Nuestro Tiempo, 1988), 144–45. 154. Lajous, Las Razones y las Obras, 166–71. 155. Daniel James, “Cardenas Denounces ‘Arbitrary’ Vote, Vows Fight,” Mexico– United States Report (September 1988), 1. 156. James, “Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Begins,” 1. 157. Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy, 165. 158. Lajous, Las Razones y las Obras, 200. 159. Quoted in “Transition to Democracy,” Contexto (March 1997), 3. 160. Alvarez interview. 161. Jose´ Antonio Ga´ndara Terrazas, “The Political Future as Viewed by the PAN,” Sucecsion Presidencial, ed. Butler and Bustamante, 208–09. 162. James, “Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Begins,” 2. 163. Go´mez and Klesner, “Mexico’s 1988 Election,” 5. 164. James, “Mexico’s Democratic Revolution Begins,” 7. 165. Go´mez and Klesner, “Mexico’s 1988 Election,” 4. 166. Baer, “Post-Electoral Analysis,” 3. 167. George W. Grayson, “A Guide to the 1994 Mexican Presidential Election,” Center for Strategic and International Studies Americas Program (Washington, DC: 1994), 31. 168. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 108. 169. For example, Ana Teresa Aranda, former ANCIFEM president and PAN president in Puebla State. Interview with author, Puebla, August 21, 1995. 170. Go´mez and Klesner, “Mexico’s 1988 Election,” 7. 171. Alvarez interview. 172. Coindreau interview. 173. Interview with Pablo Retes, assistant to PAN attorney general Antonio Lozano Gracia, Mexican Embassy, Washington, DC, October 10, 1996. Clouthier’s biographer, Enrique Nanti, offers no details that lend credence to the assassination theory. See Enrique Nanti, El Maquı´o Clouthier: La Biografı´a, (Mexico: Planeta, 1998), 195– 216.

CHAPTER 5

Transition in the Great Party, 1988 –1994

Despite being elected under dubious circumstances, Carlos Salinas de Gortari became Mexico’s most important president since the 1930s. Not only did he take major steps in modernizing the national economy, but he also enacted decisive electoral reforms that set Mexico on the road to democracy. During his six years in office, he recognized important PAN electoral victories, leading the opposition to gain more ground than at any time since the revolution. Furthermore, he broke one of the nation’s most enduring political taboos: the reform of the Constitution’s anticlerical articles, which contributed to ending a persistent social cleavage. Even his political enemies were compelled to admit that his was the most important sexenio since the reign of La´zaro Ca´rdenas.1 During the Salinas years, a double transition occurred within the two main parties. Without the cooperation of the PAN, Salinas and the PRI technocrats probably could not have achieved their reform agenda. And without abandoning its independence, the Catholic opposition formed a controversial alliance with the revolutionary reformers to enact key legislation. In engaging in this act of conciliation with its historic adversary, the PAN had to overcome its own lingering “antisystem” tendencies, which threatened to break up the party. Emerging from this controversy, the PAN became a part of the nation’s established political leadership and helped bring about an end to the “great party” struggle. SALINAS AND H I S C I R C L E Before analyzing his sexenio and his government’s relationship with the PAN, some words of background on Salinas are required. He was born April

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3, 1948, in Mexico City to a prominent PRI family, his father having served in presidential cabinets during the 1950s. His mother hailed from the PRI’s left wing; one of Carlos’s uncles, Eli de Gortari, was an important leader in the student movement of 1968. While a college student at the National Autonomous University in Mexico City, Carlos, his older brother Rau´l, and other well-to-do friends such as Manuel Camacho Solı´s and Hugo Andres Araujo, were known as Los Toficos—a nickname derived from a candy with the advertising slogan “Huy, que´ ricos.” Though standing apart from the antisystem radicalism of the student movement of 1968, some like Araujo flirted with Maoism and later helped organize the land invasions in northern states.2 Afterward, Salinas and Camacho joined Jose´ Francisco Ruiz Massieu in forming Polı´tica y Profesio´n Revolucionaria, a sort of PRI camarilla.3 They wrote for a government-sponsored journal and advocated internal party reform. Camacho and Ruiz Massieu were conspicuous in postulating new organizations for the PRI. As Camacho wrote, their goal was to form a new, enlightened elite with the capacity to work within the system.4 The political problem after 1968, as Camacho saw it, was that “feudal” interests—commercial and financial interests, regional power centers, and foreign influences outside the formal state—imposed obstacles to development. He discussed the need to consolidate the Mexican state through the efforts of a directing group—un grupo compacto—that would take over the state’s political and economic neuralgic centers to combat these “fiefs.”5 To accomplish this, he placed great emphasis on the strengthening the institution of the presidency and the aggressive exercise of its power, including golpes espectaculares, to accomplish this objective.6 But his project did not stop there. Camacho also discussed the need for transforming the ruling party, reforming the electoral system, creating a new social contract, and eventually strengthening the legislative body to create more representative democracy.7 Through Camacho’s ideas, one sees a hint of the Machiavellian nature of the Salinas political strategy: to use the powers of the prince to establish a new republic, but at the same time to maintain the PRI’s one-party model. As Camacho later stated, “I am basically in agreement with Gramsci’s version of Machiavelli: the Prince must always be the political party that sustains both the democracy and national unity.”8 Salinas completed a doctorate at Harvard University, focusing on the problem of combating poverty through education reform and social organization.9 Then, during the sexenio of Lo´pez Portillo, Salinas won an important position in the Secretariat of Programming and Budget (SPP), then under future president de la Madrid. The ascendancy of Salinas and his group represented a shift away from the statist policies of the first head of the SPP, Carlos Tello. Later, foreign-educated technocrats became the stars of the de la Madrid government. The trend away from politicos—men who earned their stripes in the PRI’s electoral trenches—had been underway at least since the Echeverrı´a sexenio, but it intensified during the 1980s. Salinas, Camacho, Ernesto Ze-

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dillo, and Jose´ Cordoba Montoya—a naturalized Mexican who was once the prote´ge´ of Francois Mitterrand’s adviser Jacques Attali—became prominent figures in the government due to their expertise. After his stint in SPP, Salinas moved to the PRI’s think tank, the Institute of Economic, Political, and Social Studies (IEPES), along with Camacho, Co´rdoba, and Luis Donaldo Colosio, where he consolidated his grupo compacto.10 Salinas and his allies became associated with the efforts to move Mexico away from the import-substitution model of development that dominated the postwar era and toward free trade. Their policies threatened the PRI’s old guard, which identified closely with the labor and peasant sectors of the party. As president, de la Madrid rewarded Salinas with the Secretariat of SPP. Salinas forged alliances with some members of de la Madrid’s familia felı´z— especially Emilio Gamboa Patron and Francisco Labastida—and worked against rivals like Interior Secretary Bartlett.11 His star rose as the debt crisis worsened, and he was considered one of the tapados to succeed de la Madrid.12 Salinas, despite having never held elected office, easily outmaneuvered his rivals and, to the surprise of many, became de la Madrid’s choice. Old guard members, like the head of the Oil Workers’ Union, openly opposed his candidacy and supported PRI dissident Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas instead.13 Nevertheless, Salinas owed much to the traditional party apparatus to secure his election. He rewarded many leaders of the old guard by including them in his technocratic cabinet, including Francisco Gutie´rrez Barrios as interior secretary, Carlos Hank Gonza´lez as agriculture secretary, Arsenio Farrell as labor secretary, and even Manuel Bartlett as education secretary. Entering office under the dark cloud of electoral scandal, Salinas needed to forge new alliances to govern effectively. He set out to reach accords with three important groups: big business, the Catholic Church, and the PAN. Moreover, he embarked on restructuring the PRI and recasting its message so that it could hold power legitimately, through open elections. In executing this strategy, Salinas rewrote the ruling party’s political formula, which had, for the most part, been in effect since the Ca´rdenas years. This grand strategy was bound to create enemies within his own party who had no intention of seeing the revolutionary out-groups get closer to power. But as he said on the campaign trail, “We change to strengthen ourselves, not to weaken ourselves.”14 Though a reformer, Salinas justified his party’s continued dominance of the political system. As he later told Newsweek magazine, “I keep hearing that in Mexico one party has held power for years, but when I think of how one party has ruled long in countries like Japan or Italy, I pay less attention to the criticism.”15 To establish his authority early, Salinas launched several of Camacho’s golpes espectaculares, first by arresting the Oil Workers’ Union head on conspiracy charges. He then deposed the head of the Teachers’ Union, Carlos Jonguitud Barrios, by announcing his retirement after he could no longer control striking teachers. He ordered the arrest of Jose´ Antonio Zorrilla, former head of

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the Federal Security Directorate, for the murder of journalist Manuel Buendia in 1984. Nor did the business community emerge unscathed; the government prosecuted an influential stockbroker, Eduardo Legorreta, for illegal profits stemming from the 1987 crash.16 During his sexenio, Salinas removed sixteen governors from their elected offices for a variety of reasons, a number far exceeding that of his immediate predecessors.17 Moreover, he created institutions without even consulting Congress; the National Program of Solidarity (PRONASOL) and the National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH) were created by presidential decree.18 Continuing what de la Madrid had started, Salinas pushed ahead with the “neoliberal” reforms of the economy. Privatization became Salinas’s major tool in reestablishing the ruptured relationship with business that had occurred in 1982. Selling off state-run industries and especially the banks created a new business elite loyal to the Salinas project.19 Likewise, by opening the Mexican economy to free trade—particularly the proposal to form a North American free trade zone—Salinas reestablished good relations with the business elite in northern Mexico, particularly in Monterrey. Salinas broached the idea of a U.S.–Mexican free trade agreement in 1990 after a similar overture to the European Union—financially burdened by German unification—had been rebuffed. Fourteen months of negotiations resulted in an agreement that whisked through the Mexican Congress. With the North American Free Trade Agreement, Salinas tolled the death knell for the protectionist development strategy of the postwar period and closed another chapter in postrevolutionary Mexico. But his neoliberal strategy would have to include a reinforced social safety net so that the bulk of the population would buy into the new economic system. To create this safety net, Salinas launched his Program for National Solidarity (PRONASOL), which was nicknamed Solidaridad. Following his doctoral thesis at Harvard, this program was designed to make people at the grass roots level more responsible for the direction of government funds. Solidaridad gave legitimacy to his economic project. The project was funded in large part by revenues received from privatization and was controlled initially out of the president’s office. By 1993, Salinas’s government was pouring 7.7 billion pesos into the project, and a new federal bureaucracy, the Secretariat for Social Development, helped oversee it.20 Choosing the name Solidaridad for the program was shrewd. It appeared to cash in on the international popularity of the social movement in Poland and the key concept of Catholic social doctrine.21 The visit of John Paul II in 1990 and his mass at the Mexico City slum known as El Chalco, a place where Salinas garnered only 27 percent of the official vote in 1988, served as the inaugurating event for Solidaridad.22 The new program certainly had a political rationale. Much of Solidaridad’s funds were directed at Mexico City and Michoaca´n—two areas that the PRI officially lost in 1988—and the poorest states like Oaxaca and Chiapas to bolster the support of the campesinos.23

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Panista Luis Felipe Bravo Mena characterized the program as “a tool of the system designed to make Mexicans think that if they need anything, the PRI can provide it.”24 As noted in the last chapter, revolutionary values had long since lost much of their luster even though PRI governments still paid lip service to them. Salinas, therefore, sought to abandon the official “revolutionary nationalism” ideology by creating a new ideology for the party, called “social liberalism.” This new ideology was to bring market capitalism and social welfare together and to distinguish Salinas’s approach from the much-maligned neoliberalism. The new paradigm would justify his abandonment of revolutionary icons like the anticlerical articles of the Constitution, economic protectionism, and the preservation of communal land in Article 27. As he put it in a speech on the sixty-third anniversary of the PRI, Our social liberalism proposes a nationalism for the end of the century and for the twenty-first century that conserves the historical sense lacking in neoliberals, but that does not tie itself to procedures from the past, nor conformed to public policies— today inoperative—made by the new reactionaries; it rejects the versions of those that associate nationalism with excluding and oppressive states, as well as those who hoist the banner of regionalism that divides and disintegrates.25

Turning his attention to the ruling party, Salinas launched new initiatives to restructure the PRI. Party leaders, like himself and then party president Colosio, saw the corporatism of the party as the source of its problems.26 At the 1990 national party assembly, the number of union members as voting delegates were reduced to one-fifth. The party also established a National Political Council and state-level councils to give more voice, theoretically, to rank-and-file concerns and reduce the influence of the corporatist barons.27 In September 1990, the PRI announced that it would attempt internal primaries for candidate selection. Candidate selection had always been the party’s Achilles’s heel and had caused its most dramatic internal crises. Internal primaries had been tried occasionally in the past, notably with the initiative of party president Carlos A. Madrazo in the 1960s. This new effort to “consult the bases,” however, foundered after a primary for the gubernatorial race in Colima and Nuevo Leon became divisive.28 Both cases resulted in cries of fraud.29 This experiment in internal democracy was then shelved for the remainder of the sexenio. At the 1992 national assembly, party president Genaro Borrego announced that the party would be organized into three movements: the CampesinoWorker alliance, the National Front of Organizations and Citizens, and the Territorial Movement (MT). This was intended to recapture the PRI’s slipping position in both rural and urban areas. The MT served as an umbrella group for the new structure, with Madrazo’s son Roberto as its head.30 The

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reforms were aimed especially at recapturing the deteriorating urban support, but they were imperfectly realized. They immediately conflicted with the old party sectors and, in many ways, left the PRI as a house divided against itself.31 New corporatist structures attempted to counterbalance the old. Privatization earned Salinas new allies in organized labor. Selling off the telephone monopoly benefited greatly the coffers of the telephone workers union, headed by Salinas ally Herna´ndez Jua´rez. The telephone workers were outside the control of Fidel Velazquez’s Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM). In 1990 Hernandez was encouraged to form his own labor confederation, the Federation of Goods and Services Unions (FESEBES) to compete with the CTM for high-skilled workers.32 Salinas also tried to revive the campesino sector by putting his ally, Hugo Andres Araujo, as its head. The CNOP, the PRI’s public workers’ sector, was reorganized as the UNE-Ciudadanos en Movimiento to attract new urban groups. REACHING O U T T O T H E C AT H O L I C O P P O S I T I O N Salinas’s strategy for obtaining the support of the Catholic Church was even bolder: reopening diplomatic relations with the Vatican and eliminating the anticlerical articles from the Constitution. Unlike many of his economic reforms, this initiative had no antecedents in the de la Madrid administration. The papal delegate to Mexico, Jeromino Prigione, and Archbishop Juan Jesu´s Posadas of Guadalajara proved themselves valuable allies in helping Salinas bring about this conciliation with the Church.33 Salinas certainly had a political imperative for better relations with the Catholic hierarchy. After the Chihuahua election in 1986, key churchmen had grown bolder in attacking electoral corruption and the tainted results of the 1988 presidential race. As an institution, the Church was far more respected than the PRI, and public opinion strongly backed both the pope’s visit and reforming the anticlerical articles.34 During his presidential campaign, Salinas signaled his intention for good relations by meeting with the four Chihuahua bishops. He later invited key church officials to his inauguration.35 During his inaugural address, Salinas had signaled his desire to close the book on the anticlerical past. “The modern state is that which maintains openness and modernizes its relations with the church,” he intoned. Despite overwhelming public support for the papal visit in 1990, some revolutionary holdouts protested. Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas, for example, condemned what he called papal interference in Mexican internal affairs, and some members of the Popular Socialist Party, Lombardo Toledano’s old vehicle, demanded that the pope be expelled under Article 33.36 After surrendering 240 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, the PRI could no longer enact by itself the reforms that required constitutional changes. The Salinas administration, therefore, had to negotiate with the PAN to carry out his programs. His reform ideas fit in well with the PAN’s own platform.

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Even though Salinas was, in essence, co-opting much of the PAN’s program, the opposition party could hardly pass on the opportunity to have them put into effect. Despite a disappointing result in the 1988 election—it appeared to have lost the protest vote to Ca´rdenas and his FDN—the PAN had gained the strategic high ground and was well prepared to exact concessions for its support. The Salinas government’s official dialogue with the PAN was quite a turnabout considering that, prior to the election, both sides dismissed the possibility of a future accord. For example, in 1986, Salinas confidant Jose´ Francisco Ruı´z Massieu wrote that bipartisanship with the PAN was unworkable because he presumed neither party could arrive at a minimum agenda. The PAN, he noted, wished to reform Article 27 to eliminate the ejido.37 For their part, many PAN sympathizers after the 1988 election assumed that any bipartisanship would consist of a reconciliation between the two branches of the revolutionary family, the PRI and Cardenas’s FDN. Overcoming his previous reservations, Ruiz Massieu later wrote a flattering article about the PAN’s founding in the party journal Palabra, highlighting the opposition party’s peaceful strategy and noting its contribution to a pluralist model of government. In doing so, he justified the administration’s strategy in forging its alliance with the PAN. “The political culture (the culture of pluralism),” he wrote, “begins to consolidate when the privileged political agents (the political parties) have the will to dialogue (democracy is fortified dialogue) and debate (democracy is, without remedy, controversy). And this only happens when the agents convert themselves into interlocutors, and when enemies become antagonists. To study the adversary in order to know him and to be able to convince him and win him over. This is the proposition that we share.”38 Ruı´z Massieu foresaw the end of the great party conflict and a new role for the PRI as a system party. THE PAN DEC I D E S T O C O O P E R AT E After the 1988 election, the PAN found that “unforeseen expenses” had placed it in debt. That fall its National Council took up the question on whether to accept public funding. Traditionally the party had prided itself on being independent of the public funding that was offered to register parties under the LFOPPE. Moreover, it saw disadvantages in that some donors would be less inclined to support the party and that some candidates would become less self-reliant.39 The northern committees of the party, following Clouthier’s position during the campaign, opposed “official subsidies,” but in the end this position was defeated in the council, one hundred to sixty-five.40 The party justified the decision to its followers in a short pamphlet: “The legislative change organized with the application of the Federal Electoral Code offers an objective standard to distribute public finances according to the votes and seats advanced for each party, in contrast to the previous elec-

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toral law (LFOPPE) that left the distribution to the Secretary of Interior in an arbitrary manner.”41 This change in traditional position symbolized to some extent the party’s growing acceptance of bargaining with the regime. More important than receiving public funds was the PAN’s willingness to engage in serious dialogue with its PRI opponents. Earlier, in August 1988, Salinas and his closest adviser at the time, Manual Camacho, had met with Manuel Clouthier and the PAN president, Luis H. Alvarez, at the house of Juan Sanchez Navarro, a business leader. Clouthier wanted to use the party’s new leverage to push through an electoral law that would ensure fairness at the polls.42 At this private dinner, according to Clouthier’s campaign coordinator, Jose´ Luis Salas, the conferees agreed to a general program of reform. This included the key elements of the Salinas modernization strategy: electoral reform, changing the relations between church and state, opening up the media and privatizing nationalized businesses and the ejidos, and establishing a human rights ombudsman.43 Salinas himself offered a letter of intent on political reform. Clouthier later justified these talks. “We’ve had talks with them because we are civilized people,” he said. “We are committed to change Mexico without hate and violence. We are willing to talk to anybody.”44 This encounter marked the beginning of the PAN’s cooperation with the reformist wing of the PRI. One influential member of the PAN’s inner circle, Carlos Castillo Peraza, called dialogue with the regime “a political and moral obligation.”45 It was Castillo’s belief that risking compromise, even with a “fascist regime,” had a moral authority that placed an obligation on the adversary.46 On November 16, 1988, the PAN issued a document titled “National Commitment for Legitimacy and Democracy,” which staked out its position that, although the government’s origins were illegitimate, it could legitimate itself by acting as a government of transition and carry out the necessary reforms for democratization, pluralism, and social justice.47 As the PAN leaders conceived their position, “the responsible democratic opposition is not in itself a permanent obstacle confronting government action.”48 In accordance with its “Legitimacy and Democracy” proposal, the PAN established a shadow cabinet tasked with monitoring the Salinas government’s reforms. Led by Manuel Clouthier, the shadow cabinet included Diego Ferna´ndez de Cevallos, Jesu´s Gonza´lez Schmall, and two neopanistas: Vicente Fox and Fernando Canales.49 On December 2, the day after Salinas took office, a PAN delegation consisting of Luis H. Alvarez, Abel Vicencio Tovar, Bernardo Ba´tiz, Rodolfo Elizondo Torres, Diego Ferna´ndez de Cevallos, and Carlos Castillo Peraza met with Salinas and his key advisers to discuss the PAN’s proposal. The agenda focused on electoral reform, the opening of the media, and regular meetings for political dialogue.50 The reform of the anticlerical articles of the constitution was high on the PAN agenda. In October 1987 the PAN congressional delegation had submitted a proposal to amend Articles 3, 5, 24, 27, and 130 to grant liberty of

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education, extend voting rights to priests, recognize the legal existence of churches—especially their right to hold property—and allow public church ceremonies. As PAN’s secretary general, Abel Vicencio Tovar, described it, “We are looking for congruence. Congruence between the reality that we live in and the text of the law.” The PAN’s initiative stated that “the consolidation of the state and the church’s adoption of a more limited sphere of action have reduced the antagonisms of the past. We need respect for the liberty of conscience in the area of religion.”51 For many in the revolutionary party, reform of the anticlerical articles remained a sensitive issue. Interior Secretary Gutie´rrez Barrios acknowledged this in August 1989, when he said, “Modifications of Article 130 are not being contemplated. The spirit of the Reform Laws will continue in effect.”52 But, in fact, officials and top members of Salinas’s cabinet had already entered into negotiations of the reforms. A sure sign of the new spirit of de´tente was the scheduling of another visit by Pope John Paul II to Mexico for 1990. In December 1991 Congress approved the modifications of the anticlerical articles. The vote in the lower chamber overwhelmingly passed the new laws 460 to 22, with all major parties in support, but with some revolutionary hardliners shouting in defiance, “Viva Benito Jua´rez!”53 The church was granted legal recognition and the right to operate parochial schools. Priests and religious had the right to vote and criticize the government and wear clerical attire in public. The bishops did not get everything they wanted: the articles still restricted full property rights, the ability to own and operate media of communication, and the right for religious instruction in public schools. Nevertheless, these reforms closed the book on the official anticlericalism of the Mexican revolution. To cap them off, Salinas restored full diplomatic relations with the Holy See the following September.54 Thus Salinas drew the curtain on Mexico’s official anticlericism, which had dominated politics since the Juarez era. With some reservations, the PAN reciprocated its support by backing Salinas’s showpiece initiative, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), in Congress. As Salinas noted in his memoirs, PAN leaders Diego Ferna´ndez, Carlos Castillo Peraza and Gabriel Jime´nez Remus supported the trade accord.55 The PAN bought into the classical free trade arguments that the agreement would improve the lot of the Mexican consumer, increase foreign investment, increase domestic production, and improve salaries.56 In addition, free trade would encourage more liberalization of the economy and thus continue to break down the PRI’s economic controls. Some PAN members, however, opposed NAFTA for a variety of reasons. They criticized the lack of a national debate and public information tending the government’s negotiation of the agreement.57 Felipe Caldero´n noted the fault of the Constitution that there was no provision to offer a referendum before the Mexican public on such an important agreement.58 Carlos Wagner Wagner, a party theorist writing in the tradition of Catholic social doctrine,

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worried about the inequality between the nations in salaries, productivity, and investment, and Mexico’s greater exposure to the more pernicious aspects of American culture under the treaty.59 Jose´ Angel Conchello, despite his origins in export-minded Monterrey, wrote a traditional nationalist and protectionist argument condemning the treaty.60 After NAFTA was implemented in January 1994, the PAN proposed that the government do more to help the economy adjust by investing in infrastructure, education, and worker retraining.61 Cooperation with the PRI of course had its price. After the death of Clouthier, the PAN, led by Diego Fernandez, agreed with Salinas to destroy the ballots from the 1988 election. The ballots themselves had been kept under guard in the basement of the Chamber of Deputies. Clouthier himself had opposed such a move, hoping that the case for fraud would still be opened. The deal itself seemed undemocratic and left PAN open to the charge of collusion with the government.62 The “burning of the ballots” also represented a sore point for those in the PAN who disagreed with the policy of dialogue. It should be noted, however, that with the opposition in a minority position, pressing a challenge to Salinas’s legitimacy as president was both hopeless and counterproductive. Even with the ballots examined, the real story of 1988 election would still have been obscure.

THE FIRST PA N - G OV E R N E D S T AT E Salinas made good on his alliance with the PAN in the state election in Baja California Norte in July 1989. This northern border state was especially fertile ground for the opposition because it attracted immigrants from other parts of Mexico and the political cliques there were not well established.63 Since 1959, the PAN consistently obtained at least 25 percent of the official vote in gubernatorial elections, and it may have been defrauded of victory in 1959 and 1983.64 Ca´rdenas himself had won Baja California in the 1988 presidential election. The PAN now turned to a pro-business neopanista and a popular mayor, Ernesto Ruffo, to compete for the governorship against the priista Marguerita Ortega. The state PAN, recalling how the party was deprived of presumed victory in neighboring Sonora a few years earlier, feared the repetition of a fraudulent vote. For their part, many of the PRI rank and file feared that their campaign would be sacrificed by the Salinas administration to bolster its legitimacy. This fear was underscored when Professor Wayne Cornelius, a former academic adviser of Salinas’s at Harvard, published an article in May speculating that the official recognition of an opposition victory in Baja California would alleviate skepticism and burnish the government’s reformist credentials.65 Salinas himself tried to dispel the rank and file’s skepticism before the election by receiving Ortega in the presidential residence and announcing more money for public works in the state.66

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With a good organization and vigilant teams of poll watchers behind him, and with the ability, characteristic of many neopanistas, to reach beyond the PAN support base, Ruffo captured 53 percent of the vote to Ortega’s 43 percent.67 Moreover, the PAN’s impressive victory demonstrated the evanescent quality of neocardenismo. Even though Ca´rdenas himself took the majority of the vote there the year before, his candidate for governor this time only gained 2 percent of the vote. Without an institutionalized presence, Cardenas’s party could not make inroads after his initial success.68 The PAN camp still feared that victory would be taken away from Ruffo, as they believed it had been taken from Rosas Magallo´n in 1959. But PRI president Luis Donaldo Colosio insisted that his party accept the defeat, defying the wishes of many party “dinosaur” sectors, such as the CTM, and the Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants, and other official unions who in a meeting called him a traitor and shouted, “Chilangos go home!”69 Colosio took the heat and insisted, “We seek to maintain our status as the party in power via the only means of legitimization—that is, the popular vote.”70 Baja California became the first state to be governed by an opposition politician since the Madero years and was a symbol of Salinas’s commitment to political reform. The president even attended Ruffo’s inauguration. According to Tonatiuh Guille´n Lo´pez, an expert on Baja California politics, much of the credit for Ruffo’s victory lies with the PAN’s organization. Unlike the PRI and neocardenismo, the PAN is based on individual membership, which helps it avoid internal conflicts. “Evidently, there also exists in the PAN internal factions and different interests, but the internal structure of the party facilitates its solution: It is not the same to have questions about an individual as it is about an entire organization.” He further stressed the flexibility of the party and, despite its small organization, its capacity to grow during the electoral season, and the know-how of its members after decades of experience in opposition to challenge fraudulent practices.71 The decentralized nature of the PAN, according to Guillen, also allows it to adapt better to the different political cultures in Mexican states.72 As the first opposition governor, Ruffo launched an ambitious program that corresponded to the PAN’s traditional doctrine. He sought to increase Baja California’s autonomy vis-a`-vis Mexico City as well as to improve the authority of the state’s legislative and judicial powers. Moreover, he introduced a plan to allot more funds to the state municipalities and to provide land titles to squatters. Realizing the need for sound administration, Ruffo’s government raised police salaries and fired corrupt municipal employees. After having criticized the PRI for supporting his opponent with state funds, Ruffo himself rejected the state’s traditional patronage politics, both with PAN supporters and with the press. Under Ruffo, Baja California established new electoral laws and thereby ensured greater transparency of the voting process. The local press and the unions became more adversarial toward the government, but by and large, Ruffo’s administration was generally viewed as a success.73

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ELECTORAL R E F O R M— C O F I P E One of the most important fruits of the political dialogue between Salinas and the PAN was a major electoral reform. The PAN first submitted legislation to change the electoral laws in a special session of Congress in May 1990.74 Party President Alvarez justified this effort “to initiate a process of transition to democracy through new legal instruments that would stimulate civic participation and create a new democratic culture.” The panistas regarded this as an effort to break the inertia of the system. As Alvarez described their thinking: “we cannot aspire to being the eternal minority.”75 The Federal Code of Institutions and Electoral Procedures (COFIPE) replaced de la Madrid’s ineffectual Federal Electoral Council and replaced it with the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE). The IFE, although still under the authority of the Interior Secretary, featured a new general council composed of more opposition party members and independent citizens. Now no single party could dominate its proceedings. The new law also provided for improved voter registration and new tamper-proof ID cards. Revising the governability clause of the last round of electoral reform, the new law granted the party that garnered 35 percent of the total vote a working majority in Congress. The new governability clause was seen by many as too great a concession to the PRI.76 The new electoral rules touched off a controversy within the PAN. The leadership hailed the new legislation, but 25 percent of the panistas in Congress voted against it.77 In addition, the COFIPE was criticized as a setback for small parties, who previously enjoyed more favorable rules for representation in the lower house. Only days after the PAN delegates voted to approve the constitutional changes for electoral reform, the party faced another confrontation with the PRI in state elections in Sinaloa. Claiming fraud, panistas staged violent protests. In the end, the city hall in Culiaca´n was set afire and two died in the commotion.78 For many within the party, it was clear that the PRI did not intend to honor the spirit of reform. The main test for COFIPE came with the 1991 midterm election. With Salinas at the peak of his power at the midpoint of his sexenio, the PRI was poised to do well. The election was, in effect, the referendum on Salinas’s free market reforms. The PRI recaptured its commanding position in the Chamber of Deputies and regained control over constitutional reforms. The PAN won only 17.7 percent of the total vote. Despite winning its first senate seat with Hector Tera´n Tera´n’s convincing victory in Baja California, the PAN’s position in Congress remained virtually unchanged from 1988. However, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), Ca´rdenas’s new party formed out of the FDN, suffered a stunning reversal and gained only 4 percent of the total vote. Ca´rdenas’s party attacked the new national voter roll and urged a vote against the result’s validity, but the PAN, having bought into the new

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electoral system, abstained from protesting despite the doubts of some of its members.79 The COFIPE reform had not ensured the transparency of the process. PAN President Alvarez denounced the electoral fraud as “scandalous.” Old habits persisted; PRI officials withheld disclosure of the registration lists and voter identification cards from some opposition-loyal areas. The PRI also enjoyed its traditional use of government resources—especially the new Solidaridad program—and media access without restriction. In many places the vote exceeded the number of registered voters; in some polling places 100 percent of the vote was for the PRI; in others opposition militants were prohibited from entering polling stations.80 With the exception of Baja California, which had passed into the PAN’s hands in 1989, the PRI still ran the voting process, from the interior secretary down to local polling districts. Significantly, the PRI’s few losses in 1991 occurred in Baja California. The PAN ended up submitting over two hundred disputes before the Federal Electoral Tribunal. Jose Angel Conchello remarked trenchantly: “How good that they stole from us 40 districts in the Federal District—it demonstrates that we are indeed an independent party.”81 BARGAINING S T AT E E L E C T I O N S State elections in 1991 and 1992 were more problematic for Salinas. In Mexico State, Hidalgo, Coahuila and Yucatan the opposition parties leveled complaints that the old, heavy-handed ballot stuffing practices were still in effect. Moreover, the most contested gubernatorial races were in Guanajuato and San Luis Potosı´, which corresponded with the midterm elections and featured strong opposition candidates. Both contests would generate considerable controversy. In Guanajuato, the PAN federal deputy and an outspoken Salinas critic, Vicente Fox Quesada, competed against a former PRI presidenciable under de la Madrid, Ramo´n Aguirre, and the PRD senator from Mexico City, Porfirio Mun˜oz Ledo. Fox, a native of the state, had advantages over Aguirre, who was seen by the state PRI as a Mexico City politician. Fox ran a good campaign but claimed fraud when Aguirre was announced as the victor. According to the official results, Aguirre had obtained 53 percent to Fox’s 35.5 percent. But of 294 voting stations in five municipalities, 240 had irregularities. Indeed, Mun˜oz Ledo, who ran a distant third, proclaimed that Fox had won the race.82 Fox’s boisterous public protests caught the attention of the U.S. press. This occurred at a sensitive time when Salinas was engaged in negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with the United States, and he did not want to be handicapped by accusations of unsavory electoral tactics. Meanwhile, the PAN leadership pushed Salinas to recognize Fox’s win. But the PAN’s position was tenuous. Officially, the party maintained that Fox had won.83 According to one PAN official, Fox could demonstrate evi-

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dence of fraud and irregularities—for example, 500 polling places with no votes for the PAN—but not enough evidence to have denied him the victory.84 Moreover, an exit poll conducted by Gallup had confirmed a decisive victory for Ramon Aguirre.85 Nevertheless, the audacity of Fox’s protests, the PAN’s shrewd bargaining, and Salinas’s vulnerability on the fraud issue forced Mexico City’s hand. Salinas hated Fox—as a federal deputy in 1988 Fox held two spoiled ballots to his head to mock Salinas’s prominent ears—and had no intention of allowing Fox to take over a statehouse.86 So a deal was reached, with Diego Fernandez as the prime negotiator between the PAN and Interior Secretary Gutierrez Barrios. Aguirre resigned the governorship and the state legislature chose the panista mayor of Leo´n, Carlos Medina Plascencia, as the interim governor. According to Luis H. Alvarez, no deal was made that stipulated the PAN must accept a PRI secretary of interior for the state; that was a decision taken by Medina himself.87 But many commentators accept the conclusion that this was a concession the PAN made to the PRI. Thus another state came under PAN rule, but not without some cost. The media and the PRI faithful excoriated both Salinas and the PAN for this concertacesio´n, roughly translated as a backroom deal.88 As one state PRI official said, “First they impose on us a candidate, then they oblige us to like it. Now they oblige us to resign.”89 And Fox, though he remained within the party, had a serious falling out with the party leadership, especially Diego Fernandez. The party president, however, explained that, from his point of view, the party was being offered the governorship of an important state and it offered an excellent opportunity to demonstrate the superiority of PAN’s management.90 In San Luis Potosı´, the PAN, the PRD, and the Mexican Democratic Party (PDM), the political wing of sinarquismo, all backed the local political celebrity Dr. Salvador Nava for the governorship. Nava, who was elected as the first opposition mayor of a state capital in 1958, had a long, turbulent career as a democratic activist in San Luis Potosı´. After he was defrauded in the 1961 gubernatorial contest, he retired from public life until overwhelmingly elected mayor of San Luis Potosı´, the state capital, during de la Madrid’s accommodation in 1982. By 1991, however, Nava was ailing and his popularity had waned with a new generation of voters. Nevertheless, he offered stout resistance to the handpicked PRI candidate, Fausto Zapata, and after the election results came in, there was ample evidence of fraud in Zapata’s two-to-one victory. Nava, backed by the allied political parties, launched an ambitious protest campaign that culminated with a march on Mexico City scheduled to coincide with Salinas’s annual address to Congress. Nava demanded the election be reheld and rejected the government’s offer to become an interim governor. The PAN decided to participate in new elections, rejecting Nava’s call for abstentions, and the party won some important municipalities, including the

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capital.91 To resolve the matter of governor, Salinas ordered Zapata to resign the governorship and replaced him with his old mentor, Gonzalo Corbala´. In 1992, two more important gubernatorial elections took place, both eliciting different responses from Salinas. In Chihuahua, Mexico City recognized the impressive victory of panista Francisco Barrio, the victimized candidate of 1986. Chihuahua, like Baja California, was another state in which PAN had a good electoral track record. Barrio, in addition, benefited from PRI Governor Francisco Baeza, whose political situation in many ways mirrored that of Salinas. Because he entered office under suspicious circumstances, he deemed it prudent to reconcile with both the Catholic Church—whose local archbishop, Adalberto Almeida, had vigorously protested the fraud—and the PAN opposition. The usurpador Baeza, a devout Catholic himself, also pushed through electoral reforms suggested by opposition leaders.92 Barrio’s candidacy may also have been boosted by a sympathy vote after one of his daughters was killed in a car accident shortly before the election. Gomez Morı´n’s home state, the cradle of the early PAN, became the third state governed by an opposition party. Michoaca´n, the home state of Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas, represented a different matter for Salinas. Salinas adopted a confrontational approach toward the revolutionary apostates, the PRD. He had already been forced to concede over one hundred municipalities to the PRD by 1990.93 The contrast to Chihuahua, in which the president called to congratulate the winner, was complete. Despite numerous irregularities, Salinas refused to concede the election to the PRD. Electoral reforms notwithstanding, Salinas, not electoral officials, was the final arbiter on state elections.94 THE “ANTI SYS T E M” R E AC T I O N WI T H I N T H E PA N The policy of cooperation with the Salinas government generated unrest within the PAN and reawakened its remaining “antisystem” elements. In 1990 Gabriel Jime´nez Remus of Jalisco, a follower of Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, challenged Luis Alvarez for reelection as party president based on his opposition to deals with the PRI.95 After the fourth round of voting in the National Council, Jimenez Remus’s followers conceded the race to Alvarez. Nor did the voting go well for the critical faction for positions in the National Executive Committee, and Jimenez Remus declined to take a position on the committee in solidarity with his defeated comrades.96 The election was bitter; the defeated candidates announced that they would remain in the party, but they refused to reconcile with the party’s leadership. For many of the party’s traditionalists, these compromises with the Salinas administration constituted the loss of PAN’s identity. Manuel Gonza´lez Hinojosa, twice president of the party, saw the party drift from its original mission, “to clean up public life in Mexico and to elevate the human condition

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of the Mexican people.”97 Among some of the party old guard, considerations of how parties often needed to compromise to make advances did not fit into their definition of how the PAN should act. This crisis placed on display the inner tensions and conflicts of the party. In 1990 dissident panistas formed the Forum on Democracy and Doctrine— el Foro—to demand both internal reform and to oppose the policy of cooperation. Conchello, Madero, Jesu´s Gonza´lez Schmall, Jorge Eugenio Ortiz Gallegos, and Bernardo Batiz stood out in the Foro as having held major leadership positions within the party. Curiously, many of the foristas had themselves opposed the traditionalists during the divisive conventions of 1975 and 1976, but they now took up the mantel for party traditions in the face of the neopanista threat. Besides protesting the cooperation policy, the foristas took aim at PAN’s support for free market reform. Some Foro sympathizers, like founder member Juan Landerreche Obrego´n, had earlier defended Lo´pez Portillo’s nationalization of the banks and objected to their privatization under Salinas.98 Gonzalez Schmall spoke for those in the PAN who remained suspicious of the free market: “It has been proven that a free market results in the concentration of wealth, and that markets are not the solution if they are not oriented to meet social needs. If there is no democratic control to direct the market, it will not lead to social justice.” Gonza´lez Schmall worried that the bank nationalization had attracted too many business types into the party, and he justified the Foro as a means of maintaining the PAN as a “forward-looking, reformist party” and not a “rightist” party.99 Specifically, the foristas attacked the concertacesio´n of Guanajuato, the destruction of the ballots for the fraudulent 1988 election, and, similar to the traditionalists on LFOPPE in 1977, the PAN’s support of COFIPE.100 On COFIPE, they argued that the new legislation was but a small advance—it could not guarantee the vote—at the expense of sacrificing the party’s prestige.101 Bernardo Ba´tiz, former PAN secretary general, believed that the PAN was becoming “a second official party.”102 Conchello, who had thundered against the “Allendization” of the country by Echeverrı´a during the 1970s, became equally vitriolic in attacking the “far right’s” invasion of the party during the 1980s and 1990s, especially by ANCIFEM, DHIAC, and MURO—an anticommunist group that confronted the leftist General Strike Council in the 1960s.103 Without irony, the former Vitro Group executive criticized two leaders of the PAN, Ernesto Ruffo and Luis Felipe Bravo Mena as being “not authentic panistas” and “representing, in some manner, the business class.”104 The forista crisis came to a head during the 1991 midterm elections. The party leadership gave the foristas a severe rebuke, excluding Madero and Conchello from the party list, in favor of two newcomers to the party, Francisco Paoli and Fauzi Hamdan. In internal elections for Senate seats, the National Executive Committee broke a deadlock by picking Abel Vicencio Tovar over

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Bernardo Batiz—Batiz had secured more votes—and vetoing the candidacy of Gonzalez Schmall.105 Another point of contention was Conchello’s challenge to Cecilia Romero, former head of ANCIFEM, for the party leadership in the Federal District.106 Alvarez attempted to placate the foristas by including two of their members in the CEN, but they remained intransigent and refused to dissolve. Some met with Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas at the home of Rodolfo Gonza´lez Guevera, a former PRI member and founder of the FDN. For its part, the PRD seemed amenable to forming an alliance with the PAN dissidents even though they had rejected joining forces with the PAN in Baja California’s gubernatorial election.107 With little hope of reconciliation, Alvarez and company resolved to maneuver the foristas out of the party. Finally the main foristas, with the notable exception of Conchello, quit the party in October 1992. This led to a few hundred members departing the PAN nationwide. In their resignation statement, the foristas again complained of the party’s pragmatism, its vote in favor of reforming Article 27, selling off the banks, and destroying the ballots of 1988. As the foristas noted: In sum, the PAN now is not a party of humanist inspiration that would defend human rights against the abuse of authority and that looked for the just distribution of wealth, that opposed the regime with valor and with the spirit of liberty and independence and that moved souls with ideas, principles, and its own programs, inspired by its doctrine. Today the PAN is pro-Salinista, proliberal, and pragmatic.108

In the opinion of Carlos Arriola, the foristas failed because they offered no real alternative of their own and, in opposing a leader of stature like Luis H. Alvarez, they lacked a strong moral voice.109 After the foristas quit, five of the seven living ex-presidents of the party were no longer official members of the PAN.110 The Mexican press played up the internal controversy, but, in the end, it cost the PAN little in terms of leadership and probably helped rallied its members around the new policy of dialogue and cooperation. After failing to form a party of their own, the foristas themselves scattered to the winds. Some, like Batiz and Gonzalez Schmall joined the PRD; others, like Madero, later teamed up with the sinarquista remnant, the Mexican Democratic Party. In essence, the forista controversy boiled down to a conflict between the “system” and the “antisystem” PAN. For key defectors like Pablo Emilio Madero, it meant leaving a party that was bent on the pursuit of political power, instead of what was perceived as its traditional role, a critical voice from the sideline.111 Fundamentally, the foristas saw preservation of the party’s ideological and institutional integrity and as more important than its efforts to affect a democratic transition.

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After surviving its most serious internal controversy since the mid 1970s, the PAN was in its best position ever to compete for power. It had come a long way since 1987, when Alvarez took over as party president. Then the party only held 18 municipal governments. By 1993 it held three governorships and 99 municipalities, including about 40 percent of the municipalities with over 250,000 inhabitants. The number of card-carrying members had increased from 75,000 to 111,000.112 Officeholders, not party functionaries, were rising to positions of leadership within the party. By 1993 Carlos Castillo Pereza successfully ran for the PAN’s presidency to succeed Luis H. Alvarez. Like Vicencio Tovar, Castillo Pereza bridged the gap between the PAN’s pragmatic stance during the Salinas years and PAN’s traditionalism. In some ways his intellectual tendency was very much like that of the 1960s PAN, that is, on the left wing of the Catholic spectrum. The Castillo election also represented the party’s old tendency of preferring ideologues rather than politicians as its leaders. Castillo Pereza, though well known as a party intellectual and writer, had served only once as a federal deputy from the party list. Because of his party credentials and his support for the cooperation strategy, he received broad support for the post, with even the conchellistas in the Federal District backing him.113 After taking over, he pledged to sharpen the party’s ideological message and make its proposals relevant to the nation’s poor.114 DISSENT WI T H I N T H E R E VO L U T I O N A RY FA M I LY Despite the PRI’s emphatic victory in the midterm elections of 1991, PAN leaders still viewed the PRI as a party in deep decline. They saw the main sectors of the revolutionary party, especially the CTM, as exhausted. Ideologically, the PRI had little to offer. According to Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, it was not the party’s machinations that carried the 1991 election, but Salinas de Gortari himself. Indeed, the Solidaridad program—Salinas boasted in his Third Informe that it included 62,000 centers throughout the country— looked like the makings of a new party to supplant the old.115 In 1993 the first ruptures in Salinas’s coalition became evident. The cabinet purge came early in 1993, replacing Interior Secretary Fernando Gutierrez Barrios with Patricinio Gonza´lez Garrido, a Salinas cousin and governor of Chiapas. Gutie´rrez Barrios was offered no new job, as would have been customary, and his “resignation” had all the appearances of a dismissal.116 Manuel Bartlett was also sent off to be governor of Puebla, where his election was greeted by charges of electoral fraud.117 It appeared that Salinas was trying to assert some independence from the old PRI. Shortly thereafter, Salinas weathered a storm of bad publicity when news surfaced about his attendance at famous dinner party held in February 1993 at the home of PRI elder statesman Antonio Ortiz Mena. The gathering consisted of a few dozen of Mexico’s richest men—Emilio Azca´rraga, Miguel Alema´n Velasco, Eugenio Garza Laguera, Carlos Hank Rhon, Carlos Slim

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Helu, and Eloy Vallina, among others—who gathered to hear a pitch from the president to help make the PRI independent of the government.118 Salinas hoped to receive $25 million from each businessman, some of whom had reached billionaire status courtesy of his privatization policy, to amass a party war chest before restrictions were imposed.119 The dinner underscored for many the intimacy between the ruling party and big business, a relationship that especially flourished during the Salinas years. Another conspicuous blow to the prestige of the Salinas administration was the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas in Guadalajara in May 1993. Posadas had earned his reputation by taking over Bishop Sergio Me´ndez Arce’s diocese in Cuernavaca, the seat of left-wing Catholic radicalism in Mexico for many years, and setting it on a moderate path preferred by John Paul II. Posadas then headed the archdiocese of Guadalajara and earned the red hat. The cardinal actively cooperated with Salinas in his efforts to reform the Church-State relations and, despite serious reservations within the Catholic hierarchy, he strongly endorsed the NAFTA negotiations.120 By 1993 Posadas was considered one of Mexico’s most prominent churchmen and even as a candidate for the papacy.121 Posadas died in a hail of gunfire at the Benito Jua´rez airport in Guadalajara while awaiting the arrival of Papal Nuncio Prigione from Mexico City. The official report was that he fell under fire by the Arrellano Felix narcotrafficking gang of Tijuana, which had mistaken Posadas for a rival trafficker. Church leaders and many residents of Guadalajara aggressively questioned this conclusion. They emphasized that the bullets had been fired at close range and that Posadas was easily identifiable because he was wearing clerical garb. Moreover, the gang members responsible apparently were permitted by federal police to fly back to Tijuana.122 Suggested motives in the case vary. Some Catholics speculated that both Posadas and Prigione were the intended victims because of their efforts to normalize the state’s relations with the Catholic Church and that Mexico’s anti-Catholic “dinosaurs” directed this assassination. Others believed that Posadas intended to deliver documentary evidence to Prigione about his knowledge of official collusion with narcotrafficking. A Vatican official declared that the church had information associating the murder with a hard-line group of priistas known as “Now or Never” who were attempting to destabilize the Salinas government.123 The official version still arouses ire in Jalisco years after Posada’s death. Whatever the motivation, Posadas’s demise was a blow to the Salinas administration and a harbinger of mounting violence against authority. Some considered the growing atmosphere of violence the worst since the formation of the revolutionary party in the 1920s and symptomatic of severe political crisis. On January 1, 1994, several thousand indigenous peasants calling themselves the Zapatistas revolted in Chiapas State and seized several municipalities. Led by the charismatic, ski-masked Subcomandante Marcos, the

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Zapatistas were revolting against the implementation of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Initially stating their goal as the imposition of socialism on Mexico, the Zapatistas soon changed their tune and claimed as their motive the defense of indigenous rights. The Zapatistas, however, had scant military capacity and were unsuccessful in attacking military installations. They quickly lost some 150 followers, and the Army was posed for the kill. But, not wanting a peasant massacre on his hands, Salinas called off the counterattack and decided to negotiate with the rebels. Salinas later sent down Manuel Camacho to start the first rounds of negotiation with the Zapatistas.124 The Zapatista uprising ostensibly took Mexico City by surprise. However, the regional commander in Chiapas alleged that Salinas knew about the Zapatistas in mid-1993 when the army informed him of their stumbling upon the rebels’ training camps.125 Salinas chose to do nothing, even though in September 1993 he attended under heavy security the opening of the hospital near the Zapatista bases. The Zapatistas succeeded in embarrassing Salinas in the international community and establishing themselves as a thorn in Salinas’s side for the rest of 1994. Another blow to Salinas was the kidnapping of one of his close advisers, Alfredo Harp Helu. The banker had disappeared for weeks until his release. This was interpreted as a direct blow to Salinas’s inner circle and underscored the vulnerability of even his most trusted associates. Many interpreted all these events as the dark hand of reactionary forces in Mexico aimed at delegitimizing the Salinas agenda. Negotiations with the PAN, and the privatization of state industries, had created too many enemies for Salinas within his own party.126 The worst blow of all to Salinas’s prestige was yet to come. By the beginning of 1994, some observers noted that the Mexican economy had become highly vulnerable to currency devaluation because of its massive current account deficit.127 The government issued dollar-denominated bonds to ensure investor confidence. Rather than risk devaluation before the election, Salinas’s ministers kept the peso strong relative to the dollar by using its currency reserve to intervene in the money market. Just as in the previous three administrations, an economic crisis loomed at the end of the sexenio.

MORE ELEC T O R A L R E F O R M In his Fourth Informe, Salinas called for greater electoral transparency and pledged that the PRI would forego the huge advantages it enjoyed as the official party. Pressure mounted on the government to make these reforms after charges of electoral fraud and postelectoral violence broke out in Michoaca´n and Tamaulipas.128 In March 1993 the PRI stated that it would not accept personal donations above $320,000, a modest concession, to be sure.129 The following June, both the PAN and the PRD issued a joint declaration calling for, among other things, the opening of the Senate to proportional

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representation, strengthening the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), creating an autonomous electoral tribunal, opening up access to the media, and financial reform of the parties. The government responded positively to all their demands with the exception of the proposal to streamline the rules for permitting coalition candidates.130 To maintain the PAN’s support, that September the Salinas government submitted to Congress some new constitutional reforms to build on COFIPE and allow the presidential elections to proceed smoothly. These provisions granted the opposition parties more access to the media, placed limits on campaign spending, and granted more independent election observers. The IFE would be the authority for both verifying voting registration and for giving final approval to the election of congressmen.131 The PAN and the PRI additionally agreed on the creation of the Federal Tribunal of Elections (TRIFE), which would have juridical oversight of all violations.132 The new legislation rejected the controversial governability clause in the lower house in favor of a system that allotted the 200 proportional representation seats in proportion to the total vote.133 One party was prohibited from holding more than 315 seats, thus ensuring the cooperation of at least one other party to amend the constitution.134 The most dramatic change in the new electoral reform was the reorganization of the Senate. The number of senators from each state was increased from two to four, with three to win their seats by relative majority and the fourth by proportional representation. In addition, the opposition was guaranteed one-quarter of the Senate seats. The PAN and the PRI also agreed to modify Article 82 of the constitution, which limited the presidency to citizens born of Mexican parents. Impelled by the popular Vicente Fox, who was prohibited from running under Article 82 because his grandfather was American, the PAN pushed for changing this requirement, and Salinas, who had previously stated that it would not pass in his administration, relented.135 However, the PAN delegation under Diego Fernandez accepted the president’s compromise that the new amendment would not go into effect until the election in 2000, thus prohibiting Fox from running in 1994.136 The opposition failed to have imposed limits on the public officials’ participation in campaigns and to outlaw the use of the national colors by a political party—a longstanding privilege of the PRI.137 Salinas’s own proposal to put the IFE under the control of political independents broke down because of resistance within his own party.138 The reforms for the most part had real content, but the opposition was right to complain that the limitations placed on campaign spending were meaningless. In the election for Mexico State governor held in June 1993, the PRI overwhelmed PAN candidate Luis Felipe Bravo Mena and PRD candidate Alejandro Encinas Rodrı´guez with the resources it threw into the race. Even the victor admitted that the party spent the equivalent of $20 million, although some estimated the true figure at eight times that.139

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Before the run-up to the presidential election, Salinas faced another electoral controversy, this time in “dinosaur”-dominated Yucatan. After the state gubernatorial and municipal elections, the main capital, Merida, experienced a power outage as the final vote was being tabulated, eerily reminiscent of the 1988 federal election. The PAN, led by its yucateco party president Carlos Castillo Peraza and defeated candidates Ana Rosa Payan for governor and Luis Correa Mena for Merida mayor, launched protests that were met by PRI threats. The party documented the fraud case in laborious detail. When Salinas intervened to arbitrate the dispute, the governor, Dulce Maria Sauri, and the PRI candidate for mayor resigned.140 The PAN’s protests were partially successful; the state’s electoral institute awarded Correa Mena the Merida post.141 The Yucatan case demonstrated the willingness of the PRI’s old guard both to ignore the spirit of the times in electoral reform and to challenge the authority of its own president. As a consequence of the Chiapas uprising, Salinas had shuffled his cabinet in January 1994, replacing the discredited Jose´ Patrocinio Gonzalez with the respected Jorge Carpizo Macgregor as the secretary of interior to oversee the presidential election that summer. As part of his office, Carpizo was sworn in as head of the IFE. For many, this was a reassuring choice, because Carpizo, a legal scholar and former head of the newly created national human rights commission, was known as a political independent. Meanwhile, more pressure mounted for electoral reform as hundreds of prominent citizens signed a petition titled “20 Commitments for Democracy” calling for impartiality and probity in the upcoming elections.142 One of Carpizo’s first important acts in his new office was to secure agreement by the opposition parties for clean elections. This time, the three major parties agreed that the General Council of the IFE would be composed of “citizen counselors” with parties having only observer status. The interior secretary, however, would remain the overseer of the proceedings.143 As part of the agreement, Carpizo spearheaded a decision by the Federal Electoral Institute to lower the spending cap for the election from U.S. $230 million to U.S. $43 million for each party. Since the PAN only intended to spend $5 million and the PRD $1.5 million, this reform was but a symbolic gesture to curb runaway PRI spending.144 More significantly, however, Carpizo ensured more media access to the political parties and the availability of the voting lists. Foreign election observers, long resisted by the PRI, were also permitted for the election. Finally, the Salinas government enacted the suggestion by the PRD that the officials at polling stations be chosen by a lottery and that no ballots would be destroyed until six months after the election.145 While the government took great lengths to establish a consensus on the fairness of the electoral system, it did not give up control. The vast funding advantage by the PRI remained a serious discrepancy, and the IFE still fell under the oversight of the interior secretary. And although the PRI took a

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back seat to independents on the IFE’s General Council, the president of that body was a PRI party man, Arturo Nun˜ez. THE PRESI DE N T I A L E L E C T I O N O F 1 9 9 4 By late 1993, the PAN was in a fairly strong position to make a run at the presidency. Its party organization now covered 77 percent of the national population. Its three governorships in Baja California, Chihuahua, and Guanajuato included nearly 16 percent of Mexicans. The PAN also governed several significant cities, including Ciudad Jua´rez, Leo´n, Me´rida, Saltillo, San Luis Potosı´, and Tijuana.146 But the PAN lacked a clear choice for its presidential candidate for the 1994 election. None of its three governors was interested in running, and Vicente Fox was still barred under Article 82. Diego Ferna´ndez de Cevallos, an attractive possibility due to his conspicuous leadership in the Chamber of Deputies, followed the PAN’s tradition of candidate reluctance in seeking the nomination. He may have given up his bashfulness when Pablo Madero insulted him by saying that, because he had negotiated with the Salinas government, he was not “a clean politician.” In August, forty-four PAN federal deputies beseeched him to run, and he responded, “You push: I will not stand still.”147 According to scholar Soledad Loaeza, Ferna´ndez was something of a crossover figure: “Diego was to demonstrate that one could be a panista of the past and be as effective as one of the present.”148 Like Castillo, his “born in the PAN” background—his father had been a party founder in Queretaro—appealed to the traditionalists and his pragmatism to the neopanistas. His staunch Catholicism, stentorian voice, full beard, and ever-present cigar also gave him a charismatic appeal. He easily swamped his opponents in the PAN convention: Javier Livas, the political gadfly from Monterrey who had just joined the party, and Adalberto Rosas, who had waged a heroic campaign for Sonora’s governorship in 1985. Fernandez, despite his role as a behind-the-scenes negotiator with the Salinas government, nevertheless struck an uncompromising figure. As one columnist for the pro-government newspaper Excelsior wrote: “God, the family and the fatherland are the fundamental values for Diego Ferna´ndez de Cevallos . . . bearer of a noteworthy beard on the style of Maximilian, unabashed admirer of Don Quixote, Herna´n Corte´s . . . he provokes admiration as well as opposition.”149 He was despised by the leftist opposition for his closeness with Salinas. Moreover, because he was a practicing Catholic, he frequently had to field questions from the hostile press on whether his presidency would lead to the persecution of minority religions. Nevertheless, Ferna´ndez’s candidacy represented a political milestone for Mexico. He became the first candidate for president in the nation’s modern history whose notoriety arose from his leadership role in Congress. This symbolized Congress’s emergence as a meaningful political institution.

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Selected by his party without controversy, Diego had a jump on the PRI, who had yet to declare a candidate. Departing from de la Madrid’s “precandidates” experiment, Salinas kept his decision close to the vest. It was widely anticipated that he would chose another technocrat from his inner circle. The two major tapados were Manuel Camacho, the ambitious mayor of Mexico City and longtime Salinas collaborator, and Luis Donaldo Colosio, a former PRI president and secretary of social development who had oversight of the extensive Solidaridad public works campaign. Waiting to the end of the year, Salinas chose Colosio to carry on his legacy, leaving Camacho, and doubtless other members of his grupo compacto, embittered. Indeed, Camacho violated one of the PRI’s unwritten rules; he neither visited Colosio nor pledged his support.150 It was another example of the fundamental weakness of the party’s selection method that often failed to placate serious rivals for the presidency. Colosio looked like he would follow in Salinas’s reformist footsteps. In the opinion of journalist Armando Ayala Anguiano, having chosen Camacho would have represented a step back from reform because, as mayor of Mexico City, he followed the same practices of past PRI caciques.151 For his part, Colosio forbade two discredited PRI governors, Enrique Alvarez de Castillo of Jalisco and Xicotencatl Leyva of Baja California, from campaigning for him in order to clean up the party’s image.152 And during one campaign interview, Colosio frankly stated his Catholic formation and that his children “also are being educated in the Christian faith.”153 This phrase resonated with many Mexican Catholics and seemed a step beyond Avila Camacho’s “soy creyente” remark in 1940. But Camacho, in his role as chief negotiator with the Zapatistas, threatened to overshadow the PRI candidate. Colosio’s public support, though ahead of his two main rivals, was lackluster, despite his having good contacts with the PRI’s Solidaridad-based grass roots.154 As Salinas point man on the effort to reorganize the PRI and recognize PAN’s victories, Colosio had to endure grumbling from the party rank and file. Rumors swirled in the PRI that Camacho was to replace Colosio as the presidential candidate. Salinas convened a special meeting of top party officials and chided them by saying, “No se hagan bolas”—roughly, don’t get confused; Colosio was still the choice.155 Many believed that Colosio was distancing himself from Salinas—not an uncommon pattern in PRI presidential politics—and pointed to his March 5 speech on the Revolution as a step in that direction. “It is time to close the path to influence peddling, corruption and impunity,” he announced. As rumors flew that Camacho was about to declare his candidacy under the banner of the small Green party, Colosio demanded that Salinas get Camacho under control. The president responded by scolding Colosio for trying to energize the campaign at his expense.156 Everything changed by March 23. In a campaign stop in Tijuana, a drifter named Mario Aburto shot Colosio. The candidate died the same day with a wound to his head and his side. It was the first assassination of a presidential candidate since Obrego´n’s in 1928.

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Rumors abounded concerning the authors of the Colosio assassination. The French newspaper Le Monde postulated that PRI dinosaurs such as Fernando Gutie´rrez Barrios and Javier Garcı´a Paniaguas, along with some ex-presidents, were part of a plot to destabilize the regime to block the process of modernization. One PRI group pinned the blame on Salinas’s chief of staff, Jose´ Co´rdoba Montoya.157 Some blamed President Salinas, and others—Colosio’s close supporters—blamed jilted candidate Manuel Camacho. The two wounds on either side of Colosio’s body—and a video that appeared to show the assassin Aburto being ushered through the crowd by a member of Colosio’s security detail—fed the theory of conspiracy. Few believed that Aburto acted alone, although ballistics tests demonstrated that Aburto’s gun had fired both rounds.158 By appearing to impede the initial investigation conducted by authorities in PAN-governed Baja California, Salinas attracted much of the blame for the misdeed.159 The first commission appointed to investigate the event concluded that Aburto was the lone assassin. A disgusted public rejected this with contempt—nearly 90 percent rejected the notion—and Salinas was forced to form another commission.160 Whatever the truth was about the incident, the welter of dark conspiracy theories—like those surrounding the death of Obregon—revealed something about Mexicans’ belief that, after decades of single party rule, their own political system operated in the shadows. The hero worship accorded to Colosio after his death, which was exploited by the PRI throughout the presidential campaign, also reflected the longing of many Mexicans for purity in politics. After Colosio’s assassination, party hard-liners, such as former president Echeverrı´a, pressed Salinas to pick Fernando Ortiz Arana or Fernando Gutierrez Barrios, both outside the president’s political circle and hard-line polı´ticos, not compromise-minded tecnı´cos. The president also received a delegation of PRI governors, led by Manlio Fabio Beltrones, governor of Sonora, who showed the president a video of Colosio praising Ernesto Zedillo when appointing him as his campaign manager.161 It was clear that Zedillo was a compromise choice for a large bloc of party leaders. After a few days of fielding complaints and calls for democratizing the selection process, Salinas turned to Zedillo, his education secretary, as the substitute candidate.162 Zedillo was a surprise choice. In 1992, as part of the Salinas project to recast the party ideology and self-image, Zedillo had overseen a new public textbook program drafted by Hector Aguilar Camı´n, editor of Nexos magazine and close Salinas ally. The new books, where were distributed to all students, praised Porfirio Dı´az, previously the beˆte noire of the Revolution, with having built the country’s infrastructure and having attracted foreign investment. The books even boosted NAFTA, which at the time of publication was still unsigned. This controversial rewriting of history, and especially the criticism of the army’s actions at Tlatelolco, forced the project to be curtailed.163 Zedillo, then believed to be damaged goods, was a close ally of Salinas aide Co´rdoba Montoya. As a model technocrat, he had no experience running for

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elected office, but his experience in the central bank and as head of the budget office meant at least he was a safe bet to carry on with Salinas’s economic reform agenda as president. Because of Colosio’s death, the election was postponed from July until August 21 to give the PRI time to introduce Zedillo to the public. Although pitching a message that he represented the modernizing aspect of the PRI, Zedillo had to rely even more on the traditional party machinery than Colosio had. Agriculture Secretary Carlos Hank Gonza´lez, an archetypical party “dinosaur,” had one of his men from Mexico State, Ignacio Pichardo, installed as party president for the race and employed state employees and allegedly public money at the service of the campaign, ignoring newly passed electoral reforms.164 The endorsement of Hank-sponsored campaign ads by numerous PRI ministers reinforced the impression that Zedillo was backed by party hardliners whom Colosio had rebuffed.165 The most dramatic moment of the 1994 presidential campaign was the nationally televised debate of the three major candidates in May. The government yielded to opposition demands—the PAN had insisted on a presidential debate for years—and agreed to hold the first one ever. This entailed some risk, because it pitted the policy-minded Zedillo against both the eloquence of Diego Ferna´ndez and the enigmatic charisma of Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas. In the end, Ferna´ndez’s forceful presentation carried the day. Diego ended the television debate with this quotation addressing Zedillo: “I want to say simply in order to conclude, that if we Mexicans are to believe that you are a democratic option, we would have to believe that Aburto is a pacifist.”166 Most of the media accepted Ferna´ndez’s debating victory. In practical terms, Fernandez jumped ahead of Zedillo in some polls, causing many to believe that this would be a contested race like in 1988.167 Ca´rdenas, whose telegenic defects manifested themselves in the intimate TV format, fell to third place in the polls and never recovered. Despite nearly six years of PRI-PAN cooperation, Diego Fernandez strove to differentiate his proposals from those of the ruling party. He emphasized the PAN’s commitment to authentic federalism and criticized the Solidaridad program for bypassing local authorities. Among other fiscal reforms, he proposed significant increases in the allotment to states and municipalities, from nearly 23 percent of all public revenues in 1994 to 50 percent by the end of his term. Directing his attacks against the PRI system, Diego also called for legislation to suppress “all vestiges of corporatism.” He doubted that, even with the reforms, the PRI intended to democratize: “I’ve been the only presidential candidate that competed and was elected democratically. And remember that no one gives what they do not have.”168 But Diego’s pitch was entirely centered on political liberties and social peace, with little emphasis given to an alternative agenda to the Salinas administration. At the close of his campaign in Mexico City, Diego—as he was always called—placed the revolutionary regime in historical context: “Over the past

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fifty years, Nazism, Fascism, Francoism, the Japanese neo-Shogunism, the dictatorships of Somoza and Pinochet, numerous military juntas, South African apartheid, and the Soviet socialist system have collapsed. Only the Mexican oligarchy remains, with the pretension of excellence and eternity.” Under his campaign slogan, “For a Mexico without Lies,” Fernandez insisted that his victory would bring about the rule of law.169 But Diego by the end of his campaign had seriously disappointed his followers. For weeks he failed to capitalize on his success in the debate, going to an abbreviated campaign schedule, as Zedillo gained a strong lead. Negotiations for a second debate, something that Diego counted on to reestablish momentum, fell through. Diego Fernandez’s anemic campaign has occasioned many theories. According to one prominent panista, the PAN was marshaling its limited resources for a strong push in the few weeks prior to the election. Coupled with this were the candidate’s independent personality and his stubborn refusal to take advice from campaign advisers.170 In addition, he was having health problems; a stomach ulcer that required an operation a few months after the campaign slowed him down.171 Part of the reason might have been poor campaign management from the start. According to one press account, few turned out for a Diego rally in Ciudad Jua´rez, a PAN-governed city in its Chihuahua stronghold.172 In the opinion of Felipe Caldero´n, the PAN’s secretary general, Diego’s problem was more one of the party’s inability to use the media effectively than one of poor campaigning. Diego did concentrate much of his energy on giving radio interviews at the expense of traveling around the country.173 However, political scientist Jose Antonio Crespo reflected the belief of many by concluding that Diego and the PAN leadership feared taking over the government in difficult times and therefore decided to wait.174 On a more conspiratorial note, another possibility was suggested that Diego was ordered to back off by the PRI, which certainly was not ready to yield the cornerstone of political power to the opposition.175 Whatever the explanation, it appeared as if the PAN candidate had pulled his punches, and this resulted in puzzlement and some bitterness in the PAN camp. Waging a more vigorous campaign probably would not have ensured victory. Diego’s campaign still had to overcome the enormous institutional advantages that the PRI enjoyed. The television media in Mexico, though privately owned, regarded itself as part of the state’s apparatus. Emilio Azca´rraga, the owner of the near-monopoly Televisa, had described it thus: “The television consortium is considered as part of the governing system and as such supports the campaigns of PRI candidates. What I have said publicly, we are part of the system, and the president of the republic is the maximum chief that we have and we are content that it be so.”176 Diego’s campaign coordinator, Jose´ Luis Salas, commented on what seemed to the campaign as a media effort to establish an atmosphere of fear; for example, the overattention given

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to the crisis in Bosnia.177 Moreover, the print media openly favored Ca´rdenas over Ferna´ndez, who, according to well-known commentator Sergio Sarmiento, was viewed as a stooge for the PRI.178 The ruling party did dominate the airwaves. Ads for opposition candidates appeared mostly in short radio spots.179 According to study by the Alianza Cı´vica, the PRI bought 141 out of the total of 187 television spots and outspent the PAN in this area by a ratio of four to one.180 Not only did the ruling party have virtually monopoly rights on television ads, but it also benefited from biased news coverage. A study conducted by the Federal Electoral Institute indicated that over 50 percent of radio news and 37 percent of television news about the election was devoted to the PRI. The PAN trailed well behind even the PRD in this survey.181 The constant TV public service messages for Salinas’s hallmark program, Solidaridad, probably helped the PRI candidate as well. Despite the media bias, a bright spot of the 1994 election was the enormous effort made by the Salinas government to turn out a fair vote. The Secretariat of Interior financed the expensive campaign to create a new national voting registry and provide all eligible Mexicans with new voting credentials. Advertisements appeared around the country exhorting citizens to “get your picture taken.” The new cards contained many devices to prevent fraud and became a de facto national identity card. The IFE also funded a number of “quick counts” that would confirm the official outcome.182 Salinas broke with tradition and invited hundreds of foreign observers, including United Nations representatives, to witness the election.183 The parties themselves, joined by civic groups such as the Alianza Cı´vica and COPARMEX, turned out thousands of poll watchers, joined by hundreds of international observers, although only about two-thirds of the nation’s polling stations were covered.184 In promoting the legitimacy of the election to the international community, the government was aided by a study conducted by Theodore C. Sorensen, a Kennedy administration official and a partner of the Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison law firm in New York, that concluded that the election on August 21 will be “substantially free, clean and honest in accord with the generally accepted international principles, norms and criteria.”185 The electoral reforms had served their purposes well: the participation rate of 78 percent was the highest in modern Mexican history. The final results gave Zedillo 50.2 percent of the total vote, with Diego Ferna´ndez trailing at 26.7 percent and Ca´rdenas at 17 percent. Zedillo officially tallied 17 million votes, nearly double that which Salinas had officially received in 1988. The PRI dominated the voting for Congress, winning 274 out of 300 majorityelected deputy seats and 97 out of 128 senate seats. The opposition won no Senate seats outright, but it received 33 based on the new second-place finishing formula.186

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As noted by Renee Scherlen, the election shattered a number of political myths, among them that a high turnout (over 70 percent) would hurt the PRI, and that, in a fairer contest, the public would turn against the ruling party. Despite the traumatic events of 1993 and 1994, the public endorsed the Salinas project and gave the modernizing PRI a mandate to govern.187 Despite a disappointing outcome for the PAN, the contest reaffirmed its place as the main opposition party. The party received its highest vote total in a national election and, with over 7.5 million votes, equaling what Salinas received officially in 1988. The PAN won 22 majority-elected deputy seats and 22 senate seats gained by the new second-place method. Its performance in first-past-the-posts congressional races was a set back from the 38 contests it won in 1988, but its 119 total seats in the Chamber of Deputies represented its largest total ever. The party did best in Jalisco, Yucatan, and Nuevo Leon, and came in second place in 25 out of 31 states. The electoral reforms did not ensure an unassailable process. The PRD, joined by allied groups like Alianza Civica, had maintained from the start that the election would be flawed. Afterward, Samuel Del Villar of the PRD claimed that “we are faced with the biggest fraud committed in the recent history of Mexico and the world.” The PRD itself protested results in 219 out of 300 electoral districts.188 One Alianza Civica board member stated “for Alianza Cı´vica, the election was neither clean nor transparent.”189 Journalists reported instances of ballot box stuffing in various locations.190 Yet these protests, often accompanied by outlandish claims, resonated little with the general public. Diego Ferna´ndez and the PAN leadership themselves initially complained about the “unfair and inequitable” conditions—such as funding and media coverage—that advantaged the ruling party. Diego himself admitted that “nobody can speak of a legitimate triumph.”191 The PAN also challenged the returns in about 15 percent of the voting precincts and also raised a successful protest about the outcome in Monterrey’s mayoral election. Some party members wanted to be more vocal: Vicente Fox of Guanajuato urged civil disobedience to protest the results. In the end, the PAN’s leadership was anxious to pronounce the elections a success and declare Zedillo the fair winner. Party president Carlos Castillo Peraza and Diego Ferna´ndez presided over the new PAN delegation to the Chamber of Deputies and exhorted them to vote for recognizing Zedillo as the next president. According to PAN deputy Jorge Padilla of Nuevo Leon, his colleagues greeted this request with skepticism. Speaking out against the vote, Padilla declared that the PRI bought some voters in his district with $50 bills. Besides, the PRI’s complete domination of the media was well known. To the notable irritation of Castillo Peraza and Ferna´ndez, the PAN delegation voted overwhelmingly—115 to 3—to refuse approval of Zedillo’s election.192

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CONCLUSIO N The Salinas sexenio has in large part been overshadowed by the revelations of scandal that followed it. But its legitimate achievements should be recognized. The remarkable cooperation between the PRI and the PAN during the Salinas sexenio advanced important electoral reforms that placed Mexico on the road to democracy. In his memoir, Salinas highlights the importance of reaching consensus on reforms with the PAN. “Beginning with the election of 1991,” he writes, “the PRI did not need concurrence with any political party to reform the Constitution. . . . However, instead of using legislative force as had been done in other occasions, I decided to give priority to dialogue and political negotiations in order to strengthen the regime of parties in Mexico.” He praises the PAN for overcoming its role as historical adversary of the PRI and for participating in the constitutional reforms. “By this manner, the reforms, part of the structural base of Mexico’s modernization for the twenty-first century, emerged with broad consensus.”193 Salinas overcame the inertia within his own party to recognize legitimate PAN wins in important state elections. Significant elements of the revolutionary party had reconciled to the Catholic opposition. The reform of the anticlerical articles of the Constitution helped Mexicans close the book on an enduring “great party” conflict. For its own part, the PAN, by participating in dialogue with the Salinas government, encouraged the PRI to start behaving as a “system party” itself. During this history-making sexenio, the strength of the PAN’s party organization enabled it to both endure an internal crisis of antisystem elements and emerge as a stronger, more unified party. Under sound leadership, it managed to both cooperate with the Salinas administration and maintain its independence. Accusations of concertacesio´n by the press and its rivals did not hurt the PAN in the public’s eyes. Despite a disappointing outcome, the PAN emerged from the 1994 elections as the nation’s primary opposition party and was determined to assert itself as a “system party” alternative to PRI rule.

NOTES 1. See the opinion of Porfirio Mun˜oz Ledo in Toma´s Borge, Salinas: los dilemas de la modernidad (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1993), 165. 2. Armando Ayala Anguiano, Salinas y su Mexico (Mexico: Editorial Grijalbo, 1995), 15, 78. 3. Borge, Salinas: los dilemas de la modernidad, 102. 4. Editors of El Financiero Sucesio´n Pactada (Mexico: Plaza y Valde´s, 1993), 4. 5. Ayala, Salinas y su Mexico, 22. 6. “Dramatic strikes.” 7. Sucesion Pactada, 21–24. 8. Enrique Ma´rquez, Por que´ perdio´ Camacho (Mexico: Oceano, 1995), 76.

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9. Ayala Salinas y su Mexico, 26. 10. Sucesio´n Pactada, 11. 11. Sucesio´n Pactada, 12. 12. Tapados—those who are covered up before the destape, or unveiling, by the president. 13. George W. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism? (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 79. 14. Quoted in Luis H. Alvarez, “Political and Economic Reform in Mexico: the PAN Perspective” in Riordan Roett, ed., Political and Economic Liberalization in Mexico (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1993), 144. 15. “Tough Sell for Salinas,” Newsweek 116 (December 3, 1990), 39. 16. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism? 81. 17. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism? 95. 18. Sucesio´n Pactada, 55–56. 19. Sucesio´n Pactada, 37. 20. Sucesio´n Pactada, 47. 21. Interview with Catholic labor organizer Rau´l Va´squez, Mexico City, July 14, 1994. 22. Sucesio´n Pactada, 72. 23. “The Perils of Politics,” in Mexico and NAFTA Report (February 24, 1994), 7. 24. Andrew Reding and Christopher Whalen, “Fragile Stability: Reform and Repression in Mexico under Carlos Salinas” (New York: World Policy Institute, 1992), 29. 25. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, “El liberalismo social, nuestro camino” (Mexico: Presidencia de la Repu´blica, 1992), 13. 26. Jenaro Villamil, Ruptura en la cu´pula (Mexico: Plaza y Valdes, 1995), 43. 27. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism? 89. 28. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism? 90. 29. Crespo, Urnas de Pandura, 109. 30. Sucesio´n Pactada, 64. 31. Sucesio´n Pactada, 118. 32. Sucesio´n Pactada, 90. 33. Carlos Salinas de Gortari, Me´xico: un paso difı´cil a la modernidad (Barcelona: Plaza y Janes, 2000), 271–72. 34. George W. Grayson, “Courting the Church in Mexico,” Christian Science Monitor (May 17, 1990), 19. 35. Allan Metz, “Mexican Church-State Relations under President Carlos Salinas de Gortari,” The Journal of Church and State 34 (Winter 1992), 114–15. 36. George W. Grayson, “Meet Me in Church,” Commonweal 117 (August 10, 1990), 440. 37. Jose´ Francisco Ruiz Massieu, Nueva Clase Polı´tica o Nueva Polı´tica? (Mexico: Oceano, 1986), 112. 38. Jose´ Francisco Ruiz Massieu, “1939: Una nueva modalidad de la discrepancia” Palabra 3 (October–December 1989), 176. 39. Interview with PAN’s adjunct secretary general, Cecilia Romero, Mexico City, July 27, 1994. 40. “Frentes Politicos” Excelsior (November 6, 1988).

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41. “Por que´ el Partido Accio´n Nacional decidio´ aceptar el financiamiento pu´blico” (n. d.) (Mexico: Accio´n Nacional, 1988). 42. Ayala, Salinas y su Mexico, 47. 43. Interview with Jose´ Luis Salas, Monterrey, May 13, 1997. 44. Russell, Mexico under Salinas, 91. 45. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 508. 46. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 163. 47. Gerardo Galarza, “El gobierno de Salinas va a la zaga en la democratizacio´n del paı´s y el tiempo se agota” Proceso 852 (March 1, 1993), 6. 48. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 129. 49. La Nacio´n, 48 (March 1, 1989), 12. 50. “Primer dia´logo PAN-Salinas” La Nacio´n 47 (December 15, 1988–January 1, 1989), 23. 51. Daniel Alder, “PAN Leaders Seek Great Political Freedom of Church” The News (October 9, 1987), 4, 16. 52. Rodrigo Vera, “En secreto negociaciones entre funcionarios pu´blicos y jerarcas cato´licos” Proceso 666 (August 7, 1989), 6. 53. Tim Golden, “Mexico Ending Church Restraints after 70 Years of Official Hostility” New York Times (December 20, 1991), A1. 54. Tim Golden, “Mexico and The Catholic Church Restore Full Diplomatic Ties” New York Times (September 22, 1992), A1. 55. Salinas, Me´xico: un paso difı´cil, 123. 56. Felipe Caldero´n, “TLC: Los efectos previsible,” La Nacio´n 51 (November 2, 1992), 6–7. 57. Georgina Trista´n, “ALC, necesario un debate nacional,” La Nacio´n 49 (October 15, 1990), 14. 58. Elı´as Cha´vez, “Diez partidos ante el Tratado de Libre Comercio: siete a favor, tres en contra,” Proceso 772 (August 12, 1991), 21. 59. Carlos Wagner Wagner, “Economı´a y TLC para 1994” Palabra 7 ( July– September 1993), 52–53. 60. Jose´ A´ngel Conchello, El TLC: un callejo´n sin salida (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1992). 61. Felipe de Jesus Caldero´n, “El PAN y el TLC,” La Nacio´n 53 ( January 14, 1994), 27. 62. Interview with Ricardo Villa Escalera, Puebla, August 21, 1995. 63. Interview with Manuel Diaz Teres, COPARMEX director, Mexicali, Baja California Norte, December 11, 1996. 64. George W. Grayson, “The 1989 Baja California Elections” CSIS Latin American Election Study Series (August 10, 1989), 13. According to one high-ranking PRI official, the only election the PRI ever won legitimately in the state was in 1953. See Gerardo Galarza, “El u´nico priista que gano en Baja California fue Braulio Maldonado, afirma Gonzalez Guevara,” Proceso 662 ( July 10, 1989), 10. 65. Gerardo Galarza, “Aunque Colosio solo reconocio el triunfo de Ruffo, desato protestas en su partido,” Proceso 662 ( July 10, 1989), 8–9. 66. Elı´as Cha´vez, “El cardenismo languidece, Ruffo sube y Margarita le debe todo al Presidente,” Proceso 660 ( June 26, 1989), 22. 67. George W. Grayson, “The 1989 Baja California Elections,” CSIS Latin American Election Study Series (August 10, 1989), 3. 68. Interview with Professor Tonatiuh Guille´n Lo´pez, El Colegio de la Frontera, Tijuana Baja California Norte, December 12, 1996.

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69. Elı´as Cha´vez, “Apabullados por el triunfo de Ruffo, los priistas de Baja California repudia los enviados del centro,” Proceso 662 ( July 10, 1989), 6–7. Chilango is slang for a Mexico City resident. 70. George W. Grayson, “The 1989 Baja California Elections,” CSIS Latin American Election Study Series (August 10, 1989), 6–7. 71. Tonatiuh Guille´n Lo´pez, “Baja California, una de´cada de cambio polı´tico” in Tonatiuh Guillen Lopez, ed., Frontera Norte: una de´cada de polı´tica electoral (Mexico: Colegio de Mexico, 1992), 175. 72. Guille´n interview. 73. Russell, Mexico under Salinas, 93–95. 74. Gerardo Galarza and Rodrigo Vera, “Aunque no total, el gobierno logro´ el apoyo del PAN a la ley electoral,” Proceso 715 ( July 16, 1990), 8. 75. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 197–99. 76. Cothran, Political Stability in Mexico, 192. 77. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 161. 78. Russell, Mexico under Salinas, 92. 79. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 213–21. 80. Reding and Whalen, “Fragile Stability: Reform and Repression in Mexico under Carlos Salinas,” 8–11. 81. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 230 82. Crespo, Urnas de Pandura, 176–77. 83. Alvarez interview. 84. Coindreau interview. 85. Ricardo Alema´n Alema´n, Guanajuato: Espejismo Electoral (Mexico: La Jornada Ediciones, 1993), 119–120. 86. Alvarez interview. 87. Galarza, “El gobierno de Salinas va a la zaga,” 9. 88. A term coined by the El Universal columnist Francisco Ca´rdenas Cruz, September 3, 1991. 89. Crespo, Urnas de Pandura, 181. 90. Alvarez interview. 91. Robert R. Bezdek, “Democratic Changes in an Authoritarian System: Navismo and Opposition Development in San Luis Potosı´,” in Rodriguez and Ward, Opposition Government in Mexico, 39–49. 92. Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti, “Baeza hizo concesiones a la limpieza de la eleccion, pero no demasiadas; el PRI confiaba en el abstencionismo,” Proceso 661 ( July 3, 1989), 8. 93. Andrew Reding, “Mexico: The Crumbling of the ‘Perfect Dictatorship,’” World Policy Journal 8 (Spring 1991), 277. 94. Cothran, Political Stability and Democracy in Mexico, 204. 95. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 510. 96. Gerardo Galarza, “Los derrotados dicen que no rompen con el PAN, sino con su dirigencia,” Proceso 696 (March 5, 1990), 29–30. 97. Gerardo Galarza, “El PAN perdio´ identidad y no hay iı´deres capaces de cambiar de direccio´n: Gonza´lez Hinojosa,” Proceso 846 ( January 18, 1993), 8. 98. Pascal Beltra´n del Rio and Rodrigo Vera, “Neopanistas y paleopanistas se disputan el control del partido de Gomez Morı´n,” Proceso 642 (February 20, 1989), 20. 99. Russell, Mexico under Salinas, 88–90.

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100. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 514–15. 101. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 169. 102. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 144 103. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 511. 104. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 143. 105. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 204–05 106. “La divisio´n en el PAN se ahonda hasta impedir la eleccio´n en la capital,” Proceso 713 (July 2, 1990), 30. 107. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 177, 188 108. Gerardo Galarza, “El comunicado de los renunciantes: El PAN es empresarial, prosalinista y pragmatico; Luis H. Alvarez: no es cierto,” Proceso 832 (October 12, 1992), 13. 109. Arriola, Ensayos sobre el PAN, 147–48. 110. Daniel Moreno, “Por diferencias ideolo´gicas o enconos personales, esta´n fuera del PAN 5 de sus 7 expresidentes vivos,” El Financiero (February 12, 1993), 10. 111. Interview with Pablo Emilio Madero, Monterrey, May 14, 996. 112. “Preparing for 1994,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (March 25, 1993), 2. 113. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 518. 114. “Preparing for 1994,” 2. 115. Luis Martı´nez Alcantara´, “El u´ltimo cumplean˜os del PRI,” La Nacio´n 51 (March 2, 1992), 3–4. 116. “Cabinet Reshuffle Sets Stage,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (February 18, 1993), 3. 117. “Bartlett Does It Again,” Mexico and NAFTA Report ( June 10, 1993), 2. 118. “Ortiz Mena’s Guest List,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (March 25, 1993), 7. 119. Tod Robberson, “Mexican Ruling Party Assigns Big Business Big Quotas” Washington Post (March 4, 1993), a14. 120. Salinas, Mexico: un paso dificil, 125. 121. Andrea Tornielli, “Martyrdom of the Cardinal,” 30 Days 10 (1993), 12. 122. Andrea Tornielli, “Prelate in the Line of Fire,” 30 Days 10 (1993) 15–20. 123. Ayala, Salinas y sus tiempos, 50. 124. Andres Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos (Boston: Little Brown, 1996), 14–25, 41–42. 125. Crespo, Urnas de Pandura, 209. 126. Ayala, Salinas y su Mexico, 48. 127. Sucesio´n Pactada, 41. 128. “Violence and Protests Scar Reform Offer,” Mexico and NAFTA Report ( January 14, 1993), 2. 129. “President Salinas’s Strange Notions of Electoral Transparency,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (March 25, 1993), 1. 130. Salinas, Mexico: un paso dificil, 1045. 131. Rodriguez, Decentralization in Mexico, 52. 132. Roberto Zamarripa, “El proyecto de reforma del PRI aceptable; ‘pone las bases para un cuarto poder, el poder electoral’: Castillo Peraza,” Proceso 875 (August 9, 1993), 23. 133. Jose Antonio Crespo, Raising the Bar: The Next Generation of Electoral Reforms in Mexico (Washington, DC: CSIS, 2000), 19. 134. Dominquez and McCann, Democratizing Mexico, 178.

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135. “Serra Puche Squashed,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (July 15, 1993), 3. 136. Tim Golden, “Leveling Mexico’s Electoral Field” New York Times (September 20, 1993), A10. 137. Rodriguez, Decentralization in Mexico, 52. 138. Tim Golden, “Leveling Mexico’s Electoral Field” New York Times (September 20, 1993), A10. 139. Ayala, Salinas y su Mexico, 89. 140. Tod Robberson, “Fraud Charges Again Haunt Mexico Yucatan in Turmoil After State Election Descends into Darkness.” Washington Post (December 4, 1993), a21. 141. Dominquez and McCann, Democratizing Mexico, 179. 142. Renee G. Scherlen, “Lessons to Build On: The 1994 Mexican Presidential Election,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 40 (Spring 1998), 22. 143. “The Second Reform,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (April 21, 1994), 3. 144. “Watch Carpizo, Not Camacho,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (February 24, 1994), 3. 145. Dominguez and McCann, Democratizing Mexico, 192. 146. Gerardo Galarza, “PRI y PRD, hijos de la misma matriz autoritaria, dijo Castillo Perarza en la convencion en que el PAN designo a su candidato presidencial,” Proceso 890 (November 22, 1993), 20. 147. “High Class Gossip,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (September 23, 1993), 3. 148. Loaeza, El Partido Accio´n Nacional, 522. 149. Dominguez and McCann, Democratizing Mexico, 189. 150. Ayala, Salinas y sus tiempos, 56–57, 72. 151. Ayala, Salinas y sus tiempos, 66–69. 152. Douglas Farah, “Mexico’s Preeminent Party Looks Uneasy as New Candidate Learns on the Job” Washington Post (April 18, 1994), a11. 153. Federico Reyes Heroles, 50 Preguntas a los candidatos (Mexico: FCE, 1994), 415. 154. Ayala, Salinas y sus tiempos, 58. 155. “Will Camacho Run?” Mexico and NAFTA Report (February 24, 1994), 2. 156. Ayala, Salinas y su Mexico, 60–61. 157. Raul Perez Barbosa, El Grupo Compacto: La increible y triste historia del “carro completo” (Mexico: Editorial Planeta, 1994), 106. 158. “The Evidence,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (April 21, 1994), 6. 159. Ayala, Salinas y su Mexico, 112. 160. “Incredulidad Ciudadana,” Reforma ( July 17, 1994), 1. 161. Oppenheimer, Bordering on Chaos, 120–24. 162. Guy Gugliotta, “Unknown Bureaucrat Now the Front Runner Zedillo, President’s Pick, Vows Same Pick” Washington Post (March 30, 1994), a25. 163. “Zedillo’s bungle,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (September 23, 1993), 3. 164. Dominguez and McCann, Democratizing Mexico, 185. 165. “Zedillo picks his team,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (May 12, 1994), 2. 166. Rafael Rodriguez Castaneda, “Acicateados por Fernandez de Cevallos, Cardenas y Zedillo le entraron parcialmente al pleito,” Proceso 915 (May 10, 1994), 7. 167. “El Saldo del Salinismo,” La Carpeta Pu´rpura 7 ( June 24, 1994), 6. 168. Federico Reyes Heroles, 50 Preguntas a los candidatos, (Mexico: CFE, 1994), 13–35.

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169. Diego Fernandez de Cevallos, “El Cierre del Campana Speech,” August 13, 1994. 170. Interview with panista Lourdes Torres Landa, Mexico City, August 23, 1995. 171. Salas interview. 172. Paul B. Carroll and Craig Torres, “Open Season: As Election Approaches, the Uprising in Mexico is Shaping Up Politics” Wall Street Journal (February 7, 1994) A1. 173. “What happens after the elections,” Mexico and NAFTA Report ( July 21, 1994), 2. 174. Crespo, Urnas de Pandora, 279. 175. In the interview with the author—Fernandez’s campaign manager, Jose Luis Salas, neither confirmed nor denied this speculation. 176. Crespo, Urnas de Pandora, 143. 177. Salas interview. 178. Orme Jr., ed. A Culture of Collusion: An Inside Look at the Mexican Press, 38. 179. Having an extended stay in Mexico from June through August, the author can testify to the overwhelming PRI-government presence on television during the election period. 180. Marı´a Elena Medina, “Gastarı´a Zedillo 16 Millones en TV” Reforma (August 17, 1994), 9. 181. Miguel A´ngel Jua´rez, “Exhorren a Medios a Ser Equilibrados” Reforma ( July 9, 1994), 1A. 182. Dominguez and McCann, Democratizing Mexico, 198. 183. The author was an accredited election observer in August 1994. One government official at a meeting for international observers sponsored by the Federal Election Institute made it clear to us that this was not a reform toward democracy, but a reform in democracy. 184. The author witnessed the voting process in Morelia, Michoacan. At least in the heart of this city, which has a strong presence of both the PRD and the PAN, the voting was orderly and efficient. One noted a spirit of cooperation among the different party loyalists who participated in the proper tabulation of the votes. The only incident stemmed from an inadequate amount of absentee ballots at one polling station—a set number had been agreed to by all three major parties—which occasioned a boisterous street protest in front of the station and the local electoral institute. 185. Un Informe ante El Consejo Coordinador Empresarial, “Las Perspectivas para unas electiones libres, limpias y honestas en Mexico” (August 15, 1994), 8. 186. Edward Molina y Vedra, “Despite anomalies, Zedillo Acknowledged Winner” Inter Press Service (August 22, 1994). 187. Scherlen, “Lessons to Build On,” 34. 188. Crespo, Urnas de Pandora, 260–61. 189. Stephen Fidler, “Mexican Election: Battle Over Rules Goes On” Financial Times (August 23, 1994), 6. 190. “Too Good to Be True?” Mexico and NAFTA Report (September 29, 1994), 2. 191. Anthony DePalma, “New President Is Snubbed by Opposition in Mexico” New York Times (September 8, 1994), A11. 192. Interview with PAN congressional deputy Jorge Padilla, Monterrey, May 14, 1997. 193. Salinas, Mexico: un paso difı´cil, 1032–33.

CHAPTER 6

The Triumph of the System Party, 1994 – 2000

President Ernesto Zedillo had the unenviable task of taking office during 1994, “the year in which it was impossible to be bored in Mexico,” according to writer Carlos Monsiva´is.1 Besides the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas in January and the murder of Luis Donaldo Colosio in March, Jose´ Francisco Ruı´z Massieu, the PRI’s secretary general and a key Salinas adviser, was gunned down in September. After Zedillo’s election, the belief that the peso was overvalued spread, and prominent PAN and PRD politicians called for devaluation.2 Salinas passed this off for his successor, and, shortly after taking office in December 1994, the Zedillo government devalued the peso. The devaluation severely tarnished the Salinas legacy and caused an open political feud between the former president and Zedillo, a violation of one of the unwritten rules that had kept the Revolutionary Family together.3 Thus Zedillo began his presidency with his party split, with the dinosaurs against the technocrats, and the technocrats against one another. During this time of political uncertainly, Zedillo attempted to continue the modernization of the economy, further the process of democratization, solve the crisis in Chiapas, and resolve the Colosio, Posadas, and Ruiz Massieu murders. To calm the political waters, Zedillo announced that he would maintain a “healthy distance” between himself and the party and that he would implement a “New Federalism” policy that would devolve more responsibilities to the states. In a rare display of bipartisanship, he even appointed a panista, Antonio Lozano Gracia, to join his cabinet as attorney general. In January 1995, Zedillo and the leaders of the major political parties signed a “National Political Accord” to continue electoral reforms and soothe financial markets.4

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During this time, the PAN experienced both important victories and disappointing setbacks. Maintaining the delicate balance between cooperation and confrontation with the ruling party often resulted in a confusing public posture. The PAN additionally had to cope with the rise of Vicente Fox and his followers both inside and outside the PAN; for a time, they threatened to overshadow the party itself. In the end, the PAN demonstrated institutional resiliency and flexibility of strategy. The previous chapter demonstrated how the conciliation between the PAN and the PRI technocrats laid the groundwork for the democratic transition. This chapter surveys how the PRI came to accept defeat as a “system party.” During the Zedillo’s sexenio, the lower house of Congress, captured by the opposition in 1997, often blocked the president’s agenda. State governments under opposition control set their own policies independent of Mexico City and began the clamor for authentic federalism. The Federal Electoral Institute (IFE) became an independent body and successfully oversaw two national elections that resulted in losses for the ruling party. Finally, the PAN won the presidency and the PRI turned over power, thus peacefully ending over seventy years of “great party” rule. PAN VICTOR I E S A N D T H E N E W F E D E R A L I S M During Zedillo’s first full year as president, the PAN proved that its own electoral strength, and not concertacesio´n, accounted for its triumphs in state races. The PAN scored a stunning success in Jalisco in February 1995, vindicated its interim government in Guanajuato in May with another victory, and held on to power in Baja California Norte in August. The PAN was thus becoming an electoral power not only in border states but also in more populous central Mexico. Jalisco had been the center of Catholic resistance for decades, but it was not until the Clouthier campaign in 1988, in which he captured nearly 31 percent of the official vote, that the PAN had gained any ground there. Progress there was slow because, in some parts of Jalisco, Catholic traditionalists associated with sinarquismo would prefer voting for the PRI rather than the PAN. Indeed, it was widely believed that Gutie´rrez Barrios, while interior secretary, was channeling money to the Mexican Democratic Party, the sinarquista political wing, to exploit this division.5 But particular events turned the public to the PAN opposition. In 1992, an explosion in the sewer system in Guadalajara killed over one thousand people. It was the worst disaster since the Mexico City earthquake in 1985. The source of this explosion was attributed to a PEMEX pipeline running through the city. The authorities handled the affair badly, balking at indemnities for those who lost their homes and roughly handling protesting citizens.6 In the following year, the apparent collusion between federal police and the presumed killers of Cardinal Posadas in Guadalajara also soured many to the PRI gov-

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ernment. On top of that, the peso crisis gravely affected the PRI’s standing with the public.7 The Jalisco State PAN had for years been influenced by Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, who, though having resigned his membership after the convention crisis of the mid-1970s, still had his supporters. But the neopanista influence energized by Clouthier began to make its presence felt. Alberto Cardenas, mayor of a Jalisco municipality, challenged the party establishment, headed by Senator Jime´nez Remus, to run for governor in 1995. To the surprise of many, the young, attractive, but hitherto unknown politician won the nomination. In February, after a bitter campaign in which the PRI tried to tag the PAN as “Nazi-fascist,” Ca´rdenas captured nearly 53 percent of the vote and handed the ruling party its worst electoral defeat ever. Another neopanista and former DHIAC member, Ce´sar Coll, captured the municipal palace of Guadalajara, Mexico’s second city. Along with Guadalajara, the PAN took nine of the other most important cities in the state.8 Jalisco is a lesson in how the new atmosphere of electoral probity worked against the PRI. One reason for the PAN’s success was the appointment of Felipe de Jesu´s Preciado, a nonpolitician and former head of the Red Cross in Guadalajara, to head the state electoral commission and ensure the legitimacy of the process.9 According to one well-placed panista, the PRI was badly hurt by not being able to rely on public money to fund its campaign. In addition, the PAN was able to place poll watchers in nearly 100 percent of the state’s polling places.10 In Guanajuato, the PAN’s Carlos Medina Plascencia held the interim governorship of Guanajuato for nearly four years. Reminiscent of the cristero struggle, Medina attended a large meeting—nearly 120,000 reportedly attended—at El Cubilete to celebrate Christ the King. His very presence drew flak from political opponents who did not approve of the presence of politicians at religious ceremonies.11 Nevertheless, this event indicated the growing atmosphere of toleration regarding religion in public life. But Medina’s main concern as governor was electoral reform. “The commitment of my interim government is to gain elections extraordinarily clean and transparent, that will be a national model,” Medina had intoned at his inauguration. His initiative on electoral reform—the Coordination Commission for the Political Reform of the State of Guanajuato (CORPEG)— enjoyed support from minor parties in the state, but Medina still had to win over a state congress dominated by the PRI.12 He pledged to stay in office until the state congress approved electoral reform establishing an independent electoral authority, a new electoral tribunal without party affiliation, a new state voter registration, and transparency in party finances.13 Eventually, both parties worked out a compromise on electoral reform that paved the way for Vicente Fox to win the Guanajuato governor’s office without controversy in May 1995. Fox’s nearly two-to-one victory over his PRI rival seemed to vindicate his earlier position that he had been defrauded in 1991.

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Under Fox, Guanajuato became one of the most aggressive states in demanding from Mexico City more responsibility for its own affairs. As Ruffo and Medina had discovered, PAN-governed states often suffered budget cuts instituted by the federal government.14 This was a serious liability considering how limited was a state’s ability to provide for its own funding. Fox tried to confront this problem by trying to attract expatriate money for a state development fund. In February 1996 the Guanajuato governor signed an accord with President Zedillo that passed control of the administration of water, agrarian, and social policy to the state.15 Following the PAN’s principle of subsidiarity, Fox also embarked on a plan to pass more authority to the state’s municipalities. Programs such as infrastructure maintenance, which were previously managed by the federal government, passed directly to the municipalities. In keeping with the concept of the “free municipality,” Fox transferred control of property taxes to the cities as well. The city of Leo´n took advantage of this new spirit of selfgovernment by instituting “Citizen Wednesday,” a program recalling the colonial era in which citizens could take their complaints directly to city officials. Much of Fox’s agenda was simply an implementation of constitutional provisions governing the states and municipalities that were long ignored.16 In Baja California Norte, Governor Ernesto Ruffo had given high profile to state electoral reform. He originally set out four objectives: reorganization of the State Electoral Commission, enacting rules governing party financing, remaking the state’s electoral register, and issuing voter identification cards to all citizens. Perhaps the most notable accomplishments were the last two, since Ruffo went ahead with these reforms despite their being under federal oversight. Baja California became a model for the nation on revamping its voter list and issuing new credentials.17 Ruffo was less successful in fighting the federal revenue sharing system. He challenged the federal government to allow the state to retain more of the tax revenue it collected for Mexico City’s coffers. He further argued that without fiscal autonomy, the legal responsibilities that the states and municipalities had were meaningless because they did not control the resources to enact them. Ruffo threatened to sue the federal government in the Supreme Court to redress this problem, but his confrontational approach ultimately failed to move the Salinas government.18 Even though the six years of Ruffo’s administration witnessed intense electoral competition between the PRI and the PAN in the state, the ruling party was unable to unseat the opposition. In 1995, the PAN retained the governorship of Baja California Norte, marking it the first state with consecutive opposition governments. Hector Tera´n Tera´n, the PAN’s first elected federal senator, won by a comfortable margin and proved that his party’s victory there in 1989 was no fluke. Later that year, in the state of Puebla, the PAN was able to secure many electoral enclaves in larger and more important municipalities, including the

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state capital Puebla, the fourth largest city in Mexico. The party fought bitterly against Governor Bartlett in several contests that featured widespread accusations of fraud. Gabriel Hinojosa, a businessman from a PAN family but himself a party newcomer, captured the nomination over veteran candidate Ricardo Villa Escalera to compete for the mayor of Puebla. Hinojosa’s candidacy was another example of the party’s growing acceptance of outsiders who had the talent to win elections. During the campaign, Hinojosa gained the public’s sympathy by staging a hunger strike to protest the failure to implement reform of the voter rolls, which helped him win a convincing victory against his PRI rival.19 Victories in state elections had placed the PAN’s demands for federalism on the national agenda. First announced in his inaugural address, Zedillo sponsored a program called “New Federalism,” a broad plan for the decentralization of many administrative functions to states and municipalities. As an example of this new initiative, funds from Salinas’s Solidaridad, renamed Ramo 26 (Branch 26), fell under state discretion.20 Moreover, aggressive PAN tactics in the states forced Mexico City to decentralize. The mayor of the border city Ciudad Jua´rez, Francisco Villarreal, decided to bypass federal authorities by opening his own toll booths for cross-border traffic. Other border towns copied his methods. The resulting conflict gained Villarreal public sympathy and forced Zedillo to concede a percentage of the collected revenue to these municipalities.21 By 1997 all the major parties in Mexico had taken up the call for federalism to some degree. That year Zedillo issued a decree that stated in detail the goals of the New Federalism.22 Despite the rhetoric, little progress was made in giving states and municipalities authority to control the collection and dispersal of its own revenues. In 1997, the federal government still allotted 80 percent of public expenditures to its own needs, with 16 percent directly earmarked for the states and 4 percent for the municipalities. The PAN had called for a major redistribution of funding to the states and municipalities that would approximate 40 percent of the national budget.23 The PAN president threatened to vote down the federal budget if this disparity—which placed numerous PAN-governed municipalities in dire financial straits—was not addressed.24 As the PAN was soon to discover, federalism sometimes proved to be a double-edged sword. In 1998, for example, the PAN battled Governor Bartlett in Puebla over the distribution of municipal funding. With the help of a PRIdominated legislature, Bartlett succeeded in pushing through a law that diverted state revenues earmarked for municipalities to the poorest, rather than the most populous, cities. In this way Bartlett succeeded in controlling the money for those municipalities—and especially major cities like Puebla—that had been governed by panistas. The PAN held that this law passed in defiance of the Federal Financial Law; PAN mayors and party activists chained themselves to columns outside the federal Congress to protest this “economic

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cordon” around PAN municipalities.25 Bartlett retorted by denouncing the panistas as “counterrevolutionaries.”26 Thereafter, the Puebla State Congress—dominated by the PRI—passed the Treasury Federalism Act, the socalled Bartlett Law, which gave the state government control over distribution of municipal money. The new law cost the PAN’s municipal government in Puebla over $50 million.

THE LIMITS O F C O O P E R AT I O N Unmoved by the benefits gained from their pact with Salinas, many panistas were anxious to become a more aggressive opposition party. Some PAN leaders even believed that the PRI had intentionally mismanaged the economy to ensure a favorable outcome in the presidential election. In addition Zedillo’s proposed bailout package for the peso crisis aroused nationalistic sentiments within the PAN. Led by federal deputy Jorge Padilla, many PAN congressmen believed this plan humiliated the country into putting up its oil revenues as collateral through the New York Federal Reserve. On the eve of the vote, party president Carlos Castillo Peraza urged the PAN deputies to support the bailout. According to his own testimony, Padilla rallied his fellow deputies to oppose not only the party leadership, but President Zedillo, on the bailout issue. Zedillo himself summoned Padilla to Los Pinos, the presidential residence, and debated him on the merits of the policy.27 The next day, 118 PAN deputies voted against the package, leaving the PRI as the only party to support the president. Although the PAN demonstrated its willingness to continue cooperation, Zedillo’s invitation for them to take over the attorney general’s office was greeted with trepidation. Initially Zedillo had offered the attorney general position to his rival Diego Ferna´ndez, who turned it down. Two other prominent panistas refused the position, but Antonio Lozano Gracia, the PAN’s speaker in the Chamber of Deputies, accepted the appointment.28 Lozano Gracia undertook the major investigations into the murders of Colosio, Ruı´z Massieu, and Cardinal Posadas. In the Colosio case, his investigators reopened the possibility of a conspiracy to murder the PRI candidate, but little progress was made in proving the case, and one of the main suspects was found innocent in court. In the Posadas case, the PAN’s team rejected the theory that he was killed in a cross fire and instead held that this was a case of mistaken identity. This satisfied neither the Catholic Church nor the PAN government of Jalisco, which proceeded with its own investigation. In the Ruı´z Massieu case, the evidence gathered by the Lozano Gracia team ultimately succeeded in convicting former president Carlos Salinas’s brother Raul of the crime, but only after considerable controversy. His chief prosecutor, Pablo Chapa, was accused of leaking information, soon ridiculed in the press,

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that the decomposed body found on Raul Salinas’s ranch was that of Manuel Mun˜oz Rocha, one of the conspirators in the crime.29 Lozano Gracia’s decision to take a leave of absence from his party to pursue this office did not insulate him from accusations of partisanship. PRI politicians viewed him with distrust. The impatience of Zedillo in closing the assassination cases resulted in the panista’s being firing from the post in 1996, even though he had succeeded in arresting one of the country’s most notorious drug traffickers, Juan Garcı´a Abrego.30 In the end, the limited experiment of a pluralistic cabinet failed and looked like a ploy to discredit the PAN.31 In May 1995, the PAN threw down the gauntlet over another controversial election in Yucatan. In a repeat of the results in 1993, the electoral machine of state boss Victor Cervera Pacheco, whom PAN officials dubbed “the Milosevic of the Mayab,” overcame the PAN’s Luis Correa Mena in a tight race. The party issued a detailed pamphlet on the PRI’s tactics, charging a packed state electoral commission, physical harassment of PAN electoral workers, vote buying, and irregularities in 200 out of 1,527 polling places.32 Party president Castillo Peraza and Correa staged well-publicized protests against the perceived fraud and warned of the endangerment of their National Political Accord with Zedillo’s government. This time, however, the PRI government refused to intervene against the newly elected Cervera. The PAN succeeded in drawing much attention to the Yucatan case, but it probably exaggerated the extent of the abuses. According to one PAN analyst, despite evidence of fraud, the lack of a well-developed state organization contributed to its defeat. “If you compare the number of PAN municipal committees with those of the PRI, you will see why the PAN lost.”33 Another opportunity for confrontation presented itself in early 1996, when the PAN claimed blatant electoral fraud in the small town of Huejotzingo, Puebla. The state’s electoral commission’s denied the PAN’s initial victory— Governor Bartlett sent in police to evict panistas from the municipal offices— and provoked the PAN to abandon discussions of further electoral reform for the country. In order to continue, the PAN demanded that Zedillo intervene in this local election.34 Castillo Peraza declared that “the theft of votes isn’t incidental, it’s structural. And National Action is not disposed to sacrifice the structural change that the nation demands. We are going to win and defend what is ours. The Mexico of the Year 2000 has just commenced in Huejotzingo.”35 President Zedillo had to trump the PRI leadership in Puebla to concede the city to the PAN. Despite a growing atmosphere of confrontation, the impressive electoral victories inspired some triumphalism from the PAN leadership. Castillo Peraza boasted frequently that his party governed “34 million” Mexicans.36 “The PAN now controls seven of the ten most important cities, 11 state capitals and 80 of the 120 major cities in Mexico. In Germany the ruling party has less control than this.”37 Under Castillo Peraza, the party took pride in its buttoned-down, centrist message and its incrementalist strategy, and it tried

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to distance itself from its identity as a Catholic-inspired, pro-business party. For example, a trip to Cuba by PAN leaders was intended to make the party seem more “progressive.”38 But after his three-year term as party president, Castillo Peraza decided to step down, explaining that he lacked the administrative skills to take the party to the next stage of its development.39 Certainly his own leadership was suspect after he failed to convince this party to back Zedillo on the peso bailout package and on a reform of the social security system.40 And although the party enjoyed some of its greatest electoral successes under his presidency— such as the 1995 victories in Jalisco and Guanajuato—he himself played no role in them. In its internal election for party president, the PAN’s National Council chose Felipe Caldero´n Hinojosa of Michaoca´n to succeed Castillo as president. The thirty-three-year-old Caldero´n won a comfortable victory over the early favorite, Ernesto Ruffo, a former governor of Baja California Norte. As the son of party luminary Luis Caldero´n Vega, Felipe was considered the choice of the party old guard and Castillo Peraza.41 Caldero´n, a former party secretary general, had little electoral experience, having come in third in the gubernatorial race in his native Michoaca´n. But in keeping with its habits, the party decided on a young party stalwart in favor of a successful politician. However, Caldero´n represented a traditionalist of a different sort; he accepted the proposition of the neopanistas that the party’s main order of business was to win elections and to confront the regime. PAN backbenchers indeed perceived that the “cupola” of the party was backing Ruffo, which in their mind meant more acquiescence to the government’s position. Rather than seeing Caldero´n as Castillo Peraza’s man, many panistas viewed him as one willing to take a harder line.42 ELECTORAL R E F O R M A N D T H E 1 9 9 7 M I D T E R M ELECTIONS President Zedillo was personally committed to advancing the progress toward democracy begun by his predecessor. His interior secretary presided over a summit in January 1996 that included both representatives from political parties and citizens groups and elaborated a sixty-point document as a framework for future electoral reform.43 In May, after the Huejotzingo electoral fraud case was resolved in its favor, the PAN agreed to return to negotiations and became a major partner for the administration in negotiating the details of the new reform.44 This time, the PRD, which had refused to endorse the revisions of COFIPE before the 1994 election, cooperated fully with its rival parties. After nineteen months of negotiations and much rancorous debate, the reform was approved in special session by all major parties. The Federal Electoral Institute was finally made independent of the federal government, with

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the interior secretary no longer presiding over its General Council. Congress was responsible for appointing the IFE president and nine independent counselors of its council. The General Council itself was increased in membership, and the vote was taken away from its political party representatives to ensure greater impartiality. It also improved the voter registration lists, and most importantly, reformed public financing and media exposure for the parties. Parties were granted public money and air time based on a 30/70 rule: All the parties would divide evenly 30 percent of the total, with the remaining 70 percent of the money and air time proportioned according to each party’s vote return in the previous election. Besides the important reforms of IFE, Congress granted that elections be held for Mexico City’s mayor, previously an appointed post.45 The new reforms revived the controversial “governability clause,” which now set overrepresentation of the majority party at 8 percent of total votes for proportional representation seats. For this clause to go into effect, the party with a plurality above 42.2 percent, plus having obtained 165 or more majority seats, would be granted an absolute majority in the lower house. But no party could hold more than 300 seats, thus ensuring the need for cooperation to pass constitutional amendments.46 The new reforms even took aim at the PRI itself. Party membership would have to be individual, not collective.47 This provision did not have the immediate effect of dismantling the PRI’s corporativist system, but it at least enshrined the principle of the pluralist, rather than monopolistic, party. Nevertheless, the PRI’s majority in both houses managed to water down much of the reform provisions. It rejected plans to improve the oversight of party finances and eliminated a provision to make excessive campaign spending a criminal offense. It also restricted the means by which opposition parties could support single candidates for select races.48 Despite obvious gains, many opposition figures expressed disappointment at the results. The major electoral reforms set the stage for a highly competitive July midterm election. Besides replacing all the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and half the Senate, for the first time since the revolution Mexico City would hold a mayoral contest. In addition, state governorships would be decided in Nuevo Leo´n, Campeche, Colima, Quere´taro, San Luis Potosı´, and Sonora. Traditionally, the midterm elections have always demonstrated the peak of presidential power. In the case of Salinas, after a disputed victory and an uncertain mandate, the overwhelming success in the midterm elections strengthened his position greatly. But for Zedillo, the midterm elections revealed starkly his party’s weakening electoral position. PAN President Felipe Caldero´n predicted that his party would end the PRI’s domination of Congress and form “a new majority.” In January 1997 the PAN was running well ahead of the PRI in the polls in Mexico City.49 The party also had high hopes for five of the six gubernatorial races. Caldero´n foresaw an opportunity to forge a working alliance with the PRD and other

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opposition parties to deny the PRI control of Congress. Yet his optimism remained guarded about the effectiveness of the newly constituted electoral institute to monitor 120,000 polling stations.50 What the PAN did not expect was that the PRD, under its new president, Manuel Lo´pez Obrador, would revive itself in 1997 by engaging in ambitious campaign of grass roots organization. After a series of disappointments, the PRD was desperate for a victory and staked it all on the race for Mexico City. The party chose as its candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, its most popular politician by far. The PRD’s cause in Mexico City was aided vastly by the failure of PAN’s leadership to convince Diego Ferna´ndez de Cevallos, its best-known candidate, to run for the nomination. With Ferna´ndez passing up the most important race in the electoral season, the PAN ended up selecting the reluctant Castillo Peraza—who himself would have preferred to prepare for the 2000 presidential nomination—over a weak field. Still, the PAN could reasonably expect to pull out a victory in the city; the party had taken 27 percent of the vote there in 1994 and had a history of even higher percentages.51 Castillo Peraza, however, brought in his own loyalists from Me´rida, Yucatan, to run his campaign, which alienated the Mexico City party from the beginning. Perhaps recognizing that he needed to solidify his base of support, Castillo uncharacteristically emphasized moral issues and exposed his campaign to ridicule in the city press. His accusations of corruption against Ca´rdenas and the PRI’s selection, Alfredo del Mazo, and his fading position in the polls, gave his opponents an excuse to exclude him from the nationally televised debate. Thus the well-spoken Castillo lost an outstanding opportunity to shine at the expense of the stolid Ca´rdenas.52 With weeks to go and the Mexico City campaign effectively over, Caldero´n decided to shift vital campaign revenues over to other races in which the party had a chance of winning.53 Ca´rdenas easily beat del Mazo and Castillo with 48 percent of the vote, and his party also captured an impressive majority of seats in the district’s assembly. The Mexico City election naturally overshadowed all the other contests, even though the battle for the Chamber of Deputies would have greater long-term impact on the government. The PRI was shaken by its performance in congressional races. It fell just short of taking a lower house majority because, though it won 165 majorityelected seats, it garnered only 38 percent of the total vote. The PRD edged the PAN for second place, winning 70 majority seats and taking 25 percent of the popular vote for a total of 125 seats. The PAN took 64 majority seats and 26 percent of the vote for 121 seats, a disappointing result in light of its high expectations. Much of the PAN’s debacle can be attributed to the poor Federal District campaign of Castillo Peraza, whose 15 percent of the total vote enabled the PRD to win 29 out of 30 federal deputy seats in Mexico City and most seats in the local legislature.54

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The impressive victory by Ca´rdenas and the new electoral strategy of Lo´pez Obrador in using grass roots organizers—Brigadas del Sol—to get out the vote, enabled PRD to edge the PAN in the number of plurality seats in the lower chamber. In the end, the PAN lost its traditional place as the number one opposition party by three seats. But together, PRD and PAN prevented the PRI from holding on to its majority; now the president would have to deal with an adversarial Congress for the first time since the revolution. In state races the PAN fared better. In Nuevo Leo´n the PAN had its best opportunity for a decisive win. The political elite of the state was divided between PRI and PAN; Benjamin Clariond, cousin of the PAN’s 1985 candidate, Fernando Canales Clariond, had served as Nuevo Leo´n’s interim governor after the resignation of Socrates Rizzo. According to PAN state party president Jose´ Luis Coindreau, the parties were inclined to cooperate with each other on issues of campaign and electoral reform—a new political culture was emerging.55 The veteran of the 1985 campaign, Fernando Canales would have a chance to avenge being deprived of victory due to alleged PRI malfeasance. The PAN already had held the mayor’s office in Monterrey since 1994, as well as some of the important neighboring municipalities like Guadalupe and San Pedro Garza Garcia. To fight off the PRI effort to buy votes, the PAN printed thousands of leaflets with the slogan: Toma lo que te dan, vota por el PAN.56 Initially, Canales’s campaign lacked the fire of 1985 and his challenger, Navidad Gonza´les Paras, ran a good race, pulling even with the panista in the polls for much of the spring. But by election day, Canales won by a ten-point margin.57 The PAN also took Quere´taro in a surprising turn of events. The PRI’s candidate for governor, Fernando Ortiz Arana, was considered by many as one looking ahead to the 2000 race, but his campaign stumbled early over a public dispute with his brother, Jose´, who ran himself on the Ca´rdenas party ticket. The PAN benefited from the divisions within PRI and a weak showing by the PRD; the PAN’s candidate, Ignacio Loyola Vera, took 44 percent of the vote to Ortiz Arana’s 41 percent.58 Besides adding another state to the PAN column, this upset victory also had symbolic importance—as the birthplace of the 1917 Constitution, Quere´taro was a common meeting place for the revolutionary party. Even though accusations of fraud followed their losses in two more states, the PAN strengthened its position considerably. In San Luis Potosı´, the PAN assumed the mantel of the deceased Salvador Nava Martinez, who for years symbolized the opposition in this cacique-dominated state. Upon his death, Nava’s movement had split, with his son running under the PRD banner but unable to recapture his father’s appeal. The PAN’s Marcelo de los Santos Fraga lost to the priista Fernando Silva Nieto by only a narrow margin, 45.5 percent to 38.5. The PAN enjoyed an early lead but lost it when the rural vote came in, prompting accusations of fraud.59 Despite this cloud, the party

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managed to establish itself as clearly the state’s second force. In Colima, the PAN secured 37 percent of the vote in the gubernatorial election, being edged out by the PRI’s Fernando Moreno Pena, but dramatically improving its presence in the state. It even edged the PRI in votes for federal deputies, taking advantage of a split in the PRI over Moreno Pena’s candidacy.60 Sonora, however, represented a major disappointment. The campaign to succeed Salinas ally Manlio Fabio Beltrones was won by his handpicked successor, who secured 46 percent of the vote. The panista who had waged the energetic campaign in 1985, Adalberto Rosas, was replaced at the last minute by party president Caldero´n. The PAN’s National Executive Committee, it is believed, had suspected that Rosas and two other PAN candidates for the gubernatorial nomination were in the pay of Governor Beltrones. Caldero´n chose Enrique Salgado as PAN’s candidate, and many panistas loyal to Rosas defected to the PRD. As a consequence, the PRD not only captured nearly 11 percent of the total vote, but also gained eight of twenty-one municipalities and matched PAN’s number of seats in the state congress. With the help of the PAN schism, the PRD became a force in Sonora overnight.61 The public posture of President Zedillo signaled an important development after the midterm elections. He did not try to inhibit the PRI’s unprecedented loss of the lower house of Congress. His genial acknowledgement of Ca´rdenas’s win in Mexico City demonstrated good sportsmanship. Moreover, Zedillo chided his PRI colleagues for using the party as a shield to commit ethical abuses. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune, Zedillo made a statement, which in retrospect appears prophetic: “I can’t tell you that automatically whoever is the PRI candidate is going to be the next president of Mexico, because now we have arrived at a true democratic system.”62 The new Congress presented a considerable obstacle for the president because of its possibility for forming a united front against his policies. In a symbolic gesture of its new independence, the Chamber of Deputies prohibited President Zedillo from making a foreign trip.63 Faced with a determined effort on the part of Interior Secretary Emilio Chauffyet to control the mechanisms of the chamber, the four opposition parties allied against the PRI and controlled the appointment of major committee heads. For the speaker of the chamber, the opposition deputies elected the PRD’s Porfirio Mun˜oz Ledo to ensure that the PRI could not dominate the body.64 The PAN never considered the “Group of Four” alliance with the PRD and two other small opposition parties to be anything more than a temporary agreement. On matters such as the Revenues Bill, the PAN broke with the group and cast its vote with the PRI on the president’s proposal.65 The PRD bitterly criticized this decision because it felt PAN had sold out the coalition for “a mess of pottage.” The PAN’s coordinator in the chamber, Carlos Medina Plascencia, retorted that the party did not intend to be held captive to any position. In defense of its position, PAN stated that the new bill featured a 37 percent increase in revenue sharing for states and municipalities and the

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elimination of discretionary spending and of the president’s secret fund. But PAN supported a proposal to cut the 15 percent value added tax (VAT), this time siding with the PRD in a failed effort to overturn the unpopular tax.66 During the debate over the VAT some speculated that several PRI senators might defect from their seventy-six-seat delegation and vote with the opposition. A group of fourteen reformers and Colosio loyalists mostly hailing from PAN-governed states and known as the “Galileo Group” declared that their commitment to PRI proposal should not be taken for granted. Leaders of this group—Hector Murguia and Jose´ Luis Soberanes—stated that their intention was not to stand in opposition but to reform the PRI from within. In the end the Galileo Group backed the PRI’s stance on the VAT, but the group’s outspokenness was a sign that the ruling party’s iron discipline was breaking down.67 From 1997 on, the Chamber of Deputies stood as a serious counterweight to President Zedillo’s legislative agenda. Despite an attempt at an accord with Caldero´n, Zedillo could not revive the general agreement that Salinas had had with the PAN.68 For example, his plan to resolve the Chiapas crisis legislatively stalled when the PAN submitted its own counterproposal. Besides the eleventh-hour passage of the budget each year, the only major piece of legislation in which the PAN deputies backed Zedillo was his controversial plan to bail out the banking system, which occurred only after PAN governors, led by Vicente Fox, directly lobbied for its passage.69

THE GREAT PA RT Y ’ S L A S T R A L LY Growing divisions within the PRI, especially since Salinas had challenged some of the basic tenets of “revolutionary nationalism,” occurred frequently during the first half of Zedillo’s sexenio. In 1995, Luis Echeverrı´a challenged the unwritten rules and spoke out forcefully against the neoliberal order that was the heart of Salinas’s reform strategy. “I think we should go back to the 1917 Constitution, which recognized the huge needs of the rural population, the democratic demands of Madero and the fight for independence,” Echeverrı´a intoned. He joined the PRD in calling Salinas to answer for what he had done.70 Salinas fired back in an open letter to the Mexican media, stating that “nothing that happened in that year [1994] was unconnected with the titanic struggle for power. What was at stake was the direction of the country’s development. This means that the campaign waged against me by Licenciado Luis Echeverrı´a . . . cannot be dismissed as something casual. He stood for a closed economy, with a one party state, and antagonism between different classes.” Salinas endorsed the view that attributed the Colosio murder to those PRI dinosaurs who rose to power during the 1970s. He likewise identified the group associated with the disbanded Federal Security Directorate—

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formerly headed by his former Interior Secretary Gutie´rrez Barrios—as responsible for discrediting his administration.71 Challenges to the presidency came not only from opposition forces, but now also from within the PRI itself. Zedillo had been reluctant in exercising decisive leadership, and the party has lost direction. His neoliberal principles also increasingly stood at odds with the growing dissatisfaction among the rank-and-file for the glory days of rule under true polı´ticos. At the party’s national convention in 1996, the delegates rejected Salinas’s “social liberalism” and restored “revolutionary nationalism” as a definition of official PRI ideology.72 At the party’s National Assembly in Quere´taro, PRI president Mariano Palacios Alcocer announced that the party would propose that the presidential selection be conducted in an open manner and that tapadismo would be done away with. In a clear rebuke to President Zedillo and the technocratic wing of the party, the convention proceeded to introduce new requirements for elected office—called “padlocks” by their critics—to reduce the influence of the technocrats. During the state elections in 1998, the PRI experimented with holding party or open primaries to select its candidates. The results were mixed, with the most notable success in Chihuahua, where PAN Governor Francisco Barrio had had a bumpy term of office. Three years earlier, the voters had punished Barrio in the state’s midterm elections because he had tried to raise state taxes to gain some fiscal autonomy from Mexico City. Thereafter, the state depended upon Mexico City’s resources all the more to recover from a long dry spell. Moreover, Barrio insisted on publicly defending his friend Carlos Salinas even after his plummet from grace.73 A primary open to all voters succeeded in selecting Patricio Martinez, the moderate mayor of Chihuahua City who proceeded to beat the PAN candidate in the governor’s race. In other states, however, the primaries often resulted in party conflict in which jilted PRI candidates left the party to join the leftist opposition. Formerly safe PRI states like Zacatecas, Tlaxcala, and Baja California Sur all passed to the opposition in this manner. Nevertheless, the primary method was retained, especially since it seemed to reduce the power of the president in selecting state leaders. The greater challenge of course would be to select the PRI presidential candidate in this fashion. The first candidate who anticipated the changing times was Puebla Governor Manuel Bartlett, who declared his intentions to seek the nomination in early 1998 after fending off the PAN in state elections. The 1996 federal electoral reform, which encouraged the states to institute similar programs, had no effect on Puebla, as Bartlett controlled the state electoral commission. In the 1997 midterm election, Bartlett engineered for the PRI a clean sweep of the fifteen congressional seats despite the strong presence of the PAN in the state’s major cities. According to the PAN’s state party president, Angel Alonso Diaz-Canejo, the PAN had still lacked the personnel to monitor the polls sufficiently.74

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In openly declaring his candidacy, Bartlett broke another of the party’s unwritten rules, as traditionally summarized by the Confederation of Mexican Workers’s (CTV) Fidel Velazquez: “He who moves first, doesn’t show up in the picture.” Bartlett’s example encouraged another, more formidable candidate, Roberto Madrazo of Tabasco, to do the same. Both these men posed a challenge to Zedillo’s favorite, Interior Secretary Francisco Labastida of Sinaloa. The PRI’s nominating process threatened to pass from Zedillo’s hands. Faced with the prospect of losing complete control of the process, Zedillo declared that the party’s candidate would be decided by a vote open to all eligible Mexicans. By this method, he prevented party factions from dominating the proceedings. Labastida acted as if he was the destapado, but Madrazo offered him a real challenge. His appeal with southern voters and the PRI rank and file threatened to offset Labastida’s advantages as the president’s choice. Madrazo also benefited from his association with the Territorial Movement, one of Salinas’s creations, and evoked the legend within the PRI of both his deceased father and the slain Colosio. He likewise waged an intense media campaign. Labastida’s supporters countered by trying to link Madrazo with the discredited Salinas and with the interests of the formidable dinosaur Carlos Hank Gonza´lez. Such a pitched battle within the PRI had not occurred since the Henrı´quez movement in the 1950s. In the end, the machine triumphed over the upstart. Labastida captured the lion’s share of the vote total as well as 272 electoral districts to Madrazo’s 21. Francisco Gutie´rrez Barrios, called in by Zedillo to oversee the process, announced that it was a complete success, with 10 million Mexicans voting. Yet some examples of old practices turned up. On the cover of the Proceso newsweekly appeared the picture of an armed cacique departing with a ballot box in Puebla. One respected pollster expressed incredulity about the total; his own estimate indicated a turnout of only half of what the PRI reported.75 For a time Madrazo dragged his feet about endorsing the winner, but he eventually gave in. THE FOX CHA L L E N G E During the Zedillo administration, the PAN also experienced a challenge to its own unwritten rules. Vicente Fox became something new to the PAN— a professional presidential candidate. Since Diego Ferna´ndez’s loss in 1994, a leadership vacuum had occurred; Fox proved eager to fill it. Indeed, Fox had been positioning himself for the presidential nomination since 1992, when he waged the campaign to change Article 82 of the Constitution to permit Mexicans of foreign parentage like himself to be eligible for the presidency. In contrast to someone like party president Castillo Peraza, Fox hailed from the party’s pragmatic wing. Like other neopanistas from northern states, Fox got his introduction to politics when PRI-organized squatters tried to take over part of his farm. Thereafter, Manuel Clouthier convinced him to join

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the PAN.76 Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1988, Fox, a divorced though practicing Catholic, cut an independent figure within his own party and sometimes opposed its conservative stances on social issues such as abortion. He always maintained, however, his fidelity to the party’s doctrine.77 During the 1994 presidential campaign, Fox joined a group of intellectuals headed by Jorge Castan˜eda and Adolfo Aguilar Zinser that called themselves the San Angel Group. This gathering announced that they wanted the country’s elites to come together and create a Mexican version of the Pact of the Moncloa, the governability framework of the first post-Franco Spanish government.78 Before the August election they issued a plea to the new president to forge a government of national unity.79 Panistas like Fox and Ricardo Villa Escalera of Puebla who participated in the San Angel meetings urged the party to forge electoral alliance with the PRD.80 But Castillo Peraza, who considered the PRI and the PRD to be cut from the same cloth, rejected forming alliances: “To forget our ideals and ally ourselves with parties supporting a different platform is not the way to match the PRI. We win when we go forward alone, and according to our own philosophy.”81 While agreeing with this in part, Fox rejoined, “But when you’re fighting for democracy, that’s the value. Once you’ve reached that goal, then you can put your ideology first.”82 Speaking about this in February 1998, Fox explained that “I am a panista, I believe in the ideology, doctrine and universal values of the PAN and I am going to be the PAN’s candidate. This does not contradict the search for alliances, dialogues, pacts and the assurance of tossing the PRI out of [the presidential residence of] Los Pinos.”83 Even after being elected governor of Guanajuato in 1995, Fox probably still harbored some resentment against his party leadership, particularly Castillo Peraza and Diego Ferna´ndez, that negotiated an interim government four years earlier.84 At his inauguration, he invited more members of the PRD than the PAN, and no PAN National Executive Committee (CEN) members were in attendance.85 Later, Fox would reconcile with his party over this decision, even stating publicly that the nomination of Medina was constitutional and legitimate. In an unusual move for a PAN politician, Fox declared his candidacy for the presidency immediately after the federal midterm elections in 1997. By 1998, panistas like Francisco Barrio in Chihuahua announced that other leaders in his party could still make a run at the party nomination, but that Fox had already gotten a head start. He conceded that Fox started very early by PAN’s usual standards and that intimidated other candidates. Caldero´n himself, obviously put off by Fox’s iconoclastic candidacy, consistently emphasized that Fox was not the only PAN precandidate—even though none had declared an intention to run—and he even floated the idea of a non-panista, such as historian Enrique Krauze, competing for the nomination as a unity candidate. One of the unique features of Fox’s candidacy was his creation in 1998 of

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his own political action committee, the Friends of Fox. This group consisted of Fox supporters both inside and outside the PAN. Using marketing techniques—derisively referred to by some as a pyramid scheme—each “friend” was responsible for recruiting five more people to the organization. The friends also made good use of the Internet to maintain communications and recruit contributors. By the beginning of 2000, Fox’s supporters bragged that their numbers had swelled to over 2 million. To some observers, the Friends of Fox appeared to be a more formidable organization than the PAN itself.86 The PAN hierarchy grew suspicious of the Friends of Fox movement. According to Puebla State party president Angel Alonso Dı´az, he received a call from national party president Felipe Caldero´n rebuking him for attending a Friends of Fox meeting.87 Diego Ferna´ndez demanded that the Friends open up their record books on campaign finances, prompting a sharp attack by Fox spokesman Lino Korrodi.88 Diego Ferna´ndez further insinuated that Fox maintained no loyalty toward the PAN: “This is a respectable party, not a ‘one-night-stand’ for a campaign.” Fox retorted that the party was not “a private club.”89 Fox criticized PAN traditionalism in his campaign book, A Los Pinos, in much the same way that the earlier neopanistas had: “For many years the PAN was nourished by great men and grand doctrine, but it lacked the hunger for victory, until the crisis brought new blood into the party.” Fox implicitly took issue with the thesis that the party’s work is a brega de eternidad. Like Clouthier, he stressed the need to win. He criticized both the party’s timidity for not backing Clouthier’s postelectoral protests in 1988 and, more controversially, Diego Ferna´ndez’s passive campaign in 1994. “But Diego’s history will not be repeated; I am going for the presidency of the republic and for this reason I went to work three years before the election.”90 Despite the evidence of discontent with Fox’s candidacy, changes within the PAN worked to Fox’s advantage. First, Castillo Peraza resigned from the PAN in May 1998. After his crushing defeat in the Mexico City race, his political career was essentially over. Then in December, Felipe Caldero´n, after overseeing a series of electoral disappointments in 1998, declined to run again as PAN president. Fox had himself called Caldero´n’s leadership “ambivalent” and suggested publicly that he be replaced.91 In early 1999, Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, a former COPARMEX analyst and close adviser to Manuel Clouthier, easily defeated Ricardo Garcı´a Cervantes to become the party’s next president. Bravo Mena combined both a neopanista background with a deep understanding and respect for PAN doctrine. His friendship with Fox probably contributed to his victory.92 Meanwhile in 1998 the PAN decided to open up the candidate selection to rank-and-file party members rather than conventioneers. The faction that supported the old method of allowing the national counselors to select the candidate still argued that opening up the process could expose the party to outside manipulation. But those endorsing the open method overwhelmed

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this group.93 Fox benefited from changes in the PAN’s statutes that opened up the nomination process. First, the PAN had already dropped the requirement that its nominee needed to receive 80 percent of the delegates’ votes in the convention. This high threshold, which was deemed necessary to prevent the PRI from surreptitiously supporting a candidate in the convention, seemed unrealistic, especially now that the PAN had opened its doors to new members. And second, the PAN allowed its second class of members—the sympathizers, as distinct from the party militants—to vote for the candidate, thus doubling the voting base. This decision probably was prompted not only by Fox’s strong appeal with the average panista, but also by the efforts the PRI made to democratize its own selection process. Significantly, even though the PAN old guard was often uncomfortable with the brash-talking Fox, it still passed internal reforms that worked to his advantage. Moreover, the traditionalists like Diego Ferna´ndez de Cevallos offered no challenge to his candidacy. Fox ran for the PAN’s nomination unopposed, the only time that Mexico’s “democratic” party did not have a competition for its presidential candidate selection. When the PAN finally selected its candidate, only about 37 percent of the PAN members actually bothered to vote.94 Nevertheless, Fox commanded a solid mandate from his party’s rank and file, especially since this was the first time the PAN seemed settled on its candidate long before the convention took place. Still, some of the old guard continued to harbor reservations. Castillo Peraza nevertheless probably typified the views of many: “Fox appealed to the exterior of the party in order to win over the interior. This is a precedent. In the future other precandidates will do it. And without its interior the party could come to an end. It is a very corrosive method for the PAN.”95 Seen in retrospect, Fox owed much to Manuel Clouthier’s earlier presidential candidacy. As one of Maquı´o’s sons put it, Clouthier saw his role as that of a tackle in American football; his job was to create the holes so that another could advance the ball. The deceased leader began the era of neopanista dominance within the PAN and created a precedent of combative campaigning. Both Clouthier and Fox saw the PAN as a means to an end—to open up the political system. But Maquı´o had run to promote a comprehensive, ideological program that did correspond to the party’s platform. Fox, on the other hand, was more improvisational in promoting a transition platform.96 THE ATTEM P T T O F O R G E A N O P P O S I T I O N COALI TION Throughout 1999, pressure mounted to forge a united opposition coalition to challenge the PRI in 2000. State elections that year seemed to underscore the necessity of joining together. On the one hand, the PAN and the PRD united behind a local business tycoon in the PRI stronghold of Nayarit and

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upset the ruling party in the governor’s race. On the other hand, after failing to join forces in Mexico State, the opposition lost to the PRI despite garnering over 50 percent of the vote. Ca´rdenas himself proposed an alliance in February. The onus was on the PAN to accept it, or face the prospect of having all the small parties join with the PRD. In addition, rejecting the PRD’s offer would make the party appear undemocratic. Since its founding, the PAN was set against the idea of forming alliances of convenience. Gomez Morı´n had warned against linking the PAN’s fortunes to other parties or political personalities.97 According to Felipe Caldero´n, the cooperation was often one-sided, with the PAN putting up the resources and the PRD the candidate.98 Nevertheless, the PAN accepted the offer for dialogue. Negotiating teams from both parties often met in Diego Ferna´ndez’s home or law office. That Ferna´ndez, as much an opponent of the PRD as he was of the PRI, would himself host the talks demonstrated that the PAN’s old attitudes about the revolutionary left were moderating. Besides, Fox publicly favored the idea and seemed a likely choice to lead the coalition since he was favored over Ca´rdenas in most polls.99 The main sticking point in negotiations was the means by which the candidates would be selected. The PAN—supported by the Friends of Fox— continued to insist on a public opinion survey. The PRD, however, backed a primary, which, because of its larger membership, would give it an advantage. But by September 1999, a major loss in Coahuila State, in which a PRI candidate—elected through a primary system—badly beat a PAN-led coalition, may have tempered some enthusiasm for the alliance idea. To the surprise of many, the PAN and the PRD, along with six small opposition parties, agreed to a common platform and made strides to comply with the electoral requirements for a coalition. The only obstacle was selecting the unified coalition candidate. Both major parties agreed to the convening of a Citizens’ Council manned by nonpartisans to decide the method for electing the coalition candidate. After lengthy deliberation, the council decided to hold a round of primaries and public opinion surveys, a clumsy compromise between the PAN and the PRD positions. Although it appeared that the primary would be the deciding factor in determining the candidate, the survey would act as a check on the authenticity of the process. The PAN leadership believed, however, that no selection method would be verifiable, and besides it continued to distrust the PRD, whose own internal election had to be canceled in March due to widespread accusations of vote fraud.100 With Fox’s approval, the PAN ended the negotiations. The two parties went their separate ways. The PRD proceeded to organize a coalition with many of the left-wing satellite parties, under the banner “Alliance for Mexico.” The PAN opted for an “Alliance for Change” with the small Ecological Green Party.

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THE ELECT I O N O F 2 0 0 0 On the campaign trail, Fox took pains to identify himself with the Catholic resistance of the past. During PAN rallies, the candidate delighted in shouting a famous cristero phrase: “If I advance, follow me! If I stop, push me! And if I retreat, kill me!”101 At the ceremony announcing his campaign in his native Guanajuato, Fox invoked the spirit of Mexico’s herald of independence, Miguel Hidalgo, by embracing the banner of the Virgin of Guadalupe. Electoral law still forbade the use of religious imagery in politics, but it was not the first time the Virgin was impressed into political service. In 1952, for example, her visage was painted on walls to urge PRI supporters to vote for Ruiz Cortines.102 Nevertheless, this act caused a brief outcry in the press. One journalist noted that the “cristero” Fox seemed to draw more inspiration from sinarquismo than his own party.103 In another act aimed at gaining the support of traditional Catholicism and social conservatives, Fox published an open letter to the nation’s religious leaders claiming he would reform Article 130 to permit more religious freedom. The letter contained ten proposals, which included the promotion of the respect for life, the rights of parents to decide their children’s education, the reduction of church taxes, and their access to the mass media.104 Fox’s open letter drew fire from a Freemason leader and PRI party member, Manuel Jimenez Guzma´n, who believed that Fox was mixing religion and politics.105 It was another example of Fox’s taboo-breaking tendencies that aroused the suspicions of Mexico’s liberals/revolutionaries. Fox kept to his promise and ran an aggressive, even confrontational, campaign. Like his PAN predecessors, his emphasis continued to be “throw the bums out.” He boldly set out a goal for 7 percent economic growth—the minimum rate, he believed, adequate to keep pace with young people entering the economy. He advocated the need for more power devolved to the states. Likewise, he pressed the issue that the energy sector, especially electricity and petroleum, needed reform, but he stopped short of calling for privatization of PEMEX, the state-owned oil company. In a trip to the United States, he declared that the goal for North American Free Trade Agreement was to establish a common market, not simply a free trade zone. Although he offered a more comprehensive vision than Diego Ferna´ndez had in 1994, Fox still fell short on describing specific policies. His campaign rested mostly on personal appeal and the strong belief that Mexicans desired a respite from PRI rule.106 Fox relished the image of a man fighting against the system. He deliberately cultivated the persona of a man ready to do battle. As he said of himself, “[Mexicans] wanted to see an aggressive guy, a rough guy with boots and his sleeves rolled up, who wouldn’t shrink from a fight for social justice, a Lech Walesa, a Nelson Mandela, a challenger, a guy who’s a winner, a guy with guts.”107 In its advertisements, the campaign used the simple slogan “Ya”— meaning “it’s time” or “now.” Under marketing consultant Francisco Ortiz, the campaign presented an all-out media campaign that far exceeded that of Diego Ferna´ndez’s four years ago.108

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Taking a page from Clouthier’s book, Fox raised the rhetoric against the PRI, stating that the country would descend into chaos if the ruling party won again. He darkly hinted that his followers would take to the streets if, once again, they were defrauded. Fox publicly stated that the PRI’s machine would provide an additional margin for Labastida of from 3 to 5 percentage points, based on the vote in rural areas beyond the control of electoral authorities. “Labastida is obliged to win with a big margin for the triumph to be recognized . . . at least ten percentage points.”109 He also linked the PRI to the narcotraffickers. “The narcos took over the PRI long ago. No president from the PRI can solve this because their governments have participated in the drug trade,” he said.110 Many commentators believed that, despite Fox’s competitive standing in the polls, he could not win the general election. Few believed that the PRI would willingly cede power. In a press conference in Washington, DC, Fox addressed that concern and stated that, although Mexico’s secretary of defense had forbade generals to meet with opposition candidates, he had secretly met with five top-ranking generals who assured him that the electoral outcome would be respected. Fox clearly implied that a democratic transition was already taking place within the military, which he claimed now owed its loyalty to the constitution, not the PRI.111 Even though negotiations for a formal coalition had failed, Fox hinted that informal talks continued and that some candidates would drop from the race and offer Fox their endorsement. Of course, the only candidate whose endorsement would substantially help Fox was Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas. On 22 March Ca´rdenas squelched the rumors by stating: “He’s dreaming. To leave the field clear for right-wing fascism, opportunism and authoritarianism that Fox represents would be suicide for the democratic movement in this country.”112 Ca´rdenas’s remark, though disingenuous since he had proposed seeking an alliance with the PAN a year earlier, underscored dramatically the ideological gulf that continued to exist between some panistas and old-line “revolutionaries.” Yet by April, a new coalition was unnecessary became Fox alone was thoroughly competitive with the PRI’s candidate, Francisco Labastida. In a bold move for a PAN candidate, Fox took the campaign battle right to the traditional PRI electoral “granaries,” the southern, rural states that represented the party’s heartland and major voter reserves. With “Operation Tractor” Fox made inroads with the rural voter by promising new agricultural reform, even suggesting modifications to NAFTA to help the Mexican farmer.113 Adding to his viability as a candidate, Fox came off well in a televised presidential debate on April 25, with a plurality of viewers claiming that he won it.114 By early May, the Mexico City daily el Universal announced that Labastida and Fox were in a statistical dead heat, with 42 to 39 percent of the vote, respectively.115

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Another sign that the Fox campaign was gaining momentum was the defection of some priistas to his campaign. One of the most prominent was Florencio Salazar, the top party leader in Guerrero and former ally of Jose´ Francisco Ruı´z Massieu.116 Leftist leaders also rallied to his banner, including Layda Sansores, a PRD senator, and leaders of some near-defunct Marxist parties.117 This may have been due more to Fox’s appearing to be the only candidate with a chance of beating the PRI than any attraction to his message. Yet Fox did moderate some of his views to appeal to Ca´rdenas’s voters, pledging, for example, that he would never privatize the state oil company PEMEX. The 1996 reforms clearly helped the opposition parties gain more access to the airwaves. Although the PRI did not have the overwhelming dominance of the media as it did in the past, it still enjoyed more free airtime in the 2000 campaign. According to a report by the electoral institute, Labastida was featured in 47 percent of the television news coverage between March 12 and April 8; Fox and Ca´rdenas trailed behind at 23 percent and 15 percent, respectively. The IFE report did find, however, that the news reporting tended to be free of bias. Still, some other independent observers alleged that, on the whole, news coverage tended to present Labastida in a much more favorable light than his two main rivals.118 One salient characteristic of the 2000 presidential race was the battle within the opinion polls. The Mexican public was treated to a wide variety of polling that offered varying views on Labastida’s and Fox’s relative strengths. Most polls gave the PRI candidate the edge, but Fox took solace in a few polls that showed him in a technical dead heat. A few weeks after the April 25 debate, Zogby International released a poll giving Fox an advantage—46.3 percent to 41.6 percent.119 This caused many commentators to announce the momentum swinging in Fox’s favor. ( Just before the official closing date for polls, however, Zogby released another survey showing Labastida with 43.6 percent of the vote as compared with Fox’s 40.7 percent.120) A final survey by a former PRI pollster, published in the Dallas Morning News, gave Fox a 10-point lead. The pollster believed she had tapped into the public’s disaffection for the ruling system.121 Political commentators noticed weaknesses in the Labastida campaign. The candidate himself lacked charisma, which was never a problem for PRI presidenciables in the past, but now it represented a significant Achilles’ heel in a more competitive environment. Because of interparty squabbling due to the new methods for choosing candidates for party posts, Labastida had to take valuable time away from his campaign to resolve these disputes. Labastida repudiated Zedillo by saying he would restore the “healthy closeness” between the presidency and the PRI while at the same time trying to distance himself from the “old” PRI. Meanwhile, his campaign suffered from the Mexico City mayor’s race conducted by his ally, Jesu´s Silva Herzog, who lost a commanding lead in the polls to former PRD president Andre´s Manuel Lo´pez Obrador.

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THE CHURCH S P E A K S With Cardinal Norberto Rivera of Mexico City as its combative spokesman, the Catholic Church made clear its intention to support the democratic process, defend the vote, and inject itself in the struggle for political and social reform. In March 2000 the Bishops Conference issued a pastoral letter urging lay members to promote human rights and social justice. It unequivocally defended the transition: “Democracy, without an institutional and cultural framework based on values and principles of human dignity, easily degenerates into demagoguery and political formulas that go against liberty and justice.” The document’s promoters insisted on the need to defend the vote, equating electoral fraud to a serious sin. It also suggested that real democracy meant alternation in power, a clear rebuttal to those in the PRI who argued that their seventy-one-year hold on power indicated popular sovereignty. The Fox campaign enthusiastically distributed the episcopal letter.122 In a dramatic sign of the church’s new assertiveness, Cardinal Rivera presided over a huge open-air mass of 50,000 in Mexico City’s Zo´calo.123 According to some press reports, this was the first mass of its kind since a ban in 1873. Others likened it to the Christ the King ceremony on el Cubilete in Guanajuato that presaged the cristero conflict.124 The government’s response to the Catholic Church’s public posture sounded like an echo from the past. “We don’t want praying politicians or governing priests,” announced Humberto Lira Mora, Mexican subsecretary of religious affairs.125 The tone of the response suggested a government that saw itself as increasingly under fire from important elements of civil society. The religious issue did not end there. In June the Vatican announced the canonization of twenty-five martyrs of the cristero revolt, mostly priests and religious killed by Calles’s forces. Although the process of making the new Mexican saints had been in the works for years, some priistas saw this as the pope trying to kick the legs out from under the ruling party as he helped do to the Soviet Union.126 EL ECTI ON DAY, J U LY 2 , 2 0 0 0 The Mexican government spent an estimated $1.2 billion to ensure an accurate vote count, and, in addition to thousands of domestic observers, the Federal Election Institute registered over eight hundred foreign observers.127 The PAN announced that it would man every station with at least one representative; in the end it managed this for only 85 percent of the 113,000 polling stations. The IFE, however, trained enough crews to man the casillas. All these preparations paid off. The election proceeded smoothly and without serious incident. On election day, TV Azteca began announcing the preliminary results of the Guanajuato and Morelos gubernatorial elections and the Federal District’s

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mayoral election. By 6 p.m., it was clear that the PAN would rack up impressive victories in both state races and remain competitive with the PRD in Mexico City. Indeed, the PRI’s uncompetitiveness in the three contests foreshadowed defeat for Francisco Labastida. Before the end of the night, President Zedillo went on television himself to announce that Vicente Fox would be the next president of Mexico. The final results stunned the PRI. Fox defeated Labastida by 6 points, 43 percent to 37 percent. States that had been moving toward the PAN, such as San Luis Potosı´ and Colima, fell into Fox’s column. Fox likewise beat the ruling party’s candidate where the PAN had recently come close to gaining a plurality—Puebla, Mexico State, and Veracruz. In other states where the PAN had suffered notable setbacks, such as Chihuahua, Coahuila, and Tamaulipas in the north, turned in thumping victories for Fox. Fox even edged Labastida in Yucatan, where the governor, Victor Cervera Pacheco, embodied old-style PRI bossism and had embarked on an ostentatious campaign to distribute bicycles and washing machines to buy the election.128 The party also edged out the PRI in the race for Yucatan’s Senate seats, revenge for many years of frustrating setbacks in the peninsula state. Riding on Fox’s coattails, the PAN beat the PRI in most Senate and House of Deputies races. It was easily the party’s best performance ever in the majority-seat contests. The PAN greatly augmented its bank of seats in the lower house, rising from 120 to 209. It also broke the PRI’s domination of the Senate by obtaining its largest block of senators ever. The PRI, however, maintained a plurality in the upper house because, having lost most of the majority-seat races, it still came in second in more states than the PAN had. Having won Senate and Deputy seats in every region of the country the race transformed the PAN into a truly national party overnight. It dominated the vote in its strongholds—Baja California, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leo´n, Guanajuato, and Jalisco. It staged a dramatic comeback in the Federal District, surpassing the PRD in the Senate race and getting the lion’s share of the federal deputations. In the state race in Mexico State, the PAN captured most of the municipal contests. Only in Guerrero did it register less than 20 percent of the total vote. By devoting much campaigning time in rural areas, Fox had placed the party in striking distance for governorships in several states where previously it had little hope of waging a competitive race. Moreover, by winning so impressively, the party was sure to attract more supporters and more talented candidates. The PRD could take some consolation in having held on to Mexico City after surviving a competitive race. Otherwise, the situation looked bleak. Ca´rdenas, with 16.5 percent of the total vote, did not improve upon the share he gained in 1994. According to one report, nearly 800,000 voters aligned with Ca´rdenas’s Alliance for Mexico instead exercised their “useful vote” for Fox.129 The position of Ca´rdenas’s party in the lower house deteriorated dramatically.

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After having gained 126 seats in 1997, the entire Alliance for Mexico picked up only 68 this time. The PRD itself could claim only slightly more than half that number for itself. In the Senate it was also a transformed itself into minor party, having won only two majority seat races, in Baja California Sur and in Ca´rdenas’s native Michoaca´n, where his son was on the ticket. It lost the Mexico City Senate seats to the PAN, and it even missed out on second-place finishes in Oaxaca and Chiapas, two states where it should have been more competitive. In most states it finished a distant third. The PRI’s defeat naturally provoked a spate of mutual recriminations from the stunned loyalists. Mexican Freemasons demanded that Zedillo be expelled from the PRI due to his quick recognition of the PAN’s victory. A representative of the labor sector of the PRI governing body demanded the party censor Zedillo for his “electoral coup.” Party hard-liners, such as Manuel Bartlett, viewed the defeat as a vindication of their analysis that the technocrats had eviscerated the party and that only under the banner of revolutionary nationalism could the PRI stage a comeback. For their part, the technocrats believed that the dinosaurs, with their heavy-handed ways, had sunk Labastida’s candidacy. With a profound sense of history, one headline writer summarized the depth of this defeat by calling Zedillo “the last Juarista president.”130

NOTES 1. Quoted in Sabastian Rotella, Twilight on the Line (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 20. 2. “Surviving the First Attack,” Mexico and Nafta Report (May 12, 1994), 6. 3. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism, 116. 4. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism, 140. 5. Interview with Leonardo Garcia, PAN state senator, Guadalajara, July 29, 1995. 6. Interview with Martı´n Hernandez, PAN regidor, Guadalajara, July 25, 1995. 7. Ayala, Salinas y sus tiempos, 50. 8. Jose´ Manuel Barcelo and Carlos Mendoza Sepulveda, Sociedad civil y poder polı´tico, Jalisco 95 (Guadalajara: Editorial Agata, 1995), 152–54. 9. Barcelo and Mendoza, Sociedad civil y poder politico, 175–76. 10. Interview with Emilio Gonzalez, PAN regidor, Guadalajara, July 25, 1995. 11. Vero´nica Espinosa, “En el Guanajuato de Fox, la televisio´n del estado transmite la misa dominical,” Proceso 1194 (September 19, 1999), 12–14. 12. Interview with Carlos Medina Plascencia, governor of Guanajuato, July 20, 1995. 13. “Mensaje de Ing. Carlos Medina Plascencia, gobernador de estado de Guanajuato, dentro de la Gira para la Democracia” (n. d., n. p.) Given to author courtesy of Governor Medina. 14. Jose Luis Gutierrez, “Reduccion al presupuesto de Guanajuato,” La Nacio´n 53 (March 11–25, 1994), 24.

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15. Matt Moffett, “Political Vacuum: As Mexico’s Leader Cedes Some Authority, Power Scramble Begins,” Wall Street Journal (March 25, 1996), A1. 16. Andrew Reding, “Facing Political Reality in Mexico,” Washington Quarterly 20 (Autumn 1997), 113. 17. Victoria E. Rodriguez and Peter M. Ward, Political Change in Baja California (San Diego, CA: Center for U.S.–Mexico Studies, 1994), 44–45. 18. Tonatiuh Guille´n Lo´pez, Baja California 1989–1992: Alternancia polı´tica y transicio´n democra´tica (Mexico: El Colegı´o de la Frontera Norte, 1993), 111–15. 19. Interviews with Gabriel Hinojosa and Ricardo Villa Escalera, Puebla, August 21, 1995. 20. Victoria E. Rodriguez, Decentralization in Mexico (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 83–85. 21. Jose´ Luis Trueba Lara, El primer an˜o de Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico: Ediciones Roca, 1995), 78–79. 22. “Programa para un Nuevo Federalismo 1995–2000,” Diario Oficial de la Federacio´n (August 1997). 23. Interview with Fernando Estrada, August 30, 1995. 24. Jorge Rodrı´guez Banuelos, “Declara Caldero´n en emergencia a Municipios,” La Nacio´n 56 (October 3, 1997), 12. 25. Tom Buckley, “Puebla Legislators Clash over State Funding,” The News ( January 28, 1998), 1. 26. Tim Duffy, “Objections to Puebla’s New Funding Law,” Reuters ( January 29, 1998), 3. 27. Interview with Jorge Padilla, PAN congressman, Monterrey, May 14, 1997. This incident reveals something about the changing political culture in Mexico and especially the power of the president. According to Padilla, Socrates Rizzo, the PRI governor of Nuevo Leo´n, delivered him a message from Zedillo: stop opposing the economic policy. Rizzo warned him: “Jorge, it’s not worth it to take such a risk.” Later that year, a delegation of PAN senators visited Cuba, where Fidel Castro inquired about Jorge Padilla and specifically, his health. When an incredulous Senator Bravo Mena asked Castro why was he so concerned, Castro, related Padilla, responded that it was unheard of that there was no retaliation against Padilla. “Now we’ll see a change in Mexico.” 28. “The reasons and the versions of Lozano Gracia’s resignation,” Contexto 1 ( January 1997), 2. This offers a PAN sympathetic view of the Lozano era at the PGR. 29. An associate of Lozano Gracia insisted to the author that a DNA test conducted on the body by the FBI proved it to be that of Mun˜oz Rocha. 30. “Lozano Gracia under Pressure,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (March 28, 1996), 2. 31. “The Reasons and Versions of Lozano Gracia’s Resignation,” Contexto 1 ( January 1997), 1. 32. PAN National Executive Committee, “The Democratic Plea of PAN in Yucatan” ( June 27, 1995), 5–9. 33. Interview with Felipe Gonza´lez Camerera, analyst in PAN’s Secretariat de Estudios, Mexico City, August 20, 1995. 34. Roderic A. Camp, The Zedillo Legacy (Washington, DC: CSIS, 1997), 4. 35. Fernando Mayolo Lopez, “El PAN por dentro y por fuera: tranquilidad ante sus elecciones, y agitacion por el “fraude” de Huejotzingo,” Proceso 1009 (March 4, 1996), 26.

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36. A figure derived by counting both municipal and state populations governed by the PAN, which often overlapped. 37. Speech by Carlos Castillo Peraza, President of PAN, photocopy (November 14, 1995). Received by author courtesy of Carlos Castillo Peraza. 38. Diane Solis, “Mexico’s Other Party Flexes its Muscles,” Wall Street Journal (September 21, 1995), A19. 39. “Race for PAN leadership gets under way,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (February 22, 1996), 4. 40. “La renuncia de Castillo Peraza al PAN, deja vı´a libre a Fox,” Accio´n 21 (May 11, 1998), 4. 41. “A surprise win for Caldero´n,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (March 28, 1996), 8. 42. Padilla interview. 43. “Cobbling together another package,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (March 28, 1996), 4. 44. “The PAN joins in,” Mexico and NAFTA Report ( June 13, 1996), 3. 45. Armand B. Peschard-Sverdrup, The 1997 Mexican Midterm Elections: Post Election Report (Washington, DC: CSIS 1997), 5–6. 46. Crespo, Raising the Bar, 20. 47. Grayson, Mexico: From Corporatism to Pluralism, 142. 48. Mary Beth Sheridas, “Mexico OKs Scaled-Back Law on Fair Elections,” Los Angeles Times (November 20, 1996), 12. 49. “La renuncia de Castillo Peraza al PAN, deja vı´a libre a Fox,” Accio´n 21 (May 11, 1998), 4. 50. Norma Jimenez, “Confian partidos en comicios limpios,” El Norte ( July 3, 1997), 1. 51. George W. Grayson, A Guide to the 1997 Mexico City Mayoral Election (Washington, DC: CSIS, 1997), 18. 52. Peschard, The 1997 Mexican Midterm Elections, 11–12. 53. Personal interview with Armand Peschard, CSIS, Washington, DC (September 17, 1997). 54. Joseph L. Klesner, “Democratic Transition? The 1997 Mexican Elections,” PS 30 (December 1997), 706. 55. Coindreau interview. 56. “Take what they give you, and vote for the PAN.” 57. Salas interview. 58. Klesner, “Democratic Transition?” 709. 59. David Carrizales, “Virtual Triunfo priı´sta en Colina y Sonora, panista en NL y Quere´taro,” La Jornada ( July 8, 1997). 60. Peschard-Sverdrup, The 1997 Mexican Midterm Elections, 14–15 61. Peschard-Sverdrup, The 1997 Mexican Midterm Elections, 14. 62. Paul de la Garza, “Mexico’s Ruling Party Could Lose Presidency, Leader Says,” Chicago Tribune ( July 20, 1997), 1. 63. “Zedillo Prohibited from Foreign Travel,” Wall Street Journal (November 6, 1997), A1. 64. “En riesgo la unidad de la oposicion en la Camara de Diputados,” Accio´n 20 (October 20, 1997), 3–10. 65. John Ward Anderson, “Budget Gets Full Debate in Mexico Opposition Parties Play Rare Key Role,” Washington Post (December 18, 1997), A32.

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66. “Las diferencias no deben canceler la relacio´n PAN-PRD: Caldero´n,” La Jornada (December 18, 1997), 7. 67. Helena Oliviero, “The Galileo Factor,” Business Mexico 7 (November 1997), 16–17. 68. “Busca el PRI recomponer su alianza parliamentaria con el PAN,” Accio´n 20 (November 10, 1997), 3–10. 69. Vicente Fox, A Los Pinos (Mexico: Oceano, 1999), 158–160. 70. “Ex-presidents shatter code of silence,” Mexico and NAFTA Report ( January 18, 1996), 4–5. 71. “Ex-presidents shatter code of silence,” 4–5. 72. John Ward Anderson, “Mexican Ruling Party Dinosaurs’ Win Round,” Washington Post (September 28, 1996), A23. 73. Interview with PAN researcher Felipe Gonzalez Camerera, Puebla, August 20, 1995. 74. Interview with the PAN president of Puebla State, Angel Alonso Diaz-Canejo, Washington, DC, October 13, 1998. 75. Sam Dillon, “Mexican Pollsters Challenge Size of Turnout in Primary,” New York Times (17 November 1999), A10. 76. Andrew Reding, “The Next Mexican Revolution,” World Policy Journal 13 (Fall 1996), 62. 77. Maria Scherer Ibarra, “Fox, ante el aborto: se puede y se debe permitir cuando peligra la vida de la madre y cuando se detecta muerte cerebral en el feto,” Proceso 1158 ( January 10, 1999), 12–14. 78. “What happens after the elections,” Mexico and NAFTA Report ( July 21, 1994), 3. 79. “Much of a muchness,” Mexico and NAFTA Report (August 25, 1994), 3. 80. Villa Escalera interview. 81. Howard La Franchi, “Mexico’s ‘Asphalt Party’ Rides a Faster Lane,” Christian Science Monitor (October 13, 1994), 7. 82. Howard La Franchi, “Mexico’s ‘Asphalt Party’ Rides a Faster Lane,” Christian Science Monitor (October 13, 1994), 7. 83. Entrevista Reforma (5 February 1998), 6. 84. “La Renuncia de Castillo Peraza al PAN, Deja vı´a Libre a Fox,” Accio´n 21 (May 11, 1998), 4 85. Interview with Miguel Angel Vichique, coordinator for social communication, Guanajuato, Guanajuato (August 18, 1995). 86. Francisco Ortiz Pardo and Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti, “En detalle, la gigantesca organizacio´n que mueve a Fox,” Proceso 1215 (February 13, 2000). Guillermo H. Cantu´, Asalto A Palacio, (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2001), 189–207. 87. Diaz-Canejo interview. 88. Areli Quintero, “Aumentan las tensiones entre el CEN del PAN y los amigos de Fox,” El Economista (April 19, 1999), http://www.economista.com.mx/historico.NSF/. 89. “Se Acorta la Distancia Entre Foxismo y Panismo Tradicional,” Accio´n 22 (8 November 1999), 4–5. 90. Fox, A Los Pinos, 94. 91. “Tras su derrota en Chihuahua, el PAN obligado a ganar Aguascalientes,” Accio´n 21 ( July 20, 1998), 8.

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92. “Bravo Mena y Garcı´a Cervantes Compiten por la Presidencia del PAN,” Accio´n 22 (March 1, 1999), 3–8. 93. Juan Manuel Venegas, “Podra´n panistas adherentes votar por candidato a la presidencia,” La Jornada (November 22, 1998), http://www.jornada.wam.mx/1998/ nov98/981122/podra´n.html. 94. Julia Preston, “Mexican Hotly Pursues Presidency, Hobbled by a Cool Party,” New York Times (October 10, 1999), A11. 95. Francisco Ortiz Pardo y Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti, “Hacia el final de la campan˜a, Fox domo´ al PAN,” Proceso 1229 (May 23, 2000). 96. Ismael Bojo´quez Perea, “El hijo de Clouthier: a diferencia de mi padre, Fox plantea un programa de nacio´n, no de partido,” Proceso 1231 ( June 6, 2000). 97. Arriola Ensayos sobre el PAN, 192. 98. Felipe Caldero´n at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, Washington, DC, October 14, 1997. 99. “Se Acorta la Distancia,” Accio´n, 5. 100. Julia Preston, “Ruling Party Gets a Lift in Mexico as Foes Disagree,” New York Times (September 29, 1999), A1. 101. Scherer Ibarra, “Fox, ante el Aborto,” Proceso 1158 ( January 10, 1999), 17. 102. Creagan, Minority Political Parties in Mexico, 126. 103. Ricardo Aleman Aleman, “El cristero Fox, sin lugar en el PAN hı´storico,” Universal (September 14, 1999). 104. Reforma (May 7, 2000). 105. Jime´nez Guzma´n became coordinator of Labastida’s campaign in March 2000. Andre´s Becerril, “Jime´nez Guzma´n Nuevo Coordinador de Gestio´n de la campan˜a de FLO” Reforma (May 8, 2000). 106. Sam Dillon, “In Mexico’s Election, The Race is Real,” New York Times (March 12, 2000), A1. Fox was retreating from an earlier public statement that seemed to favor PEMEX’s privatization. 107. Sam Dillon, “In Mexico’s Election, The Race is Real,” New York Times (March 12, 2000), A1. 108. Ken Guggenheim, “Underdog Mexican Presidential Candidate Seeks to Topple PRI Dynasty,” Associated Press (March 11, 2000). 109. Associated Press (March 11, 2000). 110. Sam Dillon, “In Mexico’s Election, The Race is Real,” New York Times (March 12, 2000), A1. 111. Press conference sponsored by CSIS, Washington, DC, March 20, 2000. 112. “Mexico’s Ca´rdenas Declines to Step Aside,” Washington Post (March 23, 2000), A20. 113. Francisco Ortiz Pardo y Francisco Ortiz Pinchetti, “En el campo, la disputa por 11 milliones de votos,” Proceso 1223 (April 9, 2000). 114. Jose´ de Cordoba, “Fox’s Prospects Brighten in Presidential Bid,” Wall Street Journal (April 27, 2000), A22. 115. Julia´n Sanchez, “Mantiene FLO mı´nima ventaja sobre Fox,” El Universal (May 2, 2000), 1. 116. Wilbert Torre y Jesu´s Guerrero, “Encabeza Salazar desbandada de ex funcionarios,” El Norte (April 12, 2000), 10. 117. Humberto Musacchio, “Mito y metas del voto u´til,” Reforma (May 30, 2000), 11.

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118. “The Media’s Influence in Mexico’s Electoral Campaigns,” Mexico Election Monitor 2000 (Washington Office on Latin America, June 2000), 4–5. 119. Mary Beth Sheridan, “Opposition Candidate Leads in Mexico Poll,” Los Angeles Times (May 12, 2000), 11. 120. “Ruling Party Leading in Mexican Polls,” Washington Post ( June 22, 2000), A20. 121. Alfredo Corchedo, Laurence Iliff, “Fox Holds a Big Lead in New Poll: Ruling Party Doubts Ex-PRI Pollster’s Data,” Dallas Morning News ( June 21, 2000), 1A. 122. Jose´ de Cordoba, “In Mexico the Pious May Be Political,” Wall Street Journal ( June 15, 2000), A20. 123. The main square. 124. John Rice, “Church rebuilding role in Mexico as election nears,” Associated Press (May 6, 2000). 125. “Official Cautions Clerics Who ‘Step Outside Their Business’” BBC (March 25, 2000). 126. Jose´ de Cordoba, “In Mexico the Pious May Be Political,” Wall Street Journal ( June 15, 2000), A20. 127. Peter Fritsch, “Campaign Promise: How Zedillo Became a Force in Mexican Politics,” Wall Street Journal ( June 30, 2000), A1. 128. Jose´ de Cordoba, “To Mexico’s ‘Dinosaurs’ Old Style Politicking is Far from Extinct,” Wall Street Journal ( June 16, 2000), A1. 129. Laura Go´mez Flores, “La lucha de Ca´rdenas hizo posible el resultado del 2 de julio: Robles,” La Jornada ( July 12, 2000), http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2000/jul00/ 000712/cap1.html. 130. Juan Ervizu Arrioja, “El u´ltimo presidente Juanista,” El Universal ( July 19, 2000), 1.

CHAPTER 7

Lessons of the Mexican Transition

Max Weber’s statement that “politics is a strong and slow boring of hard boards” could have been made with Mexico’s lengthy political transition in mind.1 To explain how a democratic transition could take place in Mexico’s divided political culture, it was necessary to describe the historical foundations of both the ruling “great party” regime of the PRI and its major opposition, the “system party” PAN. Mansfield’s defense of Edmund Burke’s view that “great parties” in England originated in religious divisions—and that religious settlement formed the basis for stable, party government—appears particularly relevant to Mexico’s case as well.2 Before the founding of the PAN, conflicts in Mexico’s political culture were profound and took years to resolve. The great party conflict had impeded an earlier democratic transition that might have occurred during the first phase of the Mexican Revolution. Instead of “contingent consent,” democracy in such an environment needed to rest on a foundation of democratic values. To avoid the problems associated with procedural definitions of democracy, Chapter One offered three necessary conditions for gauging the progress of Mexico’s transition: reconciliation of the great party issue, the development of political liberties, and the founding of the opposition “system party.” To amend the thesis of Schmitter and O’Donnell introduced in the beginning of Chapter One, the transition was a consequence of an opposition “system” party springing from civil society. Catholic opponents of the wellentrenched great party founded the PAN as an instrument committed to democratic values and dedicated to transforming great party politics. The cleavage between hard-liners and soft-liners in the PRI derived largely from how the ruling party should respond to the PAN’s challenge.

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THE VITAL C O N T R I BU T I O N O F T H E S Y S T E M PA RT Y The PAN itself was the product of Catholic conciliation to the values of both pluralistic democracy and, indeed, to some aspects of the Mexican Revolution. Significantly, it defended the Constitution of 1917 with the exception of the anticlerical articles. Though supporting the rights of the Catholic Church, the PAN distanced itself from a “confessional” label. But the party did develop a comprehensive ideology based on Catholic social doctrine that enabled it to serve as a rallying point against the revolutionary regime even when electoral victories were few and far between. Moreover, the PAN rejected the PRI’s corporatist organization and instead established a durable, representative organization that survived its internal crises intact. Eventually overcoming its own “antisystem” elements that rejected dialogue and political participation, the PAN followed a gradualist strategy of competing in elections and negotiating reforms. Several of the PRI’s reforms to the electoral system, beginning in 1946, were defensive in nature and made in response to pressure from the PAN. When the PRI received several shocks to the system, especially during the 1980s, the PAN managed to gain electoral strength and improve its bargaining position. Its steady growth as an electoral force and its willingness to engage in dialogue helped encourage reformist elements within the PRI to begin their own transition to a “system party.” That a political friendship could develop, even for a short period of time, between the old Catholic and revolutionary political adversaries during the Salinas sexenio demonstrated a level of trust and a respect for the common good long absent from Mexican political culture. With the accord between President Salinas and the PAN, conciliation was firmly underway. Especially with the reforms of the anticlerical articles of the Constitution, one of the key stumbling blocks to end the church–state conflict was removed. In agreeing to this historic reform, the PRI abandoned one of its most important principles and paved the way for the Catholic PAN to assume power. Now Mexico’s bitter conflict between church and state appears to be a subject for the history books. Toward the end of his sexenio, President Zedillo publicly attended the opening of a Catholic cathedral—previous Mexican presidents would not be seen entering a church—without provoking a negative reaction. Later, Vicente Fox publicly took communion shortly after becoming president, symbolizing the end of an era. Mexico has, likewise, made great progress in fulfilling the conditions of political liberty. Beginning in 1997, the Federal Congress asserted itself as a counterweight to the presidency. The Federal Electoral Institute proved itself to be an independent, fourth branch of government with its successful performance in the 2000 presidential election. Both President Zedillo and now President Fox have had to learn the skills of working with opposition-controlled legislatures. Congressmen now assert

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their right to modify or vote down the executive’s legislative initiatives. This political reality has virtually ended the president’s metaconstitutional powers. As for the proper relationship between the federal government and the states, this remains a work in progress. An early Fox initiative for “The Reform of the State,” which was intended in part to define clearly the rights and responsibilities of state and municipal governments, has been moved to the back burner. But one clear sign of respect for state governments was the unwillingness of President Fox to take direct action against the PRI governor of Yucatan who resisted an unfavorable ruling by the Federal Electoral Tribunal. The PAN played a vital role in bringing about these democratic reforms, but the political transition could have proceeded differently. For example, had Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas and his schismatic National Democratic Front won the election in 1988, his presidency would have ended the political monopoly of the PRI but not the political hegemony of the so-called Revolutionary Family. Ca´rdenas, one of the few Mexican political leaders who protested the pope’s visit in 1990, probably would not have taken steps to heal the profound cleavage in the political culture as Carlos Salinas had. Wanting to restore the ideology of “revolutionary nationalism” abandoned by the PRI’s neoliberal reformers, Ca´rdenas himself lacked an ambitious project of reform. As Jorge Castan˜eda relates in Perpetuating Power, after meeting with Salinas shortly after the election, Cardenas displayed no inclination to use his newly won status as an opposition leader to negotiate with Salinas and press for reforms.3 In essence, he left this field open to the PAN. Only later did his PRD join the PRI and the PAN in reforming the anticlerical articles and cooperating on electoral reform. The death of Manuel Clouthier itself might have delayed the transition by six years. Clouthier was emerging as the charismatic leader the PAN had lacked throughout most of its history. He demonstrated an impressive ability to attract outsiders to the PAN. Though an advocate of reform and dialogue with the PRI, Clouthier also clearly articulated his differences with the revolutionary regime. Had he been able to campaign for the presidency in 1994 with the same energy as he had in 1988—only this time, with the electoral safeguards of COFIPE in place—he might have won the general election. Although the PAN was never the vehicle of a single ambitious politician, the personal appeal of Clouthier and Vicente Fox demonstrated that inspired political leadership needed to complement sound party organization and clearly defined principles “to stir the voters’ souls.” That said, the ultimate victory of the PAN was far from inevitable. President Zedillo’s commitment to democratic principles ultimately made the transition possible. From the beginning of his sexenio, Zedillo continued the electoral reforms begun by his predecessor. He recognized the electoral victories of all parties, not just the PAN. In the July 2000 election, his firmness of character may have prevented both a serious PRI effort to tamper with the

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polls in rural districts, which remained a weak point in the electoral system, and to impede Fox from taking office. The harsh attacks by PRI members on Zedillo after the election at least suggests that part of the ruling party was not ready to accept defeat. W HI THER TH E G R E AT PA RT Y ? As Mansfield notes in Statesmanship and Party Government, the parties “made small” by the settling of the religious controversy in England did not make “lukewarm” parties. It just established them on a new foundation.4 Similarly, conflict resolution in Mexico now has a chance to take place in a democratic environment and a pluralistic party system. But the book is still open on the PRI’s conversion into a full-fledged “system party.” Even before its 2000 defeat, a journalist described the party as having “a political crisis, an electoral crisis, and an ideological crisis.”5 The 2000 election demonstrated that the PRI had become the party of underdeveloped Mexico. Labastida was roundly defeated in both Mexico City and the most prosperous states. The few states in which the PRI registered strong wins— Durango, Hidalgo, Oaxaca, Tabasco, and Guerrero—are among the poorest in the nation. Meanwhile, the party lost its heartland: Mexico State, Puebla, and Veracruz, the traditional center of Mexican liberalism. Shortly after Fox’s win, the PRI surrendered Chiapas to an opposition coalition candidate and then became embroiled in an electoral scandal in Tabasco. Its technocratic leadership is discredited in the eyes of the party rank and file, and its dinosaurs in the eyes of the general public. The question of whether former Tabasco governor Roberto Madrazo, who was elected PRI president in March 2002, can remake the party remains an open one. But the PRI is still the best-organized political party in the Mexican political system. Despite its rapidly diminishing appeal, especially in urban areas and the fastest growing cities in the country, the PRI remains competitive in every part of Mexico. Even in the states and municipalities in which it lost badly, it has demonstrated the capacity to rebound, as it did in Chihuahua in 1998. Likewise it can depend upon the loyalty of public sector workers, making it at times difficult for Fox to govern effectively. More seriously, however, an effort by PRI hard-liners to reunite the Revolutionary Family under the banner of “revolutionary nationalism” and to revive great party politics could endanger the democratic transition. The midterm elections of 2003 offered a strong sign of the PRI’s capacity to recover. After receiving an enormous, and to some observers, potentially crippling fine of $90 million by the IFE for funds the party siphoned off from the state oil company PEMEX during the 2000 campaign, the PRI bounced back in July 2003, capturing 34.4 percent of the national vote and gaining approximately 20 more seats in the House of Deputies. The PAN, blamed for President Fox’s inability to push through his economic reform agenda, trailed

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with 30.5 percent of the vote and lost nearly 50 house seats. (PAN’s other opponent, the PRD, also rebounded, taking 17 percent of the vote and adding nearly 50 house seats.) More significantly, the PRI proved it could recapture an important industrial state, Nuevo Leo´n, winning the governorship in a landslide. After the elections, the PRI’s president Roberto Madrazo declared that now Fox would have no choice but to negotiate with the PRI. Despite its encouraging victory, there are no signs that the PRI intends to capitalize on it by stoking the fading embers of revolutionary nationalism. The midterm elections did little to change the political balance of power— the PRI added to its relative majority in the House without gaining an absolute majority. But they demonstrated convincingly that the glory days of Mexican authoritarian politics, in which the governing party added to its majority in the midterm, had ended with Salinas. GOVERNI NG F R O M A S Y S T E M PA RT Y P E R C E P T I V E One of the greatest challenges for Fox’s government has been to avoid awakening great party aspirations. Old animosities, of course, will die hard. In its search for political allies, the PRI has rejected the possibility of teaming up with the PAN, “a clerical party of the right.”6 For many on the Mexican left, Fox and his supporters are direct descendents of the cristeros and others who want to rechristianize Mexico through authoritarian means.7 Certainly Fox, who does not shy from public displays of his Catholic faith, has ushered in a new era of church-state relations in Mexico. One of his challenges as president will be to avoid testing the limits of toleration. Fox himself appears committed to govern from a “system party” perspective. Since his victory speech, Fox’s tone has been moderate toward the defeated PRI. Though pledging to root out “nests of corruption,” Fox rejected the idea that his government would engage in witch-hunts.8 As the first president since the revolution who did not make his living off of politics, the former Coca-Cola executive, Fox, is better positioned to combat corruption in his own administration than past presidents.9 And although he was unable to get through the reconciliation plan he wanted, by tackling the ongoing deadlock with the Zapatista rebel group in Chiapas, Fox showed a skeptical public that he was willing to try to fulfill his campaign promises. Interviewed in the late 1960s, Go´mez Morı´n conceded that the PAN, in order to form a government, would have to look outside its own ranks, perhaps to form a cabinet of “national unity.”10 Over thirty years later, Fox tried to implement this idea by relying less on party activists and by reaching out to political independents. Remarkably, the PAN seemed content with having only modest representation in Fox’s cabinet. For his interior secretary, Fox named Santiago Creel, a panista of recent vintage. Josefina Va´squez, a PAN backbencher in the Chamber of Deputies, became his secretary for social development. Party luminaries Ernesto Ruffo, Francisco Barrio, and Luis H.

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Alvarez accepted the task as Fox’s advisers on the border region, corruption, and the Chiapas problem, respectively. Carlos Abascal, the former head of COPARMEX and son of the sinarquista leader Salvador Abascal, took the position of secretary of labor. Otherwise, Fox’s appointments came from private industry or were well-known leftist personalities such as Jorge Castan˜eda, his secretary of foreign affairs. The PAN’s ambivalent “will to power,” ironically, served Fox’s transition period well. After the election, party president Bravo Mena pledged to maintain “democratic ties” with the Fox government because, “genetically” the party is not constituted to mix with government. He rejected the idea of replacing the PRI as “a party of state.” “For us the point is not very complicated,” Bravo Mena said. “Perhaps in the dominant political culture it is difficult to understand.”11 W HI THER TH E PA N ? Though operating in the shadow of the president, it is unlikely that the PAN will ever become Fox’s political vehicle. The old members have too much pride in their doctrine and the independence of their institution. As one of the sons of founder Manuel Go´mez Morı´n stated following the election, “Fox needed the party and the party doesn’t need Fox. Without the party he would not have won.”12 Indeed, the PAN now has no threat of being overshadowed by a new Fox-aligned party. Shortly after the election, Lino Korrodi, chief spokesman for the Friends of Fox organization, claimed that it will disappear as a financial backer of Fox and would instead take the form of a nonpartisan civil association.13 The experience with Friends of Fox and, ironically, the PRI’s open primary nevertheless had an important impact on the PAN. Shortly after the 2000 election the PAN faced its own internal pressures to open up. Several top leaders criticized the tendency for some PAN families to control state committees and restrict membership. Moreover, the party’s modest membership rolls seem more suited to a civic association than a political party with ambitions to govern a nation. In the near future, the PAN will probably make attaining membership less stringent. It will likewise be difficult for the PAN to maintain its old representative structure as other parties like the PRI and the PRD adopt ostensibly more democratic, open primaries to select candidates. As National Executive Committee member Jose´ Gonza´lez Morfı´n stated after the election, “we must find more open schemes for larger participation of our membership and of citizens in general.”14 Part of the internal reforms may include updating its venerable “Principles of Doctrine.” As signaled by its leadership, the PAN intends to maintain its “political humanist” ideology and resist efforts to label it “a party of the right.”15

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The assumption of national power by a panista highlights a deeper concern once expressed by former party president Felipe Caldero´n: “It is necessary to win the government without losing the party.”16 As panistas win elections and govern in cities and states, they become more exposed to the corruption characterized by the PRI over the years. Especially in states like Baja California Norte, Chihuahua, and Jalisco, this may take the form of narcocorruption. As the party grows in power, membership, and influence, it will surely attract those criminal elements wishing to expand their reach into the political system, or simply political corruption.17 One should add that the PAN has less room for error on corruption issues than its opponents. For example, parties with Catholic roots such as the COPEI in Venezuela and the Christian Democrats in Italy have suffered far worse than their opposition parties after revelations of corruption. The public’s disappointment with its performance in government and some corruption scandals caused the PAN to lose the 2003 midterm elections. Of some consultation to the party was that it managed to finally win the governorship of San Luis Potosı´ and retain the governorship of Quere´taro. It also fought the PRI to close finishes in Sonora, where the PAN has been competitive since the 1980s, and Campeche, where, until recently, the party had little organizational presence. As of this writing, these two races and the distribution of seats in the House of Deputies have yet to be decided, but there is no question the midterm elections are a warning to the PAN that it cannot succeed on good intentions alone. For the PAN, keeping its organizational ideals intact may still be its highest priority. Asked in July 2000 if Fox’s victory ended the “eternal struggle” of which the PAN founders spoke, party president Bravo Mena replied: No, because the eternal struggle was not an electoral thesis that to win is sufficient. The eternal struggle is to make Mexico a generous and well-ordered fatherland. That means a country of justice, of progress, in which the law and rights rule. A country in which we Mexicans can feel fully satisfied to be Mexicans, in which we can work together with others to be better persons, and in which our dignity is fully respected.18

The great test for the PAN during the Fox era and beyond is how it will keep its ideals while dealing with both the demands and the allure of political power.

NOTES 1. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 128. 2. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government, 8–9. 3. Castan˜eda, Perpetuating Power, 214–15. The revelation of Cardenas’s meeting with Salinas after the 1988 election attracted much attention in the Mexican press. 4. Mansfield, Statesmanship and Party Government, 6.

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5. Michael Stott, “Mexico’s Ruling Party Faces Unhappy Birthday,” Reuters (March 3, 1998), http://global.factiva.com/en/arch/display.asp. 6. Jorge Tehera´n, “Buscara´ PRI pactos electorales, anuncian,” El Universal (February 26, 2001), 20. 7. Carlos Martinez Garcı´a, “De los cristeros a Fox,” La Jornada (February 21, 2001), 9. 8. Molly Moore, “Fox Sets Priorities for a New Mexico: President-Elect Targets ‘NESB of Corruption,’” Washington Post ( July 5, 2000), A1. 9. As of early 2002, Fox’s government has made an aggressive push to break the Tijuana drug cartel of the Arellano Felix brothers. 10. Wilkie, Mexico Visto, 219. 11. Claudia Ramos, “Entrevista / Luis Felipe Bravo Mena / Generosidad, tolerancia y dialogo,” Reforma ( July 9, 2000), 6. 12. Pablo Cesar Carrillo, “Entrevista / Mauricio Gomez Morı´n / Fox necesita al partido, AN no necesita a Fox,” Reforma ( July 7, 2000), 8. 13. Jorge Herrera, “Desaparecera´ en semana y media ‘amigos de Fox,’” El Universal ( July 12, 2000), 8. 14. Lucero Ramı´redel Panez, “Urge redefinir ideologı´a y estrucrura del PAN, coinciden dirigenres,” El Universal ( July 12, 2000), 11. 15. Lucero Ramı´rez, “Anticuado, etiquetar al PAN: Ling,” El Universal (August 10, 2000), 13. 16. Fernando Mayolo Lopez, “El sistema no esta´ dispuesto a ser democra´tico; su mesa de la reforma, decorativa”: Felipe Calderon,” Proceso 1009 (March 4, 1996), 27. 17. In 2002, the PAN has been rocked by scandals in the suburbs surrounding Mexico City. Jose´ de Co´rdoba, “In Mexico, Murder Rocks Political Party Know for Probity,” Wall Street Journal (April 12, 2002), 1. 18. Claudia Ramos, “Entrevista,” Reforma ( July 9, 2000), 6.

Bibliography

IN TERVIEW S Luis H. Alvarez, PAN senator (Mexico City, August 23, 1995). Ana Teresa Aranda, former ANCIFEM president and PAN president in Puebla State (Puebla, August 21, 1995). Luis Felipe Bravo Mena, PAN senator (Mexico City, August 27, 1995). Felipe Caldero´n, PAN party president (Conference at SAIS, Washington, DC, October 1997). Jose´ Luis Coindreau, PAN president of Nuevo Leon (Monterrey, May 14, 1997). Angel Alonso Dı´az-Canejo, PAN president of Puebla State, (Washington, DC, October 13, 1998). Professor Manuel Dı´az Cid of the Autonomous Popular University of the State of Puebla (Puebla, August 16, 1995). Manuel Dı´az Teres, COPARMEX director, Mexicali, Baja California Norte (Mexicali, December 11, 1996). Fernando Estrada Samano, PAN National Executive Committee member, (Mexico City, July 20, 1995, and August 30, 1995). Leonardo Garcı´a, PAN state senator from Jalisco (Guadalajara, July 29, 1995). Alicia Garza de Navarro, ANCIFEM chapter in Monterrey (Monterrey, May 16, 1997). Jesu´s Go´mez, president of DHIAC’s Jalisco chapter (Guadalajara, July 26, 1995). Efraı´n Gonza´lez Morfı´n, former PAN president and presidential candidate, secretary of education of Jalisco State (Guadalajara, July 27 1995). Emilio Gonza´lez, PAN regidor (Guadalajara, July 25, 1995). Felipe Gonza´lez Camerera, analyst in PAN’s Secretariat de Estudios (Mexico City, August 20, 1995). Professor Tonatiuh Guille´n Lo´pez, El Colegio de la Frontera (Tijuana, December 12, 1996).

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Index

Abascal, Carlos, 200 Abascal, Salvador, 43, 45–46, 66, 200; founder of colonies, 46 Aburto, Mario, 152–154 Accio´n Cato´lica Mexicana (ACM), 35, 41, 48, 65, 78, 81, 108 Action Franc¸aise, 36, 44, 52n118, 67 Active and Peaceful Civil Resistance (RECAP), 114, 118 Adenauer, Konrad, 72 Aguascalientes, 76–77 Aguascalientes convention (1915), 34 Aguilar Camı´n, Hector, 153 Aguilar Zinser, Adolfo, 180 Aguirre, Ramo´n, 141–42 Alema´n, Miguel, 76–77, 79–80 Alema´n Velasco, Miguel, 146 Alianza Cı´vica, 156–157 Almaza´n, Juan Andreu, 14, 74–75, 77 Almeida, Adalberto, 109, 143 Alvarado, Salvador, 34 Alvarez, Luis H., 12, 80–81, 109–10, 117–18, 136, 140–43, 145–46, 199–200; 1958 “caravan of democracy,” 80; 1986 “caravan of democracy,” 109; PAN’s president, 110, 140–41

Alvarez de Castillo, Enrique, 152 Amparo law, 24 Antireelectionist Party, 31, 65 Aquinas, Thomas, 5 Aranda, Ana Teresa, 100 Araujo, Hugo Andres, 130, 134 Aristotle, 5, 6 Arrellano Feliz gang, 147 Arriola, Woog, Carlos, 83, 120, 145 Asamblea Democra´tica para el Sufragio Efectivo, 116 Asociacio´n Cato´lica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM), 36–38, 41, 46, 64–66, 78, 81, 104 Athenian democracy, 60 Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM), 118 Avila Camacho, Manuel, 75–77, 152 Aviles, Alejandro, 83 Ayala Anguiano, Armando, 152 Azca´rraga, Emilio, 146, 155 Baeza, Francisco, 143 Bailey, John J., 107 Baja California (North), 46, 81, 85, 99, 101, 107, 117, 138, 141, 143, 145, 151–153, 166, 168, 172, 188, 201; (South), 178, 189

218

Index

Bajı´o, 44 Banegas Galva´n, Francisco, 34 Bank of Mexico, 62, 98, 115 Barrio, Francisco, 99, 108, 117, 143, 178, 180, 199 Bartlett Dı´az, Manuel, 107–8, 111, 117–18, 131, 146, 169–71, 178, 189; “Bartlett Law” (Treasury Federalism Act), 170; Chihuahua and “patriotic fraud,” 108–109; Puebla governor, 168–70 Base, the, (Organizacio´n, Cooperacio´n, y Accio´n), 43, 45, 65–66, 75 Batiz, Bernardo, 136, 144–45 Battalion Olympia, 96 Belgium, 24 Beltrones, Manlio Fabio, 153, 176 Bergoend, Bernardo, 29, 36 Bismarck, Otto von, (“kulturkampf ”) 25–26, 29 Bloy, Leon, 57 Bolshevik Revolution, 33 Borrego, Genardo, 133 Bouquet, Manuel, 36 Bravo Mena, Luis Felipe, 85, 113, 133, 144, 146, 149, 181, 200; PAN president, 181 Bruhn, Kathleen (Mexico: The Struggles for Democratic Development), 111 Buendia, Manuel, 132 Burke, Edmund, (“Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents”) 8, 195 Business Coordinating Council (CCE), 113 Cabrera, Luis, 32, 76 Caldera, Rafael, 64, 83 Caldero´n, Luis Vega, 8, 64–65, 68, 172 Caldero´n Hinojosa, Felipe, 110, 137, 155, 172–73, 176–77, 180–81, 183, 201; PAN president, 172 Calles, Plutarco Elı´as, 32–37, 39, 41, 58–59, 61–62, 72, 97, 187; “Calles Law,” 37; “Cry of Guadalajara,” 41, 43; founding of the National Revolutionary Party, 58; “Maximato,” 61; “Six Year Plan,” 41

Camacho, Manuel Solı´s, 130–31, 136, 148, 152–53 Camp, Roderic, xi, (Crossing Swords: Politics and Religion in Mexico), 21 Campeche, 173, 201 Canales, Clariond, Fernando, 108–9, 117, 136, 175 Canon law, 5, 109 Capistra´n Garza, Rene´, 22, 38 Ca´rdenas, Alberto, 167 Ca´rdenas, Cuauhtemoc, 14, 95, 111–12, 116–20, 131, 134–35, 138, 140, 143, 154, 156, 174–76, 183, 185–86, 188, 197; Democratic Current (CD), 112; National Democratic Front (FDN), 95, 116–21, 140, 197; National Liberation Movement, 112; neocardenismo, 139; Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), 6, 10, 12, 111, 140 Ca´rdenas, La´zaro, 42–47, 61–62, 65, 68, 72, 74–75, 105, 111, 129; AntiCatholic policies, 44; Nationalization of the oil industry, 65; Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), 61, 68; Popular Front, 42, 69 Carpizo Macgregor, Jorge, 150 Carranza, Venustiano, 28, 34; carrancistas, 76 Carrillo Puerto, Felipe, 22 Casa del Obrero Mundial, 33 Castan˜eda, Jorge G., 106, 180, 197, 200 Castillo Peraza, Carlos, 11, 12, 100, 110, 136–37, 146, 150–51, 157, 170–72, 174, 179–182; candidate for Mexico City Mayor, 174; PAN’s president, 146, 150, 157 Catholic Church, 6, 12, 21–22, 26–28, 34–35, 37, 46–48, 55 n. 203, 65, 78, 108–9, 115, 131, 134, 143, 147, 170, 187 Catholic Congress, 27 Catholic social doctrine, 1, 5, 11, 21, 25, 40, 46–47, 57, 66–67, 70, 72, 86, 99, 101, 110, 132, 137, 196; solidarity, 68; subsidiarity, 40, 66, 68. See also Quadragesimo Anno; Rerum Novarum

Index Cedillo, Saturnino, 61–2, 74 Celaya, 46 Ceniceros y Villarreal, Rafael, 37 Cervera Pacheco, Victor, 171 Chamber of Deputies, 76, 81–82, 97, 102–104, 119, 134, 138, 140, 151, 157, 170, 173, 174, 176, 177, 180, 198–99, 201 Chapa, Pablo, 170 Chauffyet, Emilio, 176 Chiapas, 31, 132, 146–47, 165, 198 Chihuahua, 62, 65, 67, 78, 80, 85, 99, 106–8, 111, 117, 120, 134, 143, 151, 155, 178, 180, 188, 198, 201; election of 1985, 106–8; election of 1992, 143 Chihuahua City, 107 Chihuahua Group, 107 Chile, 64, 78, 84 Chilpancingo, 69 Christian Democracy, 9, 11–12, 15, 26–27, 44, 57, 64, 66, 68, 79, 81–84, 100–102, 110, 113, 120; Christian Democracy International, 78, 110; in Italy, 201 Christian Family Movement, 108, 113 Christlieb Ibarrola, Adolfo, 10, 69, 71–72, 81–85, 96, 104, 109; facing Christian democrats, 83–84; projection of the Principles of Doctrine, 84 Church and State relations, 6, 11, 21, 22, 27, 29, 30, 35, 37, 47, 57, 136, 147, 196, 199 Ciudad Jua´rez, 80, 100, 108–9, 116, 151, 155, 169 Ciudad Obrego´n, 98 Clariond, Benjamı´n, 175 Claudel, Paul, 57 Clouthier, Manuel J. “Maquı´o,” 98–99, 101, 106, 109, 112–21, 135–36, 138, 166–67, 179, 181–82, 185, 197; campaign themes, 115; death of, 121, 138; “Me´xico en la Liberdad,” 106; presidential candidate, 113–18; Quotes Don Quixote, 115 Coahuila, 28, 141, 183, 188 Coindreau, Jose´ Luis, 108, 121, 175 Colima, 38, 133, 173, 176, 188

219

Coll, Cesar, 167 Colombia, 84 Colosio, Luis Donaldo, 131, 133, 152–54, 165, 170, 177, 179; assassination, 152–53; PRI president, 139; PRI presidential candidate, 152 Comintern, 33 Comite´ de organizacio´n polı´tica electoral independiente (COPEI), 83, 201 Communism, 4, 33, 42, 44, 62, 67, 69, 81, 97 Conchello, Jose´ Angel, 101–102, 104, 138, 141, 144–45 Confederation of Mexican Businessowners (COPARMEX), 99, 113, 181 Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), 55 n. 201, 61, 74, 76, 134, 139, 146 Conservative Party, 22–24, 29, 31, 46 Constitution (1824), 22, 25 Constitution (1857), 23, 25, 35 Constitution (1917), 12 , 28 , 32, 34–37, 52n115, 67, 72, 77, 129, 137, 158, 175, 177, 179, 196; Article 3 (education) 34, 36–37, 41–42, 52n115, 65, 73–74, 77, 79, 109, 136; Article 5, 35, 37, 52n115, 136; Article 24, 136; Article 27 (land ownership), 35, 37, 52n115, 62, 133, 135, 136, 145; Article 33 (foreigners and political activity), 36, 134; Article 82 (eligibility for the presidency), 149, 179; Article 97, 76, 85; Article 115 (municipality), 73, 107; Article 123, (rights of labor) 35, 72; Article 130 (restricting clerical privileges), 35, 37, 52n115, 65, 73, 83, 109, 136–37, 184 Constitutionalists, 34 Constitutional Progressive Party, 31 Coordination Commission for the Political Reform of the State of Guanajuato (CORPEG), 167 Corbala´, Gonzalo, 143 Co´rdoba Montoya, Jose´, 131, 153 Corella, Norberto, 114 Cornelius, Wayne, 138 Correa, Eduardo, J. 29, 31, 32

220

Index

Correa Mena, Luis, 150, 171 Corte´s, Herna´n, 79, 151 Cosı´o Villegas, Daniel, 9–10, 95 Cossio y Cosı´o, Roberto, 72 Cravioto, Alfonso, 34 Creel, Santiago, 199 Crespo, Jose´ Antonio, xiv, 14, 155 Cristero rebellion, 32, 35–36, 38–42, 45, 47–48, 53n148, 58, 59, 64, 66, 109, 113, 184, 187, 199 Cuban Revolution, 112 Cuernavaca, 147 Cuevas, Mariano, 27 Culiaca´n, 140 Dealy, Glen C., 4 Debt crisis, 95, 105 De Gortari, Eli, 130 De la Madrid, Miguel, 95, 106–7, 109, 110–11, 116, 121, 130–31, 134, 152; familia felı´z, 131; presidential candidate, 106 De Lamanais, Felicite´, 24 Delhumeau, Antonio, 70 Del Mazo, Alfredo, 174 Del Villar, Samuel, 157 De Maetzu, Ramiro, 63 Democratic transition theory, 2–5, 8 De Mun, Albert, 36 “Destape,” xiv; destapado, 76, 179 Diamond, Larry, 1 Dı´az, Pascual, 39, 40, 46–47 Dı´az, Porfirio, 24, 27, 28, 29, 30, 48, 59, 153; “Porfiriato,” 66, 69 Dı´az-Canejo, Angel Alonso, 178, 181 Dı´az Ordaz, Gustavo, 14, 82–83, 85, 97 DiPalma, Guiseppi, 3 Directorate of Federal Security (DFS), 133, 177 Donoso Corte´s, 25 Durango, 107, 198 Duverger, Maurice, 13 Echeverrı´a, Luis, 85, 96–99, 101, 103, 104, 112–13, 130, 177; “revolutionary nationalism, 98; Student movement crackdown, 98 Ecological Green Party, 152, 183

Ejido (collectivized farm), 46, 72, 113, 135–36 El Antireeleccionista, 59 El Cubilete, 36, 167, 187 Electoral reform, 148–49, 172–73; of 1946, 76; of 1963, 82, 86; of 1973, 98; of 1977, 103; 1986, 110; 1990–91, 140–41; 1996, 172–73, 178; governability clauses, 111, 173. See also Federal Code of Institutions and Electoral Procedures (COFIPE); Federal Law on Political Organization and Electoral Processes (LFOPPE) Elizondo Torres, Fernando, 136 Elorduy, Aquiles, 65, 76–77 El Paı´s, 27, 30, 31, 32 El Paso, 109 El Universal, 37, 185 Encinas Rodrı´guez, Alejandro, 149 Erhard, Ludwig, 72 Escobar, Jose´ Gonzalo, 39, 58, 74 Estrada Iturbide, Miguel, 64, 66, 68, 78 Estrada Samano, Fernando, 57, 67, 84, 110 Excelsior, 98, 112 Ezquivel Obrego´n, Toribio, 65 Federal Code of Institutions and Electoral Procedures (COFIPE), 140–41, 144, 149, 172 Federal Electoral Code (CFE), 110, 135. See also Electoral Reform of 1986 Federal Electoral Commission, 81–82, 104, 117, 119 Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), 7, 140, 149–50, 156, 166, 172, 185, 187, 196, 198 Federal Electoral Tribunal, 141 Federal Law on Political Organization and Electoral Processes (LFOPPE), 103–4, 135–36, 144. See also electoral reform Federal Tribunal of Elections (TRIFE), 149 Federation of Goods and Services Unions (FESEBES), 134

Index Federation of the Parties of the People, 79 Ferna´ndez de Cevallos, Diego, 136–38, 142, 149, 151–52, 154–56, 170, 174, 179–84; presidential candidate, 151–52, 154–57 Ferna´ndez Somellera, Gabriel, 29, 32 Ferrero, Guglielmo, 7 Flores Mago´n, Jesu´s and Ricardo, 28 Forum on Democracy and Doctrine (El Foro), 144 Fox Quesada, Vicente, ix, 99, 136, 141–42, 149, 151, 157, 166–68, 177, 179–88, 197–201; (A los Pinos), 181; Friends of Fox, 181, 183, 200; Guanajuato state election, 141–42; Operation Tractor, 185; Presidential candidate, 184–86; President, 197–201; “Reform of the State,” 197; San Angel Group, 180 Fraga, Marcelo de los Santos, 175 Franco, Francisco, 62 Fujimori, Alberto, 4 Freemasonry, 22 (see Masonic lodges), 28, 29, 33, 34, 40, 42, 184, 189; Leo XIII’s Humanum Genus, 48n11; Scottish Rite, 22; York Rite, 22 Frei, Eduardo, 64 French Revolution, 17n29, 24–25 Fuerza Popular, 77 Gamboa Patron, Emilio, 131 Ga´ndara, Jose´ Antonio, 119 Gandhi, Mohandas, 36, 114 Garcı´a Abrego, Juan, 171 Garcı´a Barraga´n, Marcelino, 96 Garcı´a Cervantes, Ricardo, 181 Garrido Canabal, Toma´s, 33, 41–43, 45; “Red Shirts,” 42; Garza Laguera, Eugenio, 146 Garza Sada, Eugenio, assassination of, 98–99 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, 111 General Strike Council, 97, 144 Germa´n del Campo, 61 Germany, 4, 25, 44, 72, 83, 171 German Center Party, 29

221

Glorious Revolution (1688), 59 Go´mez, Leopoldo, 116, 119 Go´mez, Rube´n Raymundo, 114 Go´mez Morı´n, Manuel, 9, 10, 12, 13, 14, 60–62, 65–78, 81, 84–86, 96, 98, 103, 108, 112, 143, 182, 199–200; attacks on President Ca´rdenas, 68–69; Christian Democracy, 84; correspondence with Vasconcelos, 64; criticism of the constitution, 62, 65; criticism of the revolution, 63, 65, 69; democracy, 71; early years, 62; importance of Catholic tradition, 63, 65; influence of Ortega y Gasset, 63; Vasconcelos’s campaign treasurer, 60; (1915), 63 Gonza´lez Flores, Anacleto, 36, 38, 44, 52n118, 66 Gonza´lez Garrido, Jose´ Patricinio, 146, 150 Gonza´lez Guevera, Rodolfo, 145 Gonza´lez Hinojosa, Manuel, 85, 102, 104, 114, 143 Gonza´lez Luna, Efraı´n, 46, 66, 68–71, 73–76, 79–81, 84, 96–97, 101, 103; “political humanism,” 71; presidential candidate, 79–80; Gonza´lez Morfı´n, Efraı´n, 84, 97, 99, 101–3, 115, 143, 166; party president, 101; presidential candidate, 97; “solidarismo,” 115 Gonza´lez Morfı´n, Jose´, 200 Gonza´lez Paras, Navidad, 175 Gonza´lez Schmall, Jesu´s, 96, 113, 118, 144–45 Gonza´lez Torres, Jose´, 81–83 Gorosteita, Ernesto, 39 Gramsci, Antonio, 130 Great Britain, 22 Great Depression, 61 “Great party,” 1–2, 4–5, 7–8, 11, 15, 21, 32, 46, 57, 86, 95, 121, 129, 135, 158, 166, 195, 199 Gregory XVI, 24–25 Grupo Accio´n, 33 Grupo Vitro, 101 Guadalajara, 27, 37, 67, 76, 106, 147, 166–67

222

Index

Guanajuato, ix, 14, 42, 44, 46, 67, 76–77, 99–100, 120, 141, 151, 157, 166–68, 172, 184, 187–88 Guerrero, 186, 188, 198 Guille´n Lo´pez, Tonatiuh, 139 Gutie´rrez Barrios, Fernando, 121, 131, 137, 142, 146, 153, 166, 178–79 Gutie´rrez Lascuraı´n, Juan, 78, 80 Gutie´rrez Vega, Hugo, 83 Guzma´n, Fernando, 100. See also Integral Human Development and Civic Action (DHAIC) Halifax, Lord, 59 Halperin, Maurice, 55 n 201 Hamdan, Fauzi, 144 Hank Gonza´lez, Carlos, 131, 154, 179 Hank Rhon, Carlos, 146 Harp Helu, Alfredo, 148 Harvard University, 130, 132, 138 Henrı´quez, Miguel, 79, 111 Heredia, Carlos Marı´a, 42 Hermens, Ferdinand, 4 Hermosillo, 83 Hidalgo, 141, 198 Hidalgo, Miguel, 184 Hinojosa, Gabriel, 169 Huejotzingo, 171–72 Huerta, Victoriano, 28, Decena Tragı´ca, 32, 34 Humanum Genus, 38 Huntington, Samuel, 2 Ibarra Piedra, Rosario, 119 Iglesias, Eduardo, 42 Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), 28 Institute of Economic, Political and Social Studies (IEPES), 131 Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), 1–2, 5, 7–9, 12–15, 58, 70, 77–82, 85–86, 95–99, 101, 103–7, 111–13, 116–21, 129–41, 146–58, 165–67, 170–71, 173–80, 182–85, 188–89, 195, 198, 200; Democratic Current (CD), 112; “dinosaurs” (hard liners), 150, 153, 165, 177; electoral reform, 103; Galileo Group, 177; govern-

ability clause, 140; left wing, 111; National Front of Organizations and Citizens, 133; National Political Council, 133; reformers, or technocrats, 121, 153, 165, 178; “revolutionary nationalism,” 133, 177, 197–98; shocks to the system, 95, 105; “system party,” 121, 198; technocrats, 129; Territorial Movement (MT), 133, 179; “unwritten rules,” 152, 179. See also Revolutionary Family Integral Human Development and Civic Action (DHAIC), 100, 103, 118, 144 Italian Fascism, 61 Itua´rte Servı´n, Alfonso, 78, 82–83 Iturbide, Agustı´n de, 22, 44 Jacobins, 25, 33, 34, 74 Jalisco, 29, 31, 36, 38, 42, 100, 114, 120, 143, 147, 152, 157, 166, 170, 172, 188 James, Daniel, 119–20 Jime´nez Guzma´n, Manuel, 184 Jime´nez Remus, Gabriel, 137, 143, 167 Johnson, Kenneth, 2 John Paul II, 101, 104, 132, 137 Jonguitud Barrios, Carlos, 131 Juan Diego, 44, 54 n185 Jua´rez, Benito, 23, 24, 26, 35, 44, 137, 189 King, Martin Luther, 114 Klesner, Joseph, 116, 119 Knight, Alan, 59 Knights of Columbus, 36 Korrodi, Lino, 181, 200 Krauze, Enrique, 24, 63–64, 96, 108, 180 Labastida, Francisco, 113, 121, 131, 179, 185–86, 188, 198; “healthy closeness,” 185; presidential candidate, 179, 185–86 La Nacio´n (National Catholic Party newspaper), 30, 32 Landerriche Obrego´n, Juan, 64, 144

Index Latin American Bishops Conference, 84, 104–5; Medellı´n, 84; Puebla, 105 Latin American Student Conference, 64 League for the Defense of Religious Liberty (LDRL), 37, 38 Lee Kwan Yew, 4 Legion, the, 42, 65 Legorreta, Eduardo, 132 Le Monde, 153 Leo XIII (Rerum Novarum), 26, 27, 29, 40, 57, 66, 68 Leo´n, 44, 76, 142, 151, 168 Leo´n de la Barra, Francisco, 31 Lerdo de Tejeda, Sebastian, 24 Leyva, Xicotencatl, 152 Liberalism, 21, 22, 25 Liberalization, 6 Liberal Party, 22, 23, 29, 30 Liberation theology, 84, 105 Linz, Juan, 9 Lira Mora, Humberto, 187 Livas, Javier, 151 Loaeza, Soledad, 9, 11, 63, 65, 77, 86, 97, 101, 105, 151 Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 10, 55n201, 61, 64, 76, 134 Lo´pez de Santa Anna, Antonio, 23 Lo´pez Mateos, Adolfo, 60, 81, 83 Lo´pez Obrador, Andre´s Manuel, 174–75, 185 Lo´pez Portillo, Jose´, 99, 103–5, 113, 130, 144; electoral reform of 1977, 103; “last revolutionary president,” 104; nationalized the banking system, 99, 105 Lo´pez Portillo y Rojas, Jose´, 31 Lozano Gracia, Antonio, 165, 170–71 Los Altos, 38 Lujambio, Alonso, 62 Mabry, Donald J., 11, 77 Machiavelli, Niccolo, 5, 66 Madero, Francisco I., (The Presidential Succession of 1910), 28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 50n54, 59, 60, 101, 113, 139, 177 Madero, Pablo Emilio, 100–3, 106,

223

109–10, 117, 144–45, 151; presidential candidate, 106 Madero de Garcı´a, Teresa, 100 Madrazo, Carlos A., 112, 133 Madrazo, Roberto, 133, 179, 198–99 Maldonado, Braulio, 81 Mandela, Nelson, 184 Manent, Pierre, 7 Mansfield, Harvey, 195, (Statesmanship and Party Government), 198 Marcos, Ferdinand, 114 Marcos, “Subcomandante,” 147 Marı´a Auxiliadora, 46 Maritain, Jacques, 46, 66, 67; (Integral Humanism), 66 Martı´nez, Ifigenia, 118 Martı´nez, Luis Marı´a, 38, 46–47, 61–62 Martı´nez, Patricio, 178 Maurras, Charles, 36, 44 Maximilian (Emperor of Mexico), 23, 30, 151 Mecham, J. Lloyd, 34 Medellı´n, (Latin American Bishops Conference) 84 Medina Plascencia, Carlos, 100, 142, 167, 176 Mejı´a, Toma´s, 23 Me´ndez Arce, Sergio, 147 Mendez Medina, Alfredo, 35 Me´rida, 83, 85, 150–51, 174 Mexicali, 85, 107 Mexican Apostolic Church, 37 Mexican Communist party, 33, 37, 61 Mexican Congress, 24, 32, 58, 73, 132, 137, 140, 151, 156, 166, 173–74, 188, 196. See also Chamber of Deputies Mexican Democratic Party (PDM), 114, 145, 166 Mexican Labor Party, 33 Mexican Liberal Party, 28 Mexican Revolution (1910–1920), 1, 6, 9, 11, 27, 28, 41, 43, 46, 47, 58, 63, 69, 85, 137, 152, 196; defending the “true” revolution, 79; myth of the revolution, 58; revolutionary ideology, 95 Mexican Socialist Party, 33

224

Index

Mexican Social Secretariat (SSM), 35, 41, 48 Mexico City (also, Federal District), 29, 34, 42, 67–68, 80, 95, 100, 106–7, 110, 117–18, 120, 129, 132, 139, 142, 145–46, 154, 166, 173–74, 185–89, 198; earthquake of 1985, 95, 107, 166 Mexico State, 29, 31, 120, 141, 149, 183, 188 Meyer, Jean, 32 Michaels, Albert, 44, 74 Michelena, Margarita, 112 Michoaca´n, 29, 31, 38, 42, 46, 66, 77–78, 111, 117, 120, 132, 143, 148, 172, 189 Miramo´n, Miguel, 23 Molinar, Juan, 103 Monsiva´is, Carlos, 165 Montalembert, Charles, 24 Monterrey, 65, 76–77, 83, 96, 101, 106, 121, 138, 151, 175 Monterrey Group, 98 Monterrey Technological Institute of Sinaloa, 113 Montesquieu, 6 Monzo´n, Luis G., 34 Mora y del Rı´o, Jose´ Marı´a, 29, 37, 39 Morelia, 27, 37, 38, 46, 67 Morelos, 187 Moreno Pena, Fernando, 176 Morones, Luis N., 33, 36, 39, 59 Morrow, Dwight, 39, 58, 60–61 Morse, Richard, 5 Mu´gica, Francisco J., 33, 34, 36, 74. See also Jacobins Municipality, (“free”), 7, 60, 62, 79 Mun˜oz Ledo, Porfirio, 112, 118–19, 141, 176 Mun˜oz Roca, Manuel, 171 Murguia, Hector, 177 MURO, 144 Murray, John Courtney, 57 Mussolini, Benito, 60 National Action Party (PAN), 1–2, 5–6, 8–15, 21, 46, 48, 57, 62–63, 65–86, 95–121, 129, 131, 134–46, 148–58,

165–85, 188, 195–201; Absentionism, 58, 85–86; agrarian reform, 72; “Alliance for Change,” 183; amending the anticlerical articles, 136–37; antisystem elements, 15, 129, 143–45, 195; the Base’s contribution, 65; Cambio Democra´tico de Estructuras, 84; capitalism, 101; Christian Democracy and PAN, 68, 83, 102; concertacesio´n, 142, 144, 158, 166; “confessional” party, 11, 68, 82, 86; cooperation with Salinas, 134–35; Cuba, 172; education, 73; election of 2000, 184; elections of 1985, 107–8; electoral fraud in 1988, 118–20; electoral reform, 73, 104, 110–11, 136, 140; el Foro, 144; “the eternal struggle,” 15, 74, 100, 181, 201; federalism, 166–69; first convention, 67; ideology (“political humanism”), 13, 70, 115, 200; “institutionalized” 10; Integral Human Development and Civic Action (DHAIC) and PAN, 100; internal democracy, 13; La Nacio´n, 69, 83, 97, 110; land reform, 135; land seizures, 99; “Loyal opposition,” 9; “Minimum Program,” 72; municipality proposals, 73, 107; NAFTA, 137–138; “National Commitment for Legitimacy and Democracy,” 136; national conventions of 1975–76, 99, 102; National Council, 110, 135; National Executive Committee (CEN), 13, 65, 67, 110, 144, 176, 180, 200; National Political Accord, 165, 171; neopanism, 96, 101, 103–4, 112, 120, 136, 139, 179, 182; The Non-Violent Political Struggle: Criteria and Methods, 114; origin of party name, 67; Palabra, 110, 135; participation strategy, 58, 76, 103; party conventions, 77–78; party platform, 79; peso crisis, 170, 172; presidential candidate selection, 14, 181–82; Principles of Doctrine, 68, 70, 73, 200; projection of the Principles of Doctrine, 84; reforming anticlerical articles, 73; shadow cabinet, 136;

Index “solidarity,” 68 “subsidiarity,” 12, 68, 72, 168; “System party,” 1, 8, 9, 48, 57, 95–96, 158, 195; Tlatelolco massacre, response to, 97; traditionalists, 101–3, 181; Value Added Tax, 177; youth organization, 83 National Antireelection Party, 59 National Autonomous University of Mexico, 130 National Catholic Confederation of Workers (CNCT), 36–37 National Catholic Party (PCN), 12, 21, 27, 29, 30, 31, 32, 34, 37, 47, 67, 85; Prototype of “system party,” 47 National Civic Association of Women (ANCIFEM), 100, 114, 118, 144–45 National Commission of Human Rights (CNDH), 132 National Conference of Catholic Students of Mexico (CNECM), 64 National Democratic Front (FDN), 95, 116–21, 135, 140, 145, 197. See also Cuauhtemoc Ca´rdenas. National Program of Solidarity (PRONASOL), also “Solidaridad,” 132, 141, 146, 152, 156, 169 National Revolutionary Party (PNR), 35, 41, 58–60 National Union of Catholic Students (UNEC), 64, 65 National University of Mexico, 64, 130 Also see National Autonomous University of Mexico, 130 Nava, Salvador, 142, 175 Nayarit, 182 Nazism, 4, 44 Newell, Roberto, 96 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 132, 137–38, 141, 147–48, 153, 184 Nuevo Leo´n, 77, 100, 108, 117, 133, 157, 173, 175, 188, 199 Nuncio, Abraham, 13, 67 Nun˜ez, Arturo, 151 Oaxaca, 27, 78, 116, 132, 198 Obrego´n, Alvaro, 33–35, 37–38, 58–60, 62, 152–53 Obrego´n, Carlos, 76

225

O’Connell, Daniel, 24, 36 O’Donnell, Guillermo, 1–4, 195 Oil Workers’ Union, 131 Operarios Guadalupanos, 27 Orozco y Jimenez, Francisco, 37 Ortega Marguerita, 138–39 Ortega y Gasset, Jose´, 63, 67 Ortiz, Francisco, 184 Ortiz Arana, Fernando, 153, 175 Ortiz Gallegos, Eugenio, 113, 144 Ortiz Mena, Antonio, 146 Ortiz Rubio, Pascual, 59–61 Padilla, Eziquel, 77 Padilla, Jorge, 157, 170, 190n27 Padilla, Juan Ignacio, 45 Palacios Alcocer, Mariano, 178 Palomar y Vizcarra, Miguel, 27, 32, 39 Panebianco, Angelo, 15 Paoli Bolio, Francisco, 83, 144 Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), 6, 10, 12, 111, 140–43, 145, 148, 150, 172, 174–77, 180, 182–184, 188–89, 199; “Alliance for Mexico,” 183, 188–89; Brigadas del Sol, 175 Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), 61, 68, 70, 73–75 Party of the National Cardenista Renovation Front (PFCRN), 118 Palavicini, Felix, 34 Parsons, Wilfred, 39 Pattee, Richard, 42 Pax Romana, 81 Payan, Ana Rosa, 150 Pegu´y, Charles, 57, 63 Petro´leos de Me´xico (PEMEX), 105, 184–85, 198 Peru, 4 Pesch, Heinrich, 97 Philip II, 27 Philippines, 114 Phillippi, Ernesto, 36 Pichardo, Ignacio, 154 Pino Suarez, Jose´ Marı´a, 31, 32 Pius IX, 23, (Syllabus of Errors), 25; 26

226

Index

Pius XI, (Quadragesimo Anno), 40–41, 66, 68; Paterna Sane Sollicitudo, 40; Acerba Animi, 42 Pius XII, 57 Plan of Ayutla (1855), 23 Plan of Guadalupe (1913), 34 Polı´tica y Profesio´n Revolucionaria, 130. See also Salinas, Carlos de Gortari Political culture, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 34, 47, 135, 175, 195 Political liberty, xi, xiv, xvi, 4, 6, 7, 10, 13, 17n29, 24, 28, 32, 37, 63, 65, 73, 154, 195–96 Popular Socialist Party (PPS), 10, 118, 134 Portes Gil, Emilio, 33, 39–40, 58 Portugal, 34 Posadas, Juan Jesu´s, 134, 147, 165–66, 170; his assassination, 147, 165, 166 Preciado, Felipe de Jesu´s, 167 Preciado Hernandez, Rafael, 68, 81 Prigione, Jeronimo, 109, 134, 147 Pro, Miguel Agustı´n, 38, 64 Proceso, 112, 179 Protestantism, 34 Prud’homme, Jean-Francois, 13 Przeworski, Adam, 3 Puebla, 27, 31, 100, 168–69, 171, 181, 188, 198 Quadragesimo Anno, 40–41, 66, 68 Quere´taro, 23, 31, 42, 47, 58, 151, 173, 175, 178, 201 Quirk, Robert, 34 Quiroga, 77 Raiffeissen banks, 27 Ramo 26, 169 Ramos, Samuel, 5 Reform Laws, 23, 24, 25, 26, 30, 32, 137 Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), 32, 36–37, 39, 59–61 Religioneros, 24 Rerum Novarum, (“On the Conditions of the Working Classes”), 27, 31, 40 Revolutionary Confederation of Workers and Peasants (CROC), 139

Revolutionary Family, 6, 9–10, 28, 32–33, 36, 39, 44, 45, 47, 58, 60, 61, 66, 69, 74, 79, 195, 198 Revolutionary Party of National Unification (PRUN), 10 Reyes, Bernardo, 28 Reyes Heroles, Jesu´s, 101, 103 Rivero, Norberto, 187 Rizzo, Socrates, 175 Robles, Miguel Alessio, 65 Rocha, Lauro, 40 Rodriguez, Antonio L., 77 Rodriguez Lapuente, Manuel, 83–84 Roman law, 5 Romero, Cecilia, 100, 145 Romo de Alba, Manuel, 42, 65 Rosas, Adalberto, 98, 108–9, 151, 176 Rosas Magallo´n, Salvador, 81, 101–2, 139 Rubio, Luis, 96 Ruffo, Ernesto, 99–100, 138–39, 144, 168, 172, 199; Baja California Norte governor, 139 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo, 79–80, 111, 184 Ruiz Massieu, Jose´ Francisco, 130, 135, 165, 170 Ruiz y Flores, Leopoldo, 37, 39 Russia, 39 Salas, Jose´ Luis, 118, 136, 155 Salazar, Jose´ Florencio, 186 Salgado, Enrique, 176 Salinas de Gortari, Carlos, xii, 1, 14, 111, 116–17, 120–21, 129–38, 140–43, 146–53, 156–58, 165, 177, 197, 199; early years, 129–30; grupo compacto, 130; Polı´tica y Profesio´n Revolucionaria, 130; presidential candidate, 116–17; privatization, 134, 136; Secretariat of Programming and Budget (SPP), 130; social liberalism, 133, 178 Salinas de Gortari, Rau´l, 170–71 Saltillo, 151 San Luis Potosı´, 61, 107–8, 141–42, 173, 175, 188, 201; city of, 151 San Pedro Garza Garcı´a, 83, 175 Sansores, Layda, 186

Index Santacruz, Antonio, 66 Santiago, Chile, 78 Sarmiento, Sergio, 156 Sartori, Giovanni, 2 Sauri, Dulce Marı´a, 150 Schapiro, Ian, 3 Scherlen, Renee, 157 Schmitter, Philippe, 1–4, 195 Schumpeter, Joseph, 2, 3 Second Vatican Council (1962–65), 47, 55n203, 84, 96 Secretariat for Social Development, 132 Secretariat of Programming and Budget (SPP), 130. See also Salinas de Gortari, Carlos September 23 League, 98 Silva Herzog, Jesu´s, 186 Silva Nieto, Fernando, 175 Simpson, Leslie Byrd, 43 Sinaloa, 98, 113, 115, 140, 179 Sinarquismo (UNS), 21, 43–48, 55n201, 64, 66, 72, 79, 114, 166; Fuerza Popular, 77 “great ‘antiparty’,” 43, 44; hispanidad, 44; Mexican Democratic Party (PDM), 114 Singapore, 4 Slim Helu, Carlos, 146–47 Soberanes, Jose´ Luis, 177 Social encyclicals. See Catholic social doctrine Socialist Party of the Southeast, 33 Social market economy, 72, 114 Sociedad Cato´lica de Me´xico, la, 25 Solidaridad. See National Program of Solidarity (PRONASOL) Sonora, 28, 33, 35, 98, 107–8, 138, 173, 201 Sontheimer, Kurt, 4 Sorensen, Theodore C., 156 South America, 84 Spain, 21, 25, 63, 180; Pact of the Moncloa, 180 Spanish Civil War, 62 Stepan, Alfred, 5, 8 Supreme Court, 73, 76–78, 80, 85, 111, 168 Tabasco, 179, 198

227

Tamaulipas, 148 Teachers’ Union, 131 Tejada, Adelberto, 33, 37, 40, 41 Televisa, 116, 155 Tello, Carlos, 130 Tera´n Tera´n, Hector, 140, Territorial Movement, 133 Tijuana, 85, 107, 147, 151–52 Tlatelolco massacre, 85, 95–98, 105, 153 Tlaxcala, 77, 178 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 5, 6, 7, (Democracy in America), 23; (“The Old Regime and the French Revolution”), 17n29 Toral, Jose´ de Leo´n, 38–39, 59 Torres Bueno, Manuel, 44 Torres Sarranı´a, Manuel, 77 Troncoso, Jose´ Marı´a, 27 Trotsky, Leon, 62 Trueba, Alfonso, 45 Trueba Olivares, Jose´, 45 TV Azteca, 187 “U,” the, 38 UNE-Ciudadanos en Movimiento, 134 Unio´n Cı´vica Leonesa, 76 Unio´n Nacional de Padres de Familia (UNPF), 36, 72 Unio´n de Obreros Cato´licos, 27 Unio´n Polı´tico-Social de los Cato´licos Mexicanos, 29 Unio´n Popular, 36, 42–43, 47, 61 United States, 22–23, 28, 44, 108, 111, 141 Vasconcelos, Jose´, 14, 59–60, 61, 64, 75, 77; (Brief History of Mexico), 59; (Mexican Ulysses), 60 Vasquez, Josefina, 199 Vatican II, See Second Vatican Council Vela´zquez, Fidel, 134, 179 Venezuela, 64, 83–84 Vera, Ignacio Loyala, 175 Veracruz, 33, 40–41, 79, 188, 198 Vallina, Eloy, 107, 147 Vicencio Tovar, Abel, 104, 136–37, 144, 146 Villa, Francisco “Pancho,” 28, 34

228

Index

Villa Escalera, Ricardo, 107, 180 Villarreal, Francisco, 100, 109, 169 Virgin of Guadalupe, 29, 34, 43, 54n185, 184; shrine, 36 Von Ketteler, Wilhelm Emmanuel, 25 Von Sauer, Franz, 9, 78 Wagner Wagner, Carlos, 137 Walesa, Lech, 184 War of the Reform (1860), 23 Weber, Max, 195 Weimar Republic, 4 Wilkie, Edna de Monzo´n, 65 Wilkie, James W., 22, 65 Windhorst, Ludwig, 29 Wolfe, Bertram, 33 World War I, 26 World War II, 4, 46, 57, 111

Yucata´n, 33, 34, 85, 100, 105, 120, 141, 150, 157, 171, 174, 188, 197 Zacatecas, 29, 31, 37, 178 Zapata, Emiliano, 28, 34 Zapata, Fausto, 142–43 Zapatistas, 147–48, 152, 165 Zedillo Ponce de Leo´n, Ernesto, 14, 130–31, 153–56, 165–66, 168–73, 176–78, 186, 188–89, 196; “New Federalism,” 169; PRI presidential candidate, 153–57; as president, 165–66, 168–73, 176–78, 186, 188–89, 196 Zogby International, 186 Zorrilla, Jose´ Antonio, 131 Zuno, Jose´ Guadalupe, 36

About the Author

MICHAEL J. ARD is Second Secretary, Political Section, U.S. Embassy, Caracas, Venezuela. Dr. Ard has served as a political analyst for the U.S. government since 1997. His articles have appeared in Crisis, Organization Trends, and The Roepke Review.