Local Mexico: Democratic Transitions in an Authoritarian Context 9781626377684

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LOCAL MEXICO

LOCAL MEXICO Democratic Transitions in an Authoritarian Context

Patricia Olney

Published in the United States of America in 2018 by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. 1800 30th Street, Boulder, Colorado 80301 www.firstforumpress.com

and in the United Kingdom by FirstForumPress A division of Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Gray’s Inn House, 127 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1 5DB

© 2018 by Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Olney, Patricia, 1963– author. Title: Local Mexico : democratic transitions in an authoritarian context / by Patricia Olney. Description: Boulder : Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc., [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018011887 | ISBN 9781626376830 (hc : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Local government—Mexico—Case studies. Classification: LCC JS2111 .O56 2018 | DDC 320.80972—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011887

British Cataloguing in Publication Data A Cataloguing in Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Printed and bound in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials Z39.48-1992.

5  4  3  2  1

To the memory of Papito, and to Elsa, with gratitude

Contents

List of Tables and Figures Acknowledgments

ix xi

Introduction

1 Mexico’s Democratic Transition in Context

Part 1 Factional Defeats: Electoral Coups

1

19

2 The Multiplication of the PRI

47

4 The Division of the PRI

85

3 The Case of Cacalchén 5 The Case of Parácuaro

65

103

Part 2 Snowball Defeats: Electoral Revolts 6 Anatomy of a Snowball Defeat

133

8 Snowballs in Indigenous Municipalities

169

7 The Case of Hunucmá 9 The Case of Chemax

Part 3 Transformational Defeats: Electoral Revolutions 10 Entrepreneurs and Transformational Defeats 11 The Case of Zamora

vii

155

177

205

231

viii

Contents

Part 4 Conclusion

12 Lessons Learned

Bibliography Index About the Book

255 275 323 351

Tables and Figures

Tables

3.1 Cacalchén Municipal Electoral Results, 1987–2015 3.2 Names and Party Affiliation of Cacalchén’s Mayors, 1988–2012 5.1 Opposition Vote During Period of PRI Hegemony in Parácuaro 5.2 Parácuaro Municipal Elections, 1977–2015 7.1 Hunucmá Municipal Elections, 1987–2015 9.1 Chemax Municipal Elections, 1978–2015 11.1 Zamora Mayors, 1984–2018 11.2 Zamora Municipal Elections, 1977–2015 12.1 Comparative Table of PRI Defeat Types

71

76

117 119 163 195 241 245 263

Figures

3.1 3.2 5.1 5.2 7.1 7.2 9.1 9.2 11.1 11.2

Cacalchén Municipal Elections, 1987–2015 Cacalchén Municipal Elections, 1987–2015 Parácuaro Municipal Elections, 1977–2015 Parácuaro Municipal Elections, 1977–2015 Hunucmá Municipal Elections, 1978–2015 Hunucmá Municipal Elections, 1978–2015 Chemax Municipal Elections, 1978–2015 Chemax Municipal Elections, 1978–2015 Zamora Municipal Elections, 1977–2015 Zamora Municipal Elections, 1977–2015 ix

73 73 121 122 157 158 196 197 243 244

Acknowledgments

It would probably take a book as long as this entire volume to thank all the people who helped make this project possible, some of whom, I am sad to say, have passed away, but I have to try to mention at least a small fraction of them. My greatest debt is to Elsa Montaño, whose tireless efforts to help me obtain interviews and to keep me informed (with material often supplied by Joél Hernández) kept me from giving up. Members of all the main political parties in Mexico also provided me with invaluable assistance. Juan Luis Calderón Hinojosa, Arnulfo Vázquez, Ignacio Peña, Luis H. Álvarez, Miguel Medina Maldonado, and Florentina Villalobos, among so many others in the PAN, went well beyond the call of duty to help me along. I thank Humberto López Torres, Andrés Grajales, José Luis Sierra Villarreal, and Jorge Varona Rodríguez, within the PRI, for providing me with such candid accounts of the way the party operated in their states. Felipe Álvarez Calderón, Mario Enzáztiga Santiago, Jaime García, and Jorge Luis Tinajero are among those in the PRD who shared not only their candid accounts but also introduced me to local mayors who gave me firsthand experience of their travails. It pains me not to be able to mention the hundreds of people who helped me in the dozens of towns I visited, but I must at least thank Esperanza Torres and Armando Villaseñor of Parácuaro for befriending and hosting me during my repeated visits. Medardo Uc Chimal also gave me invaluable help on my trips to Chemax. At the University of Miami, I am grateful to my classmate Alejandro Alvarado, who helped me with sources in Yucatán, and to Bruce Bagley and Bill Smith, who provided me with their guidance and friendship upon the untimely deaths of two of my most beloved mentors, Enrique Baloyra xi

xii

Acknowledgments

and Alexander McIntire. Thanks to a visiting research fellowship generously granted to me by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, I had the privilege of spending time with Mexico experts who contributed to the insights in this book, especially those touching on economic issues. Richard Millett, now among my dearest friends, contributed to the project in the most valuable way—by becoming my mentor and teaching me the importance of cultivating relationships. He also connected me with Linda Robinson, then Latin America bureau chief of U.S. News & World Report, who hired me, mentored me, and served as the best model possible of a top-notch professional and excellent writer. My university, Southern Connecticut State University, was also extremely supportive. I received summer research grants, minority recruitment and retention grants, and a one-year sabbatical to bring this project to fruition. My department colleagues also offered me invaluable support, including Clyde Weed, Jonathan O’Hara, Arthur Paulson, and Theresa Marchant-Shapiro. Among those I may owe the most are the many kind people who stepped in to substitute for my far-away family during my brushes with death and disability, including Mike Fenton and Daniela Balzano, Patricia and John Zibluk, Sally Flagler, Krystyna Gorniak, Xiaomei Yang, Wilmer Barzallo, Nick Benas, Betsey Muirden, Jess Detlefsen, Joe Trzaska, Nancy Ciarleglio, the Connecticut Hospice nurses, and my many doctors and surgeons. Finally, I thank my acquisitions editors at Lynne Rienner, Jessica Gribble and Carrie Broadwell-Tkach, and my copyeditor, Jennifer Kelland, for their professionalism, kindness, and patience. I hope the hundreds of others who helped me complete this project will not feel slighted by their absence here as each and every one has my most heartfelt thanks.

Introduction

The saying “fuera de México, todo es Cuautitlán” (outside Mexico City, everything is Cuautitlán) has become somewhat of a metaphor for the complex relationship between local Mexico and Mexico the country, often synonymous with its capital, Mexico City. Coined by the legendary beauty nicknamed la Güera Rodríguez, known mostly for her A-list lovers, like Simón Bolívar, Alexander von Humboldt, and particularly Mexico’s liberator-emperor Agustín Iturbide, the phrase embodies the arrogance of the elitist, centralist culture associated with Mexico City. Not only did everyone who was anyone live in the capital, but any place outside it was a worthless outpost by comparison, with inferior, uncultured, inconsequential residents. Any attempt to distinguish between one part of this nothingness and another or to assign any of it some importance was a waste of time. Yet Mexican states, municipalities, and the myriad of communities that comprise them not only have their own unique histories and cultures but also host events that can be very consequential to the nation, as demonstrated by the 1994 outbreak of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) guerrillas in a few municipalities of Chiapas. Each is a font of diversity. In some, blue and green eyes almost outnumber the dominant brown ones, as migrant enclaves of Russians, Italians, Armenians, Israelis, Chinese, Palestinians, Lebanese, Japanese, French, and Germans, among many others, dot the country. Most municipalities have hidden natural treasures within their often hundreds of far flung “localities:” waterfalls, caves, springs, forests, lakes, and butterfly sanctuaries, to name a few. Many are the birthplaces of famous national heroes, including two from Cuautitlán: the quasi-mythical peasant Juan Diego, who allegedly witnessed an appearance by the Virgin of

1

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Guadalupe, and Luis Nishizawa, a famous Japanese Mexican painter captivated by the beauty of both local Mexico and places like Japan, Belgium, and the United States. Cuautitlán is to some degree a microcosm of the diversity of local Mexico, as its communities include farms, old haciendas, agrarian cooperatives (ejidos), and cities. It has a rich precolonial and colonial history and, like many municipalities, has suffered from divisions and border disputes. It lost much of its territory with the creation of Cuautitlán Izcalli, now the scene of violent disputes among four major drug cartels. The greatest irony, however, is that Cuautitlán has not only rendered the old saying obsolete but reversed it—now dentro de Cuautitlán, todo es México (inside Cuautitlán everything is Mexico). Mexico City’s explosive growth, due in great part to in-migration from the rest of Mexico, led to Cuautitlán’s absorption into greater Mexico City. It is also a main site of housing developments where middle-class Mexico City employees, the new “somebodies” of Mexico, return to their homes in an attempt to mimic a suburban lifestyle. Meanwhile, Mexico City’s demographics increasingly reflect a mass influx from thousands of communities nationwide. Local Mexico remains relatively unknown in much of urban Mexico, however, partly because that elitist mind-set persists, but also because the difficult geography and ethnic diversity have made difficult completing the task of national integration, undertaken with considerable success by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) regime. Anyone from Mexico City is effectively a stranger in much of local Mexico, which, despite Mexico’s dramatic urban transformation, still has many rural pockets. As one of the first opposition mayors of Zamora, Ignacio Peña García, said about a 1994 trip to Chiapas, after the EZLN put indigenous Mexico on the map for the first time for most urban Mexicans, “I was surprised at the poverty in poor communities I never knew existed within my native Zamora, but the four municipalities I visited in Chiapas were like another planet. I felt like a space invader.” This “otherness” of local Mexico, common to much of the developing world, persuaded me that I could overcome my biases and fears about the country where I was born and raised, when prudence advised avoiding politics. Perhaps the most emphasized value in my formative years was aguante, a combination of resignation and endurance that contributed greatly to the Mexican resilience but may have impeded its transformative potential. I had avoided studying Mexico, undertaking research in Peru, Colombia, and the Southern Cone, and even comparative studies that never bore fruit in places like Brazil and far away Azerbaijan and

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Turkey. Nostalgia and the inevitable attraction of what had been forbidden when I was younger meant that Mexico always beckoned to me. I may have inherited another attraction from my father, who seemed to find refuge from the dark eastern European roots he would not discuss, in the honesty, warmth, and simplicity of small-town Mexico. Quite charismatic, he was greeted with enthusiasm by local residents when we left the city on day trips. Although cancer tragically cut his life short when I was eleven, I still remember his lamenting on our way home from these excursions that Mexico needed a revolution every fifty years. Yet I remembered these towns as devoid of politics, without the constant chatter about imminent devaluations, relentless complaining, and the presidential jokes that were a favorite pastime in Mexico City. They were places where time seemed to stop, where my sister and I chased sheep, and where we were taught (unsuccessfully) to make tortillas from scratch. Even the shah of Iran’s mansion in Tepotzlán, with its seemingly impossibly high walls, seemed an example not of the presence of politics but of its ability to hide from view, away from the city’s bright lights. When I started traveling to small towns in the 1990s, despite the increasing competitiveness of elections reflected in statistics, interest in politics was not widespread. However, interviewing the protagonists of political struggles revealed that Mexican local politics was fascinating, partly because each municipal case was simultaneously unique and fractallike. As common threads emerged from the broad diversity of political stories in towns and cities that had experienced competitive elections since the PRI’s formation, a limited variety of patterns started to take shape and seemed to repeat themselves at every level of government— as they probably do throughout the developing world. I first learned about the power of local research to reveal the inner workings of the still hermetic PRI system when I met with high-level PRI representatives in Chiapas and Tabasco in 1992 and 1993, while studying opposition to the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as a graduate student. Most were members of the “1968 Generation,” a left-leaning PRI group that defected spiritually from the PRI system after the Tlatelolco student massacre at the hands of the Gustavo Díaz Ordáz government that year. They were critical of the regime’s authoritarianism and particularly at odds with then president Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s administration and policies. Through them I learned about the Zapatista guerrillas over a year before they burst onto the national scene and caught a glimpse of the still shrouded divisions in the PRI. It also became evident that the state-level PRI in the south had far more power over that region than the federal government.

4

Introduction

I started this study soon after the spectacular rise of the National Action Party (PAN) in the 1994 presidential elections. Diego Fernández de Cevallos had surprised everyone by beating both Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) and the PRI’s Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León in the first televised national presidential debate. He had mysteriously vanished from the public scene during the rest of the campaign period but even so managed an impressive 24 percent of the vote at the time of the election. Many had their eyes on Cárdenas, hoping he would finally triumph after allegedly being cheated of his victory in 1988, when a five-day “system failure” reversed voting tendencies that were, until then, strongly in his favor. The PAN had often been dismissed as the “loyal opposition,” the party that seemed to exist mainly to give the PRI some democratic legitimacy. I remembered seeing the same workers painting slogans and distributing propaganda for both the PAN and the PRI when I was growing up. Yet Clement Moore (1970, 51) had predicted that if the state ever stopped embodying the Mexican Revolution in the eyes of citizens, a multiparty system would inevitably result. He further predicted that the PAN, based on its two significant victories in 1967 (Mérida and Hermosillo), could break the PRI’s monopoly on power. Its potential seemed worth exploring. After several more security-oriented research trips to the Colombian jungle, Paraguay, Argentina, and Uruguay, I finally went home to Mexico in March 1995 to study Mexico’s democratization, partly because, after I had faced several close calls in conflict-ridden regions, studying the emergence of local Mexican party systems seemed safer. I started with preliminary research in Mexico City. At the PAN offices in Coyoacán, I had a long conversation with Humberto Aguilar Coronado, then PAN organization secretary and Felipe Calderón Hinojosa’s personal assistant and later a member of President Vicente Fox’s cabinet and a senator for his native Puebla. I asked to see a thick list of municipal PAN victories on his desk. As I flipped through the more than fifty pages, I was amazed not only by the number of PAN victories but also by the time span they covered. There had been at least a dozen victories in the 1940s, and both the pace of PRI defeats and their numbers increased dramatically in the three most recent decades at the time. It won 120 elected posts between 1939 and 1979 but won posts at over six times that rate between 1982 and 1991, when it chalked up 187 more, and increased its pace tenfold from there to win 222 municipalities between 1994 and 1995 (Loaeza 1997, 105). I was fascinated not only by the pattern of PAN victories but also by the refreshing honesty of

Introduction

5

some of the party’s exponents, like Humberto, and especially Juan Luis Calderón Hinojosa, former president Felipe Calderón’s brother, who helped me in Morelia as I did research over the years in Michoacán. They made me aware that local victories did not necessarily mean political modernization or democratization. Juan Luis noted in 1995 that much of what looked like progress in statistics was misleading as PRI defeats often represented the perpetuation of caciquismo (strongman rule), and in many areas drug traffickers controlled local affairs. It also became evident that the fault lines in Mexican politics still fell along political camarillas (and families) that cut across parties, ideologies, and economic sectors, blind to any legal distinctions in the activities of their members. Michel Antochiw, a French anthropologist working on an encyclopedia of Yucatán, was presciently pessimistic that alternation in power could change anything in less industrialized states because of the inseparability of economic, political, and familial authoritarian strands in the political fabric. Others often echoed his skepticism, suggesting that Andrade Bojorges’s (1999, 36–39, 65) revelation that drug traffickers had ties not only to the PRI’s 1968 Generation faction (part of which defected to the PRD) but also to the 1930s PANassociated Acción Católica groups meant that organized crime was a problem to be managed, not eradicated. Juan Luis spent hours answering my questions about why the PRI lost over the years in specific municipalities, revealing how deceptive the electoral records could be. I noted that Zacapu had an interesting voting pattern with a PAN victory, then a PRD victory, followed by a Worker’s Party (PT) victory. Juan Luis nodded knowingly and said, “That is a curious case. Lencho [Lorenzo Martínez] is a car salesman who became an opposition leader. He first won with the PAN and then switched party affiliations to the PRD, and then to the PT. The voters support his group unconditionally.” When I asked why opposition leaders switched party affiliations so easily, he suggested they did so partly out of aversion to government in general but also due to party infighting, bribery, and other less philosophical motivations. Some of Juan Luis’s other valuable insights had to do with the pace of change, the importance of political culture, and the unlikelihood (as Antochiw also stressed) that alternation in power would result in major changes: “Change is slow. It takes much more patience than most people imagine. I do not mind. I am a panista by heredity and remember how much worse things were for my father. Alternation in power is a major victory, but it changes very little porque somos los mismos mexicanos [because we are all the same Mexicans]. But it is a beginning.”

6

Introduction

He also admitted, to my surprise, that the water agency he headed on my second visit in 1996 operated at a 20 percent efficiency rate, implying that good leadership and commitment to rule of law could not overcome bureaucratic inertia, except in the very long term. These interviews suggested that the advent of subnational alternation in power and its contribution to the national-level political transition then unfolding formed only part of the story. The spread of organized crime, the resilience of authoritarianism, and the glacial pace of change seemed of far greater importance. To better see the balance between continuity and change, one had not only to distinguish the different pathways to alternation in power but follow their trajectories over time. By the mid-1990s drug trafficking had become embedded in many provincial contexts. Federal and state-level politicians were guarded about the subject, but at the municipal level most of my questions about municipal politics were answered with references to drug trafficking. It was a fact of life throughout much of the country. When I asked someone to recommend a hotel costing between ten and twenty dollars a night in Juárez, Chihuahua, a woman directed me up a hill to a group of three hotels and said they were exceptional. “They are owned by drug traffickers,” she explained. “They are clean, have an outstanding comida corrida (three course meal), and are very safe.” My hotel room featured a large, dark, soundproof window through which I could witness package exchanges in the early-dawn hours as I cautiously glanced at small planes and trucks around an improvised landing strip. Throughout the country I was reminded of the power of drug traffickers. They financed political campaigns, chose municipal presidents, served as important local employers, helped with (and sometimes controlled) public works projects, financed beauty pageants and soccer matches, and sponsored local bands, among many other activities that gave them more legitimacy than the state in the 1990s. Ten to fifteen years later much of this admiration had turned to fear as a new generation adopted terrorist tactics, cultivated local drug markets, engaged in extortion, kidnapping, and rape, and fueled the growth of gangs. While I interviewed key political actors in most Mexican states, I confined my in-depth research to Chihuahua, Michoacán, and Yucatán. The PRI was underrepresented in the initial phase of my research except in Yucatán, mostly because priístas were less available for interviews. (Local PRI infrastructure only sprang to life during campaign periods.) Conversely, PRI members were overrepresented in the 2006 phase, when obtaining interviews with the PAN-state became difficult. I spent a great deal of time with the PRD in Mexico City, Michoacán,

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Zacatecas, Chiapas, and other PRD strongholds. In Michoacán, the PRD was characteristically divided in two. The Cristóbal Arias Solís faction had abandoned Cárdenas and agreed to cooperate with the Salinas regime. It controlled its local clientele of PRD mayors through the Institute for Municipal Training and Support (ICAM), led by lawyer Jorge Luis Tinajero. Jorge Luis invited me to a meeting of the mayors in that faction, at which they shared their problems with local and state-level PRI groups. They brought pictures showing the PRI distributing bags of cement to supporters, sabotaging PRD projects, or beating up PRD supporters. Jorge Luis, who was in close touch with his panista friends from Guanajuato, patiently told them what legal steps to follow, knowing that many of them had just a couple of years of formal education. While the traditional leftist PRD leaders were mostly concerned with distributional not procedural issues, Jorge Luis emphasized the legal approach of the PAN. “Our strategy is to exhaust all legal resources,” he said. “We write letters, ask for meetings, and go on up the chain of legal steps we can take to get our problem addressed.” (Many of the groups within this more modern faction of the PRD were eclipsed by tradition-bound groups, like those supporting 2018 presidential front runner Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who broke away in 2011 to later found his own party vehicle, Morena.) Several mayors in attendance invited me to their municipalities. I ended up accepting several invitations. Parácuaro mayor and successful agri-businessman Ramón Álvarez Soto extended the most generous of these, as he let me stay at his home and accompany him through a week of administrative duties. There still were no paved roads to many of the ejido communities and no indoor plumbing (even Don Ramón had no toilet). Drug-trafficking activity was completely out in the open. In Morelia, both the PRI and the PRD either denied or underplayed its role, but the ejido communities considered it a completely legitimate and even an honorable enterprise. The drug industry was “hip” among young people, to the extent that many had stopped attending school, and many older people respected the traffickers. Its illegality was as irrelevant in Parácuaro as was the fact that official statistics did not reflect Don Ramón’s victorious bid for mayor. When I asked why no statistics reflected his 1992 PRD win, he said, “Lo que cuenta está en el terreno de los hechos” (What counts are the facts on the ground.) He drove that lesson home to me every time my maps did not coincide with the towns he said we were in. Law, associated with the federal government, had a poor reputation in that region. Many people saw drug trafficking as the embodiment of revolutionary promise—the activity that

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Introduction

permitted the poor to surmount the obstacles to getting rich and fulfilled many of the development functions that the state had never come through on: employment, maintenance of order (in those days), and access to services. Despite being a PRD bastion, Michoacán also had historical PAN strongholds. The PAN had governed all of its largest cities. The 1983 opposition victory in Zamora was at least as dramatic as those of the well-studied cases in Chihuahua. During August 1996, then former mayor Peña was tending to one of his small businesses, Baños y Recubrimientos Peña, a bathroom fixtures store. I had never met anyone more anxious to tell me his story. For almost seven hours I leaned over a sink in his shop to take advantage of the only available writing surface while he recounted the PRI’s very first defeat. At several points he broke into tears, and not sure what to do, I stayed propped against the sink, notebook in hand, waiting for him to regain his composure. Neither of us moved from about 11:00 a.m. until dusk. On my two subsequent trips in 1996 and 2006, I had similarly fruitful meetings with his successor as mayor, Arnulfo Vázquez, and with others whose accounts revealed much about PRI key figures and how the party operated. In Yucatán, thanks to a well-connected former classmate, I had the broadest access to state elites. I was even introduced to iconic strongman Governor Víctor Cervera Pacheco, but I did not exploit this association to avoid creating problems for my contacts when I did not adopt the PRI worldview. Except for PRI lynchpin José Luis Sierra Villarreal (a former 1970s guerrilla and husband of former governor and PRI president Dulce Maria Sauri), who was warm and generous, the Yucatecan PRI was very guarded, and obtaining help required persistence. Months of efforts to obtain 1989–1992 internal PRI municipal-level surveys finally paid off when the architect of the surveys, Guadalupe Huchím Koyoc—who canceled eight appointments and originally would only let me take notes on the more than fifty volumes of internal surveys—told me at the end of one day of my frantic scribbling, “Go ahead and take them. You are the only one who has ever had access to these.” Among their interesting revelations was that while an average of 16 to 25 percent of people in many towns said they intended to vote for the PAN, the final statistics recorded 5 to 8 percent PAN voting in these same towns, suggesting an active effort to divert PAN votes (by any method) to either the PRI or a PRI-controlled party. The PRI offices in Yucatán were at the time housed in La Casa del Pueblo, a colonial building that previously served as a resting place for poor people traveling to the capital. It took weeks to find my contacts

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“in,” but when I did, I was rushed past at least fifty people waiting in the halls and taken to a room where my hosts were laughing and eating as they watched a soccer match, unperturbed by the crowd waiting patiently outside to see them. The president of the Yucatecan PRI at the time, the talented PRI stalwart Jorge Carlos Ramírez Marín, became visibly worried, locking glances with others in the room, when I said I wanted to study municipal electoral contests. He finally commanded, “¡Toma dictado!”—an order to write down what he was about to say that he probably intended me to remember from grade school. I obediently took down the letter he dictated. He instructed me to submit it typed and to write my full name and all of my addresses. Then he said his office would assign me an acompañante (traveling companion) who would take me to a total of seven municipalities in one day, during which I could “easily complete all interviews in Yucatán.” My PRI hosts offered to expedite the issuance of an official badge to “facilitate access to public officials.” Later I learned that these PRI representatives were well known in the rural areas I visited because they would personally hand out gifts at election time to secure the PRI vote—though they reportedly never left their trucks while doing so. My PRI hosts scheduled our trip to depart the following day, but I canceled due to “illness” and modified my choice of municipalities to exclude those I had mentioned. I selected Cacalchén because of its fascinating electoral patterns, which boasted an opposition split between the Cardenista Front of National Reconstruction (PFCRN), a small Cárdenas-associated socialist party, and the classic liberal PAN, the main vehicle in Yucatán for regionalist and anticenter, antisystem sentiment. Cacalchén also had four opposition victories by the late 1990s. It was indeed difficult to meet public officials in Cacalchén, but not because I lacked an official badge. When I stepped off the bus at the central plaza at about 10:00 a.m., I asked a woman where I could find the municipal president. She responded that he was at work and would be at the municipal palace at around 7:00 p.m. In those days, in keeping with the aspirational nature of Mexico’s “revolutionary” legal system, municipal officials did not get paid. (By 2006 they had voted themselves salaries of over US$8,000 per month, about 100 times the average income for residents.) She asked a young boy to take me to the municipal president’s home in case he was still there. My young guide and I waded through almost kneedeep mud until we arrived, but after a twenty-minute conversation with his wife, who said they belonged to the PRI, which had never lost there, I discovered I was not even in Cacalchén but in a neighboring municipality incorrectly designated on my map.

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When I finally reached Cacalchén, then a similarly desolate and poor municipality (although slightly less muddy), I was taken to the home of an individual who had a post in the municipal administration. The male residents of Cacalchén had left, I was told, probably for Mérida. A woman busy weaving a hammock told me I could wait. I asked her why the town seemed so empty, and she said everyone was in Mérida either working or looking for work. There were no jobs in Cacalchén. I asked whether unemployment helped explain why the opposition had won in Cacalchén, and she said the two were unrelated, as few people could afford to care about politics because they were too busy trying to make a living. As I interviewed more people I realized that Cacalchén’s official statistics were no evidence of liberal democracy. Another memorable moment occurred when I first arrived with my host, Medardo Uc Chimal, in the Mayan municipality of Chemax in July 1996. The political atmosphere was charged to a far greater degree than it had been anywhere else. Over 300 chemaítas gathered around me, apparently hoping I had come to encourage the opposition. I asked them whether they were going to win the 1998 elections. The crowd answered with a resounding no. They told me they would never win again. Ever. I immediately assumed that they must be so isolated that they did not realize municipal victories had become the norm throughout the country, that the opposition was winning governorships at the rate it used to win municipalities and even had a shot at the presidency. The moment I tried to explain, a leader stopped me. As it turned out, he knew what was going on not only elsewhere in the country but also in Albania! Still, I insisted. I had studied around 100 opposition victories, and from countless hours of reading and listening I believed I knew the infallible least common denominator for a victory. “If you have the numbers, you can win,” I told them. “Just make sure everyone goes out to vote, guard every polling booth and ballot box, get press coverage and outside observers, meticulously report anomalies, supervise every facet of the contest, and defend the victory.” The crowd of chemaítas was silent, seemingly bewildered (though they were probably not surprised, given my Mexico City accent) by how poorly I understood their situation. Their leaders were experts in campaign and election strategy. I decided that perhaps their pessimism was standing in the way of victory, but statistics showed that the opposition vote had skyrocketed since the opposition’s only recognized victory in 1980 and continued to increase even after years of repression. These methods had eventually worked everywhere else, but their “otherness” seemed to prevent it from working for them, until after the 2000

Introduction

11

transition at the national level. The limits of agency were evident in Chemax, where no amount of effort could break the power of the state. The intra-elite nature of Chemax’s battle was also evident, as it became somewhat of a proxy war between the state- and national-level PAN and PRI. Former president Felipe Calderón had participated in the chemaítas struggle, as he had done with far more success in nearby Valladolid. There I met a woman who had been arrested and jailed in another fraudulently repressed opposition movement. Felipe Calderón had come to her rescue with a couple of other panistas back in the 1980s. I wrote up a draft of the study at the Center for US-Mexican Studies in 1997 but had to rework the entire project when my mentor at the University of Miami, a man beloved by all who knew him, Enrique Baloyra, suffered a fatal brain aneurysm. Two weeks before I was to defend my dissertation in 1999, another dear mentor, Alexander McIntire, also suffered a tragic and premature death. Within less than a year, I had a tenure track position at my current university and endured a baptism by fire: a four-course-per-semester teaching load. Soon after the 2000 PAN victory, I wrote a book prospectus based on the study but was uneasy about having been unable to obtain surveys permitting me to draw conclusions over a long enough period to reliably discuss changing values. Since almost no surveys existed of the decades before I conducted my study and the cost of tailor-made ones was prohibitive, I decided to follow the cases into the future. The second and third research phases took place between 2001 and 2009, with most interviews collected between 2006 and 2008, permitting the study to include between five and ten elections in each of the five municipalities since the achievement of alternation in power, always including the return of the PRI. By then all three of the main political parties were run by a new generation of political leaders. The PRI had changed significantly, at least in terms of the frankness and openness of many of its new young leaders, the administrative savvy and dynamism (although definitely not incorruptibility) of a new set of governors, improvements in the candidate-selection process, and the ability in some cases to orchestrate unified support for PRI candidates among the party’s many rival currents. A high-level member of the Chiapas PRI gave the PAN a lot of credit for its three administrations in the capital, Tuxtla Gutiérrez (1995–2003): The PAN fired 400 aviadores [those who “fly by” to collect pay but do not work], but the parties are still weak, there is no transparency, and we need to get rid of the unions. Section 7 of the teacher’s union [SNTE]

12

Introduction

supports the PRI and section 40 supports the PRD—they are political tools used only to topple governors—they have no representative role and keep education levels low so we can never have the cultural changes needed. The media, chambers of commerce, all organizations have links to the government. Our public officials also have higher salaries than those at the federal level and keep them secret, which is legal here. The PRD is a puppet that sells itself to the highest bidder, and its base is so poor that it can be mobilized with handouts of 20–30 pesos [then US$2– US$3]. There is competition, but it is expensive—we have one million pesos—half goes to payroll and most of the remainder goes to corporative sectors and only covers very low salaries. We had four million before—we cannot operate without much more money (Grajales 2006).

Conversations with PRI members were never this candid in 1996. There were rumors that the PRI had fielded electable “unity” candidates because it had money again (not in Chiapas, which may be why the PAN and PRD candidates were all from the PRI), some of it from dubious sources. The PRI selectively applied traditional (authoritarian) and modern (closed primaries) candidate-selection methods depending on location and the composition of local groups. It was guided by the search for effective solutions, not movement toward rule of law. Now riven by factionalism and plagued by corruption scandals, the PAN had become as unavailable and distant from society in many places (as in Aguascalientes, where it had a long run of consecutive victories) as the PRI had been. Though still divided and ineffective, the PRD benefited in some locales from some key defections from both the PRI and the PAN. The pace of modernization was startling.1 Places that had taken four days to reach (like Guadalupe y Calvo, Chihuahua, only accessible from relatively nearby Parral by slowly descending a deep ravine over the course of several days) took only a few hours on the new highways and paved roads. There were Internet cafés, and the Oxxo convenience stores and Elektra’s rent-to-buy chain had brought the comforts of civilization to even the most faraway places. While I mostly had to rely on the fourth-class buses serving small municipalities and often boarded by the army and less often by bands of robbers, there were new luxurious, reasonably affordable overnight buses from Mexico City to Chiapas and Oaxaca. Government programs had improved life in many locations, and in some areas the PAN had made good on its promise not to link benefits to political support, which opened the door for other parties (usually the PRI) to do so. By 2006 the PAN had reproduced in most municipalities, probably inevitably, the same clientelist practices of the PRI. The bureaucratic presence of the government had also increased substantially, reinforcing corporatism and clientelism.

Introduction

13

All three parties were fielding businessmen as candidates because they were by far the most electable and could finance their own campaigns. Alternation in power did seem to be improving the effectiveness of administrations, at least as measured by public works projects and the proliferation of big box corporations like Walmart that offered new employment and consumer opportunities. However, all three parties had learned that perception was far more important than reality for obtaining votes. They spent millions of pesos promoting real and imagined accomplishments and much less money and effort on the projects themselves. There were numerous reports of incomplete (or barely started) projects that left no trace of the millions of pesos spent on them (as happened in Hunucmá’s “toiletgate,” involving 300 toilets paid for but never received). These procurement contracts, often involving relatives of new opposition elites, were at the root of corruption scandals surfacing when another party displaced an incumbent and ordered an audit. Worse yet, the auditing agencies (like ORFIS in Veracruz) were allegedly co-opted and traded to parties in political arrangements (Herrera Altamirano 2006), adding to the sense that there had been no definitive progress toward rule of law. While in 1996 panistas in affected states saw organized criminal influence as an inevitable power factor partly produced and used by the PRI-regime, they did not predict the degree to which it would become the dominant power factor by 2006. Nor did they foresee that it would penetrate all parties and corrupt a significant segment of a new generation of binational Mexicans. In 1996 many panistas believed that only through democratization could they achieve the honest government required to uproot organized crime. In 2006 they limited themselves to saying democracy did not make it worse. Irene Villaseñor Peña (2006), a panista related to a former PRI governor from what the PAN designated as the “responsible PRI,” said, “There is no relationship between democratization and drug-related violence. It is a product of the reduced accessibility of US drug markets and of the Mexican government’s decision to fight drug trafficking.” While perhaps alluding to the futility of the Mexican government’s shift from its modus vivendi with drug traffickers to confronting them in the name of an unachievable (at least in the short term) rule of law, due to US drug policies, she never addressed the relationship between instability and fragmentation of power. Nor did the impact of US drug policies explain the role of the endemic corruption of a deeply rooted political system that predated them. Campeche’s PAN asserted that when trying to trace its campaign errors in previous elections it discovered a parallel infrastructure that

14

Introduction

drug traffickers were laying throughout the state and probably the country (Gómez 2006; Michaud 2011, 25). Many candidates admitted to accepting campaign contributions from traffickers, or at least explained theoretically why they could never reject them. Representatives of all three parties in most states admitted organized criminals had penetrated their party. It was also common for the main parties to form coalitions with small parties with well-known links to drug traffickers, as if doing so were a way of benefiting from drug financing while isolating risk. One documented example was the Knights Templar drug kingpin Saúl Solís, who was the 2009 candidate of the Mexican Green Ecological Party (PVEM), a party usually partnering with the PRI, for a federal deputyship and Turiscato’s (near Parácuaro) director of public security (2003–2005). Most cities I visited had an internal market for drugs, and not a single municipal official thought he or she could do anything to reclaim the municipal territory from the organized criminals. The only state where drug-trafficking influence in politics and on the social fabric was largely invisible was Yucatán, where the PRI-state remained reasonably united, powerful, and authoritarian even in post-transition years, suggesting interesting trade-offs between freedom and order, particularly in less developed states. Elsewhere the dimensions of the organized crime problem were still far more visible at the local level, although self-censorship prevented important details from surfacing. The industry was still an integral part of local culture in many towns of Michoacán, but the new generation my contacts feared in 1995—the young immigrants who, according to many residents and leaders, had “lost their manners,” stopped going to school, and wanted the quick money and fast life of organized crime— seemed to have taken it over. One of my key contacts, a senator who had previously invited me to talk to him in Apatzingán, was listed among those with ties to the drug cartels after a rash of arrests in Michoacán during the Calderón administration, as was Parácuaro’s mayor. Several of my other contacts were kidnapped for ransom in YouTube-documented incidents, and a few were assassinated between 2008 and 2012. The trips in the second series were a stark contrast to the first ones. In 1995 many of the homes on the Parácuaro ejidos lacked not only toilets, phones, and electricity but also a rear wall, so they were exposed to the elements. Yet, despite severe underemployment (only small jobs that paid very little were easily available), life on the ejidos had some laudable aspects: tranquility and fresh food, for example, including door-to-door “cow service” for fresh milk and homemade cheeses. Scor-

Introduction

15

pions were the main security threat, and even they were mainly an issue during the jícama harvest. You could see a dramatic starlit sky from your bed, while a breeze softened by its passage through the fruit trees refreshed the air under the mosquito nets. By late 2006 the central square had more amenities (thanks partly to donations by Parácuaro celebrities like the late Juan Gabriel), and most people living near the urban head had toilets and electricity. Yet the peace of 1990s Parácuaro had given way to a palpable tension that would only get worse. This was before President Calderón’s visit and establishment of an army presence in 2007, La Familia’s 2011 split that created the Knights Templar, and the 2014 incursion of paramilitaries, followed by the allegedly state-financed subgroup Los Viagras. Many of the 2006 visits took place in the weeks before and after the elections bringing Calderón to power. I was at Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s closing event in Morelia while the Cárdenas-controlled PRD quietly boycotted his campaign, possibly costing him the extremely close election. Calderón’s victory meant the PAN was ebullient in every state and looking forward to monopolies on power. Yucatecan panistas seemed baffled when I asked about their previous advocacy of alternation in power. Most reform-minded (although not necessarily rule-oflaw oriented) interviewees were in the PRI, but they had grown frustrated with the weight of the older generations in the bureaucracy impeding change. Zamora’s PAN seemed weaker than it had been in 1996, the PRI was no better, and most of the major reformers had left to work for the Fox and Calderón administrations. Still, Zamora had developed into a thriving city, and drug-related problems were superimposed on the political fabric, rather than tightly woven into it as in Parácuaro, which had regressed in terms of quality of life. Yet I found it harder than anticipated to distinguish between municipalities where the PRI lost power to superficial electoral coups and revolts like those of Cacalchén, Parácuaro, and Hunucmá and the electoral revolutions that had been transforming politics in the 1990s in cities like Zamora, Juárez, Chihuahua, León, and Guanajuato, particularly in terms of progress toward rule of law. Ironically, these larger cities attracted more developmental assistance due to their more expensive vote-buying operations (to counteract the strength of those who refused to sell their right to hold elected officials accountable for their performance in power). These social funds increased the power of the constituency supporting traditional authoritarian practices like clientelism and corporatism. The seeming convergence of cases where alternation came as a result of very superficial changes confined to elites and those resulting

16

Introduction

from deep changes in local societies had several possible explanations. The slow pace of change meant the more numerous traditionalists were exerting more influence than reformers in a more democratic Mexico. It was also because the local and national levels are “mutually reinforcing” (Spink et al. 2008, 246). Thus, by 2006 the nationalization of subnational reforms had ironically shifted the balance of power in favor of traditionalist forces. The 1996 visits captured an initial phase of rapid reform, when twenty years of incubation as the PRI lost power had led PAN-identified reformers to explode onto the scene. The long-repressed modern segment of society suddenly achieved the representation it had been earning over decades. These reformers incorporated themselves into the elites, using authoritarian institutions to impose reform, thus overrepresenting reformers. By 2006 the political rubber band had snapped back. In 1996 the 20 percent or so of reform-minded voters had a disproportionate impact on politics, whereas in 2006, although that number may have increased to 30 to 35 percent, some of these had been partially socialized by the more numerous old guard steeped in the dominant authoritarian culture. Between 2006 and 2008 I captured a period of local stagnation when majoritarian democratic reforms had empowered the traditional class representing at least 60 percent of the political and possibly more of the security bureaucracies (which had not benefited from the redistribution of power). The decentralization/fragmentation of power and resources reinvigorated the informal authoritarian institutions. While I must leave determining the tipping point at which reformers dictate outcomes more than traditionalists to other researchers, the pace of change may perversely be inversely proportional to success at instituting majoritarian democracy. Without mechanisms in place to overrepresent modern reformers and the most productive sectors of the population, achieving the economic growth necessary for redistribution and developing the bureaucratic culture necessary for enforcing the rule of law may take too long to prevent reversals. However, the tension between achieving political equality and rule of law requires further exploration. There are a few other methodological notes to add to those in the first chapter. All quotes from interviews are my translations, and most of the interviews were unstructured and informal. The deteriorating security situation in Mexico since my last research trips and the complicated political situation in the south led me to leave out some of the names of some sources in the text but still include them in the bibliography. While the local snapshots of political change in provincial Mexico give an unvarnished version of the symbiotic relationships between the

Introduction

17

local and national levels at two critical points in the Mexican political transition, the study covers approximately fifty years of political change. It leaves many matters unresolved, one of the most intriguing of which concerns gauging the pace of change and possibly determining thresholds that might better predict democratic consolidation or reversion to authoritarianism. This research does not decipher where Mexico’s transition is leading, although many indicators suggest an increasing sector of society, perhaps as great as one-third of the population, is continuously inching forward, committed to organized and permanent participation in pursuit of rule of law. It does, however, ascertain that at least in Mexico, dentro y fuera de Cuautitlán, todo es México (within and beyond Cuautitlán, everything is Mexico). Note 1. Juan Duch Coleil, a Yucatecan historian interviewed in Mérida on 19 July 1996, emphasized modernization as the primary motor of all observable changes, stressing the way transportation and communication infrastructure had changed life in states on the periphery, like Yucatán. The overall pace of modernization may not be greater since 2000 than it was in the past.

1 Mexico’s Democratic Transition in Context

In Tiempo contado (1995), historian Enrique Krauze, who had previously wished for a democracy “without adjectives,” wondered whether Mexico in 2000 would look more like Spain or like Peru. He presumably meant that Mexico’s seven-decades-old one-party regime could end in an elite pact to hold free and fair competitive elections, paving a path to economic growth and liberal democracy, or that Mexico could descend into the chaos of a Peru in the throes of the Shining Path insurgency, which ushered in a new period of authoritarian rule behind a democratic facade. While his vision of transition away from authoritarianism focuses on the ability of national elites to forge a consensus around democratic political norms, Krauze was also addressing the more complicated question about the fate of democracy once it is accomplished. Given the unexpected political trajectories of countries like Peru, Russia, Tunisia, Turkey, Zambia, and Mexico, explaining the origins and direction of political change in developing countries is clearly complicated. Elites play a critical role, but so can society. Larry Diamond (2008, 4) observed, “The fate of democracy is not simply driven by abstract historical and structural forces. It is a consequence of struggle, strategy, ingenuity, vision, courage, conviction, compromise, and choices by human actors—of politics in the best sense of the word.” While both elite divisions and social movements are responses to a legitimacy crisis leading to a loss of faith in the authoritarian system, either because of its failures or its success in creating more educated and demanding citizens (Diamond 2008, 88, 91), the transition process is still not well explained. Do transitions where social movements play a role result in deeper or longer-lasting changes than those involving just elite reaccommodation? If transitions are often the product of

19

20

Local Mexico

courageous, organized, and committed reformers and their ability to galvanize antiregime sentiment, does it matter how much of that sentiment calls for the overthrow of the system and how much might settle for a change in leadership? Do the levels of organization required to defeat authoritarian elites benefit from a learning curve over a period of many elections (or other forms of civic resistance where these are banned)? Must some critical mass of citizens be committed to ongoing participation in politics and the idea of rule of law to prevent reversion to authoritarianism? What factors determine whether elite recomposition leads to liberal democracy or relegitimized authoritarianism? In short, we might more easily glean the fate of electoral transitions from authoritarianism if we better understand the process ending the authoritarian regime’s monopoly on power.1 Studies suggesting prerequisites of democracy have emphasized different factors in different periods. Krauze’s and Diamond’s emphasis on human agency, the actions taken by individuals and groups independent of the context, is relatively recent. In the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, many analysts believed the emergence of enduring democracies depended on political and economic development (Huntington 1968, 1970; La Palombara and Wiener 1966; Padgett 1966). These modernization theorists argued that attaining, and particularly sustaining, democracy required a sizable middle class, as well as values rooted in the universal effects of industrialization on citizen values. When democracies emerging in the 1960s and 1970s failed and gave way to modernizing military and other autocratic regimes, the theory of bureaucratic authoritarianism (O’Donnell 1999, 53) suggested that an authoritarian phase could help countries reach a development threshold necessary for democracy. As these authoritarian regimes gave way to democracies in what Samuel Huntington (1991) called the “Third Wave,” their setbacks in the post-Soviet era led some to argue that democracy required values associated with Western experiences, without which even industrialized countries could retain authoritarian institutions indefinitely (Wiarda 1995; Harrison and Huntington 2000; Johnson 1971). Yet, by the new millennium, the persistence of African, Asian, and Latin American democracies helped shift what was seen to be an ethnocentric focus on values and wealth to an attention on institutions and human agency. By the time Mexico experienced its national transition with Vicente Fox’s 2000 victory for the National Action Party (PAN), ending the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s (PRI) seventy-one-year stint in power, there was a widespread belief that people in all countries yearned for political freedom and that developing the right institutions

Mexico’s Democratic Transition in Context

21

would create incentive structures that could sustain democracy in any context, an optimism that helped fuel the high hopes for a democratic Iraq. Starting in the 1990s, Mexico developed world-class electoral institutions, thanks in part to subnational innovations in previous local democratic openings, making its elections some of the most legitimate in the world. Its electoral courts all but ended the previously typical violent post-electoral confrontations (Eisenstadt 2006, 244). Still, despite continued progress on the institutional front (notwithstanding local backsliding), the achievement of macroeconomic stability, and the proliferation of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) led by citizens determined to achieve rule of law, Mexico faces severe problems that prevent effective governance in many parts of the country, including microeconomic deficiencies, political instability, the hijacking of institutions by organized criminal groups, high levels of corruption, and grave human rights violations. In 2017, after almost two decades of national alternation in power, Mexico ranked in the eighteenth percentile in terms of rule of law, well below authoritarian countries like China and Cuba. From 2005 to 2015 Transparency International demoted Mexico from 66 to 95 out of 168 countries in its corruption rankings, making it the most corrupt country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with a score of 35 percent. The World Bank ranked it 153. Mexico also declined in the rankings more than any other country in Latin America (Casar 2016, 13–18). Between 2007 and 2014 the number of deaths and disappearances (approximately 164,000 and 27,000, respectively) more than doubled those in Iraq and exceeded by more than ten times those in Mexico at the height of the Cold War (which totaled between 658 and 2,500).2 These indicators suggest that in some ways Mexico is worse off than during its more authoritarian years. Mexico is not unique in this regard. The wide array of problems faced by emergent democracies suggests that threshold levels of development and possibly political culture continue to be necessary (if not sufficient) conditions to sustain an effective democracy; otherwise, we would not have added so many qualifiers to the term since less developed nations joined the democratic club. Illiberal (Zakaria 1997), uneven (Montero 2004), delegative (O’Donnell 1994), minimalist (Przeworski 1999), inefficient (Rubio and Kaufman 2006), thin (Diamond 2008, 21; Schmitter and Karl 1993), electoral (Durand Ponte 2007), precarious (Alonso 2000), fragile (Issacharoff 2015), tenuous (Diamond 2008, 200), and weak (Aguirre 2006) are among the many adjectives used to describe countries classified as democracies because they hold regular

22

Local Mexico

and apparently free and competitive elections but do not meet standards of effective governance. These include control of corruption, protection of property and human rights, and particularly respect for the rule of law, a characteristic long associated with Western democracies. Level of development partly matters because underdeveloped countries do not have enough resources to redistribute among newly empowered constituents (Przeworski 2005, 265). It also matters because many voters, especially in regions at the midlevel of development (Magaloni, Díaz Cayeros, and Estévez 2007, chap. 8) voluntarily forge clientelist relationships in which they trade political freedom for tangible benefits. Members of clientelist and corporative groups can also be surprisingly loyal to leaders regardless of their effectiveness. Beatriz Zavala Peniche (1996), who tried to democratize neighborhood organizations in the 1991–1993 Mérida PAN administration, was amazed to discover that PAN voters from low-income neighborhoods who had complained about their corrupt, PRI-imposed block bosses, rebelled against her efforts to set up the democratic election of new block leaders and rallied around their old leaders, no matter how corrupt.3 Perhaps partly because the rate of economic growth had been insufficient to meet the growing array of demands, as elections became increasingly competitive the new parties rapidly adapted to deeply rooted authoritarian practices. In Aguascalientes, Chiapas, Hidalgo, Puebla, Querétaro, Tlaxcala, and Veracruz, party representatives said vote buying was more prevalent and aggressive since alternation in power began because now the voters demanded it, local and campaign budgets were bigger, and PAN efforts to modernize bookkeeping procedures made pinpointing supporters more accurate (Cornejo Barrera 2006; González Loyola 2006; Grajales 2006; Montes 2006; Salas Rebolledo 2006; Tavares 2006; Varona Rodríguez 2006; Vázquez Domínguez 2006). In these mid-developed areas, self-government was not valued. “People still see politics as something dirty and participation as inviting repression,” said an electoral advisor for the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) (Herrera Altamirano 2006). The undeniably major political change that “votes count” did not lead to real competition that promotes accountability as many voters sold their right to evaluate performance. As O’Donnell (1999, 142) observed about new democracies where the “state-as-law” barely exists, people had political rights but not liberal freedoms resulting in what he called “low intensity citizenship.” Free elections did not stop popular support for mechanisms that undercut rule of law and perpetuate political monopolies and corruption. It would seem that even minimalist democracy requires a

Mexico’s Democratic Transition in Context

23

bureaucratic culture supportive of the enforcement of new democratic rules and a critical mass of citizens who value their political voice enough not to sell it to the highest bidder. The apparent lack of (and sometimes negative) correlation in developing countries between democracy, on the one hand, and effective governance, rule of law, and control of corruption, on the other, reminds us that a paradox of at least one-party revolutionary regimes like Mexico was that their centralization was a symptom of weakness not strength. Countries like Mexico, Russia, Iran, many Middle Eastern and post-Soviet states, and even China may have large but not necessarily strong states and control much of their territory indirectly, through subnational authoritarian power brokers. In Mexico there is a form of “clientelistic federalism” in which mayors are clients of governors, and governors, of the president. Modernizing reforms disrupt these clientelist relationships, creating conditions that make reforms progressively more difficult to implement. Paradoxically, the more successful democracy is at diffusing power vertically across levels of government and horizontally across all sectors of elites and society, the more the traditional majority and bureaucratic culture dilutes the efforts of the reformist minority, often reducing the pace of reform to a crawl and also leading to setbacks and reversals. Therefore, a democratization process that promotes good governance may perversely depend partly on the degree to which political practices and mechanisms overrepresent reformist forces until the rate of change in the bureaucratic culture and in electoral constituencies reaches a critical mass that permits the implementation of reforms. The Subnational Dimension in Democratic Transition

Maintaining the momentum of reforms is easier said than done because emerging democracies are often not politically, geographically, demographically, economically, or culturally homogenous, complicating the harnessing of reformist forces. The ambiguous and contradictory nature of Mexico’s political trajectory reflects an insight shared by historian Alan Knight in his 1986 history of the Mexican Revolution: Mexico (like many other developing countries) is really many Mexicos and therefore on many different paths simultaneously. More recent studies suggest that we can gain understanding of these different paths at the subnational level, despite the idiosyncrasies of small-town Mexico (Alonso 1985; Azíz Nassif 2003; Calderón Mólgora 1994; Grindle 2007; Knight and

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Local Mexico

Pansters 2005; Selee 2011). The transparency of politics in small towns helps shatter embedded assumptions about the natural course of political development and the meaning of democracy to citizens by placing a spotlight on the actions of specific individuals and the institutions they create, as well as on the complex interplay between structure (including political culture) and agency in (real or apparent) political transition. In the regime’s most authoritarian phases, the subnational level has the greatest number of political vacuums—what O’Donnell (1999, 140) called “brown areas” beyond the legal reach of the state—or as Diamond (2008, 25) more euphemistically puts it, the most “democratic space,” some of which incubate modernizing social movements. The modernizers, however, as this study argues, are unrepresentative of most opposition movement supporters. The greatest source of opposition is political leaders at all levels, in and out of the regime, who feel locked out and want to use the legitimizing force of majoritarian democratic principles to break into the power structure. The decentralization and fragmentation that came with the implosion of the PRI-regime further facilitated the harnessing of reforms by local leaders to their own advantage. Political liberalization and decentralization thus empowered both leaders pushing for democratic reforms and the far more numerous ones trying to resist them. Analysts’ previous neglect of the symbiotic relationship between national and subnational realities, however asymmetric, made it harder to trace the origins and direction of political change in centralized developing countries. The 1968 government repression of the student protestors on Tlatelolco Plaza became the symbol of a legitimacy crisis starting at the local level in the 1950s, and the spontaneous emergence of a self-help society faced with government ineffectiveness in the aftermath of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake reflected a new civic awakening that had started at least ten years prior in northern municipalities. The creation of the PRD in the wake of the 1988 presidential elections, the 1994 assassination of PRI candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, and the 1997 PRI loss of its majority in Congress heralded the demise of the old PRI system after twenty to thirty years of local erosion, and Vicente Fox’s 2000 victory signaled Mexico’s democratic transition. Consequently, democratic transitions seem to arrive suddenly, catalyzed by some surprising event—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Tunisian revolution launching the Arab Spring. A closer look at how events unfolded usually reveals that in each case the catalysts arose out of a very long, slow, and low-profile process foreshadowed at the local level. Vicente Fox’s 2000 victory, shattering seventy-one years of uninterrupted PRI rule, seemed to conform to Krauze’s “Spain” and result from an elite pact forged between the

Mexico’s Democratic Transition in Context

25

incumbent faction of the PRI, revolutionary nationalist PRI dissidents and leftist leaders in the PRD, and classic liberal modernizers in the PAN that would effectively shift the benchmark of legitimacy from revolution to democracy.4 However, as scholars have now documented, it culminated decades of struggle at the municipal and state levels (Bassols and Arzaluz 1996, 109; González 2008, 199; Mizrahi 2003, 13; Shirk 2005, 35; Spink et al. 2008, 246). Fox was a veteran of this subnational struggle. In the 1980s, he saw how at “8:00AM León’s ballot boxes were already full” and had his first run-in with electoral authoritarianism when he was serving as an opposition polling booth representative in the community of La Sandía during the elections of León, Guanajuato. A thug walked in, thrust a gun into Fox’s stomach, and ran off with the ballot box (Fox Quezada 1996). Recruited by the legendary opposition leader Manuel Clouthier, he went into politics, winning election in 1988 to represent Guanajuato in the Senate, where he irreverently questioned the legitimacy of Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s presidency in the aftermath of the controversial 1988 elections. In 1991 he was the PAN’s gubernatorial candidate in Guanajuato, in elections marred by massive fraud. In a controversial move, the PAN brokered a deal with President Salinas, who “awarded” (with no legal basis) an interim governorship to the PAN, with Carlos Medina Plascencia, the first opposition mayor of León, a city struggling for democracy since the 1940s, taking the office. In 1995 President Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León recognized Fox’s victory as governor of Guanajuato in extraordinary elections, a position from which he paved his way to the presidency. Summary of the Argument

This book argues that both the outset and the outcome of electoral transitions is at least partially path dependent, and the means of achieving the original opposition victories reveals much about the relative weight of authoritarian and democratic values within the elites and society. Optimism about democratic outcomes often results from giving too much weight to urban opposition movements and victories representing unique circumstances that do not apply to the overall population, projecting the future effects of democratic reforms without consideration of the context and with undue confidence, examining cases for too short a period, and not accounting for the trade-offs involved in democracy between freedom, political control, and equality.5 If a new democracy succeeds in extending political freedom to most of the population

26

Local Mexico

before the state’s productive apparatus can meet popular demands, the result will be security problems and a greater incentive for elites to break democratic rules (Przeworski 2005), as there are not enough resources to consistently win power through votes. Bribing voters to relinquish their right to hold leaders accountable (reinforcing clientelism) is more politically cost-effective. These lessons drawn from subnational transitions in Mexico may well apply to transitions at other levels and in other countries—yet are far easier to examine at the municipal level. Furthermore, the greater freedom of provincial elites means the cracks in the system are more likely to emerge in towns and cities on the periphery, not at the center (Spink et al 2008, 220). While an authoritarian system’s increasing corruption erodes its power and undermines its legitimacy, fueling these local movements, reformers are overrepresented6 as they negotiate with regime-identified elites. With exclusionary mechanisms in place, the president can directly implement a reformer’s ideas, as happened when Ernesto Ruffo Appel negotiated reforms before, during, and after his groundbreaking 1989 gubernatorial victory in Baja California. He obtained the nationalization of his local and state reforms: an updated voter registration list, an unfalsifiable electoral identification card, a human rights ombudsman, among others, thanks to the autocratic powers of President Salinas, who was incentivized by his legitimacy deficit after the 1988 elections. Therefore, the urban rule-of-law priorities are overrepresented initially, leading to a transition “bump” exemplified by the creation of institutions, new laws, and many liberalizing measures. As these changes empower the middle and lower levels of the governing elites and society, however, those individuals and groups with more authoritarian values and practices gain representation proportional to their numbers. The weight of the forces of continuity increasingly dilute those of change as reforms and new institutions are adapted to informal authoritarian mechanisms. Based on both a general study of transitions throughout the country and in-depth case studies, this book identifies three distinct paths or patterns leading to a PRI defeat for the first time in Mexican municipalities. The first and most prevalent pattern, which I term “factional PRI defeat,” essentially entails electoral “coups d’état” in which an institutional reform provides the opportunity for one faction of regime-identified local elites to unseat a candidate imposed by the central government by borrowing, renting, or, in the PRD’s case, creating an opposition party identity. The “opposition” victory takes place with very little involvement of the larger society, and leaders only seek replacement of the dominant leader or group, not changes in the procedures of government. Over time parties

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proliferate and become the new corporative organizations used by statelevel elites to manipulate elections and by local ones to siphon off resources. Few changes materialize—beyond a multiparty facade and, sometimes, the security consequences of power fragmentation. The second pattern I label “snowball PRI defeats” or “electoral revolts.” These resemble (nonviolent) popular uprisings in which frustrations with abusive and disrespectful local authorities build over the course of several elections. Despite massive participation during elections that finally unseat the dominant elites, the revolt quickly recedes afterward, partly because it is driven by a popular hatred of politicians and politics. There is no commitment to procedural change or ongoing participation in politics, only to a change in leadership (they search for a leader-savior), and eventually the opposition’s representatives get absorbed into the old power structure and reproduce authoritarian practices. Over time, there can be real competition between political groups using two parties with small but real constituencies. However, competition is neutralized as local representatives of parties at the state level mobilize the clienteles of competing groups, with little free participation and increasing levels of corruption. Finally, the much rarer but most significant pattern entails “transformational PRI defeats” or “electoral revolutions.” They are revolutionary and transformative because at least part of the opposition, estimated at 15 to 30 percent, wants to move toward rule of law and change the system and institutions of government, not just who is in power. While the remaining 70-plus percent have the composition of a “snowball” movement, this critical segment of the opposition, instead of being motivated by the rage and antipolitical sentiments of those engaged in electoral revolts, share leaders’ optimism about the potential to change politics through citizen participation. The more modern layer of citizens believes if they actively engage in self-government and institutionalized checks to prevent corruption, arbitrary use of resources, and abuse of power, old and new elites will both make good rulers. While initially overestimating overall popular desire for political change and participation, leaders eventually realize that new institutions and practices cannot immediately replace old ones but must be phased in over time. In the meantime, while they usually successfully resist the incentives of O’Donnell’s “colossal prisoner’s dilemma” (1999, 161) in the wake of the erosion of the PRI-state, including short-term time horizons and neglect of social reforms, they compromise by adapting to old rules, as they realize it will take generations to phase out bureaucrats and security forces steeped in the informal, authoritarian culture. Over time,

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electoral revolutions produce a transition “bump,” followed by disillusion in the most active, optimistic layer (often deeper in the less proactive opposition participants beneath them) and then nostalgia in the more passive majority, usually leading to a return of the PRI. Transformational movements have long-term promise and guide national political reform, but in the short and medium term, political movement forward decelerates rapidly once the opposition is in power, and movement backward accelerates, as if in search of a new equilibrium. Efforts to decentralize resources and reinforce local autonomy inadvertently exacerbate the authoritarian grip of state-level elites, putting national directives promoting education, electoral, and other legal reforms out of reach. The democratic reforms the opposition inspires tend to increasingly empower local forces of continuity rather than those of change, overwhelming even the power of reformers in the national government. Based on the rapid rise in absolute numbers of voting, the now multiparty political class learns to use clientelism to capture enough of the vote to keep the rule-of-law-minded segment from determining the outcome of elections. This captured majority now shares the benefits of corruption and sustains the corruption and impunity behind the organized crime crisis. Still, the transformational movement’s focus on self-government and the gradual construction of institutions and legal reforms that might eventually curb corruption and stoke economic growth point to the potential of achieving an effective rule of law. If the modern segment keeps growing at the local and national levels, it will eventually escape the reach of clientelism and could contribute to a rule-of-law culture that will gradually improve stability and permit continued progress. However, the rate at which forward movement must take place, both in terms of political modernization and economic growth, and the long-run consequences of the capture of new institutions (can they be liberated at higher levels of development?) was not explored here. Methodology

I conducted the research for this study in several phases.7 The first entailed preliminary research for case selection in 1995. It included approximately forty interviews, mostly in Michoacán (then representing a central state with PRI-PRD-PAN competition), Chihuahua (north, PRI-PAN alternation in power), Yucatán (south, PRI-PAN polarization), and Mexico City. I conducted research in at least twelve municipalities

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in each state before making the final selection for in-depth research: Zamora, Parácuaro, and Morelia in Michoacán; Chihuahua, Ciudad Juárez, and Parral in Chihuahua; and Mérida, Cacalchén, Hunucmá, and Chemax in Yucatán. Due to limitations of space, I jettisoned the Chihuahua cases and those for the capital cities, leaving the five cases included here: Cacalchén, Chemax, Hunucmá, Parácuaro, and Zamora. I extrapolated the generalizations of the study not exclusively from the case studies but also from the totality of the evidence collected about the first PRI defeats in local Mexico. The study draws from approximately 300 interviews and oral histories conducted between 1993 and 1998 (most in 1996) and 100 additional interviews conducted mostly between 2006 and 2008 with actors in competitive electoral contests; union, NGO, and political party representatives; and public officials, reporters, businessmen, academics, and various other community leaders in twenty-eight Mexican states. Each causal pathway to a PRI defeat (Y) (a more accurate label than “democratic opening” or even “opposition victory”) consists of different combinations of features, each of which may or may not be present in a given locality. Each of these factors or features is measured as a dichotomous variable (present = 1, absent = 0). The different combinations applied to approximately seventy cases were treated as configurations and reduced to their lowest common denominators. The paths were parsed together using Boolean techniques, as developed by Charles Ragin (1987), who pioneered their use for making historical case studies more systematic. Since they allow for simultaneous different combinations of multiple factors, as derived from the facts from each site, they are considered more descriptive of the democratization processes than statistical studies involving correlations of variables from (often inaccurate) official statistics. I derived four factors associated with the defeat of a hegemonic party from the literature on parties before proceeding with the fieldwork. I then modified them in light of twenty-seven causes of PRI defeats identified from a content analysis of the oral histories obtained. The Boolean algebraic techniques facilitated the simplification of this list of overlapping variables into four distinct conditions associated with PRI defeats. Factor A is increasing levels of electoral competitiveness (A).8 Factor B is changing attitudes in the society and among the elites (B).9 Factor C is high levels of opposition organization (C). Factor D is changes in the institutional context (D). The only variable or category derived from the literature on parties that I had to change substantially after collecting the oral histories was C, which was initially “high levels of opposition party organization.” Notably, political parties turned out

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to be relatively unimportant in most of the examined PRI-state defeats. Opposition organization was highly relevant, but political parties rarely channeled it adequately. Therefore, parties dropped out as a necessary causal factor despite the PAN’s extremely relevant strategic decision to use a bottom-up strategy to attain political power (Shirk 2005, 108; Mizrahi 2003, 27). Parties in municipalities were found to adapt to local opposition forces rather than to channel these through the party. I assembled a master database of the seventy initial first-time PRI defeats, including those cases with enough information to evaluate the presence or absence of the four conditions based on thresholds established in context. I gave local information and studies precedence over archival resources and official statistics. I used four preliminary tables to record the presence or absence of each of the causal conditions in the municipal electoral contests from which the most information was obtained, and I consolidated the results in a “truth table” (matrix) used to obtain the following equation representing paths to PRI defeats. In the equations, upper case letters indicate the presence of the variable; lower case, the absence. Although theoretically there are twenty-four possible combinations of the four variables, not all of those possibilities presented themselves in the cases that were coded. The following eight possibilities emerged. The resulting equation is a concatenation of the combinations of conditions or pathways, each producing a PRI defeat. The effects of a causal condition depend on the presence of other conditions. Multiplication indicates causal conjunctures, and addition indicates alternative causal pathways: Y = abcD + ABCd + ABCD + AbCd + ABcD + AbcD + abCD + AbCD

In tracing the pathways to a PRI defeat, the absence of any given factor was not usually relevant. Using the rules of Boolean simplification, which include the consolidation of patterns existing regardless of the presence of a third or fourth factor/condition,10 this equation reduces to Y = ABC + AcD + abD+ AbC

Using further Boolean techniques to simplify the equation yields Y = AC + AD + D

The final equation is thus Y = AC + D.11

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These results indicate that there are two possible pathways to a PRI defeat. A PRI defeat can be achieved through increasing levels of electoral competitiveness (a history of increasing opposition voting in absolute terms) in conjunction with high levels of opposition organization (surveillance and mobilization capacity). Alternatively, a PRI defeat can even more easily result from a favorable institutional context (political opportunity in the form of other party vehicles, a more level playing field due to electoral reforms). These are least-common denominators for achieving defeats, and each of the final algebraic terms contains subpaths to PRI defeats. The study distinguishes between paths conducive to the self-rule and rule of law assumed of liberal democracy and those that are not. The “institutional” path to PRI defeats (explained in the following section), therefore, is not a path to democratic transition, even though it does seem to lead to greater party competition. There are rarely substantial parties at the local level, especially outside large cities. What seem to be parties are often long-established nonideological political groups using authoritarian mechanisms to compete against each other for power. The most significant by-product of competition under different party initials was its contribution to the evolution of sophisticated electoral institutions that reduced the violence associated with these struggles and permitted some measure of accountability. The most remarkable implication of these results is not only that PRI defeats were relatively independent of political parties but also that they were relatively independent of changing values. In other words, authoritarianism, or at least semi-authoritarianism, is fully compatible with (real or apparent) party competition. In particular, the elites and citizenry did not need to change their attitudes about authority to produce a PRI defeat. They could continue to actively or passively endorse near dictatorial power. Often, in fact, PRI defeats were provoked either by pent up rage against the state and its candidates (without questioning the alegal political procedures of municipal presidencialismo—an all-powerful mayor) or by support for a leader-savior expected to “truly” represent his constituents. The idea was not to change the power structure to increase popular participation but to find leaders who would use that power to benefit the majority. Many PRI defeats represented the search for someone who would “keep his promises” and not for ways of holding those in power accountable for doing so and becoming less dependent on the clientelist relationship the dependence on promises represents. More than twenty-five years after some of these transformational movements, a majority of voters still see clientelism as providing more

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hope than law because it is personal, involves reciprocity but minimal effort, and is open-ended: there is no limit to what you might achieve if your patron bestows goodwill upon you. Law, on the other hand, is faceless, undependable, limited, and invariably, according to the experience of most, an instrument of the most powerful. For these reasons, few societal opposition movements bet on law or stronger parties and other institutions. The preference for clientelism, expertly analyzed by Beatriz Magaloni (2007, 193), may also be a product of the intermediate level of local development, the deficient microeconomic context, and the related high levels of state dependence, making the rewards of clientelism outweigh what most people believe they can achieve with their education, skills, and opportunities on their own. The coexistence, in these cases, of clean elections and alternation in power with the lack of rule of law and authoritarian norms is consistent with Wiarda’s (1995, 320) emphasis on the resilience of traditional political culture, O’Donnell’s (1999, 138) observations about the illiberalism of delegative democracies, and Karl and Schmitter’s (1993, 49) contention that “democracies are not likely to appear more orderly, consensual, stable, or governable than the autocracies they replace.” However, O’Donnell’s assumptions of perverse short-term incentives that will almost inevitably be followed by rational actors and the other authors’ contention that new democracies may simply be “different” leave little room for the importance of the values and actions of a small but influential segment of the population, usually in more developed areas, whose members place the public interest above short-term rational incentives. This leadership segment not only sacrificed their interests in an attempt to implement their vision of the public good but also arrived at liberal democratic goals through practical insights more than philosophical or historical influences. The levels of productivity necessary to achieve their vision of the public good entailed access to accurate information (requiring freedom and transparency), long-term horizons (requiring strong institutions), and the ability to hold leaders accountable for performance (requiring a clean electoral process, alternation in power, and an enforceable legal system in which no one is above the law). Most of their fellow local residents were not long-term pragmatists, let alone liberal idealists, but some leaders in Mexico’s democratic movement started changes that moved Mexico towards rule of law, and their vision of democracy was consistent with liberal values. The central importance of civic-minded leaders and their followers led me to construct this study around three paths, even though the final Boolean equation indicated only two paths to PRI defeats. This is because

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while changing attitudes (B) do not determine PRI defeats, they are related to the evolution of the procedural transformation of the political system. For this reason, I interpret a subset of AC, ABC (the B is unnecessary and at times counterproductive in achieving a PRI defeat), as constituting a separate path, less because of the way the defeat is achieved than because it brings about changes that affect subsequent PRI defeats and changes in the political system at all levels of government. I explain the three paths to regime change presented in this volume in the following section. This study refers to the respective movements as factional (producing electoral coups), snowball (producing electoral revolts), and transformational (producing electoral revolutions) because of the way in which the forces that led to PRI defeats developed. Of the seventy defeats in the database, forty-five were classified as factional defeats, twenty five were snowball defeats, and ten of the snowball defeats were transformational defeats (Chihuahua and Juárez 1983; León 1991; Ensenada 1986; Mérida 1991; Durango 1983; Zamora 1983; San Pedro Garza García 1974; Tuxtla Gutiérrez 1995; Cajeme 1979).12 Adding thirty-two PRI defeats from oral histories collected in municipalities where primary source research was not conducted did not change the rough distribution among the patterns. However, I did not systematically take into account the size and representativeness of, and the role of timing in, the sample of cases.13 Furthermore, the evaluations of the presence/absence of each condition, based on judgment more than measurement (Schedler 2012), could not be considered scientifically valid in the same sense as a statistical study. There were many methodological limitations, including that the design dated back to the project’s inception, access to data and not representativeness was the criterion for the samples, and the local data available were uneven and not easy to compare across cases, resulting in a large margin of error.14 This study therefore represents a rough cut that suggests directions for further research, particularly about the importance of the process and pace of political change and ideas for how to measure it.

The Three Avenues to Municipal PRI Defeats Electoral Coups

Defeats following the factional and essentially centrifugal pattern resulted from institutional changes (D) that automatically transformed voting patterns by providing opportunities for disgruntled victims of the

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PRI’s increasingly centralized local candidate-selection process— namely, electoral reforms in 1977 (discussed in the next chapter) and the 1988 PRI split and 1989 creation of the PRD. They essentially constituted coups d’état rather than popular revolts or revolutions. Participation was shallow and manipulated and basic attitudes about the mechanisms of politics remained unchanged. Regardless of the rhetoric, most of these communities and their leaders continued to support traditional clientelist politics that undermined the importance of laws and procedures in favor of personal gain, however short-term or ephemeral. Disaffected elites wanted their turn at exploiting illegality, and citizens had no interest in disrupting clientelist networks, which made room for the arbitrary application of the law.15 The coup to displace the candidate selected by PRI authorities could be relatively effortless, as the state government could selectively create a level playing field to grant the victory to the non-PRI contender as a way of fixing a problem with local candidate selection or buying congressional support from the minority party. However, it could also require real competition between the two candidates, with the governor only recognizing a non-PRI victory if the opposing candidate could win at the polls. In this latter case (the subset CD) the competing PRI groups, regardless of their party vehicle, organized, were represented at polling booths, and, for example, brought flashlights to prevent the “blackout” tactic (when electricity is cut off during the vote tally to buy time to change results). This showed both a high level of organization and the ability to conduct the elections as the rules stipulated and thus level the playing field, at least for the insiders. Both elites and society learned that their loyalty lay with the PRI system, not the PRI party. More ominously for the PRI, they learned that a non-PRI (but still “institutional”) victory could result in greater rewards from the governor than noncompetitive elections. The changes in electoral laws passed in 1991, 1994, and 1996 were concessions to society much more than to the elites, but by lowering the thresholds needed of the other three variables (A, B, and C), as by reducing the need for massive surveillance of the process, they led to a proliferation of electoral coups. Post-transition changes were minimal in these municipalities. There was little disillusion with alternation in power because most people were uninvolved— there were no expectations of change and, since the mayor’s relationship with the governor remained good, there was no loss of federal or state-level funding.16 At least in Yucatán, governors seemed to focus on these municipalities to guarantee continued societal support for the system, inadvertently causing citizens to associate alternation in power

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among PRI-regime-approved parties with more state financial support. As they developed and laws changed thanks to initiatives of transformational movements implemented at the national level, independent parties managed to break into the mix, but only by adapting to, not transforming, the local culture. Examples of electoral coups include state-level victories like those in Zacatecas and Tlaxcala in 1998 and post-Soviet regime change in countries like Moldova and most of Central Asia, for example. They would seem likely at the subnational level in other countries with centralized regimes like China. Electoral Revolts

The second pattern, snowball defeats or electoral revolts (AC) started with a small group of regime opponents outside the system and “snowballed” after the PRI-regime subjected community members to a number of indignities, often over a period of decades, finally erupting in an explosion of discontent that gave its candidate more support than the regimeselected PRI candidate. If factional defeats were like coups in that they were limited to the elites, snowball defeats were like popular revolts. Opposition to the regime increased for various reasons. In all places experiencing this type of PRI defeat, corruption, ineffective government, and abuse of power fueled discontent, but action often required a catalyst that in some cases took place within the context of economic decline. Snowball defeats resulted in a temporary reduction in PRI control over local societies but, as with factional defeats, did little to affect the traditional mechanisms of politics, facilitating both the excesses of PRI elites and now also those associated with other parties and legal or illegal groups. Most of the population withdrew from all political activity after the elections. Snowballs were first repressed and starved of financial resources and then co-opted by the regime. The result was the integration of new elites into the authoritarian system, without the consent of the local political class, which guaranteed competitive but not necessarily (liberal) democratic elections. If new elites were associated with major opposition parties, the result was also a proxy war between PRI system elites and antisystem elites, which in municipalities at low to moderate levels of development always resulted in the continuity of authoritarian practices and adoption of these practices by the opposition. These defeats were heavily repressed, and the new opposition administrations were starved of funding. Demands for revenge against past leaders, followed by massive disillusion with how little the new leader could accomplish once the rest of

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society withdrew, characterized the post-transition. The PRI usually recovered these municipalities in the next election. Examples of electoral revolts include PRI defeats in capital cities like San Luis Potosí (1958), Mérida (1967), and Hermosillo (1967) and state-level opposition victories like those in Chiapas (2000), Michoacán (2001), and Oaxaca (2010). These state-level victories were mostly due to the transitionrelated fragmentation of power as the post-2000 institutional reforms hardly reached them. They are likely the type experienced by Egypt and Middle Eastern participants in the Arab Spring as well as some of the “color” revolutions in post-Soviet states (Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, Kyrgyzstan in 2005). Electoral Revolutions

Electoral revolutions or transformational PRI defeats (ABC) had as their main objective to change the procedures of government toward rule of law. Transformational movements did not form within the elites; nor did they amass around a small nucleus of regime opponents. Rather, these movements emerged from the politicization of various enduring institutions of civil society. These opposition victories required a condition that the other two patterns did not: changing attitudes within the society and the elites. Specifically, they required not only a desire for change but also an insistence on changing the procedures of politics and not just the leadership, the allocation of resources, or the distribution of benefits. At least the leaders of transformational movements equated legality with legitimacy and administrative efficiency and had come to see the excessive centralization and corruption that goes with clientelist and corporatist politics as permanent stumbling blocks to regional and local economic growth and development. The panistas, who were the most identified with this goal, were often called una bola de locos (a cluster of crazy people) and ridiculed for worrying about legality when physical and economic security seemed so much more important. As Piccato (2010, 4) observed in The Tyranny of Opinion, “Masculine honor was the keystone in the building of a modern public sphere in Mexico,” and it was a cultural trait not compatible with liberal rule-of-law notions. Yet rule-of-law values began to emerge in the least state-dependent private sectors, those not benefitting from government favoritism or contracts. By the late 1980s, partly due to the charismatic nationwide campaigns of businessman Manuel Clouthier (Maquío), who became the PAN’s 1988 presidential candidate, the idea that the problem was the system and not the leaders

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became more widespread, laying the groundwork for the emergence of a civic culture that prioritized rule of law and the role of public service in citizenship. As Clouthier put it, “No se trata de cambiar de amo como los perros del trineo, lo importante no es cambiar de amo, sino dejar de ser perros” (It is not about exchanging masters, as with a team of sled dogs; what is important is not to change our master but to stop being dogs) (Martínez 2014). Subnational electoral revolutions produced the reforms that transformed politics at the national level, but the rate at which they changed local realities decelerated rapidly over time and eventually led to authoritarian reversals, although amid continued glacial progress toward rule of law. Nationally there was a similar pattern. Thus, World Bank governance indicators (reduced corruption, rule of law, and political stability) increased significantly in President Fox’s first three years, before authoritarian forces had a chance to regroup, and fell to pretransition levels by the end of his term. Between 2000 and 2003, percentile ranks went from 37.3 to 42.5 percent for political stability, from 39.2 to 53.9 percent for corruption control, and from 43.3 to 45.2 percent for rule of law. By 2005 these rankings had dropped to 36.3, 43.8, and 39.6 percent, respectively. Rule of law dropped to 25 percent and political stability to 17.6 percent by 2015.17 Those whose interests a transition to rule of law most affected—security forces, union bosses, and the displaced PRI groups—managed to reincorporate themselves into the power structure and perpetuate authoritarianism. Initially, therefore, there was a transition “bump” in which an activated citizenry worked with the new mayor to try to improve municipal governance and practices. (The close connection between the elected leader and the citizenry was not replicated at the national level.) The mayors negotiated legal reforms, accomplished decades worth of public works projects, and found ways to use the new decentralization laws to find local funding alternatives to counteract federal and state-level financial starvation. There was little repression as mayors had successfully negotiated with state and/or national elites. The local PRI continued to sabotage their efforts, however. Furthermore, negotiated agreements with the PRI at other levels of government did not mean PRI-regime cooperation with the opposition administration, just less obstruction. Still, opposition mayors were able to carry out their reforms without military or police interference. Following this rapidly democratizing phase, disillusion set in within the layer of the most actively involved citizenry, frustrated by the apathy and political ambivalence of the majority, the fiscal starvation

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imposed by the other levels of government, and how little achieving alternation in power could accomplish. They did, however, have lower expectations than electoral revolt participants, as they saw citizens themselves as the architects of change. If the opposition defeated the PRI after 1980, it tended to win twice or three times in a row, each time by a narrower margin, as citizen energy subsided (they partly tired of supporting the 70 percent plus of often reform-resistant free riders). Nostalgia for the old regime gradually emerged in large segments of the less reform-minded population, and the PRI was voted back in. The PRI became more competitive over time less because it changed than because disillusion gave way to apathy among the most modern sectors and to nostalgia among the most state-dependent sectors of the opposition coalition who would settle for the short-term benefits of clientelism and tax avoidance. The PRI-regime fought against transformational opposition victories the hardest because they threatened the entire system and were extremely difficult to co-opt. In fact, the strong grip of organized crime in many of the most developed municipalities may represent part of the struggle against rule-of-law advocates by those whose survival depends on its absence. Some authors believe PRI-regime political motives could be associated with the unsolved murders of hundreds of women in Juárez and the extreme drug-related violence in the northern states with the longest experience of alternation in power, especially since these were incubators of Mexico’s most transcendental democratic reforms (Aziz Nassif 2003, 111; Corchado 2013, 157; Ganster and Lorey 2008, 181; Klesner 2006, 402; Zaid 1995). The transformational pattern appears to hold in gubernatorial races in the most developed states (Nuevo León 1997, Baja California 1989, Chihuahua 1992, for example) and (in a more diluted form) at the national level. This pattern may be applicable to Poland, the Baltic states, potentially Iran,18 and even some Chinese democratization movements. Applicability to Other Cases

Whether the Tunisian street vendor who set himself ablaze, triggering the Arab Spring, represented the catalytic event of a long-brewing snowball movement or electoral revolt within Tunisia or whether the national movements that followed had a cumulative impact on political change in the Middle Eastern region is for others to explore. However, Meyer (2009) has already revealed that the fall of the Berlin Wall was

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not a cause of Soviet transition but rather a catalyst, the straw that broke the camel’s back, representing the culmination of dozens of local and national movements in Soviet republics, many following the pattern of an electoral revolt. In this case the Soviet republics acted as the equivalent of states in Mexico—they were the subnational units of the Soviet Union in which movements took place.19 A very small number of these movements were probably transformational, fighting for reforms that would weaken the Soviet system and introduce liberalizing changes. One example is given by Sharansky (2004, 115) who attributes the fall of the Soviet Union partly to pressures leading to the Jackson-Vanik amendment, making trade benefits conditional on freedom of emigration, which strengthened lobbies for reforms from the safety of exile. He believes these external movements were a primary cause of the Soviet regime’s demise and a building block of the democracies that emerged in some of the Soviet states. Meanwhile, most Central Asian states only experienced factional movements or electoral coups: the same elites adapted to the new democratic institutional veneer while reinforcing the same authoritarian power structure. At most, mid-level apparatchiks replaced the highestlevel ones (White 2010), the same type of change encountered in “coups” among local PRI elites. At the same time, electoral transitions in capital cities anywhere in the developing world engender great resistance proportional to their success in diffusing power throughout society. This is partly because internal migration patterns in developing countries lead the majority of citizens to be distributed on the periphery of big cities in unplanned concentric rings of underclass neighborhoods dedicated to informal, if not criminal, activities. Once political power depends on votes, criminal and/or opportunistic power brokers encapsulate these internal migrants, make them dependent on their own political groups, and broker arrangements with the state. Thus, capital cities can conceivably have a majority of people with authoritarian values, the ones Desai, Olofsgård, and Youssef (2007) call “nostalgics,” who vote for a more democratic version (responsive to the needs of this statedependent majority) of the old authoritarian system. These authors note that nostalgics lean left and strongly endorse statism, which may partly account for the PRD’s overwhelming support in Mexico City. To those who fight for democratic change in any country or at any level of government, the resilience of authoritarian practices and concomitant corruption, as in Mexico, probably leads to similar levels of disillusion and voter apathy (Hanson 2017, 329), although these reactions may expose the slow pace of political change and the values of the

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majority that always undergird those of the relatively thin layer of modern-minded citizens. In some cases, perhaps linked to levels of development, this resilience of authoritarian practices may indicate the persistence of authoritarianism. Africa expert Julius Ihonbvere (1993, 222) explained voter disillusion in Zambia, claiming, “Uncannily, this [authoritarian] structure has survived, reproduced and rejuvenated by the legacy of military and single party rule. . . . [W]hat is the point of choosing democratically those who will control a state apparatus that is inherently undemocratic?” The degree to which the pathways identified in this study apply to these and other cases is for others to explore, but it seems almost certain that they are applicable to authoritarian implosions in developing regions around the world. Conclusion

A closer look at how the PRI-state lost control at the local level suggests that decentralization was less a transfer than a fragmentation of power, as rather than diffusing into society it remained in the hands of largely traditional elites. It was mostly the result of PRI-state implosion caused by the effects of its inherent corruption on the candidate-selection process as well as its inability to generate the resources to maintain an increasingly complex and demanding society under its control. The decentralizing institutional changes helped the state accommodate new actors within its elites but destroyed the networks undergirding political stability and did not change the authoritarian mechanisms and values underpinning the political system. Furthermore, in most cases where opposition emerged in society and not among elites, authoritarianism also remained intact. Only movements with elites who helped organize and socialize broad coalitions in local societies to value strong rule-of-law-oriented institutions and sustained participation through civic organizations achieved the types of institutional changes that could potentially erode authoritarian practices. The distribution among the patterns of municipal losses suggests that cultural support for the informal authoritarian institutions of the PRIregime is still much stronger than support for dismantling authoritarianism and building strong parties and institutions to facilitate self-government and evolution toward rule of law. Meanwhile, the PRI’s political losses were largely the result of counterforces in local elites generated by the gradual expansion of the national government’s reach through a decades-long process of central-

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ization. Candidate selection became increasingly illegitimate as its political use broke with the PRI-regime’s own informal rules. The PRIregime finally dealt with these growing pressures by increasing the number of state-dependent party options available to local elites. The political opportunity provided by these state-dependent parties led to the most prevalent pattern identified in this study, that of factional defeats or electoral coups (forty-five cases exemplified by Cacalchén and Parácuaro). This pattern included defeats taking place as a result of the 1988 PRI split and creation of the PRD in 1989. The party names changed but not the political class or the procedures of government. Electoral revolts or snowball defeats, on the other hand, formed in local societies and brought an emergent elite to power. They were characterized by a learning curve evident in the achievement of one or more unrecognized victories until they reached such high levels of participation that they defeated the PRI by a three-to-one margin. At the time of this explosion of participation, the opposition had also achieved high enough levels of organization to defend the elections such that the PRIregime was compelled to recognize its victory (twenty-five cases). Finally, nine to eleven cases constituted an important subset of snowball movements: transformational defeats. These electoral revolutions had permanent organizational foundations and were distinguished by evidence of changing attitudes in the society and the elites. These were the only movements pursuing procedural changes toward rule of law but also led to the most fragmentation of power. The PRI-regime was strong at its center, but its strength relied partly on keeping citizens and the private sector dependent and weak and then brokering arrangements with local bosses from a position of strength. Democratic reforms destroyed the central government’s ability to negotiate from a position of strength but also established an institutional infrastructure that could eventually give Mexico’s central government direct control over territory—allowing it to become strong everywhere. State and local elites have corrupted many of these institutions since authoritarian practices and values continue to predominate. The implosion of the one-party revolutionary regime, to some extent incorrectly labeled a democratic transition, led to a period of fragmentation and weakness that the old security apparatus, in cahoots with organized criminals, is taking advantage of. Yet, as the new police forces are developed and the legal transformations take place, Mexico has the potential to shift from a personalistic to a rule-of-law regime. This study suggests, however, that it is only about one-fourth to one-third of the way there, as evidenced by the

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nature of local political culture and continued high levels of state dependence revealed by the different paths to PRI defeats as well as by values surveys and voting patterns. The study demonstrates that national realities can be deceptive in centralized and formerly centralized systems, but examining events at the local level can reveal a great deal, as I hope to show in the following chapters. Part one, “Electoral Coups,” presents two cases of factional defeats, preceded by historical overviews of the institutional changes they resulted from—one in which the PRI “multiplies” by legalizing other parties (Cacalchén, Yucatán) and another in which the PRI divides and a key segment of the political class, followers of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, defects almost entirely to the PRD (Parácuaro, Michoacán). Part two, “Electoral Revolts,” includes an overview of snowball defeats illustrated by the typical case of Hunucmá, as well as one on the special case of indigenous municipalities, represented by Chemax, both in Yucatán. Part three, “Electoral Revolutions,” begins with an overview of transformational defeats and proceeds to a case in Zamora that illustrates the pattern. A concluding chapter summarizes the case studies and considers the reasons for a partial convergence over time among the three patterns. Notes 1. This study uses Karl and Schmitter’s (1993, 40) definition of democracy: “a system of governance in which rulers are held accountable in the public realm by citizens acting indirectly through the competition and cooperation of their elected representatives.” It uses O’Donnell’s (1999, 142) definition of an authoritarian context as roughly contained in his concept of “brown areas” beyond the reach of the law: “In an authoritarian context there is no legal system that guarantees the effectiveness of the rights and guarantees that individuals and groups can uphold against the rulers. . . . [I]t mixes democratic and authoritarian procedures . . . [and can respect] citizen voting rights while systematically violating the liberal component [of democracy].” 2. See Breslow (2015); Gorbea and Noel (2015). According to official counts Mexico’s drug war added more than 60,000 deaths in 2015 and 2016, 20,000 more than in the previous two years, and 2017 is on track for the highest death toll ever. See Linthicum (2017). 3. Examples of this type of loyalty to corrupt leaders that seemed to defy rational decision making surprised many local opposition leaders who obtained power and seemed to conform to some of Graham Wallace’s (1919) sometimes controversial insights about the role of habit in political decision making. 4. The PRI’s monopoly over the revolutionary ideal was broken when its “revolutionary” faction defected and formed the PRD in 1989. PRI survival almost inevitably depended on shifting the system’s source of legitimacy to democracy.

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5. Lauth (2016) develops a two-track scale for evaluating democratic quality, accounting for these trade-offs. His techniques were not applied to emerging democracies but could aid in evaluating their quality more accurately. 6. Reformers advocating democratic egalitarianism initially work with autocratic reformers who lock out traditional elite factions. 7. The database and tables mentioned are not provided because a detailed treatment of the methodology did not comply with space constraints. 8. Criteria for pretransition competitiveness was initially John Bailey’s—less than 70 percent PRI vote and less than 40 percent difference between the PRI and its strongest competitor in vote tallies (Foley 1998, 155). Thresholds for many more of the elections were context dependent, evaluated based on the oral histories due to widespread “electoral cleansing” (PRI manipulation of statistics beyond that assumed by the “Bailey competitiveness standard”). 9. Due to the prohibitive cost of new surveys, criteria for changing attitudes had to be minimalist (desire to change procedures and not just leaders or to have votes and not government representatives determine elections, for example). Local surveys were not easily comparable across different time periods or cases. 10. ABCd + ABCD or AbC + ABC become AC, because B and D can be present or absent. 11. Institutional changes (D) alone can produce a defeat, and therefore AD drops out, leaving AC + D. 12. I had trouble classifying Mérida (1991), Tuxtla Gutiérrez (1995), Cajeme (1974), and several others because the oral histories provided evidence that these PRI defeats were transformational, but the state context argued against it. Mérida’s first opposition victory (1967) was too early for reformers to have an impact on national elites, and both Mérida and Tuxtla Gutiérrez were in rural states that faced a strong state-level PRI that prevented reform. Cajeme was early and did not have repeat victories, but along with San Pedro Garza García, it was said to have influenced the 1977 reforms, and there was more evidence of commitment to procedural change in the society and the elites. Had all the cases meeting low thresholds for transformational PRI defeats been included, no more than 15 percent of the municipalities would be classified as transformational. 13. Society-driven PRI defeats are underrepresented because so many were not recognized, they predated most of the “coups” because the regime still controlled candidate selection, and there were more recognized opposition victories as elite factionalism increased in more recent elections. Local scholars contributed the comparatively few accounts of the most significant society-intensive electoral contests. 14. Boolean techniques make qualitative analysis more systematic but do not overcome the qualitative/quantitative divide. They require setting only rough thresholds of presence/absence, accommodating a wide margin of error. 15. The link between illegality (corruption) and inefficiency (the inability to produce sufficient tangible results) was only appreciated by urban leaders who sabotaged their own efforts by often not recognizing the importance of a strong state for achieving greater legality. 16. Exceptions were cases in which President Salinas was able to place governors who would thwart PRD authorities, but after his presidency, the PRD in most places became an additional vehicle to power for the PRI political class. 17. “Indicadores de la gobernabilidad en el ámbito mundial 2006,” World Bank, http://databank.bancomundial.org/data/reports.aspx?source=indicadores-mundiales -de-buen-gobierno. Unlike the improvements observed at the local level, effective governance fell throughout his term from 65.1 percent in 2000 to 60.8 percent in

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2003 and 57.4 percent in 2005, probably partly because of the increased distance between state and society built into institutions at higher levels of government. 18. Iran has a very developed middle class but many complicating factors. According to Ronfeldt (1989, 441), Iran’s Dowre system is comparable to Mexico’s camarillas. Like Mexico, Iran has a modernizing elite faction and constituency but suffers from weak parties, extreme factionalism (Brownlee 2007, 179), and the overriding importance of personal relationships. 19. The practice of injecting Russians into all republics to maintain political control was comparable to Mexico’s practice of dividing the countryside into thousands of localities. Both practices made difficult the spread and oversight of opposition.

Part 1 Factional Defeats: Electoral Coups

2 The Multiplication of the PRI

While we have no records for most early municipal contests (1940–1970) and existing case studies do not constitute a representative sample of the 22 percent of municipalities fielding more than one candidate in those years, there is near consensus among scholars of local politics that infighting was contained within the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (Calderón Mólgora 1994a, 61). Therefore the relatively few recognized early PRI defeats were societal. Still, the process of centralizing the PRI-regime and displacing local power brokers with political appointees meant the fight for the PRI candidacy intensified with every passing decade. These battles were kept out of the public eye and rarely recorded in official records, but in a zero-sum system where a victorious bid was the source of many opportunities during the time limit imposed by the no-reelection clause, the process of obtaining candidacy incited rivalries. Factionalism within the PRI elites gave rise to the most superficial and misleading type of PRI defeats. Unlike the other patterns in which societal opposition movements targeted existing elites—and in the most significant cases the political system—electoral coups were largely a conservative, elite phenomenon. They started within the small core of local power holders and worked their way outward in an effort to mobilize not voters but apolitical clienteles. A local leader who could orchestrate a sizable protest in the state capital could sometimes persuade state-level PRI officials to overrule the choice made by the national PRI representative who presided over the candidate-selection process at the local convention. They aimed only to combat the imposition of local authorities by the central government. Leaders representing a handful of families, in whose hands power had been concentrated for decades if

47

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not centuries, often led electoral coups. These leaders wanted to continue enjoying the benefits of the informal, hierarchical, traditional power structure; they did not want to change the political system in the direction of rule of law or more participatory representation. Their success therefore represented very limited democratic progress. A dissident candidate from these exclusionary elites who came to power under the initials of an opposition party contributed to the perception, particularly in electoral statistics, of democratic change in the form of alternation in power, but the process through which dissident candidates won reinforced mechanisms of continuity. Understanding the roots of PRI factionalism requires consideration of two contradictory processes: the institutional changes that engendered the centralized PRI-regime and its consolidation and those that helped contain the resulting counterforces. This chapter first introduces the institutional changes that begot factionalism and explains why the PRI could not democratize in response. It then shows how the PRIregime gradually resorted to using co-opted parties to maintain the topdown nature of local politics as it progressively lost control of local elites. Finally, the chapter discusses the 1977 electoral reform leading to the pervasiveness of the practice among local PRI elites of running under other party slogans. In most of local Mexico, party shells served simply as vessels through which the PRI elites competed over the spoils of the corrupt centralized system, not as democratizing forces. Four Key Institutional Changes: The Creation and Sacrifice of the PRI

The national leaders who came to power in the wake of the Mexican Revolution faced the dilemma of heading a central government in a country where most available power was diffused among countless local political-military groups. On the one hand, the new elites wanted to destroy the old ones, but on the other, their internal divisions and weakness made alliances with existing power centers inevitable. The first great turning point in postrevolutionary politics came with President Plutarco Elías Calles’s achievement of an elite pact among the warring revolutionary factions. Calles persuaded the generals, each heading his own political party, that without stability they could never enjoy their power or even safeguard their lives. Keeping power within a “revolutionary family” represented by one great party was in their collective best interests. Limited terms in office and a no-reelection clause would

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keep opportunities open to everyone in the revolutionary family and ensure their dependence on the central government. While it took over two decades to solve the problem of succession and consolidate the new party, the founding of the National Revolutionary Party (PNR) in 1929 was the first great step toward an effective central government. Calles had found a way to rein in the power of the warring elites, but what of the destabilizing potential of the newly politicized masses? The task of establishing regional and local stability fell to local and regional bosses who would maintain control as they always had: through a combination of paternalism and repression. Calles, a pragmatist, thought broad social reforms should wait for a time when the nation was stronger and resources more plentiful. While Calles did unleash his wrath against the church with the disastrous consequence of a ten-year civil war, la Cristiada, he was more accommodating with economic elites. His decision to side with existing economic elites as support pillars of the new regime and to lock out the less pliable revolutionary leaders put him on a collision course with a shrewd rural power contender who discovered a way to use “social power” to his advantage: Lázaro Cárdenas del Río. If Calles engineered the structure that would rein in the elites, Cárdenas engineered the one that would rein in the masses. He created the corporative party structure that would give the populist faction of the elites a permanent foothold in the government. Cárdenas had been governor of Michoacán, a state proving a great laboratory for his scheme to organize the masses so they could be easily mobilized without being dangerously politicized. A broad-based land reform making peasants directly dependent on the state, and particularly on Cárdenas, together with the incorporation of workers from diverse industrial sectors into one state-controlled union, allowed Cárdenas to use “people power” to counteract economic power. Cárdenas’s victorious 1934 bid for the presidency ended Calles’s maximato, his period of rule first as president and then through presidents he could manipulate. During his administration, Cárdenas formed the National Peasant Confederation (CNC) and the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), two corporative organizations that would dictate the new structure of a rebaptized government party in 1938: the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), which in 1946 received the name it kept, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. These two institutional moments—the creation of a revolutionary one-party system to contain the elites and of corporative organizations to facilitate the centralized manipulation of the masses—provided a weak central government with enough power to gradually extend its influence across the

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Mexican territory. However, this process generated counterforces at the local level, revealing the limits of centralized control. Before the 1940s local politics was highly decentralized. The negotiations conducted primarily by central elites with powerful local and regional caudillos1 left local strongmen in control of their territories, but at the cost of some of their independence. In return for a share of government resources and some added security, regional strongmen now had to answer to, or at least cultivate relationships with, the new regime’s national-level leaders. They could still, however, control the transfer of power in their fiefdoms. Either regional bosses imposed their preferences, or, when power was more diffuse, local political groups fought among themselves until they decided on a candidate. In either case PRI officials registered the winner as the official PRI candidate. Efforts to centralize both military and financial resources enabled the PRI-regime to gradually extend its power, but its rule at the local level remained indirect. The new corporative organizations served as instruments to help the state achieve more direct control over the territory by providing a counterweight to the strength of dominant local elites. The population was encapsulated into worker and peasant groups, and local leaders were co-opted. Because the corporations were instruments of political control and not representation, the CNC commonly dominated in places with few peasants, whereas the CTM often held sway in places with few workers. Such was the logic of the PRI-regime. As PRI-regime leaders increasingly tried to counteract the power of local bosses by integrating rural residents into the new corporations and expanding the state bureaucracy to make their control more direct, factionalism within the local PRI groups became a major electoral problem. Candidate selection gradually stopped depending on local factors and increasingly became an arbitrary decision by external elites. Part of the PRI-state’s genius was that the PRI depended on the government and not the other way around: the party could ultimately be sacrificed if it outlived its usefulness to national elites. The candidate-selection process increasingly weakened the PRI and became a double-edged sword for central elites who hoped to impose national political priorities on local Mexico. If the creation of the PRI and its corporate structure helped the PRI-regime strengthen the central government, two subsequent institutional changes worked to contain the centrifugal tendencies paradoxically produced by those efforts. The evolution of the electoral system, one of the previously understated instruments of political control, reflected the counterforces generated by the process of national

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integration. Two major changes in the electoral and party systems helped the regime check factionalism within the system, but not without contributing to the inevitable demise of PRI dominance: the 1977 electoral reforms passed by President José López Portillo and the 1988 PRI split that led to the formation of a new political party, the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).2 The 1977 Law of Political Organizations and Electoral Processes (LOPPE) legalized small parties, dramatically increasing political opportunities for local political groups. This provided the central government with a way to maintain political control where the PRI was no longer politically effective. The result was a “multiplication” of the PRI as the new state-dependent PRI satellites were drawn into the regime. The 1988 PRI-regime split, on the other hand, stemmed from the same tension that led Lázaro Cárdenas to defy Calles in the 1930s. Locked out of power by the national technocratic elites, the revolutionary nationalists, led by Cárdenas’s son, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano, planned to use “people power” to take Mexico back from unrevolutionary forces, just as Cuauhtémoc’s father had done over half a century earlier. The expulsion of this group from the PRI and creation of the PRD again sought to contain centrifugal forces within the political system, at the expense of the regime’s party, the PRI. The PRI’s division resulted in several different types of PRI defeats, but a large percentage of these represented struggles among local political groups, with similarly negligible democratic effects as those resulting from the party’s “multiplication.” The Problem of Succession

As almost any local-level political actor will attest, the most serious threats to municipal PRI hegemony over the last seven decades arose within the PRI itself. The PRI-regime started to self-destruct from the “inside out” due to a factor that it had overcome at the national level since 1952: the problem of succession. An inverse relationship existed between the increasing consolidation of the regime and local stability among elite groups: the more centralized the system became, the farther decisions grew from local realities and the less control there was over policy implementation. The revolutionary state’s gradual replacement of the territorially limited dictatorships that characterized the Porfiriato (Porfirio Díaz’s regime) with those “limited in time” due to a no-reelection clause contributed to instability because people (in and out of government) did not know whom to go to for problem resolution or how long that individual

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would last in the post. (Political analyst Gabriel Zaíd [1995, 36, 201–202] analogizes this process to the gradual replacement of “franchises,” in which regional power remained in the control of caciques [regional strongmen], with “fully owned subsidiaries.”) While the no-reelection clause in the Mexican constitution theoretically permitted more mobility within the political class, in practice the centralized control exercised over the political process inhibited mobility and also undercut local power plays. Part of this loss of local stability arose from an attempt to centralize control within the corporative organs of government at the expense of regional and local political groups. As the CNC, CTM, and government dependencies like the agriculture department opened local branches, their representatives were rewarded with posts in the municipal administrations, a strategy aimed at undercutting the power of the families in which political control had been concentrated for half a century or more. Yet, quite often, local leaders with deep roots in the community had more control than the newcomers or regained control as corruption increased in the government organizations. The sectoral organizations of the PRI became progressively weaker as mechanisms of local control because their representatives were mostly outsiders only interested in extracting as many rewards as they could, while local political groups often managed to retain and even enhance their control by adapting to new circumstances (Díaz Cayeros and Martínez Uriarte 1999). Local PRI elites called for democratization but really demanded adherence to the informal rules of the regime. Regime challengers generally remained loyal to the system and willing to trade their political autonomy for the chance to gain power through the goodwill of those above them, but felt betrayed when higher-level authorities stopped respecting the informal rules of PRI politics. As Zaíd (1995, 89) and González Casanova (1981, 204–207) have explained about nationallevel politicians, these rules basically promised that everybody within the local elite would have a chance to hold power (or serve themselves with the “big spoon”) and that PRI militants should trust in the goodwill of their superiors, not in any theoretical rights granted by law, like the power of votes, and much less in the persuasive power of violence. The arrangement had ample support for a long time, at least among elites, because it minimized the violence so characteristic of local politics, guaranteed (at least in theory) something for everyone, and left political and economic power in the hands of a small nucleus of political elites. Meanwhile, the violence of the revolutionary experience, a general distrust of the central government, and PRI efforts to depoliticize the pop-

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ulation and encourage a strictly transactional culture of controlled pressure group politics led most of society to withdraw from political activity, leaving the struggle for power to the dominant political groups. Increasingly, however, central government authorities and the party delegates they sent out to oversee the internal selection process became less respectful of these rules, and their decisions became progressively more arbitrary. After all, just as the local elites owed nothing to the voters, the PRI delegates who oversaw the candidate-selection process owed nothing to the local elites. When the governor had a preference, the PRI delegate had an obligation to enforce it, but when the governor did not, the delegate’s best bet was to go with the highest bidder (or briber). There was also an element of elitism: PRI delegates were often from Mexico City and had high-level positions within the party; they were not known for placing much importance on what the locals in the provinces wanted.3 Local political groups, however, were willing to submit to the informal rules of the regime but not to a totally arbitrary candidate-selection process. They began to resort to a variety of tactics, starting by appealing to the goodwill of state-level PRI representatives by demonstrating their superior abilities to mobilize PRI voters. The “democratization” of politics in the form of majority rule made sense to elites, partly because the regime so carefully disguised the selection process in democratic clothing and because mobilizing clienteles was the only easy way of countering centralized control over the candidate-selection process. Local PRI leaders were not democrats, but they shared with opposition reformers a desire to defend local autonomy against the central government (Wasserman 1993, 152). Why the PRI Could Not Democratize

Unfortunately for most local political leaders, democratization of the selection process was impossible, as the PRI-regime owed its control to creating dependence on central authority. The only two threats to the regime were law (the belief that one has rights and not just personal obligations that give rise to privileges) and violence. By making all power flow from the top down, everybody, from marginalized citizens and low-ranking officials to local, state, and even national elites, owed what they had to the goodwill of others above them. Zaíd (1995) observed that people, no matter their class or position in the political hierarchy, had no rights; anything they received was always conceded

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as a favor. Centralized control of the entire electoral process was what made co-optation so successful: the PRI-regime offered political posts in exchange for the surrender of political autonomy. Genuine democratization would violate the logic of the system: if votes determined who obtained the PRI candidacy, not only would the PRI-regime lose its ability to use candidacies as political rewards, but the people with the most votes would feel they had rights before the regime and could no longer be counted on for unconditional support. The PRI-regime would seemingly have had little to fear from such a slight loss of control, the forfeiture of a few of the nearly 2,500 municipalities, but that evaluation overestimates the PRI’s strength (as a political instrument at the central government’s service) and underestimates the regime leadership’s determination (not to mention that of the president) to retain absolute control. As other authors have noted, the lack of alternatives and resulting resignation, not PRI-regime legitimacy, often explained local stability (Aziz Nassif 1994b, 33, 48; Gómez Tagle 1993, 53–55; Martin 1987; Molinar Horcasitas 1991, 155–158). Thus, it was important to maintain the PRI’s image of invulnerability, which undoubtedly discouraged most people from supporting the initiatives of opposition and dissident groups. Stability depended in great part on controlling the electoral system. Therefore, yielding a little bit of power would have a cascading effect; there was no way to grant a little freedom without having to cede increasingly more. In addition, democratization would contribute to making the party increasingly independent of regime leaders, an unpalatable outcome for an elite to whom the party was an important instrument of control. According to the literature on revolutionary one-party regimes, party influence over the regime was supposed to decrease as state integration led the regime leadership’s goals to change in ways that prize economic efficiency over political control. Yet partly because debt financing in the 1970s dramatically expanded the bureaucracy and therefore the PRI, the new technocrats could not rein in the party’s revolutionary populist core.4 The reluctance of the PRI-regime to consider democratization of candidate selection is evident in its response to those suggesting it or recognizing opposition victories. Former PRI president Carlos Madrazo’s 1964 proposal to open up the candidate-selection process to the local party bases and hold primaries, in response to severe internal factionalism, met with his prompt dismissal from the PRI leadership and, some believe, even to his later mysterious death in a 1969 plane crash (Chand 1991, 66; Girard 1977, 39). State-level actors and party members who also witnessed the severe problems originating from centralized control of local

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politics suggested “modernization” (internal democratization) of the party on at least several occasions. They knew the candidate-selection process was failing and believed it could threaten regime survival. Those who dared suggest granting or awarded some local autonomy were banished from politics in one way or another. These included the Yucatecan governors General Graciliano Alpuche Pinzón and Víctor Manzanilla Schaffer, both forced to resign after recognizing National Action Party (PAN) victories (in 1984 and 1991, respectively); Chihuahua governor Oscar Ornelas, ousted in 1983 (Manzanilla Schaffer 1995, 61–65); Chiapas governor Jorge de la Vega (no democrat), reassigned within a year of letting the outgoing governor recognize the 1976 PAN victory in the capital; Michoacán governor Luis Martínez Villicaña, who had the nerve to report that Cárdenas had won 60 percent of the vote in the 1988 presidential elections; and his replacement’s (Genovevo Figueroa) interior minister, who recognized PRD victories in 50 percent of the municipalities (Fernández Menéndez 1992; Krauze 1986, 136). It has even been suggested that the democratic proclivities of the assassinated 1994 presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio may have tragically sealed his fate (Krauze 1997a, 421, 442, 136; Zaíd 1995, 231). The Limits of Control

Despite this determination to control everything in all places and at all times, the PRI started to lose municipalities as early as 1946, and the number, although initially only a very small proportion of the approximately 2,500 municipalities nationwide, increased geometrically with each passing decade. There were 15 PAN victories between 1946 and 1957, 22 between 1958 and 1969, 44 between 1970 and 1981, 190 between 1982 and 1993, 511 between 1994 and 1999, and 1,428 between 2000 and 2007. Factionalism was a primary cause of these defeats, but, as shown in subsequent chapters, pressure outside the PRI also increased progressively, contributing to a steady trickle of victories, an increasing proportion of which had to be recognized as pressures mounted. The PRI’s reputation for absolute control continued, leading many to believe that municipal PRI defeats formed a necessary part of the PRI-regime’s strategy, serving as escape valves or means to gain domestic and international democratic legitimacy. As Molinar Horcasitas (1991, 134–136) demonstrates, however, strong opposition pressure within and outside the regime preceded the electoral laws facilitating some of the defeats, suggesting that the regime was forced to grant

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concessions, particularly since reforms made electoral problems worse instead of better and representation became even more disproportionate (Castillo Peraza 1994). Caps on proportional-representation seats and low but nationwide vote-percentage thresholds for opposition parties to maintain registry were suggestive not of a regime seeking democratic legitimacy but rather of one trying to keep an increasingly powerful opposition as divided and powerless as possible. Regime-planned local PRI defeats also would not explain the opposition movement’s repression or the recognition of repeated opposition victories and opposition victories in capitals, both of which delegitimized the PRI. The PAN won Asunción Cuyotepeji, Oaxaca, six times in a row and many other municipalities three, four, and five times. By the late 1970s the capital cities of San Luis Potosí (1958), Mérida and Hermosillo (1967), and Tuxtla Gutiérrez (1976), had gone to the opposition. So had major cities like León and Tijuana and medium-sized cities like Tehuacán, Puebla, and Uruapan, Michoacán. Selective municipal democratization would at best have been a reluctant PRI strategy as it was also at odds with the party’s penchant for orchestrating carro completo (clean sweep) PRI victories.5 As Richmond McIntire (1965, 289) points out, the regime was centralized, but despite its substantial local presence institutionally, it was weak. The ruling elites in the capital took each local-level challenge quite seriously and made every effort to prevent dissent from escaping their control. Of course, it often took a defeat to get regime leaders’ attention. The extreme centralization of the system meant PRI elites could not keep track of all places at all times, and the element of surprise was important in many victories. Once alerted, however, the regime kept close tabs on most problem areas. Several opposition leaders emphasized the regime’s lack of tolerance for any local-level opposition at all, even when it posed no threat. Campeche PAN founder Dr. Miguel Medina Maldonado (1997) and Tabasco PAN youth action director Francisco Macossay (1997) both remembered when the few panistas in town, who had no following in the population, used to ride into their respective cities on horses. The police opened fire on them and found obscure laws to justify imprisoning or otherwise intimidating powerless opposition members. Some municipalities were more tolerant for one of two reasons. Sometimes the dominant political groups were relatively independent of the PRI-state, so tolerance depended on the level of insecurity of the local cacique. Alternatively, tolerance resulted when many groups shared power and kept closer track of each other than of the goings-on among the rest of the population. In Parácuaro, Michoacán, for example, local strongman

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Rafael Béjar was a benevolent dictator and more powerful in the region than any government representative. According to former Popular Socialist Party (PPS) and then PRD member Armando Villaseñor Cervantes (1996), he tolerated PPS activity because he recognized that it presented no real threat. Alternatively, in Hunucmá, Yucatán, Anacleto Cetina Aguilar (1996) observed that political groups were constantly bickering among themselves and paid no mind to the small group of Communists who rallied around the PAN. Gonzálo N. Santos, the cacique of the entire state of San Luis Potosí, on the other hand, brooked no opposition at all (Estrada 1963; Rangel 1989, 155–171).6 As early as 1959, while trying to centralize the control then in the hands of local caciques, the PRI-regime implemented measures indicating that problems with the candidate-selection process had reached the point of becoming politically relevant. A new procedure was established in which PRI leaders agreed to consider for the PRI candidacy all slates submitted by at least 200 dues-paying members. The final decision, however, was left to the discretion of the PRI delegate and, at best, as Richmond McIntire (1965, 403) notes, was based on an assessment of which group had the most power in the community and not which was the most popular, even if only among the elites. It is hard to know for sure how pervasive the problem of PRI factionalism was since much of the competition took place within PRI corporative groups: the National Peasant Confederation (CNC), the National Confederation of Popular Organizations (CNOP), the Union of Mexican Workers (CTM), and the Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM). It therefore does not show up in official election documents. However, it was certainly widespread because incidents were recorded in nearly every state of the country (Alonso 1985, 349– 374). In many municipalities the problems were contained within the PRI groups as most of the population abstained from politics. But in other municipalities, disgruntled priístas posed a greater threat because of their potential to support clusters of independent opposition. Together, PRI dissidents and embryonic opposition groups could capitalize on the dissatisfaction of a population that was (at least since the late 1950s) getting increasingly fed up with corruption, inefficiency, and abuse of power (Aziz Nassif 1989a, 187). These factional forces within the PRI intensified over time, partly because of the regime’s increasing attempts to supplant local power structures. National elites institutionalized the imposition of municipal authorities in the 1950s, and these efforts obtained a second wind in the 1970s, when Presidents Luis Echeverría Álvarez and José López Portillo

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supported political groups emerging out of the rapidly expanding state bureaucracy in an effort to displace cacicazgos (local bosses or chiefs), which were interfering with modernization efforts (Poot Capetillo 1992; Tapia Santamaría 1992). In addition, generational changes and the cooptation of dissident groups meant that the local elites kept growing, multiplying the number of aspirants for office.7 These forces, along with the development of organized dissent outside the system, led the regime to make one of the most significant institutional changes in its electoral history. The changes in the electoral system had very little impact on the mechanics of elections but did play a role in changing the local interplay of political forces (Molinar Horcasitas 1991, 134–136). Institutional reform in 1977 was an attempt to deal with increasing opposition outside the PRI-regime by dividing it. However, particularly with regard to the problem of factionalism, it was also an effort to do the nearly impossible: to change without changing and to invent a method of authoritarian alternation in power. The “Multiplication” of the PRI

The first major change leading to a rash of PRI defeats that increased geometrically over the years was the electoral reform of 1977, the LOPPE, passed during López Portillo’s presidency. It increased the number of political parties from four to seven (two of the three new parties were leftist, as were four that joined the scene in the next few years)8 and expanded the number of seats in the national chamber of deputies from 300 to 400. The extra 100 seats were deputations of proportional representation, which meant that the deputies were not elected but designated by the opposition parties according to the percentage of votes they achieved in federal elections in each of the five electoral districts. The principle of proportional representation also permitted the PRI to retain the elective posts, inhibiting the development of a political base for other parties and maintaining them as political rewards, as victory was virtually guaranteed for PRI candidates. To achieve definitive registry, the new parties needed only to obtain 1.5 percent of the vote within three years of their conditional registration (reduced from the 2.5 percent established in 1964), which meant they would be weak enough to be controllable. Most of them garnered little real support within the population and could at certain times and for certain purposes serve as instruments of the regime.9 Proportional representation was also established at the state level, giving

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them nationwide presence and legislative representation instantly, no matter how small their support base. One use of these new parties was to help the state-level PRI machinery deal with PRI factionalism. Before 1977, the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM), the result of the co-optation of a dissident PRI faction at the national level, and the Popular Party (PP) played the same role. However, the multiplication of small parties dramatically increased the number of non-PRI victories. The new rules also made it possible for parties with negligible representation in a state to hold seats in the local congress (Adler 1988, 129–131; Alcocer 1995, 57–59). We need not delve into the intricacies of such reforms, which served to counteract democratic forces at least as much as to promote them, to understand how they increased the number of PRI defeats, even where conditions normally associated with electoral victories were absent. Many minority party victories involved little citizen organization, few signs of changing attitudes, no history of electoral competitiveness, and no sustainable improvements in the levelness of the playing field. The LOPPE effectively multiplied the number of parties under state control.10 The regime added some extra “fingers” to its electoral arm, the PRI, and created a system of authoritarian party competition. The first waves of factional PRI defeats resulted almost exclusively and automatically from the institutional changes introduced by the LOPPE reforms. The perverse implementation of these institutional changes and their manipulation by regime elements demonstrate the determination of regime leaders to maintain absolute control over politics at all levels, their reluctance to permit political autonomy, and their aversion to the rule of law. The implementation of the reforms also demonstrates the true role of the pretransition PRI as a tool of regime control and its lack of autonomy. The central government’s willingness to experiment with alternative tools and to play PRI elites against one another shows that the PRI was, at least in theory, expendable. As Zaíd (1995, 110) presciently observed, “It is conceivable that the Institutional Revolutionary Party could continue to exist, and yet no longer be the PRI.” Increasing the number of legitimate parties accomplished several things for the PRI-regime. First, it helped undercut a tendency for the PAN, a party slowly gaining power, to channel popular discontent. By 1977 the PAN had accumulated sixty-one recognized municipal victories since its first in 1946, most of them facilitated by PRI factionalism. Furthermore, suppressing countless other unrecognized electoral defeats had cost the regime significant political capital (Girard 1977, 313–320). Nonetheless, as Alonso (1985) observes, even counting

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unrecognized victories, municipal electoral conflict probably did not threaten the regime. However, a regime that aspired to a monopoly of political control had to see the extension of the opposition’s geographic base as threatening. National elites knew that support for the PAN was not ideological in most places; supporters did not usually share the liberal PAN’s concern over political procedures.11 The PAN was simply becoming an alternative route to power, in many cases the only other party available to a PRI dissident. Likewise, the PRI was the only source of popular leaders, since popularity depended in a large part on having the political contacts that might bring individual or collective benefits. Few people within most communities were willing to confront the regime. Still, in most places where the PAN had a presence in the 1970s, it had the sympathy of many community members; it was in fact a party with a significant level of representativeness, sometimes as a receptacle for a generic antisystem sentiment, and this made it a threat to the regime.12 The three (eventually seven) parties legalized, on the other hand, had practically no representative role, especially not in many of the locations where they gained regime favor—almost all places where they had no constituencies. The mostly leftist parties were also ideologically closer to the PRI’s revolutionary rhetoric, which made them more attractive to both PRI factions and some of their constituencies. In some cases, the new minority parties helped the regime by dividing the opposition. In others, they prevented defections by transferring factionalism into a bi- or multipartisan structure completely under PRI-state control. These factional defeats of the first type were termed “institutional” defeats because the state-level PRI sanctioned them and the candidate need not give up any PRI membership privileges. The candidate was still “institutional,” a loyal PRI member even though he had come to power under the auspices of a party with a different emblem and initials. “Opposition” candidates usually had to abdicate their new institutional affiliation the moment they came to power and publicly reaffirm their commitment to and support for the PRI (Alonso 1985, 369; Alvarado 1994, 177; Aziz Nassif 1994a; J. Meyer 1993; Poot Capetillo 1996b; Vázquez 1996). Of course, these parties became tools not only of the PRI-state to manipulate the elites but also of the local elites to manipulate state-level PRI-regime representatives. Where political groups were a little stronger, particularly where there was an emerging private sector, they used temporary affiliation with these parties as a pressure tactic to force the PRI-state to take them into account (Poot Capetillo 1992, 330). Remarkably, however, the core PRI membership

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was very loyal, and candidates going to other parties were very happy to reaffirm their allegiance to the PRI (Klesner 2006, 392). The expansion of the regime in terms of the number of parties becoming players also reinforced the PRI-state’s corporative mechanisms of exclusion. The new parties became corporations and, through clientelism, helped the regime divide or absorb participation and convert it into passive acceptance of the PRI. Most importantly, this kept at bay demands for real institutional reforms that would make law more important in public life and give citizens a decision-making role through their representatives. The 1977 electoral reforms provided a mechanism to persuade many potential reformers to see the advantages of illegality and accept that cooperation was a much better strategy than resistance. In this way, the PRI-state found a clever way to retain control of local elite divisiveness and keep authoritarian political culture alive. Even so, the satellite parties became a permanent part of the political landscape, despite the PRI’s determination to wean the local elites from these practices and to unite them once again under the PRI umbrella. Once local elites started arranging for a “change of hats” by competing under different party emblems, uprooting the practice was difficult, if not impossible. It quickly spread to neighboring municipalities and led to a rash of defeats throughout the country. Furthermore, many of these defeats went to the PAN, a situation the reforms were designed to avoid. Minority party victories were determined in a top-down fashion, often as a result of state-level congressional arrangements, limiting the availability of small parties to local political groups and leading emerging elites to seek out the PAN. The PAN was also the only party with any presence in many municipalities, and once the practice of using “satellite” parties became commonplace, the elites started to lose their fear of repercussions for supporting a party other than the PRI. Some local satellite party leaders also attempted independent action, although rarely successfully (Guitián 1989; Poot Capetillo 1992, 333). One regime stepchild, the Workers’ Party (PT), created during the administration of Carlos Salinas, ended up as one of the vehicles used by President Salinas’s political enemies, leaders of the PRD. The pseudo-defeats of the PRI broke its symbolic monopoly, demonstrating that the PRI-regime could have many faces and accustoming both leaders and community members to at least the charade of a competitive electoral contest. These defeats also contributed to reducing the fear among elites (and later the rest of society) of looking to parties outside the PRI. Example showed leaders that they would probably be co-opted

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and not reprimanded for turning to the PAN, PRD, or any other party as a result of the discontent generated by the centralized imposition of unpopular PRI candidates.13 The image of PRI invulnerability was thus the main casualty of the reforms. Unfortunately for the PRI-regime, this change in citizen attitudes, the realization that the PRI was not invulnerable, contributed more to the debilitation of the PRI as a party than to changing the foundations of authoritarianism in ways that would preserve state and national PRI-regime control over local politics. While after 2000 the PRI no longer necessarily controlled these satellite parties, except in some state contexts, their followers had a very weak sense of party identification and continued to perpetuate authoritarian culture and practices. In the end, as the next chapter discusses in the case of Cacalchén, many of the municipalities where intra-PRI competition resulted in defeats (through co-opted parties) evolved into municipalities with sustained competitive elections involving an independent opposition party. After the 2000 transition some co-opted parties became coalition partners with all three of the main parties, as the decentralization of resources raised the stakes in electoral contests. In many cases, the same group of local elites remained firmly in control. Residents of these municipalities had neither the education nor the resources to keep their votes from becoming commoditized. The local societies of more developed municipalities would have to wage the battle for legal rights. Ironically, despite the fact that calls for democratization, at least in most of rural Mexico, came first from within the PRI, creating a civic consciousness in the elites, as the following chapter will show, has been one of the biggest stumbling blocks in achieving local democratization. Conclusion

Efforts to overcome the instability of warring postrevolutionary elite factions led to the creation, under President Calles, of the party that eventually became the PRI and, under Lázaro Cárdenas, of its corporative organs. The latter depoliticized the masses and gave revolutionary nationalists a support base to counteract policies of modernizing elites. The government increasingly used these corporative organs to establish direct control over rural areas, at the expense of local elites. These institutional changes led to counterforces that exacerbated internal factionalism as the candidate-selection process became controlled by outside authorities that exercised power arbitrarily and violated the informal norms of local elections. Despite warnings by party officials of the need

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to democratize local candidate selection, the PRI-regime did not act decisively to address the problem until 1977, when it legalized small satellite parties through which it could channel discontent about the candidate-selection process without changing the procedures or authoritarian nature of the system. These parties, for the most part, did not represent constituencies and also allowed the PRI-regime to undercut support for parties like the PAN, which had a sizable support base. The satellite parties added “fingers” to the PRI’s electoral arm and resulted in a rash of PRI defeats, suggesting some democratization in electoral statistics but in fact representing very little change in the local political system. The case of Cacalchén, discussed in the next chapter, illustrates the limited effects of factional PRI defeats and their tendency to degenerate into a multiparty clientelism that neutralizes popular participation. Notes 1. A fairly descriptive definition of a caudillo is “a charismatic man on horseback with a penchant for authoritarianism.” Omar G. Encarnación, “American Caudillo: Trump and the Latin-Americanization of U.S. Politics,” Foreign Affairs, 12 May 2016, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2016-05-12/american-caudillo. 2. The 1991 and 1994 electoral reforms were brought about more by societal pressures than PRI factionalism. 3. Candidate selection process procedures are clearly laid out in local case studies such as those by Alonso (1984, 1985, 1990), Leyva (1992), and Poot Capetillo (1990). The process was corroborated during interviews with local actors in electoral contests and organization secretaries of the PAN and PRD in Michoacán, Zacatecas, Yucatán, Chihuahua, Aguascalientes, Mexico State, and Colima, among others, as well as with José García (1996), then director of municipal affairs for the national-level PRD. 4. Wallerstein (1970, 205) argued that party importance in revolutionary oneparty regimes is inversely proportional to success in promoting economic development, leading to problems between new technocratic factions and “revolutionary” party hacks. In Mexico, this struggle has been evident since President Miguel de la Madrid (1982–1988) dealt with the consequences of debt financing by his two predecessors (Presidents Luis Echeverría Álvarez and José López Portillo). 5. Crespo (1998, 100) argues that the 1964 and 1977 reforms were preemptive strikes when the opposition was weak, and Klesner (2006, 402) makes the same argument about De la Madrid’s 1983 decentralization reforms, perhaps accurately indicating a deliberate time lag between opposition pressure and the regime’s reaction. 6. Fresnillo PAN councilman Eliseo González Pitones (1996), Colima PAN secretary general Víctor Manuel Torres Herrera (1997), Mexico State PAN founder Víctor Guerrero (1996), and member of Salvador Nava’s 1985 administration Maria Guadalupe Rodríguez Carrera (1996) shared similar anecdotes. 7. The PRI has this problem again because of competition for the high salaries of local officials. In Tabasco it had eighteen precandidates in one municipality, which allowed the PAN to win.

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8. The only new nonleftist party was the Partido Demócrata Mexicano (PDM), a pro-Catholic conservative party that grew out of pro-Catholic movements resulting from the Cristero War in the late 1920s and became known as “the party of the poor” because of its peasant/lower-class support base (Alonso 1989). The other new parties were the Partido Popular Socialista (PPS), founded in 1958 as the Partido Popular and mainly supported by small groups in the labor sector, and the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM), popular among students and urban popular movements. These were joined in the early 1980s by the Partido Socialista Unificado de México (PSUM), the result of the fusion of many leftist groups and parties, including the PCM, the Partido Social Demócrata (PSD), the Partido Mexicano de los Trabajadores (PMT), the Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST), and the Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores (PRT) (González Casanova 1981, 154–156). 9. The PDM had strong regional support, but its influence was limited to a few areas in which sinarquismo, a nationalist antirevolutionary movement dating back to the 1937 foundation of a right-wing party in León, Guanajuato, had galvanized popular protest to the regime’s anticlericalism. 10. Nationally some of these parties behaved with a modicum of independence, voting against the PRI on some occasions. Locally, however, the few voting against the PRI did so to defend elections they believed they had lost by fraud, almost never obtaining concessions (Guitán 1989). 11. Girard (1977) argues that the PAN includes many ideological currents and that the strongest, often confused with conservatism, is really (classic) liberalism. The quest for democracy, to change the procedures of government as an end in itself, is the most representative trademark of the PAN, not conservatism (Mizrahi 2003, 24; Shirk 2005, 60). 12. The PDM was also gaining sympathizers, although the state deliberately added clauses to the laws to prevent it from registering as a party until 1978 (Alonso 1989). 13. Interviews with Aguascalientes PAN organization secretary Ignacio Campos Jiménez (1997), Colima PAN secretary general Víctor Manuel Torres Herrera (1997), and Zacatecas PAN president Leonel Cordero Lerma (1996).

3 The Case of Cacalchén

Like many municipalities in which the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) experienced pseudo-defeats, Cacalchén was very underdeveloped and highly dependent on the state, with a threadbare civil society, facilitating the PRI-state’s task of manipulating local elites. Its fate of continued PRI-state control was not inevitable, however, although in the absence of despotic strongmen citizens had little motivation to fight for change. Alonso (1985, 356) describes a case in which a group of peasants from a municipality in Guanajuato outsmarted the local caciques with the help of a teacher. When one sector of the divided PRI elites ended up going with the National Action Party (PAN), the peasants got the teacher designated as the PRI candidate and placed a member of their own group in power in the subsequent elections. The 1980 victory of the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) in Juchitán, Oaxaca, provides another example of an emergent local group escaping PRI-state control (Bailón Corres and Zermeño 1987, 17; Clarke 1997, 267–311). Still, these were exceptions, and Cacalchén’s experience was far more typical. In 1996 Cacalchén was a small municipality of 6,064 residents in north-central Yucatán (it had 6,811 in 2010). Located the old henequencultivation region, like most municipalities where the formerly state-run henequen production was the main activity, it had been neglected completely by the PRI-regime and lacked most basic services. About 21 percent of the population spoke a Mayan dialect, and 70 percent lacked sewage service and working toilets. Furthermore, 70 percent of the economically active population made less than the minimum wage, according to the 1990 census. Despite Cacalchén’s interesting electoral history, it was the only municipality in which I was unable to find a single individual opposed to the PRI-regime, at least on the first trip. In retrospect

65

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this was unsurprising given abstention rates of around 60 percent (and probably much higher1), an extremely divided but very “institutional” political class, and then governor Víctor Cervera Pacheco’s agreement to support the “opposition” party’s public works projects. Cacalchén residents were not able to contribute to an understanding of the municipality’s political history partly because so few of them seemed to be there. As in many municipalities where the majority of residents worked in henequen production before the state stopped subsidizing the industry in the late 1980s, residents in the 1990s commuted to Mérida and Cancún. They had not yet headed for the United States, unlike those from municipalities dedicated to the unsubsidized cultivation of citrus fruits. One resident told me this was also why they could not devote much time to politics, let alone defend a vote: the opposition essentially consisted of electoral weekend warriors and could not conduct the acts of sustained participation required to exert effective pressure. Cacalchén had a long tradition of some form of opposition to the PRI, although numerically very small, including a local PAN committee founded in the early 1970s and in 1996 led by the sexton of the local church. It also had a very strong leftist tradition, according to Yucatecan scholar and 1995 Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD) gubernatorial candidate Enrique Montalvo Ortegón (1996), but this was difficult to verify in Cacalchén. Official electoral statistics showed that the PAN came within 100 votes of the PRI in 1982, which in most municipal elections equated to an unrecognized opposition victory. However, I found no one who could confirm this or even remembered that election. Members of the political groups were unable (or unwilling) to discuss the 1982 elections and insisted that the PAN had always been unimportant there. PAN members in 2006 maintained that a committed core of 50 to 100 had existed since at least 1988, when Manuel Clouthier’s presidential campaign through Yucatán motivated many opposition leaders to support it. Both PRI and “opposition” members expressed unconditional support for Governor Víctor Cervera Pacheco, a personal enemy of the PAN, so may have seen discussing a PAN victory as disloyal. Fortunately, many of the political actors involved in the first recognized PRI defeat were persuasively candid in their tales of the events that unfolded.2 The Candidate-Selection Process in Cacalchén

The first of Cacalchén’s PRI defeats occurred in the municipal elections of 1990—not coincidentally, the year the PAN won in Mérida for the

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first time (officially) since its historic 1967 victory. Prior to this event, there was no need for concessions to satellite parties, which may explain why “institutional” PRI defeats happened rarely between 1979 and 1990. Three local PRI leaders vied for the candidacy: Luis Kim Montalvo, José Moguel Estrada, and Teófilo Cetz Couoh.3 A representative from the national-level PRI, José Guadarrama Márquez, went to “oversee” the selection process, a practice extended and reinforced in the 1970s when President Luis Echeverría decided to centralize electoral control further instead of letting local strongmen select the candidate and submit their decision to the PRI for approval. Guadarrama turned out to be a very important figure in PRI electoral matters. In charge of the entire electoral machinery in the 1991 elections when Víctor Manzanilla Schaffer (1995, 62) was the state governor, he was, according to former PAN mayor Ana Rosa Payán (1996), one of the PRI’s most egregious “electoral alchemists.” He was also accused of being associated with up to a dozen assassinations of PRD members, particularly in his native state of Hidalgo, where he is known as one of the main caciques (Schatz 2011, 29).4 According to Moguel and Cetz Couoh, Guadarrama informed the three candidates that regardless of who won, the others would obtain an administrative post (be on the slate, or planilla). Based on the number of votes each obtained, one would become the municipal president (mayor), another the secretary, and the remaining one the síndico. 5 This arrangement met with the satisfaction of the candidates as all three positions provided opportunities for profit. Like the minimum wage, their meager official salaries almost never got paid in the 1990s, but they could supplement any income by skimming off the top of public municipal funds, one reason PRI authorities rarely kept financial records (Niblo 1999, 169). In some places there were even set formulas for what each of the main people in the administration could take from public monies—the treasurer could keep 20 to 30 percent of the taxes collected, for example. Councilmen did not get paid at all in rural Yucatán, so most worked only in the evenings and had day jobs.6 The compromise of sharing access to public monies (rather than following the usual winner-takes-all model) came at the expense of the three leaders’ families and friends, the almost universal recipients of local cabinet posts,7 but they agreed. On the evening of Guadarrama’s visit, Teófilo Cetz, who (allegedly) had the most sympathizers within the PRI, learned that he had not been selected as the candidate. The winner was Luis Kim. An annoyed Cetz and his followers claimed that it was impossible for Kim Montalvo to

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have won since he had very few supporters. The fact that Cetz ended up winning the final elections without postelectoral difficulties suggests that he was in fact the candidate who could mobilize the most voters. The other contender not selected by Guadarrama, Moguel, gave Cetz his support, suggesting that he could not compete with him or perhaps that they had come to some arrangement. A self-identified member of Kim’s political group implied that he had “bought” Guadarrama. This did not distress Cetz much as bribery was a standard practice in the PRI competition for the candidacy. Cetz said he waited along with Moguel to see whether he would get a spot in the administration as Guadarrama had promised. Neither Moguel nor Cetz had the slightest quibble with this illegal decision-making process, but both felt that Guadarrama’s offer to include them in the new local administration should be binding (Barrera Burgos 1996; Cacalchén 1993). They saw personal arrangements and not rule of law as the legitimate way to conduct politics. Unfortunately for Moguel and Cetz, Guadarrama did not follow through on his initial promise. He announced that the winner would take the entire planilla and select everyone in his administration. Perhaps he made this arrangement in exchange for a bribe that was well worth the ill will the decision would create, or perhaps he was teaching the local political class a lesson about their lack of importance to the PRI-regime. Local scholar Poot Capetillo (1996b) confirmed the prevalence of bribery where PRI delegates and not governors selected the candidate. Furthermore, there was no other reason (other than a deliberate snub) for Guadarrama not to hold to his original arrangement with the candidates—all groups had agreed to it, and it required no regime concessions. Finally, Guadarrama had a reputation for taking bribes in other municipalities. Given the pervasiveness of factionalism in Yucatán, he would not likely deliberately provoke elite discord to create an opportunity for a minority party. Cetz said that he was most bothered by the broken promise, but he decided to accept the decision por ser institucional (out of loyalty to the PRI, although the wording suggests that informal PRI rules were considered “rule of law” in the popular mind-set of rural residents). After all, PRI membership had its benefits—almost all PRI leaders and members of their groups in Cacalchén had basic services, like electricity and telephones, that the rest of the population did not. Three weeks later, representatives of a party with no presence in Cacalchén (or anywhere else in Yucatán), the Cardenista Front of National Reconstruction Party (PFCRN),8 offered Cetz its candidacy sin compromiso cualquiera (with no strings attached, no commitment to the party required), which meant the Yucatecan PRI had authorized the pro-

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posal. The negotiated aspect of these defeats was standard operating procedure. The state governor designated the candidates for the most important municipalities and had a representative or delegate go out to the municipalities to inform political leaders of the selection or preside over a bribery-prone convention in which he would select a candidate. When there was a lot of unrest in the local PRI groups and one precandidate was clearly more popular than the rest, the representative sometimes informed the state-level PRI about possible problems with disgruntled contenders, and in return for his or her cooperation in the state congress (a commitment to vote with the PRI), a state deputy representing one of the small co-opted parties would be offered the most popular precandidate to sponsor and thereby win a token municipality.9 Because the PAN was relatively strong in the Yucatán legislature at that time, it was important that the satellite parties remain within the PRI system. The campaign and elections in Cacalchén were very similar to those in which the PRI was the only contender: participation did not increase substantially. The state-level PRI authorities gave all candidates equal resources to fund their campaigns. Therefore, the PFCRN, with no resources of its own, gave Cetz the same sum of money and goods that Kim Montalvo obtained from the PRI to conduct his campaign. These were mainly despensas (basic foodstuffs), aluminum siding for homes, and bottles of aguardiente (distilled liquor): goods to buy votes with. Both candidates also held taqueadas (public gatherings with live music, free tacos, and soft drinks) to attract their clienteles. The protagonists of the elections were mainly the members of the PRI groups, and the results were close (PRI: 631, PFCRN: 697), but Cetz won. Only in a “PRI-engineered” opposition victory would the PRI-regime have recognized a vote that close and at that time as an official opposition victory. The PAN in Cacalchén obtained very few votes (121) in the 1990 election, since even its representatives admitted they only attracted protest votes, and those in Cacalchén were mostly due to the internal PRI candidate-selection process. The panistas did promote the defense of the vote and helped limit the possibilities for fraud. In these arranged competitive elections, the state and national governments did nothing to interfere with the electoral process, making the playing field curiously level compared to electoral contests involving real (unauthorized) opposition. Still, the PRI candidate’s group could make trouble since statelevel authorities could rarely completely control local elite behavior. The panistas said they could not compete with a strategy based on the distribution of gifts and pressure tactics (Puc Tec 1996; Carrillo Polanco 1996; Victoria Ayuso 2006).

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Shortly after winning, Cetz and the members of his administration, his fellow cardenistas, gave speeches assuring that they had never stopped being priístas and that the change of party stemmed only from the “fraud” in the internal selection process. Everyone who supported Cetz was back in the PRI within days after the elections. Cetz said the government was very supportive of his PFCRN administration and that all financial assistance had reached them on time, which “showed him that he picked the right party.”10 Controlled Elections Get Out of Control

In 1993, the PRI reclaimed Cacalchén back, and Kim got his turn, but only with the assistance of a mysterious blackout. These occurred like clockwork through the mid-1980s and 1990s after most competitive rural elections throughout Mexico, but most urbanites were unfamiliar with them until 1988, when the “blackout-system failure” helped reverse a trend that seemed to give the presidential victory to Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Cacalchén’s 1993 contenders were the losers in the 1990 elections, and this time Moguel went to the PFCRN. He lost, but members of his group finally got their turn in the following 1995–1998 administration. One member, Guadalupe Barrera Burgos, said that preprepared packets of fifteen to twenty ballots, all marked for the PRI, “appeared” shortly after the 1993 elections, implying they had distorted the results at the time of the vote count, causing the PFCRN to lose due to fraud. The final vote was 1,075 for the PRI, 215 for the PAN, and 871 for the PFCRN. As Table 3.1 shows, the PFCRN had actually gained nearly 200 votes over the previous election. The PRI won thanks to the same dramatic decrease in abstention that characterized many of the elections in which the PRI “won back” municipalities. This technique of reducing abstention rates was also clear in the 1991 federal midterm elections. Carlos Salinas’s sophisticated clientelistic antipoverty program (Solidarity) gave him the electoral structure for the PRI to make a surprising comeback. In Cacalchén, abstention rose from 60 to 64 percent between 1976 and 1988, then fell to 53 percent in 1990, when the PFCRN “broke” the PRI’s monopoly on power. In 1993 abstention dropped to a highly improbable 35 percent. Amazingly, however, PRI internal surveys provide no evidence of “alchemy,” as 85 percent of those surveyed in 1995 said they had voted in the last election. Still, it was not an informed vote as 50 percent did not know when the elections were, 70

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Table 3.1 Cacalchén Municipal Electoral Results, 1987–2015 Year

1987 1990 1993 1995 1998 2001

2004 2007 2010 2012* 2015

PRI

1324 631 1,075 1,148 1,207 1,176

1,865 205 789 2,109 2,100

PAN 300 121 215 198 216 208

332 1,298 987 2,207 1,876

PFCRN/ PT/PCVEM

0 697 (PFCRN) 871 (PFCRN) 1,259 (PFCRN/PT)

1,315 (PVEM) 304 (PT) 0 1,075 (PANAL) 1,302 (Convergencia) 58 (PANAL) 4

PRD

1,528 82

1,244 72 978 70 435

Abstention (%)

47 53 (60 in 1988) 35 20.1 18 24

— — ~20 ~20 ~20

Note: *Vóz y Voto was used for 2012 and 2015. The total vote for 2012 was originally 4,446, which is more consistent with the trends.

percent made below the minimum wage working informally, and most did not have a grade school diploma (Huchím Koyóc 1996). The PFCRN won Cacalchén back in 1995, but this time the PRI’s loss of control over the process was evident. Pedro Armando PérezSosa, the owner of a small store and a devout priísta, ran against Blanca Elizabeth Vázquez López for the PRI candidacy. Vázquez won the candidacy (as the PRI delegate’s choice), and Pérez-Sosa and his supporters went to Mérida to protest the selection process and “demonstrate his popularity.” The PRI insisted on supporting the original candidate. On hearing what had happened, the PFCRN representatives (cardenistas) asked Pérez-Sosa whether he would run as their candidate, perhaps after reaching an agreement with the PRI-state in the local congress, since satellite parties could not act independently while the PRI was hegemonic. Pérez-Sosa proved to their satisfaction that he had majority support among the priístas, and the cardenistas made him their candidate. Guadalupe Barrera Burgos and Francisco Partec both held posts in the 1995–1998 administration and had also participated in the 1993 elections, which, as noted earlier, the PFCRN lost. Barrera Burgos and others who participated with her in that election noted that the cardenistas had been overconfident in the 1993 elections but in 1995 had guarded the process closely and brought flashlights in case of another “power failure.” The final vote was PRI, 1,148; PFCRN, 1,259; and PAN, 198.

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Factional Defeats: Electoral Coups

As Table 3.1 demonstrates, the PFCRN vote had doubled since the 1990 victory and almost surpassed the total number of votes that year. The increasing numbers in part reflected the need for leaders to mobilize people outside the PRI groups to remain competitive. There was also slightly more participation among the population at large, which was suffering the severe effects of the loss of the henequen subsidy and the inflation associated with the ongoing economic crisis. These numbers suggest that the PFCRN was no longer being “offered” an opportunity to win a municipality in the state congress; instead, either it was recruiting PRI dissidents, or these were going directly to the PFCRN when the PRI’s selection process did not favor them. The PFCRN could not act independently but was no longer easily controlled. The PRI possibly saw this institutionalized PRI-PFCRN competition as the “least bad” way of dealing with factionalism in Cacalchén, now that the genie was out of the bottle.11 Reporters, political actors, and electoral observers claimed that electoral participation in 1995 was still very low. Yet the abstention rate was officially down to 20.1 percent, an unbelievable figure (yet, again, consistent with internal PRI surveys12), given the speed with which it descended from 60 to 20 percent and the apathy described by those interviewed (see Table 3.1 and Figures 3.1 and 3.2). Residents said the priístas in both parties became increasingly better organized to bring out the vote and started offering incentives. In keeping with PRI surveys, residents could not even tell me which party was currently in power and assured me that fraudulent practices, like stuffing ballot boxes and buying votes, characterized the 1995 elections as they had those of 1993. The cardenistas13 in power when I conducted the first visit of this study (1995–1996) claimed to have an excellent relationship with Governor Víctor Cervera Pacheco, an uncommon assertion among municipal opposition authorities about their dealings with a PRI governor, especially a traditional strongman like Cervera. PRI governors punished most opposition victors severely in the 1990s, denying them their share of funding and often delaying any approved funding for long periods, making it practically impossible to implement projects (González Melchor and Díaz Montes 2005, 240; Bassols and Arzaluz 1996, 120; Medina Maldonado 1997; Rodríguez and Ward 1995; Shirk 2005, 114; Spink et al. 2008, 231). Barrera Burgos boasted that Cervera had given them more money than he had neighboring PRI municipalities, probably to make sure they came back into the fold. Both she and Partec said they did not know who would win the next elections but stated that they had nothing against the PRI and would gladly support it, if PRI representatives approved of the “correct” candidate and

Figure 3.1 Cacalchén Municipal Elections, 1987–2015 (Number of Votes)

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