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 News from Around the Americas | May 2005 
Mexico's Politics Get Lively Review
 Diane Lindquist - Union-Tribune
In Mexico, it's often said, politics is everything, and everything is politics.
Yesterday, as part of a program to celebrate the 25th anniversary of UCSD's Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, three prominent Mexicans and the center's founder discussed Mexican political evolution during that time.
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, Juan Molinar Horcasitas and Federico Estévez Estévez – all who have operated close to the pinnacle of power in Mexico – agreed that change has not been as drastic as the uprisings and ousters that have occurred in other Latin American nations.
One reason, they intimated, is that power in Mexico is controlled by a class of "political elites." Even though three major parties now operate where one controlled the nation for more than seven decades, the leaders of each have long been players on the political scene, even holding prominent positions in parties they now oppose.
But Wayne Cornelius, who founded the center at the University of California San Diego, said that 25 years ago no one would have predicted the changes that have occurred.
Among them, he said, are the split of the once ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI; the PRI's widely substantiated theft of the 1988 presidential election from the Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD; the emergence of a three-party system; the creation of an independent electoral board; and the election in 2000 of Vicente Fox, the candidate of the National Action Party, or PAN.
Fox's election, Cornelius said, "also ushered in the era of divided government."
Power in the Mexican congress now is split among the three major parties. As a result, Fox has been unable to accomplish the fiscal and energy reforms he promised would be the major achievements of his presidency.
"It's a fragile democracy that we've achieved," said Estévez, a political science professor at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico.
Molinar Horcasitas, a congressional deputy from PAN, lamented the stalemates that have hobbled the Fox administration.
"The parties at least need an agreement to reach some agreements" on moving Mexico into the future, Molinar Horcasitas said.
And Muñoz Ledo, leader of the exodus of PRI members to the PRD and a former presidential candidate and ambassador who now is president of the Centro Latinoamericano de la Globalidad, worried that Mexico seems lost.
Unlike Argentina, which has resolved its past but not its future, and Chile, which has resolved its future but not its past, he said, Mexico has resolved neither its past nor its future.
"What is the Mexican national project for the first third of the 21st century?" Muñoz Ledo asked.
Cornelius suggested three points:
• Resolve the mess in a justice system that has become "the Achilles' heel of Mexico." Seventy percent of crimes go unreported, he said, because people lack confidence in the system. Thirteen percent of inmates in Mexico's prison system are ex-police officers.
• Thwart what appears to be the re-emergence of vote buying and voter fraud.
• Allow the 10 million Mexicans living abroad to vote in Mexico's elections. Earnings they send back to Mexico total nearly $20 billion a year, Cornelius said, and they deserve their contribution not only to the national welfare but to the national political agenda.
It's "a reform whose time has come," Cornelius said, noting that polls indicate that a majority of Mexicans favor instituting a voto remoto for migrants even if they decide the outcome of the next election, in 2006. |
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