 |
|
|
 Editorials | Opinions | March 2006 
Faults Seen In Mexico's Democracy
 Dudley Althaus - Houston Chronicle
| | Salvador Nava Martínez, 1914 - 1992 |
San Luis Potosi, Mexico - Like many thousands of Mexicans, Guillermo Pizzuto spent decades struggling to bring democracy to his country: marching in countless protests, enduring beatings by police, winning office as an opposition candidate.
Democracy finally is grabbing hold here.
Elections are mostly clean, and political parties unmolested. Local and state governments enjoy greater autonomy. Congress and the courts have been unleashed from presidential control. And this July's presidential elections might well be the most evenly balanced, wide open and unpredictable in Mexican history.
So Pizzuto feels vindicated, right?
Not even close.
Like many millions of Mexicans, Pizzuto thinks that democracy has come up far short. He and many others complain that the country's politicians are out to help themselves, not Mexico's poor majority.
"Democracy, such as it is, exists because there were a lot of people pushing for it from below," said Pizzuto, 61, whose family-owned foundry employs hundreds of workers in San Luis Potosi, a colonial city and industrial center in the high desert 250 miles north of Mexico City.
"It was an effort by many people, for many years," he said. "It wasn't about going after an election victory. It was about creating a space for society and government to work together."
"Seeing how things are now, who wouldn't be disappointed?"
Expectations overflowed nearly six years ago when Vicente Fox won the presidency, ending the seven-decade grip on national power held by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, an autocratic machine born of the 1910 Mexican Revolution.
Many thought fair elections that alternated power between political parties would be enough to quickly end corruption, force rulers to heed the ruled, create more wealth and divide it more fairly.
"We held wrong assumptions," said political scientist Sergio Aguayo, an early leader of the democracy movement that sprang from the bitter 1988 presidential elections, which many think were stolen by the PRI.
"We expected that with electoral democracy there would be a trickle down of positive effects," Aguayo said. "That did not happen."
Today, corruption and abuse of power continue to plague Mexican public life. Gangland violence, drug trafficking and other forms of organized crime are as rampant as ever.
The Mexican economy ambles along much as it did when the government was less-than-democratic, failing to provide enough jobs for a growing population. With many wages barely above desperation level, hundreds of thousands of people illegally migrate to the United States seeking a future.
Things have changed, certainly. But they've stayed all too much the same.
"All Mexico thought that it was enough to overthrow the PRI and substitute it with another party for politics to work," said political analyst Luis Aguilar, a top political operative in the last PRI presidency in the 1990s.
"It was a terribly simplistic position in which the intellectuals and politicians participated. The PRI political system fell, but a democratic political system wasn't constructed."
Voter frustration was blamed for the abysmal participation in the July 2003 midterm elections, in which only 42 percent of voters turned out. Though interest is naturally higher in the coming presidential elections, none of the candidates this year has generated the excitement Fox did in 2000.
Former Mexico City Mayor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, of the center-left Democratic Revolution Party, or PRD, leads handily in most opinion polls on presidential preferences. He's followed by Felipe Calderon of Fox's center-right National Action Party, or PAN, and the PRI's Roberto Madrazo, who trails badly.
What's frustrating, many ordinary Mexicans say, is that once in power, former opposition political parties have seemed nearly as susceptible to graft, inefficiency and haughtiness as the PRI. Fox himself takes heat for talking big and delivering small. Many Mexicans resent his inability to push major reforms through an opposition Congress.
And they point to corruption accusations involving the sons of his second wife, Marta Sahagun, as evidence that little has changed in Mexico.
"Mexico has suffered a setback," said Judith Sanchez, 25, a student in San Luis Potosi. "There are still so many poor. When you look at the Mexican Revolution, how many people died for a dream? If they were alive today, they'd die again out of disgust."
Still, the nearly imperial presidential system that existed through most of Mexico's history has collapsed. Inflation is the lowest in years, the peso is stable, per capita income is steadily rising. Government repression of dissidents, common under the PRI, has all but disappeared.
If Fox's election didn't bring heaven to Earth, neither has the sky fallen.
"Fox has been a disappointment. He has not been a total failure," said Aguayo, the political scientist. "But all of a sudden we find that some of the instruments that make democracy possible are not working."
Consider political parties. To win elections today, they must stitch together coalitions with others with whom they have nothing in common. Such alliances made sense when divergent groups were trying to end one-party rule. But in an open democracy, some activists say, they make ideology and values meaningless.
"It's the brutal pragmatism of power," said Pizzuto, who was elected San Luis Potosi's mayor as the candidate of a nonpartisan citizens' movement 20 years ago.
Political parties "are just different families looking for power," he said. "They don't represent society. It's a mockery of democracy."
As president of the Civic Front of San Luis Potosi, Pizzuto is an heir to one of modern Mexico's most revered social and political movements.
The front was created by the late Salvador Nava, an ophthalmologist who led a citizens' rebellion against a PRI strongman who ran San Luis Potosi state like a personal ranch.
Uniting disgruntled PRI members with opposition parties and groups ranging from communists to conservative Roman Catholics, Nava won City Hall in San Luis Potosi's capital, becoming the first opposition mayor of any city under the PRI.
Nava and other movement activists were jailed by the government, their protests broken up by police and army troops, with protesters gunned down in the San Luis Potosi streets. Still the movement grew, with housewives, doctors, peasants and preachers all joining in.
After losing a try for the governorship, Nava retired from politics for two decades, returning in the early 1980s to win re-election as mayor. He lost his second bid for the statehouse — a fraud-stained 1991 election in which the PRI was declared winner — but galvanized democracy advocates.
"He had the power to bring people together," said Pizzuto, who was one of the movement's leaders. "He was in the election game not because he thought he was going to win but because he thought he was going to cause change. He was an agitator."
Though suffering cancer, Nava, 77, set out with thousands of followers on a 250-mile march toward Mexico City, to protest the alleged fraud.
The march persuaded then-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari to force the declared winner from the governorship.
Salinas imposed another PRI governor, and Nava's coalition unraveled soon after he died in 1992. And though the San Luis Potosi civic movement remains a milestone, it's largely forgotten today.
"There is a weariness," said Luis Nava, one of Salvador's sons, who is a San Luis Potosi home builder and a leader in the Citizens' Movement for Democracy, a small advocacy group. "The change has been a very shallow one."
"But in a few months there will be elections," Nava shrugs. "And we'll vote, and we'll have to choose someone."
Many in San Luis Potosi are just as blasé.
Only 22 percent of voters turned out in the mayoral election three years ago.
"The problem is that society is not in the game," Pizzuto said. "The political parties took over the social movement."
But dramatic change takes time, some political analysts counter.
"That's what democracies are, political parties," said Federico Estevez, a Mexico City political analyst. "You can't have government without the parties."
"You have to be patient."
dqalthaus@yahoo.com |
| |
|
Vallarta Weddings
Tell a Friend
Site Map
Print this Page
Email Us