As the citizens of Mexico suffer through the twenty-fifth month of the country’s worst economic depression since the 1930s–and the twentieth year of contin-
ually falling real incomes-a still inchoate opposition to the long-ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its globalizing project is bubbling
up from below. This popular opposition, which is remaking the country’s political culture,
is the subject of this report.
Until perhaps ten years ago, the only political activity that mattered in Mexico took place
within the confines of the ruling PRI. Newsworthy politics pretty much consisted of interfactional maneuver-
ing for power and privilege, as well as the struggles of the party’s incorporated groups-unions, campesino
groups and urban popular organizations-for extensions of their rights, benefits and protections. In all these
cases, disputes were resolved within the PRI, and-there being no other option-a wide range of political
positions came to be represented within the ruling party itself.
Since the late 1980s, in the midst of growing poverty and displacement, three related phenomena have
shaken-though not yet broken-the PRI’s hegemony, changing Mexico in the process. In 1987, a power-
ful center-left faction within the PRI left the party to contest the 1988 presidential election behind the can-
didacy of one of its members, Cuauht6moc Cirdenas. To keep Cirdenas from winning, and to put its own
candidate, Carlos Salinas, in the presidency, the PRI engaged in its most obvious vote tampering in decades.
This not only damaged its legitimacy, it created the idea that an opposition force might actually be able to
win a Mexican election. The forces behind the Cdrdenas candidacy formed what quickly became the coun-
try’s second political party-the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)-only to suffer official repres-
sion that has been severe and relentless. The party has documented the violent deaths of over 300 of its
members in just the last three years. This ongoing assault, combined with internal divisions, has demoral-
ized the party in its infancy, even as it struggles to re-create itself as a powerful national force.
The rise of the PRD created a parallel phenomenon: the rise in power of the conservative, long-marginalized
National Action Party (PAN). The PAN, never able to seriously contest for national power, took advantage of
the opening created by the events of 1988, and began to seriously fight the wounded PRI-and the nascent
PRD-for political position. The PAN has overtaken the PRD as the nation’s second electoral force and, as
1997 begins, it governs four of Mexico’s 31 states as well as dozens of major cities. It expects to seriously
challenge the PRI for dominance in the congressional elections to be held later this year.
A third key phenomenon has been the ceding of considerable political power to forces outside the country.
With the ascent to power of a technocratic faction within the PRI led initially by expresident Carlos Salinas-
now in self-imposed exile on an Irish horse farm-and currently by President Emrnesto Zedillo, political nego-
tiations with international institutions like the IMF, the World Bank and the U.S. Treasury have assumed pri-
mary importance in shaping the governing institutions of the country. This erosion of the sovereign decision-
making ability of the Mexican government has gained the ruling faction the enmity of other factions-
progressive and reactionary alike-of the PRI.
As the PRI weakens, some of most powerful forces of the Mexican opposition are now mobilizing from
below-and from outside the party-principally among neighborhood, ethnic and interest groups in what
Mexican activists refer to as “civil society.” Although this mobilization still lacks a unifying vision, it can be
seen, in large part, as a collective attempt to contest the neoliberal project being imposed from above. A new
Mexico is being defined by the confluence of these two powerful forces: the hegemonic, culturally destruc-
tive project of Mexican neoliberalism, and the popular struggle to survive. Together, they are reshaping the
country.