The Rise of the Aztec Sun
When the governor-elect of
Mexico’s Federal District,
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas,
was asked how he cast his ballot on
July 6, he said he had voted for
Carlos Monsivafs, Mexico City’s
widely read political journalist and
cultural critic. It was Monsivais
who, in a series of columns in the
daily paper La Jornada earlier this
year, broadsided not the ruling
Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), which was slowly collapsing
under its own weight, but the con-
servative National Action Party
(PAN), which over the past few
years had staked out a convincing
claim to be Mexico’s principal op-
position party. The PAN, wrote
Monsivais, would attempt to bring
little economic change, but plenty
of social change to Mexico’s in-
creasingly beleaguered population.
With one foot in the Mexican
business community, the PAN
strongly supports neoliberal re-
forms, and with its other foot in the
ultra-conservative Opus Dei, PAN-
istas have campaigned against abor-
tion, birth control, condom use, condom ads, homosexuality, public
displays of affection, miniskirts,
public underwear ads and so on.
Retrograde and corrupt as the ruling
PRI has been, Monsivais wrote, the
PAN is not the Mexican opposition
we want. His columns turned the
tide, not against the PRI-that tide
had already turned-but in the race
for principal “contender.”
The outcome was heartening to
people who have been struggling
against the PRI machine (and PAN
moralism) for years and typically
coming out losers. “Ya se vi6 que si
se puede” (now it’s clear that it can
be done), was the post-election ral-
lying cry of the election’s big win-
ners, C.rdenas’ “Party of the Aztec
Sun,” the Party of the Democratic
Revolution (PRD).
The PRD’s hopes had been nur-
tured three months earlier in the
state of Morelos where, for the first
time, it had won legislative power.
After years of losses, Morelos had
animated the party faithful for this
next round of elections. Heavier
than expected voter turnout and the
PRD’s replacement of the PAN as
the country’s “second force” were
big election stories, though the
biggest story was in the Federal
District-Mexico City-where the
party swept the governor’s race as
well as the races for municipal
council, winning in 28 of the 30 dis-
tricts. Cirdenas won 47% of the
vote, some 20 points ahead of his
nearest rival, the PRI’s Alfredo Del
Mazo.
The PRI is still Mexico’s ruling
party-at least for three more years.
For the first time, however, the
country will have a genuinely mul-
tiparty legisature. The PRI will have
238 seats in the Chamber of
Deputies, with the PRD and the
PAN taking 125 each. The Mexican
Ecological Green Party (PVEM)
won a surprising eight seats, and the
small Workers Party (PT) four.
President Ernesto Zedillo put a
gracious face on his party’s loss. He
now declares himself a member of
the “Generation of ’68,” the radical
generation whose defining moment
was the massacre of student protest-
ers at Tlatelolco Plaza in October,
1968, just before the start of the
Mexican-hosted Olympic Games.
In the U.S. press, Zedillo is now the
Alexander Dubcek of Mexico, hav-
ing permitted his long-ruling party
to lose-or at least not sweep-an
election. He has publicly congratu-
lated the man who will surely be an
opposition presidential candidate in
2000, and announced that he will be
happy to work with whatever “na-
tional opposition front” emerges in
the new Congress. Playing the legit-
Vol XXXI, No 2 SEPTIOcr 1997
imacy card, he says it is now time
for extraparliamentary opposition
groups to halt their demonstrations,
lay down their arms, and incorpo-
rate themselves into the “institu-
tional life” of the country.
C rdenas takes office this
December in an unbreath-
able city plagued by high
levels of poverty, underemploy-
ment, corruption and crime. He
takes over a municipal government
in financial arrears, and with a deep
“social debt” to its own citizens. He
will confront the PRI’s entrenched
corporate, clientist structure, which
will not be easy to dislodge. He
knows that radicals (or “center-left-
ists”) who have come to municipal
power have gained in stature by
providing honest, efficient, partici-
patory governance. He has prom-
ised to try.
Daunting as the task in Mexico
City may be, the challenge is infi-
nitely greater at the national level, where his party confronts transna-
tional capital-a tad more powerful
than the PRI’s old urban coalition of
street venders, cab drivers and sex
workers. He is being told by the
fonts of conventional wisdom that
he must “keep his radicals under
control,” go easy against the old au-
thoritarian structures and accept the
dominance of “the markets.” In-
deed, he is already assuring both na-
tional and transnational capital that
he means no harm to their inter-
ests-in fact, that he needs their
partnership to run the largest city in
the Americas. In this last campaign,
his party adopted a toned-down pro-
file, keeping its nationalist, anti-ne-
oliberal discourse under wraps, or at
least quieter than usual. Where 75%
of the population can’t afford a
“basic basket of goods,” how long
can that go on?