Foster L.V. A Brief History of Mexico

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICO

228

Resurgence of Native Traditions

I feel I am more Maya than ever . . . I have no desire to belong

to another culture.

Pedro Meza (Foxx 1987, 209)

The mestizo nation that was ofﬁcially born with the Mexican Revolution

embodied the ideals of two traditions and two races merging into one

nation and one people. Racially, the desired mix was achieved in this

country where the nonmestizo categories are most accurately described

as “predominantly white” or “predominantly Indian.” Culturally, national

festivals, such as the Day of the Dead, incorporate pre-Hispanic ances-

tor worship into the very Catholic All Saints’ Day. Yet many Indians are

culturally distinct from mestizos; at least 10 million speak the language

of their pre-Columbian forebears. The “mestizo ideal” overlooked the

fact that these Mexicans cherish their pre-Columbian heritage and have

no desire to lose it through assimilation, especially into a society that

provides few opportunities for them.

In the most isolated villages indigenous groups continue to live in

the most traditional manner. Nahuas still calculate their corn plant-

ing according to ancient traditions of the cyclical New Year. A vestige

of an old solar calendar is still used in the Chiapas village of San Juan

Chamula. Pre-Hispanic myths pervade the contemporary religious

beliefs of the Mixtecs; Yucatec Maya sages, based on old myths, foretell

the day when their ancestors will rule once again. These Mexicans also

are among the poorest: as the millennium approached, they lived in

homes without sewers (72 percent) or running water (48 percent), and

their literacy rate (59 percent) was well below that for the nation as a

whole (90 percent).

In 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s voyage to the

Americas, indigenous peoples organized within Mexico and through-

out the hemisphere to present their concerns: they wanted the right to

preserve their cultures while achieving greater economic parity. One

result was an amendment to the Constitution of 1917: Mexico was

designated as a multiethnic, not mestizo, nation. The hoped-for by-

products are that schools will become more multilingual and native

cultures no longer will be treated as anachronisms in a mestizo world.

It would take the 1994 Zapatista armed uprising, however, to make

discrimination against Mexico’s ﬁrst peoples illegal.

229

The Problems Overlooked

Salinas’s agenda, especially con-

cerning NAFTA, was not greeted

with equanimity by all Mexicans.

Intellectuals believed national sover-

eignty and mexicanidad were threat-

ened. Small businesses knew their

survival was at stake. Economists

predicted millions of jobs would

be lost in the ﬁrst ﬁve years. Many

became concerned that their coun-

try was up for sale. When U.S. vice

president Al Gore defended NAFTA

to U.S. citizens in a televised debate, his remark that NAFTA was an

opportunity equivalent to the purchase of Alaska caused an uproar in

Mexico.

Under Salinas, modernization ignored the basic needs of the

citizenry and polarized Mexican society into the wealthy few and the

Two Mexicos: above, Mexico City skyscrapers;

below, a Mexico City street vendor making

tlacoyos, or ﬂat corn-and-bean cakes

(Photos

courtesy of the Mexico Ministry of Tourism)

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICO

230

increasingly poor masses. Hoping to impress global investors with the

strength and stability of the peso, Salinas overinﬂated it while hold-

ing down wages. To further expand the export-driven economy, he

thought low wages were essential. (Fifty-one percent of manufactured

exports were produced by maquiladoras, foreign businesses operating

with cheap Mexican labor in order to send competitively priced goods

into the United States.) The economy grew, but per capita income

never increased enough to make up for the losses caused by the reces-

sions during the 1980s. The purchasing power of the minimum wage

declined 66 percent from 1982. The now grossly inadequate minimum

wage, the lowest even among the more developed Latin American

countries, became such a political issue in the United States—yet not

for the PRI government—that NAFTA negotiations forced Salinas to

increase it. However, at the beginning of 1997 it was still under $3.50

a day. A full-time job at minimum wage equaled poverty.

More than wages were depressed. Salinas developed new social ser-

vices under his highly publicized solidarity program, yet the monies—

Overpopulation and

the Environment

amily-planning efforts reduced the birth rate from 3.5 percent in

1970 to 1.8 percent in 1995. Statistics on fertility rates for 2000

showed the average family dwindling to just over 2.5 children in con-

trast to seven in 1965. Nonetheless, Mexico’s population will continue

to grow, albeit more slowly. Already it is the 11th most populous nation

in the world. The car and industrial pollution in urban areas cannot

be missed by the naked eye; smog has become a major health hazard

requiring no-car days in the capital and the relocation of factories.

Demand has depleted the water table so much that Ciudad Juárez is

expected to run dry; in Mexico City the streets, built over the canals

and lagoons of the Aztec city, have sunk 35 feet. In the countryside,

overpopulation has forced families out of their communities in search

of new farm land, and deforestation of 1.5 million acres each year has

become a problem as potentially disastrous as it was to ancient Maya

civilization. In response, an entirely new government agency, SEDUE,

was created to prevent further disintegration of the environment, and

citizen activist groups sprang up to monitor its progress. By 2008, how-

ever, the rate of deforestation had doubled.

231

mostly from temporary reserves resulting from privatization—were

used selectively to neutralize opposition from both Cárdenas support-

ers and the “dinosaur” wing of the PRI. They did little to compensate

for the 10 percent cutbacks in social programs at a time when contin-

ued population growth meant the government could barely keep up

with the basic educational needs of the nation. For the ﬁrst time in

their history, public universities considered ending their open-door

policy; primary schools required double shifts, but compensation was

not always available for the teachers. The social security system, too,

became overtaxed with state hospitals struggling to provide adequate

care. At charity hospitals, people with broken bones could wait for

weeks while the limited staff responded to more serious emergencies.

Overpopulation had also resulted in land conﬂicts in some of the most

indigenous, and poor, regions of Mexico. Little was done to resolve

the disputes between peasants and ranchers or even between peasant

and peasant.

Trouble: Zapatistas

Despite these undercurrents, Salinas remained genuinely popular

among the middle class and, of course, the elite. The president’s conﬁ-

dence in his policies and the respect he received worldwide gave hope

to many Mexicans that an era of prosperity and development would

be theirs.

Then, on New Year’s Day 1994, the day NAFTA took effect, Mexico

was greeted by an armed uprising of 2,000 Maya Indians in the poor

southern state of Chiapas. Their leaders, faces covered with ski masks,

appeared in the world media saying that NAFTA was a death sen-

tence for Indians. Calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National

Liberation (EZLN), the Maya demanded land to farm and the return

of the constitutional provisions protecting their right to land. They

demanded greater democracy and the end to discrimination against

them. They wanted schools and medical care. Said Carlos Aguilar, a

Zapatista, “The peasants have awakened and realized that they had to

do something in order for them to listen to us. Now the whole world is

listening” (Holden: 1994).

Suddenly Salinas’s promise of a modern Mexico crashed against the

reality of a Mexico that had been completely ignored by the policies of two

successive conservative administrations. In Mexico’s indigenous states,

such as Chiapas, 70 percent of the population lived below the poverty

line. During the Salinas years extreme poverty increased by one-third.

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232

The army was sent in to restore order, but Mexicans, ashamed of the

abject poverty suffered by much of the peasant population, demanded

negotiations, not war. Salinas adeptly avoided political catastrophe by

unilaterally declaring a cease-ﬁre. Negotiations began in earnest and

resulted in the San Andrés Accords of 1996, which recognized Zapatista

demands for indigenous rights. However, the government failed to sub-

mit the accords for congressional approval, and the conﬂict continued

to fester, occasionally erupting in violence against the Zapatistas.

Assassination

This shock was followed by another in Salinas’s ﬁnal year in ofﬁce.

His hand-appointed successor as the PRI presidential candidate, Luis

Donaldo Colosio, satisﬁed many who had misgivings about Salinas’s

economic policies. Colosio had a political background that made him

seem a progressive antidote to his two PRI predecessors: as minister of

social development he was well known for his commitment to social

programs; as an elected ofﬁcial, he was more attuned to the people than

the technocrats. No one doubted that Colosio would be elected without

the help of stuffed ballot boxes.

Despite democratic reforms and strengthened opposition parties, it

looked as if Salinas had created so much support for the PRI and its

new presidential candidate that the old political machine would once

again be victorious. To further prove the PRI’s commitment to an open

election, Salinas invited international observers to monitor the election

along with Mexican grassroots groups that had sprung up during the

earthquake of 1985, such as Civic Alliance.

Colosio, however, was assassinated in March 1994 while campaign-

ing in Tijuana. It was the ﬁrst assassination of a presidential candidate

or president in the PRI’s history. Six months later, the PRI secretary

general, José Ruiz Massieu, was gunned down. The combination of

the Zapatista uprising and the political assassinations left Mexico pro-

foundly shaken.

President Ernesto Zedillo and Democratic Reforms

Unlike Colosio, the new candidate, Ernesto Zedillo, had never run

for ofﬁce. A PRI technocrat with a doctorate in economics from Yale

University, Zedillo was politically awkward. The PRI won anyway,

buoyed on a wave of Colosio sympathy. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas ran

again, but the PRI had done much to undermine the PRD; the left was

233

in disarray and Cárdenas’s campaign, lackluster. The PAN candidate,

Diego Fernández de Cevallos, more popular after Mexico’s historic ﬁrst

televised presidential debate, seemed to stop campaigning at a critical

juncture—some claimed in collusion with the PRI. The PRI victory came

with a healthy margin, because many Mexicans feared the unknown that

would result from a PRI defeat. For the ﬁrst time, they did not believe

their votes were mere protests and local elections proved them right:

the PAN racked up enough victories that by 1996 it represented about

one-third of the population in municipalities, state governments, and

EI voto es libre y secreto (Your vote is free and secret). Election reforms, such as the secret ballot,

under President Ernesto Zedillo resulted in a greater number of Mexicans voting.

(Courtesy

Partido de Convergencia, Oaxaca, Mexico)

1997 Midterm Elections, by Party

PRI PAN PRD Other

Old seats 298 119 65 18

New seats 239 122 125 14

Source: Federal Elections Commission, Mexico City

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF MEXICO

234

congressional delegations. These strides toward democracy culminated

in 1996 when all parties agreed on a constitutional restructuring of the

electoral process. Although the PRI “dinosaurs” continued their efforts

to weaken these reforms, the 1997 midterm elections demonstrated that

the PRI could no longer dictate who governed Mexico. For example,

Cuahtémoc Cárdenas overwhelmingly defeated the PRI candidate in the

mayoral election for Mexico City, the second most visible political ofﬁce

in Mexico. Also, despite the fact that the PRI had the only nationwide

political machine, it lost majority control of the Chamber of Deputies for

the ﬁrst time in its history. The new opposition Congress had the power

to force even more electoral reforms on the PRI government in time for

the presidential election in 2000.

La Crisis

While democracy made considerable advances under Zedillo, the

economy almost collapsed. The ﬂedgling president was immediately

confronted with a ﬁscal crisis. Salinas, campaigning for the position of

director of the World Trade Organization, had not seen ﬁt to manage

what would be a very unpopular devaluation of the peso. He left the

A Mixtec Success Story

roded land and population pressures sent Isác López to Mexico

City from the Sierra Mixteca as a young boy. Living with relatives

in Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, he attended school and, to contribute to

the family’s needs, sold chiclets on the public buses in the afternoon.

While the rest of his family continued to struggle to make ends meet,

they contributed what they could so that Isác could become a certiﬁed

public accountant. For 15 years, Isác worked for major corporations

in Mexico, such as Salinas y Rochas and Sheraton. In the 1990s, when

interest rates had fallen under Salinas, he qualiﬁed for a mortgage on a

new, two-story house in the resort of Huatulco, where he worked. With

the crisis of 1995, the interest on his mortgage went from 24 to 100

percent. But Isác was one of the lucky ones during la crisis: he managed

to hold on to his job and his house. The interest payments, however,

affected the well-being not only of his immediate family, but also of his

extended family who relied on him in times of trouble. In 1996, interest

rates ﬁnally fell below 30 percent.

235

dirty work to the new president, who had not yet earned the conﬁdence

of foreign ﬁnancial markets. It was mishandled: the Mexico peso went

into a downward spin, and the nation was catapulted into its fourth

recession since 1982 and its worst since the Revolution. It took an

emergency bailout loan from the United States, with Mexican oil as

collateral, to prevent complete collapse of the peso.

By mid-1996 there were signs of a fragile recovery, but Mexico was

suffering still. Two million jobs and thousands of small businesses had

been lost. To avoid a complete collapse of the currency, interest rates

had been quadrupled, and the price of gasoline and utilities had been

increased, as had the value-added tax. The cost of food increased as

Zedillo eliminated subsidies for basic foods including tortillas. By 1997

Mexico City workers needed to labor almost twice as long (50 minutes)

as in 1994 (27 minutes) to purchase a loaf of bread. Half the Mexican

population was estimated to be living in poverty. The devastated middle

class was angry: it was government lies and ineptitude that had done

this to them. Salinas’s popularity plummeted with the peso, as did

world conﬁdence in Mexican markets. Crime soared, as did migration

to the United States: the average number of Mexicans establishing per-

manent residence in the United States during the 1990s rose to 227,000

annually, 10 times greater than during the 1960s.

Oil and NAFTA

In 1998 the world economy was rocked by the Asian crisis, and oil

prices started to plummet, threatening yet another ﬁscal crisis for

Mexico. Although oil contributed only 12 percent to Mexico’s export

income, in contrast to a peak of 80 percent in 1982, taxes on PEMEX,

the government monopoly, constituted 39 percent of the federal budget.

Zedillo ruthlessly cut government programs in order to avoid deﬁcits

and a drop in the value of the peso. Further cuts were not needed, how-

ever, when his government used its position as the ﬁfth largest producer

of crude oil to organize a new cartel that included the OPEC nations

along with Norway: oil prices rose.

Driven by NAFTA and Zedillo’s ﬁscal austerity, Mexico’s economy

ﬁnally turned the corner, ringing up 7 percent growth in the GDP

in 1998 alone. Exports to the United States grew from $60 billion in

1995 to $100 billion four years later. These exports demonstrated a

new diversity: in addition to oil, machinery, clothing, fresh produce,

glass, and electronic parts. In fact, manufacturing outstripped oil in

importance and Mexico edged on China’s position as the largest single

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236

exporter of textiles. Inﬂation decreased dramatically, encouraging

foreign investment that averaged about $11 billion annually and was

increasing at the end of Zedillo’s term. More than 3 million new jobs

were created during his term. They were not enough to keep up with

population growth, but the jobless rate was reduced and consumer

spending increased. There were grounds for optimism.

Corruption

At the time of Colosio’s assassination, rumors were rampant about the

PRI’s possible involvement. With Ruiz Massieu’s assassination, they

became even more convoluted. The “dinosaurs” did it, some thought, in

an attempt to end the liberalizing policies of Salinas. Salinas did it, others

thought, because he wanted to run for a second term: his popularity was

so great that some thought he could successfully amend the constitution,

especially during a time of such crisis. Drug kingpins did it, others specu-

lated, because they were being pursued by PRI prosecutors. As extraor-

dinary as all these accusations seemed, they were widely held by the

Mexican populace and press and were fanned into greater credibility by

the television soap operas in which Salinas look-alikes played assassins.

More seriously, however, these speculations remained credible because

the government failed to resolve the murders. In the incomplete pro-

cess of untangling them, astonishing levels of corruption were revealed.

Initially Ruiz Massieu’s brother was appointed by Salinas to investigate

the deaths, but he resigned in protest, saying political pressures from

high within the PRI prevented an honest investigation. Once Zedillo took

ofﬁce he encouraged conﬁdence in his administration by appointing an

attorney general from outside the PRI. Soon thereafter Zedillo daringly

permitted the arrest and imprisonment of Salinas’s brother, Raúl, for col-

lusion in the murder of Ruiz Massieu, his own brother-in-law.

The arrest of Raúl Salinas led to a series of revelations that even the

most cynical Mexican would have thought impossible. After Salinas’s

Wages and Inﬂation

1995 1997 1998

Inﬂation 52% 17% 14%

Minimum wage –20% –17% 14%

237

arrest, the former attorney general Ruiz Massieu—hired to ﬁnd his

brother’s murderer—ﬂed the country and was arrested at a U.S. airport

carrying a suitcase that contained large amounts of undeclared cash.

Then, he was discovered to have millions of dollars in U.S. banks.

Corruption was revealed to have touched everything, from the way

tortillas are made to the sale of state-owned agencies, from protection

of drug kingpins to murder. Corruption was always known to exist, but

the Salinas scandal demonstrated a shocking degree of violence, even

in regard to one’s own family, and a scale of personal enrichment that

made a farce of the PRI. The once popular Carlos Salinas was forced to

join Hernán Cortés and Porﬁrio Díaz as among the most reviled ﬁgures

in Mexican history. He sensibly sneaked out of Mexico; in 1997, he was

living comfortably in Ireland, a country without an extradition treaty

with Mexico.

Zedillo himself was tainted with PRI-style corruption when he pro-

posed a bailout of failing banks in 1995. There was little doubt that the

economic crisis had left many banks with a massive number of unpaid

loans, but an independent audit discovered that much of the insolvency

was due to fraud and political payoffs. In addition, the United States

A garbage can in Mexico City stuffed with an efﬁgy of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. The sign says,

in part: “Trash can of history: Deposit corrupt politicians and narcopoliticians here.”

(Courtesy

Diana Ricci)

THE MARCH TOWARD DEMOCRACY