MORDIDA
RULES
The
dynamics of this election reflect the underlying crisis of
the Mexican state, which is being buffeted by economic, political
and social tsunamis that threaten to plunge the country into
chaos. Corruption is a way of life in Mexico, where mordida
rules and the drug cartels have made huge inroads both politically
and socially. The last three Mexican presidents have been
deeply
implicated in various deals with drug traffickers, and
the stench of scandal has become so thick that even the remarkably
tolerant and long-suffering people of Mexico, infused with
Catholic stoicism, have had enough. The PRI leadership, which
has always disdained party primaries, was so panicked that
they abandoned the long-standing custom of the outgoing president
appointing his successor and actually held a party primary.
The preordained winner, Francisco
Labastida, is a grim and colorless technocrat, whose short
stature is a kind of metaphor for the standing of his party
in the public's affections.
HEY,
SHORTY!
Fox,
his chief opponent – who, in a burst of political incorrectness,
once called his opponent "Shorty" – is the governor of
the northern province of Guanajuato
whose National Action Party has been able to wrest several
northern governorships from the PRI in recent years. He is
blunt, but charismatic, and has succeeded in extending the
appeal of his party way beyond its northern, middle-class
base. The PAN, founded in 1939 by Catholic activists, social
conservatives, and Mexico's embryonic class of entrepreneurs,
has been infused with new blood over the years, and a free-market
faction ideologically aligned with the Republican party in
the US arose to challenge
the stodgy old leadership. After winning the party primary,
Fox came on strong as the major contender after an abortive
attempt to form an alliance with the leftist Party of the
Democratic Revolution (PRD) – whose candidate, Mexico
City Mayor Cuauhtemoc
Cardenas, has since become one of Fox's chief critics,
second only to Labastida. In shaking the thick but essentially
hollow tree of the PRI, Fox has stirred up a hornets' nest:
he points his finger directly at Mexican Cabinet officials
whom, he says, are directly involved in narcotics. In January
of 1996 he told El Norte: "Everyone knows that there
are people involved with drugs at the highest levels of power."
NARCOSISTEMA
This
is the great irony of the recent Senate debate over "Plan
Colombia," in which the Clinton administration in alliance
with internationalist Republicans committed the US to a war
on "narco-terrorism" in Colombia to the tune of $1.3 billion
On the one hand we are supposedly fighting the Colombian "narcoterrorists,
" and on the other hand we are allying ourselves with the
Mexican wing of what Christopher Whalen of Legal Research
International, and editor of The Mexico Report calls
the Narcosistema. As Whalen puts it:
"The
drug cartels in Mexico and Colombia are not separate, discrete
organizations limited by national borders, but rather fingers
on a hand that is a transnational drug delivery, money laundering
and financial investment corporation – call it the Narcosistema
– with powerful political and business ties that reach all
around the world, from Washington to Mexico to Cali to Palermo
to Moscow."
MEXICO'S
MAFIA STATE
As
in Colombia, so in Mexico: the drug lords are a major political
factor, perhaps the major factor. They alone can provide
ready access to large amounts of hard currency, enough to
not only pay off a few cops but also to grease the wheels
of a formidable political machine. Both coca and marijuana
have long been staples of South American agriculture, and
their attempted eradication by US anti-drug agencies is widely
perceived as yet another example of Yankee cultural imperialism
– malignant meddling that is increasingly resented. The
atmosphere of lawlessness and official corruption is no better
in Mexico than it is in Colombia, and the power of what a
recent
New York Times article called the "narcocracy"
persists even in PAN-controlled provinces, such as Baja California.
Mexican law enforcement authorities appear to be little more
uniformed auxiliaries of the Mexican Mafia, the real rulers
of Mexico. As the Times' Tim Golden puts it:
"After
years in which Mexicans held to the belief that drugs like
cocaine were a problem that merely passed through their country
on their way to places like Los Angeles and New York, the
illicit trade here has begun to profoundly affect people's
lives. Street crime, fed by an explosion of drug abuse, has
risen exponentially. With the police overwhelmed by drug-related
killings and the courts awash in traffickers' bribes, crimes
almost unheard of not long ago – kidnappings, bank robberies,
drive-by shootings – are commonplace."
CARDENAS
– HE COULDA BEEN A CONTENDER
It
is widely believed that, but for massive vote fraud by the
PRI, Cardenas would have won the last presidential election,
but he has fallen out of favor with the electorate and is
way down in the polls. The early hopes for a united opposition
were dashed by regional and ethnic divisions, as well as sharp
ideological disparities: Cardenas' chief strength is among
the indigenous peoples of the region, as well as the university-based
far-left, while Fox represents the ranchers, entrepreneurs
and workers of the Anglicized, industrialized north. In any
case, Cardenas has confined his role in this election as chief
attack dog for the PRI, training his fire on Fox and practically
ignoring Labastida. The alleged PAN plan to privatize the
state-owned Pemex oil company – nationalized by Carndenas's
father, President Lazaro Cardenas, in 1938 – has been
the theme of the PRD campaign. The PRD originated as a tendency
inside the PRI, a left opposition caucus that eventually seceded.
For a long time the PRD functioned as little more than a satellite
party that revolved around the PRI, just as the various "Peasant"
and "Democratic" parties in Eastern Europe (and, today, in
China) were allowed to operate in order to give those regimes
a facade of democratic legitimacy. It wasn't until the corruption
and complete breakdown of civil society pushed the PRD forward,
as the only organized center of opposition to the regime,
that the party became any kind of national force. Now it appears
that the PRD has reverted to its historic role as a left-satellite
of the PRI, an unwanted left opposition that is basically
loyal to the nationalist, egalitarian, and deeply anti-American
orientation of the ruling party.
A
CIVIL WAR NOVELA
The
Mexican people have had enough, and they are rising up in
a populist movement to take their country and their lives
back from gangs of marauding thugs. For the second time in
its 70-year reign, the PRI is in danger of losing the presidency:
the first time they managed to avert disaster by pulling off
a massive campaign of electoral fraud. But this time the whole
world is watching rather too closely for them even to think
of trying that one again; more
than 800 observers from various countries will be on hand
to keep an eye on things – but in Mexico, where politics
is as melodramatic as any TV novela, nothing can be ruled
out as too obvious. Before a single vote was cast, Fox was
already vowing
to lead massive protests if he were "cheated" out of victory.
"If there is fraud, if there are irregularities, we'll surely
defend the citizens' vote. First we'll use legal defenses,
and of course we'll also mobilize our people." People in the
streets, mass demonstrations like those held by the Toledo
supporters in Peru, a challenge to the legitimacy of the "elected"
government – could Mexico be on the brink of civil war?
A
MEXICAN PUTIN?
The
PRI, for its part, has been engaged in a campaign that is
not only overshadowed by coercion, bribery, and fraud, but
in the last few days has taken on the tone of a veritable
civil war. To top off the accusations that the PAN was in
the pay of the big American oil companies, not to mention
Coca Cola – Fox was the CEO of Coca Cola's Mexican division
– the
PRI is now claiming to have "proof" in the form of canceled
checks: the only problem is that all the checks appear to
record legitimate business transactions unrelated to his political
activities. Never mind how the PRI got hold of the "evidence"
– suffice to say that Labastida, as the director of government
operations, functioned as the head of Mexico's secret political
police. In a fascinating piece by J. Michael Waller in a recent
issue of Insight, "The
Narcostate Next Door," the author depicts Labastida as
a kind of Mexican Putin, the man Washington sees as being
able to bring order out of chaos:
"It's
a sure sign that a corrupt regime is on its last legs when
the head of the secret police becomes the anointed presidential
candidate of the ruling party. This specter not only is appearing
in far-off Russia, where the icy KGB veteran Vladimir Putin
runs the government day to day and plans to succeed ailing
President Boris Yeltsin. It also is right on the U.S. border."
DIRTY
TRICKS
Insight
goes on to report that as "the chief political enforcer of
the PRI" Labastida presided over a vast intelligence-gathering
network of political operative whose job it was to keep tabs
on private lives as well as the politics of the regime's enemies.
While secretary of government, basically the link between
the government and the PRI apparatus, Labastida's minions
routinely engaged in electronic eavesdropping, bugging the
offices of the opposition parties as well as businessmen,
journalists, and others. According to Insight, "At one electronic
spy center in Campeche, investigators found seven years' worth
of tapes and transcripts documenting the private lives of
opposition figures and others."
NATURAL
ALLIES
If
this sounds all-too-familiar, i.e., positively Clintonian,
that's because it is: Labastida has imported his American
equivalent, none other than James Carville, the Clintonian
attack dog, as a campaign consultant. Teamed up with Democratic
pollster Stanley Greenberg and Tony Coelho's daughter, the
Carville is employing the very same tactics that he used so
successfully in this country: smear-mongering,
fear-mongering,
and outright
intimidation, the politics of personal destruction with
a Latin beat. While the official stance of the US government
is the strictest
neutrality, everybody knows that the Clintonians are pulling
out all the stops for their friends in Mexico City, the oligarchs
and their drug-trafficking friends, one of the most corrupt
regimes in the world – a natural ally for one of the
most corrupt administrations in American history.
HACK
ATTACK
A
hot election issue is who profited from the $100 billion bank
bailout that arose from the 1994-95 currency crisis. It was
the US taxpayers who originally financed the bailout, but
US political leaders have been crowing about how they not
only got their money back but made a profit on that deal –
and it is the Mexican people who have wound up footing the
enormous bill. Now they want to know who reaped the benefits
of the bailout, who looted the banks with illegal "loans"
that would never be repaid? The answer to that tantalizing
question is contained in an
encrypted computer diskette protected by five coded passwords
that – in a touch of Mexican melodrama the mechanics
of which I can't for the life of me figure out – are
held by Mexico's main political parties. While the four opposition
groups have all revealed their passwords, the PRI is the lone
holdout to withhold the mystery. Now the PRD has hired hackers
to get past the system's electronic defenses, and the Mexican
hackers are "very optimistic" that they'll soon have the list
of bailout beneficiaries. It is like something out of a novela,
an overdrawn morality play in which caricatures shriek and
posture, preen and scream at each other, all the while teetering
on the brink of violence.
A
PRISONER AT HOME
Never
mind Colombia: the question is – what are we going to
do about Mexico? Pat Buchanan describes the story of
an 80-year-old woman living on the US Mexican border, an American
citizen who is a prisoner in her own country, who lives with
bars on the windows and in a virtual prison because of the
dangers posed by illegal aliens pouring across the border.
Her dog is dead because someone fed it meat mixed with crushed
glass. Her property is overrun on a daily basis, and she lives
in terror, unable to move.
HERE
COME THE PEACEKEEPERS
It
is interesting to note that the virulently anti-American
tone of the PRI's campaign was orchestrated by American
political consultants: Fox was depicted as the agent of
a "foreign power" which could only be the US, and Cardenas
all but called him a traitor in even raising the question
of privatizing Pemex. The PRI ran a television ad that stated:
"Many Mexicans who go to the United States ... are hunted
by racists as if they were animals." Fox was depicted as an
uncritical puppet of the evil gringo colossus to the north
, too bought off to criticize US immigration policies. But
Carville & Company are playing with fire. Low level warfare
has already
broken out along the US-Mexican border, and Mexican troops
have ventured into the US in direct clashes with the Border
Patrol. American ranchers are organizing to protect their
homes and their land, as the US government seems indifferent
to (or collusive with) the Mexican invasion. But the Mexican
"human rights commission" isn't satisfied even with these
lax policies. The Mexican government has protested
to the US, and is now demanding UN intervention. In a letter
to UN human rights czar Mary Robinson, Jose Luis Soberanes
Fernandez averred that "We must prevent an atmosphere of growing
intolerance and exclusion motivated by incidents in Arizona
spreading to other places, with serious risk of there being
a climate of lynching and death." How long before the "peacekeepers"
arrive, and the Bosniazation of the American southwest is
complete?
THE
RECONQUISTA
But
what about that 80-year-old woman Buchanan talks about, who
is a captive in her own home, or the ranchers whose property
is overrun by hordes of illegals, swarming over pasture land,
despoiling the environment and trampling on ranchers' livelihoods?
The reconquista of the American southwest has been
in progress for a long time, and now the tensions that have
built are coming to a head – with James Carville and
the Democratic party stirring the pot, targeting the evil
gringos as racist colonialists and smearing Fox as a traitor
to Mexico. This beauty of this propaganda theme is that it
is the exact opposite of the truth: Carville, Greenberg, and
Ms. Coelho are not "operating out of a war room in a glitzy
Mexico City hotel," as Insight put its, desperately trying
to rescue Labastida's troubled campaign purely out of mercenary
motives: nor
is it a coincidence that on the eve of the Mexican election,
Janet Reno's Justice Department issued a report exonerating
a key Labastida ally, tycoon Carlos Hank Gonzalez, purported
to be the kingpin of one of Mexico's biggest drug cartels.
WILL
THE PRI GIVE UP POWER?
If
Fox wins, the oligarchs and the drug lords will not go quietly
into the night. On Sunday, if the PAN takes the Mexican White
House, will the victor live long enough to take possession?
In the wild West shoot-'em-up atmosphere of Mexican politics,
where more than one presidential aspirant has been gunned
down in recent years, this is an open question. Regardless
of the results, what this election portends for Mexico is
nothing short of impending disaster – one that will be
keenly felt by Americans in the not too distant future. Already,
the border states are beginning to chafe under the burden
of being in the frontlines of the invasion, the veritable
flood of undocumented immigrants pouring over the border and
effectively erasing it. Fox proposes that we abolish the border
altogether, and allow the free movement of individuals as
well as goods, in effect the merger of the US and Mexico into
a single state.
MERGER
MANIA
I
won't go into the arguments against "free" immigration here,
except to say that this North American version of the European
Union would soon acquire all the trappings of a political
union. In effect, Mexico would become the 51st
state. The merger of the PRI and the Democrats would be effortless,
since they already have much in common, including but not
limited to the services of that "Ragin' Cajun" Carville fella.
And Fox is a perfect match for the Republicans, with his conservative
social agenda carefully tailored so as not to offend, and
his mildly free market proposals that would trim the Mexican
Leviathan around the edges but leave it basically intact.
As if in preparation for the coming merger, Dubya travels
around the country campaigning in Spanish and is running ads
featuring his Latino nephew.
THE
COMING CRISIS
Fox's
proposal of a de facto merger in imitation of the EU would
provoke a storm in Mexico and give rise to a nationalist backlash
– and the prospect of war with our southern neighbor.
For the only sections that seek to merge – indeed, have
already merged with the US both economically and socially
– are the northern provinces, the bastion of the PAN,
where the general breakdown of law and order has led to open
talk of secession. The creation of such a "free zone" would
speed up that process, and hasten the coming crisis of American
– and Mexican – sovereignty. Do we want to get involved
in the next Mexican civil war, or do we start sealing off
our border now so as to avoid trouble down the road?
FORTRESS
AMERICA
This
is the question American policy makers must face, and much
sooner than anyone thinks. This Sunday marks the beginning
of a new chapter in Mexican history: one that could very well
prove to be a long and bloody one. But this is one novela
that we don't want to get a part in, not even a walk-on role
– because there will be no walking off. The central government
in Mexico City has long tyrannized and looted the provinces,
but they were tolerated as long as they offered a modicum
of protection. The general breakdown of the social contract
and the criminal justice system has opened up the possibility
of the dissolution of the Mexican state: we have seen the
beginning of it in Chiapas. The US has an interest in maintaining
peaceful relations with Mexico – something that obviously
needs to be explained to the Ragin' Cajun – but we don't
have a dog in that fight. Fox must liberate his own people,
and fight his own battles – but if the seceding provinces
of the north applied for statehood I would campaign against
it. For this would mean permanent war with Mexican irredentists.
Instead of extending our southern border, we need to fortify
it – against the storms to come.
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