Mexican Notes 4/20/2009

Socialization and Political Culture:
Culturally, Mexicans are highly supportive of their political institutions that they see as having evolved from the Mexican Revolution, and they like the democratic principles that were written into the Constitution of 1917. Given that they considered their regime legitimate, nobody is trying to overthrow the regime. Mexicans are, however, critical of their government’s performance. You remember the revolution and then the goals written into the constitution that were going to create jobs for people, reduce social inequality, get better basic public services, same things that the EZLN wanted, and people were openly critical that the government hasn’t come through sufficiently in each of those areas. Mexicans consider politicians and bureaucrats to be 1) elitist, 2) to be self-serving; that is, they are looking out for themselves, and 3) probably corrupt. Mexicans are cynical about the electoral process. For some seventy years under the one-party system, under the PRI, the average Mexican regarded participating in election campaigns, rallies, voting drives, going to actually vote, joining a political party as just something you would do, something used to say sort-of ritualistic, just something in the pattern of things people would do and that, at best, they were necessary only to extract some benefits from the system because if you were seen as getting out and supporting the PRI and their candidates, the PRI was going to dominate the government so conceivably there’s going to be some benefits for you. Mexican society is known for strong patron-client relations, and, in Mexico, we call the strong patron-client relationship a camarilla. And when the PRI was dominating for its seventy years, it depended heavily on patron-client networks to get people out to vote and to mobilize organizations to support the vote. Since 2000, patron-client networks are still there but not quite as dominant. For Mexicans, their official interpretation of the Revolution of 1910 stresses a lot of symbology, or mist—become aware of the idea that somehow their system is going to have social justice, be a democracy, and that there’s a need for national unity and that the ruling government in place came from the people. And they hold up its heroes, some of the people whose names we mentioned along the way: Father Hidalgo, Juarez, Zapata, Pancho Villa, and President Cardenas. The government’s role in all of this has been constantly reinforced by political socialization, through the mass media, through the public school system, through the families, and again when the PRI was dominant during the mass organizations that the PRI had. Another agent of socialization that I should have mentioned and didn’t was the Church; the Church is a strong teacher.

Participation:
If we look at participation in Mexico: like everywhere else, the number one form of participation is voting, and, amongst the votes, the vote that’s going to get the most turnout is going to be the presidential election. In Mexico, everyone eighteen and older can vote. In the years of the PRI domination, participation in party rallies, ceremonies often brought some degree of rewards—turned out for a PRI campaign drive, probably got a free meal, door prizes, free transportation (got to ride around in a city bus), and, so in those days during the PRI domination again, people would turn out to participate, and it would almost have a holiday flavor. On the other hand, failure to participate could result in some loss of benefits from the government. Now, since 2000, as Mexico has developed into a multi-party system, it is tougher to say what the pay-off for participation is. The rewards for being seen as an active participant probably remain, but it’s tougher for a losing party to, in any way, punish people that didn’t turn out to support them. Sanctions aren’t going to be in place anymore; they’re very like the U.S. today in this regard. Political elites in Mexican have traditionally been recruited from the middle class. 1910 Revolution opened up opportunities for ambitious, well-educated elements of the middle class, and political power has shifted to that educated middle class. Since the 1970s, tecnicos (and that is lawyers, engineers, government planners, economists, professional administrators) had all advanced much to the distress of the old dinosaurs beginning with the Echeverria administration (1970-1976) continuing through Portillo (1976-1982), particularly during the de la Madrid sexennial (1882-1988), and then the Salidas (1988-1994). Through several years then old-wide politicians who had risen to leadership in Mexico through politics or through labor organizations or through peasant organizations (those mass organizations sponsored by the PRI), have lost out to the tecnicos. Tecnicos, again, are people recruited from the college-educated; they hold advanced university degrees, often from foreign universities like the universities in the United States, and they tend to take their degrees in fields like economics and public administration. These are people, the tecnicos, that tend to spend their entire career within the government bureaucracy; they’re going to be career government workers, especially in the financial and planning agencies. They don’t often run for elective office, but when they do, they are being successful. President Fox, the first president from the PAN, was the sixth president in a row to be elected president of Mexico without previously having held any elected office. So these are people who get their education, spend a career in the bureaucracy working in the government, and then rising in their party ranks, and finally running for a top elected office and getting it. The tecnicos’ advance in the system to positions of leadership faster than the dinosaurs, consequently, tecnicos are younger.

Interest Group System:
In Mexico, agenda-building—deciding major issues—takes place within the upper levels of the government bureaucracy. Policies, historically, have been initiated and then shaped by the inner circle of the president’s advisor before they get presented to the public. Remember, for the most, particularly through the PRI years, the president was really the dominant figure through those six years. So, the president would come in, get a close ring of advisors, and they would decide the issues they were going to tackle and advise to the public. The former official party, the PRI, had been the lead in all of this, and, during their seventy years of domination, the PRI maintained three mass nationwide organizations, similar to China, but in Mexico’s case much stronger. They had a mass organization referred to as the CTM that represented organized labor; they were the National Labor Union. They had another one called the CMC that supposedly represented all the peasant farmers. And then they had another third organization that they referred to as the Popular Sector that tried to scoop up everything else—sort of a mish-mash and no where near as strong as the other two. But during the PRI, then, we are operating under a corporatist system because the CTM was the recognized organization representing labor, and the CNC was the officially recognized organization representing the rural peasants. And if the workers or peasants had an issue that they want taken up with government, they had to work it through the channels of that mass organization, and the government would get back to them through those channels. Citizens and segments of Mexican society then had access to government through these mass organizations were essentially licensed by the state to represent their sector. Now, with the loss of the presidency for the PRI, these mass organizations have all but disappeared. There were other organized interest groups, which were not controlled by the PRI. They included the entrepreneurs; in the business world, they included the military and the Catholic Church. Those groups were important enough in themselves that they had access to government elites; if the head of the military needed to talk to the president or somebody high up, he could and the same with the head of the Church. So they didn’t need either a political party or a mass organization. The business community organized into several different interest groups, and, today, we’re operating pretty much on a pluralist system. Patron-client networks sprung up and, again, particularly during the seventy years of the PRI. And they became important during the seventy-year domination of the PRI because if individuals or groups wanted to go around/bypass the mass organization [They didn’t want to deal with the CTM or the CNC, and they had their own contacts in government (patron-client relationship)], they could make their needs known to government through those patron-client networks. Under the seventy-years of the PRI, having a patron-client structure, and I would guess to some extent today, something that has worked pretty well for Mexico because a patron-client structure makes it difficult for popular demands to be collected by one group, that is to mass gathered and presented; they tend to go to government in one-sies and two-sies through patron-client relationships. If you got requests or demands from the public coming to you by individuals, it’s easier to say “no” than if it’s a big mass group coming to government. And, in Mexico over the years, the people sort-of accepted that, that is, being told “no,” and they had what they called in Mexico the “Myth of the Right Connection”—a Mexican who went to a government official and asked for something and was told “no” simply assumed that they had asked the wrong person. You got to find the right connection, and they go ask somebody else. And it tended to limit citizen frustration with government performance because they would take it on themselves to try to find the right person rather than being openly critical to government. Independent organizations not tied specifically to the PRI appear in the 1980s and continue; you had a number of human rights organizations, environmental groups, Labor Worker Association, and an active women’s movement. And over time, as Mexico is changing, you get a middle class growing, and they come together and form pluralist groups. You have angry peasant groups coming together, like the EZLN—certainly not a pre-sponsored group, but effective up to a point. And the other group that is not as well organized but is large, growing in size, low-income urban population around Mexico City (so many people live in Mexico City), which is surrounded by enormous Shanty towns—people living in huts and cardboard boxes, probably no electricity. You got people drawn to Mexico City for jobs, and then there’s no housing for them; they live in these massive slums, and, when they can, they put their bans on government for better housing for electric power, plumbing, and sanitation services, those sort of things. We try to put a bottom line on this, and I think we would say that the political elite in Mexico now faces a substantially larger number of interest groups that unlike the days of the PRI dominance are now pursuing their goals with much less deference to government, which the other side of that point would be more demanding of government, more independent. Patron-client relations are going to remain in place if citizens can find people in government to strike a relationship with.

Political Parties:
The principle political structure in Mexico from 1929 to 2000 was the PRI. When the PRI dominated, it did not have to pull citizens’ interests together to formulate a party platform in the sense that parties in western democracies tend to do. The PRI was able to maintain power by turning their clientelistic social structure into an umbrella organization called the PRI that shaped what most people did politically most of the time. The PRI was an elaborate network of camarillas, patron-client relationships. They had some fifteen million members. In addition, it was an authoritarian, non-competitive party, and it had its corporatist mass organizations over the labor movement and over the rural peasants. With the situation of PRI was interested in limiting the scope, or the amount, of flexibility that citizens had to make demands on the government. They wanted to limit demands for the people in order to take pressure off the president. And the PRI, then, (This is during their seventy years of dominance.) would seek to absorb into the party as many of the diverse economic interests, political tendencies that existed in Mexico. They tried to co-opt them and bring them in. Today, say the PRI is an inclusive party that occupies pretty much the raw center of the political spectrum in Mexico, but it flounders without a clear ideology. Before democratization, the 2000 presidential elections, the PRI was very much an appendage of government itself, especially at the presidency; you can hardly tell where government stopped and the party began—very dominant one-party system. The PRI, as a party, did not, even during its dominance, did not exert any independent influence on government, either its economic policies or social policies. And this is back to its overwhelmingly strong president. The PRI party was what the president and the leading technocrats made it at any one time, and, as presidents came and went, then the essence of the party would change to be supportive of that new president; the president is going to call the shots for six years. The party doesn’t need a platform because it does what the president wants. It just gets people out to vote. In Mexico under the years of the PRI dominance, it was probably the world’s most accomplished vote-getting machine. If you got nominated to elected office by the PRI, you were going to win. Until 2000, there had never been a non-PRI president. Until 1988/1989, there had never been a non-PRI federal government senator, and there had never been a non-PRI state governor before 1988/1989. During the years of its dominance, the PRI has several advantages; it had privilege access to the mass media (We get prime time, extensive coverage, and, if it wasn’t getting everything it wanted, it spent government money to buy it. They would hire reporters to write good stories about them.). The PRI had access to government funds to finance their election campaign. There was this vast network of government patronage because of all the jobs and favors that the government, meaning the PRI, could dispense. So the PRI had a nationwide network of campaign organizers, local representatives, poll watchers, people like that, who controlled the election. The PRI also controlled the Federal Election Commission, which was responsible for counting and validating election returns, and the Federal Election Commission could easily manipulate election results. An example was that polling places tended to move during the middle of Election Day, and only PRI supporters seemed to know where they had moved to. And there’s tremendous ability to commit election fraud and stuff the ballot boxes. Despite all these advantages, over time a share of the vote going to the PRI decline, went down. What was happening is that the population was shifting from rural to urban locations, and the PRI’s mass organizations didn’t work as well in the cities as they did in the countryside. Over time, the education level of the Mexican citizens went up and that hurt the PRI’s dominance. The PRI’s mass organizations, those representing the rural peasants, those representing organized labor, the vote fell off from them; they lost some of their grip. Younger population was increasingly out of touch with the political movements and social reforms from the 1930s and 1940s. And then we have the rise of the technocrats, and, again, some of the people fed up with the PRI. If you were a worker and by chance you may want a pay raise, you go to your mass organization, CTM; we need a pay raise; cost of living is getting away from us. CTM goes to the government leadership, the president and advisor, and said, “Workers need a pay raise.” The government is going to respond “no” because they would lose cheap labor, which was their chief attraction to get companies to come in. Workers get angry at CTM because organization is not meeting their needs; so workers start looking elsewhere. Rural peasants the same thing, who say, “We need land, preferably land with water so we can grow food.” The government doesn’t come through, and the rural peasants look elsewhere. The PRI starts losing the vote. There was a sense in which Mexico’s opposition parties was helpful to the PRI during its seventy-year dominance: 1) It gave an outlet for a protest vote (People decided that they were fed up with the PRI, they go vote for another party, and the PRI can let it go because they knew that the other party was going to win because if they had to, they would rig the election. It wasn’t costing the PRI anything.) 2) It made Mexico’s system look a little more legitimate because it made it look like a competitive two-party election system. So, over time we get opposition parties slowly becoming competitive, even though they were operating at this tremendous disadvantage of the PRI turned to fraud when it wanted to. And then it leads to the PRI losing the presidency in 2000 and starting to lose its majorities in the legislative branch. The PRI of course, looking ahead to the presidential election of 2006, was hoping that they would regain the presidency and slip right back into their dominant role, and then that didn’t happen. A second party is the PAN, the National Action Party. It formed in 1939. It has a nationwide following. It first won a governorship in 1989; that grew slowly in 1996. It was up to four governorships, and it’s about there today. PAN saw its presence in the federal congress slowly increasing, and the PAN became the dominant party in Mexico’s cities, with the exception of the one very important city of Mexico City. In 2000, as we know, the PAN wins the presidency for the first time and repeats that success in 2006. PAN represents the political right, or the conservative side, of the political spectrum. It was opposed to the anti-Church provisions of the 1917 Constitution but has to kind of accept them. As it came on, it opposed the PRI, or government, monopoly over public education. The PAN supporters included the urban middle class and some socially conservative peasants, as well as some urban working class. And having a strong political party on the right has forced the PRI to move right on the spectrum trying to co-opt supporters of the PAN, which means that the PRI . . .