Thursday 4/9, third period

Sorry they're late!


We get a political party called the National Revolutionary Party holding its first convention in 1929, and this party will become Mexico’s official party because from this point on until 2000, Mexico is a one-party system. In 1946, they changed the party’s name to its current name, which is PRI (Partido Revolucion Institucional).

President serve six-year terms, a sexennium. Not until the sexennial (1934-1940) of President Cardenas that peasants and urban workers succeeded for this first time in pressing their claims for land and higher wages. This is a period of unprecedented strikes, protests, and petitions to the government calling for the break-up of the haciendas. As a result, more land was distributed by Cardenas than had been distributed by all of Cardenas’ predecessors combined. By 1940, Mexico’s land tenure system/ownership system had been fundamentally altered, breaking the traditional domination of the large haciendas and creating a large sector of small peasant farmers called ejidatarios. The ejidatarios are small peasant farmers who receive a lot of land from the government under their agrarian reform program. As more and more peasant farmers get land, we get new organizations, one of peasant farmers, the other of urban industrial workers in Mexico. They get formed into nationwide organizations. During this timeframe, weapons are provided to rural militants, and foreign oil companies are nationalized, meaning the Mexican government takes them and American-owned oil companies. US doesn’t worry, lets it go. The worker and the peasant organizations don’t take off very much, they don’t become large or effective until after WWII. The heritage, or legacy, of Cardenas, is in some respects still alive in Mexico. If you visit or read their papers, they still talk about their revolution and its goals, but from Cardenas’s constitution and his term in office, we get:
1. The Presidency as the primary institution of Mexico’s political structure, so a one-party system with a very strong President
2. Cardenas’s time sweeping powers given to the president during his six-year term. Mexican presidents are ineligible to run for re-election ever, but while Cardenas is there for six years, he can do almost anything he wants until 2000.
3. Under Cardenas, the Mexican military is co-opted or brought in to a be supporter and defender of the Constitution, and an organization that is not a threat to power and a coup again. So the military is brought in barracks and referred to as a pillar of society, and the president says goof things about this Constitution supporting military.
4. Cardenas bring a mass organizations, particularly the peasant and labor organizations, which become functioning under the control of the PRI, and become an arm of the PRI who will support, vote, and work hard for the PRI.

Democracy has been slow to arrive fully in Mexico. The influence of these mass organizations over government policies and government priorities has been limited. There’s one mass-organization representing peasants and workers, but they’re held to the PRI, and although they support the PRI, the Mexican President didn’t really have to listen to them very much. So the PRI dominates Mexican politics for the next 70 years to the extent that Mexico was for those seventy years almost a one-party state. The PRI won every presidential race from its founding in 1929 until the year 2000, they never lost a presidential election. The PRI had a majority in Mexico’s lower house of Congress from 1929 until 1997. The PRI was challenged for the last 25 years by a rival party called the PAN. When a lot of corruption becomes public knowledge during the Selinas Administration (1988-1994), the PRI flounders a bit under so many allegations of corruption. During the 1990s, we get an internal debate going on inside the PRI between an old –guard, autocratic faction called “Dinosaurs,” who lose, to more reform-minded, free-market oriented technocrats. Technocrats win in the 70s. Dinosaurs come back in the 90s and beg for the good old days and getting the Yankees out, et cetera. This begins with the Presidency of Echeverria, 1970-1976. This continues with President Portillo, 1976-1982, and then especially with President Delemadrid, 1982-1988, and then President Selinas, 1988-1994, then to President Zedillo, 1994-2000. Gradually over several administrations, old-line politicians lose out to the Technocos (Technocrats), who open up the Mexican economy. During this time frame, we see Mexico signing the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994 with Canada and the United states, Mexico joins the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) which is an international organization that regulates free trade. Ultimately, they join the WTO (World Trade Organization) like China.

New laws in this time frame led to industrial development generally concentrate din the Northern part of Mexico where foreign firms operated factories known as Maquiladora, which are factories that use duty-free, imported components to assemble intermediate or final products, and then export what they manufactured. Many similarities with China. Mexico is building up more assembly plants where the components are brought into Mexico, assembled there, and then exported.

By 1990, more than 15000 of these Maquiladoras were manufacturing GI Joes, Barbie dolls, televisions, and automobiles for exports. The dinosaurs then trace the PRI’s declining fortunes in the last couple of decades to the rise of these Technocos, who they claim are elitist, US-educated, never had to run for elected office, and out-of-touch with the party rank and file. The Technocos during these years had implemented a few reforms, such as government run or state run industries had largely been privatized, liberalization of their trade laws had opened up Mexican markets to foreign products, changes in their electoral laws made multi-party elections freer, and that in turn struck very hard at the PRI’s core constituencies, and in part steered the party and the entire country away from their roots that were largely socialist in nature. So there’s at least a twenty year period with dramatic change in Mexico.

Reforming Mexico’s authoritarian and corrupt political system then becomes the cornerstone of President Zedillo’s administration (1994-2000). Zedillo is looking at the PRI and saying its lost support, where it’s being accused of corruption, and being challenged by the PAN, and will lose if they’re not careful. He accuses the people of not being democratic. The PRI won all these elections by doing what they had to do to win, including stuffing ballot boxes and delivering ballots to the polling places. PRI would go around and take the polling boxes to a secret location, where PRI would count it, then announce. They also had advantages. Zedillo says people are upset with the PRI, and proposes amendments to the Constitution, sends them to the states for ratification, and one would take control of elections away from the PRI, and over to an independent federal election commission. The amendment would give this independent federal election commission the authority to supervise balloting, issue picture voter registration cards to voters, give the Mexican Supreme Court the authority to ejudicate election challenges rather than leaving that with the executive branch which was controlled by the PRI, the election commission was in the authority to equalize limited access of the media, which had been in the hands of the PRI. The amendment set limits on campaign spending, contributions, and allowed any political party, not just the PRI, to use the green, orange, and white colors of the Mexican flag in their campaign banners. Up until this time, the PAN and others couldn’t use green, orange, and white in their campaign material.

There are at least three major problems that have disrupted Mexico in recent years that prove to be beyond the ability of the PRI to keep control. One of those is the economy, two is a revolt by native Indians in a Southern state named Chiapas, and three, the Narco-corruption and drug wars such as what is occurring now where people are dying, and the wars are threatening to spill over to the US. The new Mexican President, Zedillo, on the economic side, was forced to devalue the peso. The currency is under a great deal of pressure and near collapse. He devalues it and then floats it against other currencies in the international markets, and it results in a 34% drop in the value of the peso against dollar. To head off an international collapse at the time, countries agree they can’t let Mexico collapse and their currency fail, so to head off a collapse, the Clinton administration in the US provided a 40 billion dollar loan to Mexico, which guaranteed Mexico’s debt. If the government couldn’t pay its debt, US would cover it up to 40 billion dollars, and Mexico would be expected to pay it back. That loan from the US and other loans from the international monetary fund was the largest international assistance program since the Marshall Plan in 1948 after WWII, but is allows Mexico to veer away from collapse from debts, and Mexican markets stabilize during the spring of 1996.

The Indian problem goes back to 1994 when a group of Mayan Indian peasants calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) in January 1994, popped up and appeared in the state of Chiapas. They occupy several towns, and start calling for economic development. To highlight conditions in Mexico, and the large gap in wealth between Mexico’s well-off, and it’s very poor, the EZLN issues a declaration from the jungle when they emerge on the first of January. These peasants that are rebelling say,

“We are the product of 500 years of struggle, first against slavery in the war of independence against Spain, then to escape being absorbed by North American expansion. We have nothing to lose, absolutely nothing. There’s no decent roof over our heads, no land, no work, poor health, no food, no education, no right to freely and democratically chose our leaders, no independence from foreign interests, and no justice for ourselves or our children.”

In this declaration and other things they say, these peasants are rejecting the way Mexico had developed where, at the time they emerged, two of every three people in a population of over 3 million, never completed primary school. They were saying “no” to electrification programs in Mexico, in which the rivers in their state of Chiapas were used to supply electric power to Mexico City, but 1/3 of the population living in Chiapas lived in huts without electricity. It was rejection a distribution of wealth in Mexico where some 2/10 of 1% of the population were billionaires, owning things like supermarket chains or telephone companies, where this 2/10 of 1% were richer than half the people of Mexico combined, and they’re upset that ½ the people living in Chiapas have houses with dirt floors, and they’re upset that in Chiapas, there are twenty families that monopolize all the best land and they were very wealthy exporting cattle raised on large farms or estates to the US, when most people were landless or had a very little amount of land. They’re complaining about a pay scale in which 80% of the agriculture workers in 1994 earn less than the minimum salary per day, they were earning less than $5. This resulted in an estimated 88% of their children having growth retardation from malnourishment.

So these rebels come out of the jungle and make their declarations. The government has trouble dealing with them, and fighting occurs off and on from January 1994 to 1998. The Zedillo administration eventually sends tens of thousands of army troops into the state of Chiapas, bringing torture, disappearances, and arbitrary detentions for the residents of Chiapas. The rebels today are prominent, but the Mexican government never really did solve their complaints, or at least not totally.

The third problem, narco-corruption, is another major problem in Mexico. In 1996, during the Zedillo timeframe, the US and Mexico formed new army units trained by US special forces to lead in fighting the drug war in Mexico, and by 1998, over 80 members of this new elite drug-fighting organization were under investigation for being involved in drug trafficking. The drug situation and the drug wars are really nasty right now.

In the year 2000, for the first time, the PRI loses the presidency, and the candidate from the PAN, Vicente Fox, is elected President, and Mexico celebrates. Mexico is now a democracy, a two-party state, they’ve broken the PRI’s domination. However, Fox doesn’t win the cooperation of the legislative branch. The legislature remains dominated by the PRI, and they vow that they will not pass any of his legislation, so very few of his campaign promises get carried out. The lack of perceived progress resulted in some gains for the PRI in the July 2003 mid-term election. The PRI in 2003 went from 207 seats in the lower house to 222 seats. At the same time, the PAN went from 202 seats down to 151 seats. So by 2003, Fox, PAN’s president, is essentially a “lame duck.”

Fox also faced a new problem in Mexico, and that was that for years, Mexico had been a source of cheap labor. As long as the workers worked for low wages, Mexico was an attractive place for industry to locate, or for foreign factories to relocate. By 2003, Mexican industries were being heavily challenged by China. So Mexican-made products that were at one time priced low and looked attractive for export to countries like the United States, being undersold by the Chinese. An example is Mexico had made blankets, marketed at $10, cheap in the US. China comes along, and does blankets for $6, and Mexico loses. So Fox must step up to this competition.