PERPETUATING POWER: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen
By Jorge G. Castaneda, translated by Padraic Arthur Smithies
The New Press, 248 pages, $26
For more than 70 years, and despite the elaborate rituals and trappings of democratic elections, Mexico’s presidents were selected through a process as secretive and autocratic as the anointing of a new pope. The most eagerly awaited moment was not the election itself but el dedazo — the symbolic tapping with the finger, or appointment — several months before, when the outgoing president named the candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party. At that point, white smoke might as well have wafted from a chimney at the presidential palace, because with the machinery of the PRI behind him, the election of the appointee was a done deal.
And until last year’s momentous election, when the PRI lost the presidency for the first time since the 1920s, Mexico’s peculiar brand of democracy — ” ‘the perfect dictatorship,’ ” as Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa has described it — worked surprisingly well. While the rest of Latin America convulsed through endless coups, juntas and insurrections, Mexico’s political system sailed along predictably. Even the country’s economic downturns seemed to follow a set schedule.
Some historians have even said that Mexico’s greatest accomplishment during the past century was not its revolution, land reform or other epochal events, but the development of a mechanism for so smoothly transferring the baton of power from one person to another every six years, like a perfectly coordinated relay race.
In the riveting and revealing “Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen,” Jorge G. Castaneda — noted political scientist, prolific writer and now Mexico’s foreign minister in the new administration of Vicente Fox — analyzes the last six dedazos, with all their intrigue, secret machinations, pettiness and dishonesty.
It’s a fascinating dissection of a unique system that was able to withstand all manner of economic shocks and internal upheavals, like the 1968 riots that by some estimates left hundreds of students dead.
In the end, of course, the system didn’t survive. Beginning with the 1988 election of Carlos Salinas de Gortari — widely perceived as a fraudulent victory — followed by the 1994 Zapatista guerrilla uprising and the 1995 currency devaluation debacle, the pace of electoral reforms accelerated.
Under President Ernesto Zedillo, elected in 1994, the dedazo was formally abolished in favor of an open primary, though some cynics still maintain that Zedillo still greased the way for the PRI’s favorite son. And last July the unthinkable happened: The PRI lost the presidency and found itself without a majority in either house of Congress. In effect, the party had reformed itself right out of the picture–at least for now.
If there is an unavoidable shortcoming in Castaneda’s book it is that it quits too soon, with Salinas’ dedazo of Luis Donaldo Colosio as the candidate in 1993, Colosio’s 1994 assassination and the selection of Zedillo–often called “the accidental president”–shortly afterward. Castaneda’s six essays on the presidential selections to a large extent are based on interviews with four former presidents, the transcripts of which constitute the second half of the book. But because Zedillo was still in office, Castaneda thought it would be inappropriate to interview him, and so the system’s final metamorphosis is still to be written. Let’s hope Castaneda is still taking notes and that Zedillo is willing to sit down for an interview for an addendum to “Perpetuating Power.” Mexico’s wild political and economic gyrations during the past six years–political assassinations, narcocorruption, the arrest of Salinas’ brother on charges of murder and “inexplicable enrichment” and ultimately the bitter feud between Carlos Salinas and Zedillo–ought to be more than enough for a few additional chapters, if not a separate book altogether.
Castaneda writes that before the creation of the PRI in 1929, Mexico’s politics were more like a series of “ludicrous dictatorships, foreign invasions, dismemberment or insurrections”–if not one-man rule, as under Porfirio Diaz, who effectively ruled Mexico from 1876 through 1911. Plutarco Elias Calles and later Lazaro Cardenas devised a new system–a true Mexican original–that was authoritarian yet could resolve within its bosom disputes among society’s major groups, such as peasants, the army, the middle classes, labor unions and government workers.
The president was considered the ” `natural-born’ ” leader of the PRI, and–in perhaps the most original feature of the system–he could appoint his successor as presidential candidate, but he could not succeed himself. The building pressure that ultimately blew apart one-man dictatorships like those of the Duvaliers in Haiti or Somoza in Nicaragua was diffused in Mexico by internal deals and compromises among the players.
The resulting system was not much more than an elaborate pantomime of democracy, but it afforded Mexico political stability and even surprisingly steady economic growth for four decades and the modernization of the country, according to Castaneda.
Each of the six dedazos Castaneda scrutinizes (including Salinas’ selection of Zedillo after Colosio’s death) has its own fascinating twists that make the system seem more like a nimble organism than an unthinking machine. Each transfer of power had its measure of intrigue and surprise–at some points so much so that a reader might reach for a pad of paper to diagram the comings and goings of all the participants–but Salinas, president from 1988 to 1994 and a political player long before then, seems to be particularly venal.
Castaneda suggests that at one point during the administration of Jose Lopez Portillo, Salinas, then an economic adviser with the Ministry of Planning and Budget, may have manipulated financial projections to underestimate the size of the looming deficit, in order to boost the chances of his boss–Miguel de la Madrid, head of the ministry–to be the presidential nominee. And as a result, Lopez Portillo may have failed to take appropriate action to stave off an oncoming economic crisis.
“The president of Mexico,” Castaneda writes, “is the best-informed man in the country as long as the opposite is not the case–that is, provided that his sources do not dry up or go blind, and as long as the institutions that support him do not succumb to the temptation to bet on the future rather than on the present.”
Such chicanery and political hardball are hardly Mexican inventions. But as Castaneda points out, in other countries an aggressive media, an independent opposition or strong competing political institutions can serve as a counterpoint to such manipulations. But when power is as concentrated–and cloaked in secrecy–as it was under the Mexican system, there are hardly any limits on what the inside players may be willing to try or are able to get away with.
Such revelations keep the reader interested, even if the tone of Castaneda’s prose is more doctoral dissertation than Woodward and Bernstein. It’s an inherently fascinating tale that still could have benefited from more vivid writing, in the style of Andres Oppenheimer’s “Bordering on Chaos,” also a gripping but more readable account of Mexico’s roller-coaster economic fortunes during the Salinas administration.
That’s a small complaint, however, about Castaneda’s brilliantly researched book, an epitaph for the PRI and the system that kept it in power for more than 70 years. As Mexico moves into the uncharted waters of pluralistic democracy, political opposition and an aggressive media, his book is extremely timely–and begs for a sequel.
