Mexico

The hemispheric role of the US was also deeply resented in Mexico. Yet no country was more dependent on the US economically. Within the Organisation of American States, Marxist Cuba and Nicaragua had in Mexico their only supporter. Mexico had made its own revolution already in 1911. The country had good reason to bear animosity toward her US neighbour having lost half her territory to her in 1848. Mexico then suffered a French occupation (1863-7) and only gained some stability in 1876 when General Porfirio Diaz seized power and ruled the country for thirty-five years until 1911. There was spectacular economic progress during these years; a wealthy small Creole upper class modelled their life-style on Europe. The less fortunate masses of landless native American peasants worked on the Haciendas of large landowners. Diaz could rely for support on the Church and the bayonet. Sweat-shops and textile mills employed labourers at low wages.

A split among the ruling oligarchy ushered in the Revolution. Diaz was overthrown in 1911, and a liberal minded president was elected. But the fall of Diaz started renewed conflict and civil war. The hero of the Revolution was Emiliano Zapata, who led a peasant army on his white charger and became the romantic martyr. Civil war raged against the new dictator General Victoriano Huerta in the presidential palace, a flamboyant former cattle rustler, Pancho Villa led a small but well-trained force of mercenaries. Then in 1914 Huerta faced a third foe. Woodrow Wilson sent in the marines and Huerta fled. The outcome of the Mexican Revolution remained in doubt until 1923. By then both Villa and Zapata had been killed by government forces.

Despite the socialist rhetoric of the Mexican constitution, reform would be instituted from above - peasants and workers were not to become the arbiters of power. There were to be no revolutionary social upheavals. The secularisation of the state and the expropriation of Church wealth were important outcomes of the revolution. An alliance between the military, the wealthy and the middle class consolidated the powers of the presidents, and their followers were rewarded by the spoils of office. But the difference between Mexico and other Latin American countries is that an effective party organisation, renamed several times and since 1945 called the Parti do Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), controls the country and embraces workers and peasants as well as the rising middle-income groups. Lazaro Cardenas, president from 1934 to 1940, developed a corporate state in which each section of the population, workers, peasants, the military, the middle class, was placed under the party umbrella as groups rather than as individuals. Through large-scale land distribution Cardenas carried forward one of the principal aims of the revolution, breaking up the haciendas and granting the land as private plots or joint peasant farms; another aim was to take control of Mexico’s major resources, the most important of which was oil. Cardenas nationalised the largely US-owned oil companies. Dissatisfied with the compensation received, but even more disturbed that other countries might follow Mexico’s example, the international oil companies boycotted her oil and inhibited development of the state oil company until uncertainties in the Middle East after the Second World War made Mexican oil too valuable a Western resource not to be utilised.

Westerners regarded Mexico as a truly revolutionary country for a number of reasons: the attack on the Church, the official government espousal of atheism, nationalisation, reforms which hurt the wealthy landowners, the propagation of the myth of a peasants’ and workers’ revolution and admiration for Marx and Lenin, the assertion of a Mexican identity and pride in her native American roots, immortalised by the political-historical murals of Mexico’s most famous artist, Diego Rivera, and the granting of asylum to Leon Trotsky. In fact Mexico conformed far more closely to Latin American patterns than to the Soviet model. In any case the authoritarian state was not exclusive to the Soviet Union but was common among the fascist nations of Europe in the 1930s. Private property in the early 1990s remained the source of great wealth in Mexico for a minority, while poverty was the lot of the peasants and the urban masses, the high birth rate undermining efforts to raise living standards. Mexico too had seen extensive migration from country to city. In ten years, from 1970 to 1980, Mexico City increased its population by 7 million to 15 million, with a huge marginalised population living in shanty slums. The population of the country as a whole grew from 25.8 million in 1950 to 34.9 million in 1960, to 84.6 million in 1989 (by which year the gross per-capita income was US $2,010).

The Mexican state is a conglomeration of elements of socialism, state planning and a constitutional electoral process. Mexico enjoys a surfeit of elections for mayors, governors, assemblies and the president; some opposition parties are tolerated and compete. Presidential elections have occurred every six years, and the presidency has always changed hands peacefully, so the spoils are regularly redistributed. But only one party, the PRI, dominates and has decided the outcome of national and presidential elections. Miguel de la Madrid Hurtado, candidate of the PRI, was elected president in 1982 with a vote of over 74 per cent.

Distribution of land to the campesinos, the peasant owners of smallholdings, and revolutionary rhetoric kept the majority of peasants quiet as the 1990s began, engaged in trying to make a subsistence living. The seasonal and illegal exodus across the 2000-mile border into the United States provided a safety valve for tens of thousands of the poor. Even so, in urban areas where most Mexicans live, there was massive unemployment. The well-to-do were surrounded by mass poverty. The middle classes enjoyed the high standard of living which the growth and diversification of the Mexican economy had made possible, while the spoils of office were used to ensure a faithful following for the incumbent president and the dominant PRI party. There was more freedom in Mexico than in many Latin American states, but it was carefully controlled. Most sections of the population tended to accept their lack of political influence. In any case the state had a special security police, which, according to Amnesty reports, in the early 1990s continued to employ torture and murder against anyone considered to disturb Mexico’s political order. In Mexico too, hundreds ‘disappeared’, but repression was not on the same vast scale as Argentina or Chile experienced. Mexican stability rested for four decades on a revolutionary myth and authoritarian conservative control.

Below the surface, the rapid economic changes caused dissatisfaction with the authoritarian style of government to grow. During the Olympic Games in 1968, widespread student protest led to the killings of hundreds in Mexico City and attracted worldwide attention. In the early 1970s guerrilla bands appeared but were suppressed by the security services. With the enormous increases in oil prices engineered by OPEC (of which Mexico was not a member) and new oil discoveries, export earnings after 1975 increased ten times to US$20 billion. But lavish expenditure and ambitious development resulted in high inflation. The end of the oil boom in the 1980s and worldwide economic stagnation burst the Mexican bubble. Heavy foreign borrowing and austerity programmes drastically reduced standards of living, while the birth rate, if it continued unabated, would double the population every twenty years; and half the population was under sixteen years of age. Mexico was saddled with one of the largest foreign debts in the world, whose payment had to be periodically rescheduled; the bankers demanded austerity and Mexico found itself caught between trying to satisfy international financiers by making economies, while trying to prevent internal unrest as a result of policies imposed externally. The inability of the regime to cope effectively with the catastrophic earthquake that hit Mexico City in September 1985 added to a loss of credibility, which was compounded by Mexico’s economic crises. The stability maintained by the political system began to look increasingly fragile. The right-wing opposition Partido de Accion Nacional (PAN) claimed massive electoral fraud, but the ruling PRI made few concessions. Despite misgivings about the undemocratic nature of Mexican politics, Washington saw a greater danger in further destabilising Mexico and provided financial support. In the 1988 presidential elections the PRI candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, claimed to have won.

There was fraud on a colossal scale, but the PRI monopoly of power had been broken in the Mexican Congress. Nevertheless, the PRI President remained firmly in power and an economic austerity programme was instituted. But for the first time in many decades there were indications of future political changes.

In 1961, Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress was to have been the starting point for the transformation of Latin America. The cycle of deprivation, economic and social injustice was to have been broken and Latin American societies were to have started on the road to political democratic reform. Over thirty years later the problems of the continent were still daunting. Population growth outstripped development. The danger of Marxist revolution had been contained, but terrorism and repression continued. The root causes of instability had not been removed. The immigration from the countryside had swollen the shanty towns that surrounded the fashionable streets of the wealthy. Everywhere there were thousands of children begging, stealing or offering themselves for prostitution. Mexico City served as but one example of their plight. The pependores, or rubbish pickers (10,000 of them), made the City’s three huge rubbish dumps their home. Even here they were exploited by ‘bosses’ who made their money out of the refuse that could be recycled.

By turning to a market economy, privatising and liberalising trade with the expected coming into operation of a free-trade region comprising herself, the United States and Canada, Mexico hoped in the 1990s to create her own economic miracle. Many companies were privatised and in 1990/1 a good growth rate was achieved, while inflation, which in 1987 ran at 160 per cent, was slashed in 1992 to 12 per cent. Foreign debts were reduced and foreign investment began to return. Salinas toured the country and won support among the peasantry. He used proceeds from the sale of state-owned companies to build schools, to link rural communities with the electricity network and to ensure that clean drinking water was available. More than 1200 health clinics were opened in 1991 to serve the people. Huge problems remained. Carlos Salinas de Gortari declared that his aim during his six-year term of office as president from 1988 to 1994 was to take Mexico from Third World to First World status. During the first years of his presidency he made a dynamic start.

There were at last some hopeful indications of change in Latin America in the 1990s. A number of countries were determinedly trying to turn the economic corner and make a start on raising the standard of living of the most deprived.

The enormous level of Latin American debt, which had risen from $68 billion in 1975 to $410 billion in 1987, threatened to cripple efforts towards further investment and development. But, unable to recover all of it, the West agreed to write a portion of it off. Western institutions such as the International Monetary Fund insisted on the medicine of austerity and better economic management, which Mexico had to accept in order to attract new funds. Among left-wing guerrilla movements there was a collapse of morale following the demise of the Soviet Union. All but Marxist fanatics were ready to end the fighting and to exchange the rifle for the ballot box. Civilian-elected governments and multi-party parliaments became the norm. It was not democracy, but it was progress, a move away from tyrannical and authoritarian regimes.

Even so, there was no guarantee that democratic representative institutions could long survive economic mismanagement, as the example of Peru showed in 1992. Democracy cannot be divorced from social and economic progress. It can not take firm root unless the needs of the poor are also met. When elected officials accept that their power derives from the people and not just from the nation’s elite, true democracy can be established.

Widespread corruption still plagued Latin America in the last decade of the twentieth century. Birth rates still tended to be too high, though they were dropping in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Mexico. High birth rates meant that even countries on the path of economic reform would be faced with increasing poverty. The distribution of wealth, or rather lack of it, to the poor majority scarcely diminished the gap between rich and the poor. The statistics for income per head of population obscure this because they are averages: the poor were much worse off than the average. Simply absorbing the young and providing some employment for them when nearly half the population was aged under twenty was a formidable problem. Urbanisation and the growth of mega-million cities magnified the problem. The power base of the energetic political leaders of Latin America was fragile and their austerity policies to cure inflation were deeply unpopular. The leaders themselves were all too often tempted by the fruits of office.