By the time Ruiz Cortines took office, the task of the president had become maintaining the political system, not innovating. As with other incoming presidents, Ruiz Cortines was presented to the Mexican people as the solution to his predecessor’s excesses. The fact that the new president belonged to the same party as the incumbent and was chosen by him was not stressed. Rather, he was assumed to be capable of remedying the problems his predecessor was unable to solve or had in fact created.32
To a large extent, Ruiz Cortines’s policies were a response to the increasing unpopularity of the ruling elite. His most dramatic move was a vigorous attack on corruption. The New York Times noted that Ruiz Cortines’s biggest asset was that he could be believed when he said, “I was poor as a boy and I still am; I have always lived on my salary.” In an effort to limit illicit gain, legislation passed during Ruiz Cortines’s term required government officials to register their assets upon taking office and again when leaving office. Despite this law and the dismissal of corrupt police officials, by 1954 widespread reports of official corruption were once again being heard. After the Ruiz Cortines administration, anti-corruption declarations became standard fare for newly inaugurated presidents, who often left the presidency as millionaires, despite their having spent their entire adult life in government service.33
Ruiz Cortines had more success achieving his second goal, limiting government spending. He inherited several of Aleman’s spectacular semi-finished projects, such as a new campus for the National University and the Papaloapan River Basin Project, which resembled the U. S. Tennessee
Valley Authority. He limited new projects until old ones could be finished, thus keeping the budget within reasonable limits.
After 1955, there was a shift in public policy. Along with economic development and retaining power, a major goal of PRI administrations was stability and social peace. In the face of rising criticism and social unrest, social spending rose from 13.3 percent of the federal budget under Aleman to 14.4 percent under Ruiz Cortines. During Ruiz Cortines’s term, the government expanded the social security program and constructed rural clinics and hospitals. To combat inflation, price controls were placed on basic necessities. After 1955, the government ensured that the buying power of organized labor would increase. This met little opposition, since the Mexican economy was growing rapidly at the time.34
On November 4, 1957, the Secretary General of the National Peasant Confederation (CNC) announced that Labor Secretary Adolfo Lopez Mateos would be the PRI presidential candidate, since “the absolute majority of ejido committees, agrarian executive committees, regional committees, leagues of agrarian committees, and other agricultural groups have chosen him.” No one was impolitic enough to inquire just when representatives of these groups had made such a momentous decision.35
Presumably Lopez Mateos’s negotiating skills led to his selection. While serving in Ruiz Cortines’s cabinet, Lopez Mateos faced the threat of 5,000 strikes by workers seeking wage increases to offset their inflation-induced loss of buying power. He negotiated settlements limiting wage increases to 16 percent, well below what workers were asking, thus avoiding a surge of inflation and an economically damaging wave of strikes.36
On November 15 and 16, 1957, there was a PRI convention to ratify the president’s choice and make Lopez Mateos the official PRI candidate. In eighteen minutes, the nearly 5,000 delegates meeting in the Cine Colonial in Mexico City voted unanimously for Lopez Mateos. The result was such a foregone conclusion that banners extolling Lopez Mateos had been hung even before the meeting began.37
Then, as happened every six years, a massive government-financed public relations campaign began to sell the candidate to the public. As an American observer noted, “Half the stone walls are painted with giant signs of public support; all the mass media are alive with eulogies.” Before television came to dominate the political scene, so many walls were painted to promote PRI candidates that it was said that U. S. paint manufacturer Sherwin Williams was the main beneficiary of Mexican elections.38
The 1958 election proceeded smoothly. Henriquez Guzman’s potentially divisive Federation of Parties of the People had been ruled off the ballot. In 1954, to ensure that no challenger to the president’s designated successor would emerge, new legislation increased the number of members required to form a political party to 75,000, which had to include at least 2,500 members per state in two-thirds of the states.39
Between 1958 and 1994, there was relatively little change in PRI candidate selection. Presidential aspirants were expected to give the public appearance of meekly awaiting the president’s designation of his successor. The president would decide who would be the PRI candidate, a choice known as the dedazo (finger pointing). A trusted functionary then revealed the choice—an announcement known as the destape (the unveiling). Once this occurred, the PRI establishment would jump on the bandwagon. Even bitter rivals of the nominee, the destapado (the unveiled), were expected to swallow their pride and affirm that the president’s choice was the best man for the job. To do otherwise would be to fall out of favor and lose the chance for a desirable position during the next presidential term.
The PRI continued to maintain that the choice of its candidates at all levels reflected the popular will. Braulio Maldonado, who served as governor of the newly created state of Baja California, was one of the first to break the taboo and openly declare that in fact the president, not the citizenry, chose PRI candidates. He stated: “I was designated by the President of the Republic, who at that time was my distinguished friend, don Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. In our country, all the officials, high and low, have been designated that way since 1928.”40
Mexicans, rather than selecting the PRI’s next candidate, engaged in a spirited game of guessing who would be the president’s choice. They looked to signs, observing who was seen talking to whom, much as Kremlin watchers of the Cold War era attempted to divine Soviet policy.
World History
