What happened to the Mexican left?

It's unthinkable, but many officials of the Mexican government, many academics with expertise in Mexican affairs, and most of the American press are saying that a rightward drift has emerged from Mexico's present economic condition. Don't believe a word of it.

Promoters of the theory credit the neoliberal economic reforms of the Carlos Salinas regime for the shift. Mexico's economy is in great shape, they say. It is--when they're talking about the abstraction that goes by that name--an uninhabited planet measured by Gross National Product, earnings-to-investment ratios, and the rate of capital influx. But at ground level, Mexico is gasping for breath: Real unemployment is too extensive to define, purchasing power has plummeted by 60 per cent during the last two presidential terms, emigration is unabated, and there's no uptick in sight.

Advocates of the onward-and-upward Mexico thesis point to the August 21 presidential election to confirm their claims. According to official statistics, when Mexican voters went to the polls to choose the figure who will lead them for the next six years, slightly more than half--50.4 per cent--opted to stay with the status quo. They gave their support to Ernesto Zedillo, the candidate of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI, which has monopolized the presidency for sixty-five years.

Even more surprisingly, some 27 per cent of the voters supported Diego Fernandez, standard-bearer of the centerright Partido Accion Nacional, or PAN. Only 17 per cent favored Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, nominee of the center-left Partido de la Revolucion Democratica, or PRD.

During the last presidential election in 1988, even by the government's count, Cardenas outpolled the PAN nearly two-to-one. Under Mexico's proportional-representation system, that meant a bevy of congressional seats. In this year's balloting, however, the PANistas and Cardenistas switched places, and the PAN became the leading opposition bloc.

The key to the claims of the usual experts is that victory or loss is beside the point. The election was a sham. But, with few peaceful means of protest left, Mexicans are hesitant to challenge it. The election's results are probably going to be accepted--out of fear of greater uncertainties.

As his campaign opened last fall, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas found that his image was gone. There is little doubt that, by an honest cont, he would have won the 1988 election, but his officer corps did not respond to the theft of his victory in a decisive way. Though Cardenas branded the government of Carlos Salinas as "illegitimate" and personally refused to meet with Salinas or members of his government, that alone was not enough.

Candidates in his coalition who had been allotted congressional posts, for example, took their seats instead of refusing to participate. In the streets, people said that Cardenas "no tiene pantalones"--literally, that he had no pants, but figuratively, and rudely, that he had no balls. Pegging him as just another compromising politician, they didn't flock to his rallies in this year's campaign.

The party Cardenas leads, only six years old, was a recurrent problem, too. It has been faction-ridden from the beginning, having been formed from a merger of Mexico's socialists (including its Communist Party) and elements drawn from the more liberal, economically interventionist wing of the PRI.

In desperation, and to show democratic loyalty upon entering the PRD, most of the country's socialist groupings, which had polled about 15 per cent of the vote in the 1982 presidential election, dissolved themselves and even closed their publishing houses. And the liberal leadership, for its part, never forgot that it would have held on to appointive offices had it not left the PRI. As the son of a 1930s president, Cardenas had revolutionary, PRIista, and even Castroite credentials and was the only figure in Mexico capable of uniting the Left's fractous ranks. But despite him, the factions fought over party posts, nominations, and strategy.

In the early months of the 1994 campaign, public enthusiasm centered not on Cardenas but on the personality of Luis Colosio, a candidate with populist appeal. No sooner had the candidates gone to the hustings, though, than both were eclipsed by the non-nominee Subcomandante Marcos, leader of the Chiapas uprising of January 1. Not everybody liked El Sub, but he certainly monopolized public attention for a while. There was a fad so widespread that even a former president's sister wrote a poem praising his deeds.

Then he began negotiating with the government, and the public's lust waned. Marcos was just an agent of Ross Perot, some said--both opposed the NAFTA treaty, didn't they? Or, people began to say, he was an agent of the PRI, or a cat's paw for Cardenas, or a stand-in for Castro. El Sub wasn't a real revolutionary--or he wouldn't be trying to wheedle the government like a dog begging a bone.

In March, Colosio was assassinated. A mysterious, Oswald-like figure named Mario Aburto was blamed, and no one yet knows if he acted alone. But the PRI pictured Colosio as a martyr to the democratic ideal. When summer came, the kidnapping of Mexico's leading plutocrat, Telmex investor Carlos Slim, added to the unsettling picture. The police said they didn't have a clue, and industrialists and bankers bought armored limousines. Two months later, Slim's family paid a ransom.

Uneasily, Mexicans began awaiting the next untoward event. Newspapers, it seemed, were becoming mere translations of Ripley's Believe It or Not.

The PRI, sensing the people's anxiety, preached the virtues of continuity, even of antiquity. A television serial that styled Nineteenth Century dictator Porfirio Diaz as a defamed hero captured the middleclass heart. Even the PRD felt a chill. Centrists, uneasy that Cardenas was being painted with the brush of socialist revolution--he had made overtures to the rebels, though they rejected all electoralism--began secretly wishing the PRI would replace Colosio with Manuel Camacho, a cabinet officer who was winning acclaim by gently negotiating for peace in Chiapas.

In this shifting milieu, PRIista President Salinas tapped not Camacho but Ernesto Zedillo, the dour technocrat, to lead the party. It was as if Salinas had named Salinas, so close was Zedillo to being his clone.

When Zedillo was chosen, the PRD's centrists reluctantly came home to Cardenas. But then their leader lost his shirt in the nation's first televised presidential debate--which was won, everyone says, by dark horse Fernandez of the PAN. For a few weeks, the PRD centrists even hoped that Fernandez would win, the rationale being that "anything is better than the PRI." But Fernandez, Perot-like, inexplicably quit campaigning, and the word on the street was the PRI had purchased his retirement.

The only thing that was clear was this: The PRI stood for things as they had been before Subcomandante Marcos raised his head.

Leftists in the PRD weren't displeased with this scenario. If Cardenas did not win the upcoming election, they predicted in such magazines as Y Que, certainly the people would immediately rise in arms. In early August, hundreds of them met with Marcos in Chiapas to forge a compromise. They joined him in forming the National Democratic Convention, a loose national movement whose essential premise was CLEAN ELECTIONS--OR REVOLT! By uniting, both Marcos and the PRD's left wing bought time--and also delivered a threat.

In preparation for the election, hundreds of thousands of unaffiliated, mostly middle-class Mexicans mobilized to promote a big turnout. They studied electoral law, collected voting lists, picked out irregularities, and politely complained to officials and the press that everything was not as it should be. On August 21, they deployed to observe the process and guard its results. Their showing of civic concern, even of civic pride, was unprecedented in Mexico. The awakened middle class wanted an election that would shelve doubt and unrest. Its conduct left them peeved.

When the polling ended in the astounding PRI win, pundit Enrique Maza expressed the country's mood: "With Chiapas and without Chiapas," he wrote, "with Marcos and without Marcos...with Colosio and without Colosio, with kidnapping and without kidnapping...with the extension of poverty and without the extension of poverty...with unemployment and without unemployment, with debate and without debate, with significant abstentionism and showers of voters, with fraud and without fraud, no matter what, there stands the PRI with its clean sweep. ...It is certain that there were irregularities in the electoral process and there always are the same shadows and the same doubts and the same tricks in our elections, but the PRI makes a clean sweep, with or without them."

Was this year's election clean? The Mexican government claims it was so clean that only one person was arrested for an electoral crime--a drunk who allegedly ripped his ballots to shreds. And most foreign observers, allowed a peek into the Mexican process for the first time, report the voting was on the up and up.

Seasoned eyes, however, saw endless, if seemingly minor, irregularities, and even a few old-style, ham-fisted, major crimes. In Monterrey and the nearby village of Villa de Garcia, I saw PRIista operatives turning out their minions; giving supporters a ride to the polls, and even reminding them to vote, is illegal under Mexican law.

I heard talk of people paying others to vote, and I saw men lining up outside a polling station asking their handlers, "What is my name?"--obviously voting with credentials that weren't their own. In the Monterrey mid-term elections of 1991, I did not notice carruseles, or teams of traveling voters, but they were on the field in this contest, as they had been in 1988 and 1985. A PRD leader in Villa de Garcia showed me evidence that the PRI was buying votes--pairs of shoes were being handed out. He also showed me the registration cards of voters whose names had vanished from the rolls. All across the country, people saw signs like these.

The credentialed foreign observers who declared the election free of malfeasance perhaps didn't know how to eavesdrop, or weren't adept at the language, or, most likely, merely rushed into the polls and rushed out, not taking the time to hang around.

You've got to hang around.

Traveling voting teams, for example, stay outside of the voting stations when their handlers see "distinguished vistors" inside. Mexico's own nongovernmental watchdogs, the members of the Alianza Civica and Observacion 94, issued a statement saying, "The election of Sunday the twenty-first was not clean and is in doubt." Being familiar with their society, their government, and the usual way of things, they weren't fooled into endorsing a fraud.

Jose Barberan, an expert in "electoral alchemy" who heads the PRD's sleuthing office, says, "This fraud, which is immense, was prepared with slivers of a few percentage points [each] applied with a different technique, in a different manner, in each region. In some states, the taco [or stuffed ballot box] dominated, in others the shaving of voting lists, in others, the theft of voting boxes or the carrusel. A bigger fraud can be made more invisible... mixing these techniques."

By the PRD's estimates, election-day fraud tainted ten million of the thirty-four million ballots cast. The government credits Cuauhtemoc Cardenas with six million votes, Zedillo with seventeen million. If the tallies were made right, Cardenas would probably emerge the winner, though not by a landslide. The salient fact, however, is that the tallies are not going to be made right. Given that certainty, those in the middle of the spectrum are looking for a way to explain the Cardenas loss in political terms.

They find their thesis in a perceived loss of support for Cardenas among the middle class, in whose ranks he was popular in 1988.

Right-wing commentators attribute this decline to the supposed popularity of President Salinas, NAFTA, and neoliberal economic reform. But everybody in Mexico knows that's bunkum.

"What has happened in Chiapas inspired a vote of fear in the middle class," historian Abram Nuncio observes. In American terms, the "silent majority" spoke up--even if, in Mexico, some "voters" in this majority were so silent that no one heard them leave the house for the polling place.

Nevertheless, those who really did vote cannot be discounted.

The Mexican middle class, during its spurt of civicism, tried to ensure the election's credibility and was foiled. In voting for order before change, it not only precluded credibility but also closed the path of both order and change.

But the bogus conclusion that the "vote of fear" was the decisive factor has already led to a tendency, now gaining steam in the PRD's centrist camp, to blame the party's poor showing on its own left wing. This logic is not new--north of the border, anyway. It goes like this: "If it wasn't for you communists, we would have won. You scared everybody away." It's the rationale of American Federation of Labor executive councils, circa 1952.

If, as seems likely, the PRD falls apart in the coming months, we can expect "patriotic progressives" to emerge from its ranks heading a new, painstakingly anti-Marcos political group. "Democracy" will take on a new Mexican meaning: antiguerrilla, instead of anti-PRI.

Three traditions govern the state of the vanquished in modern Mexico. The oldest is the path of revolution: In 1910, when Porfirio Diaz claimed a victory that only the credulous could accept, losing candidate Francisco Madero called for revolt, the people responded, and Diaz hustled off to France.

After the Revolution, losers learned to negotiate--in advance of election day. The PRI's six "satellite parties" are masters of this game, which today's PAN has apparently learned to play as well. Its central rule is that before the ballots are cast, you arrange the terms for your concession speech: a bureaucratic appointment, a commercial concession, a seat in the congress. (In the long-term view, pre-settlement is an ancient Mexican custom. During the Flower Wars of the pre-Columbian era, subject emperors haggled, in advance, over the number of troops the Aztec hegemony would capture in annual battlefield rites.)

The newest tradition, established over the past decade by PAN, is post-electoral bargaining. It consists of calling protesters into the streets and keeping them there until the PRI improves its pre-election tender offer. During the Salinas presidency, even gubernatorial offices changed hands in this way.

Some of the PRD's centrist elements have been involved in post-electoral negotiation since August 22. It's a no-fun task; this year, after all, no matter what deals are struck the party's share of congressional and legislative seats will decline.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas will have nothing to do with these talks. Never has, never will, he says. Instead, he has gone on tour, urging the populace to prevent Zedillo from taking office on December 1. Perhaps it's just a gambit to strengthen his party's post-electoral clout. What he's calling for isn't perfectly clear, though, and Cardenas isn't laying anybody's anxieties--or hopes--to rest.

"We have had to take into account that it's not possible, by means of the vote, to overcome electoral fraud," he has declared. He has also said that Mexico will never have a clean election so long as the PRI is in power. Is he calling for civil disobedience, or for revolution if that fails? It's anybody's guess.

"There can be a thousand scenarios; I would not make predictions there," Cardenas says. "If we simply look at the Mexican Revolution, we can remember that they were celebrating ... there were fiestas, with ambassadors and grand inaugurations, and two months later goodbyes were being said to Porfirio Diaz. That is to say, the great changes of regime fo not always come in a gradual manner; sometimes they take place from one day to another."

Either the people will respond to the Cardenas call or, more likely, the PRD will simply implode. Then Mexico will return to the dark political atmosphere that prevailed before 1988, when Cardenas revived the idea that democracy is possible despite the PRI.

During the 1960s and 1970s, hundreds who didn't think so went to their graves: peasant rebel Ruben Jaramillo, the Tlatelolco and Corpus Christi demonstrators, guerrillas Lucio Cabanas, Genaro Vasquez, Guero Medrano, the young men and women of the Twenty-third of September League, Mexico's Red Brigade.

More than anyone else, it was the survivors of those movements and leaders who did the humble work of the 1988 Cardenas campaign and, in many cases, became the leaders of his 1994 crusade. For them, the PRD has been a way to pursue political goals without risking their lives. Aging and disillusioned, they're unlikely to return to arms, but their children--the Marcos generation--have only begun to fight. On August 21, they were dismayed by the prospects for peaceful change.

Though revolution cannot succeed in today's Mexico, as El Sub and his Zapaista Liberation Army have shown, that doesn't mean somebody won't try. Already a second armed group and a second guerrilla leader, "Comandante Julio," have shown themselves in Mexico's southeast. The PRI, in engineering its larger-than-life victory in August, has invited the return of a bloodily inconclusive past.