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Fox has been outfoxed, and Mexican democracy is in peril
Dodge City Globe ^ | 08/12/04 | Denise Dresser

Posted on 12/14/2004 9:42:03 PM PST by Regulator

Many Mexicans who voted for Vicente Fox are bewildered. Four years into his term as president, the man who promised to kick the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, out of power forever now seems to have been kidding. The PRI is coming back, winning state election after state election, and Mexico's first president elected in a free and fair race doesn't appear to be doing anything about it. But other Mexicans should, because if the former ruling party returns to office in the next presidential election, in 2006, the country's democracy will have been short-lived. If the PRI returns, it will come back to stay.

Politics can't tolerate vacuums, and the PRI is filling the one created by Fox's failures. Day after day, Mexican newspapers portray a paralyzed country in which very little has changed and even less gets done. Mexicans don't talk about what Fox has accomplished but about what could have been. Mexico seems to be speaking the vocabulary of disenchantment. The words "failure," "disillusion," "lack of leadership" are a daily part of the national conversation. President Fox is less than a lame duck. He's a dead duck.

Four years ago millions of Mexicans voted for change. They heard Fox's promises of better government, less corruption and more rule of law - and believed them. They elected a candidate who would kill the dinosaurs and tame the dragons who had ruled Mexico for 71 consecutive years. But he couldn't or didn't want to.

Instead of confronting the people who had despoiled Mexico, he curled up next to them. Instead of weakening the PRI when he could, he tried to collaborate with it in Congress and refused to take on vested interests in unions that the dominant party had created.

The results of accommodation are there for all to see: an emboldened PRI and a weakened government, a cornered president and two more years of politics as a blood sport. By attempting to co-govern with the PRI, Fox has breathed new life into it. Unwittingly, the president has become the PRI's secret weapon.

While Fox offers carrots instead of sticks, the PRI has been organizing itself at the state and local levels, retaking ground on the periphery as a way of regaining control of the center.

And as the recent gubernatorial races in the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz underscore, the party will resort to fear and loathing on the campaign trail to win. The PRI is using old tricks - intimidation, vote buying, patronage. And weak electoral institutions combined with low turnout mean those tricks still work.

And work they did for the new mayor of Tijuana, Jorge Hank Rhon, elected despite rumors of drug trafficking, a 1995 arrest for smuggling of endangered species and the fact that two of his bodyguards are in jail in the assassination of a prominent journalist. Hank's victory sent a clear message: In order to win, the PRI doesn't have to modernize itself, it doesn't have to change. It can nominate political dinosaurs and still win in Mexico's new, fragile democracy.

Today, the PRI's party chairman and presidential hopeful, Roberto Madrazo, is positioning himself as the candidate of voters who are disappointed with democracy; of those who believe that power-sharing has been a road to nowhere; of those who prefer the efficient corruption of the PRI to the chronic ineptitude of Fox's National Action Party. Madrazo is gambling on those who miss the old system of clear rules and predicable complicities. And he has found a constituency among Mexicans who prefer a perfect dictatorship that can get things done to a paralyzed democracy.

But Madrazo's way is not only the old way. It's the worst way. The PRI that he has reassembled is not the modernizing, technocratic party that pushed forward Mexico's much-needed economic restructuring in the 1990s. Madrazo's PRI is a group of "caudillos" who view the country as their personal fiefdom and intend to govern it as such. Madrazo's PRI is a party run by corrupt Mafias that are itching to act freely, and will dismantle the country's few democratic institutions to do so.

Ultimately, what's at stake for Mexico with the PRI's return is the viability, the longevity, the survival of Mexican democracy beyond 2006. Because if the PRI comes back, Mexico will slide back from an imperfect democracy to the government it lived with for seven decades. Only worse.

Dresser, a professor of political science at the Autonomous Technological Institute of Mexico, is director of the North American Future project at the Pacific Council on International Policy.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Foreign Affairs; Mexico; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: aliens; fox; ftaa; illegalimmigration; immigrantlist; immigration; mexico; pan; pri; vicentefox
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This article, by a Berkeley Poli Sci professor teaching in Mexico, shows the reality. Fox could not, even if he wanted to, change Mexico's hideous culture of corruption in one Sexenio. He was and is too much a part of it himself: even if he knew it was wrong, he was so deep in it, that he could not see a way out, and eventually reverted to the Caudillo mentality himself.

When the Madrazos PRI monsters come to power, there will be no excuse for the people in this country to play games with them, in the way that they have played patty cake with Fox. In one year, this will be evident, as no Mexican president does anything of note in his last year. Except steal every thing in sight.

Fox is finished, and what comes next, as Dresser says, will be worse. But that could be the catalyst for the end of open illegal immigration into our country, and the beginning of the end for appeasers here, as well as an aggressive stance towards the Mexican criminal government.

And possibly large scale violence in Mexico.

1 posted on 12/14/2004 9:42:03 PM PST by Regulator
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To: FITZ; gubamyster; Joe Hadenuf; janetgreen; WRhine; Budweiser

El Ping.


2 posted on 12/14/2004 9:44:23 PM PST by Regulator
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To: Regulator
La mordida is the Mexican way of making things run. You want to make sure the government gets up to speed, grease palms all around. You'll be amazed at how fast Mexican civil servants will then respond to your requests.
3 posted on 12/14/2004 9:45:21 PM PST by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: Regulator
"The PRI is coming back, winning state election after state election . . . "

Seems the Mexicans are voting themselves out of having a democracy.

4 posted on 12/14/2004 9:47:23 PM PST by BenLurkin (Big government is still a big problem.)
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To: BenLurkin

The PRI's "soft dictatorship" was authoritarian and corrupt but it got things done.


5 posted on 12/14/2004 9:48:20 PM PST by goldstategop (In Memory Of A Dearly Beloved Friend Who Lives On In My Heart Forever)
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To: Regulator
Interesting and sobering article. Although if the large-scale violence you fear really does start to happen in Mexico, the illegal situation could get worse, what with millions of refugees flooding here for reasons of personal safety rather than economic advantage.

I remember that during the El Salvador civil war, something like one-tenth of the nation's entire population fled the country, most settling in Southern California.

6 posted on 12/14/2004 9:49:49 PM PST by TFFKAMM
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To: Regulator
Might be time for the U.S. to dust off War Plan Green should Mexico fall into chaos.
7 posted on 12/14/2004 9:51:01 PM PST by COEXERJ145
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To: Regulator
But that could be the catalyst for the end of open illegal immigration into our country, and the beginning of the end for appeasers here,

It would be ironic if in getting rid of Fox we also got rid of the illegal immigration problem. It sounds too good to be true.

8 posted on 12/14/2004 9:52:00 PM PST by Noachian (A Democrat, by definition, is a Socialist.)
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To: Regulator

Hmmmmmmmmm.....


9 posted on 12/14/2004 9:52:21 PM PST by cyborg (http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/flamelily.html)
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To: COEXERJ145

What's that?


10 posted on 12/14/2004 9:52:39 PM PST by cyborg (http://www.zimbabwesituation.com/flamelily.html)
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To: BenLurkin
Maybe they didn't like Fox's plan of them all having to move out of their own country.

Who would vote for a political party whose leader was that hell bent on getting rid of them? Bush and Republicans wouldn't likely win an election if Americans were being locked into unventilated boxcars and semi-trailers and being shipped out.

11 posted on 12/14/2004 9:53:09 PM PST by FITZ
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To: Regulator
But that could be the catalyst for the end of open illegal immigration into our country, and the beginning of the end for appeasers here, as well as an aggressive stance towards the Mexican criminal government.

I hope that means that America will finally close off its Mexican border before the other half of Mexico gets here.

12 posted on 12/14/2004 9:54:57 PM PST by janetgreen (CLOSE THE MEXICAN BORDER)
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To: COEXERJ145

Mexico becomes a vassal state?


13 posted on 12/14/2004 9:55:12 PM PST by John Will
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To: TFFKAMM
Although if the large-scale violence you fear really does start to happen in Mexico

That happens and it will be the Mexican government -- their army shutting down the border. For one --- the rebels or revolutionaries will be funding their revolution from the USA and shipping in guns and weapons. The violence of course involve this side of the border --- but until the elites get packed up and out of there --- on over to Europe --- that government will do what it can to stop the flow of weapons from the USA. If they have a Communist take-over then it will be less immigration --- just like Castro even sees the need in keeping some people to have workers in his economy.

Fox blew it.

14 posted on 12/14/2004 9:57:34 PM PST by FITZ
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To: TFFKAMM
And one-tenth of all Mexicans emigrate to America every three years by committing a technical violation of those pesky but wholly unenforced immigration laws.

The population of illegal aliens that have come to America this year alone is equivalent to that of Houston or Oklahoma.
15 posted on 12/14/2004 9:58:17 PM PST by dufekin (Four more years! Liberals, learn: whiners are losers every time.)
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To: Regulator

Fox is actually helping the PRI party because he's been attacking the PRD party candidate. Even though PRD lined up with PAN to get Fox in --- Fox has ruined his own party's chances but is doing all he can to destroy PRD.


16 posted on 12/14/2004 10:00:24 PM PST by FITZ
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To: Regulator

Just shut down the drug traffic into the US from Mexico and the country and the politicians would go belly up.


17 posted on 12/14/2004 10:01:20 PM PST by John Lenin
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To: dufekin; FITZ
Dufe: True, but I just see it getting worse in a war/revolution scenario. Add to that the status they'd have as refugees rather than under-the-table guest-workers, and you'd have a nightmare trying to control the inflow of people.

Fitz: Didn't think about the arms/materiel angle. Probably they'd bypass the border altogether and land the stuff on the coast via clandestine shipping.

18 posted on 12/14/2004 10:14:08 PM PST by TFFKAMM
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To: cyborg
From the early 20th century (and a few date before 1900) until a few years after WWII, the Army & Navy created a ton of war plans to allow the U.S. to fight every possible contingency. Some were absurd and some were very real possibilities. Each country and/or region was shaded a different color. While the colors changed from time to time, most stayed the same.

War Plan Orange- War with Japan

War Plan Red-War with Great Britain (Each part of the British Empire was a different shade of Red such as Canada was Crimson, India was Ruby, etc. Last rehearsed in 1940 and was the primary war plan practiced until the Rainbow plans came into effect in the late 1930's.)

War Plan Red-Orange- War against the Japanese/British Alliance

War Plan Black- War with Germany (Not seriously considered after WWI. Actually involved a Germany invasion of the South America, the Caribbean, and maybe the U.S.)

War Plan Green-War with Mexico or Mexican Domestic Intervention (Officially canceled in 1946)

War Plan Yellow-China Intervention

Every country in South America had a color war plan assigned to it, Iceland was Lavender I think, Russia was Pink and later Purple, Italy was Silver, France was Gold, Cuba was Tan I think, etc. There was also "War Plan White" which was the U.S. Domestic Contingency.

19 posted on 12/14/2004 10:17:14 PM PST by COEXERJ145
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To: Regulator; Travis McGee

Fox is holding out for FTAA...and an American amnesty to hand his pipple!


20 posted on 12/14/2004 10:18:37 PM PST by ApesForEvolution (You will NEVER convince me that Muhammadanism isn't a death cult that must end. Save your time...)
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