While the gutsy, imaginative and energetic Mexican online-born “student revolt” movement, “#Yo Soy 132” (“I am number 132”), is exciting the attention of political junkies — and journalists — the world over, veteran Mexican hands, while cheered, are somber about the results.
It seems clear that the much-loathed Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) will win the presidency with its hugely financed campaign. Many voters will be merely voting July 1 for change, any change at all.
“The desperation ballot,” as one Mexican political analyst calls it.
And not a few of these same voters had been delirious with joy in 2000 with the toppling of the PRI’s 71-year-long corrupt, predatory and brutal rule by Vicente Fox of the pro-Church, pro-business National Action Party. It was a short-lived fiesta, lasting only until the middle of Fox’s term. His co-religionist successor, Felipe Calderon, has failed disastrously with his recklessly-declared war on drugs. The error: Calderon simply had no idea what he was doing. And Mexico’s law enforcement corps — twinned with a notoriously corrupt justice system — lacked the most basic characteristics, and certainly the training, to oppose better financed, more experienced, more canny drug cartels. It seemed to some as though Calderon had just arrived in Mexico with an excellent sense of Spanish and a fine knowledge of Mexican history, but no idea of how the Mexican political culture worked — or didn’t work. Naiveté is not a useful tool in waging a war of any kind.
The well thought-out entry of the students — not backing any of the three major candidates — pleasantly surprised experienced onlookers. The protesting students are not enthusiastic about any of the three candidates, because Peña Nieto and Josefina Vazquez Mota appear hollow, and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador is totally shorn of his former heartening political touch that embraced those closed out of Mexico’s political culture. In this, they agree with the family Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity, lead by Javier Sicilia, a poet, who was turned into a political activist by the murder of his son. Another killing that has not been solved.
But even bunching the members and supporters of the “#YoSoy132” and Sicilia’s movement together does not offer much of an obstacle to Peña Nieto. The PRI has invested too much money and credibility in this former governor of the state of Mexico. Yet, if this was the kind of democracy that one correspondent described for readers of the Washington Post this week — “Mexico is a fully functioning democracy, with an elected president who is leaving the end of his single, constitutionally mandated six-year term” — a vote for the PRI wouldn’t be made with so much fear, doubt and prayer. In other words, so much “desperation.”Such desperation issues not only from the shameful political sediment of the past that will be hauled into place out of pure political habit, but from the “apparent” actions presently being taken by local and state representatives of all three major parties seeking safe haven by engaging in negotiations with cartelistas. That is what is being murmured soto voce by a number of highly knowledgeable people. And the rather public inner-party rifts, splits, betrayals — and threats — seem to verify such “gossip.”
Yet, according to present polling, most Mexicans believe the PRI has rehabilitated itself. For many savvy political researchers, this belief seems to be based primarily on wishful thinking. Outside of suddenly glad-handing and lavishly wooing voters, the party of Gustavo Dias Ordaz (who ordered the Tlatelolco student massacre, October, 2, 1968, Luis Echeverria Alvarez (the Corpus Christi killings, June 10, 1971) and so on, seems to skeptical voters to be offering a lot of vague, purposefully unspecific promises. Such doubters are mostly people with keen memories, folks who know well Mexico’s rough history. After Echeverria, came his protege, Jose Lopez Portillo, who flaunted his corruption, his dangerously promiscuous spending — daring anyone to do anything about it. The list of felonies is not just long, but vast. And many keen-eyed political analysts suggest there have been no profound signs beneath the usual gross tons of rhetoric and trickery, of the kind of rehabilitation that heals the habit of governing by criminal behavior.
Yet Peña Nieto swears a PRI conversion has taken place. There are a number of reasons he determinedly does this. Getting elected is only one of them. John M. Ackerman, professor at the Institute for Legal Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico and editor in chef of the Mexican Law Review, has watched the goings on in the State of Mexico, which partially surrounds Mexico City, where Peña Nieto recently was governor. Ackerman and a number of Mexico City journalists have written of the state’s soaring homicide and poverty rates, the fact that femicides, “the targeted killing of women,” are common. The scholar Guadalupe Hernandez, has found that millions in government “social spending” went “unaccounted for” during Peña Nieto’s administration. Independent civil society groups “rank the state at the bottom in competitiveness and top in corruption,” notes Ackerman. Obfuscating public relations, a glossy smile, gelled hair, cheery handshake and oozing empty concern mask adept slights of hand, note many who’ve watched and recorded the candidate at work and play.
While such opponents may see another empty suit, many people find him convincingly charming and forthright, the right change at the right time — if a bit vague on what he’ll really do, what his intentions really are. At this hard point in Mexican history, the irony of this is that the things that “#YoSoy 132” students, and Javier Sicilia and their friends and allies are speaking of, are believing in, are precisely what Mexico seems to need. That’s what a increasing number of observers are now saying. But that opposition certainly seems too few, too late, and it sports woefully empty pockets. Not even enough to bring corrective post-election oversight and effective pressure for a wiser, more rational government.