"Triumph" rooted in fraud
DESPITE all our hopes, and the DECOITE alaur hanac and tha grave crisis in the Mexican State, the election results on 21 August were disappointing. The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) won both the presidential and parliamentary elections with just under 50% of the vote, the more rightwing National Action Party (PAN) achieved nearly 30% while Cardenismo, in the form of the Democratic Revolution Party (PRD) took only 16%. To try to find out why the expectation of peaceful electoral change was frustrated is not merely an intellectual exercise but a distressing necessity for the leftwing democratic movement. HECTOR DE LA CUEVA* Mexico City
HERE can be no denial that on 21 August the sixty year old State party system made its full weight felt in the Mexican election. Its "triumph" was rooted in large-scale fraud, manipulation of state resources, and corporate control, intimidation and blackmail. The results can only postpone and lead to a more bloody transition to democracy and the end of a dictatorship which, although it does have a real social base, oppresses more and more the majority of those who voted for it.
* Some extremely serious mistakes were made by the democratic camp, which contributed to the results. Sections of the democratic movement are now beginning to believe that under a State party system there can be no free elections, nor can democratic forces hope to win, until the mechanisms of control are broken and there are new rules by which to play.
In any case, what has been shown by the results is that the transition to democracy will be a long and complex process. In this process the National Democratic Convention (CND), founded in Chiapas on the initiative of the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) must play a central role. The CND represents the ultimate popular army-in-waiting against the State. Consolidating and broadening the Convention, organising resistance to fraud, advancing a programme of struggle which will go beyond the present political situation, and repairing the democratic and leftwing forces while learning lessons from our defeat, will help to prevent another illegitimate government - or at least reduce the time period before the PRI dictatorship can be challenged once more.
### Fraud
The PRI wanted not only to win the election but to win an absolute majority. It also wanted to force its real opposition into a poor third place. One strategy was to crush public opinion and to demoralise that opposition by way of an avalanche of opinion polls purporting to show that it would win.
Further, there is no doubt amongst the democratic movement that, independently of other political factors (which will be dealt with later), on 21 August a huge fraud was committed which effectively distorted the vote. Gradually, more and more evidence of this fraud has come to light. As Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the PRD presidential candidate has stated, there were around 10 million fraudulent votes, or nearly 30% of the officially registered vote.
The government made good use of its six years in power to prepare the ground for the fraud, carrying out numerous practice exercises in local and federal elections. The result was an almost "clean" fraud (with neither the violence nor theft of ballot boxes expected by the Mexican and international observers) which combined placing false names upon the electoral register, refusing to place potential electors upon it on the basis that they were for some reason ineligible to vote and, later, removing electors from it. Nor should we forget the hundreds of people who had more than one voting document and who on
* The author is a member of the Revolutionary Workers' Party (PRT, Mexican section of the Fourth International).
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election day were taken from one polling station to another to vote for the official party, there being more voting papers than voters, the buying of votes, the direct intimidation on election day itself, or the later manipulation of data which has produced results which do not coincide with polling station records.
In contrast, the democratic opposition did not make use of the six years of Salinism to prevent the fraud. There was a great deal of naivety and too great a faith in purely political measures. In the end there was too little time for it or Civic Alliance/Observation 94, the main citizens' grouping concerned with overseeing the elections) to set up an effective system of monitoring the various forms of fraud and, more importanly, preventing it.
Documenting and systematising the fraud, to show how it was possible, is a task of first importance for the democratic movement. On this depends not only in large part its credibility with the public, so that it will be supported in future actions, but recovery of its confidence in itself.
Weight of the system
Although the importance of the fraud cannot be underestimated, there were other factors which determined the result.
The PRI is still able to rely upon a considerable social base. There is nothing strange in this, despite the crisis in the State system of domination. After all, Pinochet achieved almost 50% of the vote in the Chilean referendum. A dictatorship can have an important social base without ceasing to be a dictatorship, and this is especially true of the PRI, with 65 years in power and a complete political and social network.
Although the apparatus of domination is cracking, the system showed at the election that the mechanisms of corporate control continue to weigh heavily upon broad sectors of society. Many of the votes in favour of the PRI came from citizens still influenced by its ideology or by direct coercion from these mechanisms.
Corruption — which in 65 years has permeated and corroded the whole of society — and clientism also brought in a large number of votes. In addition to those votes bought directly, others were bought by promises of favours, land, payment of debts and so on. The clientist programmes created by President Salinas de Gortari under the guise of combatting poverty (the National Solidarity Programme — Pronasol - and the Country Solidarity Programme — Procampo) also had an effect.
In addition, the PRI also built for its "victory" by spending thousands of millions of dollars belonging to the State. Not only did it spend State money directly upon its campaign, it reduced its foreign currency reserves by at least fifty percent in the last six months before the election using the money to maintain the value of the Mexican dollar and to bolster the economy generally.
The only thing more offensive than the "triumph" of Ernesto Zedillo is the success of Salinismo in having increased poverty to desperate levels in order to later exploit it, buying votes with charity, corruption and promises.
### Real vote
It is also vital to understand the nature of what we might term the real vote. If the votes of PAN and PRD are added together, then there is a majority for change. However, if it is the PRI and PAN votes which are added - which would seem more appropriate - then this is not the case. Even if the electoral fraud makes it impossible to tell whether or not there is a majority for change and, if so, how great it is, it is clear that a large proportion of the vote was for these two parties, and was a conservative vote, not one which calling for the removal of the State party system.
PACE
PAN captured an enormous number of votes. In addition to its conservative ideology, its gradualist strategy and the political alliance between its leadership and the government gave specific meaning to these. Particularly as a result of the televised debate between the PRI, PAN and PRD presidential candidates, PAN recovered its role of protagonist and wrested a large number of votes from the Cardenistas. There is also evidence that in some cases the fraud favoured PAN. Some commentators have taken the view that, while the PAN vote was a vote for change, it was a vote for a "soft landing". ". Others have seen it as the triumph of the gradualist approa ch. Without doubt it is an obstacle to the defeat of the State party. The best that might be said is that it is a vote for its partial correction. In this sense also it represents a conservative vote.
There are many explanations for the real vote for PRI and PAN. There seems to be agreement that it was a result of fear of what might happen if there was a vote for change. However, there is no agreement on what was behind the fear. Cecilia Soto, the presidential candidate of the small Workers* Party (PT) which has increased electorally during the last six years, has stated that Zapatista Subcommander Marcos gave many votes to Zedillo. There are even some Cardenistas who believe that Cárdenas' vote was damaged by his rapprochement with the Zapatistas, and particularly by his visit to the EZLN in Aguascalientes. They believe that the people were afraid of "violence" from the Zapatistas and therefore from Cárdenas, and that he should have pursued a more moderate line, when the reality is that if anything damaged his vote it was the confusion generated by his toning it down. This will be dealt with later.
In fact the Zapatista uprising, as is widely recognised, awoke huge sympathy and gave great impetus to the movement for change; towards the end of the campaign it gave it the CND.
Those who gave votes to Zedillo were the killers of Luis Donaldo Colosio, the original PRI candidate, assassinated on 23 March during a campaign meeting. So did those political mafias which, while presenting themselves as civil pressure groups, sowed doubt upon the feasibility of defeating the State and said that it was searching for a "civilised rapprochement"
The people were not afraid of Cárdenas or the Zapatistas but of a violent reaction from the State, of mafia terrorism, of boycott by big business and
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United States capital. In other words, they were blackmailed by the powerful, as occurred in Nicaragua. Overcoming this fear is a major challenge for the democratic and revolutionary forces in Central and South America, if they are to come to power.
However, none of the above political considerations must be allowed to disguise the serious mistakes which contributed to the Cárdenas campaign not achieving the massive vote which it had calculated upon as being sufficient to overcome any fraud.
For one thing, the campaign did not in reality take heed of what Cárdenas repeated again and again: that the 1994 election was different to that of 1988. The "Cárdenas effect" , which in 1988 took the system by surprise and produced a widespread conviction that his candidacy was the way to bring down the PRI and an end to the crisis which was crushing the State, would not repeat itself automatically. Further, in a country undergoing great changes, the struggle for the vote would be more difficult. Notwithstanding this, triumphalism began to paralyse the campaign.
### Mistakes
By triumphalism is meant not the belief that victory was possible, but that it was taken for granted that the popular vote was guaranteed and that it was merely a matter of removing the obstacles to its recognition. Mistakenly, it was more preoccupied with convincing the most reactionary sectors both inside and outside the country that it should not oppose a democratic victory, rather than with winning a majority of the popular vote. For some months the speeches and activity of Cárdenas were directed principally at these sectors, and this ambiguity created great confusion concerning the programme and objectives of the Cardenista movement. It was forgotten that the only way there can be negotiation with the powerful is by first winning majority popular support, and that the best way of attracting those who have doubts or fears is by taking a firm Stance.
The campaign also gradually lost its social definition. Originally it imagined a scenario in which there would be polarisation not along party lines but between social blocs. The Cárdenas candidacy was to be the expression of the majority popular bloc, and should rest upon a broad social spectrum, upon social committees and citizens' groups, not just political organisations. Yet such vision became secondary. Speeches became less positive, offering few alternatives and avoiding commitment on social issues.
No less costly was the signing on 27 January of the inter-party pact which gave breathing space to the government when it most needed it, when it found itself cornered by the effects of the Zapatista uprising.
The most spectacular mistake of the Cárdenas campaign was without doubt the televised debate on 12 May which, for a number of reasons, had catastrophic consequences from which it found it difficult to recover. The most grave was that PAN was able to present itself as a serious protagonist and so the electoral contest became one between three parties, rather than simply between the PRI and the PRD.
The PRD also lost a great deal of credit by the way in which it selected its deputies, senators and assembly members. It reneged upon its public commitment on the percentage of candidates who would be non-party members (meaning from the organisations which made up the National Democratic Alliance); there was a disgraceful display of internal infighting, which resulted in a short-sighted and bureaucratic approach when it came to selection.
The last two months before the election saw the campaign re-orient itself towards political mobilisation, contact with the people and a more committed approach to social issues. However, it was too little, too late.
### Evolution in political situation
The national political situation has produced all kinds of about-turns and surprises this year