March 2, 2006
Mexico—The Fraud Of The Century
By Alvaro Vargas Llosa
A secret report commissioned by the Mexican government on Mexico’s
“dirty war” under the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI) in the 1970s has caused a major scandal after being leaked
to the press. It accuses the military of carrying out a genocidal
policy against suspected subversives in the south between the end
of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1980s.
Even taking
into account a number of mitigating factors, especially the fact
that President Vicente Fox, who commissioned the study, thinks
the report does not give enough weight to the many abuses committed
by the guerrillas during the 1970s, the information is potent
enough to unmask (once again) the unmitigated fraud that was the
PRI.
The exercise
is not academic, of course: many killers remain at large, five
hundred people are still missing, scores of families will probably
never see justice done, and the PRI is still a major force in
Mexican society. During my visit to Mexico last week, I had a
chance to talk to some of the presidential candidates as well
as a broad spectrum of intellectuals, business representatives,
and journalists. The overall consensus is that the PRI will continue
to wield colossal power through the state and local government
structure as well as Congress, where it will command a solid bloc
of votes. Even though Roberto Madrazo, the candidate of the party
that ruled Mexico for most of the 20th century, is running third,
he cannot be written off.
The most
important truth contained in that report is one that it does not
formulate directly: that most political power thrives on fraud.
Of course, in more advanced democracies checks and balances limit
the scope of the fraud and therefore its practical consequences.
But even in countries with a measure of economic prosperity and
a democratic tradition those checks are not nearly enough, so
the lessons of the PRI era have universal relevance.
For decades,
the PRI maintained the so-called “Estrada Doctrine,”
a foreign policy named after a foreign minister from the 1920s
and based on the principle of “non-intervention.”
In theory, this meant: we don’t care what you do in your
own countries, so let us do as we please in ours. In practice,
it meant: we will wink and nod at any subversive current or government
that espouses Third World ideology, and even at domestic revolutionaries,
whatever their crimes, as long as they do not actually promote
revolution against us in Mexico. This translated into a connivance
with all types of revolutionaries, giving many of them safe haven,
supporting their causes at international forums, and providing
huge subsidies to an intellectual class which was allowed to criticize
the PRI mildly from time to time in return for the promise not
to question the premise of one-party rule. This policy helped
spread and legitimize the ideas that translated into violence
and poverty throughout the Latin American region.
We knew,
of course, that this policy did not, as the PRI hoped, inoculate
Mexico against armed revolution. Several groups were active in
the south in the 1960s and 1970s. And just as the North American
Free Trade Agreement went into effect in the 1990s, the Chiapas
rebellion broke out under the leadership of Marcos, that emblem
of post-modern political chic. We also knew there had been some
ugly episodes of government repression of student demonstrations.
What we did not know until this report came out, was that the
revolutionary fervor actually masked what—by the PRI’s
own standards—can only be called a fascist or extreme right-wing
policy of genocide, obliterating entire villages and killing scores
of innocent victims.
The PRI obviously
understood the times. So long as it maintained a corrupt aid to
revolutionaries inside and outside Mexico and an inflamed anti-imperialist
rhetoric, it had carte blanche from all sorts of intellectuals,
civil society movements and human-rights groups to practice a
systematic negation of everything the PRI, a supposed progressive
animal, stood for. It is difficult to remember this nowadays,
of course, because the left broke with the PRI in the 1990s, when,
in one of its many opportunistic turns, that party espoused globalization
and began to (somewhat) open up the economy. But the story of
the PRI up to that point is the story of ideological and political
fraud on a colossal scale in the interest of power.
Mexicans
would do well to remember this when they go to the polls in July
and non-Mexicans should take notice of this new reminder that,
even in the hands of governments we might feel inclined to support,
the state can sometimes be, in Nietzsche’s words, the coldest
of all cold monsters.
