Carlos Salinas de Gortari and Mexico's PRI Turning Point

The Decline of the PRI, 1968–1987

Just as with President Salinas, the PRI's history is one of internal contradiction. Historically claiming to represent the interests of the Mexican Revolution — and thus the sentiments of popular ascension — the PRI nonetheless employed its unwarranted self-identification as a socialist state in order to nationalize industries, dominate media outlets, and exert overwhelming control over the political process. Though across its unchallenged history during Mexico's first century of independence the PRI would engage Mexico in some periods of positive gain, it would ultimately become the force that, across the two decades leading up to the Salinas administration, subjected the people, the economy, and the government to serious misfortune.

Given its history as an oligarchic force in political and economic processes, the PRI long resisted with aggressive force the entrenchment of its political opponents. For nearly three decades beginning in 1940, however, Mexico enjoyed rapid growth and theretofore unseen prosperity. The swell of available jobs, the increasing value of the peso, and the positive influx of foreign investment all helped to retain the authority of the PRI. Yet it was never very far from the minds and hearts of the Mexican people that the continuous rule of the PRI should be seen as indicative of the unaccountability of the electoral process — namely, that the PRI was the only party to enjoy majority rule suggested that elections were little more than a show of democracy atop totalitarian rulership.

When the economic collapse that would follow this period arrived, the public increasingly set its attention on the inherently counter-democratic nature of the PRI's authority. An incident on October 2, 1968 would mark the beginning of a period of increasing tumult in Mexico that would persist until the reformations at the center of this discussion (McDonnell, 1). The Tlatelolco Massacre pitted progressive college students against the government and its dominance over economic industries, at which it was now increasingly proving to be a poor steward. Inequality and an evident disinterest by the government in advancing the cause of the poor collided with suspicions regarding the government's even more troubling disinterest in the democratic process. When Mexico City was selected to host the Olympic Games that year, students at the National Polytechnic Institute used the occasion to protest inequality and political injustice. Just as the students sought to bring international attention to the behaviors of the PRI, so did they succeed — instigating the military to engage lethal force on unarmed protesters, killing hundreds, and subsequently suppressing both the numbers and the cause of the violence through mainstream media outlets.

This would not only touch off two subsequent decades of fomenting crisis in the relationship between the PRI and the public, but it would also have a direct connection to the policies and perspective of Salinas himself. Often identified as a neo-liberal economist, his association with these protests is more than just theoretical: "The national university that produced most of the 1968 protesters was the intellectual enclave for Mexico's elite, and the youth of then-prosperous middle classes. Mexico's top officials — including President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, several of his Cabinet and possible ruling party nominees to succeed him — are not only alumni of the school. They are also alums of the 'Generation of 1968,' and their attitudes were shaped by that drizzly October evening." This should not, of course, obscure the central reality that Salinas was identified with the ruling party at a time when Mexicans would demand change and democracy.

In the lead-up to the Salinas administration would come two decades of deepening strife, stimulated in no small degree by the accumulation of massive foreign debt and the state's dominance over Mexican industries. Paired with a continued impression of exclusion of political, ethnic, and economic groups, the PRI found the 1970s to be a difficult era. The nationalization and overleveraging of the oil industry, compounded by a short-sighted dependency on foreign borrowing, landed the PRI in a very serious economic predicament. The manufacturing of the image of prosperity — a calling card of totalitarian government — helped demonstrate the manner in which the PRI succeeded in maintaining its authority. Where its inequities and failures to represent the public had fallen short, its control over media outlets and its proclivity toward deception allowed it to retain the impression of proper governmental stewardship.

During this time, false optimism belied a brewing disaster in the Mexican economy. In 1978, positive reports abounded; the Washington Post, for example, offered the impression that "in the short span of less than two years, the Mexican economy has shifted from crisis to recovery, with bankers banging on the door for the privilege of lending big money to the most populous Spanish-speaking country in the world" (Rowen, 1). With the discovery and exploitation of several new oil fields during this period, Mexico experienced a recovery enabled by eager international lenders. When a 1982 disruption in the value of the oil market, paired with the PRI's reckless over-production and over-reliance on its oil resources, struck the core of the Mexican economy, the peso turned sharply downward in value. According to a 1983 article published by the Miami Herald, "Mexico's inflation rate tripled in 1982, reaching 98.8 per cent, just shy of the 100 per cent that President Miguel de la Madrid had predicted in his inauguration speech Dec. 1 . . . The annual rate was more than three times the rate of 1981, when prices rose 29.9 per cent. The government has said the 1982 inflation rate was one reason Mexico was forced to devalue its currency three times last year" (HWS, 7A). This was the beginning of a long and miserable period under the leadership of de la Madrid, who would steward Mexico to a high point of inflation in 1987, where it peaked at 159% (AP, 1). This produced a dire economic condition in Mexico and, with it, a powerful hostility directed at the PRI just as a successor would be handpicked by the outgoing president.

The selection of Carlos Salinas de Gortari would in and of itself produce a great deal of consternation both within and without the party — reflecting not so much his specific personal character as it did the crisis in the economy and in the splintering PRI. His nomination was unpopular and was met with prominent displays of opposition, in the form of party splintering and the consequent formation of the first meaningful political organizations to mount effective electoral opposition.

In 1988, the PRI was reported to be "showing strains over the selection of Salinas. Labor leader Fidel Velazquez quietly walked off the stage as Salinas began his open-air acceptance speech Sunday. A leftist faction within the PRI calling itself the Democratic Current all but rejected the choice because it was made in the old-style way, by the outgoing president, Miguel de la Madrid, and in secret. Such dissidence puts to the test the PRI's near-legendary ability to pull together at election time" (Williams, 1). Having never lost an electoral venture to this juncture, the party suddenly found itself in deep peril of being ousted in a context where a combination — or sometimes a variation — of popularity and electoral fraud had assured it victory. The other aspect of resentment was the significant impact of the economic crisis and the continued devaluation of the peso, which reflected on the ineptitude of a party seldom challenged as it should have been.

To most, the failures affecting the whole nation marked the need for a hastening of democratic reform, which in turn reflected quite negatively on the PRI candidate's candidacy. One 1988 article characterized the situation plainly, noting that "the Institutional Revolutionary Party on Sunday designated Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the budget and planning secretary in the present government, to be its presidential nominee. Getting the nomination is tantamount to being named president. The PRI, as the party is universally called here after its Spanish initials, has ruled Mexico for six decades. As Mexico's largest party and the one that funds its campaign with government money, the PRI can elect almost anyone to any post by a big margin" (Flanigan, 1). That one party was funded by public money even as it retained a dominance over industries and a heavy-handed appropriation of the economy was cause for the explicit hostility faced by Salinas's electoral proposition.

As we enter into a consideration of the election and the administration of Salinas, as well as the legacy of his initiatives, we are informed both by a history of authoritarian corruption and by a clear demand for change that could not be evaded. "In time, however, one-party rule led to corruption — with some recent Mexican politicians becoming notorious for swollen Swiss bank accounts. The formation of new parties is a reaction to that corruption." Thus, the 1988 election would represent the first real challenge to the PRI's electoral dominance, even producing the widespread belief that the PRI had in fact been defeated and had steadfastly resisted this defeat through fraud.

The 1988 Election and the Fraud That Defined an Era

In 1988, Mexico was at a crossroads. The depth of its economic crisis, the dictatorial stronghold of its leadership, and the widely accepted system of political patronage and corruption had all reached a crescendo. Mexicans had long persisted through economic crisis: "The crisis produced a sharp drop in living standards for Mexicans who could not protect their incomes by investing in dollars abroad. Inflation averaged 88.4% per year during the 1982–88 period, reaching a peak of 159.2% in 1987, the year the presidential campaign began" (Bruhn, 118).

Within this negative context, the PRI had long held sway over Mexican political affairs, applying a neo-liberal and counter-democratic form of oligarchic leadership that resulted in ineffective governance, a breakdown of civil services, a steadily declining economy, and a growing imbalance of resource distribution. For the first time in its history, the PRI was experiencing the serious threat of democratic reform, with formerly suppressed opposition groups and armed guerrilla movements finding empathy through the resentment of a neglected people.

Polls throughout the election showed opposition leader Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas — grandson of one of the idealistic founders of the PRI's predecessor movement — with a meaningful lead against the incumbent party. Mexico also prepared for the first time to utilize a computer balloting system. These facts would conspicuously collide as it became visibly likely that the PRI's authority would be deeply challenged. Accordingly, "the social consequences of the economic crisis, the PRI's handling of it, and the inability of most groups to influence policy essentially prepared voters to abandon traditional poses of either PRI loyalty or loyal apathy. When Cardenas looked like the most likely candidate to punish the PRI, he won much of this available protest vote" (Bruhn, 118). However, his challenge would suffer the same fate as all prior to it, with allegations of deep and conspicuous electoral fraud abounding. Just as Cárdenas appeared poised for victory, the new computer ballots failed, with a system crash becoming the essential metaphor for the failed government of the PRI. Nonetheless, Salinas persisted and assumed the office, mired in the anger of a Mexican people who felt they had been deceived (Miller, 1).

The Salinas Administration: Reform and Contradiction

It was within this context that Salinas would begin to make his name as a reformer. The initiatives of his administration, though still stamped by the intent to retain PRI empowerment, suggested a recognition — however modest — of the need for reform. There was a characterization by some of the effort to privatize many formerly nationalized utilities and industries as a sign of progress, as was the opening of Mexico's doors to free trade taken by some as a demonstration of responsiveness to calls for change. Indeed, the promise of democracy has been an inherent premise of the process of globalization. These are indications of the contradiction in Salinas, who would at once be a symbol of the PRI's stubborn persistence and of its inevitable end.

The core irony of the Salinas administration was its simultaneous magnification of the deep and damning trespasses against democracy in Mexico and its instigation of a necessary transition for the country. The perspective taken by the administration during this final sexenio of the PRI's long-uncontested rule would be that, on a global scale, "developments in the 1990s could prove crucial to the Mexican economy and the bilateral relationship between the United States and Mexico. Mexican society is in the process of a marked transformation" (Weintraub, ix). This was an important endorsement of the process of globalization, with particular respect to the role that free trade would soon play — for better and for worse — in Mexican economy and culture.

Negotiations for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which would unite the leadership of the United States, Mexico, and Canada in a global trade arrangement, had begun under the auspices of bringing shared wealth to all signatory nations. This was paralleled by the drafting of extensive reforms in terms of human rights, acknowledging a dearth of constitutional protections regarding expressive freedom, freedom to organize politically, and security from corruption in judicial settings. Ironically, all of these developments transpired in the midst of one of Mexico's most bitterly contested moments of electoral and governmental authority. Under the specter of grotesque and highly visible election fraud, Carlos Salinas de Gortari assumed the presidency under the PRI banner.

His would be an administration so deeply embattled — held responsible in many ways for the mounting hostility toward the only political party with power in Mexican affairs for 70 years — that it would be forced to see through a transformation of Mexico. The protest against his entrance into office was as much directed at the failures of the current government as at a sense of political disenfranchisement. The outcome would be an administration mired in the controversy of its entitlement to office, stricken with devastating economic obstacles, and inclined by the flux of the rest of the global community toward the realization of reform. In Salinas, the collision of events produced something of a lame-duck incumbency for the ruling party, finally signaling, even in its assumption of office, that its identity and power would soon be irretrievably shifted.

Many Mexicans began to experience a significant acceleration in long-standing socioeconomic tensions with the early onset of NAFTA. The economically poor and agriculturally rich states which had been relatively stable compared to the sharp decline of so many regions during the fallout of the so-called "December Mistake" — referring to the height of inflation at the transition to the Salinas administration — became a primary point of interest for foreign corporate investment. Seizing on the logging and farming industries, dominant in parts of Mexico with a diverse ecology, private organizations initiated encroachments on local lands that would touch off hostility between central governmental leadership and impoverished communities who, if not displaced, would more often fall under the employ of foreign corporations for unfair wages and under exploitative conditions.

Conclusion: A Transitional Legacy

As to our reflection on Salinas, it is fair to say without connotation that Mexico is in many ways a profoundly different country than it was even two decades ago. The transition from national to private industries, the opening of the democratic process to the international community, and the inception of NAFTA — all creditable to the administration — would help to point Mexico in its current direction. Yet the contradiction that defined Salinas has also defined Mexico's path forward: progress and corruption remain entwined, the PRI's influence endures in local governments and private industries, and the promise of genuine democratic reform remains unfulfilled for many of Mexico's most vulnerable citizens. The Salinas sexenio was, in the end, a transitional period — one that changed the face of Mexico's political economy without fully dismantling the structures of inequality and authoritarian control that had long sustained it.