Mexican Labor Bibliography

IV. Mexican Politics

The PAN

Vicente Fox, A Los Pinos: Recuento Autobiografico y Politico. Mexico: Oceano, 1999. 224 pages, index.

In the autobiography written for his campaign for president, Vicente Fox explains his rise to the national political scene. Fox was born on July 2, 1942, the second son of a Mexican business family. As a boy he attended the Instituto Lux, a Roman Catholic school where the Jesuits taught his classes. In about 1960 Fox entered the Iberoamerican University in Mexico City, a private Catholic school, and then a very elite college where Mexico's finest families sent their children.

After graduating from college, Fox went to work for the Coca Cola Company as a route salesman, while studying English on the side. He rose from a salesman, to route manager, to a district superintendent, working in cities and states all over Mexico. The company eventually made him vice-president and then president of its Mexican operations. During that period he traveled for the company throughout Latin America and frequently to the United States, his English by then nearly perfect.

Fox writes in his autobiography that he took pride in working for Coca Cola which he saw as a socially responsible corporation, particularly in terms of purchasing Mexican products, respecting the environment, and promoting economic development. While a Coke executive Fox also worked with a number of foundations and non-governmental organizations which did social work for alcoholics, drug addicts and battered women. During that period Fox also took a degree in management from the Harvard University Business School.

In addition to his work for Coke, Fox always had a role in the family businesses, a ranch that produced grains and vegetables like broccoli, cauliflower, garbanzos and potatoes. The family also owned a shoe company, "Botas Fox," with a factory in Nuevo Leon that produced mens' and womens' shoes both for the national and the international market. During the Echeverria years (1976-82) the Fox family sometimes felt besieged by peasants who invaded and seized land. Fox's father personally confronted and faced down the peasant interlopers. Under Vicente Fox's management of the company after he left Coke, the company employed as many as 3,000 workers.

His experience as an executive for a U.S.-based multinational corporation and as a Mexican businessman both shaped Fox as an economic conservative. Fox's own political philosophy, he writes, rejects both the old Mexican state-controlled economy and neoliberalism, and seeks to find a harmonious relationship between government and the market. Not surprisingly, given his work as a Coke executive, a shoe manufacturer for export, and his Harvard business degree, Fox's views on political and economic matters seem very close to those of American conservatives. It was Manuel J. Clouthier, the neopanista presidential candidate who recruited Fox into professional politics.

Fox and Clouthier first met in employers' organizations such as the U.S.-Mexico Chamber of Commerce and COPARMEX, the Mexican Employers Association. After the nationalization of the bank in 1982, Fox joined the businessmen flowing into the PAN, and Clouthier was his political godfather. In 1988, Fox ran for Congress as the representative for Leon, and participated in the struggle over the 1988 election, identifying with Clouthier's resistance more than with the PAN's acquiescence. In 1991 Fox ran for governor, but the election results were contested and president Salinas appointed an interim governor. When Fox ran again in 1995 he won, and his outspoken populist style soon made him a national figure. Fox used his five years as governor to promote himself for the presidency.

Fox won the 2000 elections based largely on the Mexican people's opposition to the PRI and their desire for change. The PRI-state had made it clear in the 1988 election and the repression that followed, that the PRD would never be allowed to come to power. With that option close, the people voted for the PAN, and Fox won.

Clearly Fox, while he has a distinctive personality, is hardly a maverick. In fact, with his Roman Catholic education, his business background, and his conservative political-economic views, he well represents the traditions of the National Action Party, and particularly of panistas, the activist business wing. Within the PAN, he also represents the more pro-U.S. and pro-multinational wing. Though he denies that he is a neoliberal, his support for the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and for expanding NAFTA to the rest of Latin America locate him in the neoliberal globalization camp. For the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Treasury Department, Fox's election represents the last step in a long process that began back in 1980 when the U.S. government began to shape a new Mexican political economy.

Soledad Loaeza. El Partido Accion Nacional: La Larga Marcha, 1939-1994: Oposicion Leal y Partido de Protesta. Mexico: El Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999. 607 pages, bibliography, index, tables.

The victory of Vicente Fox in the Mexican presidential elections of 1999 leads necessarily to greater interest in the National Action Party (PAN) that he now heads. The PAN is in power--but what is the PAN?

Fox was, supposedly, no typical Panista. He often challenged the leadership of his own party, built his own campaign organization, and at times adopted views and positions alien to the PAN leadership. With the aid of former leftists like Jorge Castaneda and political chameleons like Adolfo Aguilar Zinzer he even adopted a kind of social liberal veneer to cover his fundamentally conservative views. But Fox ran on the PAN ticket, with the support of the national party, and will now have to pass his legislative program with the votes of PAN legislators.

In any case, while something of a maverick, Fox is in fact at the same time an excellent representative, indeed almost an archetype of his party's traditional leadership. For while the PAN has made itself over several times since its founding and has remained fundamentally a party of bankers, businessmen, and Roman Catholic clergy with a middle class and lower middle class following. Fox, for all his swagger and bravado, is nothing more than a Rotarian down-at-the-rodeo, the Chamber of Commerce in chaps, not a man-on-a-horse in the usual political sense of that term--that is, not a Bonaparte--but commercial centaur--a salesman-on-a-horse.

Soledad Loaeza is the author of the most recent and most comprehensive book on the PAN: "The National Action Party: the Long March, 1939-1994, Loyal Opposition and Party of Protest." Loaeza wrote her book between 1993 and 1998 at Columbia College in New York and at the Colegio de Mexico in Mexico City, attempting to understand and explain how the PAN developed from a protest party into a serious contender for power. Rejecting structural studies that focus on social class and modernization theory, she argues that the most important factor in the development of a political party is the "conjuncture," the historical and social situation, the Zeitgeist or spirit of the times. But despite her own theoretical predilections, her book makes an excellent case for the role of social class in political analysis, and makes it clear that the PAN tended over many decades to base itself on businessmen, and after 1982 became the party of the business elite and the corporations.

Vicente Fox himself, in his book "To Los Pinos [the Mexican White House]: An Autobiographical and Political Account," tells who he, as a Coke executive, rancher, and shoe manufacturer joined other businessmen in the rush to PAN in the 1980s. Both of Loaeza's comprehensive academic study and Fox's personal autobiographical account enrich out understanding of this party and the president-elect, and are recommended reading for those who want to understand what's happening in Mexico today. The following article summarizes their accounts for those who do not read Spanish.

The Origin of the PAN: Bankers and Catholic Activists
Banker Manuel Gomez-Morin and Roman Catholic ideologue Efrain Gonzalez Luna founded the National Action Party (PAN) in 1939. The PAN was formed in the government of Lazaro Cardenas that had nationalized the petroleum industry in 1938 and then reorganized the ruling party as the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM) based on the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the National Confederation of Peasants (CNC), and on the Army. To many in Mexico it appeared that the country was headed toward socialism if not to communism. The PAN was created to give voice to elites who felt excluded by Cardenas's project.

While sometimes thought of a party of the counterrevolution, in fact the PAN represented an alternative to the state-party (what later become the Institutional Revolutionary Party or PRI), an alternative that arose out of the revolutionary family. In fact, Gomez-Morin had been a high official of the Mexican state, and one of the country's distinguished intellectuals, before he became disgusted with the revolution's failure to create a program of national reconstruction and modernization. During the 1930s, a period of the struggles around the world between communism and capitalism, Gomez-Morin sought out "a third way." While Lazaro Cardenas sought to lay the foundations from above for an agrarian-based socialism in Mexico, Gomez-Morin sought to bring about capitalist industrialization and social reform.
Gomez-Morin was inspired by the Roman Catholic social teachings of Pope Leo XIII, particularly Rerum Novarum, the Papal Encyclical of 1891 that reconciled the church to modern society and to institutions such as labor unions, albeit Catholic unions. The other founder of the PAN, Gonzalez-Luna also drew on the church for his inspiration, seeing in Catholic theology and morality a bulwark against liberalism, positivism, materialism and socialism. Inspired by Hispanic culture and the Catholic faith, the ideal society formed an organic whole in which each element played its part. A traditionalist, Gonzalez-Luna rejected representative democracy in favor of a society based on the family and the community or municipality, the natural bases of human society. A firm believer in the principles of "Rerum Novarum," his first PAN chapters formed in the states of Chihuahua and Monterrey (Nuevo Leon), the latter the home of Mexico's most conservative businessmen. The PAN's other growing base of power would be found in the Federal District, the party's strongest center until the 1990s.

Another source of the early PAN ideology was the developmental dictatorship of General Miguel Primo de Rivera in Spain (1923-1930). Gomez-Morin saw in Spain the abolition of liberalism by a Christian state intervening to control bankers and businessmen while maintaining capitalist property altering the distribution of wealth; that is, an authoritarian system of social justice.
Gomez-Morin had served as Rector of the University of Mexico where, with the help of the National Union of Catholic Students (UNEC), he had resisted president Lazaro Cardenas's program of "socialist education." The UNEC, linked to the Jesuits and to Catholic Action, became the principal source of the PAN's first cadres. The PAN developed a reputation as the party of the educated elite, students, professors and professionals--in an era which very few university graduates existed in the entire country. The PAN in its first incarnation had an elitist character; it sought a government of "excellent minorities." The party projected the image of an organization of intellectuals defending culture against barbarism and totalitarianism. In those early years of the 1940s, the PAN competed with the more right-wing Sinarquist National Union (UNS), los Sinarquistas. (The UNS or Sinarquistas were also known electorally as the Popular Force Party - PFP.)

The UNS had its base in the Western states of the Cristero Rebellion, the Catholic uprising against the Mexican state between 1926 and 1934. In 1943 the UNS was estimated to have 600 committees with over half a million members in the western states of Mexico. More conservative and more militant than the PAN, the Sinarquistas were also more popular, having a base among poor farmers. PAN and UNS did not get along, the first seeing itself as a party of cadres and the latter as a party of the masses, the first as an electoral organization, the second as a popular movement outside of the political parties. While the UNS willingly subordinated itself to the Roman Catholic hierarchy, the PAN never had a clear relationship to the church hierarchy.

The PAN Party Program: Reaction and Reform
In terms of program, the PAN had no fundamental differences with the state-party (later the PRI) over the nature of the economy; like the government-party, it stood for capitalism. The PAN called for the government to intervene to protect workers, supported the organization of labor unions (preferably Catholic unions) but rejected the right of unions to strike. The PAN also called upon the state to support workers' and peasants' cooperatives. While the Mexican state-party created a corporative society based on workers' and peasants' unions, the PAN wanted a corporative society based on the municipality and the family. But the PAN, in keeping with its Roman Catholicism, was also fiercely anti-Communist throughout its history.

The PAN rejected representative democracy in theory, while the state-party did so in practice. As a party with Catholic ideology and Catholic activists, the PAN rejected contraception and abortion. Finally, in terms of international politics, the PAN rejected the U.S. conception of Panamericanism, and proposed instead a grand Hispanic alliance of Spain and the Latin American countries. PAN foreign policy in the 1940s saw two great enemies: the United States, the home of Liberal Democracy, and the Soviet Union, the home of Communism. Franco's Spain and Peron's Argentina held out some hope for the Mexican right.

From 1939 to 1949 Gomez-Morin led the party and emphasized its program of modernization and its strategy of an electoral struggle. However, when he stepped down in 1949, Gonzalez-Luna changed the direction of the party, emphasizing Catholic morality and a strategy of abstention. A really reactionary elitist, Gonzalez-Luna did not believe in representative democracy, parliament or elections; he did not trust the masses.

Roman Catholic doctrine and militants would dominate the party from 1949 to 1979. In this period the PAN became a doctrinaire "ghetto-party," isolated from the rest of Mexican political life. World War II tended to isolate the PAN even more. The war led to an alliance between the United States and the Soviet Union, the PAN's two great enemies, which Mexico joined. The PAN called for neutrality, but under pressure from Mexican President Avila Camacho, signed a statement supporting the struggle against the Axis Powers, Germany, Italy and Japan. Thus through World War II, the U.S. inspired program of Panamericanism became dominant, and within that context, Mexico began to industrialize.

The state-party also began to reach out to university graduates and other excluded sectors of middle class society. The state-party created the National Confederation of Popular Organizations (CNOP), made up of all of those excluded from the labor and peasants' unions. The CNOP included small landowners, merchants and manufacturers, members of cooperatives, professionals and intellectuals. In other words it went after the base of the PAN. The state party, re-baptized the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), had taken up the PAN's program of modernization, its orientation toward the universities. At the same time, the war had made the PAN's sympathy for right-wing authoritarian governments anathema. While the PRI adopted the popular Keynesian economics, the PAN stood outside the mainstream with its calls for monetarism and balanced budgets. The PAN found itself even more isolated, a "ghetto-party," but also the loyal opposition. In the elections of the early 1940s the PAN did poorly, running its university-educated candidates in dozens of parliamentary districts, and losing in all of them. While the PAN shouted "fraud," and with reason, its loses also had to do with its elite and sectarian character.

The PAN's Changing Social Base
During the late 1940s, when the Sinarquistas began to quarrel among themselves and the UNS went into decline, the PAN began to pick up some of its former rival's political base. The PAN began to grow in Jalisco and Guanajuato, the heart of UNS territory. During these years many university graduates, professionals and big businessmen moved away from the PAN and into the PRI, while many small merchants and businessmen, artisans and peasants formed the UNS and moved into the PAN. Consequently the PAN, without giving up its conservative Roman Catholic ideology, underwent a social transformation from a party of the urban elite to a party of the lower middle classes and the rural poor. By picking up the Sinarquista base, the PAN also increased the percentage of women in its following, which became a factor after women won the vote in 1953. (The Mexican left had generally opposed women's suffrage fearing women would be controlled by the Catholic church.) PAN also found female support in Catholic Action, where more than two-thirds of whose 350,000 members were women.

Even though the PAN had a conservative and pro-business posture, during the period from the late 1940s to the late 1960s the great industrialists, merchants and bankers did not form part of the PAN's social base because the PRI served their interests well. The one exception was a conservative business group in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon which sometimes backed the PAN, and at other times withdrew its support. The PAN had middle class or petty bourgeois leadership, and a base among small businesses, and the middle and lower middle class, with support from some workers and peasants.

During this same period, the PRI expelled its leftist and Communist elements who, led by Vicente Lombardo Toledano, formed the Popular Party (PP) which later became the Popular Socialist Party (PPS). Thus, in the 1950s and 60s, Mexico could present itself as a three-party, parliamentary democracy with a leftist party, the PPS, a right-wing party, the PAN, and the PRI as the solid and moderate center. This formula served the PRI well in various forms over several decades. Throughout the period from 1949 to 1964 the PAN never received less than 1 percent and never more than 11 percent of the vote.

Vatican II, Solidarismo, and "The Open Door"
During the late 1950s, the PAN suffered a series of political electoral defeats which caused a crisis in the party, and in November of 1962, Adolfo Christlieb Ibarrola became head of the PAN and turned the party in a new direction in an attempt to break out of the political ghetto in which it found itself. Christlieb's attempt was helped by developments in the Roman Catholic Church, for that was also the year of Vatican Council II, which produced the papal encyclical "Gaudium et Spes," an attempt to reconcile the church to liberal democracy. This important document argued that Catholics should not only be the defenders of the status quo, but also had a responsibility to change social structures to for the benefits of the people. (The Theology of Liberation would at least in part emerge from this impulse.) Christlieb was inspired by this new theology to transform the PAN.

Rather than rejecting Mexican politics, he argued, the PAN had to accept political pluralism, enter into dialogue with the government, and take political participation seriously. At the same time, the Mexican government passed a new electoral reform in 1962 that also made this possible. The Cuban Revolution and its radicalization also gave a new urgency to conservative politics. As a result of all of these factors, in the 1962 elections the PAN won hundreds of thousands of new voters, 18 seats in the parliament, including one for Chistlieb, and established itself as a more important factor in the country's political life. The PAN continued to participate and to maintain its influence throughout the 1960s until the crisis of 1970.

During the late 1960s Efrain Gonzalez Morfin, son of the party's founder, attempted under the influence of Vatican II, to turn the party back in the direction of a moral opposition to the Mexican state, economy and society. Like his father, he inclined toward Catholic moralism and abstentionism. Under the growing influence of the reformist currents in Catholicism, he proposed a new doctrine for the party that he called "solidarismo" or solidarity. The political platform that he wrote for the party in 1970, partly under the influence of the Jesuits, called for expanding access to property and to the means of production for workers, peasants, employees, and for changing the consciousness and conscience of private business so that they would invest for the good of workers and the people. His position, however, was also associated with the more moral and abstentionist wing of the party.

Mexico changed dramatically in the years between 1960 and the late 1970s as its population grew, the society became more urban and industrial, and more students entered colleges and universities to emerge as professionals. In addition, a series of international developments also had an impact on the PAN during the period of the 1960s: the period from the Cuban Revolution of 1959, the student movement of 1968, the labor and peasant militancy of the 1970s, the fall of President Salvador Allende in Chile in 1974 all of which changed Mexican political culture. In particular, the presidency of Luis Echeverria (1968-1974) appeared to the PAN and other conservatives as a threat to Mexican society. Echeverria's populism, his support for peasant land seizures, workers' strikes, and new socialist parties, while really attempts to strengthen the base of the PRI, appeared to some as a movement toward socialism.
During Echeverria's presidency a new leadership came to the forefront in the PAN led by Jose Angel Conchello. Turning away from the moral reformism of Gonzalez Morfin, he advocated a "party of the open door," that is a party open to those who were not necessarily doctrinaire Catholics, and in particular open to the growing movement of businessmen, who, frightened by Echeverria's populism, were looking for an alternative. The PAN's anti-communism, always part of its political philosophy, appealed to businessmen opposed to Echeverria. Within the party a contest developed between Gonzalez Morfin's moralism and abstentionism, and Conchello's "open door" and orientation to business. The crisis paralyzed the party in 1976, which for the only time in its history offered no presidential candidate.

"Neopanismo"
The PAN emerged from the crisis of 1976 having definitively rejected the moralistic and absentionist position, and having welcomed the influx of new middle class and capitalist groups. These developments took place within the context of yet another new electoral law that encouraged participation of both the right and the left. In the new electoral spectrum, the PRI still stood at the center with the majority of the votes, but the Communist Party (PC) stood on the left, while the National Action Party (PAN) stood on the right. During the 1979 elections the PAN grew in strength to become the second party of Mexico with 43 legislators out of 40 (while the PC had 25). The party's strength appeared in Baja California, Chihuahua, Nuevo Leon, Coahuila and Sonora. Echeverria had driven the businessmen into the PAN, and they were leading the party forward.
For author Soledad Loaeza, the key event in the history of the PAN was the PRI's 1982 expropriation and nationalization of the banks, an act that appeared as a move toward socialism which drove the key sectors of Mexican business to the right and into the PAN. The PRI's take over of the banks combined with the economic crisis and peso devaluation of the same year, created a new political current in the PAN called "neopanismo," or new-PANism, and it reflected the politicization of the business class. Capitalists with medium and small businesses especially moved into the party, but some large corporate capital began to back the party as well. Important among these were the agribusiness leaders of Sinaloa and Sonora. Many were young businessmen, local leaders in their chambers of commerce and communities. The neopanistas took electoral politics seriously and wanted to see electoral victories, but they also brought a new militancy to the party.

Direct Action and Civil Disobedience
These aggressive young businessmen brought a new political strategy and new tactics to the party, and in particular they brought the idea of engaging in "direct action" and "civil resistance." The old PAN had eschewed public political displays as undignified, and the new PAN took to the streets with car caravans, public demonstrations, and soon with generally nonviolent civil disobedience. These militant PAN activists quickly became frustrated with the PRI-government that they felt fraudulently denied them the electoral victories that they had won and to which they were entitled.
The experience in Chihuahua in 1986 proved a turning point. The PAN leaders and activists believed they had won the governorship, the electoral authorities gave the victory to the PRI, and the result was a public, political struggle. The PAN leaders Francisco Barrio Terrazas and Gustavo Villarreal, joined by longtime leader Luis H. Alvarez participated in a 22-day hunger strike. The PAN activists blocked the international bridges to the United States, and began a tax strike. The Roman Catholic archdiocese put out a letter calling upon the public to preserve political pluralism--that is to support the PAN.
The PAN's new militancy suddenly brought the party, its politics and its people to national attention, and to international attention. The PAN became front-page news in the United States where the arch conservative Jesse Helms suddenly spoke out against electoral fraud in Mexico. The national and international attention encouraged the party activists who now seized banks, bridges and the tollbooths on the international bridges and highways, as well as taking over railroads and public buildings. The PAN took its complaints to the Organization of American State and the Inter-American Human Rights Court in Washington. The U.S. National Security Council held meetings with PAN leaders to see if they would support the U.S. Central American policies. While the PAN lost the battle over the Chihuahua governorship, the strategy and tactics had changed the party.

Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and the PRD
During the 1980s, the PRI had been undergoing an internal crisis of its own as the technocrats, led by Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas, moved to oust the nationalists from power in the party. As the technocrats reoriented the party toward what would be called the neoliberal globalization program, the nationalists led by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas and Porfirio Munoz Ledo of the Democratic Current of the PRI resisted. Finally in 1987 the Democratic Current left the PRI and Cardenas launched his campaign for the presidency in 1988, first as the candidate of the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM) and then of the National Democratic Front (FND). Cardenas, son of president Lazaro Cardenas, represented the historic enemy of the PAN, and his emergence as the leader of a new opposition to the PRI both frustrated and infuriated the PAN leadership and membership.

The PAN saw itself as marching toward victory in 1988 to find its path blocked by the very forces that had led to its formation in 1939.The PAN chose Manuel Clouthier, a businessman and independent and outspoken neopanista to represent the party in 1988. Clouthier and his supporters hoped to create a national mass movement that could overturn the PRI, and looked for inspiration to Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Corazon Aquino as their inspirations. The Philippine's experience appeared as particularly important, for a mass movement of the people in that country had just succeeded in ousting Ferdinando Marcos, and Clouthier frequently shouted out at meetings, "The Philippines points the way!"

But in the summer of 1988, Cuauhtemoc Cardenas had captured the imagination of many Mexicans, from peasants in states where his father had distributed land to their fathers, to schoolteachers in Mexico City, to college students in many parts of the country. Cardenas emerged as the winner of the 1988 election--but president Miguel de la Madrid and head of the Ministry of the Interior Manuel Bartlett gave the victory to Carlos Salinas to Gortarti. To his credit, Manuel Clouthier joined Cardenas in opposing the PRI. But the PAN as a party, while declaring the election lacked legitimacy, did not back Clouthier in his opposition, and preferred instead to negotiate with the PRI.

The PRI, with the support of the PAN, was able both to secure the presidency of Salinas, and to move to reestablish the state-party system. For these reasons, for several years the PAN became discredited in the eyes of many Mexicans. Nevertheless, throughout the 1990s, the PAN continued to win governorships and mayoralties in important cities, and remained the second political party of the country. After the 1988 election, the Mexican left merged with Cardenas's former PRI organization to form the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and clearly Cardenas would be the party's candidate in the 1994 election.

But on January 1, 1994 the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (EZLN) led the Chiapas uprising against Salinas and NAFTA and created a new problem. The PRI chose a more populist candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio--but his assassination added to the sense that things were unraveling and Mexico might become Central America or Colombia. The PRI's new candidate Ernesto Zedillo put himself forward as the candidate of political stability and peace in a time of instability and violence. PAN candidate Fernandez de Cevallos declared that he was the candidate of "a state of law, a Mexico without lies." He made a good impression in the first televised presidential debates, and it seemed he might be able to win, when suddenly he seemed to pull back--some accused him of having sold out. In any case, in the election Ernesto Zedillo of the PRI won 50 percent of the votes, the Cevallos of the PAN 27 percent, and Cardenas of the PRD was reduced to a mere 17 percent.

Zedillo and the PRI moved to formalize the alliance with the PAN by appointing Antonio Lozano to become Attorney General, a position which necessarily implicated the PAN in all of the PRI's corruption. The appointment served the PRI well, but further discredited the PAN in the eyes of some Mexican citizens. The PAN, sharing the same political platform, the same political economy, and the same sort of social leadership, and became the political partner of the PRI.
The PRD appeared as a genuine opposition with the election of Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1995, but through the Salinas and Zedillo years the PRD suffered tremendous repression with about 500 PRD members killed in confrontations with the PRI or the state and the party was constantly stigmatized by the press and undermined by the PRI

The failures of the PRI and the repression of the PRD made Fox the only possible and realistic alternative for voters of the PRI, PRD, and his own PAN who wanted change. Fox’s career in the neo-panista movement, his business background, and his orientation toward the neoliberal, globalization agenda of the United States made him acceptable both to the Mexican elite, and to the U.S. government. All of these factors, and his own brilliant campaign orchestrated by U.S. image-makers, combined to make him the victor in 2000.

Abraham Nuncio. Alternativa de poder o instrumento de la oligarquía empresarial. Mexico: Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1986. 449 pages, appendices (historic documents), index/

Abraham Nuncio has written an engaging, readable, historically reliable history of the National Action Party (PAN) from the point of view of the Mexican left. His book places the conservative party in both historical perspective and in its regional geographical context. He discusses the rise of the Garza-Sada family and its influence in Monterrey, the role of the church, bankers, and the revolutionary intellectual Gómez Morin in founding the party. Nuncio’s book has a brief useful discussion of the “sindicatos blancos,” literarally “white unions,” but referring to the company unions created by the Garza-Sada clan of Nuevo Leon. While now superceded by Soledad Loaeza’s El Partido Accion Nacional: La Larga Marcha, 1939-1994: Oposicion Leal y Partido de Protesta. (Mexico: El Fondo de Cultura Economica, 1999) [see above], still Nuncio’s book remains a good read and offers worthwhile observations from another perspective.

THE PRD

Kathleen Bruhn. Taking on Goliath: The Emergence of a New Left Party and the Struggle for Democracy in Mexico. University Park: Pennsylvania, 1997.

Kathleen Bruhn is an assistant professor of political science at the University of California at Santa Barbara and this book began as her doctoral dissertation. This is the only book on the PRD in English so far. Bruhn's book, relatively free from jargon for a book in the field of political science, tells the story of the rise of the Democratic Current, the creation of the National Democratic Front (FND) and Cuauhtemoc Cardenas's 1988 campaign for president, then turns to the organizational and political failures of the PRD through 1994. While this is a useful overview, in my view Bruhn fails to relate the growth of the PRD to the economic and social struggles taking place in the country, concentrating too narrowly on party building and electoral contests.

Luis Javier Garrido. La Ruptura: La Corriente Democratica del PRI. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1993.

Luis Javier Garrido is well known and respected for his history of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) (El Partido de a Revolucion Institucionalizada: La Formacion del Nuevo Estado en Mexico (1928-1945) [Mexico: Siglo Ventiuno Editores, first published in 1982, 7th Edition, 1995]). But Garrido is also the author of La Ruptura which traces the history of the Democratic Current, the split in the PRI which gave rise to the Party of the Democratic Revolution. This is a well written, serious history based on newspaper accounts, documents, and interviews.

Adolfo Gilly. Cartas a Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1989.

Adolfo Gilly, the Argentinean-born Mexican historian, edited and published these fascinating letters sent to Cuauhtemoc Cardenas during his 1988 presidential campaign. Written by workers, peasants, teachers, students, and middle class supporters, the letters provide a fascinating picture of Cardenas's backers in that campaign.

Jorge Laso de la Vega, ed. La Corriente democratica: Hablan los protagonistas. Mexico: Editorial Posada, 1987.

A collection of many of the basic documents of the Democratic Current of the PRI, the forerunner of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD).

Ifigenia Martinez, ed. Economica y Democracia: Una propuesta alternativa. Mexico: Grijalbo, 1995.

A collection of over 40 essays, nearly 500 pages, by leaders of the Party of the Democratic Revolution and economists and social scientists sympathetic the party which present economic alternatives to the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) program of neo-liberalism. Edited by Ifigenia Martinez, a founder of the Democratic Current which became the PRD.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II. Cardenas de cerca: Una entrevista biografica. Mexico: Grupo Editorial Planeta, 1994.

Written to promote Cardenas's 1994 presidential campaign, this interview/biography provides some basic information about Cardenas while failing to ask any hard questions. Taibo, famous as a historian, biographer and detective story writer, brought none of his critical faculties to bear on Cardenas, disappointing those of us who have been his faithful readers. Partisan journalism.

The PRI

Luis Javier Garrido. El Partido de a Revolucion Institucionalizada: La Formacion del Nuevo Estado en Mexico (1928-1945). Mexico: Siglo Ventiuno Editores, first published in 1982, 7th Edition, 1995.

The classic critical study of Mexico’s PRI, the party that ruled the nation for over 70 years. Essential.