安魂曲
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2004/02/14
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作者：安魂曲 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
Political Background
Mexican political history has been heavily conditioned by the fact that the country has never experienced a peaceful transition of power between opposing political forces. Though far-reaching economic changes have occurred in times of peace, major political changes at the national level have followed cataclysmic civil wars that have cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives. There have been three such upheavals: the War of Independence, from 1810 to 1821; the War of Reform against landed conservatives, the Catholic Church, and their French allies, coinciding with Benito Juárez’ liberal reforms in the 1850s and 1860s; and the Revolution of 1910-1920, followed by land reform and nationalization of the oil industry.
Though Mexico has held elections for more than a century, these have never, at least at the national level, led to alternation in office.1 They have instead served to ratify choices already made by those holding the reins of power in Mexico City. In 1876, following the death of President Benito Juárez, General Porfirio Díaz overthrew Juárez’ designated successor. He assumed the presidency the following year, then had himself reelected to consecutive terms spanning a third of a century.2 Finally, in 1910, he had to resort to electoral fraud to fend off a strong challenge from Francisco Madero, a reformer who campaigned on the slogan “effective suffrage and no reelection.” That fraud was the spark that ignited the Mexican revolution.
Though “effective suffrage and no reelection” became the official motto of Mexican governments in the post-revolutionary era, only the latter half was fully implemented. In 1928, Alvaro Obregón, a revolutionary general who had served as president from 1920 to 1924, tried to circumvent the revolutionary ban on reelection. He was assassinated before he could begin a second term. That posed a dilemma for his political ally, Plutarco Elías Calles, who had served as president during the intervening four years, and could not reassume the presidency without risking chaos. Calles’ solution was to form the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, PNR) in 1929 as a vehicle for a shadow presidency. For six years, from 1928 to 1934, Calles ruled indirectly through a succession of puppet presidents.3 Because he continued to be referred to as el jefe máximo (supreme chief), the period is known as el maximato.
In 1933, Calles tried to extend his influence by installing yet another protégé as president. But General Lázaro Cárdenas broke with his sponsor after assuming office in 1934. When Calles tried to reassert control in 1936, Cárdenas gave him a one-way plane ticket to the United States. Cárdenas then reorganized the PNR into the Party of the Mexican Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Mexicana, PRM). The PRM was structured in corporatist fashion—by group as opposed to individual membership—around sectors representing workers, peasants, civil servants, and the army.4 With the PRM as a base, Cárdenas embarked on an ambitious program to implement the social provisions of the Constitution of 1917. He redistributed 12% of Mexico’s land to peasants and indigenous communities; created national peasant and labor unions to press for higher wages, and nationalized foreign oil investments. Reacting to these radical changes, conservatives formed the National Action Party (PAN) in 1939, which would become Mexico’s only important opposition party for the next half century.5
Cárdenas also institutionalized the constitutional prohibition on reelection, by completely retiring from politics at the conclusion of his term in 1940. Yet two of Cárdenas’ actions contributed to the persistence of antidemocratic practices. Like Calles, Cárdenas hand-picked his successor, General Manuel Avila Camacho, then at least tolerated the use of electoral fraud to install him in the presidency. And though he had intended to increase the influence of ordinary Mexicans on government by restructuring the ruling party along corporatist lines, that strategy ended up having the opposite effect under succeeding administrations.
When Miguel Alemán became president in 1946, the party underwent a further transformation. Where Cárdenas’ sympathies had been with wage-earners and peasants, Alemán, who was himself an entrepreneur, was more sympathetic to business owners and managers. Far from wanting to organize the lower classes for social change, Alemán sought to keep them pacified. Corporatism suited the purpose, because just as it could be used to mobilize, it could be used to immobilize, by subjecting labor and peasant unions to government control. Reflecting the new emphasis on stability, the party was renamed Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI).6 As with its predecessors the PNR and the PRM, the PRI was organized in vertical fashion from the presidency downward. That meant that unlike political parties that developed in democratic societies, the PRI was always more of a tool of governance—more specifically, an extension of presidential authority—than a membership organization contending for a share of political power.
Though there have been eight presidential elections since the founding of the PRI, and though the constitutional prohibition on reelection has been observed throughout, the aim of developing a more open, democratic, system has been frustrated by institutionalization of the dedazo. That is the figurative “tap of the finger” by which each outgoing president designates his successor, in what is known as the destape (“unveiling”) of the tapado (“the hidden favorite”). There has been little pretense of democratic process within the PRI: the outgoing president’s choice has always prevailed by acclamation.7 The PRI candidate has then confronted rivals from other parties in very unequal contests, with overwhelming advantages in campaign financing, television exposure, and patronage. When these advantages have proven insufficient, the government has often resorted to electoral fraud, as it did to secure the election of Carlos Salinas in the closely contested 1988 presidential election.8
Electoral fraud has, to be sure, been a last resort. Until the debt crisis of the 1980s, the PRI tried to keep as many of the country’s political forces as possible under its tent, by an internal process of negotiation, and by dividing the spoils of office. Labor bosses could count on a percentage of governorships and seats in Congress, as could army officers, leaders of peasant unions, and representatives of the business community. The government also subsidized everything from tortillas and subway fares for the poor to electricity rates and communications satellites for businesses. Where dissent surfaced nonetheless, the PRI would often try to coopt it, by offering leaders government posts or bribes.
By the early 1980s, the collapse in oil prices and rise in interest rates made such largesse unsustainable. To keep the country solvent, the government had to slash subsidies and cut back patronage employment. To make payments on the debt, it also had to print money, causing double-digit inflation that sliced the purchasing power of wages in half. The rich could shield themselves and even profit from the economic collapse by buying dollars and taking advantage of lower real wages; the poor could not. The strain was too much, and the PRI split.
In 1986, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of the former president, concluded his term as governor of the state of Michoacán and launched a campaign to democratize the PRI. With Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, a former PRI president, cabinet minister, and ambassador to the United Nations, Cárdenas formed the Democratic Current (Corriente Democrática, CD), whose members pressed the party to hold internal elections and caucuses to select candidates, including the party’s presidential nominee. When their efforts failed, they quit the PRI the following year, and formed National Democratic Front (Frente Democrático Nacional, FDN), a coalition of four small parties and dozens of civic organizations.9 In 1988, Cárdenas ran for the presidency as candidate of the FDN.
Cárdenas did better than anyone expected. On election night, with early returns showing him with a substantial lead over PRI candidate Carlos Salinas, government officials abruptly cut off public access to the vote-tallying computers.10 In the ensuing days, tens of thousands of Cárdenas ballots were found in smoldering heaps along roadsides, floating down rivers, and stuffed in dumpsters.11 Tally sheets were found to have been altered by the addition of zeros in the PRI columns. Ten days after the election, the Federal Electoral Commission released official results showing Salinas with just over 50% of the vote to 32% for Cárdenas and 16% for Manuel Clouthier of the PAN. But copies of official tally sheets from the 55% of polling stations that were covered by opposition poll watchers showed Cárdenas in the lead, and the government refused to make public the tally sheets for the remaining 45%.12 An independent statistical analysis of the data released by the federal electoral commission suggests Cárdenas won the election with between 41 and 42% of the vote, to about 36% for Salinas and 22% for Clouthier.13 The government’s only response was to deny opposition requests to reexamine the sealed ballot boxes, which were kept under military guard in the basement of the Chamber of Deputies, then destroyed in 1991.14
Cárdenas refused to accept the legitimacy of the Salinas presidency. Travelling across Mexico in the period between the election and the inauguration, he led massive protests against electoral fraud. Then in October 1988, as the FDN disbanded into its constituent units, Cárdenas called for creation of a new political party of the moderate left, to pursue the struggle for democracy. It was named Party of the Democratic Revolution (Partido de la Revolución Democrática, PRD), in commemoration of the “democratic revolution” initiated at the polls on July 6, 1988, and that remained to be consummated by vanquishing electoral fraud.15
Salinas took office in December 1988 under a cloud of suspicion over the election results, with every opposition legislator voting to reject his designation as president, and with scores waving burnt ballots. In his inauguration, held behind cordons of soldiers and riot police, he pledged to clean up the electoral process. An electoral reform followed in 1989-1990, but left control of elections securely in the hands of the PRI, undermining the credibility of official electoral results. That led to mass protests following elections in the states of Guanajuato (1991), San Luis Potosí (1991), Tabasco (1991-1992), and Michoacán (1992). With walls of protesters blocking access to the statehouses, government ground to a standstill, forcing the president to ask the PRI governors to step aside.16
The international embarrassment caused by evidence of continuing electoral fraud amid efforts to secure passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) led to a second federal electoral reform in late 1993. This doubled the number of Senate seats to 128 (four per state) in order to reserve a quarter of the seats for opposition parties, and limited the ruling party to a maximum of 315 of 500 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. Yet it left electoral commissions under the control of the president and his party.17 The ink was barely dry before the government faced its next embarrassment, in the December 1993 gubernatorial election in Yucatán. Under cover of a power blackout, electoral officials doctored results in an effort to recover the mayoralty of Mérida, the state capital, from the PAN. Though the government was eventually forced to back down on Mérida, it nonetheless set off extensive protests by inaugurating a PRI governor whose election was likewise tainted by fraud.18
Then on January 1, 1994, Mayan rebels seized several large towns in the southern state of Chiapas. Calling themselves the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN), they made democracy their central demand, winning widespread sympathy throughout the country. The political shock of the zapatista rebellion led to replacement of hard-line Secretary of Government (Secretario de Gobernación, informally known as minister of the interior) Patrocinio González Garrido with Jorge Carpizo, who began negotiations for further electoral reforms.19 Unlike previous negotiations, these included representatives of the PRD as well as the PAN. This led to more substantial reforms, the most important of which was an end to PRI control of the General Council of the Federal Electoral Institute. Though an important advance, the new, more independent council did not convene until June, limiting its ability to influence conditions for the August 21 presidential and congressional elections.
作者：安魂曲 在 罕见奇谈 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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老安我靠论据说话，再给林思云的“墨西哥一直是民主社会”论一击
