Mexico: Salinas and the PRI at the Crossroads

Abstract

Wayne A. Cornelius is the Gildred Professor of Political Science and founding director of the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at the University of California at San Diego. A past president of the Latin American Studies Association, he has conducted field research in Mexico since 1962. His most recent books are Politics in Mexico: An Introduction and Overview (1988), Mexico's Alternative Political Futures (coeditor, 1989), and Mexican Migration to the United States: Process, Consequences, and Policy Options (coeditor, 1990). Is recent Mexican political history repeating itself?. President Miguel de la Madrid began his six-year term in 1982 with a burst of political reformism. In the first half of 1983, his government strictly adhered to a policy of recognizing opposition-party victories in municipal elections, wherever they occurred. This resulted in a string of victories by the conservative National Action Party (PAN) in important cities of northern Mexico. Hard-liners within de la Madrid's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which has governed Mexico since the late 1920s, quickly convinced him to truncate the political opening. The lesson of 1983 seemed to be that clean elections were a prescription for electoral disaster, in the absence of a thorough internal reform of the party. Yet de la Madrid was not prepared to shift the focus of political reform from relations between the PRI and the opposition parties to the internal problems of the PRI itself. Reforming the PRI would have been far riskier and potentially more disruptive than making further concessions to the opposition parties. As de la Madrid's term wore on, the gap between economic modernization and political modernization grew ever wider. It was a glaring contradiction, never resolved, that contributed importantly to the PRI's electoral debacle of 1988, when the party's presidential candidate, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, won with a bare majority (50.4 percent) amid charges of widespread PRI fraud from his challengers on both the left and the right.