ELECTORAL FRAUD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: MEXICO’S CASE by Fredo Arias-King
ELECTORAL FRAUD AND ITS CONSEQUENCES: MEXICO’S CASE
In 1988, Mexico experienced a presidential election tainted by evident and widespread fraud which anointed the candidate of the one-party regime then in power continuously since 1929.
The fraud came complete with a “system crash” which interrupted the official vote-tabulating, which had been putting the leftist oppositionist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano ahead of Carlos Salinas de Gortari of the ruling PRI party. When the system came back on, Salinas was suddenly ahead. It took several days for the results to become official. The lackey press became even more an Orwellian “Ministry of Truth” those months. Several witnesses from within the system coming forward were murdered or beaten.
I was volunteering then for the candidate of the center-right PAN, the jolly entrepreneur Manuel J. Clouthier, or Maquío as people fondly knew him. Clouthier represented the fiery branch of the PAN known as the “barbarians of the north”, in contrast to the subdued, murky, and unelectable PAN traditionalists, used to uninterrupted electoral defeats since the party’s founding in 1939, which they would take in stride as God’s moral punishment (they’re devout Catholics after all).
After the fraud, Cárdenas and Clouthier formed an unlikely alliance to challenge the results. The former, the son of the revered former president Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, probably could have mobilized his hordes of angry supporters to storm the institutions of power (the PRI regime however said it was ready to kill a million people to prevent this), but instead this uncharismatic engineer followed a legalistic approach which fizzled out.
Clouthier continued barnstorming the country to lead rallies condemning the fraud. He formed a “shadow cabinet” with fellow “barbarians” (businessmen-turned-politicians), some of which were elected to Congress. One of them, former director of Coca-Cola Mexico, Vicente Fox Quesada, mocked the illegitimate president Salinas at the Congress by wearing on his ears ballots found in landfills and floating on rivers.
However, as Clouthier was mobilizing the masses, the PAN’s nomenklatura, which was never easy with him and other non-ideological “interlopers” to begin with, betrayed Clouthier and started negotiating with Salinas and the PRI, virtually cementing his fraudulent victory. (U.S. Vice President George H.W. Bush, running concurrently for president, came out strongly to endorse Salinas, and they remained friends and partners thenceforth.)
Clouthier died in mysterious circumstances in a highway accident the following year, in October 1989.
The consequences of this fraud are instructive.
First, Mexico was governed from 1988 to 1994 by an illegitimate president who passed many necessary reforms that he otherwise would have unlikely adopted if he had felt more secure in that chair. The PAN evidently traded its support in exchange for Salinas breaking the disastrous cycle of statist, patron-client, and inflationary economics which had bankrupted the country repeatedly but which was a hallmark of the PRI regime’s long hold on power. Salinas ushered in a form of shock therapy and either closed or privatized thousands of state-owned-companies. His crowning achievement was negotiating and passing NAFTA, which eventually made Mexico a manufacturing superpower and surpassing Canada and China as the U.S.’s number-one trading partner as of 2019.
Second, this created a silent and later evident civil war within the PRI party and system, with those outraged by the end of their easy privileges and massive corruption that state control of the economy provide, opposed to Salinas and his “reformers” which also became rich through the crony capitalism that replaced the previous crony socialism. The unofficial leader of that wing of the PRI-regime dissatisfied with Salinas and his “free-market reforms” was former president Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970-1976), widely despised by average Mexicans but considered still powerful by virtue of his ties to the political police (which he once headed) and the leading drug cartels. When Salinas’s handpicked successor was murdered while campaigning in 1994 and his brother Raúl was arrested for grand theft and murder, Salinas publicly blamed Echeverría. Salinas became the bête noire of Mexican politics, widely blamed for the 1994 financial crisis. He fled the country and was on the run for years.
Third, it corrupted the once-pristine PAN unrecognizably, turning it into a form of appendage of the PRI regime. Diego Fernández de Ceballos, the leading PAN nomenklatura ideologue who negotiated with Salinas in 1988, became the PAN candidate in the 1994 elections and was widely seen as toning down his campaign when polls showed him catching up with the PRI candidate, the eventual winner Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León. Later, journalists discovered numerous choice properties in his name which he explained away casually. Later yet he was kidnapped for several weeks and apparently much of his fortune was extracted for his release.
Vicente Fox became the PAN candidate in 2000 and won unexpectedly but refused to change the PRI-system in any way, surrounding himself mostly with its hacks and ignoring the citizen coalition which mobilized against all odds to put him in power. It was discovered later that Fox had had numerous meetings with Echeverría, and later appointed several of his key operatives to the most sensitive posts in his cabinet. I was handling foreign relations for the campaign and witnessed this political crime firsthand after the PAN’s pyrrhic “victory”. His successor, Felipe Calderón, squarely from the PAN nomenklatura, did essentially the same thing after his victory in 2006. Calderón’s chief of federal police and most visible face in the combat against the drug cartels is now in a U.S. prison awaiting trial for his links with the Sinaloa drug cartel of “El Chapo” Guzmán, also in U.S. custody now.
A fourth consequence of the political eddies emanating from that 1988 electoral fraud and subsequent alliance of the PRI and PAN into the new governing class, was predictable: It set the stage for an anti-system insider posing as an outsider to form a new party (Morena), condemn the “PRIAN” system as one big corrupt oligarchy (which it was) and win an overwhelming victory in 2018.
Several of the leading characters from that era kept reappearing later in leading roles, which say a lot about the surreal nature of Mexican politics.
The PRI governor of Clouthier’s state, Francisco Labastida Ochoa, who was suspected in organizing the accident that killed Clouthier in 1989, later became the PRI’s candidate that unexpectedly lost the 2000 election to Vicente Fox, whom Clouthier had brought into politics from Coca Cola as part of his “shadow cabinet.”
Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), a longtime leftist firebrand politico who marched with Cárdenas in 1988, later became Mexico City mayor and presidential candidate in 2006. He barely lost that election after a 15-point lead in the weeks prior, claiming massive electoral fraud which was improbable and moreover never proven. He ran again in 2012 before winning an overwhelming victory in 2018.
The interior minister responsible for the 1988 elections and who was the most visible face of the fraud, Manuel Bartlett Díaz, was considered a political corpse until AMLO resurrected him to serve as a key ally and cabinet member.
Two of Clouthier’s children, who had also dabbled in politics, also allied themselves with AMLO.
After three unsuccessful presidential campaigns (1988, 1994, and 2000), Cárdenas later settled for a minor role as head of foreign relations of the Mexico City government and also as a “senior figure” of the classic Mexican left. He had a falling-out with AMLO which was revealed plainly in a Wikileaks document from a meeting he had with the U.S. political attaché. I didn’t meet Cárdenas until a few years ago, even though our respective families have a long and complex history together.
While the 1988 electoral fraud (as most electoral frauds) was seen and justified then by the regime as an expedient tool that would be forgotten, things did not go as planned. Fraud has long-term unintended consequences also for the perpetrators.
The fortunes of those that perpetuated the 1988 fraud became cursed. It proves the Spanish dictum that “En el pecado se lleva la penitencia” (“The sin comes wrapped with the punishment”).
Today, most Mexicans consider both Clouthier and Cárdenas, the two victims of that 1988 electoral fraud, as the only untainted major politicians of modern times.