The Mexican presidential election of 1990 bore little semblance of freedom or openness. The turmoil of the preceding two-and-a-half years had been a direct result of the contentious election of 1988, and no PRI figure—least of all the party’s presidential nominee, Manuel Bartlett—was in the mood for a fair fight. In many ways, Bartlett had already been running the country for over a year, so his inevitable victory on November 15 was to be more an anointment than a popular endorsement.
It was feared that an independent, left-wing candidacy would only exacerbate the unrest. So, in August, Bartlett used his power as Government Secretary to ban the FDN from fielding a presidential candidate, on the grounds that it was associated with the terrorist ELM and therefore could not be trusted with executive power. Still, a totally uncontested election would have been unfashionable—the United States was watching its southern neighbor closely, and while President Bush had little problem with the leftists being shut out of the running, he expected there to be at least a pretense of competitiveness in the election. So the PAN was permitted to run an opposition candidate. Manuel Clouthier was still tired out from his 1988 campaign, so instead, the party settled on 72-year-old industrialist Luis H. Álvarez, who had also been the PAN’s presidential nominee in 1958. Álvarez ran a quiet campaign, his advanced age preventing him from making many speeches or campaign appearances.
Not that it mattered anyway. The nationwide press was increasingly falling under direct government control, and state-run media outlets ignored Álvarez's campaign so much of the population was not even aware that Álvarez was running for President. When election day came, Álvarez was simply not on the ballot in many states, and in the rest, DFS, Army and state police troops kept careful watch over the polls in opposition-friendly areas to ensure that voters made the "right" decision. Bartlett's landslide victory, therefore, was a foregone conclusion.
On December 1, 1990, Bartlett was sworn in as President. On February 16, 1991, twenty-one
caciques across southern Mexico were brutally murdered in a shocking, if shoddily-organized, ELM campaign. Over the course of a single day, the homes of 43 highly influential landowners throughout Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca were set upon by squads of well-armed men and women affiliated to the ELM. Half of these attacks failed: in nine cases, the assailants were repelled by their target’s bodyguards, while in thirteen cases, the assailants broke in, only to find that their targets were not at home. British historian David Brading has alleged that as many as thirty additional attacks were planned, but fell through because the attackers never received their weapons, failed to meet up at the appointed time or were detected by Army patrols. Nevertheless, by the following morning, 21 rural overlords were dead, their estates reduced to scorched piles of blackened rubble.
The direct effect of the “Night of the Long Guns” (as David Brading would later term it) upon rural Mexican society was negligible. Twenty-one guardians of the PRI social order may have perished, but hundreds more were still alive to do its bidding. However, the raids did prove that the revolutionary underground was capable of shocking feats of organized violence, and, two days after the attacks, the ELM claimed responsibility and demanded that all “class oppressors and fascist PRI warlords” leave the region or face further ferocity. Most heeded the warning: over the next few months, almost half of all
caciques—including nearly all in northern Chiapas, northern Guerrero, eastern Oaxaca, and even many in southern Veracruz—would flee in terror, while many of the rest would secretly ally themselves with the underground
campesino movement in exchange for physical security.
In October 1990, the tiny hamlet of Paso Achiote in western Chiapas was ransacked by gunmen loyal to local cacique Isidro Flecha. Shockingly, after Flecha was shot in both kneecaps and left to die in his burning mansion four months later on the Night of the Long Guns, the villagers proved rather uncooperative with government investigators. [1]
This made it very difficult for the central government to enforce law and order, let alone investigate the raids. Over the previous fifteen months,
caciques had been instrumental in enforcing martial law, helping federal authorities identify local “troublemakers” and contributing their own private gunmen to government raids on suspected terrorist hideouts. Now that most of the local power brokers had fled or switched sides, federal authorities found it nigh-impossible to maintain effective control over the region. The old guard PRI also collapsed in strength following the Night of the Long Guns. The
caciques had always played a crucial role in preserving PRI hegemony, intimidating its opponents through use of force and using their political influence to bolster its authority in their locales; without their stewardship, that crucial strain of the PRI that stressed obedience to the President practically went extinct, paving the way for complete subversion of the grassroots-level PRI by radical
campesinos. The
campesino-controlled PRI organizations still followed party procedures and many were legitimized by turncoat
caciques, meaning that the central government was largely unaware of the transformations the
partido oficial was undergoing in the south.
By summertime, the entire region had become one big money pit for Los Pinos. Since January of 1990, the federal government had spent as much as $140 million keeping order in the south—money it could scarcely afford to lose, as it was now forced to spend $373 million every month to service its crippling debt to the United States. In June, President Bartlett reluctantly removed 8,000 Army and DFS troops from Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, taking the lack of major violence since February to mean that enough of the radicalized population had been jailed to prevent further unrest.
The main reason why President Bartlett agreed to recall the troops is because their services were required elsewhere. In July of 1991, fresh elections would be held for the Congress of the Union, and Bartlett wanted the PRI to regain its supermajority. To ensure this, Bartlett pulled federal forces out of the south and stationed them in opposition-friendly polling places, just as he had done for his own election campaign in November. Bartlett’s Government Secretary, “Don” Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, [2] warned the President not to assume that the elections would go smoothly in the south, but Bartlett pooh-poohed his fears. After all, the PRI Congressional candidates in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero (all of whom had been selected by local PRI committees in the aftermath of the Cacique Raids) were running unopposed, and therefore guaranteed to win. What could possibly go wrong?
Don Fernando couldn’t answer, and neither could the rest of the world. Most of Latin America was fixated on Venezuela, where President Carlos Andrés Pérez successfully defended his government from a coup d’état in June. Andrés Pérez had taken power around the same time as Carlos Salinas, and had initially pursued a similar agenda of cutbacks and privatizations. But after watching Salinas’s neoliberal policies lead Mexico to economic ruin, Andrés Pérez reversed course, taking advantage of high petroleum prices (which had risen sharply following the Mexican oil workers’ strike in 1988) to increase funding for popular welfare programs, making his government much more popular among the Venezuelan people. In June of 1991, a radical socialist faction of the Venezuelan Army led by Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez tried to take power in a coup, but failed miserably. Public opinion toward the coup plotters was almost overwhelmingly negative. Most of its leaders were arrested, while Chávez himself went into hiding. [3] Andrés Pérez and the rest of South America were therefore too distracted to pay much heed to events in Mexico.
Within a week after handing over his presidential sash, Raúl Salinas de Gortari had moved into a $62 million mega-mansion in Steinhausen, Switzerland. Critics pointed out that he couldn’t possibly have afforded the mansion without massive looting of the public coffers, but the Mexican press was silent on the issue, respecting the decades-long tradition of not criticizing former Presidents.
In the United States, however, the Mexican situation was getting ample attention from the political establishment, largely through the efforts of one man: Henry Cisneros. Cisneros had been the highly popular Democratic Mayor of San Antonio from 1981 until 1988, when he publicly confessed that he had had an extramarital affair and resigned to focus on reconciling with his family. Pundits declared the end of Cisneros’s political career, and when he announced a year later that he would run for Texas’s Class 2 Senate seat in 1990, he was almost laughed off the podium. [4] But critics underestimated Cisneros’s potential. He was a skilled political bridge-builder, having won broad support on all his mayoral campaigns from both liberals and conservatives. His Mexican heritage and Catholicism ensured near-universal support from Hispanics—indeed, Cisneros repeatedly stated that his inspiration to run for Senate had been meeting the tens of thousands of Mexican refugees who had fled their home country in 1989 to join Texas’s sizable Hispanic community, which he believed needed greater representation at the federal level.
Cisneros easily won the Democratic nomination, while the incumbent Republican Senator, Phil Gramm, saw a surprisingly strong primary challenge from former state senator Hank Grover, who lambasted Gramm for being “soft” on illegal immigration. Gramm subsequently took a hard line on immigration which was criticized by many as having discriminatory undertones. Gramm also repeatedly tried to use Cisneros’s extramarital affair against him, but this backfired, as Cisneros’s openness about the affair and seemingly genuine remorse meant that voters saw Cisneros as both an honest politician and a truly penitent Christian—two qualities which many felt were lacking in contemporary American politics. Of the two incumbent Republican Senators who lost their seats in 1990, few would have guessed that one would have been from Texas, of all states.
Senator Cisneros quickly emerged as Manuel Bartlett’s harshest critic in Washington. Over the course of his term, he would introduce several Senate resolutions condemning the PRI regime, as well as a bill to leverage U.S. ownership of Mexican debt in order to force Bartlett to loosen his repression. As things continued to get worse for the Mexican people, Cisneros forced the American political establishment to acknowledge their hardship even when politically inconvenient. He soon grew into a champion not only of Mexican residents, but for Mexican-Americans and inner-city residents across the entire United States. And, as Mexican-American communities swelled with refugees and American cities were flooded with illegal drugs from Mexican cartels, Cisneros’s status as a rising star in the Democratic Party was secure.
[1] Isidro Flecha was/is a real person. He conducted a raid on Paso Achiote in OTL April 1990, and to my best knowledge faced no significant repercussions for it.
[2] Who was Carlos Salinas's Government Secretary in OTL.
[3] In OTL, Andrés Pérez continued on with his neoliberal agenda, making his regime extremely unpopular among regular Venezuelans. Chávez's coup still failed, but he was still supported by much of the population, setting the stage for his pardoning and his eventual, successful Presidential run in 1998.
[4] In OTL, Cisneros did not publicly reveal his affair or run for Senate. Here, turmoil in Mexico has had a indirect, but clear, twofold effect on his political decisions.
[5] The OTL Democratic nominee was Hugh Parmer, whom Gramm beat in a landslide.
I'm very glad you're enjoying this timeline! I've been planning it for close to a year now, and I'm happy to see that it's going over well. The next update should be up sometime over the next couple of days. I'm on vacation now, so there might be a bit of a delay.
