Sorry about the long delay, this is a busy time of year for me. To make up for the gap, you get an extra-long update today. Also, the next part will be a narrative piece so it’ll be easier to digest. Enjoy!
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By August of 1991, the war between the
Zapatistas and the Mexican government was at a bitter stalemate—the ELM was too overstretched to push beyond the declared borders of the
Estado de Zapata, while the Mexican Army (exhausted after two years of martial law) had neither the strength nor the funding to reconquer the rebellious territory. Within a month of the initial uprising, President Bartlett was on the phone with George Bush, begging for U.S. military assistance and joining dozens of Congressmen who had been clamoring for a U.S. intervention since week one of the conflict.
Bush, for his part, was dead-set against sending troops into Chiapas. He feared that an intervention there might degenerate into a second Vietnam, a military quagmire that would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, kill thousands of American soldiers, and exacerbate, rather than solve, the crisis. It would be better, President Bush snidely informed his Mexican counterpart, to resolve the situation through bilateral, foreign-mediated negotiations between the government and the
Zapatistas. “If the post-Cold War world is to have one defining principle,” the President declared in a high-minded speech on August 13, “it should be that disputes among armies are best resolved not through death and destruction, but through deal-making and dialogue.”
In his efforts to justify not intervening in Mexico, President Bush found an unlikely ally in his fellow Texan, Henry Cisneros. The freshman Democratic senator was among the fiercest opponents of intervention, calling Manuel Bartlett "every bit as tyrannical as Saddam Hussein" and persuading many Americans to support the Zapatistas
in their war against the Mexican government.
Later that week, as news channels flooded with reports that Iraq had invaded Kuwait, Bush would find himself wishing he had chosen his words more carefully.
Relations between the two oil-producing states on the Persian Gulf had long been tense and hostile. But, on August 18, 1991, when Saddam Hussein's Iraq suddenly launched an invasion of its minuscule, coastal neighbor, the world was shocked [1]. The tiny Kuwaiti Army was quickly overwhelmed, and, to preserve U.S. access to Kuwait’s vast oil reserves, Bush soon announced he was deploying U.S. troops (alongside those from a 35-country Coalition) to the Gulf. Critics leapt to point out the hypocrisy of praising peace one week and threatening war the next; many Congressmen called on President Bush to make good on his previous statements about war by negotiating a peaceful solution to the Kuwait crisis.
Some of these anti-war Congressmen were temporarily swayed by the testimony of Nayirah Al-Sabah, a 16-year-old Kuwaiti girl who testified that she had watched Iraqi soldiers commit horrible atrocities while serving as a nurse in a Kuwait City hospital. However, it was soon revealed that Nayirah was, in fact, the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States, and her tearful testimony had been a lie. [2] It was anger over this deception, and at the gap between the Bush administration’s peaceful rhetoric and belligerent actions, that prompted the Senate to invoke the War Powers Act, voting on November 17 not to authorize long-term use of military force against Iraq. [3]
This gave the U.S. only a narrow, 60-day window in which to liberate Kuwait. Coalition forces invaded on December 3 with one U.S. division fewer than initially planned, and although they suffered no major defeats, the rushed nature of the invasion led to higher-than-expected casualty figures, particularly among the 101st Airborne Division. Public support for the war was further sapped by various ignoble incidents, such as when the U.S.S.
Tripoli and
Vincennes were badly damaged by Iraqi mines, and the infamous “Highway of Death”, in which Coalition forces bulldozing through a six-lane highway destroyed thousands of civilian vehicles and killed many of their occupants. By the time Coalition forces crossed over into Iraqi territory, the U.S. had already begun withdrawing its troops, and though Saddam agreed to a ceasefire on January 20, the War had left a bad taste in the mouths of the American people, souring them on any new foreign entanglements for the foreseeable future.
After the Mexican oil workers’ strike in 1988, President Bush had sought to insulate America from the unstable Mexican oil market by increasing petroleum imports from Canada, Venezuela, and other countries. This strategy backfired during the Gulf War, which caused a renewed spike in world oil prices that reinforced the lackluster state of the American economy.
In the newly-founded State of Zapata, meanwhile, the
Zapatistas were working to consolidate their territory and organize a civilian administration to administer it. The very concept of having a sovereign state government was controversial—some of the breakaway state’s inhabitants feared that a centralized state government would become just as repressive as Mexico City, while others complained that it would interfere with each individual community's right to govern itself. However, most
Zapatistas realized that some sort of civilian administration would be necessary if they wanted to retain their independence. Political power in Zapata was split among several grassroots organizations that hated each other almost as much as they hated the PRI; when the Mexican Army inevitably attacked again, many feared that the State would crumble into warring factions unless held together by a single, unified administration. Many also saw an elected, civilian government as a means of checking the ELM’s power and preventing it from turning Zapata into a military dictatorship. So, in mid-August, the breakaway
Congreso Independiente passed a resolution calling for the immediate election of a Governor and a new State Congress.
Electoral campaigns began almost immediately, with the state’s four most powerful groups—OCEZ-
Centro, OCEZ-CNPA CIOAC and COCEI—each nominating its own candidate. The only clear "issue" in the race was whether or not to enter into peace talks with the Bartlett administration; OCEZ-
Centro and CIOAC both insisted that negotiating with Mexico City would be futile, while OCEZ-CNPA and COCEI felt that some sort of settlement was crucial for Zapata’s long-term survival. Equally, if not more, important was tribal identity of each candidate: COCEI's nominee, Héctor Sánchez López, swept western Zapata (which was dominated by his fellow Zapotec Indians) but drew little support from anywhere else, while CIOAC's Margarito Xib Ruíz struggled to garner widespread support in part because his people, the Tojolobals, were in the minority.
In addition, the voting procedures were highly irregular. In towns dominated by one particular group, that faction would often used borrowed PRI fraud tactics to inflate its vote count. Even in places where the vote was free and fair, there was rarely enough paper for individual ballots, so all votes were recorded on a single sheet and carried off to the state’s
de facto capital of Venustiano Carranza in a process that took more than two months to complete. By October, enough votes had been counted to determine with certainty that Arturo Albores Velasco, a charismatic community organizer from Tuxtla, had won the election. [5] Most voters preferred Albores's vision of possible peace to his opponents’ promise of definite war, and while Albores’s faction, the OCEZ-CNPA, controlled less territory than its rivals, Albores himself was personally popular as a skilled community activist and proponent of Mayan culture. Albores’s plurality was large enough that his victory was not widely questioned, except by the most diehard members of rival organizations.
Elections to the new Congress, however, were highly questionable. Zapata’s population was estimated at around 1.8 million, and municipalities were instructed to send one delegate for every 5,000 citizens, so that the
Congreso de Zapata would have approximately 360 members. Instead, on October 12, over 1,100 men and women crowded into the
Casa del Pueblo in Carranza, each claiming to have been “elected” by their constituents. Most had, in fact, been appointed by their respective factions, each of which desired to control as much of the
Congreso as possible. Arturo Albores was inaugurated as Governor of Free and Sovereign State of Emiliano Zapata on October 15, but his effective power was dubious, as the fractious and disorderly legislature made it impossible for him to pass any sort of legislation, let alone draft a working Constitution. Though the civilian government had been intended as a check on the ELM's power, the Army increasingly appeared to be the only genuinely functional, orderly organization in Zapata.
One thing Albores
could do, however, was press forward with the peace negotiations process. Talks were scheduled to commence on March 1, 1992, and Albores and ELM
Subcomandante Marcos were set to attend, along with several American diplomats. Other attendees would include Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, the Archbishop of Guadalajara and a senior figure of the Catholic clergy in Chiapas; Raymond Chrétien, the former Canadian ambassador to Mexico; and even Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, whom the
Zapatistas regarded as the legitimate President of Mexico on the grounds that he had been the rightful victor of the election of 1988.
In 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had gone into grief-fueled isolation to mourn the death of his beloved wife, Celeste Batel. By 1991, the grief had mostly passed, and when the Zapatistas
announced that they would not participate in any peace talks that did not include Cárdenas (whom they regarded as the "true" President of Mexico), he agreed to return to public life by helping to mediate terms between the governments of Manuel Bartlett and Arturo Albores Velasco.
President Bartlett, of course, would also be sending representatives to the peace negotiations, but he had no intention of settling. Since the very start of the Selva Rebellion, Bartlett had been determined not to rest until the
Zapatistas had been pounded into dust. But for that, he would need money—$730 million, to be exact, which Defense Secretary Juan Arévalo Gardoqui estimated would be the minimum cost of an effective counterinsurgency. Bartlett decided he would raise the money by selling off more government-owned corporations and agencies to the private sector, but this posed a problem: since the bloody Cananea Strike of 1990, labor leaders across Mexico had vowed to resist privatization of any kind. How to ensure that privatization would not simply lead to more unrest? For that, Bartlett would need the help of someone who understood the inner psychology of the Mexican labor movement—someone who knew that a Mexican union boss will agree to just about anything, provided he is kept safe, rich and happy. The right person, as it turned out, was a labor leader herself: Elba Esther Gordillo, Secretary-General of the enormous National Teachers’ Federation.
During her brief time as leader of the largest labor syndicate in Latin America, Elba Esther Gordillo’s political genius had kept Mexico’s schoolteachers firmly loyal to the PRI, even as union after union turned against the ruling party. She was appointed Secretary of Labor on August 22, and immediately began negotiating with various union leaders to ensure a smooth transition to private ownership. Within two months, agreements had been hammered out, and the privatizations began apace: Sepomex, the Mexican national postal service, was purchased for $132 million by Carlos Slim Hélu, who appointed his son, Carlos Slim Domit, as Executive Director. The state-owned television broadcaster Imevisión was sold to the young magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego for $354 million, with the tacit understanding that he would not broadcast material critical of the government. The heftiest purchase of all was for the National Bank of Mexico, or Banamex, which was sold to Pueblan textile magnate Kamel Nacif Borge for a cool $464 million.
Elba Esther Gordillo became the highest-ranking woman in Mexican history when Bartlett appointed her Secretary of Labor. Her negotiations with union leaders may have prevented another round of strikes, but the concessions she gave to the unions significantly reduced the market value of the state-owned companies, diminishing the revenue the government gained from their sale.
Yet, even after pawning off all of these government appendages, Bartlett still lacked the funding to carry out the full breadth of his institutional ambitions. The
Zapatistas had been so effective at infiltrating the Chiapas State Congress that Bartlett no longer trusted any of Mexico’s 31 state governments to faithfully enforce his edicts. And, as Bartlett realized the degree to which his party had been compromised by rebel infilitration, he began to fear than any
priísta, from the lowliest ward heeler to the President of the Chamber of Deputies, could secretly be a
Zapatista agent in disguise.
The solution to this problem, Bartlett decided, was a massive reinvestment in the DFS. Most of the Federal Security Directorate’s 4,100 agents were personally loyal to President Bartlett, because he himself had signed their credentials while serving as Government Secretary. In mid-October, ambitious plans were announced to double the DFS's staff, extend the Law of Regional Security so that the DFS could serve as a police force in "disloyal" states, and give DFS agents the power to detain and interrogate citizens suspected of harboring “terrorist sympathies”. All PRI members would be subject to extensive background checks from a new sub-department of the Government Secretariat, the
Oficina de Integridad Política (“Office of Political Integrity”), and if this new agency judged a certain
priísta’s loyalty to the government to be doubtful, it would be the duty of the DFS to “apprehend the traitor” and remove him or her from the public sphere. To finance this planned expansion of federal power, Bartlett would need even more money than he could squeeze out of government-owned corporations—and he knew just how to get it.
Every year, millions of kilograms of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and other illegal narcotics traveled thousands of miles from the poppy fields and coca plantations of South America to the run-down inner cities of the United States. As these substances passed through Mexico, they fueled a massive river of cash billions of dollars deep which flowed from one end of the country to the other, drenching every institution it touched with the corrosive acid of drug money and rewarding those few who mastered it with outrageous wealth and power. The kingpins were among the most influential men in Mexico, commanding cartels that in some cities were more powerful than the police and amassing riches beyond the wildest dreams of most Mexicans—and Bartlett knew them all like his old roommates at the University of Manchester.
In 1985, several prominent drug lords—Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo, Miguel Félix Gallardo, Eladio Vuente and several others—had joined forces to kidnap, torture and murder Enrique “Kiki” Camarena, an American DEA agent who had been disrupting their business. The drug dons had bought protection from badge-carrying DFS agents by bribing then-Government Secretary Bartlett [6]; as he delivered the money, Guadalajara Cartel leader Rafael Caro Quintero had asked the aspiring politician to “remember us when you get up high”. And now that Manuel Bartlett had reached the political stratosphere, he was prepared to honor that request. On February 6, 1992, Bartlett met in secret with the heads of the most influential cartels for some negotiations of his own, hoping to secure enough support and funding to pulverize the rebels into dust whatever the outcome of the peace talks...
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[1] The Iraqi invasion of Kuwait happened in OTL August of 1990. In TTL, the Mexican oil workers’ strike led to a spike in world oil prices in the late 1980s, which staved off Saddam’s concerns about Kuwaiti oil production long enough to delay the invasion by a year.
[2] In OTL, Nayirah gave her testimony in October 1990. Though it was a deception, it still had a considerable effect in persuading Congress to support the Gulf War. The deception was not revealed until 1992, after the war was over. In TTL, because all arguments in favor of the War are under closer scrutiny, the deception is revealed much earlier, to very different effect.
[3] In OTL, the
Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 1991 passed the Senate rather narrowly, by a margin of 52 to 47. In TTL, there are already two extra Democratic Senators (Cisneros, plus Lawton Chiles managed to hang on in TTL’s 1988), and the Nayirah testimony combined with Bush’s two-faced rhetoric swings enough crucial votes to defeat the Resolution by 53 to 47.
[4] In OTL, the Gulf War didn’t last as long because the U.S. Army had more time to prepare before launching the invasion. The victory also sparked a much more positive and optimistic reaction among the American people because the U.S. was a committed participant, rather than a part-time belligerent as ITTL.
[5] In OTL, Albores was shot to death in the shop he owned on March 6, 1989. In TTL, owing to the generally more violent climate, Albores has been more careful about his movements and has managed to escape death.
[6] All of which occurred before the POD—and therefore in OTL as well as in TTL. The death of Kiki Camarena and Bartlett’s role in it is discussed in “Blood on the Corn”, a series of three articles published in 2014 by Chuck Bowden and Molly Molloy.
Part 1 is here if you’d like to read it yourself!
