Part 11: Andrés López Obrador
Some historians argue that is unfair to call President Raúl Salinas de Gortari the "Lesser Salinas". Despite all his failures, they argue, Carlos's neoliberal agenda was so putridly counter-progressive that had he survived, he would have done an even worse job than his brother. But this is a minority view. Most agree that Raúl was in many ways inferior but in no ways superior to Carlos as a President and as a man. Raúl faced many of the same issues as Carlos had, but he attacked them without his brother’s political guile, economic know-how or pragmatic instincts. He slashed government spending and welfare programs but failed to divert the savings back into streamlined social services, so the economy sank ever deeper for lack of demand while the kleptocratic Raúl stashed billions of dollars away in secret overseas bank accounts. His secluded nature did much to undermine the soft power of the Presidency, cheapening the image of what, under Carlos, had been the vibrant, dynamic nexus of Mexican political life. And his one potentially redeeming quality—his apparent distaste for the hardhanded authoritarian tactics of his compatriots within the PRI—was canceled out by his deference to Manuel Bartlett on all matters of national security. Raúl likely could have kept a leash on his Government Secretary had he been so inclined, but instead, he allowed Bartlett to become President in all but name while he withdrew into the opulent vestiges of Los Pinos.
Bartlett’s influence on the interim President was evident from the very beginning, when Raúl announced his decision to reestablish the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate). The DFS had been founded in 1947 as an intelligence agency under the command of the Government Secretary, and over the following decades its infamous Brigada Blanca would kidnap and torture tens of thousands of suspected leftist rebels, doing most of the dirty work of the PRI’s Dirty War. By the 1980s, practically all 1,500 DFS employees had developed deep ties to the illegal drug trade, and after a scandal in 1985 involving the kidnapping and murder of an American DEA officer, Secretary Bartlett had been forced to disband the DFS in response. [1] After it was revealed in late September 1989 that the DFS would be reorganized under Bartlett’s direct control, one panista Congressman called Raúl a “puppet President” of Bartlett, accusing the Government Secretary of simply wanting his own personal paramilitary organization which he could order around without having to haggle Army troops from the Defense Secretariat. Bartlett (speaking for Raúl during one of the president's many public absences) countered that, in this time of civil strife and public assassinations, the country desperately needed an organization that could enforce the law and uphold public order without being held back by pesky judicial constraints. [2]
Over the objections of opposition legislators, the DFS was officially reborn in autumn of 1989. American law enforcement officials were not pleased at the revival of the blatantly corrupt agency, but after the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, the State Department became too distracted by the imminent end of the Cold War to pressure the Lesser Salinas into changing his mind. By January, over 1,100 agents had been recruited into the new DFS, and despite claims of a rigorous screening process, many were just ex-employees of the old agency, who brought into the new organization their connections to crime syndicates and drug cartels. [3] Drug kingpins like Amado Carrillo Fuentes and Miguel Caro Quintero were delighted to see their lieutenants become commanders in a government paramilitary force, and fully intended to use this newfound power and influence to expand their drug empires.
In contrast to his late brother’s gift for political showmanship, President Raúl Salinas de Gortari was largely seen as a withdrawn and reclusive figure. This image was solidified just one week into his presidency, when he refused to attend Carlos’s state funeral out of fear that he might also be assassinated.
The reconstituted DFS saw action just two months after its reformation. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had largely withdrawn from nationwide politics following his wife’s murder, but his supporters had remained politically active, and his political coalition, the Frente Democratico Nacional (FDN), had spread throughout the countryside, attracting a militant following in agrarian states like Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán, whose populations had suffered decades of neglect from incompetent PRI administrations, and who were being slowly radicalized by the deprivation of the recession. [4] Tensions between disgruntled campesinos and local PRI warlords came to a head in December of 1989, when local elections were held in Guerrero and Michoacán. The FDN fielded mayoral candidates in dozens of municipalities across the two states, and the statewide PRI crushed them all with the time-tested tactic of electoral fraud. But this time, the Frente refused to back down. Well-armed Frentistas took over thirteen of the contested municipalities in Guerrero and eleven in Michoacán, invading town halls, inaugurating alternative mayors and setting up “popular police” forces to administer their occupation. Most appallingly, many of the rebellious campesinos proclaimed their allegiance to the Army of Mexican Liberation—the same organization which had kidnapped ex-President José López Portillo in March. The ELM, as it called itself in Spanish, was seizing control of entire municipalities, and the government would not stand for it. [5]
On the morning of January 28, 1990, over 1,300 security forces (900 from the Guerrero state judicial police, 130 from the federal judicial police, and 150 from the reconstituted DFS) [6] closed in on thirteen municipalities in Guerrero to dislodge occupying protesters by force. The newly-appointed state governor, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, had instructed state police chief Gustavo Olea Godoy to use as much force as possible in evicting the protesters, in order to show the ELM, the Frente and any other hostile forces that the PRI was not a force to be trifled with. But as security forces arrived in the rebellious towns, they found to their horror that the protesters were armed. In Cruz Grande, Zihuatenejo, Ometepec, Atoyac de Álvarez, and nine other villages in Guerrero, policemen and DFS toughs marched toward the town centers expecting minimal resistance, only to be fired upon from every building by ELM fighters wielding assault rifles, submachine guns, Molotov cocktails and even some hand grenades (some of which had been supplied by the Cubans, the rest of which had been looted from local police armories). [7] The ELM cells, each led by three or four “commanders” who had undergone brief training from the Cuban Army, fought viciously against the police forces, who resorted to setting many buildings ablaze to flush out entrenched Frentistas and, often as not, shooting them as they ran from the flames. No town bore fewer than 19 deaths; the heaviest burden was borne by the village of Coyuca de Benítez, which saw 43 citizens and 21 officers die in the bloody battle for control of the heavily-fortified municipal palace.
Anti-PRI dissidents, accompanied by several ELM recruits, fight back against federal police forces in the town of Teloloapan.
In neighboring Michoacán, it seemed things would go a bit more peacefully. Only eleven towns in the entire state were occupied by ELM guerrillas in response to the fraudulent elections, and after moderate PRI governor Genovevo Figueroa Zamudio (no relation to Figueroa Alcocer) gave the rebellious townspeople an advance warning about the evictions, most of the protesters returned peacefully to their homes. But the most dedicated ELM fighters stayed on, forcing rather bloody evictions in four of the eleven occupied towns between February 12 and 16 (mostly performed by DFS agents under the orders of Secretary Bartlett due to Figueroa Zamudio's reluctance to call in the Michoacán judicial police). Even after the seditious municipalities were cleared out, violence persisted: on March 4, ELM guerrillas shot and killed José María Campos Vargas, the newly-elected PRI mayor of Huandacareo, Michoacán, prompting two days of civil conflict between dedicated priístas and rebellious Frentistas. [8]
The killings saw relatively little media coverage outside Guerrero and Michoacán, as most of the nationwide press was distracted by the Cananea strike. [9] But after the New York-based human rights agency Americas Watch published a blistering report in June on the problem of violence in rural Mexico, the U.S. government began pressuring the Lesser Salinas to do something about the apparent communist rebellion in his midst. To solve this problem, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer proposed that the Congress pass a federal law that would empower state governors (with the express permission of the President) to declare martial law and call in federal peacekeeping forces and Army troops to help deal with perceived “threats to internal security” within their state. The law was ostensibly conceived to decentralize government power by devolving certain federal powers down to the state level, but Secretary Bartlett envisioned such a law as a prime opportunity to increase federal power by “persuading” state governors to sign over the rights to police their own state. Bartlett was particularly interested in lessening state powers because he believed that Ernesto Ruffo Appel, the PAN governor of Baja California, as well as the PAN-controlled Chihuahua State Congress, were secretly in league with a shadowy cabal of right-wing businessmen and Catholic clerics who would annex the border states to Texas if given the chance. [10] Bartlett feared that the Chihuahua and Baja California state police forces were also in on the conspiracy, and therefore sought to reduce their power by subordinating them in practice to the DFS and the Federal Judicial Police.
The “Federal Law of Regional Security” was quickly drawn up and was presented to the Congress in April. In addition to Figueroa’s suggestions, the measure included provisions allowing the Government Secretary (on the orders of the President, of course) to “temporarily” suspend the people’s rights to private property, and to their freedom of speech and assembly in a given region. Opposition legislators of all stripes railed against the bill, with Frentistas and panistas alike calling it an affront to the people’s most basic constitutional rights. Vicente Fox Quesada, a PAN deputy from Guanajuato, controversially encouraged Secretary Bartlett to meterlo en el culo de su madre, or “shove [the law] up his mother’s ass” during an open Congressional debate in the National Medical Center. FDN Senator Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, whose role in the Congress had practically become that of both opposition leader and whip, managed to rally every single non-PRI legislator against the measure, but in the end, it didn’t matter: Bartlett used the PRI majorities to ram the measure through both houses of Congress. President Salinas signed it into law on April 29 (Raúl’s sense of indebtedness to Bartlett was so deep that he was practically the rubber pen to Congress’s rubber stamp), and the National Supreme Court of Justice, honoring the centuries-old Mexican tradition of a politically-pliable judiciary, quickly affirmed its constitutionality.
The Law was quickly invoked by Governor Figueroa Alcocer, and within weeks, dissident towns in Guerrero were undergoing a military occupation similar to that which had gripped Mexico City since mid-September. Grassroots movements all over the country came out in force to protest the Law of Regional Security, most notably in Tabasco, where political unrest had been brewing continuously since September due to the deteriorating economy and the efforts of Frentista figure Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Since the tumultuous days of late 1988, López Obrador had managed to regain control of his many thousands of supporters, effectively holding them at bay and preventing them from channeling their passionate energies to acts of violence that would only invite further repression from the government. It is therefore very strange that, when he finally released them onto the streets of Villahermosa on May 2 to protest the blatantly repressive Law, the protests degenerated so quickly into a bloody mess of crossfire and street fighting between López Obrador’s supporters, loyal priístas and federal security forces. The official government position was that the Frentistas started the violence; historians and eyewitness accounts dispute this position, arguing that the first shot was likely fired by a DFS operative, perhaps acting on orders or perhaps not. Regardless of who threw the first punch, when the dust settled, all who remained were 83 badly wounded civilians and one dead politician.
__________
[1] All of which is OTL (before the POD). The DFS by the mid-1980s had become so corrupt that it was practically the paramilitary wing of Mexico's illegal drug trade, with badge-carrying DFS agents guarding shipments and roughing up (occasionally killing) civilians or officers who got too close, as happened with DEA agent Kiki Camarena in 1985. The DFS was not reformed again in OTL, but with the more turbulent 1989, Secretary Bartlett feels that it is a necessity.
[2] This is, naturally, just an excuse. No Mexican policeman in the late 1980s would have felt particularly constrained by oversight or the rule of law.
[3] When the DFS's 1,500 agents and commanders were cut loose in 1985, many simply became full-time members of cartels or crime syndicates. Now, many of those guys are back in the saddle, but even more overtly corrupt this time.
[4] In OTL, rather than withdrawing from politics, Cárdenas remained politically active throughout 1989, converting the Frente into the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). By OTL December 1989, the PRD was actually more widespread in the rural areas than the Frente is in TTL, because Cárdenas's direct involvement gave the young opposition party more momentum and a heightened national profile. Here, with Cárdenas—the figurehead of the movement—in a self-imposed state of aggrieved seclusion, his political allies are having a tougher time spreading the Frente throughout the countryside.
[5] This also occurred in OTL after the December 1989 elections, but on a larger scale: 20 towns were occupied in Guerrero and 16 were occupied in Michoacán. In TTL, for the reason described above, the Frente isn't quite as widespread and doesn't run as many mayoral candidates. And the ELM didn't exist in OTL, so their involvement is completely different.
[6] In OTL, a total of 1,000 troops were dispatched throughout Guerrero to deal with a larger number of occupied municipalities. In TTL, with more authoritarian governments in place on both the state level and the federal level, more manpower is used to deal with a smaller problem.
[7] In OTL, the people who occupied the town centers were armed mostly with sticks and other non-lethal weapons, and no town saw more than two or three deaths during the evictions. Here, the ELM is on express orders from the Cuban Army to join in the municipal rebellions and fight back tooth-and-nail, hoping it will stir the populace into class rebellion. TTL's post-election troubles are less widespread, but they're far, far bloodier.
[8] In Michoacán, the evictions were completely bloodless in OTL, because Governor Figueroa Zamudio gave an advance warning to the protesters that they would be evicted (which also occurs in TTL) and because Cárdenas called for his supporters not resist the evictions (which he does not do in TTL).
[9] What is the Cananea strike, you wonder? Just you wait until the next update!
[10] Bartlett really believed (and maybe even still believes) in such a conspiracy.
Bartlett’s influence on the interim President was evident from the very beginning, when Raúl announced his decision to reestablish the Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate). The DFS had been founded in 1947 as an intelligence agency under the command of the Government Secretary, and over the following decades its infamous Brigada Blanca would kidnap and torture tens of thousands of suspected leftist rebels, doing most of the dirty work of the PRI’s Dirty War. By the 1980s, practically all 1,500 DFS employees had developed deep ties to the illegal drug trade, and after a scandal in 1985 involving the kidnapping and murder of an American DEA officer, Secretary Bartlett had been forced to disband the DFS in response. [1] After it was revealed in late September 1989 that the DFS would be reorganized under Bartlett’s direct control, one panista Congressman called Raúl a “puppet President” of Bartlett, accusing the Government Secretary of simply wanting his own personal paramilitary organization which he could order around without having to haggle Army troops from the Defense Secretariat. Bartlett (speaking for Raúl during one of the president's many public absences) countered that, in this time of civil strife and public assassinations, the country desperately needed an organization that could enforce the law and uphold public order without being held back by pesky judicial constraints. [2]
Over the objections of opposition legislators, the DFS was officially reborn in autumn of 1989. American law enforcement officials were not pleased at the revival of the blatantly corrupt agency, but after the Berlin Wall fell on November 9, the State Department became too distracted by the imminent end of the Cold War to pressure the Lesser Salinas into changing his mind. By January, over 1,100 agents had been recruited into the new DFS, and despite claims of a rigorous screening process, many were just ex-employees of the old agency, who brought into the new organization their connections to crime syndicates and drug cartels. [3] Drug kingpins like Amado Carrillo Fuentes and Miguel Caro Quintero were delighted to see their lieutenants become commanders in a government paramilitary force, and fully intended to use this newfound power and influence to expand their drug empires.
In contrast to his late brother’s gift for political showmanship, President Raúl Salinas de Gortari was largely seen as a withdrawn and reclusive figure. This image was solidified just one week into his presidency, when he refused to attend Carlos’s state funeral out of fear that he might also be assassinated.
The reconstituted DFS saw action just two months after its reformation. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had largely withdrawn from nationwide politics following his wife’s murder, but his supporters had remained politically active, and his political coalition, the Frente Democratico Nacional (FDN), had spread throughout the countryside, attracting a militant following in agrarian states like Guerrero, Oaxaca and Michoacán, whose populations had suffered decades of neglect from incompetent PRI administrations, and who were being slowly radicalized by the deprivation of the recession. [4] Tensions between disgruntled campesinos and local PRI warlords came to a head in December of 1989, when local elections were held in Guerrero and Michoacán. The FDN fielded mayoral candidates in dozens of municipalities across the two states, and the statewide PRI crushed them all with the time-tested tactic of electoral fraud. But this time, the Frente refused to back down. Well-armed Frentistas took over thirteen of the contested municipalities in Guerrero and eleven in Michoacán, invading town halls, inaugurating alternative mayors and setting up “popular police” forces to administer their occupation. Most appallingly, many of the rebellious campesinos proclaimed their allegiance to the Army of Mexican Liberation—the same organization which had kidnapped ex-President José López Portillo in March. The ELM, as it called itself in Spanish, was seizing control of entire municipalities, and the government would not stand for it. [5]
On the morning of January 28, 1990, over 1,300 security forces (900 from the Guerrero state judicial police, 130 from the federal judicial police, and 150 from the reconstituted DFS) [6] closed in on thirteen municipalities in Guerrero to dislodge occupying protesters by force. The newly-appointed state governor, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, had instructed state police chief Gustavo Olea Godoy to use as much force as possible in evicting the protesters, in order to show the ELM, the Frente and any other hostile forces that the PRI was not a force to be trifled with. But as security forces arrived in the rebellious towns, they found to their horror that the protesters were armed. In Cruz Grande, Zihuatenejo, Ometepec, Atoyac de Álvarez, and nine other villages in Guerrero, policemen and DFS toughs marched toward the town centers expecting minimal resistance, only to be fired upon from every building by ELM fighters wielding assault rifles, submachine guns, Molotov cocktails and even some hand grenades (some of which had been supplied by the Cubans, the rest of which had been looted from local police armories). [7] The ELM cells, each led by three or four “commanders” who had undergone brief training from the Cuban Army, fought viciously against the police forces, who resorted to setting many buildings ablaze to flush out entrenched Frentistas and, often as not, shooting them as they ran from the flames. No town bore fewer than 19 deaths; the heaviest burden was borne by the village of Coyuca de Benítez, which saw 43 citizens and 21 officers die in the bloody battle for control of the heavily-fortified municipal palace.
Anti-PRI dissidents, accompanied by several ELM recruits, fight back against federal police forces in the town of Teloloapan.
In neighboring Michoacán, it seemed things would go a bit more peacefully. Only eleven towns in the entire state were occupied by ELM guerrillas in response to the fraudulent elections, and after moderate PRI governor Genovevo Figueroa Zamudio (no relation to Figueroa Alcocer) gave the rebellious townspeople an advance warning about the evictions, most of the protesters returned peacefully to their homes. But the most dedicated ELM fighters stayed on, forcing rather bloody evictions in four of the eleven occupied towns between February 12 and 16 (mostly performed by DFS agents under the orders of Secretary Bartlett due to Figueroa Zamudio's reluctance to call in the Michoacán judicial police). Even after the seditious municipalities were cleared out, violence persisted: on March 4, ELM guerrillas shot and killed José María Campos Vargas, the newly-elected PRI mayor of Huandacareo, Michoacán, prompting two days of civil conflict between dedicated priístas and rebellious Frentistas. [8]
The killings saw relatively little media coverage outside Guerrero and Michoacán, as most of the nationwide press was distracted by the Cananea strike. [9] But after the New York-based human rights agency Americas Watch published a blistering report in June on the problem of violence in rural Mexico, the U.S. government began pressuring the Lesser Salinas to do something about the apparent communist rebellion in his midst. To solve this problem, Rubén Figueroa Alcocer proposed that the Congress pass a federal law that would empower state governors (with the express permission of the President) to declare martial law and call in federal peacekeeping forces and Army troops to help deal with perceived “threats to internal security” within their state. The law was ostensibly conceived to decentralize government power by devolving certain federal powers down to the state level, but Secretary Bartlett envisioned such a law as a prime opportunity to increase federal power by “persuading” state governors to sign over the rights to police their own state. Bartlett was particularly interested in lessening state powers because he believed that Ernesto Ruffo Appel, the PAN governor of Baja California, as well as the PAN-controlled Chihuahua State Congress, were secretly in league with a shadowy cabal of right-wing businessmen and Catholic clerics who would annex the border states to Texas if given the chance. [10] Bartlett feared that the Chihuahua and Baja California state police forces were also in on the conspiracy, and therefore sought to reduce their power by subordinating them in practice to the DFS and the Federal Judicial Police.
While attacking the city of Zihuatenejo, Guerrero, federal judicial police troops accidentally shot and killed an American national, Andrew Dufresne. This nearly led to an international incident, until the State Department learned that Dufresne, a former banker from Maine, had been sentenced to life in prison in 1947 for the murder of his wife, but had later escaped to Mexico and spent the next twenty-three years managing a beachside hotel under an assumed name.
The “Federal Law of Regional Security” was quickly drawn up and was presented to the Congress in April. In addition to Figueroa’s suggestions, the measure included provisions allowing the Government Secretary (on the orders of the President, of course) to “temporarily” suspend the people’s rights to private property, and to their freedom of speech and assembly in a given region. Opposition legislators of all stripes railed against the bill, with Frentistas and panistas alike calling it an affront to the people’s most basic constitutional rights. Vicente Fox Quesada, a PAN deputy from Guanajuato, controversially encouraged Secretary Bartlett to meterlo en el culo de su madre, or “shove [the law] up his mother’s ass” during an open Congressional debate in the National Medical Center. FDN Senator Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, whose role in the Congress had practically become that of both opposition leader and whip, managed to rally every single non-PRI legislator against the measure, but in the end, it didn’t matter: Bartlett used the PRI majorities to ram the measure through both houses of Congress. President Salinas signed it into law on April 29 (Raúl’s sense of indebtedness to Bartlett was so deep that he was practically the rubber pen to Congress’s rubber stamp), and the National Supreme Court of Justice, honoring the centuries-old Mexican tradition of a politically-pliable judiciary, quickly affirmed its constitutionality.
The Law was quickly invoked by Governor Figueroa Alcocer, and within weeks, dissident towns in Guerrero were undergoing a military occupation similar to that which had gripped Mexico City since mid-September. Grassroots movements all over the country came out in force to protest the Law of Regional Security, most notably in Tabasco, where political unrest had been brewing continuously since September due to the deteriorating economy and the efforts of Frentista figure Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Since the tumultuous days of late 1988, López Obrador had managed to regain control of his many thousands of supporters, effectively holding them at bay and preventing them from channeling their passionate energies to acts of violence that would only invite further repression from the government. It is therefore very strange that, when he finally released them onto the streets of Villahermosa on May 2 to protest the blatantly repressive Law, the protests degenerated so quickly into a bloody mess of crossfire and street fighting between López Obrador’s supporters, loyal priístas and federal security forces. The official government position was that the Frentistas started the violence; historians and eyewitness accounts dispute this position, arguing that the first shot was likely fired by a DFS operative, perhaps acting on orders or perhaps not. Regardless of who threw the first punch, when the dust settled, all who remained were 83 badly wounded civilians and one dead politician.
__________
[2] This is, naturally, just an excuse. No Mexican policeman in the late 1980s would have felt particularly constrained by oversight or the rule of law.
[3] When the DFS's 1,500 agents and commanders were cut loose in 1985, many simply became full-time members of cartels or crime syndicates. Now, many of those guys are back in the saddle, but even more overtly corrupt this time.
[4] In OTL, rather than withdrawing from politics, Cárdenas remained politically active throughout 1989, converting the Frente into the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). By OTL December 1989, the PRD was actually more widespread in the rural areas than the Frente is in TTL, because Cárdenas's direct involvement gave the young opposition party more momentum and a heightened national profile. Here, with Cárdenas—the figurehead of the movement—in a self-imposed state of aggrieved seclusion, his political allies are having a tougher time spreading the Frente throughout the countryside.
[5] This also occurred in OTL after the December 1989 elections, but on a larger scale: 20 towns were occupied in Guerrero and 16 were occupied in Michoacán. In TTL, for the reason described above, the Frente isn't quite as widespread and doesn't run as many mayoral candidates. And the ELM didn't exist in OTL, so their involvement is completely different.
[6] In OTL, a total of 1,000 troops were dispatched throughout Guerrero to deal with a larger number of occupied municipalities. In TTL, with more authoritarian governments in place on both the state level and the federal level, more manpower is used to deal with a smaller problem.
[7] In OTL, the people who occupied the town centers were armed mostly with sticks and other non-lethal weapons, and no town saw more than two or three deaths during the evictions. Here, the ELM is on express orders from the Cuban Army to join in the municipal rebellions and fight back tooth-and-nail, hoping it will stir the populace into class rebellion. TTL's post-election troubles are less widespread, but they're far, far bloodier.
[8] In Michoacán, the evictions were completely bloodless in OTL, because Governor Figueroa Zamudio gave an advance warning to the protesters that they would be evicted (which also occurs in TTL) and because Cárdenas called for his supporters not resist the evictions (which he does not do in TTL).
[9] What is the Cananea strike, you wonder? Just you wait until the next update!
[10] Bartlett really believed (and maybe even still believes) in such a conspiracy.
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