Part 17: 1992 Canadian federal election, 1992 Chihuahua gubernatorial election
By March of 1992, John Turner’s second term as Prime Minister of Canada was going almost as badly as his first. His attempts to foster national unity had failed due to the collapse of the Meech Lake Accords, a set of proposed constitutional amendments which many Quebecois had regarded as the “last chance” to keep their province an integrated part of Canadian society. [1] Now, rather than holding the country together as he had originally intended, Turner found himself struggling just to hold his own Party together as more and more Liberal MPs from Quebec defected to the Progressive Conservative Party, led by moderate Quebec nationalist Marcel Masse. Ironically, Turner’s most valuable political ally was one of his fiercest personal enemies: Jean Chrétien, a staunch Canadian loyalist who hated Turner, yet supported him politically, because he knew that if Masse became Prime Minister the divisions between Quebec and the rest of the country would only grow deeper.
However, all of that would change when the Palenque Conference ended in disaster and took the life one of Canada’s most distinguished diplomats. The death of Raymond Chrétien shocked the entire nation, but no one took it harder than Jean Chrétien (who just so happened to be the late Raymond’s beloved uncle). On March 21, a no-confidence motion was tabled in the House of Commons, and when a choked-up Chrétien voted against the government and inspired 11 of Quebec’s 20 remaining Liberals to do the same, it was all over for Prime Minister Turner.
The ensuing federal election wasn’t much of a contest, as the Liberals were too riven with infighting to wage a cohesive campaign. Knowing Quebec was all but lost, Turner desperately hoped that the populist Reform Party would cut into the PC vote share in the western provinces. In the end, however, the coalition which had delivered a Tory landslide in 1984 held firm. With a comfortable 40-seat majority, Masse would be inducted as Prime Minister on May 19, and immediately set about negotiating a modified version of Meech Lake known as the Moncton Accord which narrowly passed a public referendum in January. However, the relationship between Masse’s government and his home province would not remain smooth for long: within a year, Jean Chrétien would be elected Premier of Quebec, and would go on to spend his entire ten-year term passionately resisting any further attempts to widen the gulf between Canada’s two “distinct societies”.
Masse was not the only North American leader struggling to keep constituent provinces under friendly control. In his talks with the drug kingpins, Bartlett had agreed to appoint various corrupt officials as state governors in order to abet the illegal drug trade; getting these men selected as PRI nominees was easy as pie, but the elections themselves—which in decades past had been mere formalities—now posed a significant challenge because the PRI’s popularity was at an all-time low, and several of the elections would be held in northern border states, where the opposition PAN was stronger and better-organized than anywhere else in the country. How to pull off a string of victories under such hostile political conditions? For Bartlett, the answer was simple: make the local party grassroots get off its ass and work harder than it had ever worked before.
After Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios was killed in the Palenque attacks, Bartlett had appointed Carlos “El Profesor” Hank González—a former Mayor of Mexico City and arch-godfather of the PRI hardline—to take Guitérrez's place as Secretary of Government. This put Hank González in charge of the Office of Political Integrity (OIP), a new intelligence agency which had been formed after the Selva Rebellion to root out ELM moles within the ruling party. However, Hank González quickly found a new use for the OIP: in May of 1992, two months before the state of Chihuahua was to elect its next governor, 32 local PRI officials (those most notorious for skipping the weekly Party meetings to go to drug-fueled orgies) were arrested, hauled before OIP committees and given harsh prison sentences. Though widely publicized as an anti-corruption measure, party members well understood the hidden meaning behind the crackdown: any PRI member not seen devoting every waking moment to the election campaign would be at the cruel mercies of El Profesor. For the next two months, every priísta in Chihuahua kicked into election mode, scrambling twelve hours a day, seven days a week to get their candidate into the governor’s mansion.
Yet the race would still be an uphill battle because the PAN candidate, Francisco Barrio Terrazas, had already run for Governor in 1986 and had massive name recognition, while the PRI candidate, Miguel Lerma Candelaria, was a faceless bureaucrat. To improve Lerma's chances, Bartlett directed DFS agents in Chihuahua to disrupt Barrio’s campaign at every possible turn. Barrio would later describe the race as "the worst months of my life", as he would routinely show up at scheduled campaign stops to find all his supporters had been scared away by pushy DFS toughs, and twice was arrested before he could even begin speaking. Lerma, meanwhile, received some very generous (and very secret) campaign donations from the Juárez Cartel, which he used to buy the votes of some 30,000 desperate Chihuahuans. When election day came on July 12, Lerma declared victory before the polls had even closed, ultimately winning with less than 60% of the vote. [2] Pro-democracy activist Sergio Aguayo led a wave of sit-ins and civil demonstrations across the state to protest the results, but the protests petered out within a month and Lerma took office as scheduled.
A similar scene would play out three weeks later, when nearby Baja California held its midterm elections. The incumbent panista Governor, Ernesto Ruffo Appel, was only halfway through his term, but on August 2 the PRI regained its majority in the State Congress after three years of PAN control. On September 9, one week after the new State Congress sat, Bartlett's Attorney General announced he was filing corruption charges against Governor Ruffo Appel and recommended that the Congress remove him immediately (these charges were, of course, completely false, but that hardly mattered because the local newspapers, which depended on the government for advertising revenue, parroted the narrative that Ruffo was guilty on all fronts).
Bartlett tried to persuade Ruffo Appel to resign voluntarily, but the Governor refused, and so on September 18, the PRI-controlled Congress voted to remove him from office with immediate effect. The following day, front pages all over Mexico carried the image of a stoic Ruffo Appel being dragged out of the governor’s mansion in Mexicali by DFS agents. The replacement governor, Tijuana Mayor Daniel Quintero Peña, quickly proved to be far more corrupt than the federal charges had alleged of Ruffo Appel.
When Governor Ernesto Ruffo Appel was removed from office by the PRI-dominated State Congress, Tijuana erupted into street protests. These proved much more destructive than previous civil disturbances because, after the humiliating defeat at San Cristóbal de las Casas, all Army units throughout the country had been relieved of their peacekeeping duties to go through rigorous retraining exercises. This left the city in the hands of the DFS, whose leaders were much less adept at calming civil unrest, responding to even the smallest protests with brutal crackdowns rather than negotiating with opposition figures as the Army had done.
Though Bartlett was pleased at his success in wresting states away from PAN control, he soon began to worry that he was alienating the Mexican people from their Party. He needed something to galvanize the public behind him, something to revitalize the grand, revolutionary consensus that had legitimized decades of seamless PRI hegemony. And when the crème de la crème of Mexico’s literary elite announced plans to hold an international literary symposium in Mexico City, Bartlett could hardly believe his luck. Called “The Experience of Liberty”, the grandiose cultural summit would be held in October at the UNAM campus, [3] and would attract prominent intellectuals from all over Latin America to discuss the state of the world now that the Cold War was over (the so-called "Union of Sovereign States" may have been the USSR’s official successor state, but no one considered it to be a significant ideological player on the world stage, particularly as President Gorbachev’s Communist Party collapsed around him and most republics elected liberal or nationalist governments). Bartlett, however, saw the summit as a golden opportunity to shift popular opinion in his favor with the help of a secret weapon: Octavio Paz.
Octavio Paz was perhaps the most famous poet and writer in modern Mexican history. Through his control of the literary magazine Vuelta he dominated intellectual debate in his country, and his reputation grew even further when was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. [4] And, best of all (at least from Bartlett's point of view), he was firmly pro-PRI, having strongly defended Carlos Salinas's presidency from leftist critics. After being personally assured by Paz that the author would not speak ill of the government, Bartlett gladly allowed the symposium to go ahead and even arranged for its proceedings to be broadcast live on the TV network Televisa, knowing his popularity would improve immensely if Mexico's greatest thinker endorsed him on national television.
Between 1988 and 1990, Mexico's literary world had been locked in a war of words between anti-PRI leftists, and pro-PRI moderates. Open dissent had largely disappeared since Manuel Bartlett was sworn in as President, but rumblings of discontent were growing louder by the month, and Bartlett hoped that opposition voices would be cowed if Octavio Paz publicly reaffirmed his support for the government.
As expected, Paz’s enormous literary stature allowed him to dominate the conference. There were surprisingly few open condemnations of Bartlett's regime; indeed, the most climactic censure came not from a Mexican leftist but from a foreign moderate, the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. [5] In a televised discussion with Paz and several other Mexicans, Vargas Llosa opined that, “for many years, the perfect dictatorship wasn’t Cuba or the Soviet Union, it was Mexico—because this dictatorship was often camouflaged in such a way that it seemed like it wasn’t one. But in the past two or three years, the cosmetic trappings of democracy that disguised this dictatorship for so long have begun to fade and expose it for what it truly is.” [6]
The Mexican moderates squirmed in their seats at Vargas Llosa’s brazen condemnation of the PRI regime; several turned anxiously to Octavio Paz, expecting the venerated poet to cut in and put the upstart Peruvian in his place. But, instead, Paz allowed Vargas Llosa to finish his argument, then responded with a point of his own: “To liken our country to Cuba or the Soviet Union is to compare Abraham Lincoln with Adolf Hitler. Yet I must agree that this system of hegemonic domination has many flaws. If wrongs are being committed against the Mexican people, I call on them to right those wrongs on an individual basis, and to resist any encroachment upon their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal.” [7]
Subdued though they were, Paz’s words rippled instantly to all corners of Mexico. Mere seconds later, an incensed President Bartlett ordered Televisa to cut away from the discussion, but it was too late—tens of thousands of free-dreaming souls had already been awoken from their authoritarian slumber. Sergio Aguayo’s anti-fraud movement instantly spiked in support, and on November 16, he led a 17,000-man march in the border state of Tamaulipas to beseech President Bartlett not to rig the upcoming gubernatorial election (PRI candidate Tomás Yarrington [8] would end up winning anyway, but the ruling party's vulnerability in the state was made abundantly clear).
Democracy and human rights activist Sergio Aguayo had been fighting the PRI system for decades, having founded the Mexican Academy for Human Rights in 1984. Though not an orator by nature, Aguayo eventually thrust himself into the spotlight and became the leader of an anti-fraud movement in Mexico's northern states that would play an increasingly vital role in the months to come.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Gulf, one person who took Octavio Paz’s message to heart was a journalist named Lydia Cacho. Since accepting a job with a local newspaper in Cancún 1986, Cacho had mostly stuck to light-hearted topics like arts and entertainment. But as she watched one of her literary idols emboldened her to resist authoritarianism “with any means at [her] disposal”, a flame awoke within Cacho’s belly, a burning need to sift through the vast haystacks of government lies and pluck out precious needles of truth. She quickly found her story: like Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, her home state of Quintana Roo would soon be electing a new governor, and it was quietly rumored that PRI nominee Mario Villanueva Madrid was a stooge of the Juárez Cartel. As the election approached, Cacho began to do some digging, hoping to find something that would permanently wreck Villanueva’s credibility and hobble the PRI’s seemingly-invincible fraud machine.
In the meantime, though, four of Mexico’s five northern border states were now governed by the handpicked puppets of the cartels, whose drug routes quickly exploded into narcotic superhighways. By early autumn, the Transamerican drug trade was working like a well-oiled machine: Every week, mountains of cocaine, heroin and marijuana would be flown 5,000 kilometers from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of northern Mexico, touching down at airports in Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja California or Tamaulipas with the guidance of state-appointed air traffic controllers. Then, the illicit cargo would be loaded onto DFS vans and trucked up to the border, where it would cross into the United States with the help of state-appointed customs officials.
Day after day, the cycle continued, dumping hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of illegal drugs on American shores for the voracious consumption of American drug addicts. A DEA report estimated that 324 kilograms of heroin, 83 metric tons of cocaine and 435 metric tons of marijuana had entered the United States in September alone, and as drug abuse rates soared and American cities exploded with drug-related violence, more fuel was thrown onto the flames of an already-murky presidential race. As election day 1992 approached, no one seemed quite sure whether President Bush, his Democratic challenger, or the renegade, populist independent candidate would emerge victorious.
[2] In OTL, Francisco Barrio Terrazas did run as the PAN candidate in 1992, and not only did he win a majority of the votes, but Carlos Salinas (who was still President at that point IOTL) recognized the results as valid and allowed him to take office as Governor.
[3] In OTL, “The Experience of Liberty” was held in August of 1990. In TTL, the ideological upheavals of that year, not to mention the troubles at the UNAM, cause the summit to be delayed two years.
[4] As he was in OTL.
[5] I initially toyed with the idea of having Mario Vargas Llosa win the 1990 Peruvian Presidential election in TTL, but I eventually decided against it because it would be too much of a stretch with a POD in 1988, and because it would butterfly away this incident, which I believe is important to the story.
[6] In OTL, Vargas Llosa's said this: "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship isn't Communism, it isn't the Soviet Union, it's not Fidel Castro, it's Mexico. Because this dictatorship is camouflaged in such a way that it often seems like it's not one." The phrase 'perfect dictatorship' has since become popular shorthand among historians and ordinary Mexicans for the PRI regime as a whole.
[7] In OTL, after Vargas made his "perfect dictatorship" remark, Octavio Paz offered a much firmer defense of the PRI regime: "...in Mexico we have a hegemonic system of domination. We cannot speak of a dictatorship." You can watch the full exchange (in Spanish) here on YouTube.
[8] In OTL, Yárrington was elected Governor of Tamaulipas in 1998, six years later than in TTL. In 2013, he made Forbes's list of the 10 Most Corrupt Mexicans (which also happens to include Raúl Salinas de Gortari and Elba Esther Gordillo).
However, all of that would change when the Palenque Conference ended in disaster and took the life one of Canada’s most distinguished diplomats. The death of Raymond Chrétien shocked the entire nation, but no one took it harder than Jean Chrétien (who just so happened to be the late Raymond’s beloved uncle). On March 21, a no-confidence motion was tabled in the House of Commons, and when a choked-up Chrétien voted against the government and inspired 11 of Quebec’s 20 remaining Liberals to do the same, it was all over for Prime Minister Turner.
The ensuing federal election wasn’t much of a contest, as the Liberals were too riven with infighting to wage a cohesive campaign. Knowing Quebec was all but lost, Turner desperately hoped that the populist Reform Party would cut into the PC vote share in the western provinces. In the end, however, the coalition which had delivered a Tory landslide in 1984 held firm. With a comfortable 40-seat majority, Masse would be inducted as Prime Minister on May 19, and immediately set about negotiating a modified version of Meech Lake known as the Moncton Accord which narrowly passed a public referendum in January. However, the relationship between Masse’s government and his home province would not remain smooth for long: within a year, Jean Chrétien would be elected Premier of Quebec, and would go on to spend his entire ten-year term passionately resisting any further attempts to widen the gulf between Canada’s two “distinct societies”.
Masse was not the only North American leader struggling to keep constituent provinces under friendly control. In his talks with the drug kingpins, Bartlett had agreed to appoint various corrupt officials as state governors in order to abet the illegal drug trade; getting these men selected as PRI nominees was easy as pie, but the elections themselves—which in decades past had been mere formalities—now posed a significant challenge because the PRI’s popularity was at an all-time low, and several of the elections would be held in northern border states, where the opposition PAN was stronger and better-organized than anywhere else in the country. How to pull off a string of victories under such hostile political conditions? For Bartlett, the answer was simple: make the local party grassroots get off its ass and work harder than it had ever worked before.
After Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios was killed in the Palenque attacks, Bartlett had appointed Carlos “El Profesor” Hank González—a former Mayor of Mexico City and arch-godfather of the PRI hardline—to take Guitérrez's place as Secretary of Government. This put Hank González in charge of the Office of Political Integrity (OIP), a new intelligence agency which had been formed after the Selva Rebellion to root out ELM moles within the ruling party. However, Hank González quickly found a new use for the OIP: in May of 1992, two months before the state of Chihuahua was to elect its next governor, 32 local PRI officials (those most notorious for skipping the weekly Party meetings to go to drug-fueled orgies) were arrested, hauled before OIP committees and given harsh prison sentences. Though widely publicized as an anti-corruption measure, party members well understood the hidden meaning behind the crackdown: any PRI member not seen devoting every waking moment to the election campaign would be at the cruel mercies of El Profesor. For the next two months, every priísta in Chihuahua kicked into election mode, scrambling twelve hours a day, seven days a week to get their candidate into the governor’s mansion.
Yet the race would still be an uphill battle because the PAN candidate, Francisco Barrio Terrazas, had already run for Governor in 1986 and had massive name recognition, while the PRI candidate, Miguel Lerma Candelaria, was a faceless bureaucrat. To improve Lerma's chances, Bartlett directed DFS agents in Chihuahua to disrupt Barrio’s campaign at every possible turn. Barrio would later describe the race as "the worst months of my life", as he would routinely show up at scheduled campaign stops to find all his supporters had been scared away by pushy DFS toughs, and twice was arrested before he could even begin speaking. Lerma, meanwhile, received some very generous (and very secret) campaign donations from the Juárez Cartel, which he used to buy the votes of some 30,000 desperate Chihuahuans. When election day came on July 12, Lerma declared victory before the polls had even closed, ultimately winning with less than 60% of the vote. [2] Pro-democracy activist Sergio Aguayo led a wave of sit-ins and civil demonstrations across the state to protest the results, but the protests petered out within a month and Lerma took office as scheduled.
A similar scene would play out three weeks later, when nearby Baja California held its midterm elections. The incumbent panista Governor, Ernesto Ruffo Appel, was only halfway through his term, but on August 2 the PRI regained its majority in the State Congress after three years of PAN control. On September 9, one week after the new State Congress sat, Bartlett's Attorney General announced he was filing corruption charges against Governor Ruffo Appel and recommended that the Congress remove him immediately (these charges were, of course, completely false, but that hardly mattered because the local newspapers, which depended on the government for advertising revenue, parroted the narrative that Ruffo was guilty on all fronts).
Bartlett tried to persuade Ruffo Appel to resign voluntarily, but the Governor refused, and so on September 18, the PRI-controlled Congress voted to remove him from office with immediate effect. The following day, front pages all over Mexico carried the image of a stoic Ruffo Appel being dragged out of the governor’s mansion in Mexicali by DFS agents. The replacement governor, Tijuana Mayor Daniel Quintero Peña, quickly proved to be far more corrupt than the federal charges had alleged of Ruffo Appel.
When Governor Ernesto Ruffo Appel was removed from office by the PRI-dominated State Congress, Tijuana erupted into street protests. These proved much more destructive than previous civil disturbances because, after the humiliating defeat at San Cristóbal de las Casas, all Army units throughout the country had been relieved of their peacekeeping duties to go through rigorous retraining exercises. This left the city in the hands of the DFS, whose leaders were much less adept at calming civil unrest, responding to even the smallest protests with brutal crackdowns rather than negotiating with opposition figures as the Army had done.
Though Bartlett was pleased at his success in wresting states away from PAN control, he soon began to worry that he was alienating the Mexican people from their Party. He needed something to galvanize the public behind him, something to revitalize the grand, revolutionary consensus that had legitimized decades of seamless PRI hegemony. And when the crème de la crème of Mexico’s literary elite announced plans to hold an international literary symposium in Mexico City, Bartlett could hardly believe his luck. Called “The Experience of Liberty”, the grandiose cultural summit would be held in October at the UNAM campus, [3] and would attract prominent intellectuals from all over Latin America to discuss the state of the world now that the Cold War was over (the so-called "Union of Sovereign States" may have been the USSR’s official successor state, but no one considered it to be a significant ideological player on the world stage, particularly as President Gorbachev’s Communist Party collapsed around him and most republics elected liberal or nationalist governments). Bartlett, however, saw the summit as a golden opportunity to shift popular opinion in his favor with the help of a secret weapon: Octavio Paz.
Octavio Paz was perhaps the most famous poet and writer in modern Mexican history. Through his control of the literary magazine Vuelta he dominated intellectual debate in his country, and his reputation grew even further when was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. [4] And, best of all (at least from Bartlett's point of view), he was firmly pro-PRI, having strongly defended Carlos Salinas's presidency from leftist critics. After being personally assured by Paz that the author would not speak ill of the government, Bartlett gladly allowed the symposium to go ahead and even arranged for its proceedings to be broadcast live on the TV network Televisa, knowing his popularity would improve immensely if Mexico's greatest thinker endorsed him on national television.
Between 1988 and 1990, Mexico's literary world had been locked in a war of words between anti-PRI leftists, and pro-PRI moderates. Open dissent had largely disappeared since Manuel Bartlett was sworn in as President, but rumblings of discontent were growing louder by the month, and Bartlett hoped that opposition voices would be cowed if Octavio Paz publicly reaffirmed his support for the government.
As expected, Paz’s enormous literary stature allowed him to dominate the conference. There were surprisingly few open condemnations of Bartlett's regime; indeed, the most climactic censure came not from a Mexican leftist but from a foreign moderate, the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. [5] In a televised discussion with Paz and several other Mexicans, Vargas Llosa opined that, “for many years, the perfect dictatorship wasn’t Cuba or the Soviet Union, it was Mexico—because this dictatorship was often camouflaged in such a way that it seemed like it wasn’t one. But in the past two or three years, the cosmetic trappings of democracy that disguised this dictatorship for so long have begun to fade and expose it for what it truly is.” [6]
The Mexican moderates squirmed in their seats at Vargas Llosa’s brazen condemnation of the PRI regime; several turned anxiously to Octavio Paz, expecting the venerated poet to cut in and put the upstart Peruvian in his place. But, instead, Paz allowed Vargas Llosa to finish his argument, then responded with a point of his own: “To liken our country to Cuba or the Soviet Union is to compare Abraham Lincoln with Adolf Hitler. Yet I must agree that this system of hegemonic domination has many flaws. If wrongs are being committed against the Mexican people, I call on them to right those wrongs on an individual basis, and to resist any encroachment upon their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal.” [7]
Subdued though they were, Paz’s words rippled instantly to all corners of Mexico. Mere seconds later, an incensed President Bartlett ordered Televisa to cut away from the discussion, but it was too late—tens of thousands of free-dreaming souls had already been awoken from their authoritarian slumber. Sergio Aguayo’s anti-fraud movement instantly spiked in support, and on November 16, he led a 17,000-man march in the border state of Tamaulipas to beseech President Bartlett not to rig the upcoming gubernatorial election (PRI candidate Tomás Yarrington [8] would end up winning anyway, but the ruling party's vulnerability in the state was made abundantly clear).
Democracy and human rights activist Sergio Aguayo had been fighting the PRI system for decades, having founded the Mexican Academy for Human Rights in 1984. Though not an orator by nature, Aguayo eventually thrust himself into the spotlight and became the leader of an anti-fraud movement in Mexico's northern states that would play an increasingly vital role in the months to come.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the Gulf, one person who took Octavio Paz’s message to heart was a journalist named Lydia Cacho. Since accepting a job with a local newspaper in Cancún 1986, Cacho had mostly stuck to light-hearted topics like arts and entertainment. But as she watched one of her literary idols emboldened her to resist authoritarianism “with any means at [her] disposal”, a flame awoke within Cacho’s belly, a burning need to sift through the vast haystacks of government lies and pluck out precious needles of truth. She quickly found her story: like Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, her home state of Quintana Roo would soon be electing a new governor, and it was quietly rumored that PRI nominee Mario Villanueva Madrid was a stooge of the Juárez Cartel. As the election approached, Cacho began to do some digging, hoping to find something that would permanently wreck Villanueva’s credibility and hobble the PRI’s seemingly-invincible fraud machine.
In the meantime, though, four of Mexico’s five northern border states were now governed by the handpicked puppets of the cartels, whose drug routes quickly exploded into narcotic superhighways. By early autumn, the Transamerican drug trade was working like a well-oiled machine: Every week, mountains of cocaine, heroin and marijuana would be flown 5,000 kilometers from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of northern Mexico, touching down at airports in Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja California or Tamaulipas with the guidance of state-appointed air traffic controllers. Then, the illicit cargo would be loaded onto DFS vans and trucked up to the border, where it would cross into the United States with the help of state-appointed customs officials.
Day after day, the cycle continued, dumping hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of illegal drugs on American shores for the voracious consumption of American drug addicts. A DEA report estimated that 324 kilograms of heroin, 83 metric tons of cocaine and 435 metric tons of marijuana had entered the United States in September alone, and as drug abuse rates soared and American cities exploded with drug-related violence, more fuel was thrown onto the flames of an already-murky presidential race. As election day 1992 approached, no one seemed quite sure whether President Bush, his Democratic challenger, or the renegade, populist independent candidate would emerge victorious.
__________
[1] The Meech Lake Accord also failed in OTL when the legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland failed to ratify the agreement.
[2] In OTL, Francisco Barrio Terrazas did run as the PAN candidate in 1992, and not only did he win a majority of the votes, but Carlos Salinas (who was still President at that point IOTL) recognized the results as valid and allowed him to take office as Governor.
[3] In OTL, “The Experience of Liberty” was held in August of 1990. In TTL, the ideological upheavals of that year, not to mention the troubles at the UNAM, cause the summit to be delayed two years.
[4] As he was in OTL.
[5] I initially toyed with the idea of having Mario Vargas Llosa win the 1990 Peruvian Presidential election in TTL, but I eventually decided against it because it would be too much of a stretch with a POD in 1988, and because it would butterfly away this incident, which I believe is important to the story.
[6] In OTL, Vargas Llosa's said this: "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship isn't Communism, it isn't the Soviet Union, it's not Fidel Castro, it's Mexico. Because this dictatorship is camouflaged in such a way that it often seems like it's not one." The phrase 'perfect dictatorship' has since become popular shorthand among historians and ordinary Mexicans for the PRI regime as a whole.
[7] In OTL, after Vargas made his "perfect dictatorship" remark, Octavio Paz offered a much firmer defense of the PRI regime: "...in Mexico we have a hegemonic system of domination. We cannot speak of a dictatorship." You can watch the full exchange (in Spanish) here on YouTube.
[8] In OTL, Yárrington was elected Governor of Tamaulipas in 1998, six years later than in TTL. In 2013, he made Forbes's list of the 10 Most Corrupt Mexicans (which also happens to include Raúl Salinas de Gortari and Elba Esther Gordillo).
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