The death of Hugo Chávez had little direct impact on Venezuela’s political landscape. Most Venezuelans still saw Chávez as a dangerous demagogue for his attempt to overthrow the government in September of 1991, while those who agreed with his socialist agenda resented him for having abandoned the country after the failure of the abortive coup. Most of Chávez’s high-ranking supporters within the Army had been imprisoned, and no politician was willing to associate himself publicly with such an unpopular figure. But even though Chávez himself was gone, the disaffected lower class from which he had drawn his political support was very much still around. And as Venezuela’s impoverished voters watched inflation eat away at their meager savings while President Carlos Andrés Pérez resigned in disgrace for mass embezzlement, they began to search for a viable political alternative to the two establishment parties which had had a stronghold on power for over three decades.
The void was quickly filled by Radical Cause (La Causa Radical, or
La Causa Я, as its more enthusiastic supporters insisted it be spelled). La Causa had started off as a fairly minor socialist party in the 1970s, based mainly in the industrial hubs of Caracas and Bolivar State. But, as the establishment’s power waned, La Causa’s popularity grew. By 1993, the party had elected several candidates to high office, and its presidential nominee, Bolivar Governor Andrés Velásquez, was believed to have a real, if remote, shot at the presidency. When election day finally rolled around and the results started pouring in, they weren’t quite earth-shattering, but they were nevertheless surprising: Velásquez had taken almost a quarter of the vote nationwide. This put him five percentage points behind Claudio Fermín, nominee of the establishment center-left party Democratic Action, but it was still a larger share of the vote than any third-party candidate had ever achieved since the start of the two-party system (To this day, Velásquez alleges that he would have come in second if not for rampant electoral fraud). Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, the nominee of the establishment center-right party COPEI, won the presidency thanks to the split in the left-wing vote, but his unimpressive 38% vote share was an ominous sign for what had historically been Venezuela’s second-largest political party.
The elites in both major parties, disturbed at the meteoric rise of La Causa, quietly hoped to themselves that this upstart political movement would fade into nothingness by the time of the next election. But their hopes would be in vain. President Álvarez Paz would do little over the course of his term to improve the lives of poor Venezuelans, and in the presidential election of 1998, La Causa’s Francisco Arías Cárdenas won the presidency by a very narrow margin, beating out COPEI and Democratic Action with only 36% of the vote. That election would mark Venezuela’s transition from a party system based on familial allegiance and machine politics to one based on ideological competition. Over the course of Francisco Arías’s term, as La Causa (which soon adopted the slightly more orthodox name of Radical Movement) established itself as the dominant party of the Venezuelan left, while COPEI shifted to the right and Democratic Action staked out a position in the liberal, center ground of Venezuelan politics. Venezuela remains one of Latin America’s oldest and stablest democracies, yet many have grown disillusioned with the current three-party system, just as they did with the two-party system before it. As disaffection increases, Hugo Chávez’s historical reputation has improved; the negative memories of his attempted coup have faded and a new admiration has taken its place. Today, some of Venezuela’s more fervent leftists hold up Hugo Chávez as a martyr to the socialist cause, a true revolutionary willing to challenge the system and push for genuine change. A few of his most dedicated adherents believe he’s still out there somewhere, hiding out in the remote jungles of Colombia or El Salvador with a band of fearless followers, watching and waiting for the right moment to come out of hiding and lead Venezuela in a glorious, Bolivarian revolution.
Chávez had ventured forth to rebel-run Mexico to try and carve out for himself a little patch of power, and had died for his troubles. But he would be far from the only Zapatista to suffer such a fate. On October 6, 1993, Arturo Albores Velasco, Governor of the State of Zapata, was shot in the back five times in the state’s
de facto capital of Venustiano Carranza. [1] Life had been pretty tough for Governor Albores ever since the Battle of San Cristóbal a year and a half before—even though the Zapatistas had won, the Battle had ravaged the city of San Cristóbal, which up until then had been the main hub of Albores’s OCEZ-CNPA faction and his strongest base of political support. Rival factions, OCEZ-
Centro and CIOAC, had remained in control the State’s Congress, blocking most of Albores’s attempts to make any effective use of the governorship. His efforts to promote indigenous culture had initially been successful (Albores’s artistic workshop, the
Taller de Expresión Artistica Popular, recorded hundreds of songs and oral traditions in the Chol, Tsotsil, Mame and Kanjobal languages and produced paintings which now hang in museums from Bilbao to Buenos Aires). [2] But Albores’s leadership was called seriously into question after the Mexican Army launched a renewed offensive in June and recaptured dozens of Zapatista communities. His attempts to organize a new round of peace talks with the Bartlett administration went nowhere, and yet they deeply angered his anti-peace factional enemies. After Albores was shot, OCEZ-
Centro and CIOAC vigorously denied all involvement in his assassination, blaming it instead on DFS assassins, but that certainly didn’t stop gun battles from erupting between rival State Congressmen for weeks afterward.
Nevertheless, Albores’s death had a negligible impact outside Carranza. For the previous two years, the Zapata state government had been too paralyzed by factional gridlock to do anything worthwhile, and virtually all the individual municipalities were self-governing and self-sufficient in every meaningful way. Many communities—especially those under siege by the Mexican Army—had bigger things to worry about than the internal affairs of a state government which they had never trusted or wanted in the first place. In the wake of Albores’s death, each of the major factions tried to take control of the governorship, but none could persuade a majority of the bitterly fractured State Congress to appoint its leader as provisional governor. As weeks went by with no resolution, many legislators began calling on the ELM to take over the state and form a military government, but Subcomandante Marcos adamantly refused, stating that the ELM had no place in the internal politics of the state. Finally, after two months of fruitless partisan wrangling, the Congress appointed a governor whose sole allegiance lay not with a faction, but with God: Samuel Ruiz García, the long-serving Bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas.
Appointed in 1959, Bishop Ruiz was a progressive prelate who sympathized with the poor and oppressed indigenous people of southern Mexico. A staunch liberation theologist, he saw the Catholic Church as a means to help the Mayans build for themselves “a new society, structured on justice and fraternity”. To that end, since 1960, the Diocese of San Cristóbal under Ruiz’s direction had trained up a whole new generation of catechists, deacons and lay preachers, and sent them out to indigenous communities all over northeastern Chiapas to spread
La Palabra de Dios, the Word of God. But rather than simply teaching indigenous people the “correct” interpretation of the Bible, these clergymen encouraged them to methodically discuss and reflect upon the problems facing their communities, and use their own understanding of the holy scripture to develop concrete solutions to those issues. This idea of
tijwanej (“to bring out what’s in another’s heart” in Tsotsil), of helping the Indianas find divine guidance within themselves rather than imposing on them from the outside, inspired a powerful civic and political awakening among the indigenous people of Chiapas, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the Zapatista movement. [3] Twenty years later, Ruiz’s army of 8,000
catequistas was well-known and respected in every village and
ejido from Simojovel to Comitán. Almost 90% were indigenous themselves, and most of them had mastered multiple indigenous languages, a skill which made them important intermediaries between villages dominated by different ethnicities. That made them a vital force of peacekeeping and moderation amid the endless factional struggles that defined Zapatista politics. And when Ruiz was appointed governor, the
catequistas became, for all intents and purposes, the Zapatista civil service. While the ELM worked to free villages under siege by the Army, priests and deacons under Governor Ruiz’s careful direction embarked on seven-hour treks up craggy mountainsides to bring them letters, medicine and food supplies to the besieged residents. Usually, officers would let the clerics pass through their cordons in exchange for little more than a bribe; when the Diocese was running low on cash, the more bold-hearted priests would simply walk past the Army’s blockade, confident that no good Mexican soldier would dare shoot a man of God.
Zapatista children play with an unwilling soldier during the siege of Oventic municipality. The Zapatista communities proved remarkable resilient during the months of siege, even despite critical shortages of food and medicine that pushed them nearly to the brink of collapse.
Despite these new developments, Manuel Bartlett was much too busy to pay attention to the Zapatistas. His time as President of Mexico was entering its final year, and would soon come time for Bartlett to exercise the time-honored tradition of
dedazo (“finger-tap”) and handpick a member of his inner circle as his successor. Bartlett thought long and hard about whom to nominate for the presidential election, which was to be held in August of 1994. One strong contender was Government Secretary Carlos Hank González, who had decades of experience in politics and government, and, as a fierce PRI hardliner, could be trusted to defend the sacred principles of the Mexican Revolution. But Hank also had one crippling flaw—his father had been an immigrant from Germany, and the Constitution required that both of the President’s parents be native-born Mexicans. It would be easy enough to get rid of this requirement through a Constitutional amendment, but Bartlett felt that such a change would be disrespectful to the nationalist legacy of the Revolution. Also, Hank was nearing his seventieth birthday, and Bartlett felt that Mexico needed a more youthful leader to guide it into the new millennium. He soon found the perfect candidate: Elba Esther Gordillo, his Secretary of Labor. Esther Gordillo was a shrewd and accomplished politician, having served as President of the Chamber of Deputies and head of the National Teachers’ Union until Bartlett named her as his Labor Secretary in 1991. Esther Gordillo had served adeptly and ably in her role, helping Bartlett privatize many state-owned businesses by smoothing things over with the unions and preventing a new round of strikes. She also had considerable symbolic appeal: the most recent former Labor Secretary to serve as President, Adolfo López Mateos, was still held in high esteem 35 years after his death, and Esther Gordillo would surely attract favorable comparisons. And, best of all, she was a
woman! Bartlett was sure that by naming Esther as the PRI nominee, he would not only capture an overwhelming majority of the female vote, but would cement his place in history as an enlightened progressive who had helped elect Mexico’s first-ever female head of state.
Although she had displayed a sharp political acumen as Secretary Labor, Elba Esther Gordillo’s shrewd intelligence did not translate well into campaign charisma. Those who heard Esther Gordillo speak found her unengaging and disingenuous, and she had trouble whipping up the traditional PRI fervor at her rallies.
In late November, Bartlett revealed his choice of successor to the PRI’s most venerated elders, who quickly ordained Esther Gordillo as their party’s nominee. But her official
destape, or “unveiling”, to the public was overshadowed when Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, an opposition senator from Mexico City, announced on December 5, 1993 that he would be running for president as an independent candidate. President Bartlett was surprised at the announcement—though he had turned against the PRI in recent years, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo (himself a former President of the PRI and one-time contender for the party’s presidential nomination) was still a
priísta at heart, Bartlett was certain of it. Surely Muñoz Ledo had some sort of hidden agenda; Bartlett initially considered trying to buy him off with a cabinet position or ambassadorship. In the end, though, Bartlett decided to let Muñoz Ledo continue his campaign because it would allow him to shut out the National Action Party, which had been building up its organizational strength in the north, and had even come uncomfortably close to poaching a few governorships. Bartlett had already been looking for an excuse to ban the PAN from contesting the presidential election, and Muñoz Ledo’s candidacy would allow him to do so while still at least
pretending to give voters a free choice.
Indeed, on the surface this election seemed near-identical to almost every single one that had come before it. But to the old timers, to the people who had been watching the PRI conduct its electoral business for decades and knew what a “normal” presidential election looked like, this one was different. In elections past, when the PRI presidential candidate rolled into town on a campaign stop, he’d strut down the street with a huge grin and a squadron of suit-clad bodyguards, shaking hands and kissing babies as he went. Admirers of all ages would flock from miles around to see him in the flesh, screaming with excitement at their community’s fleeting moment in the spotlight. He would give his speeches in auditoriums and gymnasiums stuffed far beyond capacity with thousands of supporters, some hauled in by their union bosses, others attracted by promises of free beer and sandwiches, and the rest compelled by the sheer, multigenerational force of party loyalty. But when Elba Esther Gordillo marched down the street on her way to a speaking engagement, the people would jeer and whistle at her from the sidewalks, and when she arrived at the venue, often as not, half the seats would be empty. For millions of voters, the generational ties that had bound them to the PRI through crisis after crisis had bent, frayed and finally snapped under the weight of Manuel Bartlett’s excesses, and now his designated heiress was getting hung out to dry; After every desperate attempt to attract crowds to Esther Gordillo’s rallies failed, her staff eventually started busing in the most fervent and dedicated
príistas from other cities and, sometimes, other states (one campaign event in Zacatecas attracted so few locals that Esther Gordillo’s campaign manager, Liébano Sáenz, brought in two hundred PRI ward heelers from Mazatlán, over 500 kilometers away).
But when Porfirio Muñoz Ledo went out campaigning, it was different. As per President Bartlett’s strict orders, Televisa and the PRI-friendly newspapers gave Muñoz Ledo about as much airtime as they would normally devote to Jay Leno’s newest hernia. And yet, somehow, everywhere he went, the people seemed to know him. Some remembered him from 1988, when he’d been the only PRI politician of any stature to back Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas for the presidency, even though it meant giving up all his power and spending six long years locked in the political doghouse. Others remembered how, for the entirety of Manuel Bartlett’s
sexenio, he had been the leading (and, at times, the only) voice of reason in the PRI-dominated federal Congress. For those with short memories, word of mouth made up the difference: this guy is on our side, said friends to friends, sisters to brothers, sons to fathers, and daughters to mothers. Wherever Muñoz Ledo’s campaign took him, thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of people would come and listen not with admiration, but with hope: a doubtful, skeptical hope that this baby-faced ex-President of the PRI might actually be capable of building a future for their country. And what he said, at least, did not disappoint that hope. While Elba Esther Gordillo, with her Chanel dresses and facelift-assisted smile (some voters had given her the mildly misogynistic moniker of
Señora Sephora for her obsession with luxury brands and cosmetics) spun long, empty yarns about the glorious legacy of the Revolution, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo looked out upon the masses and talked to them straight. I see your pain, he said in his deep, thundering baritone. I know the system. I want to change it, I know how to change it, and, if you elect me, I
will change it.
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s promises to reinvest in social welfare programs, democratize the labor movement, and reestablish civil liberties resonated well with Mexico’s impoverished and oppressed, who were eager to embrace any candidate who might bring an end to the corrupt, sixty-year reign of the PRI.
Esther Gordillo’s campaign was faltering at the bottom as well as at the top. In campaigns past, welfare agencies, public utilities, and other fertile founts of PRI patronage would throw open their doors to Mexico’s poor, lavishing them with all sorts of favors and goodies—everything from sacks of rice and Portland cement to washing machines and underground telephone lines—in exchange for their votes. This vast, intricate vote-buying machine had allowed the PRI to rack up Stalinesque landslides in every election for sixty years, and made the rural and urban poor into the most dependable voting bloc in the PRI coalition. But by 1994, Manuel Bartlett and his predecessors had ripped so many parts out of the machine that it was violently rattling off its hinges. The welfare agencies, gutted by Carlos Salinas’s budget cuts and then squeezed almost dry by Bartlett’s obsession with enlarging the security budget, could barely afford to hand out business cards, let alone washing machines. Most of the big public utilities had been privatized during Bartlett’s great government clearance sale in 1991, and the billionaires who now owned them were unenthusiastic about the idea of giving away their services for free to millions of voters.
In years past, these obstacles would have been offset by poor Mexicans’ knee-jerk, generational loyalty to the PRI. But by 1994, this goodwill had almost completely evaporated. Carlos Salinas’s systematic dismantling of the Mexican welfare state had left millions of poor voters with the impression that the PRI no longer gave a damn about their problems, and Manuel Bartlett’s aggressive use of physical force against even the faintest whisper of dissent disgusted those who remembered the murders of Celeste Batel and Cardinal Posadas Ocampo. The PRI had an emergency reserve for situations like this—a secret, discretionary fund, controlled by the president and containing almost four billion dollars, which the party had set aside specifically for campaign purposes—but when President Bartlett reached into this fund to boost Esther Gordillo’s campaign, he was shocked to discover that almost all of the money had somehow vanished since 1990 (former President Raúl Salinas, sixteen countries into a two-year world tour on his $253 million mega-yacht, was too busy touring mansions in New Zealand to return Bartlett’s calls).
Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s campaign, on the other hand, was running like a well-oiled machine. Since 1989, the PAN, largely under the direction of human rights activist Sergio Aguayo, had constructed a formidable network of canvassers and campaign volunteers stretching all across the northern border states. And when President Bartlett banned the PAN from fielding a presidential candidate of their own, that network put its energies squarely behind Muñoz Ledo's campaign (Muñoz Ledo had already agreed with PAN officials that, if elected, he would incorporate several high-ranking
panistas into his cabinet). As the hot desert spring wore on, teams of volunteers under Aguayo’s studious management piled into old Jeeps and Chevys and drove out to campaign for Muñoz Ledo in the isolated villages of the vast Sierra Madre. Meanwhile, all throughout April and May, members of the
Frente Autentico de Trabajo—the federation of independent labor unions led by Julia Quiñónez in Ciudad Acuña—were canvassing for Muñoz Ledo in every border city from Tijuana to Matamoros. Dozens of independent unions were also being formed in the Federal District, and their members campaigned for Muñoz Ledo not only in Mexico City’s sixteen densely-populated boroughs, but also in the remote municipalities of Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca, where the candidate’s promises to reinvest in social welfare and reform the
ejido system played very well with the region’s impoverished coffee farmers.
Priests had been inserting subtle anti-government messages into their sermons ever since the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in 1993, and after Porfirio Muñoz Ledo began his presidential candidacy, Sunday morning Mass became an important focal point for his campaign. Muñoz Ledo’s campaign manager, Jorge Castañeda (himself a future President), would remark in 2011 that “the whole campaign was run out of Church basements and backrooms”.
Under normal circumstances, these bold campaign volunteers would be harassed at every turn by security and police forces. Indeed, President Bartlett had ordered the DFS to disrupt and harass the Muñoz Ledo campaign as much as they possibly could. But, by 1994, most DFS agents were busy with much bloodier matters. In early 1993, the DFS had launched a dazzlingly successful campaign against the Tijuana Cartel, decapitating the syndicate and expelling its remnants from Tijuana while Americans just over the border looked on, impressed and amazed. [4] But no sooner was the Tijuana Cartel driven out than Miguel Caro Quintero’s Sonora boys rolled into town, picking up right where the
Tijuanitos had left off. And while one half of the DFS stayed behind in Chihuahua with the Juárez Cartel, the other half joined Caro Quintero in Tijuana to share in the spoils of his lucrative business. But this arrangement would not hold for long. In October of 1993, a pair of Chilean businessmen, Gustavo Fring and Max Arciniega, approached Miguel Caro Quintero (whose syndicate had practically cornered the market on meth) in an attempt to persuade him to distribute a new variety of methamphetamine they had developed. When Caro laughed them off, Fring and Arciniega turned instead to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the Juárez Cartel, who knew a good opportunity when he saw one and immediately pounced on the offer.
By the end of the year, the Juárez Cartel (with the dutiful aid of Governor Miguel Lerma in Chihuahua) was selling hundreds of pounds of meth every month and cutting a serious hole in the Sonora Cartel’s profits. Relations between the two cartels quickly frosted over; Caro angrily asked Carrillo to stop interfering with his business, and Carrillo told Caro that he’d had his chance with the new product, and if he didn’t like it, he could pound sand. Caro didn’t like that answer. In February of 1994, a northbound shipment of Carrillo’s meth was ambushed and the decapitated corpse of the driver left to molder in the Chihuahuan desert. Five days later, one of Caro’s
subcomandantes was blown to fiery bits by a car bomb in Ensenada. Six days after that, gunmen under Caro’s command stormed one of Carrillo’s meth kitchens and burned it to the ground with the cooks locked inside. Finally, on March 5, Miguel Caro Quintero himself was ambushed while his convoy of armored Jeeps rolled through Nogales, resulting in twenty-one deaths: seven civilians, two of Caro’s personal bodyguards, and twelve DFS agents—most of them killed by their supposed comrades-in-arms.
For all that they’d been Manuel Bartlett’s personal army in 1989, by 1994, the DFS was for all intents and purposes the paramilitary wing of the drug trade, and every individual agent’s loyalties lay with whichever cartel he’d happened to shack up with. After Caro Quintero just barely escaped from Nogales with his life and committed his own DFS forces to a full-scale retaliation campaign against the Juárez Cartel, the federal agency found itself split on opposite sides of a rapidly deteriorating bloodbath. So, when Manuel Bartlett nicely asked the DFS in May if it could please interfere just a little bit with Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s presidential campaign, he found that most DFS agents were too busy slaughtering each other to care about politics (Bartlett asked the Army if it could fill in where the DFS fell short, but every general seemed to have an excuse for why he just couldn’t spare the manpower).
The war that erupted between the Sonora Cartel and the Juárez Cartel in April of 1994 fit into a context of violence and bloodshed affecting Mexico’s narcotic underworld. Since being driven off their native territory in 1993, the Tijuana Cartel under the aggressive Ramón Arellano Félix had waged a vicious war against the rival Sinaloa Cartel, culminating in the creatively brutal slaying of its leader, Joaquín Guzmán (also known as “El Chapo” for his short stature).
Still, even as his entire security apparatus collapsed in on itself, President Bartlett remained confident that Elba Esther Gordillo would win with the election in a typical PRI landslide. The press remained obligingly silent on Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s candidacy, and throughout the entire campaign Elba Esther Gordillo barely even acknowledged that she had an opponent, aside from endless repeating her zinger that he would bring about a new
Porfiriato (referring to the 35-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz). Word of mouth was powerful, but on its own, it could only go so far; without some degree of coverage by Televisa and the major newspapers, Muñoz Ledo would be hard-pressed to reach a majority of Mexicans and break the PRI’s stranglehold on political discourse.
On May 29, 1994, the international press would give Muñoz Ledo the biggest gift of his political career.
__________
[1] In OTL, Albores was shot in the back
eight times on March 6, 1989. Say what you want about Mexican assassins, they know how to get the job done.
[2] The
Taller de Expression Artistica Popular existed in OTL, and indeed it predates the point of divergence. Sadly, though, nothing it produced ever went to a museum as far as I’m aware.
[3] To any Catholics seeking proof that the Church can indeed do great things under the right circumstances, look no further. Ruiz's army of
catequistas provided an important spark for the Zapatista movement's strong emphasis on civic engagement. You can read a brief account of the Diocese's efforts
here.
[4] See Part Nineteen.
