Al Grito de Guerra: the Second Mexican Revolution

[Roberto El Rey]

July 2, 1988
Mexico City​

A great city is never silent.

Of course, no city is ever silent in the literal sense. No matter the hour, engines groan in Xianjiang, dogs bark in Kananga and pistons pound in Magnitogorsk. But beneath the cursory activities of their inhabitants, those cities are lifeless. Blinded by smoke and smog, choked by soot and ash and drowned out by screams and cries, a lifeless city has no rhythm and no soul. Its every inch is caked in mud that dulls its native shine, its residents share nothing but the dirt and grit and grime. And on those vibrant nights when a great city flaunts its feathers and dances to its own music, a lifeless city is silent, too stifled by the taste of its own atmosphere to make a single sound.

This was a great city. Just as a city of gold is pure to the smallest speck, Mexico City expressed its vivid history in every brick and riverbed. Any errant cobble might have once been trod by Cortés or Moctezuma; every transient fleck of dust carried within it seven centuries of struggle and solidarity. Every structure was a story, from the frailest hovel to the grandest palace. Every street was an open book, a folk anthology of secrets and sagas that a longtime inhabitant could read as easily as Nervo or Cervantes. And from every crack in age-old asphalt, through every alleyway and mountain pass, there wafted a melody: the music of Mexico, the music of a people who, for countless generations, had felled tyrant after tyrant with the blood in their hearts and the resilience in their arms.

Never in her life had Celeste had much trouble making out the music as it echoed off the stony edifices of Mexico City. But as she leaned forward to adjust her position in the leather cushion of the passenger seat, she suspected that the battered Toyota’s air conditioning system wasn’t the only thing deafening her to the national mood.

Scanning the adjacent building through the corner of her eye, she encountered the face of her husband leering down at her from a poster through the unwelcoming orange glow of a streetlamp. It did not blink and, though the corners of its lips were turned upward, it certainly did not smile. Ever since Cuauhtémoc had announced his presidential candidacy the previous year, Televisa had practically made a weekly segment out of mocking his ever-present grimace. Still, after twenty-five years of marriage Celeste had thought she knew every hidden route and secret passage to the pensive smile he always carried with him just beneath his skin.

But the campaign was changing him. As months of constant abuse from the establishment to which he’d devoted his life took its toll, the hidden grin receded deeper and deeper until some nights, she couldn’t find it anywhere, no matter how long or how desperately she searched. And with him gone so often for interviews or speaking tours, many nights she had no one to cure her loneliness but that ever-present image. It was a ghost, a perverse contortion of the real Cuauhtémoc. The real Cuauhtémoc frowned outwardly but smiled inwardly; this feeble cameo that could be found on every street corner smiled outwardly, but inwardly could think of nothing but how tired he was, and how it dismayed him that the system his father had built and held together with his own two hands was devouring its children. Every time she looked upon that weary shadow of her husband and sensed the exhaustion in his eyes, Celeste felt warm tears gathering behind her own as she felt one more piece of her heart drop away. She inwardly prayed that Cuauhtémoc would lose the election, just so that he might be spared from six years of administrative agony.

She knew that it was selfish of her to entertain such wishes. For the first time in six decades, the Mexican people had a genuine chance to cast off the authoritarian class that ruled them. If they chose him, it was Cuauhtémoc’s national duty to serve as the first opposition President in living memory. But Celeste couldn’t help but ask whether it would be so terrible for the system to survive for just a few years longer so that the most kind-hearted and conscientious man she’d ever known could escape the mental ravages of the most stressful office a Mexican could ever fulfill.

She couldn’t tell with any certainty how Wednesday’s election would go. It seemed that for every peasant farmer she’d met who supported Cárdenas’s call for a return to the deepest roots of the Revolution, she’d encountered a zealot whose allegiance to the ruling regime was stronger than his allegiance to God, to Mexico or to his own mother. The previous months had been a dramatic crescendo, a dizzying upward spiral of violins and trombones and drumbeats all building toward…something. But what exactly? How would the 1988 Overture conclude—with the crashing of drums and the triumphant jubilation of trumpets, or with the collapse of so much outward momentum into the typical monotony of history? Celeste strained her ears listening for any hidden clues within the elaborate harmony that might deliver the answer.

She, Francisco, and Román had been anxiously discussing this subject an hour earlier when the dullish grey Toyota had blown a tire. [1] None of them were familiar with this neighborhood, so Celeste had stayed behind to watch the car while the other two went out looking for a repair shop. Her diversionary reflections on Mexican history complete, she began to worriedly wonder how much longer she would have to wait beside the poorly-lit street before her companions returned from their automotive odyssey. The sight of a figure walking directly toward the car so relieved her that she barely had time to realize that it was neither that of Francisco nor that of Román. This realization, in turn, so confused her that she did not have any time at all to realize what sort of object the figure was pointing at her head. When Francisco and Román returned eighteen minutes later with a spare jack and a fresh tire, there was no figure, no object, and no Celeste. There was nothing but a body with a once-beautiful face that had been blown to bloody chunks by the superfluous force of five bullets.

~​

Three hours later, when Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas opened the front door to his residence to see two uniformed Mexico City beat cops, he was dismayed at the government’s brazenness. To arrest him now, just four days before the election? That was just poor sportsmanship, and a bit low even for the PRI. But he had no opportunity to say as much.

“Señor Cárdenas,” one officer began with a well-concealed edge of indignation, “your wife…she has been shot.”

Cárdenas had already lost all feeling by the time his body hit the ground.

[1] This is our point of divergence. In OTL, Francisco Javier Ovando Hernandez and Román Gil Heraldez (two very high-ranking officials in Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas's campaign for President of Mexico) were both assassinated on this night and in this manner. The most likely perpetrator seems to be the government, but the murder has never been solved. ITTL, Celeste Batel stayed late at the campaign office, asked for a ride home and, because it's dark and she's sitting inside the car, the assassin mistakes her for one of his targets. As a result, she is tragically murdered.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

The killing of Celeste Batel was an appalling blow to the Mexican people.

For decades, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had maintained its uninterrupted, sixty-year stranglehold over Mexican politics through unsavory methods: rigging elections, buying off voters, intimidating and even occasionally arresting opposition figures. But this was different. Assassinating the wife of a presidential candidate just four days before the election would have been monstrous enough in any case, but Celeste Batel de Cárdenas was royalty. Her late father-in-law was Lázaro Cárdenas, the beloved former President who had nationalized the oil industry, distributed land to the deprived peasants and pioneered the PRI organization. He was universally revered as a hero of Mexican history, and now his son, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, was running for President to mop up the excesses of the system his father had created. Cuauhtémoc himself was so adored that older Mexicans burst into tears of joy just by looking at him, and Celeste was practically on par with Jackie Kennedy or Princess Diana as a living symbol of Mexican political history.

The PRI government, of course, vehemently denied that it had had any part in the killing of Celeste Batel, but practically no one believed it. Claims that Celeste's death had been a botched robbery rather than a political assassination were mooted when it was found that nothing had been stolen from the car [1], and although the state-run media declined to show the gruesome pictures taken of her corpse, the more rebellious journals quickly got hold of them and printed them in full color, horrifying the millions who saw them.

Up until then, the Presidential race had genuinely seemed up in the air. The very idea of a presidential election of which the result was uncertain would have been unthinkable six years before, because throughout its sixty-year history, the PRI had won every single presidential election in a landslide. But its handpicked nominee for the 1988 election—the owlish, squeaky-voiced, unpopular Budget Secretary Carlos Salinas de Gortari—seemed increasingly likely to lose to the dynastic dauphin Cárdenas. After Celeste's murder, public sympathy for Cárdenas and horror at the PRI's perceived brutality eliminated any chance that the so-called "official party" might eke out a legitimate win. But that didn't mean it would accept defeat. The PRI knew it was heading to a defeat in the polls, but it could still manufacture a victory through its beloved pastime of electoral fraud.

On polling day, July 6, 1988, PRI operatives resorted to their usual roster of fraudulent tactics: stealing ballot boxes at gunpoint from terrified poll watchers, equipping loyal PRI voters with enough false ID cards to cast five ballots each, and recruiting teams of children to mark thousands of ballots for the PRI. But the opposition had other ideas. Francisco Javier Ovando Hernández, a high-ranking ex-PRI official in Cárdenas's campaign (who owned the car in which Celeste had been brutally slain), had assembled a nationwide federation of independent poll watchers, who reported Cárdenas leading by a shocking margin [2]. Opposition officials had been invited to the offices of the Government Secretariat to witness the results as they flowed into the central computer system; the computer had been rigged to only display the vote tallies from precincts loyal to the PRI, but the system malfunctioned and instead showed Cárdenas with a sizable advantage [3]. When Salinas declared victory the following morning, it was obvious to all that the PRI had once again tried to steal a presidential election, and had done an embarrassingly poor job of it.

Armed with mountains of evidence, the opposition set out to have Cárdenas recognized as the victor, but they were frustrated at every turn. The PRI had majorities on all of the local vote-tabulating committees, enabling it to certify tainted results and vote down all complaints of fraud. The ballots from the election were eventually transported to the basement of the Palace of San Lázaro, the building in which the federal Congress of the Union was housed; when opposition legislators attempted to gain access to the ballots, they were told that it would be illegal to count them again. Eventually, the "official" results were announced: Salinas had won with 47.7% of the vote, Cárdenas and the Frente Democratico Nacional (the leftist coalition Cárdenas had engineered for his campaign) had come in a distant second with 34.8%, and businessman Manuel Clouthier of the National Action Party (a conservative party that had been the main opposition to the PRI since the 1930s) in third with 16.5%.

These results were a pack of lies, and no one believed them. The figures gathered by Francisco Ovando's independent poll-watching network indicated that Cárdenas had won with at least 48% of the vote, and that Salinas had barely exceeded 40%. But in the end it didn't matter: the final authority on the results was the lower house of the Congress, the Chamber of Deputies, in which the PRI had managed to engineer for itself a continued majority. The PRI deputies, following the iron law of obedience to the party line, voted to certify the election after a twenty-hour-long debate on September 11, 1988. The man who lost the election had won the presidency; the people had spoken, but their words had been deliberately mistranslated [4].

​

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas himself was conspicuously silent as all of this went on, having sequestered himself in his home to mourn his beloved wife of twenty-five years. The few people who saw him during this time reported that the man's infamous frown had only grown longer, and that he barely said a word to anyone as he dealt with his grief. As the weeks wore on, Cárdenas's loyal devotees grew increasingly restless for a word from their leader. After the fraudulent results were certified, the Cardenistas' feelings of impotence and anger threatened to spiral into violence and unrest if not properly assuaged. Finally, at the urging of his campaign aides, Cárdenas agreed to make a public address. On September 15, Cárdenas greeted 270,000 angry, volatile supporters in the Zócalo, Mexico City's central square. His words on that day would shape the course of Mexican history.

__________
​

[1] IOTL, when Ovando and Gil were killed, nothing was stolen from the car, leading to the same conclusion that it was not a robbery.
[2] IOTL, because Ovando was killed, this network of poll watchers did not operate effectively, robbing the opposition of their own reliable account of the vote totals. Here, with Ovando alive, the independent system kicks into action and does its job well.
[3] As happened OTL. Mexicans call this malfunction of the PRI's fraud mechanisms se cayo el sistema—"the system crashed".
[4] As essentially happened in OTL—the Chamber of Deputies voted to confirm results that had obviously been tampered with. Miguel de la Madrid, who was President at the time, admitted in 2004 that IOTL, Cárdenas would have won if not for the fraud. And that's without the sympathy factor of his wife being brutally slain just days before.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Years later, when asked by Elena Poniatowska during an interview whether he regretted his remarks in the Zócalo on September 15, 1988, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas merely stated that while his "message was extreme" and his choice of words "perhaps poorly attuned to the moment", the upheavals that resulted from his address were "beneficial in the long term to the social and political development of the Mexican nation”. After all, Cárdenas's initial intention had not been to incite his supporters to violence, but to calm them down. As he gazed upon the central square of Mexico City, the sight of a thousand uniformed police officers reminded him that the authorities would pounce on any pretext to lash out at the people with unspeakable brutality. He knew that he had to restrain his horde of supporters before they gave the government a reason. [1]

Cárdenas began by drably recapping the myriad ways in which the PRI had spit on democracy in its mad drive to hold on to power. He maintained to his audience that he and his National Democratic Front had won a majority of votes. He called on Salinas to resign as President-elect, but warned his followers not to agitate a government that was simply waiting for an excuse to unleash “a devastating wave of repression”. He tried to maintain a subdued demeanor, but as the speech wore on, those close enough to the podium could sense Cárdenas’s composure deteriorating. Atop the swirling sea of humanity floated a hundred banners displaying the image of his wife under the words Justicia para Celeste. As he gazed upon the banners, Cárdenas’s voice became increasingly choked as her winsome face slowly melted into the mess of blood and brain that had scarred Cárdenas’s retinas in July.

Of the 270,000 people who stood in that square on that day, enough would endure the upheavals of the subsequent years to provide a reasonably detailed account of at least the next part of the speech. As Cárdenas wound his way around a paragraph decrying the frequent occurrence of murder and low distribution of justice, he struck a phrase that seemed almost to surprise him: “Let the whole weight of the law fall on the murderer of…” [2]

As he trailed off, the microphones picked up what sounded very much like a sob. Cárdenas’s throat was garroted by sorrow, and for twenty seconds he could not make a sound. Finally, he spoke again: “No."

Fearing that no one had heard him, he raised his voice. "No! NO, NO, NO, NO!" the assembled populace became alarmed and energized by the sudden change of tone.

"The tyrants, the public thieves, the government terrorists, the goddamned priístas, they don’t want us to agitate the foundation of their power. No matter what we do, they will still oppress us, they will still enslave us, they will still slit the throats of our loved ones and pillage the wealth from our pockets!”

The assembled throng began to scream in fury as Cárdenas’s tirade continued. “They want us to stand around and mutter about peace and civility. They want us to channel our fears into worthless chatter they can wave away like candle smoke! Did the people of Manila stand around when action was required of them?” he asked, referring to the revolution that had toppled Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos in 1986. “No! They stormed the fortresses of their oppressors and broke the tyrants’ power within a week!”

Many of the assembled thousands had barely even heard of the Philippines, but the point was clear. Several policemen made a dash to tear the wires out of the sound system, but could not penetrate the fuming, rumbling mass of humanity. “In 1910, when our grandfathers were deprived of their democratic rights, did they simply stand around and curse the name of Díaz?”

This time, everyone knew which revolution Cárdenas was referencing. “No!” the throng screamed as an unstable whole.

“No!” their leader affirmed. “They took up arms and forced him out by the points of their bayonets! Change has only ever been won in Mexico through the blood of tyrants, and now the tyrants would have us forget that lesson and go about our liberation with words and peace marches! Will we allow ourselves to forget that lesson?”

It is presumed that most of the crowd shouted “no” at this prompting. By this point, the coherence of the crowd was dissolving. The distraught candidate’s dignified demeanor was degenerating into the hysterical ravings of an aggrieved widower, and his words were being drowned out by individual shouts for revenge and rebellion. Most of the rest of the speech has not been reliably recorded; the last passage upon which all the historians agree is as follows:

“Mexicans of true democratic conviction, now is your moment to rise up! Reclaim San Lázaro, Chapultepec and the National Palace, for they are the halls of the people and they belong to you! The Institutional Revolutionary Party have betrayed the ideals of the Revolution, and the only way to redeem them is with a new Revolution, one that will only be complete when fountains of blood—fountains of blood—spray from the necks of every priísta in this country!”

Once that last sentence was uttered, all illusion of control disappeared. The simmering crowd exploded into a riotous cacophony of screaming voices and cracking bones as policemen and protesters went to battle. Within minutes, the seething mob had taken to the streets, leaving agitation and blood in its wake as it barreled toward the most prominent symbols of the federal government and everything it stood for. Their "leader" was soon overtaken by grief and collapsed into a mess of sobbing incoherency, before being dragged off the podium by several policemen. But even at the height of his composure, he couldn’t have coaxed them back into civility. For decades, the PRI had been pilfering their wealth and clamping down on their freedoms, and now their beloved President had finally given them the permission to strike back and unleash years of pent-up resentment. There would be no going back now.

As Enrique Krauze would write: "The order from Cárdenas sent Mexico up in flames, but the fuel had been laid gradually, over generations, by the failings and excesses of decades of PRI rule." [3]

__________
​

[1] IOTL Cárdenas did give a speech on September 15, 1988 in the Zócalo before 250,000 supporters (ITTL, an extra 20,000 show up because it's his first public appearance in months). But rather than degenerating into a frantic incitement to violence and bloodshed, the speech called for Cárdenas's followers to change the system through peaceful means and not give the authorities a reason to unleash "a bloodbath and a devastating wave of repression". The speech is widely recognized as an important moment in Mexico's successful shift toward democracy, as the people were encouraged to channel their resentment of the system into productive, nonviolent democratic measures. The full text of the speech (in Spanish) is available here.
[2] Up until this point, the speech is the same. IOTL, the equivalent line was "Let the whole weight of the law fall on [slain politician Inocencio Romero's] murderers and on those of Ovando and Gil, of Del Arco and his young companions". Since Ovando and Gil are still alive at this point ITTL, Cárdenas instead calls for justice for his brutally-murdered wife, causing him to snap and lose his calm quite spectacularly.
[3] IOTL, Krauze (a prominent Mexican historian and intellectual) made this remark about Cárdenas's speech advocating for peace: "an order from [Cárdenas] would have sent Mexico up in flames. But perhaps in memory of his father, the missionary general, a man of strong convictions but not a man of violence, he did the country a great service by sparing it a possible civil war."

 

[Roberto El Rey]

It is an oft-documented oddity that an enormous crowd—even one with no eminent leader—can display enough singularity of mind to commit truly horrifying amounts of destruction. The “revolutionaries” of September 15 may have been angry, disorganized mobs, but they certainly seemed to know where they were going and what they were going to do once they got there.

The National Palace was directly adjacent to the Zócalo, so it was the first to fall. In centuries past the Palacio Nacional had served as the seat of imperial power, but by 1988 it only housed parts of the Treasury and National Archive. Nevertheless, a massive crowd began banging at the doors of the building as soon as Cárdenas mentioned it by name, and after twenty minutes of pummeling and pounding, the ancient oak gave way and a thousand angry Mexicans poured in. A few tried to reach the Archive, desperately seeking answers about the fates of family members who had disappeared in the 1970s amid the government’s “Dirty War” against leftist guerrillas. But all the important offices were locked behind iron gates and security doors, so most of the stormers settled for simple pillaging. Glass bookcases were smashed and delicate volumes yanked off the shelves, covers cracking as they hit the floor. Fine china was stuffed into pockets for resale, desk drawers were forcibly ripped out and documents haphazardly scattered about luxurious offices. All told, the Palacio suffered almost three million pesos’ worth of damage at the hands of the rioters.

A far greater tragedy occurred outside Los Pinos, the official home of the President of Mexico. Shortly after Cárdenas’s speech, a few thousand fired-up Cardenistas began an impromptu pilgrimage to the Presidential palace, intending to voice their outrage to President Miguel de la Madrid. Most of the marchers would leave midway through the journey, but many stayed on until the end so that, at approximately 6:47 that evening, 483 disaffected Mexicans arrived at the gates of Los Pinos, face-to-face with seventy-four army regulars, to demand a public audience with the President.

There is some historical disagreement over what exactly happened next. Some claim that the crowd charged directly at the palace gates while brandishing daggers and handguns, leaving the soldiers no choice but to fire back in self-defense. Others contend that the unarmed crowd threw rocks and broken bottles in the general direction of the soldiers until one officer got fed up and started shooting, prompting his seventy-three colleagues to do the same. The weapons found clutched in the hands of many dead rioters clearly disprove the latter theory (provided one disbelieves the eyewitnesses who claim to have seen officers planting pistols on corpses).

What no one disputes is that, when the shooting died down, 64 marchers were dead or wounded. And yet, horrifyingly, the Los Pinos Massacre is not the most infamous legacy of September 15, 1988.

Unlike Los Pinos, the Legislative Palace of San Lázaro (in which the federal Chamber of Deputies convened for legislative sessions) was only a few blocks away from the Zócalo, and the marchers arrived there in less than half an hour. By that point, nearly all of Mexico City’s uniformed policemen had been diverted elsewhere, allowing the unruly crowd to march right into the seat of the legislative branch with very little impediment.

It was a well-known fact that all of the ballots cast during the tainted Presidential election were being stored in San Lázaro's basement [1]. Once inside, several dozen rioters attempted to reach the basement, apparently intending to count up all twenty million ballots and overturn the election all by themselves. Scores of heavily-armed policemen arrived outside the building within a quarter of an hour, but the rioters barricaded the doors with heavy electoral machinery and hunkered down for a siege. The officers were wary of breaking in because they did not know whether the infiltrators were armed; meanwhile, the Cardenistas passed the time by pretending to be levantadedos [2], taking turns making impassioned speeches from the podium and staging mock votes on resolutions to criminalize the PRI and install Cárdenas as President (all of which passed unanimously). When that kind of activity began to wear on them, they went to work dismantling the electronic voting buttons on PRI lawmakers' desks.

No one knows for sure exactly how the fire started. In its final report in February of 1989, the federal investigative commission blamed the "dangerous and violent rebels" for starting the fire, either by accident while handling the flammable paper ballots, or intentionally "out of disrespect for the physical manifestations of Mexican democracy". But this finding was thrown into doubt when several of the experts who testified before the commission later admitted to having accepted government bribes. Many historians allege that the authorities started the fire in order to flush out the rioters, but there is no proof of this assertion, and the hurried manner in which the building was cleaned out prevented the gathering of any further evidence [3].

In any case, one thing is undeniable: 681 Mexicans perished in the fire, prevented from escaping by the blocked-off doors. And despite the solemn memorial service held the following week in the Catedral Metropolitana, many have noted how it fortunate it was for the government that the Presidential ballots—the only potentially concrete evidence of electoral fraud—died with the protesters.

Tragic though this event was, it was far from the government’s most pressing concern that night. The 270,000 enraged Cardenistas fanned out across Mexico City in packs, prompting rioting and street fighting in each of the city’s sixteen boroughs that lasted all through the night and well into the morning. Most of the city’s policemen were busy restoring order by use of nightsticks and teargas while ordinary firefighters handled the inferno. But as images of the legislature burning bright against the night sky were beamed across the world live by satellite, the San Lázaro Fire became the defining event of El Otoño Terrible. Tom Brokaw asked NBC viewers to imagine turning a corner in Washington to see Capitol Hill ablaze; Nicholas Witchell reporting for the BBC drew similar comparisons to the Palace of Westminster. This was a shocking display from a country that most westerners had counted among the most "civilized" in Latin America.

By the next morning, the entire world had a wonderfully exaggerated conception of a Mexico embroiled in full-scale civil war, its capital in the hands of violent guerrillas and its government struggling and failing to maintain order. de la Madrid had hoped that the protests would wear off in a few days as they always had, but instead, the capital city had figuratively and literally gone up in flames, and—worst of all—the entire world had watched it happen.

__________​

[1] That is all OTL. All of the ballot boxes from the election were being stored in the basement of the Chamber of Deputies by the time the legislative session began in August 1988. Why? Heck if I know. Thirty opposition congressmen (including one PAN deputy from Guanajuato named Vicente Fox) attempted to go down into the basement to get the ballots, but found the door blocked by soldiers who said the only person with a key to the warehouse was the head of the PRI congressional delegation. Later in OTL 1988, President de la Madrid struck a deal with the opposition to have all of the ballots burned, erasing any evidence of fraud.
[2] Levantadedo is (was?) hip Mexican slang for a PRI congressman. The word literally means "finger-lifter"—a reference to the fact that, in the proud tradition of rubber-stamp legislatures, priístas in Congress did little but lift their fingers to press the little green button and approve the President's latest edict.
[3] IOTL the building actually did burn down on May 5, 1989, due to an electrical issue. As for what happened ITTL? I leave it up to you to decide.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

In contrast to the popular fervor whipped up in response to the Los Pinos Massacre, very few Mexico City residents were particularly outraged by the San Lázaro Fire. After all, the Chamber of Deputies had never had any real power in the legislative process, and any debate that occurred within its walls was utterly irrelevant because the PRI majority invariably approved every Presidential edict put before it. Why should the Mexican people mourn a government building that not even the government cared about? [1]

By far, those most affected by the San Lázaro Fire lived not in Mexico but in Manhattan. Glued to their television screens as the Mexican equivalent of Capitol Hill went up in smoke, thousands of horrified Wall Streeters let their imaginations run wild. Today, the legislature had burned to the ground. Tomorrow, the severed head of the President would be paraded around the city on a stick. Texas would fall to invasion within a week, and by next month, nuclear bombs would be falling on Philadelphia. And—most importantly—all of their investments south of the Rio Grande would disappear! At precisely 9:30 in the morning on Friday, September 16, 1988, thousands of anxious investors flooded through the doors of the New York Stock Exchange looking to get their money the hell out of Mexico as fast as humanly possible. By the time the markets closed at four that afternoon, Mexico had lost $953 million. Almost one billion dollars—enough to feed the entire population for a day—gone, vanished from the country in seven-and-a-half miserable hours. Worse, as investors frantically exchanged their pesos for dollars, Mexico's Central Bank was forced to spend almost one-sixth of its foreign reserves to protect the peso from a catastrophic collapse in value.

Traders on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange rush to pull their investments from Mexico on September 16, 1988.​

President Miguel de la Madrid was horrified by this sudden outflux of currency. He knew that if the country kept losing capital at this rate, then the foreign reserve would quickly be depleted, there would be no way to curb inflation, the peso would fall off a cliff and the entire economy would come tumbling after. If a recession was to be avoided, de la Madrid would have to act, and he would have to act now. Conferring with President-elect Salinas, de la Madrid formed a plan: on September 17 and 18, the markets would be closed for the weekend, and large-scale capital flight would cease momentarily. Those forty-eight hours were de la Madrid's chance to prove to the world that he was in complete control of his country, and for that, he would have to crack down on the riots with as much force as the Geneva Conventions allowed. On the night of September 16, de la Madrid announced that a temporary state of emergency had been declared in the Federal District (which comprised Mexico City), and that civilian rule would be “temporarily suspended until such time as order [could] been safely restored”.

The contrast between the night of the 16th and the morning of the 17th was whiplash-inducing. At the time of de la Madrid's declaration on the 16th, Mexico City was in open rebellion, both from groups protesting the Los Pinos Massacre and from Cárdenistas heeding their beloved President's call to arms. The police were so overstretched that law enforcement had collapsed entirely in large parts of the city, leading to widespread looting and vicious street battles between Cárdenistas and priístas. Then, the Army was called in. Overnight, more than 30,000 troops arrived in the capital city, and the atmosphere changed completely. As dawn broke, stone-face soldiers and riot police marched in lockstep down every block. By Presidential order, anyone could be detained for "suspected involvement in terroristic activities", and police were using this pretext to corner, beat and arrest practically every passing pedestrian they could find. Anything resembling a public gathering was immediately attacked with teargas and rubber bullets. Those that surrendered were taken in custody, while those that ran were chased down, beaten, and then taken into custody. By Saturday night the city had been purged of all activity, and by Sunday morning the city was as close as it had ever been to silent.

Because de la Madrid and Salinas were preoccupied with the markets, the task of managing the military occupation of Mexico City fell to the Secretary of the Government, Manuel Bartlett Díaz [2]. Bartlett was a staunch PRI hardliner who believed that the best way to deal with threats to the system was with physical force. He instructed the police and the Army to maintain order by any means necessary, and both groups immediately began exploiting this power for monetary gain. Walking down the street soon became an endless succession of arbitrary police "searches" that were really just state-sanctioned muggings, and as often as not, those who didn't have any cash to hand over were arrested as "terrorists" and held for days or weeks until their families could raise enough money for a bailout.

Police arrest a young man for taking part in an anti-government demonstration on September 26, 1988.​

When they weren’t out committing crimes themselves, these “peacekeepers” were busy profiting off of someone else’s crime. Policemen would often look the other way as shops were looted in exchange for a cut of the takings, an enterprise which was so profitable for both the police and the looters that, in many neighborhoods, the heavy police presence ironically led to an increase in crime rates.

The Army was getting in on the gravy train too. Secretary Bartlett gave mid-ranking officers the power to shut down any organization they deemed to be a “front for seditious activity”, which in practice became nothing more than a license for them to set up protection rackets in their corners of the city. As the weeks wore on, the police and the Army over which organization had jurisdiction over which section of the city, small but bloody skirmishes between soldiers and policemen became increasingly commonplace. As instances of particular brutality and impunity became public knowledge to the residents of the Federal District, fury and vengefulness began to build up and threatened to blow up once more into open resistance to government-imposed order.

By the end of September, Mexico City was consumed with fear and fury. Thousands of innocent individuals had disappeared into crowded holding cells based on nothing more than groundless "suspicions". The city's economy was paralyzed because millions of employed people were too frightened to come to work, and the few establishments that stayed open saw little business because, after two weeks of incessant police “searches”, no one was foolish enough to go outside with money in his pocket. Only the most fervently devout Catholics mustered up the courage to attend mass on Sunday the 25th, and the memorial service held that day for the victims of the San Lázaro Fire drew fewer attendees than had perished in the fire itself. Although the Federal District would remain under martial law long after 1988, the initial months were particularly unpleasant because the soldiers and policemen (believing that the “temporary” suspension of civil liberties actually would be temporary) worked to extort as much money as they could before their position of power was revoked. In his later writings on the Revolution, Enrique Krauze would refer to these first two months as El Otoño Terrible: the “Autumn of Terrors”.

​

Worst of all, despite all of the blood that was being shed in the name of economic stability, de la Madrid’s and Salinas’s plan was failing. At first, world markets had responded positively to images of the nascent Mexican police state; only $115 million was removed from the country on Monday the 19th, a much more sustainable loss than that which Mexico had suffered after the San Lázaro Fire. But, rather than slowing to a halt as expected, the capital flight simply continued at a slower rate. Much of the fleeing capital belonged not to foreigners, but to wealthy Mexicans who sensed the kleptocratic mood in the capital and feared no less for their fortunes. And as they informed their friends in New York that tensions were bubbling just beneath the authoritarian surface, the nation continued to bleed capital at an alarmingly steady rate. As October neared, Mexico had expended nearly half its $6 billion foreign reserve just to keep the peso stabilized. As capital continued to stampede from country with end in sight and Mexico City at an economic standstill, the economy seemed increasingly likely to collapse once more into recession. Student groups from the National University began organizing protests that energized the sinking civic spirits of the people and pushed them to the brink of renewed rebellion. And when areas far away from the capital started experiencing upheavals of their own that further eroded investor confidence, de la Madrid and Salinas began desperately searching for some way—any way—to save the entire country from backsliding into economic catastrophe.

On October 2, 1988, their fateful attempt to blame juveniles for the crisis would seal the fate of Mexico.

__________
​

[1] This isn't an exaggeration—the government really didn't care much at all about the Palacio de San Lázaro. Case in point: after the building burned down in OTL 1989, it still had not been rebuilt eight years later (despite years of economic growth) because the government did not think it worth the expense to rebuild.
[2] This cabinet position, referred to in Spanish as Secretario de Gobernación, is typically rendered in English as "Secretary of the Interior". But I prefer to use "Secretary of the Government", for two reasons: one, because the English word is closer to the corresponding Spanish word, and two, because while in America, the Secretary of the Interior is among the least important cabinet positions, the Mexican Secretario de Gobernación is probably the most important post in the Mexican cabinet, dealing with matters of national and internal security, intelligence gathering and domestic affairs. Therefore, I feel "Secretary of the Government" is a better translation to use, and will use it henceforth in this project.

Oh, and that Manuel Bartlett Díaz guy? Remember him, because he's going to be important later.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

It has often been said that history repeats itself. It has been said so often, in fact, that the phrase has become one of the stalest clichés in the English language (almost as much as "it has often been said"). After decades of overuse, the expression has lost its edge, like a hatchet gone blunt after felling ten thousand trees. The most tragic effect of this overuse is that the phrase falls short on days when it really counts, when today and yesterday align so perfectly that one can't help but wonder where the one begins and the other ends. One such day was October 2, 1988, when President Miguel de la Madrid ordered military troops to occupy the National Autonomous University of Mexico and arrest over one thousand students—precisely twenty years to the day after the Tlatelolco Massacre of 1968, when President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz had ordered military troops to occupy the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in Tlatelolco and murder almost four hundred students.

President Miguel de la Madrid already had an exceptionally troubled relationship with the UNAM (as the National Autonomous University of Mexico was often called). On September 19, 1985, Mexico City had been hit by a massive earthquake that had left 180,000 residents homeless. In response, the students had organized themselves into independent brigades and undertaken valiant rescue efforts, taking control of devastated neighborhoods and making de la Madrid’s government look pathetically incompetent by comparison. The leaders of this upstart, radically left-wing student movement—most prominent among them the President of the Student Council, Imanol Ordorika Sacristán—had stayed politically active over the following three years, serving on all kinds of Committees and Councils to drum up support for Cárdenas in the 1988 Presidential election. [1] And now, as the Autumn of Terrors began in earnest and reports of police brutality swept the city, the students’ civil instincts were triggered once again.

The first Brigada Estudiantil para la Protección Civil (Student Brigade for Civil Protection) was organized on September 19, the three-year anniversary of the Earthquake. It barely took a day for them to start causing trouble; on September 20, a brigada consisting of eleven students from the Faculdad de Ciencias confronted a pair of police officers who were busy shaking down a defenseless civilian. The officers, furious but outnumbered, were forced to let the man go. The next day, the same two policemen, accompanied by an entire platoon of officers, stormed the School of Sciences, arrested twenty-two students (only two of whom had actually taken part in that brigade), and held them without charge or access to legal counsel. On September 22, almost 40,000 students embarked on a disorganized eight-mile protest march from the UNAM campus to the Zócalo, demanding that the government release the abducted students, find Celeste Batel’s killer, and bring the officers responsible for the Los Pinos Massacre to trial. de la Madrid was unmoved and saw little reason to stop the marchers, who, after reaching the Zócalo, quickly realized that there was nothing for them to do and awkwardly dispersed. But, despite a general sense of aimlessness, the students were emboldened by the success of the march, assuming that the President had failed to stop it not because he was unfazed, but because he was too scared to confront them.

From left to right: Antonio Santos Romero, Carlos Ímaz Gispert, and Imanol Ordorika Sacristán, the most prominent leaders of the student movement at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, shown here chairing a meeting of the UNAM's University Student Council in 1987.​

Learning from the disorganized nature of this protest march, the students set up a Coordinadora (Coordinating Committee) to guide the brigadas. Headed by preeminent student leader Imanol Ordorika, the Coordinadora quickly got to work dispatching brigades to certain streets and neighborhoods, establishing clear leadership and self-reliance in every brigade, and outfitting each one with non-deadly weapons and two-way radios. Under the leadership of the Coordinadora, the Brigadas Estudiantiles quickly became models of efficiency and coordination; by the last day of September, over fifty of them had been formed and were challenging the police for effective control of the City’s southern suburbs. Secretary Bartlett wanted to punish the students for defying the authority of the government, but de la Madrid feared that a crackdown would only lead to street battles that would further endanger Mexico’s economic standing. Undeterred, they patrolled the streets, rescuing hundreds of citizens from police abuse. By the end of the week, similar brigades were being set up in the National Polytechnic Institute (Politécnico), Mexico City's second-largest university. And as news of the brigades traveled through word of mouth, the students won public admiration for their bravery and willingness to challenge the government.

When Miguel de la Madrid was informed by moles within the student movement that another march to the Zócalo was being planned for Friday, September 30, he was unconcerned. Over the previous week, he and President-elect Salinas had been so fixated on containing capital flight that they failed to realize how well-organized the students had become. de la Madrid ignored Secretary Bartlett’s pleas to suppress the march, believing that the planned demonstration would just be another small, harmless affair like the previous week. It was only after 190,000 students—80% from the UNAM, 20% from the Politécnico—were joined in the streets by 230,000 citizens, who had been attracted to the protest by a highly successful student-led propaganda campaign, that the President realized his mistake. Army blockades were hastily assembled to block the path of the march, but when the crowds approached the officers simply let them pass through, knowing that attacking hundreds of thousands of unarmed civilians with guns could only lead to disaster. Thus, on the last day of September, 420,000 citizens packed themselves into the Zócalo to vent their anger at two weeks of terror and dictatorship.

The Coordinadora had put much preparation into the march, setting up a speaking platform and inviting over a dozen speakers to address the crowd, including Jorge Carpizo MacGregor, Rector of the UNAM and respected jurist, who criticized the PRI's continuous breaking of the law to preserve power; Sergio Aguayo [2], Mexico’s foremost independent human rights activist, who recounted the horror of the Los Pinos Massacre and fired up the crowd with calls for justice; and Rosario Ibarra, a minor candidate in the 1988 presidential election and the mother of a boy who, after joining a communist guerrilla group in the 1970s, had become one of los desaparecidos: the thousands of people who had been arrested by the government and subsequently disappeared, never to been seen again. Ibarra’s speech proved by the far the most inflammatory, because a significant percentage of the protesters had close friends or family members who had been arrested that month. Ibarra’s stories of pain and anguish at the loss of her son terrified tens of thousands of citizens into thinking that they might never see their loved ones again, and her closing note that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (who had not been seen in public since September 15) might himself become a desaparecido did little to help matters. The authorities looked on helplessly, unable to break up the rally for fear that it would flare up into yet another mass rebellion.

The Zócalo on the afternoon of September 30, 1988, in the midst of a protest rally which dwarfed that held by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas earlier in the month.​

But, to the government’s surprise, the protest ended anticlimactically. The students slinked out of the Zócalo as quickly and as efficiently as they had entered, having intended for the protest to be show of civilian strength rather than a flashpoint for revolution. Nevertheless, severe damage had been done. The Coordinadora had had the good sense to invite television crews from NBC and ABC to film the protest, and when foreign investors turned on their television screens to see yet another massive rally in the Zócalo barely two weeks after Cárdenas’s frenzied speech on the 15th, the illusion of government control was shattered. Nearly half a billion dollars fled the country that afternoon, bringing the foreign reserves down to a dangerously low $2.1 billion. de la Madrid, President-elect Salinas, and Finance Secretary Gustavo Petriccioli tried to assure the executives at Bank of America and CitiCorp that the situation was more peaceful than it appeared, but found them impossible to convince. The banks anxiously informed the President that he had until Monday, October 3, to prove that he could keep the peace. If, by that point, Mexico still seemed to be on the brink of civil war, then nearly all foreign investments would stampede out of the country and the economy would almost certainly collapse.

de la Madrid wasted no time. Saturday, October 1 was a whirlwind of hasty military planning and conferencing with President-elect Salinas, Defense Secretary Juan Arévalo Gardoqui, and Government Secretary Bartlett (who exuded quite a bit of smugness after being proven right about the protest). As dawn broke on the twentieth anniversary of the Tlatelolco Massacre, the first police cars entered the UNAM, hoping to occupy the campus, arrest the leaders of the Coordinadora, and leave without causing much upheaval. What the President and Secretary Bartlett failed to realize was that, in the midst of equipping and organizing dozens of Brigadas, the students had developed a plan for exactly the situation they now found themselves in. The plan wasn’t terribly detailed, mainly consisting of a general call to fight against the occupation forces with whatever weapons were at hand. But in the hyper-alert UNAM of 1988, word traveled at lightning speed, and within an hour the entire student body was mobilized, ready to fight like wild dogs in defense of the cherished “autonomy” of their Autonomous University.

The most disciplined and organized of all the students were the brigadas. They were at the forefront of the defensive campaign, engaging wave after wave of policemen and soldiers in hand-to-hand combat at the outskirts of the campus while students further inside built barriers across the University’s main avenues. Eventually, the brigades were dealt with and the way finally cleared for police cars and Army trucks, only for them to find that many of the paths had been barricaded off, giving them little choice but to clamber around them on foot. The alleyways between residential buildings became gravitational booby traps, as students in fifth-story dormitories poured out garbage cans and pots of boiling water onto the heads of soldiers and policemen below. Police cars left alone for longer than half an hour were set on fire. After a day passed and the campus was still far from pacified, tanks and bulldozers were brought in to push through the barricades, which swiftly came under attack from students hurling Molotov cocktails. [3] Thousands of students sustained injuries, many of them serious, but de la Madrid had ordered that use of deadly force be kept to an absolute minimum, tying the hands of the officers and significantly slowing the progress of the military takeover (though not saving the 14 students who were killed by overly aggressive officers, nor the 53 who would eventually die of their wounds).

Finally, after four days of exhausting skirmishes between 12,000 well-armed officers and 260,000 poorly-armed but fiercely-motivated students, the authorities had essentially subdued the UNAM. They arrested over twelve thousand students, only to find that most of the Coordinadora was gone, having secretly fled the campus in the opening hours of the fight and left Mexico City to go into hiding. de la Madrid was apoplectic, ordering that the most prominent leaders—Ordorika, Santos, and Ímaz—be tracked down and apprehended. But he had little time to focus on his rage because, after it became evident that the student leaders had escaped, capital flight became a stampede as investors lost all their remaining faith in the government's ability to keep order. de la Madrid and Salinas, knowing that the last of the country’s meager foreign reserves would be gone within the week, now turned in desperation to the U.S. government, begging and pleading with President Reagan for a loan that would allow Mexico to partially shield itself from the oncoming financial maelstrom.

Though reviled by investors and the government, these students quickly became international heroes. Accounts of police corruption and Army brutality in Mexico City had spread everywhere from London to La Plata, attracting near-universal condemnation. And when news of the students’ resistance was publicized, the juveniles were celebrated throughout the democratic world as civic exemplars, fearlessly defending their fellow citizens from state tyranny. The question of when exactly the Second Mexican Revolution began remains a topic of fierce contention among historians and academics, but a significant fraction argues that the National Autonomous University of Mexico on October 2 became the first real battleground of the Revolution. The Battle of the UNAM, as many call it, is one of the most romanticized moments in the Mexican revolutionary mythos, and the simultaneous outpouring of rage and sympathy it inspired all across the country ensures that it will stay that way, no matter what verdict history eventually delivers on its significance to the Revolution as a whole.

__________​

[1] This happened in OTL, before the POD of this work. Student brigades from the UNAM conducted some truly impressive rescue work of their own initiative in the aftermath of the Earthquake, putting their lives on the line to rescue newborn babies from collapsed maternity wards and maintaining order in areas of the city where law enforcement had broken down. For a detailed description of their heroism, see here.
[2] Remember him. He’ll be important later.
[3] In 1968, the UNAM was occupied by police and military to practically no resistance. But when the Politécnico was occupied days later, the skirmishes lasted three days, and the students used almost all of the outlined methods of fending off the occupiers.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

While Mexico City simmered under the twin pressures of urban violence and martial law, similar disturbances were occurring all over the country. In the state of Michoacán, where Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas was revered as a former Senator and Governor, his speech inspired a massive protest campaign that included the spontaneous blocking of dozens of highways across the state, the seizing of government-owned warehouses, and an protest occupation of the central square in the state capital that lasted for four straight days, until PRI Governor Luis Martinez Villacaña got fed up on September 27 and ordered the state police to break it up by force. When attacked, the protesters heeded Cárdenas’s calls to resist by fighting back viciously with whatever weapons, sharp or blunt, were at hand. Similar demonstrations were called in Guerrero, Oaxaca, Puebla, Guanajuato, Sonora, and many other states, and in each case, the results were the same: hundreds of protesters were killed, hundreds injured and hundreds more arbitrarily arrested and held for weeks or months without trial.

Cárdenas’s speech also triggered a more organized reaction in Chiapas, a majority-indigenous state that was by far the poorest and least developed in Mexico. An agrarian state, Chiapas was populated mostly by impoverished dirt farmers known as campesinos, many of whom had lost faith in the PRI after de la Madrid’s slashing of agricultural subsidies left them near-destitute. As a result, by 1988, Chiapas was locked in a bitter partisan struggle between supporters of the PRI (represented by the CNC [1], the PRI’s official campesino civic organization) and opponents of the PRI (represented by independent groups such as the OCEZ [2] and the CIOAC [3]). In late September, using Cárdenas’s speech as a pretext, members of the OCEZ and COIAC forcibly occupied dozens of large, privately-owned estates in northern Chiapas in an attempt to press for land reform. The government responded by cracking down on the rebellious campesinos, mobilizing local CNC chapters to force them off the occupied properties with clubs and shotguns. Violent confrontations ensued, and dozens died at the hands of their neighbors in this newest chapter of the simmering civil conflict in Chiapas.

Meanwhile, in the neighboring state of Tabasco, the people had already been swept up into a massive wave of civil resistance thanks to the efforts of one man: Andrés Manuel López Obrador. López Obrador was a master of public appearances and an eloquent speaker. He had been President of the Tabasco state PRI from 1983 to 1985, but later defected to the Cardenista opposition and ran an unsuccessful campaign for Governor in 1988. After losing the election, López Obrador alleged that the PRI had cheated him out of his victory and declared a nonviolent war on the government, leading his supporters through an endless series of protest marches, sit-ins and roadblocks all across Tabasco. By mid-September, these nonviolent protests had been going on for two months and showed no signs of flagging, as López Obrador’s charisma and talent for grassroots organizing kept the public continuously energized and angry. [4] But after Cárdenas ordered all of his adherents to spill “fountains of blood...from the necks of every priísta”, these "noviolent" protests suddenly started becoming a lot more violent. By October, as he watched peaceful protest marches degenerate into bloody street riots, López Obrador began to wonder whether he was truly in control of the populistic rage he had unleashed. Whether he was or not, it was clear that interesting times lay ahead for the people of Tabasco.

After losing his 1988 bid for Governor of Tabasco, opposition figure Andrés Manuel López Obrador led a statewide, nonviolent civil resistance campaign that he struggled to keep in line following Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas’s “Fountains of Blood” speech.​

Back in Mexico City, more fuel was thrown onto the proverbial fire with the advent of labor unrest. On Friday, October 7, one day after the Battle of the UNAM, several thousand staff members from the National University went on strike to protest the occupation. They were quickly joined in the streets by oil workers, teachers, telephone workers, and thousands more who found it impossible to do their jobs amid the terror of martial law (many of them had little else to do but strike, since the lack of business had forced their employers to shut their doors indefinitely). Security forces were sent to put the strike down on Saturday, but this only induced more workers to join in the strike.

Practically all of these workers were unionized, but the strike had not been organized by the unions themselves; all of these unions were member organizations of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), which, as the official labor wing of the PRI, was not a vehicle for working people to express their interests, but the instrument by which the Mexican government kept a leash on the working classes. Therefore, when President de la Madrid asked Fidel Velázquez, the 88-year-old Secretary-General of the CTM, to put an end to the budding general strike, he expected no resistance whatsoever from the traditionally-pliable unions. Neither did Velázquez; on October 12, the octogenarian labor leader decreed that all members of CTM unions who participated in the strike would have their membership revoked (a dire punishment, because employers were legally required to dismiss any employee who lost his or her union membership).

Many were angered by this declaration, but Joaquín “La Quina” Hernández Galicia—the leader of the Mexican Petroleum Workers’ Union—was furious. The STPRM, as it was abbreviated in Spanish, was among the most powerful labor unions in Mexico, representing the employees of Pemex, Mexico’s state-owned petroleum corporation. Pemex was a vital pillar of the Mexican economy, with revenues from the sale of state-owned oil bringing tens of billions of dollars into the country every year. In order to keep the oil workers happy and maximize production, successive PRI presidents had granted all sorts of special perks and privileges to the STPRM, and allowed it to take a huge proportion of Pemex’s profits for itself. [5] But, over the course of his presidency, Miguel de la Madrid had gradually stripped away the STPRM’s autonomy, introducing measure after measure to turn the Union into just another appendage of Los Pinos. And now, Velázquez, that rotting pile of excrement, had tried to take away his workers’ constitutional right to strike? Hernández Galicia wouldn’t stand for it. Instead of expelling the 8,000 Pemex workers who were participating in the strike, “La Quina” congratulated them for their bravery in standing up to the government. His confidence in the government, as well as that of thousands of oil workers, had become extraordinarily fragile.

By 1988, Fidel Velázquez Sánchez had held an iron grip on the Mexican Workers' Confederation for 47 years. He was 88 years old, nearly blind, and had become more concerned with subduing the working class than with fighting for its interests within the corporatist hierarchy of the PRI.​

Within a week, that wafer-thin confidence was shattered. On October 16, 1988, after a week of negotiations with U.S. President Ronald Reagan, Miguel de la Madrid announced that he had secured a loan of $2.6 billion from the U.S. government to get the economy back on track and stabilize the value of the peso, which had depreciated by almost 8% since the beginning of the month. To finance the loan, de la Madrid had put up over 50 million barrels of crude oil as collateral, and had vowed to pay off the loan by selling petroleum to the United States at prices far below market value. The announcement proved controversial in the United States because President Reagan had not consulted Congress about the loan, leading to accusations of executive overreach and unilateralism. [6] But if it was controversial in the U.S., the bailout was Earth-shattering in Mexico. When Lázaro Cárdenas created Pemex in 1938 by nationalizing the oil industry, his intention had been to put Mexican oil to the benefit of the Mexican people. And now, Miguel de la Madrid was practically planning to give oil away for free to the Americans, all while digging the country deeper in debt with a predatory loan. This was a betrayal of the very idea of modern Mexico, and the fiercely nationalistic Hernández Galicia would not have his workers finance it by digging the oil out of the ground. On October 18, the Mexican Petroleum Workers’ Union staged a simultaneous, nationwide strike to protest the bailout.

If the Mexican economy in October of 1988 was a house of cards, then the Pemex Workers’ Strike was a tornado. Approximately 11.5% of the country’s GDP came from the sale of oil, [7] and on October 20, production came crashing to a halt as the nation’s 210,000 oil workers staged walkouts from Tabasco to Tamaulipas. The national economy instantly underwent a violent contraction, and within a week it was barreling toward recession; as investors lost their last remaining faith in Mexico’s ability to pay back its foreign debt, ordinary Mexicans lost much of their remaining faith in the peso, which, by November 4, had depreciated by a full 30% of its value. Oil prices shot up by 900%, and prices of most basic goods quadrupled. Within a few weeks, many people’s savings had been wiped out by inflation, to the point that many could barely afford to feed their families. On November 6, former U.S. Treasury Secretary James Baker wrote that Mexico's economic woes were akin to childbirth, as both involved "extraordinarily painful contractions and some serious labor pains".

As Mexico City’s troubles droned on into their third month, cities and villages all around the country began to see economic unrest, made worse by radicalized UNAM students who had returned home following the occupation to advocate for rebellion against the system in their hometowns. Seeing no other options, de la Madrid and Salinas embarked on November 16 on a state visit to the United States—first to Washington, where they planned to negotiate with the new President-elect to refinance Mexico’s $48 billion foreign debt, and then to New York, where they would meet with the leaders of the International Monetary Fund in order to secure a bailout. Any chance of growth was shattered for the foreseeable future, but at least they might be able to bring the economy to a state of "managed decline".

As they departed for the United States, de la Madrid and Salinas realized that they would not have the time or the energy to administer the country while abroad, and so they conferred all powers to maintain order upon Government Secretary Manuel Bartlett. Bartlett had already been in charge of administering the military occupation of Mexico City, but now the hard-fisted authoritarian would be charged with holding the entire country together as it combusted with unrest. On November 14, by Presidential decree and with the written consent of Mexico City mayor Manuel Camacho Solís, the “temporary” state of emergency in the Federal District became permanent, to end only “when the President concludes that peace can endure in the Federal District without the direct support and enforcement of the government”. There was no end in sight to the cycle of reprisals and counter-reprisals that now characterized life in the Federal District, and it seemed that this cycle may establish itself in other parts of the country as well. This was the end of the Autumn of Terrors and the beginning of a new chapter in the 167-year history of independent Mexico.

__________​

[1] Confederación Nacional Campesina (National Campesino Confederation)
[2] Organización Campesino Emiliano Zapata (Emiliano Zapata Campesino Organization)
[3] Central Independiente de Obreros, Agrícolas y Campesinos (Independent Center of Workers, Farmers and Campesinos)
[4] All of this, including AMLO's backstory, occurred in OTL.
[5] In fact, the STPRM took so much money from Pemex that, by 1980, the Union’s 210,000 members were practically a nation unto themselves. To quote Julia Preston and Sam Dillon’s Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy,

“La Quina used the torrent of cash from Pemex to buy farms and build factories, stores, and housing, creating a socialist protectorate. Oil workers shopped at union supermarkets, ate union-grown produce, wore union-made shoes, convalesced in union hospitals, and mourned in union funeral homes—often at subsidized prices.” (Preston and Dillon 192)
[6] Some may question the plausibility of Ronald Reagan, the eminent fiscal conservative, shelling out $2.6 billion to a foreign country at the drop of a hat. But these are unusual circumstances: the Election of 1988 is fast approaching, and Reagan’s advisors have informed him that an economic catastrophe in Mexico may shock the U.S. economy enough to throw the election result seriously in doubt, perhaps even enough to swing the election to Democratic candidate Michael Dukakis. In addition, almost $10 billion of Mexico’s foreign debt in 1988 was owned by American banks, and so it is in the interest of the United States to keep Mexico solvent so that it can pay off that debt. On top of that, Congress is going to adjourn within the week, and Reagan has already spent much of his political capital with Congressional Democrats getting the Anti-Drug Abuse Act passed. He knows that giving away $2.6 billion will anger conservatives in both parties, so, rather than trying to push a bailout through Congress during the last week of its session, Reagan reaches into the Exchange Stabilization Fund to get the money (just as President Clinton did when he bailed out Mexico in OTL 1995).
[7] According to Bernard S. Katz and Siamack Shojai's The Oil Market in the 1980s: A Decade of Decline, in 1988 Mexico produced approximately $10 billion worth of petroleum. In the same year, Mexico’s GDP was estimated at $87.06 billion. Therefore, about 11.5% of Mexico’s GDP that year came from oil production.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

I had a day off, and the next update will take some time to research, so here's Part 7 up front. Enjoy!

__________​

Going into the last month of the United States presidential election of 1988, Republican nominee George Bush looked unstoppable. As Vice President to popular President Ronald Reagan, Bush had successfully portrayed his Democratic opponent, Governor Michael Dukakis, as an elitist “Massachusetts liberal” who was soft on crime, ignorant of military matters and out of touch with the hopes and dreams of average, everyday Americans. As September turned to October, Bush seemed assured of a decisive victory. But, when events south of the border began to spiral into crisis, Bush’s lead shrank and the election was thrown into doubt.

Bush’s running mate, Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana, had been selected more for his youth than for his intelligence. This became embarrassingly evident at the vice-presidential debate on October 5, when, after being asked how he would deal with the Mexican situation if called on to serve as President, Quayle responded that he would “go into a close cooperation with President Sevillas” (referring to Mexican President-elect Carlos Salinas) to combat the “rebels and radicals” that had shaken up Mexico City. Democratic vice-presidential candidate Lloyd Bentsen swiftly pounced on Quayle, pointing out the mistake and arguing that it proved Quayle was oblivious to world events. Though Republicans emphasized that Bush himself had vast foreign policy experience, some voters became nervous about putting a man as ill-informed as Quayle so close to the Presidency.

“How do you expect to negotiate with President Salinas, Senator,” Bentsen asked his gaffe-prone opponent, “when you can’t even call him by his name?”​

In addition to botching Salinas’s name, Quayle was chastised for seemingly taking the side of the Mexican government over that of the protesters. It was well-known by this point that the PRI had fraudulently robbed Cárdenas of victory, and most Americans sympathized with the Mexican civilians who were protesting the fraud. Yet, here was Quayle calling them “rebels and radicals” and promising to help repress them if he became President, drawing heavy criticism from Dukakis’s campaign. Vice President Bush managed to deflect much of the heat in the second presidential debate on October 13, toeing a moderate line by lending his “moral support” to the protesters while claiming that the most important thing was to restore order and stability by backing the PRI government. Bush was widely seen as having won the debate, using the burgeoning Mexican crisis to flaunt his foreign policy prowess in front of the inexperienced Dukakis. Still, Quayle’s (and, by extension, Bush’s) credibility had been dented.

Shortly after the presidential debate, President Reagan announced that he had agreed to loan Mexico $2.6 billion, drawing criticism from Democrats for his failure to consult Congress about the bailout. But this issue was rapidly overshadowed by the sudden economic downturn. Days after Mexico’s petroleum workers went on strike, gas prices shot up by over forty cents a gallon, slashing consumer confidence and aggregate demand as shopping trips and family vacations were canceled. The oil shock pushed the economy into a sudden decline which, as election day neared, was growing increasingly steep and showed no signs of slowing down, forming the beginning of what economists now refer to as the Late 1980s Recession. When election day came on November 8, the same pollsters who had predicted a safe Bush victory one month before no longer felt particularly comfortable predicting anything.

By the next morning, it was clear that Bush had won, albeit by a narrow margin. The historical consensus is that Michael Dukakis was simply not a compelling enough candidate to woo enough voters away from Bush. If Dukakis had gone on the offensive in the last month of the campaign, attacking Reagan’s administration for supporting the authoritarian PRI and creating the necessary conditions for economic uncertainty, he may well have had a chance at victory. But, instead, he hung back while Bush deftly handled these true October surprises [1]. Bush’s 2.5% margin of victory in the popular vote was narrow, but he had secured a conclusive majority of 97 in the electoral college [2], and while the Democrats had slightly increased their majorities in the House and Senate, the Presidency would remain in Republican hands for another four years.

​

The United States wasn’t the only North American country to hold an election in November of 1988. On November 21, just thirteen days after George Bush was elected President of the United States, Canada would go to the polls to deliver a verdict on the four-year premiership of Prime Minister Brian Mulroney.

In the 1984 federal election, Mulroney had led his Progressive Conservative Party to a landslide victory, winning the largest parliamentary majority in Canadian history. Mulroney did not want to compromise this majority with another election, but the Canadian Senate refused ratify Mulroney’s historic Canada-United States Free Trade Agreement (FTA) without a fresh mandate. So, in September of 1988, Parliament was dissolved and a new federal election was declared.

The election campaign was initially dominated by the single issue of free trade. John Turner, leader of the opposition Liberal Party and former Prime Minister, led a fiery campaign against the FTA, vowing to “tear it up” if he ever became Prime Minister again. This stance won Turner an early lead in the polls as most Canadians did not support free trade with the United States; Mulroney recognized this problem, but hoped that the center-left New Democratic Party (which was also opposed to the FTA) would split the anti-free trade vote and allow the Progressive Conservatives to retain their majority. Following the advice of pundit Allan Gregg, Mulroney decided to fight the election by attacking Turner’s credibility, criticizing him for decisions made during his brief stint as Prime Minister and his contentious leadership elections. This, combined with a $6 million pro-FTA advertising campaign, swung the lead to the Tories in October, seemingly assuring them of victory.

And then, the economy began to sputter. The Mexican oil workers’ strike in mid-October did not have an exorbitant direct effect on Canada, as Canada’s high domestic petroleum production managed to keep prices at the pump from rising by more than fourteen cents in most places. But, by November, as America’s economy tumbled, it became increasingly clear that Canada was being dragged down by its southern neighbor. While George Bush had had the advantage of being elected before it became obvious that a recession was coming, by late November, the economy had been in decline for long enough to convince many Canadians that difficult times lay ahead. This gave Turner and Broadbent the perfect opportunity to blame Progressive Conservative policies for the downturn, arguing that Canada would have been less vulnerable to American market fluctuations if not for Mulroney’s gradual lessening of trade restrictions with the U.S. To combat this, Mulroney doubled down on the personal attacks on Turner, but this only drew criticism for trying to distract the public from the serious issues. By the time Canadians went to the polls on November 21, free trade had become highly unpopular, and only the prospect of an even split between the Liberals and the NDP comforted Mulroney on that stressful night.

​

The result was a Tory landslide—in Alberta, at least. The bump in gas prices was good news for the province’s bustling petroleum industry, and the Progressive Conservatives retained all twenty of the province's federal ridings. Outside of Alberta, though, it was a bad day for Mulroney: the Tories held only 134 seats, losing 65 ridings and, with them, their majority. The Liberals, meanwhile, increased their representation from 38 to 109 seats, a very large profit but still not enough to form a majority government. Fortunately for Turner, the NDP enjoyed a 20-seat gain from 32 to 52 seats (Broadbent’s moderate socialist agenda attracting increased support in times of looming economic uncertainty), more than enough seats to form a coalition government with the Liberals. Talks between the two parties began the day after the election, and on December 10, John Turner returned to Sussex Drive for his second term as Prime Minister. [3]

Shortly after the new Parliament sat, Mulroney resigned as party leader. The PC backbench lambasted Mulroney for squandering the largest electoral majority in Canadian history, blaming him for his failure to retain the support of the diverse alliance of interest groups that had delivered a landslide in 1984. The Progressive Conservative Party set out to find a leader who could unite those blocs once more into a winning coalition, and after a heated leadership contest, the party settled on moderate Quebec nationalist Marcel Masse, the former Minister for Energy. Though he had only first been elected to the House of Commons in 1984, Masse’s anti-free trade credentials were strong, and he had a bedrock of support in his native Québec (which had seen a significant swing against the Tories in the election but which, PC leaders believed, could still be a promising groundswell of PC support in future elections). As 1989 dawned, Prime Minister Turner was faced with the gloomy task of abandoning the FTA, and thus damaging relations with one of Canada's largest trading partners just as a recession dawned.

__________​

[1] lord caedus, where u at?
[2] In OTL, Dukakis only won 10 states and 111 electoral votes. Here, Bush's margin of victory is reduced by over 5%, enough to swing California, Illinois, Pennsylvania, Maryland and Vermont (all of which went to Bush by narrow margins in OTL) to Dukakis, almost doubling his electoral vote total to 220. It's not enough to win him the election, but it's something.
[3] In OTL, the PCs retained 169 seats, the Liberals were left with 83, and the NDP with 43. Mulroney kept his majority and stayed on as Prime Minister. Here, his luck is worse and he is voted out.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Not quite a regular update, but I hope you still enjoy it! This is the first of what will hopefully be many narrative pieces examining the thoughts of this timeline's characters as they deal with the harrowing events of TTL.

October 5, 1988
Puebla​

Henry Gabriel Cisneros struggled to hold his eyelids up as he gripped the steering wheel, blearily watching yard after yard of dark gray gravel disappear underneath the hood of the car. To give his eyes a reason to stay open, Henry took a momentary look at his wife, who was slumped asleep in the seat beside him as the irritable Volkswagen rumbled down the rough rural road, its headlights slicing through the dark night air.

Henry’s mouth tightened with guilt at the sight of her. When Henry had heard that two of his cousins in Puebla had been killed while protesting Mexico’s 1988 election, all he could think about was his disgust at the Mexican government, which defrauded its people and turned its weapons on them when they complained. When his mother had insisted that the family return to Puebla to attend the funeral, he could only think about how much of a hassle it would be to lobby the City of San Antonio for an extra week of vacation time, find someone to look after the kids and fend off criticism from those who believed that an incumbent Mayor should be forbidden from leaving the country during his term, family crises be damned. On the drive from Mexico City to to the remote Puebla village, all he could think about was how badly the rental car handled and how noisy the brakes were.

But once Henry arrived at that house he hadn’t seen in two decades, with its white stucco frame nestled into a nameless hillside as its occupants rushed out to greet him with a bittersweet mix of tears and exuberance, all he could think about was the love. The love that Henry struggled to dispense through the strains of public office, even to his closest and dearest. By the time he and his brothers and sisters arrived, the solemn domestic vigil was over, but the the family remained. Long into the night, Henry conversed and reminisced with his long-lost relatives, feeling them deliver their love to him, a distant cousin, as plentifully as they did to lifelong familial companions. He was reminded just how much these people relied on their families in times of need, how they depended on that network of lifelines and support structures to shield them from pain and adversity. How even death couldn’t break the bonds that joined a Mexican family, and how every member of the family was expected to continually nurture and strengthen those bonds by giving just as much as he took from one other.

Henry grimaced to himself, knowing that, on occasion, he had fallen short in holding up his end of these familial responsibilities. But, he reminded himself as he grappled with the speeding sedan, he couldn’t possibly be blamed for it. He was an important man with an important job, and if he occasionally lacked time and effort to donate to his family, well, that certainly wasn’t his fault.

Henry was suddenly blinded as pangs of guilt and anger flashed across his eyes. He was lying to himself. For seven years, he’d been using his busy schedule as an excuse to justify unjustifiable things: late nights that could have been less late, forgetting to buy Christmas presents, and…

He tried to look back at Mary, but found himself still blinded by shame. For the first time in a year and a half, he told the truth to himself: he had been unfaithful to his wife, and there was no justification and no excuse for it. [1]

For months, Henry had been intoxicating himself with the same old lies. “Lots of men have affairs”, “it’s only a little fling”, “Mary wouldn’t mind if she knew”, he would always tell himself. But, as tears of self-hate moistened his tired eyes, that brittle shell of self-deception broke away, and Henry finally acknowledged his crimes: he was an adulterer, a traitor to his wife and to his family. He had been given the choice to remain faithful, and had decided instead to soil the covenant of his marriage. He was an insult to the bonds that tied him and his kin together across international borders and decades of absence, and there was no avoiding it. He would have to come clean—not only with the world, but with his wife.

He tried one last time to look at Mary and found, miraculously, that he could. In his crazy haste, he almost opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, he realized that the temperamental car was approaching a dangerously sharp curve. He yanked his neck forward, pounded on the brake, jerked the wheel rightward, and cleared the curve by mere inches. Glancing nervously out the window, he found that the unguarded path gave way to a perilous, steep hillside, and that he had just brushed up against the vestiges of a fiery death; glancing the other direction, he found that his wife was still asleep, her slumber barely disturbed by the screech of the brakes and the violent jerking of the car. The only possible explanation, Henry quickly realized, was divine intervention. Hoping he had interpreted the message correctly, Henry locked his eyes forward and realigned his focus toward a single goal: getting back safely. As he righted the steering wheel and aimed the Volkswagen back toward its distant target of Benito Juarez International Airport, he hoped his wife was sleeping well. They'd be having a very stressful conversation when they got back home.

__________​

[1] In OTL, Henry Cisneros served as Mayor of San Antonio from 1981 and 1989, and for the last two years of his tenure, he had an extramarital affair with campaign staffer Linda Medlar. This eventually led to a multi-million dollar FBI investigation when Medlar sued Cisneros, who was now Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in President Clinton's cabinet, for conspiracy, lying, concealment and obstruction of justice. This scandal eventually tanked his political career, particularly after it emerged that Cisneros had been paying hush money to Medlar. ITTL, the above experience will lead Cisneros to deal with his infidelity in a different manner.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Carlos Salinas de Gortari was sworn in as the 53rd President of Mexico on December 1, 1988, with the legitimacy of his mandate in grave doubt. The Palacio de San Lázaro was still a smoldering wreck, so the legislators instead gathered in the conference hall of the National Medical Center, [1] watching their new President take the oath of office from seats usually reserved for visiting hematologists. Struggling to be heard over jeers and catcalls from opposition deputies (those few who had chosen not to boycott the inauguration), President Carlos Salinas announced his intentions to repay Mexico's foreign debt, discard the obsolete, statist economic model that had dragged Mexico through recession after recession, and restore peace and stability to a country that had spent the preceding two months embroiled in civil crisis and turmoil.

Salinas immediately ran into criticism regarding his cabinet appointments. Manuel Bartlett was retained as Government Secretary, causing an uproar among the many people who blamed Bartlett for the repressive actions the government had taken in the preceding months. More controversial was the President’s appointment of his own brother, Raúl Salinas de Gortari, as Secretary of Tourism [2]. Critics accused Carlos Salinas of nepotism; in truth, the President simply wanted to keep an eye on his brother, and prevent him from embarrassing the government through his legendary feats of corruption. [3]

Raúl Salinas de Gortari was appointed to a minor cabinet position by his younger brother, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who hoped that he could contain Raúl's corrupt impulses by keeping him close. This decision would have resounding consequences for Mexico.​

After getting his cabinet sorted out, President Salinas's first priority was to put an end to the social unrest. Over the objections of Government Secretary Bartlett, Salinas greatly relaxed the military occupation of Mexico City, recalling most of the Army presence and ordering that the arbitrary arrests and seizures be stopped. He pressured the Governors of Sonora, Guerrero and Michoacán into releasing over 4,000 protesters who had been arrested in September, allowing them to return to their friends and families. He called for an end to civil conflict in impoverished Chiapas and in oil-drenched Tabasco, where Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s civil resistance movement was getting more unruly by the month. By March, the political unrest had ended in most areas of the country. Economic unrest, however, was soaring, as inflation had reached severe levels and many families were struggling to afford food and basic goods.

Salinas’s second priority was to stop the oil workers’ strike. In mid-November, Salinas and his predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid, had departed for a two-week conference with the leaders of the International Monetary Fund, hoping to secure a bailout for the troubled Mexican economy. They had returned with over $18 billion in low-interest loans, bringing the foreign debt up to approximately $75 billion. Salinas was determined to pay back those loans on time and in full, but because the government derived 35% of its revenue from the sale of state-owned petroleum, he would have no means of repaying them until the oil workers went back to work. In the first week of his sexenio, [4] Salinas announced a round of open negotiations with union leader Joaquín Hernández Galicia, with the aim of ending the strike as soon as possible.

The negotiations were a grueling experience. Not only was Salinas forced to humble himself before Hernández Galicia, whom he absolutely despised, [5] but he was made to grant maddening concessions to the STPRM: removing practically all forms of government oversight over the Union’s activities, restoring the Union’s guaranteed right to 50% of all of Pemex’s construction contracts, and allowing the Union to take an even larger proportion of Pemex’s profits for itself. The strike was finally called off in mid-February, but Salinas’s labor pains didn’t end there, as several other major unions, including the National Teachers’ Federation and the Government Workers’ Union, were offended by Salinas's preferential treatment of the oil workers and threatened to stage strikes of their own. After a month of negotiations between Fidel Velázquez's CTM and the private sector, Salinas was able to secure a 15% wage hike for all members of PRI-affiliated unions. This was not nearly enough to make up for the purchasing power lost to inflation, which was estimated at 28% in March, but Salinas hoped that he could make ends meet by using the bailout money to wrangle the peso back down to a stable value.

President Salinas (left) was aided in his negotiations with organized labor by Elba Esther Gordillo (right), the newly-appointed leader of the National Teachers’ Federation. Esther Gordillo’s shrewd political instincts allowed her to keep her union, the largest in Latin America, firmly in line with the government’s wishes. [6]​

Even though oil production was back up to speed, government revenues were still far insufficient to pay off the foreign debt, compelling Salinas to pursue a fiscal policy of cutbacks and privatization. Salinas’s Budget Secretary, Ernesto Zedillo, drew up an austerity budget that slashed government spending while raising the national sales tax. PRONASOL, Salinas’s ambitious plan for a targeted social welfare system, was put on indefinite hold. [7] Beginning in March of 1989, all sorts of state-owned business enterprises were sold off to the private sector—banks, hotels, funeral parlors, even massive government bureaucracies like Telmex, the state-owned telephone monopoly, which was sold to billionaire investor Carlos Slim Helú in June. Impoverished farmers felt the pain of these cutbacks worse than anyone else: guaranteed prices were swiftly abolished for all crops except maize and beans, and by summertime, government agencies such as the National Rural Credit Bank (Banrural) and the National Agricultural Insurance Corporation (ANAGSA), which aided poor farmers and subsidized agricultural production, had seen their funding drastically cut or had disappeared entirely. [8]

Although Salinas’s agenda was praised by the international community, it drew strident criticism from his fellow Mexicans. Cardenistas were livid at Salinas’s opening up of the country to foreign trade, which they saw as the first step to foreign imperialism, and his privatization of state-owned assets, which exposed the livelihoods of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans to the unpredictable ravages of the market. The National Action Party (PAN), Mexico’s longtime conservative opposition party, largely supported President Salinas’s reforms, but also saw in them a golden political opportunity as people became disillusioned with the PRI’s neoliberal turn. Several states, including Chihuahua and Baja California—both hotspots of anti-PRI dissidence—would be holding statewide elections in July of 1989, and the PAN leadership began quietly stockpiling its meager campaign resources, hoping that this could finally be their chance to take control of a state Congress, and perhaps even win a governorship.

To this day, debate rages over the economic policies of Carlos Salinas de Gortari. Some historians praise him as an anti-corruption crusader, arguing that his attempts to scale back the federal bureaucracy and root out excess and entrenchment within the PRI system might have saved it from collapse, if chance had not intervened. Others argue that Salinas’s cuts to the welfare system in 1989 played a crucial in fostering rural rebellion. Federal agencies like Banrural and ANAGSA may have been notoriously corrupt and inefficient, but many farmers nevertheless depended on them for crop insurance, farm credit, and market access. When those agencies were dissolved or weakened by Salinas’s administration, those farmers were left helpless, ineligible for new loans and unable to invest in their crop. [9]

Maize farmers from Chiapas lead a march through the state capital, Tuxtla, in April 1989 to protest the abolition of guaranteed prices for maize and beans. [10]​

This was especially true for Mexico’s coffee farmers, who for decades had sold their crop not directly to buyers, but to a government agency called the National Coffee Institute (INMECAFE), which in turn would sell the coffee on the world market and bring them the profits. In a cruel twist of timing, INMECAFE was cut by Salinas’s administration in June of 1989, just as the quota system put in place by the International Coffee Agreement collapsed and world coffee prices plummeted by over 50%. This meant that in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero—three states in which much of the “action” of the Revolution would be concentrated—coffee farmers were now forced to sell their crop directly on the global market at greatly reduced prices, without the help of government intermediaries. Hundreds of thousands of coffee-farming families were left destitute and starving, heavily contributing to the wave of campesino radicalism that would consume the region by 1991. [11]

Carlos Salinas is often credited for his relative success in calming the country down following the chaos of 1988. In December, when he announced a formal, independent investigation into the murder of Celeste Batel and revealed to the country that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had not been thrown in prison but was at his home, secluded in grievance of his late wife, Salians was able to assuage some of the Cardenistas’ worst fears about their beloved hero. Still, he is frequently blamed for worsening the economic crisis through his agenda of privatization. Under the PRI, state investment had always been the dominant force in the Mexican economy, and when state revenues were cut by a full third during the Pemex strike, the ensuing drop in aggregate demand pushed the economy into a severe recession that threatened to turn into a depression. Salinas believed that recovery would only come from selling government-owned businesses to the private sector, because private enterprise is so much more efficient than government at generating profits. What he failed to realize was that, in such a poor economic situation, “efficiency” meant laying off hundreds of thousands of employees. This added to the climbing unemployment rate; in Mexico City, where the Autumn of Terrors had led to the closure of thousands of businesses, unemployment had reached nearly 20%, leading to an increase in crime rates and the emergence of small street gangs, which frequently clashed with the Police and what few Army units remained in the Federal District. Inflation was finally brought under control by mid-May, but this was of little benefit when so much of the country was out of work.

Many believe that Carlos Salinas’s most tragic mistake in 1989 was his failure to recognize perhaps the most pressing threat to national security: the students. After the UNAM was stormed by Army troops in October of 1988, nearly all of the University’s 260,000 students had returned home, not wanting to remain on a campus that was under occupation. In December, President Salinas ended the occupation and classes resumed shortly thereafter. Most students came back to the University, but many did not, choosing instead to remain in their home states to spread the rhetoric of rebellion. The National University had always been a testing ground for the ideas of an array of squabbling revolutionary sects, and since 1985, the most dominant faction had been a moderate one, a faction that believed in creating social change through civil resistance and community service, not through bloody revolution. But the leaders of this faction—Imanol Ordorika, Carlos Ímaz, and Antonio Santos Romero—had gone into hiding in Oaxaca after the Battle of the UNAM, and were tracked down and arrested in January. This left a power vacuum for the leadership of the student movement, one which was quickly filled by the faction so immersed in radical Marxist theory that it had ties to la lucha armada, the clandestine armed underground of guerrilla armies and campesino militias.

As students from the UNAM spread throughout Mexico to preach radicalism and rebellion, they appealed to the memories of the many far-left, militant, grassroots movements of the 1960s and 1970s which the PRI had annihilated, turning them into martyrs of the revolutionary cause.​

These young Marxists visited Universities in their hometowns, regaling students with tales of youth heroism and government tyranny during the battle of the UNAM. Using their links to underground guerrilla groups (most of which had been largely dormant since the beginning of the decade),they were able to recruit thousands of students in Sinaloa, Sonora, Veracruz, Campeche and many other states to the cause of rebellion against la sistema. As they fanned out across the country, many of these agents kept in contact with one another, meaning that by the time the school year concluded in the springtime, there existed all throughout Mexico a veritable fifth column, a nationwide network of radical revolutionaries who were young, fierce and willing to strike out against the government and all that it stood for. The only thing stopping them was their lack of leadership and money; in May of 1989, in an episode that would humiliate the Salinas administration before the nation and the world, it would gain both of those things.

__________​

[1] This location was also used to house the Congress after the Palacio de San Lázaro burned down in OTL 1989.
[2] In OTL, President Salinas appointed Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios as his Secretary of the Interior and demoted Manuel Bartlett to Secretary of Education. Here, Salinas doesn't want to risk further inflaming things by removing the man who controls the government response to the troubles right after they start.
[3] Even by Mexican standards, Raúl Salinas de Gortari is one hell of a corrupt guy. Forbes named him one of the Ten Most Corrupt Mexicans of 2013, and the public started calling him El Señor Diez Por Ciento—"Mr. Ten Percent"—in reference to the informal commissions he charged on the many lucrative contracts he approved for his cronies. In OTL, he spent ten years in jail for his involvement in a massive, high-profile political scandal involving the murder of PRI General Secretary José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, but was eventually acquitted and released from prison, becoming a symbol of corruption and impunity.
[4] Sexenio refers to a Mexican President’s single, six-year term of office.
[5] In fact, Carlos Salinas hated Joaquín Hernández Galicia so much that, in OTL, just two months into his sexenio (see above), Salinas had the man arrested on trumped-up charges. Here, he can’t afford to offend the oil workers’ union, so La Quina stays free.
[6] In OTL, Elba Esther Gordillo was appointed leader of the teacher’s union in April 1989, but in TTL, backlash to Fidel Velázquez after the Pemex strike has allowed her to reach this position a few months earlier. It is also worth noting that she was listed alongside Raúl Salinas de Gortari in Forbes’ list of the most corrupt Mexicans of 2013; do with that information what you will.
[7] In OTL, PRONASOL (Programa Nacional Solidaridad, National Solidarity Program) was launched in December 1988 and quickly became the public face of Salinas’s presidency, centralizing the government’s social welfare programs under one umbrella and alleviating some of the harsh effects of Salinas’s cutbacks. It also became a tool through which the PRI increased its power, as funding for PRONASOL programs was controlled by PRI officials who withheld it from disloyal communities. In TTL, Salinas's administration has fewer resources to spare with the increased foreign debt and the program is put off indefinitely.
[8] Everything between this and the preceding footnote happened in OTL, with one minor exception: the sale of Telmex to Slim Helú happened in 1990 and not in 1989. Here, the government is in a more frantic rush to raise money, and so the sale goes through earlier.
[9] All of this also occurred in OTL due to Salinas’s policies, but here it’s worse due the absence of PRONASOL and the economic recession.
[10] In OTL, maize and beans were the only two crops whose price was still guaranteed by the government after 1989. In TTL, the worse economy forces the government to cut back subsidies even for these agricultural staples.
[11] The collapse of the International Coffee Agreement and the dissolution of INMECAFE also occurred simultaneously in OTL, with similar results. Here, however, there is no PRONASOL to help alleviate some of the worst effects, and the earlier world recession means that people are buying less coffee. So Mexico’s poor coffee farmers are faring even worse than in OTL.

I couldn't figure out how to work a proper wikibox into this update, so you'll have to subsist on the "events" box this time around.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

In May of 1989, Carlos Salinas was not a particularly popular President of Mexico. But he was, surprisingly enough, not the least popular President in Mexico. That dubious honor belonged to ex-President José López Portillo, who could not walk down the street in his retirement without being pelted with verbal abuse.

José López Portillo had entered office in 1976 amid a huge oil boom. The discovery of vast oil reserves in the Gulf of Mexico had allowed his government to shower petrodollars on every social program and industrial project imaginable, financed with massive loans from the United States. But when the boom went bust in 1981, López Portillo had refused to cut back on government spending, ballooning the foreign debt and plunging the economy into recession. Rather than accepting blame for the crisis, López Portillo alleged that a clique of wealthy financiers had sabotaged the Mexican economy by sending their riches abroad. Striking back against this imaginary enemy, López Portillo nationalized the banking system in one sweeping presidential decree; but, rather than punishing the upper class as López Portillo intended, the nationalization only succeeded in hurting the poorest Mexicans, who lost their jobs to the recession and their savings to severe inflation. And while ordinary Mexicans struggled to get by on the severely weakened economy, López Portillo used billions of pesos of government money to build himself a retirement compound, including four mansions and private tennis courts, swimming pools, stables, and a gym, all perched on a hill in a western Mexico City suburb above a road traveled by commuters. Enraged, Mexicans dubbed López Portillo’s decadent palace la colina del perro—“Dog’s Hill”. He quickly became a recluse in his huge estate, unable to venture outside for fear that civilians would bark at him. [1]

President José López Portillo's plundering of the public coffers was extreme even by Mexicans' tolerant standards, and his vast, 13-square-kilometer estate quickly became a symbol of corruption under the PRI system.​

On March 2, 1989, former President Luis Echeverría’s modest suburban home was firebombed in revenge for the 3,000 students and guerrillas who had disappeared in the 1970s during his “Dirty War” against the Mexican left. Echeverría himself was unharmed, but José López Portillo was so spooked by the attack that he began quietly making plans to leave the country. Thus, when López Portillo and his wife, Carmen Romano, turned up missing from their mansion on the morning of May 3, their domestic staff didn’t even bother reporting it to the police, believing that the pair had simply fled announced. It was only ten days later, when fourteen Mexican national newspapers each received a parcel containing Polaroids of the former President and tied to a chair and a note from a communist group calling itself the “Ejército de Liberación Mexicana” (Army of Mexican Liberation) demanding $27 million in ransom, that the nation realized something was amiss.

Dumbfounded, President Salinas immediately commissioned an investigation by CISEN, Mexico’s federal intelligence agency, which concluded that ex-President and First Lady had been abducted in the early hours of March 16 by a well-trained team that knew the layout of the estate, and were transported in the back of a van to Tuxpan, a port city on the Gulf of Mexico. There the trail went dead, but CISEN investigators speculated that the captive couple had been loaded onto a ship and taken to Cuba, and were now being held by the Cuban government. This assumption was supported by the fact that this so-called “Army of Mexican Liberation” (ELM for short) appeared to have sprung up completely out of nowhere and had no clear roots to a preexisting Mexican movement, and by the fact that the professional nature of the kidnapping implied not amateur guerrillas but well-trained, special forces of the kind maintained by few Central American polities this late in the Cold War.

Salinas was furious, but there was little he could do but pay the ransom. If López Portillo really was being held on Cuban territory (which he was), Salinas couldn’t exactly send in a rescue mission. Nor could he bring himself to refuse the ransom; unpopular as López Portillo was, it would be unthinkable to allow a former President to die at the hands of kidnappers. And, after all, Salinas himself would one day be a former President, and he would want to set a certain example in case, God forbid, he were ever to find himself in a similar situation. He couldn’t even publicly state his suspicions, as Cuba had up until this point maintained relatively positive relations with Mexico and there was no solid proof that Fidel Castro’s regime was behind the kidnapping. So, on May 5, seven weeks after the initial kidnapping, a humiliated Salinas ordered that the ransom money be paid in full.

Four days later, José López Portillo and his wife were dumped unconscious on the shore of the Yucatán Peninsula. After regaining consciousness, the former first couple wandered five kilometers to the port town of Sabancuy, where the locals promptly taunted and harangued them for two hours until they were whisked away by the Campeche State Police. Within two days, they were back in Mexico City; within two weeks, they had settled into a newly-purchased penthouse apartment in Miami Beach. Neither would return to Mexico for a very long time.

​

The ransom money disappeared almost immediately after it was paid, but Senator Samuel del Villar would eventually piece together its rough path in a 2004 Congressional report on the ELM. The $27 million ransom payment was transferred through several bank accounts operated by the Cuban government before ending up in Cuba itself. Approximately one-quarter disappeared into the pockets of Cuban Army and government officials, a further third was put to the discretionary use of the Cuban government, and the remainder—approximately $9 million—was set aside in a special fund. This fund would be drawn upon for various purposes over the following years, but in mid-1989, it was primarily used for three purposes: purchasing weapons from international dealers, transporting radicalized Mexican youths to Cuba and giving them basic combat training, and smuggling those trainees and their weapons back to Mexico.

It is unclear exactly how and when Fidel Castro first stuck his wrinkled hand into Mexico's internal affairs. According to del Villar's report, the first links between the Cuban government and the Mexican student movement were probably forged in November of 1988, when a Cuban cultural attaché happened to hear a speech given by an UNAM radical to a students' meeting at the University of Veracruz. Believing that his government might be intrigued by the possibility of a socialist revolution in Mexico, the junior diplomat advised his superiors in Foreign Ministry about the growing wave of student radicalism, prompting immediate interest from the highest echelons of Havana. Historian Enrique Krauze disputes this claim, alleging that the Cuban government had been sponsoring far-left movements in Mexico since the 1970s, and creating the ELM was simply the latest expression of that foreign policy. Whatever the story, by autumn of 1989, approximately 8,000 young Mexican men and women had been issued with firearms and roughly 900 had been hastily trained in their use, all courtesy of López Portillo’s ransom money. A small, underground army—one that claimed to aim for “Mexican Liberation” but was really just an appendage of a foreign nation—was being built right under the noses of Mexican authorities, with cells developing in seven states. The ELM’s recruits were mostly untrained and inexperienced, but it was well-funded, and it received strategic guidance from a professional military force, one whose longtime commanders were very well-versed in guerrilla warfare. And the ELM would need all the funding and guidance it could get, because its first major offensive was scheduled for December.

Meanwhile, President Carlos Salinas’s fortunes were finally beginning to turn around. His popularity had hit a nadir in May, after he used millions of dollars of public money to bail out one of the most hated men in Mexico. But Salinas’s reputation began to climb after the statewide elections of July 2, 1989. Elections were held in six states, and the PRI saw unprecedented losses in all of them due to the poor economic conditions and lingering spirit of political dissent. In two particular states, the results were revolutionary: PAN deputies now had a majority in the Chihuahua State Congress, and panista businessman Ernesto Ruffo Appel had beaten all the odds and been elected Governor of Baja California. For the first time in over sixty years, a Mexican state was to be governed by the opposition. Government Secretary Manuel Bartlett (who, in 1986, had organized a feat of blatantly obvious electoral fraud to prevent PAN candidate Francisco Barrio Terrazas from winning the governorship of Chihuahua) pleaded with President Salinas not to allow Ruffo to take office, believing that PAN control of one state could eventually lead to the collapse of the entire PRI system. But Salinas immediately recognized Ruffo Appel's victory, winning approval both at home and abroad for his tolerance of political pluralism. [2]

In 1989, Ernesto Ruffo Appel (right) made history by being elected the first opposition governor in Mexico since the 1920s, and President Carlos Salinas (left) made history by becoming the first PRI President to recognize an opposition victory in a statewide election.​

Recognizing Ruffo's victory gained Salinas much good will with the PAN, allowing him to negotiate with PAN leaders in the federal Congress to pass far-reaching constitutional reforms. At the time, over 90% of Mexicans professed to be Catholic, and yet the PRI had been anti-clerical from the start, depriving clergy members of certain rights and discouraging religious education (though this provision was ignored by the millions of parents who sent their kids to Catholic schools). On September 6, the PRI and the PAN joined forces to pass a constitutional amendment effectively normalizing relations with the Catholic Church by legitimizing Catholic schools, allowing the Church to own property, and allowing priests to vote in elections and wear their robes in public. [3]

Though a cooperative spirit was developing in the summer of 1989, trouble still lingered. On August 20, an attempt was made to kidnap José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the PRI Governor of Guerrero, in the hope that Salinas would pay a ransom as he had for José López Portillo. But the attempt quickly degenerated into a shootout between the kidnappers and the governor's bodyguards, in which Ruiz Massieu himself was shot and killed (particularly poignant news for President Salinas, because Ruiz Massieu was his brother-in-law). [4] To complete Ruiz Massieu's term, the PRI-dominated Guerrero State Congress appointed Rubén Figueroa Alcocer, descendant of four former governors of Guerrero and the scion of a political family which had dominated the state's politics for decades. [5] Evidence would later indicate that the kidnappers were a mere criminal gang with no political agenda; still, the priísta hardliner Figueroa alleged that they had been taking orders from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and vowed to avenge Ruiz Massieu by ruthlessly stamping out any sign of anti-PRI sentiment within the state.

Nevertheless, by the end of the summer, the mood of Carlos Salinas's administration had shifted from one of frustrated impotence to one of careful optimism. Talks to reduce Mexico's foreign debt by a massive $20 billion were well underway; relations between the President and the PAN remained mostly positive, and further reforms were planned to restore the legal rights of the Catholic Church and create an independent commission to oversee elections. In late July, the situation in Tabasco had partially stabilized, after Salinas convinced statewide opposition leader Andrés Manuel López Obrador to stand down part of his rowdy civil resistance movement in exchange for several policy and electoral concessions. The increased political stability allowed President Salinas to finally begin making good use of the traditional gira, or Presidential tour. In August alone, Salinas spent a total of twenty-one days trekking around the country from Sinaloa to Quintana Roo, inaugurating ten-bed health clinics, conferences on physics and ecology, and boxing rings in public parks. [6] At every stop he hugged grandmothers and kissed babies, using his skills as a master of political showmanship to spread his government's largesse everywhere he went. By mid-September, as the anniversary of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas's infamous speech approached, it seemed that Mexico was finally on the road to economic recovery and social stabilization.

__________​

[1] All OTL.
[2] All of this also happened in OTL: Ernesto Ruffo Appel won the governorship of Baja California, and Salians recognized the victory, increasing his stature as a reformer among Mexican and foreign observers.
[3] This reform also happened in OTL, but not until 1991.
[4] In OTL, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu would serve out his term as governor and go on to become Secretary-General of the PRI, the second-highest position in the party, until he was shot and killed in 1994, in a crime that was eventually blamed on President Carlos Salinas's brother, Raúl.
[5] Rubén Figueroa Alcocer also succeeded Ruiz Massieu as Governor in OTL. He was also an iron-fisted authoritarian in the tradition of his political forebears; more on that later.
[6] Under the PRI system, it was routine for the President to preside over the completion of minor public infrastructure projects as a way of maintaining connections with the people. Imagine if your country's President or Prime Minister personally came to your town in order to give a speech at the grand opening of a new neighborhood playground!

 

[Roberto El Rey]

September 15, 1989
Mexico City​

With an attractive flourish, the decorated officer flung his right arm forward, bowing the massive flag in a move that brought to mind the artful parry of a seasoned swordsman. Then, the dark velvet-sleeved arm was retracted, and the proud tricolor with its lustrous shine stood up straight in respect of the statesman before it. In a single, graceful motion, the soldier hoisted the satin banner up toward the vaulted ceiling of the National Palace and pulled it right back down again, before thrusting it forth into the waiting arms of the President of the Republic. The President accepted the national symbol, turned on his heel and strode smoothly forth.

In a few steps, President Carlos Salinas de Gortari was on the balcony. Gazing down upon the Zócalo and basking in the crowd’s raucous cries of admiration, he remembered that precisely one year ago, this square had been packed to capacity with 270,000 men and women who would have happily killed Salinas and ripped his corpse to shreds if given the chance. Now, as he proudly surveyed the cheering mass of humanity before him, he was emboldened and invigorated by their excitement. Thousands of flags both large and small danced high and low above the square in fervent celebration of Mexican independence.

Salinas silently congratulated himself on having won back the confidence of the Mexican people. [1] In September of 1988, much of the city’s population wouldn’t have spat in the direction of a priísta like himself. The troubles had gotten so bad that poor Miguel had had to cancel his final Grito de Dolores [2]. Now, 365 days later, the nation was coming together as it always had in remembrance of the revolutionaries and freedom fighters who had first liberated the country from Spanish rule. After months spent cooped up in offices and conference halls negotiating with obnoxious union bosses and indolent foreign bureaucrats, Salinas was finally able to connect with the people face-to-face like a real Mexican President. Securing lasting civil order, rebooting the economy, and restoring the people’s confidence in the PRI would be enormous challenges, but Salinas would attack them head-on and with the full thrust of his power and determination. Perhaps, he mused to himself as he prepared for start of the ceremony, in a hundred years’ time, these people would be honoring Salinas’s name alongside those of the country’s greatest heroes.

Clutching the flag with his left hand, he reached out his right and tugged six times on the tricolor cord that hung beside him. With each pull, the ancient bell above him rang out into the still night air, just as it had done on the early morning of September 16, 1810, when Miguel Hidalgo had first spoken from his pulpit in Guanajuato to rouse the Mexican masses to revolution.

As the final toll died away, President Salinas opened his mouth to address the assembled throng. [3]

“¡Mexicanos!”

The crowd fell quiet in preparation for the call.

“¡Vivan los héroes qui nos dieron patria!”

“¡Viva!” the people dutifully replied.

Salinas proceeded with the speech, energized by the vibrant historical spirit of the people. “¡Viva Hidalgo!”

“¡Viva!”, the crowd responded once again.

“Viva Morelos!” he continued, recalling the cleric who had taken over the independence movement following Miguel Hidalgo’s death.

“¡Viva!”

“¡Viva Allende!” he shouted, memorializing the Spanish turncoat who had helped lead the Mexican independence movement to victory.

“¡Viva!”

“¡Viva Guerrero!” he cried, in remembrance of the African-descended general who had abolished slavery during his short stint as Mexico’s second President.

“¡Viva!”

“¡Vivan los Niños Héroes!” he bellowed, in tribute to the six teenaged soldiers who had sacrificed their lives in 1847 to defend Chapultepec Palace from the encroaching U.S. Army.

“¡Vivan!”

“¡Viva la independencia nacional!” he yelled, in honor of the goal in whose defense hundreds of thousands of Mexicans had died over the centuries.

“¡Viva!”

“¡Viva nuestra unidad nacional!” he cheered, to remind his countrymen of his administration's prime objective.

“¡Viva!”

Then, with all of the passion of the liberated President of a liberated people, he launched into the finale:

“¡Viva México!”

“¡Viva!”

“¡Viva México!”

“¡Viva!”

Salinas opened his mouth for the third and final declaration, the climax of the entire ceremony. But when he tried to summon a breath of air into his lungs, he found them constricted and his breathing stifled. Involuntarily, Salinas crumpled to the floor of the balcony. In the following few seconds, his mind registered a number of jarring sounds—shouting and screaming from the confused and panicking crowd, the dull thud of the bell as the cord was yanked by his falling hand, the clopping of heavy boots as the soldiers leapt forth to pull him away from the balcony. But as the mustachioed President’s tenuous grip on consciousness slipped away, he was most jarred by the slight metallic taste in his mouth, and by the sight of his presidential sash stained red by a veritable fountain of blood…

__________
​

[1] Note that this is Salinas's inner thought, and therefore his perception is clouded by his own hubris. While, by September 15, he is certainly more popular than he was at the start of his term, he has not exactly won back the confidence of the people. Although inflation is being slowly brought back under control, many Mexicans are still forced to stick to a bare-bones diet of beans and tortillas, the labor unions resent him for negotiating a pay raise that's far insufficient for them to maintain their standard of living, and some peasant leaders argue that his reform to the ejido system will not lead to renewed investment in rural areas but will only cause ejido farmers to sell their plots for extra cash, leaving them landless.
[2] The Grito de Dolores is the formal name for this ceremony, performed every September 15 by the incumbent President in the Zócalo, as well as by municipal presidents and school headmasters all over the country. Here is supercut of all Presidents from Adolfo López Mateos to Felipe Calderón doing the Grito, while here is a more complete version of Ernesto Zedillo's grito in 1999.
[3] The exact words vary from year to year and from President to President. I've slightly abridged this version, but the effect is the same.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Carlos Salinas de Gortari is one of the most frequently-discussed figures in contemporary Mexican history. Some historians claim that Salinas's sexenio would have been a dismal failure if allowed to run its course, because his agenda of privatization and cutbacks would have only worsened the country's economic hardship. Others have turned him into Mexico's Yuri Andropov, the man who could have saved the PRI system from collapse if only he had lived longer. His assassination is similarly polarizing in terms of the slew of conspiracy theories it has inspired; dozens of individuals and entities have blamed for the assassination with varying degrees of plausibility, including Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Manuel Bartlett, the President’s own brother Raúl, the Army, the oil workers' union, hardline priístas angered by Salinas’s reformist attitude, and even the soldiers who were standing behind Salinas at the moment of the assassination—enough potential culprits to rival the assassination of John F. Kennedy (in fact, two suspects—the CIA and Fidel Castro—are occasionally accused of having killed both Salinas and Kennedy).

Idle speculation aside, the most commonly agreed-upon explanation is as follows: Angelo Orozco Vela [1], a 21-year-old undergraduate student-turned-ELM guerrilla, entered the Mexico City Metropolitan Cathedral, just across from the National Palace, on the morning of September 15, thus bypassing the police checkpoints which would be set up later in the day to screen visitors to the central square for weapons. Armed with a Cuban-supplied, Romanian-made PSL sniper rifle which he had dismantled and packed away into a suitcase, Orozco Vela managed to locate a backroom stairwell and ascend to the roof of the cathedral, where he hid from public view for over thirteen hours, subsisting on a few paltry snacks and attending to certain bodily needs in rather unpleasant ways. Finally, at 11:08 that night, after the Zócalo had been filled with people, soldiers and policemen, the President finally emerged onto the central balcony of the National Palace and into the view of his assassin. Orozco Vela fired several missed shots, each time waiting until the crowd shouted "¡Viva!" so as to mask the sound of the gunshots. Orozco Vela missed as many as four shots before finally hitting his target at a range of about 153 meters; the bullet tore through the President's abdomen, ripping his right lung in two and grazing against his heart. The assassin was quickly spotted by policemen and soldiers on the square below, who began firing automatic rifles at him. To avoid capture, Orozco Vela leapt from the roof of the cathedral and fell 36 meters to his death on the pavement below.

Orozco Vela’s suicide naturally prevented him from being interrogated, but his most likely motive for shooting the President seems to be that he held Salinas personally responsible for the death of his father and sister, who were killed by the Federal Judicial Police during protests in his home state of Sinaloa in October of 1988. A formal government investigation in 1998 concluded that Orozco Vela had acted of his own volition, and not on the orders of his ELM cell, the Cuban government, or any other entity. Many disbelieve this story, but can offer little or no evidence that their chosen boogeymen were behind the killing. As for the weapon, the fact that it came from an Eastern Bloc country was surprising to some, but the PSL had seen frequent use in Nicaragua since the 1970s, and it was presumed that a few thousand may have found their way up the continent to Mexico and into the hands of the amateur assassin. The Cuban connection would not become clear until later on, although the CISEN’s suspicions regarding Castro's involvement were raised significantly by the discovery of the Romanian rifle.

But all of this speculation and ambiguity would come later. Right now, all that mattered was that Carlos Salinas de Gortari, the 53rd President of Mexico, was dead.
​

​

The assassination quickly went out on the international media, to the shock of the entire world. Foreign economic confidence in Mexico, which had been very slowly creeping upward during Salinas's nine months of sensible fiscal stewardship, was dashed once again. But, in Mexico itself, the reaction was surprisingly subdued. Unlike Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas's inflammatory speech of the previous year, the assassination did not immediately spark a massive conflagration of protests. The crowd within the Zócalo was rather upset at the murder of their President (understandably, since in this time of PRI unpopularity and economic hardship, only devout priístas were willing to indulge President Salinas by attending the grito ceremony), but overall, Salinas's milquetoast neoliberalism had inspired comparatively little devotion from the hungry and unemployed inhabitants of Mexico City. The city's shrinking population of hardcore priístas did engage in some limited rioting in Cardenista-friendly neighborhoods, but it had died down almost completely by the following dawn. Although the assassination had gone out live on national television, it sparked practically no major disturbances outside of the capital city, for similar reasons. Even in those smaller communities that still staunchly supported the PRI, there was little cause for the people to riot because there was no local opposition against whom they could direct their fury.

Still, it was the government's duty to uphold the public order, and it certainly wouldn't be swayed from this objective by something as frivolous as the lack of a serious threat to the public order. President Salinas had gradually downgraded the military presence in Mexico City to the point that the soldiers had essentially become nothing more than an auxiliary street patrol. However, de la Madrid's order permitting unlimited occupation of the Federal District remained in effect, and Defense Secretary Antonio Riviello Bazán invoked it to mobilize over 11,000 additional troops. September 16, 1989 bore an uncanny resemblance to September 16, 1988, as citizens of Mexico City awoke to the sight of troops patrolling most of the city's major thoroughfares.

When several thousand troops moved to occupy Mexico City for the second time in a year, they found a populace with little interest in rioting over political issues. Instead, it soon became clear that the most pressing issue for the soldiers was dealing with the city's substantial and unruly population of unemployed and "underemployed" citizens, whose number had been steadily growing since the beginning of the economic recession the previous year.
​

Mexico had no Vice President or equivalent position. Instead, following the death of a President, the Congress of the Union was required to met for a special session and—provided there was a quorum of two-thirds—appoint by secret ballot an interim President to serve for between fourteen and eighteen months, until a new President could be popularly elected to complete the sexenio. [2] On the afternoon of September 16, the federal legislature convened in the National Medical Center (the very same complex where, mere hours ago, President Carlos Salinas had been declared dead of his wounds) to select a caretaker President. The PRI controlled both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies, so there was never any doubt that the nominee would be a priísta; the pressing question was which priísta the Congress would select.

The obvious choice was Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the Secretary of Government. Bartlett had held the second-most important position in the government for almost seven years under two different administrations, and after Carlos Salinas was declared dead in the final moments of the 15th, Bartlett automatically became the highest-ranking federal official in the country. Miguel de la Madrid had strongly considered nominating Bartlett as the PRI's candidate in the 1988 Presidential election, and it was fully expected that the Congress would name him interim president when it convened for an extraordinary session on the afternoon of the 16th. However, in an address to the assembled legislators, Bartlett announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration, stunning the 463 members of Congress who had managed to arrive on time.

Manuel Bartlett Díaz had been a prominent luminary of the PRI system since his college years, and was upset when Miguel de la Madrid passed him up as Presidential nominee for his role in rigging the Chihuahua state elections in 1986. The Presidency had been a lifelong goal of Bartlett's, and when the opportunity presented itself with Carlos Salinas's assassination, he was determined not to let it slip.​

The shock wore off when, in the same Congressional address, Bartlett announced that he was endorsing Raúl Salinas, the late President's older brother and Secretary of Tourism, for the interim presidency. Veteran priístas quickly saw through the gambit: Bartlett wanted the top job, but knew that, as interim President, he could serve for between fourteen and eighteen months, after which point he would be constitutionally barred from serving as President ever again. So Bartlett made a pact with Raúl, who was heavily influenced by greed and by his grief over the death of his brother. Bartlett would use his influence over the nationwide PRI to have Raúl elected to the post of caretaker President, and in exchange, Raúl would give Bartlett a free hand over domestic policy, and would promise to name Bartlett as the PRI's presidential candidate in the subsequent replacement election, after which he would be President until late 1994. By endorsing Raúl, Bartlett ensured that he would wield strong executive power for the remaining five years of the sexenio, rather than just for a year and a half.

The outcome of the balloting was never in doubt, but the vote itself provided an interesting insight into the inner mechanics of the Frente Democratic Nacional, the leftist coalition which Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had engineered for the election of 1988. Between them, the four parties that made up the Frente had 139 deputies and four senators. But many of those legislators were themselves former priístas, and two of the constituent parties—the Popular Socialist Party (PPS) and the Authentic Party of the Mexican Revolution (PARM)—had long been considered satellite organizations of the PRI, voting with the ruling party on almost all occasions until the late 1980s. Cárdenas (still grieving in his self-imposed house arrest, though he had increasingly been coordinating with his political allies over the preceding months) was swiftly nominated for the presidency, but, despite the best efforts of the Frente's congressional leader, Senator Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, the old habit of supporting the PRI proved too second-nature for many Frente deputies to kick. Of the 102 Frente deputies who made it to the Centro Medico Nacional in time for the vote, 26 broke ranks to vote for Raúl Salinas.

Party discipline was much stronger within the PAN delegation. The PAN had 101 deputies, 77 of whom showed up to the balloting ceremony. All but two of these 77 backed Manuel Clouthier, who had been the PAN candidate for President in 1988. Of the 411 assembled deputies, 75 voted for Manuel Clouthier, 78 voted for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, and 258—including all 232 priístas and 26 Frentistas—voted for Raúl Salinas de Gortari. The Senate was a much larger landslide. Of 64 senators, 52 showed up: 49 priístas and three Frentistas. The result was predictable, as all senators managed to adhere to their party's line. In a way, the presidential election of 1989 was simply a rematch of the previous one: the only difference was that the PRI candidate had a different first name and a slightly less questionable margin of victory.

​

Raúl Salinas de Gortari was sworn in as interim President of Mexico on the evening of September 16, not twenty-four hours after his brother had been shot and killed in full view of 110,000 people. Manuel Clouthier alleged that the PRI regime was becoming more brazenly monarchical by the day, with the title of President now passing from brother to brother like that of Dauphin or Prince Regent. But overall, the opposition had essentially no power to challenge the results, not least because the Frente's leaders were now distracted by the issue of figuring out which Frentista Congressmen had voted for Raúl Salinas (a task made near-impossible by the secrecy of the balloting). Moreover, "the lesser Salinas", as some unkind historians would later call him, was in many ways a figurehead, as much of the day-to-day running of the country would be left to Manuel Bartlett. In a hastily-written and clumsily-delivered speech on Televisa two days after the assassination, Raúl urged unity and reconciliation, and asked his subjects to honor his late brother's memory by uniting in opposition to terrorism and rejecting political violence in all its forms. The new President saw a palpable boost of popularity after the assassination purely due to heightened public sympathy, and it was hoped that the dampened national mood would turn into one of, if not exactly optimism, then one of begrudging acceptance of and compliance with government authority.

By January, all hope of such a consensus would fall apart, and it would soon become clear that Mexico's social turbulence and political unrest was only just beginning.

__________
​

[1] Angelo Orozco Vela is a made-up individual, because I didn't want to turn some random person into a presidential assassin. Still, I feel his story is plausible enough that it could have happened to a real Mexican, given the turbulence of TTL's autumn of 1988 and the weapons flowing into the country through Cuba in TTL.
[2] In 1989, Article 84 of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 (which has since been amended) said the following:

"In the event of the absolute disability of the President of the Republic, occurring during the first two years of his term, if the Congress is in session, it shall immediately constitute itself as an electoral college, and if there is at least two thirds of the total membership present, it shall name by secret ballot, and by an absolute majority of votes, an interim President; the same Congress shall issue, within ten days following the designation of the interim President, a call for the election of a President to complete the respective term; between the date of the call and that designated for holding the election, there must be an interval of not less than fourteen months nor more than eighteen."

 

[Roberto El Rey]

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.

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.

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​

[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.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

As the spring of 1990 turned into summer, millions of Mexicans were stuck beneath a government jackboot. Mexico City's military occupation droned on, but after so many months, the Army was less a brutal agent of authoritarian power and more a difficult, but adaptable, fact of life in the Federal District. The real reign of terror was in rural Guerrero, Tabasco and Michoacán, where the newly-passed Regional Security Law had led to the imposition of harsh, regional police states. Public demonstrations, of which there were many, were crushed with teargas and rubber bullets. Several high-ranking opposition figures (including from the PAN, which had had no part in the unrest of previous months) were arrested and held indefinitely without trial. On an almost weekly basis, Army troops would descend upon a rural hamlet and evict all of its inhabitants. After the village was cleared out, the local cacique (a political overlord who dominated a particular area through land ownership and influence over the local PRI political machine) would send in his private gunmen to loot the peasants' homes and steal their possessions. Most of the families were eventually allowed to return to their homes; but in at least two cases there were no homes to return to, because the cacique's gunmen had burned the village to the ground after they were done ransacking it. [1]

About the only place in which opposition figures were permitted to exist in peace was Juchitán de Zaragoza, a coastal city in southern Oaxaca. Juchitán, as it was usually known, had a more independent political culture than perhaps any other municipality in PRI-era Mexico. Opposition groups had held sway in the city since the 1970s, when COCEI, [2] a left-wing grassroots movement, was formed to promote democratic reform. COCEI defeated the PRI in the municipal elections of July 1989, and President Carlos Salinas stunned the Juchitecos by accepting the results rather than kicking the reformists out of power. [3] Even after Carlos was shot, Juchitán remained undisturbed, as Secretary Bartlett, for all his authoritarian leanings, did not want to go back on the government's word by disputing the same election results which Salinas had already recognized as legitimate. Bartlett fully intended to crush COCEI at the next elections, but for the time being, Juchitán remained an exception, an island of political pluralism in a sea of hard-fisted repression.

Juchitán de Zaragoza was populated mostly by Zapotec Indians, who proudly maintained a cultural identity distinct from that of the rest of Mexico. When independent campesino organizations began spreading throughout southern Mexico in 1990, Juchitán's ruling COCEI coalition proved very friendly to the radical cause, and the city quickly became the Unified Campesino Movement's base of operations in Oaxaca. [4]​

The Lesser Salinas was oblivious to all of this, focusing instead on his "fiscal agenda". Regardless of one’s opinions on the economic policies of Carlos Salinas, it is difficult to deny that the man at least had economic policies. Raúl, on the other hand, seems to have been driven entirely by greed, basing his decisions not on their fiscal soundness but on the personal profit he could expect to make from them. The interim President thus continued his brother's agenda of privatizations and cutbacks, but whereas Carlos had been motivated by a desire to root out corruption and inefficiency, Raúl simply wanted to line his pockets by selling off government companies to millionaires and taking a cut of the profits for himself. His first target was the Compañía Minera de Cananea, or CMC, Mexico's second-largest copper mine. Geographically isolated from the rest of the country in their remote corner of Sonora, the people of Cananea had long depended on the state-owned CMC for employment, which in turn depended on the townspeople for labor. Over the decades, a unique social harmony had formed, with the CMC providing generous services and benefits to the townspeople. But by 1990, the company was insolvent and a prime target for privatization. Three weeks of fractious labor negotiations prompted the powerful mine workers' union to go on strike, but Salinas was determined not to give in. On January 29, three thousand Army troops (accompanied by 130 DFS agents) descended on the remote border town to declare the CMC bankrupt and evict the mine workers from the company compound. [5]

But the government had sorely underestimated the power of the decades-long bond between the CMC and the townspeople. The federales arrived in Cananea to find the entire town in a state of full-fledged resistance, with women forming picket lines to prevent troops from occupying important buildings, and major thoroughfares blocked off by personal vehicles parked lengthwise across the street. Cananea itself held great significance in the Mexican revolutionary canon, because a strike there in 1906 against an American copper magnate is seen by many historians as the birthplace of the Mexican labor movement; union leaders leveraged this symbolism to garner public sympathy and form connections with the nationwide press. The occupation dragged on for weeks until, on February 21, 1990, three DFS agents opened fire and killed twelve unarmed picketers, including five women and one sixteen-year-old boy. [6]

Despite state efforts to prevent news of the incident from spreading, the miners’ expertly-forged media contacts ensured that the deaths of the innocent picketers was widely reported the following day. The killings ended any hope of a peaceful settlement between the mine workers and the government, and in April, the state washed its hands of the affair by selling the CMC outright to Carlos Slim Helú (the same billionaire who had bought Telmex in 1989) for the meager price of $41 million, of which $17 million went straight into the President's pocket. [7] Slim eventually managed to get the miners back to work by restoring their labor contract and all its generous benefits—in effect, a privately-managed return to the status quo ante.

The Second Cananea strike (so called to differentiate it from the one in 1906) was over, but the symbolic impact of the killings was immeasurable. Since the days of Lázaro Cárdenas, labor relations in Mexico had been governed by an unwritten social contract: The PRI-controlled government would shield the working class from foreign competition through protectionist trade barriers, and would provide the unions with ample perks, privileges and subsidies. In exchange, the unions would remain loyal to the PRI, delivering millions of votes at election time and refraining from inconvenient activities such as strikes. This contract had already been severely weakened by de la Madrid's cutbacks and deregulations, and after Mexican soldiers shot Mexican workers in the very birthplace of the Mexican labor movement, the unspoken accord was finally torn asunder. Labor leaders no longer trusted the government to protect their physical bodies, let alone their political interests. The PRI lost substantial support from all sectors except for petroleum (because the Pemex union continued to receive special treatment following its cataclysmic strike in 1988) and public education (which was kept in line largely through the political savvy of Elba Esther Gordillo, the Secretary of the National Teachers’ Federation). Subsequent attempts to privatize other state-owned companies would be met with hostility and obstructionism from once-pliable unions.

As relations between the PRI and its lapdog unions deteriorated, similar developments were rocking the agricultural sector. Impoverished rural campesinos, particularly in the southern states of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, had backed the PRI almost universally since the 1930s, out of habit and a lack of viable alternatives. But whatever genuine, substantial support the PRI had enjoyed in the region was gone by the autumn of 1990. The Lesser Salinas, having failed to enrich himself through privatizations, instead began to pilfer funds from the federal government’s agricultural welfare programs. Carlos Salinas had already eviscerated most of these programs during his administration, and by springtime, most of their remaining budget had disappeared into Raúl's overseas bank accounts, leaving millions of farming families without crop insurance, credit, price guarantees, or any other sort of government assistance. [8] Many families fled the region for cities in Mexico or the United States, but most stayed, lacking the means to emigrate or feeling a generational attachment to the land. Those families who stayed struggled to survive the growing season; a few chose to raise coffee and sell it on the open market for whatever meager profit could be made, but most depended on maize-based subsistence farming, growing gaunt and emaciated on a bare-bones diet of beans and tortillas. Overall, as many as 70,000 campesinos succumbed to starvation during the horrible summer of 1990.

In Chiapas, one-third of all small farms lacked electricity, 40% lacked clean drinking water, and 96% depended on rainfall for irrigation, which only made life harder for the state's campesinos as they struggled to survive the growing season on limited food stocks. As many as 300,000 individuals are thought to have fled the state in the summer of 1990 alone.​

Meanwhile, independent campesino groups were exploding in strength and number. Since the 1970s, radical leftist militias had been fighting political repression with little tangible success. But now, with the population radicalized by destitution and neglect, their star was on the rise. Since 1989, the three largest independent campesino groups in Chiapas—the OCEZ, the CIOAC, and the UU—had seen surging growth, even though they were often at odds with each other (and, in the case of the OCEZ, divided into factions). Each branch of the budding radical movement came into contact with local ELM cells, who quickly reported back to Havana about the revolutionary potential of the situation. As political radicalization spread like wildfire, Cuban military leaders began developing on a strategy to stitch the groups into a more-or-less unified fighting force. With the help of the ELM, the disparate campesino militias rapidly branched out across the region, and by mid-September, significant portions of Chiapas, Oaxaca, and Guerrero, as well as parts of southern Tabasco and Veracruz, had been all but taken over by one radical group or another.

These developments remained invisible to the central government. Secretary Bartlett had been handpicked by Salinas as the PRI nominee for the presidential election in November, and he was too busy rigging his own victory to pay attention to events in Chiapas. Salinas himself was growing increasingly desperate to squeeze every penny he could out of his fleeting presidency, and was therefore too busy pilfering hundreds of millions of dollars from discretionary funds to care about anything outside of Los Pinos. After all, there seemed little reason to fret, because, even in this most rebellious of regions, there were no significant political challengers to the PRI: the PAN was virtually nonexistent in this part of Mexico, while the FDN was not yet firmly established. But the monolithic hegemony of the ruling party was an illusion—the reality was that the PRI’s hold over southern Mexico was growing increasingly weak and unstable. The PRI-affiliated Confederación Nacional Campesino (CNC), once the region’s dominant civic organization, now struggled to attract more than a dozen attendees to its meetings in towns of 8,000 or more. Priísta mayors now feared to walk the streets without armed bodyguards. By September, as many as 34,000 campesinos had thrown in their lot with radical resistance groups, and the ELM (which was rapidly constituting itself as the campesino movement's military wing) was swelling with new recruits. And with each passing month, radical leaders grew ever bolder in their determination to rise up and overthrow the PRI regime.

But how, exactly? It was pointless to challenge the ruling party electorally—as shown by the chaos in Guerrero and Michoacán, the PRI would simply rig the elections and crush all dissent. Instead, with the help of Cuban Foreign Ministry officials, the campesino groups developed a strategy to infiltrate the PRI secretly and from the inside. The decline of the PRI at the grassroots level meant that its electoral machinery was lying fallow, ripe for the taking; CNC meetings and municipal PRI committees soon swelled with radical agents, fifth columns undermining the official party from within. By November 1990, independent campesino groups had all but taken control of the PRI in significant portions of Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero. Their only obstacles to complete control were the caciques, the powerful individual landholders whose private armies of hired goons were the old-school PRI’s last line of defense against ideological subversion. And as winter approached, a plan was being developed in the highest echelons of Havana to destroy the cacique class, eliminate the last vestige of an oppressive regime, and bring about the necessary conditions for revolution...

__________
​

[1] This precise sequence of events was a fairly common occurrence in Chiapas for decades in OTL—and for all I know, it still happens on a regular basis. The only major difference is that it was usually state police who did the evicting. Here, with the significantly more turbulent political situation, the practices has spread to other states with problems of “disloyalty” among citizens.
[2] Coalición Obrera, Campesina, Estudiantil del Istmo (Coalition of Workers, Peasants and Students of the Isthmus [of Tehuantepec])
[3] This also occurred OTL: the COCEI beat the PRI, as it had previously done in 1980, and Salinas recognized the electoral results as valid.
[4] This past January, the New York Times published an article documenting the work of Graciela Iturbide, a Mexican photographer who has spent past last fifty years documenting life in remote and isolated corners of her country, including Juchitán. I am incredibly fortunate to use Iturbide’s work to make this timeline more vivid and believable. This photograph is hers, and I plan to use many more of them, so go read the article right now and take a good look at all of the images. In addition to the sheer artistic value, you might recognize the next one when it comes up!
[5] The Cananea strike happened in OTL on August 20, 1988. In TTL, President de la Madrid was too focused on post-election unrest to do it as planned.
[6] In OTL, the strike ended when the government relented and restored the previous labor contract. Here, with trigger-happy DFS troops added into the mix, things turn out bloodier than they actually did.
[7] In OTL, the CMC was finally sold to Grupo Minera México for $475 million. Here, with the mine workers practically in a state of revolt and the company's equipment rusting from lack of upkeep, almost no investor wants to touch the company, forcing the government to sell it and one-tenth of what it's worth.
[8] In OTL, Carlos Salinas supplemented his welfare cutbacks with grandiose social programs such as PRONASOL and PROCAMPO, which (theoretically at least) dispensed government funding to communities and individuals that needed it most, rather than dispersing it all willy-nilly. They were deeply flawed programs, but they were a whole hell of a lot better than nothing. Here, with a deeply-indebted government and an administration that doesn’t even care all that much about looking charitable, the campesinos have been hung out to dry. The results aren’t nice.
[9] In OTL, Albores Velasco and Pérez Núñez (a former PRI state Congressman) were both assassinated in December of 1989. Here, with the generally more repressive environment, the leaders have been more careful about their actions and have therefore managed to survive. In OTL, the leaders’ deaths gave way to infighting that preventing the major campesino groups from unifying into a single whole.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

September 15, 1990
6:26 PM​

ERNESTO ZEDILLO, Secretary of Planning and Budget, leaned back in his chair and felt his aching spine press against the pliable black leather. He listened idly to the muted chatter from his office television. At that precise moment, the President of the Republic, Raúl Salinas de Gortari, stood on a podium at the Centro Medico Nacional delivering his first and only informe to the assembled delegates of the Congress of the Union.

Well, most of the assembled delegates. The PAN delegation had made a point of boycotting the address in protest of the undemocratic nature of the Presidential campaign (not that they would have been welcomed inside anyway). Watching Salinas drone through hour three of his speech out of the corner of his eye, Zedillo was reminded of his own aversion to electoral politics. With his absolute lack of oratorical skills or charismatic touch, Zedillo knew it would take nothing short of a national tragedy to convince him to run for any sort of office, high or low.

Although he was resting his back, Zedillo wasn’t reclining. Reclining was something you earned, a leisurely reprieve, a satisfied man’s respite after a long day’s work. Zedillo was dithering. He knew that as soon as he faced his desk, he’d have no other choice but to look back at the document, read the dreaded figure printed upon it, sign his name at the bottom and approve the disappearance of yet another unrecoverable slice of Mexican national wealth. Probing his sore vertebrae with a tender finger and thinking back to the epistemology course he’d taken at Yale, Zedillo wondered if he could make the paper vanish simply by refusing to acknowledge its existence.

Finally, after exhausting every possible philosophical excuse to avoid it, the Secretary of Planning and Budget conceded defeat. He exhaled and threw himself forward, cradling his chin in his hands and sending a jolt of pain scurrying up his spinal cord. Dragging his jaded gaze across the text, Zedillo found it nearly identical to the hundreds of others he’d processed over the previous two years: a tediously-worded order to deposit a sum of money from an innocent-looking federal fund to a marginally less innocent-looking bank account in the Caymans. To an untrained eye, it would have seemed unremarkable but for the sum in question: $7,130,812. Even to someone who knew not to be surprised that the figure was measured in American rather than Mexican currency (no self-respecting government official would accept his bribes in the form of the notoriously unstable peso), that was a colossal sum. And with every passing month, it grew. Until May, Zedillo had never signed off on more than two hundred thousand dollars at a time, and now, here he was, about to flush the lifetime earnings of ten average Mexican families down the financial drain, never to be seen again.

The order was not in and of itself out of the ordinary. These presidentially-controlled funds (buried deep within the government’s books and obscured from public eyes) were the lifeblood of the PRI patronage pyramid, a discretionary reservoir of cash billions of dollars deep on which thousands of elections had been fought and won. Every journalist who’d been bribed to censure an opposition candidate, every intellectual who’d been silenced with the gift of a new car, every citizen whose vote had been bought with the promise of a free washing machine or an underground telephone line—all were paid directly from Los Pinos, at the President’s whim.

Personally, Zedillo strongly disapproved of this system, believing that it had served only to empower a class of professional kleptocrats who profited by administering inefficiency. Still, the system being what it was, it was nothing unusual for small quantities of money to travel from presidential ownership to private bank accounts. What was unusual (Zedillo realized after recovering his mental acuity from the ravages of another spinal offensive) was that now, every penny was being funneled into a single cluster of accounts. Thrice a week for almost a year now, the government had been donating exorbitant sums to just three or four anonymous bank accounts, all of which were likely controlled by a single entity. And that wasn’t even counting the vast quantities the President could spend without reporting to his cabinet. Who on Earth could the President possibly be donating tens of millions of public dollars to on a weekly basis?

As he glanced back to the television and saw Salinas’s mustachioed mug stammer its way through a poorly-written paragraph about trade deficits, Zedillo was enveloped by noxious cloud. It filled his nostrils and mouth with the stench of realization and burned his eyes with the sulfur of recognition. It jammed a pair of pincers into his tormented back, causing him to lurch forward in spasm. Zedillo strained to reach his pen and a fresh sheet of paper. It made the pain even worse to contort himself in this way, but Zedillo had to do it—hecouldn’t continue serving a President whose only interest was to gluttonize himself on the people’s money.

As he wrote, a curious thing happened: the barbs embedded in his spine gently unhooked themselves and retreated upward, as if being wound up on a fishing line. Reeled in by catharsis, the pain traveled down Zedillo’s arm and through his fingers. The pen was a magnet, drawing in the pent-up revulsion in Zedillo’s conscience and depositing it onto the page as black ink. Each stroke eliminated more of the discomfort, and by the time he flicked the tip of the pen back across the page to cap off his signature, the air seemed cleaner, his back relieved, and Salinas’s nauseating voice practically inaudible.

He ascended from his seat, donned a black blazer and strode smoothly out the office door. As he exited the office, he stopped only to deposit the letter onto his secretary’s desk and request that it be delivered immediately.

To Raúl Salinas de Gortari, President of the United Mexican States

Dear Mr. President,
I hereby resign the Office of Secretary of Planning and Budget.

—Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León
​

6:29 PM​

VICENTE FOX, Congressional Deputy from the 3rd District of Guanajuato, felt the muscles in his neck clench as he looked over his shoulder one more time, hoping he’d finally shaken his escort. No such luck. The policeman who had been shadowing Vicente for the past three hours was still on his tail, delivering a stare that managed to be menacing from forty meters away and through a dark pair of sunglasses. The muscular cop hadn’t let more than half a block come between him and Fox for the entire afternoon, and he showed not the faintest sign of tiring. And even if Vicente did manage to wear the officer down, he would promptly be replaced by one of three thousand other local, uniformed guardians of the PRI order.

Vicente had thought he’d gotten off easy when the PAN leadership had told him he wouldn’t have to sit through Salinas’s droning, four-hour diatribe of an informe—that is, until he found out that he, along with all other PAN deputies, would be spending the day knocking doors in his district. Not that he disliked campaigning—on the contrary, meeting his constituents was one of his favorite parts of being a politician—but being dogged for hours by a grimacing PRI pitbull was not his idea of a Saturday afternoon. Vicente was two meters tall in his cowboy boots, but he doubted he’d stand much of a chance against a cop who looked like he’d beaten half a dozen criminal informants into pulp that same morning.

Normally, Vicente wouldn’t have been out canvassing this early. His seat in the Congress wasn’t up for re-election until July, which was almost a year away. But these were extraordinary circumstances. Secretary Bartlett was administering the very Presidential election in which he was the candidato oficial, meaning his victory in November, however fraudulent, was a foregone conclusion. And even Vicente, the obstinate optimist, knew that a Congressional election under President Bartlett would be a carnival of flagrant electoral fraud. Pessimists within the PAN were predicting an electoral wipeout, a loss of sixty, seventy, or even eighty of the Party's 101 seats in the Congress of the Union. By starting their campaign so early, the party leaders hoped they might be able to squeeze out a few extra votes and keep a few more precious seats from falling to the inevitable mudslide of fraud.

His energy not yet depleted by the extremely low-speed chase, Vicente set his eyes determinedly upon the next house. He bounded up the steps, reached the white stucco door and rapped on it sharply. Within a minute, there emerged a diminutive housewife who looked up with surprise to see a large, bearded stranger hovering over her doorstep. “Señora, take off your apron,” he exclaimed to the woman, “come out and meet your Deputy!”

The woman was positively astonished. Her federal deputy—mortal, corporeal, and without a squadron of bodyguards—standing on her doorstep? She started inside to fetch a plate of carnitas for her distinguished guest. She’d barely had time to wipe the pork grease off her hands, however, before a card was thrust before her. The cheap, jagged-edged slip of cardstock cut Vicente’s finger as the woman slid it from his hand, yet the deputy’s toothy smile held. As she scrutinized the card and saw the PAN insignia on it, Vicente was sure he saw a glimmer of excitement glint off the woman’s dark brown eyes. In a moment, Vicente assured himself, she would look up and, with a slight smile or nod of approval, affirm her solidarity in the fight against PRI tyranny and pledge her vote to the National Action Party in August!

Vicente was as blind as any other man to the world behind his back, but the reflection in the woman’s visage was clearer than a mirror. As she raised her head to respond, she spied something behind Vicente that terrified her. “No estamos interesados,” she quickly announced and slammed the door so hard that the entire house rattled like a rickety toolshed. Bending down to retrieve the card she’d thrown down onto the step, the increasingly demoralized Deputy saw the policeman standing beside the road with folded arms and a petrifying sneer, carrying out his avowed duty of scaring the public into submission.

Turning toward the next door with a gnawing sense of futility, Vicente tried to persuade himself that his colleagues across the country were surely having a better time than he was.

6:33 PM​

FELIPE CALDERÓN, president of the National Action Party’s youth league and eminent leader of the Michoacán state PAN, writhed like a worm on the uncaring concrete floor.

As his sense of hearing was gradually restored, Felipe became dimly aware of a loud and unpleasant noise. He might have recognized it as a voice, if not for the blood in his ear canal. He opened his eyes just in time to spot a boot-shaped object racing toward him, and within a moment, his already-amorphous sense of his surroundings was further undermined by a sensation in his chest similar to that of being struck by a freight train.

After two and a half months, these “questionings” had become a tidy routine: a question would be spat at Felipe to which he did not know the answer, and if he failed to provide one within a span of approximately fifteen seconds, a guard would generously offer to refresh Felipe’s memory with his boot or fist. The sequence would cycle around two dozen times before his hosts tired of his company and escorted him back to his suite to recuperate.

Today, his captors’ subject of interest was a sizable shipment of automatic rifles which had been uncovered on its way to an unknown recipient somewhere in Michoacán. They seemed to believe that Felipe had somehow masterminded their acquisition from his cell, and could divulge the name, address, occupation and drink preferences of every man, woman and child involved in getting them across the country. “You going to answer me, you cocksucking panista?!” one inquired as they watched Felipe try to burrow his way to safety through the cell floor.

No, Felipe would not be giving any kind of answer to their ridiculous questions. One half of his brain was busy trying to numb itself to the daggers in his ribcage, while the other half was busy condemning its own foolishness for not having fled the country when he had the chance.

Felipe had been right to stay put when the ELM first reared its head in Michoacán; the PAN would not bow to a bunch of schoolboys armed with guns they could barely fire and pamphlets they could barely read. But when the Regional Security Law was passed, empowering the President to suspend constitutional rights in “rebellious” states, Felipe should have fled. When he saw soldiers marching down the streets of his town, Felipe should have fled. And when he heard that the infamous Palacio de Lecumberri was being converted back into a political prison, Felipe should have moved to Fiji, changed his name, burned his passport and hired a crew of well-paid, full-time bodyguards.

And yet, he had stayed. This was Mexico, after all, not Kampuchea or the Congo—Felipe had been sure that even the PRI, for all its totalitarian flirtations, would never stoop as low as arbitrary arrest and internment of peaceful political rivals. It was only after he answered the door one night and was greeted by half a dozen DFS thugs that Felipe realized how wrong he had been. Spotting what looked like a blurred fist closing in on the bridge of his nose, Felipe couldn’t help but think perhaps it was really the fist of God, preparing to mock him for his foolishness.

Crunch.

Felipe desperately hoped he’d imagined that cracking sound.

6:38 PM​

ENRIQUE PEÑA NIETO’s eyes darted back and forth as he slipped down the street, feeling about as inconspicuous as a black-furred rodent scurrying across a snowbank. His elegant, tailored suit would have drawn respect and admiration in most places, but here, it singled him out as a prime target for the muggers and the extortionists, the ugly birds of prey that had driven Mexico City’s crime rates into the stratosphere.

Enrique knew as well as anyone how foolish it was to venture outside in expensive clothing, but ever since the notary’s office had closed down in August, he’d been desperate for a new job. He was lucky to have found this interview in the first place, and was determined to make a good impression on these potential employers, so he’d picked out the best suit he owned: the gravel-grey Calvin Klein which his uncle Alfredo (the former Governor of the State of México) had gifted him for his twentieth birthday. He had no place to carry it but on his back, and it was impossible to get a taxi these days, so he’d found himself with little choice but to walk the streets of Mexico City in an embarrassingly upscale outfit, trying to ignore the greedy and resentful glares from those who passed him.

Enrique hoped he could avoid assault if he kept to the busy streets. After all, what mugger would be dumb enough to strike in the middle of a crowded thoroughfare? But, he realized as he turned onto the Paseo de Lorenzo Boturini, the major avenues weren’t very crowded today. September 15 was a momentous day in recent Mexican history; that morning, a memorial procession for the one-year anniversary of Carlos Salinas's assassination had clashed with one for the two-year anniversary of the Los Pinos Massacre, resulting in a fifteen-minute street battle that, if rumor was to be believed, took half a dozen lives and resulted in nearly a hundred arrests. As a result, most residents had elected to stay inside this evening. Enrique was therefore a bit startled when he rounded a corner and nearly collided with a roving band of men, all decked in the dark green outfit of the Army of the Republic, marching in the opposite direction. And his surprise turned into fear when he realized that they were eyeing his body with the same avaricious look that a vulture gives on a wolf carcass.

The sergeant, a mustachioed man with a vulture’s beak for a nose, whistled to his fellows, evoking the same tone they used when cooing at a young lady in a short skirt. “Look at this cola,” he crooned through a fearsome grin, crudely implying that Enrique was a homosexual. “He thinks he’s el gobernador with the suit he’s got on!” The other soldiers laughed their assent, rifles gleaming in the setting September sun.

Without a moment’s hesitation, Enrique stuffed his hand into his breast pocket and produced out a leather wallet marked with rough white streaks from years of scratching and scuffing. Reaching in, he produced a crumpled wad of 10,000 peso notes, which had finally regained some of their value after the inflation was killed off by the recession.

“I’m s-sure we can work out our disagreements, compadres,” Enrique stuttered, peppering his speech with stifled, terrorized guffaws. A woman was walking in Enrique’s direction. His eyes tried frantically to link up hers, hoping for any sign of concern or solidarity. But she simply kept on walking, passing Enrique and the soldiers without so much as a glance.

Enrique was snapped back to attention as the sergeant snatched the cash out of his jittering hand. “Oh no, cola,” the soldier said. “It’s not just your money we want.” Before Enrique could respond, he was yanked by the arm and shoved into an alleyway. He regained his footing only to be shoved even deeper into the back street. Enrique whirled around and felt three calloused hands groping up his torso and probing through his clothing, carefully unhooking the buttons of his blazer and pulling his arms out through the sleeves. He attempted to get up only to be knocked right back down with the butt of a rifle, and spent the next several minutes clutching his cheekbone in pain as the uniformed arms went to work removing his trousers, dress shirt and shoes, and carefully stripping the expensive wool, cotton and leather garments from his body.

And then they were gone.

The next day, Enrique would realize how lucky he had been. If the soldiers had been just a bit more serious about their cola remarks, he might have been made the victim of a truly horrible crime. But, as he walked back home, he couldn't think about that. All he could think about was how humiliating it was to walk through three kilometers of open city streets while wearing nothing more than a pair of very tight (but not very white) tighty-whities.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

The Mexican presidential election of 1990 bore little semblance of freedom or openness. The turmoil of the preceding two-and-a-half years had been a direct result of the contentious election of 1988, and no PRI figure—least of all the party’s presidential nominee, Manuel Bartlett—was in the mood for a fair fight. In many ways, Bartlett had already been running the country for over a year, so his inevitable victory on November 15 was to be more an anointment than a popular endorsement.

It was feared that an independent, left-wing candidacy would only exacerbate the unrest. So, in August, Bartlett used his power as Government Secretary to ban the FDN from fielding a presidential candidate, on the grounds that it was associated with the terrorist ELM and therefore could not be trusted with executive power. Still, a totally uncontested election would have been unfashionable—the United States was watching its southern neighbor closely, and while President Bush had little problem with the leftists being shut out of the running, he expected there to be at least a pretense of competitiveness in the election. So the PAN was permitted to run an opposition candidate. Manuel Clouthier was still tired out from his 1988 campaign, so instead, the party settled on 72-year-old industrialist Luis H. Álvarez, who had also been the PAN’s presidential nominee in 1958. Álvarez ran a quiet campaign, his advanced age preventing him from making many speeches or campaign appearances.

Not that it mattered anyway. The nationwide press was increasingly falling under direct government control, and state-run media outlets ignored Álvarez's campaign so much of the population was not even aware that Álvarez was running for President. When election day came, Álvarez was simply not on the ballot in many states, and in the rest, DFS, Army and state police troops kept careful watch over the polls in opposition-friendly areas to ensure that voters made the "right" decision. Bartlett's landslide victory, therefore, was a foregone conclusion.

On December 1, 1990, Bartlett was sworn in as President. On February 16, 1991, twenty-one caciques across southern Mexico were brutally murdered in a shocking, if shoddily-organized, ELM campaign. Over the course of a single day, the homes of 43 highly influential landowners throughout Chiapas, Guerrero and Oaxaca were set upon by squads of well-armed men and women affiliated to the ELM. Half of these attacks failed: in nine cases, the assailants were repelled by their target’s bodyguards, while in thirteen cases, the assailants broke in, only to find that their targets were not at home. British historian David Brading has alleged that as many as thirty additional attacks were planned, but fell through because the attackers never received their weapons, failed to meet up at the appointed time or were detected by Army patrols. Nevertheless, by the following morning, 21 rural overlords were dead, their estates reduced to scorched piles of blackened rubble.

The direct effect of the “Night of the Long Guns” (as David Brading would later term it) upon rural Mexican society was negligible. Twenty-one guardians of the PRI social order may have perished, but hundreds more were still alive to do its bidding. However, the raids did prove that the revolutionary underground was capable of shocking feats of organized violence, and, two days after the attacks, the ELM claimed responsibility and demanded that all “class oppressors and fascist PRI warlords” leave the region or face further ferocity. Most heeded the warning: over the next few months, almost half of all caciques—including nearly all in northern Chiapas, northern Guerrero, eastern Oaxaca, and even many in southern Veracruz—would flee in terror, while many of the rest would secretly ally themselves with the underground campesino movement in exchange for physical security.

In October 1990, the tiny hamlet of Paso Achiote in western Chiapas was ransacked by gunmen loyal to local cacique Isidro Flecha. Shockingly, after Flecha was shot in both kneecaps and left to die in his burning mansion four months later on the Night of the Long Guns, the villagers proved rather uncooperative with government investigators. [1]​

This made it very difficult for the central government to enforce law and order, let alone investigate the raids. Over the previous fifteen months, caciques had been instrumental in enforcing martial law, helping federal authorities identify local “troublemakers” and contributing their own private gunmen to government raids on suspected terrorist hideouts. Now that most of the local power brokers had fled or switched sides, federal authorities found it nigh-impossible to maintain effective control over the region. The old guard PRI also collapsed in strength following the Night of the Long Guns. The caciques had always played a crucial role in preserving PRI hegemony, intimidating its opponents through use of force and using their political influence to bolster its authority in their locales; without their stewardship, that crucial strain of the PRI that stressed obedience to the President practically went extinct, paving the way for complete subversion of the grassroots-level PRI by radical campesinos. The campesino-controlled PRI organizations still followed party procedures and many were legitimized by turncoat caciques, meaning that the central government was largely unaware of the transformations the partido oficial was undergoing in the south.

By summertime, the entire region had become one big money pit for Los Pinos. Since January of 1990, the federal government had spent as much as $140 million keeping order in the south—money it could scarcely afford to lose, as it was now forced to spend $373 million every month to service its crippling debt to the United States. In June, President Bartlett reluctantly removed 8,000 Army and DFS troops from Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero, taking the lack of major violence since February to mean that enough of the radicalized population had been jailed to prevent further unrest.

The main reason why President Bartlett agreed to recall the troops is because their services were required elsewhere. In July of 1991, fresh elections would be held for the Congress of the Union, and Bartlett wanted the PRI to regain its supermajority. To ensure this, Bartlett pulled federal forces out of the south and stationed them in opposition-friendly polling places, just as he had done for his own election campaign in November. Bartlett’s Government Secretary, “Don” Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios, [2] warned the President not to assume that the elections would go smoothly in the south, but Bartlett pooh-poohed his fears. After all, the PRI Congressional candidates in Chiapas, Oaxaca and Guerrero (all of whom had been selected by local PRI committees in the aftermath of the Cacique Raids) were running unopposed, and therefore guaranteed to win. What could possibly go wrong?

Don Fernando couldn’t answer, and neither could the rest of the world. Most of Latin America was fixated on Venezuela, where President Carlos Andrés Pérez successfully defended his government from a coup d’état in June. Andrés Pérez had taken power around the same time as Carlos Salinas, and had initially pursued a similar agenda of cutbacks and privatizations. But after watching Salinas’s neoliberal policies lead Mexico to economic ruin, Andrés Pérez reversed course, taking advantage of high petroleum prices (which had risen sharply following the Mexican oil workers’ strike in 1988) to increase funding for popular welfare programs, making his government much more popular among the Venezuelan people. In June of 1991, a radical socialist faction of the Venezuelan Army led by Lieutenant Colonel Hugo Chávez tried to take power in a coup, but failed miserably. Public opinion toward the coup plotters was almost overwhelmingly negative. Most of its leaders were arrested, while Chávez himself went into hiding. [3] Andrés Pérez and the rest of South America were therefore too distracted to pay much heed to events in Mexico.

Within a week after handing over his presidential sash, Raúl Salinas de Gortari had moved into a $62 million mega-mansion in Steinhausen, Switzerland. Critics pointed out that he couldn’t possibly have afforded the mansion without massive looting of the public coffers, but the Mexican press was silent on the issue, respecting the decades-long tradition of not criticizing former Presidents.​

In the United States, however, the Mexican situation was getting ample attention from the political establishment, largely through the efforts of one man: Henry Cisneros. Cisneros had been the highly popular Democratic Mayor of San Antonio from 1981 until 1988, when he publicly confessed that he had had an extramarital affair and resigned to focus on reconciling with his family. Pundits declared the end of Cisneros’s political career, and when he announced a year later that he would run for Texas’s Class 2 Senate seat in 1990, he was almost laughed off the podium. [4] But critics underestimated Cisneros’s potential. He was a skilled political bridge-builder, having won broad support on all his mayoral campaigns from both liberals and conservatives. His Mexican heritage and Catholicism ensured near-universal support from Hispanics—indeed, Cisneros repeatedly stated that his inspiration to run for Senate had been meeting the tens of thousands of Mexican refugees who had fled their home country in 1989 to join Texas’s sizable Hispanic community, which he believed needed greater representation at the federal level.

Cisneros easily won the Democratic nomination, while the incumbent Republican Senator, Phil Gramm, saw a surprisingly strong primary challenge from former state senator Hank Grover, who lambasted Gramm for being “soft” on illegal immigration. Gramm subsequently took a hard line on immigration which was criticized by many as having discriminatory undertones. Gramm also repeatedly tried to use Cisneros’s extramarital affair against him, but this backfired, as Cisneros’s openness about the affair and seemingly genuine remorse meant that voters saw Cisneros as both an honest politician and a truly penitent Christian—two qualities which many felt were lacking in contemporary American politics. Of the two incumbent Republican Senators who lost their seats in 1990, few would have guessed that one would have been from Texas, of all states.

​

Senator Cisneros quickly emerged as Manuel Bartlett’s harshest critic in Washington. Over the course of his term, he would introduce several Senate resolutions condemning the PRI regime, as well as a bill to leverage U.S. ownership of Mexican debt in order to force Bartlett to loosen his repression. As things continued to get worse for the Mexican people, Cisneros forced the American political establishment to acknowledge their hardship even when politically inconvenient. He soon grew into a champion not only of Mexican residents, but for Mexican-Americans and inner-city residents across the entire United States. And, as Mexican-American communities swelled with refugees and American cities were flooded with illegal drugs from Mexican cartels, Cisneros’s status as a rising star in the Democratic Party was secure.

__________
​

[1] Isidro Flecha was/is a real person. He conducted a raid on Paso Achiote in OTL April 1990, and to my best knowledge faced no significant repercussions for it.
[2] Who was Carlos Salinas's Government Secretary in OTL.
[3] In OTL, Andrés Pérez continued on with his neoliberal agenda, making his regime extremely unpopular among regular Venezuelans. Chávez's coup still failed, but he was still supported by much of the population, setting the stage for his pardoning and his eventual, successful Presidential run in 1998.
[4] In OTL, Cisneros did not publicly reveal his affair or run for Senate. Here, turmoil in Mexico has had a indirect, but clear, twofold effect on his political decisions.
[5] The OTL Democratic nominee was Hugh Parmer, whom Gramm beat in a landslide.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

The Mexican legislative elections of 1991 fit perfectly into the national theme of electoral fraud and democratic dishonesty. On July 1, opposition candidates all across Mexico fought the PRI for precious seats in Congress, and all across Mexico, they lost—largely through the intervention of federal security forces. For the previous month, DFS and Army troops all across the country had been in campaign mode, using any and all means at their disposal to make life hell for non-PRI candidates: breaking up opposition rallies, intimidating known PAN and Frente supporters and buying votes with promises of government jobs, washing machines, and free box lunches (this last strategy worked well in this time of economic depression, particularly in the many areas where unemployment rates had grown to exceed 35%). All in all, the PRI gained 147 seats in the Chamber of Deputies. The PAN's seat count fell by over 60, shrinking from 101 to 39 seats. The assorted parties of the FDN fell even further, slipping from 125 to just 54 seats. The PRI majority in the lower house grew from ten seats to 157, enough to amend the Constitution without begging a single opposition vote. In the Senate, the picture was even bleaker. Before the elections, only four Senate seats had been held by the opposition, and now two of those seats had been fraudulently stolen by the PRI.

But the election results (and President Bartlett’s remarks congratulating the Mexican people for “choosing stable and experienced leadership over neo-Marxism and pseudo-fascism”), were not front-page news for long. On July 4, the Army of Mexican Liberation publicly issued what it called the “Manifesto Zapatista de la Selva”, effectively a declaration of war on the Mexican government. The Manifesto argued that the PRI regime had abandoned the principles of the Mexican Revolution, and therefore had to be overthrown and replaced with a government that adhered more closely to the dreams and ideas of the great Mexican revolutionary leaders. “The Institutional Revolutionary Party”, the Manifesto declared, “has become a bourgeois class of kleptocrats and murderers who insult the Mexican people with false elections, and who hoard power and wealth for themselves while their countrymen starve. It is not only the RIGHT, but the DUTY of all Mexicans to overthrow this oppressive regime and form a new government that truly reflects the dreams of Villa and Zapata!” [1]

Subcomandante Marcos (left) and Subcomandante Pablo (right), the two chief military leaders and spokesmen of the Army of Mexican Liberation, announce the creation of the Manifesto Zapatista de la Selva on July 4, 1991. Marcos and Pablo each became targets of adoration from Western leftists, and intelligence units within the DFS quickly went to work trying to determine the identities of the two anonymous men.​

Before the text of the Manifesto could even reach international newsstands, it was already becoming a reality. All throughout July 5 and 6, pickup trucks drove into municipalities across Chiapas and Oaxaca, whereupon teams of rifle-wielding, balaclava-wearing soldiers emerged, took over municipal halls and government buildings, and announced that the town was under ELM control. By the morning of the 7th, the ELM had systematically seized control of a large portion of southeastern Mexico, comprising hundreds of towns and municipalities in a curvaceous, 35,000 square-kilometer zone stretching from the Gulf of Tehuantepec to the Guatemalan border.

Compared to the Night of the Long Guns, the Selva Rebellion was such a remarkable success that some historians consider the former to have been intended as a “practice run” for the latter. The high failure rate of the Cacique raids four months prior had prompted Fidel Castro to send several million dollars’ worth of arms and comms equipment, as well as several hundred Cuban military advisors. The effects were astonishing: of 124 attacks, over 70% resulted in the ELM assuming control of the municipality with broad support from the local population. In most towns, due to the lack of federal troop presence, the ELM saw no resistance other than from local police forces, many of which had already been paid off or switched sides. Those policemen who did fight back were typically overwhelmed by the guerrillas, who had superior numbers and firepower, and—in some cases—the backing of the local cacique, whose influence was enough to ensure success. Only 32 attacks failed, and these were mostly due to equipment and coordination failures rather than successful counterattacks. Overall, less than twenty lives were lost during the initial uprising (the region contained many other, smaller hamlets and villages, but these did not require armed takeovers because the ELM or its sister organizations already held near-unanimous popular support in all of them). [2]

Members of the Army of Mexican Liberation enter the town of San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas, on July 5, 1991. Because federal forces were dispersed throughout the country and state police forces were underfunded and exhausted, the ELM met with no real resistance during its first few days of rebellion against the Mexican government.​

News of the Rebellion sent President Bartlett into a fit of apoplectic rage. At first, he was powerless to stop it; The Army and DFS were in no immediate position to put down the uprising, having been dispersed all throughout the country for the Congressional elections, while the state police forces of Chiapas and Oaxaca had been downsized in order to increase presidential power. It took five days to amass enough troops for a counterattack, by which point the rebels were dug in and ready to fight back. Soldiers raced through mountain passes, only to be ambushed by guerrillas hiding behind every boulder and twist in the road. Bands of camouflaged locals who were familiar with the local terrain leapt from the Lacandon Jungle to attack frightened Army units with assault rifles. Federal troops retook some villages on the outskirts of the rebel zone, but the fighting was tough, and progress was slow and bloody.

After a week of fighting, the government managed to claw back a few towns on the fringes of the ELM’s reach. Overall, however, the ELM's territory had stayed intact, and the rebels were in the process of consolidating their grip even on those municipalities which had resisted the initial uprising. The Rebellion was attracting international attention, and President Bartlett was coming under increasing pressure from the United States to call a ceasefire and negotiate with the rebels.

Then, on July 18, there came a development so shocking that, to this day, geopolitical analysts are surprised by its sheer audacity. Two weeks earlier, on July 1, midterm elections had been held for the Chiapas state legislature, alongside those for the federal Congress. Many of the deputies who had won election to the unicameral Chiapas State Congress had run unopposed, and all 40 of them had been elected under the banner of the PRI. The new legislature was not due to convene in the state capital of Tuxtla until December, making it all the more surprising when 22 Chiapas state congressmen suddenly gathered in the city of Venustiano Carranza, right in the heart of rebel territory. Convening in the Casa del Pueblo (“House of the People”, a community center in Carranza which had served as the nucleus of Chiapas’s independent political movement since 1972), the assembled legislators unanimously passed a resolution stating that the northern half of Chiapas would secede from the south and form a new entity—not a breakaway republic, but a new state within the framework of Mexico, one with "a special commitment to the principles of the Mexican Revolution". The “independent Congress”, as it called itself, declared that the new state would be called “The Free and Sovereign State of Zapata”, after Emiliano Zapata, the famed peasant revolutionary who had been slain in 1919 during the First Revolution (ironically, his assassins were under the command of Venustiano Carranza—the namesake of the town in which the Congress was meeting).

Rough map of territory controlled by the Army of Mexican Liberation in early July 1991, following their initial uprising against the Mexican government. Most of the captured territory was in Chiapas, where the state legislature (which had secretly become dominated by ELM allies) declared a breakaway state within Mexico on July 18.​

If the Rebellion had angered President Bartlett, then the formation of the State of Zapata unleashed a torrent of Presidential fury that the even the strong walls of Los Pinos could not contain. Somehow, the rebels had infiltrated the Chiapas state PRI, and had used this influence to take control of the state government. And, as Bartlett quickly realized, if they could do it in Chiapas, they could certainly have done it in other places. George Bush was just as stunned at the uprising as Bartlett was, but he failed to grasp just how chilling the implications were for the Mexican President: if the Institutional Revolutionary Party—that vital fixture of twentieth-century Mexico—could be subverted, then anything could be subverted. Bartlett’s paranoia skyrocketed as he feared he could not trust any institution to remain steadfastly loyal to him. The U.S. and its allies continued to urge Bartlett to press for a peaceful resolution, but there was no way he was giving in to these traitors. And, as July turned into August with no end in sight, Bartlett convened a meeting of the Army’s top brass, hoping to devise a long-term strategy to defeat the Zapatistas (as they were now being called), through attrition and relentlessness.

Meanwhile, although the ELM was steadily consolidating its territory, the new state of Zapata was facing an uncertain future. The “Congress of Zapata”, as it was now known, was a technically-legal entity; its members had previously comprised a majority of the Chiapas State Congress, and therefore constituted a legitimate quorum to pass legislation. However, in the strictest legal terms, the “State of Zapata” only included parts of Chiapas, and therefore excluded all of ELM-controlled Oaxaca. To resolve this issue, the Zapatista Congress called for a referendum to be held in these areas on whether to join the Zapata or not (which, everyone knew, would return overwhelmingly positive results). However, political cohesion within the new legislature soon began to disintegrate, as the legislators began to fracture on political lines. The first two days of the Congress' session were marked by deadlock and dispute; progress on writing a Constitution for the State of Zapata halted almost immediately, as the Congressmen (all of whom adhered to different strains of leftist thought) began to quibble over minutiae such as the proportions of the state’s flag and the placement of particular adjectives in unimportant articles. Mexico entered the autumn of 1991 with an extra state, and as stalemate set in, no one—not the Zapatistas, not President Bartlett, and certainly not the international community—seemed to know what was going to happen next.

There is one thing, however, that is agreed on near-universally. The Second Mexican Revolution is subject to much historiographical controversy—particularly over when it started. Some historians believe the Second Revolution (in some form) began as early 1985, while others place the starting date as late as Cacique raids. But, no matter how stubborn a historian may be about his interpretation of the Second Revolution, just about all of them agree that, by the time of the Selva Rebellion, it was in full swing. Mexico was changing, for better or for worse, and there was no going back now.

__________
​

[1] This is based on OTL’s First Declaration of the Lacandon Jungle of December 31, 1993, in which the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) announced its intention to declare war on the Mexican government. In OTL, the Declaration was immediately followed by the Zapatista Rebellion by the EZLN which took control of much of northern Chiapas, territory that the EZLN still controls to this day. The Declaration can be read in English here.
[2] This is essentially an earlier, larger-scale version of the Zapatista Rebellion, which in OTL occurred on January 1, 1994. In TTL, the much worse economic situation has served to move the up two-and-a-half years and almost double the territory affected (in OTL, the Zapatistas captured about this much territory during their initial uprising), while the Cuban association has helped give the ELM the strength to handle the stress of occupying a larger area.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

Moscow, USSR
August 7, 1991​

Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev, President of the Soviet Union, grunted a word of thanks as the document was deposited on his desk. Slouching forward in his chair, the General Secretary of the Communist Party dragged his gaze across the cover of the forty-page typescript: Report on Political Developments in Mexico Since 1988.

A few years ago, Gorbachev would never have had the time to commission a report on a country halfway across the globe. There was so much to do then: rooting out corruption within the Communist Party establishment, loosening the restrictions on freedom of speech and expression, reviving an economy with all the stability and efficiency of a dropped lasagna. Now, however, it seemed that the President was losing power and influence by the day. Where he once had sweeping powers over the vast country, Gorbachev now struggled to keep control of his own Party, watching helplessly as sessions of the new Congress of People's Deputies erupted into open rhetorical warfare between squabbling Party factions. Meanwhile, each corner of the Union was revolting against Moscow. The Baltics had already gone their own way, chauvinistic parties were on the rise in Ukraine and Belarus, and Tajiks and Armenians were at each others’ throats as law and order disintegrated.

What stung most, Gorbachev realized, was that his own mistakes had worsened many of the problems. If Gorbachev hadn’t sent tanks rumbling through Vilnius, the Baltic Republics might not have been so adamant about independence, and the Ukrainians and Belarusians might not be making similar noises now. And, Gorbachev thought, if he hadn’t spent so much time cozying up to unpopular reformists, he wouldn’t have lost so much of his credibility as General Secretary of the Communist Party.

Luckily, though, things were looking up now. By forming an alliance with the hardliners, Gorbachev had shored up his remaining Party influence over the objections of men like Yeltsin, who said that allying with the old guard would only bring destruction and disarray. In two weeks, nine of the thirteen Republics would gather in Moscow to sign the New Union Treaty, ensuring that the Soviet Union—in the form of a decentralized confederation—would survive into the next millennium. Still, Gorbachev was increasingly finding himself with a lot of spare time, and, although the Foreign Ministry was in many ways a mere phantom of its former self, it still knew how to put together a good report. So he had asked Foreign Minister Bessmertnykh for a study on Mexico, a country in which he had taken particular interest since the rebellion had broken out in July.

As he flipped through the report, Gorbachev was reminded of just how much he had had in common with Carlos Salinas. Both men had rapidly risen through the ranks of one-party states, both men had tried to bring liberal reform to stagnant and sclerotic political systems, and both men had become despised by the hardliners within their respective parties (and, of course, both men were balding). Despite the vast differences between two Presidents’ economic policies, they had shared several fruitful and good-natured communications during Salinas’s short time in office; plans had already been made for them to meet in person when Salinas was shot in 1989. The General Secretary had been deeply shaken by the news of Salinas’s assassination, and as he held the report in his hands, he was eager to see how his successors had handled the turbulent situation.

Reading the document, he found to his dismay that they had quite thoroughly bungled it: First, Salinas’s incompetent kleptocrat of a brother had sent the economy plunging, and then, the new fellow, Bartlett, had been so indiscriminate with his application of government force that now, he had a full-scale rebellion on his hands. Some of the more “colorful” elements of the Western press had declared the ELM to be Soviet lackeys; in truth, Moscow had been just as blindsided by the rebellion as Mexico City had been. Still, it didn’t hurt to be well-informed, the General Secretary reminded himself as he buried his nose within the report.

As he read, a picture started to form in Gorbachev’s mind of just what had been going on in Mexico City for the past three years. Salinas, the reformer, had come to power over the grumbling objections of the Party hardliners, who then kept up appearances of supporting the President while secretly plotting to undermine him and preserve their entrenched privileges. And when Salinas was suddenly killed in 1989, the old guard swiftly swooped in, nominated a puppet leader in the form of Salinas’s older brother, and then took direct control of the country in the form of Manuel Bartlett. Hardliners, Gorbachev thought to himself, are at their most dangerous when they’re acting friendly toward reformists.

Just as this thought formed in the General Secretary’s mind, a parallel one began to crystallize, far less abstract and far more unsettling than its predecessor: What exactly was Pavlov's [1] intention last month, when he asked the Congress to give him my Presidential powers?

This thought birthed other, even less pleasing thoughts, and Gorbachev closed his eyes to examine them:

Who exactly was Kryuchkov [2] talking about when he called for the purging of “traitors” within the Party leadership?

Why was Pugo [3] so quick to deny plans for a coup during our meetings, when I hadn’t even mentioned a coup in the first place?

What did Shevardnadze [4] mean when he said that “dictatorship is coming?”

For several minutes, Gorbachev sat pondering these questions, his pulse growing quicker as billions of neurons fired furiously within his birthmarked cranium. Hardliners are at their most dangerous when they’re acting friendly toward reformists.

Then, with the grace of a stumbling elephant, he lunged for the telephone and slammed the receiver into his ear. A few tinny rings, then a click, and then an ever-so-slightly slurred voice emerged from the other end.

“Mr. President?”

Gorbachev briefly considered addressing the President of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic with the same title, but decided against it.

“Boris Nikolaevich,” Gorbachev began, “I’m afraid I require your assistance in dealing with a few pressing threats to our national security…”

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[1] Valentin Pavlov, who was Prime Minister of the Soviet Union for a few months in 1991. Pavlov was a member of the so-called "Gang of Eight", a clique of Communist Party hardliners that perpetrated the failed "August Coup" of 1991, which tried to depose Gorbachev and prevent the disintegration of the Soviet Union but only accelerated its demise.
[2] Vladimir Kryuchkov, head of the KGB, who was also part of the Gang of Eight.
[3] Boris Pugo, another Party minister who was a member of the Gang of Eight.
[4] Eduard Shevardnadze, Gorbachev's Foreign Minister from 1985 until 1990, when he resigned in protest of Gorbachev's cozying up to Communist Party hardliners like those in the Gang of Eight.

 

[Roberto El Rey]

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.

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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!