Al Grito de Guerra: the Second Mexican Revolution

Narrative Interlude #5
  • February 6, 1992
    Atlacomulco, State of México

    The sun shimmered vermilion as it sank below the mountainous horizon, sheathing first the distant metropolis and then the growing countryside in despondent blue twilight. As the caravan of black SUVs trudged through the warm winter air, the sky went from red to pink to blue to grey to black, so that by the time it reached the appointed spot the evening’s eye had closed and the world was bat-blind to the deeds of men below. When twenty-four Army troops, sixteen DFS agents and one President saw the isolated, crumbling shack by the harsh glare of twelve pairs of headlights, they were alone in the night.

    The rotting structure which they beheld had first been built in 1954 as a civic center. However, like most twentieth-century Mexican public works projects, its true purpose had been to funnel taxpayer money into the private pockets of senior government officials. Then-Governor Salvador Sánchez had contracted the job out to one of his own construction companies, which had cut every possible corner, eventually resulting in a crooked concrete hut that was so far away from the nearest settlement that barely anyone had given it a moment’s thought in years. That this forsaken structure hadn’t collapsed during the quake of ’85, but the General Hospital of Mexico had, seemed to imply that God had a morbid sense of humor when it came to his natural disasters.

    Still, the isolation made this the perfect spot for tonight. Obsessed with secrecy, President Bartlett had personally sought out the most isolated hovel within one hundred kilometers of the Federal District, then summoned the crême de la crême of the country’s narcotic aristocracy to pile themselves into it in anticipation of his arrival. As he exited his Range Rover, Bartlett saw that three luxury cars were already parked outside the front door to the shack, chauffeurs languishing anxiously within. This irritated the President as he was escorted toward the waiting door (he had asked the traffickers to come as inconspicuously as possible), but he quickly remembered that these men’s line of work forced them to make constant, gaudy shows of their personal wealth and power. The international drug trade was a vicious, vicious game, and the slightest sign of weakness could invite internal coups from underlings or assassination attempts from alleged allies. Only a great fool, Bartlett realized as he pushed open the door, would show up to a meeting with his most prominent business rivals in anything less than his finest suit and most expensive sports car.

    As Bartlett entered the dingy room and came face-to-face with three grimacing drug dons, he suddenly remembered the meeting he had attended seven years earlier to plan the murder of Kiki Camarena. So much had changed since then: the country was in turmoil, Bartlett himself was President, and three of the meeting’s attendees—Rafael Caro Quintero, Ernesto Fonseca Carrillo and Miguel Ángel Félix Gallardo—had been imprisoned for their involvement in Camarena’s death. The incarcerated men’s families had scattered to the winds, destroying the old Guadalajara Cartel and replacing it with several lesser organizations spread out across the northern border states, all operating within the fragile bounds of several easily-broken truces. Already, Félix Gallardo’s progeny in Tijuana were at war with Joaquín Guzmán’s forces in Sinaloa; Bartlett hadn’t invited either cartel to this meeting for fear that they would be at each other’s throats.

    Returning to the moment, Bartlett took a seat and surveyed his distinguished guests across the table: Amado Carrillo Fuentes, Fonseca Carrillo’s nephew and founder of the Juárez Cartel; Miguel Caro Quintero, Rafael’s brother and leader of the Sonora Cartel; and Manuel Salcido Uzueta, the most prominent remaining trafficker still based in Guadalajara and a man most preferred to call El Cochiloco, or “The Crazy Pig”. No one else. The meeting in 1985 had been packed—the Secretary of Defense, DFS Chief, Governor of Jalisco, military officials, and police chiefs, attended by armed bodyguards and servants bearing cocaine cigarettes on silver platters, had all squeezed themselves into a lavish suite at the Las Americas Hotel in Guadalajara to do their business. Someone had squealed, and everyone had suffered for it. Bartlett couldn’t afford that kind of risk tonight—if the world found out what he was about to do, his head would be the first one to roll.

    Clearing his senses, the President of the Republic finally spoke. “Respected comrades and associates,” he began as he took his seat, “may I offer regards of the sincerest profundity on my administration’s behalf, and gratitudes of the highest solemnity for your concurrence with the purposes of this conclave.”

    Amado Carrillo Fuentes blinked. Miguel Caro Quintero squinted. The Crazy Pig just grunted. “What?”

    Bartlett grumbled inaudibly. He’d forgotten just how thick these men were. “Thanks for coming,” he clarified in the condescending voice of an overworked primary school teacher.

    “Why exactly have we come, el señor presidente?” Amado Carrillo Fuentes inquired with the indignant sneer of a man accustomed to choosing the time and place of his meetings. “You were so tight-lipped about it on the phone, I don’t have a clue what it is you intend to offer us.”

    Suppressing his offense at the drug lord’s unprofessional manner, Bartlett cut to the chase: “Mexico is under attack. Our sacred institutions are being subverted by radicals of the most pernicious kind,” he claimed, incapable of diluting his rhetoric below a certain threshold. “If we are to defeat them, we must have a strong security apparatus, and for that we need money—lots of money—that doesn’t come out of Washington’s usury funds. That, my friends, is where you come in.”

    There was a pause as the full significance of the offer sunk in. “You want us to fund your reign of terror?” Carrillo asked with an exotic mix of confusion and bemusement.

    “The donations you provide would serve to streamline the functions of the Government Secretariat, allow for more incursions into the territory of the southern rebels—and, of course, triple the size of the Federal Security Directorate,” the President emphasized with a slight, tight smile.

    This time there was no pause. “Why should we care about your security apparatus?” El Cochiloco interjected with a flippant wave of his hand. “What’s in this deal for us?”

    Bartlett had expected that part to be obvious, but you could never be sure with these morons. He leaned forward in his seat. “The more federal agents I have to enforce my laws, the more you have to guard your operations. The DFS works for you as much as it does for me, and we all know it,” Bartlett noted, hiding his discomfort at the knowledge that the long-term security of his regime rested on an army of part-time smugglers. “The stronger the Directorate is, the stronger you are. An investment in the Directorate is an investment in yourselves.” Bartlett leaned back once again, hoping he’d dressed his sales pitch just well enough to make it a convincing argument.

    By the looks of Carrillo’s prolonged smirk, it hadn’t been. “Oh no, el señor presidente,” he cockily insisted. “I’m no philanthropist. If I’m to contribute to this little slush fund of yours, then it’d better be more than worth my while. You take my money,” he slithered, “you become my employee.”

    Beneath the table, Bartlett dug his fingernails into his palms. “What do you want from me?” he inquired evenly, carefully concealing his anger.

    “I want control over all your new hires in my territory. No one in Chihuahua gets a DFS job without my say-so.” The smugness with which he laid out his terms suggesting he would be recommending several hundred of his own lieutenants as agents in the near future.

    Bartlett recoiled. “What kind of imbecile are you?” he shouted with outward horror, secretly relishing the indignant pleasure of the insult. “The CIA and the DEA have agents everywhere, especially since I re-established the DFS. What do you think will happen when one of them finds out that I’m seeking out your approval on matters of security? Washington will go berserk, Bush will send his armies down and this time next year, we’ll be the 51st state!”

    The President drew breath, cooling the embers of his anger but fanning the flames of his determination.

    “Washington will tolerate—even expect—some corruption in the DFS, as long as I appear to be fighting it,” he continued. “But if they start to suspect that I am facilitating that corruption, America’s support will shrivel like a poblano in the sun. And if they find out that I am conspiring with international criminals—even if it’s for the ultimate good of the country—each of us will soon find himself five kilograms lighter and twenty-five centimeters shorter.” The finger Bartlett dragged across his neck left little ambiguity as to what he meant. The traffickers took the point: it would be foolish to cooperate so openly with the federal government.

    Sensing that he had reclaimed the initiative, Bartlett pressed ahead with his own suggestion. “What if I used the DFS to dismantle the Tijuana Cartel?” the President proposed. “That would benefit us all: each of your organizations will profit from the reduced competition and greater market share, and I will be able to show Bush and his cronies what a fierce adversary of organized crime I am.” Several moments of silence ensued as the traffickers considered the offer. It would certainly help, but what assurance did the traffickers have that Bartlett would not then use his strength to go after them, too?

    “Give us more governors,” Miguel Caro Quintero suddenly spoke.

    “Give you what?” asked Bartlett, vaguely puzzled at the offer.

    “Moving product from one end of a state to the other is ten times easier when you’ve got the governor on your side,” Caro explained. “Do you have any idea how hard it was to ship cocaine across Sonora after the DFS was first disbanded? Do you know how huge Sonora is?!!!” he exclaimed, Carrillo’s look of sympathy suggesting that this was a grievance shared by all international drug barons.

    “…but,” Caro continued after calming down a tad, “since Manlio took office in Hermosillo everything has gotten so much easier. All of sudden, airstrips and rail hubs have opened up all over the state. Now my men travel with state police escorts, and I’m tipped off at least a week before every raid. If you can turn more of my associates into governors, and I know you can,” Caro proposed, “you can have all the money you need from me.”

    President Bartlett massaged his shaven chin with a feeling of quiet vindication: he’d always suspected Governor Beltrones was corrupt, and now he had his confirmation. The offer wasn’t quite as reckless as it sounded, either; corrupt governors had been reigning in Mexico since independence, after all, and if one of these “associate” governors was found out, he, rather than Bartlett, would take the fall. Carefully watching the traffickers’ expressions, he sense that it was time to give in or risk losing his chance at a deal. “I accept your proposal,” he said with as little informality as he could muster.

    The next half-hour was spent discussing payment methods. Thanks to the immense fiscal power afforded to the presidency, this would be surprisingly simple: unlike governors, the President had access to several secret, state-owned bank accounts which were well-hidden from prying eyes and which the President could use without reporting anything to anyone. The traffickers would honor their end of the bargain simply by transferring funds from their own clandestine bank accounts to the President’s, as they would with any other illicit transaction.

    Discussion then switched to the governorships themselves. Names of states and cities were tossed around like hot potatoes as the traffickers bickered over territory, tracing invisible lines on the table as if it were a giant map. Various “associates” were named, such as Tomás Yárrington, a nobody Congressman from Matamoros who had no political ambitions beyond the fattening of his wallet, and who therefore would make a perfectly pliable Governor of Tamaulipas; Miguel Lerma Candelaria, a high-ranking bureaucrat from Juárez whose job had disappeared amid Carlos Salinas’s budget cuts, and who would do just about anything for a high-paying gig like that of Governor of Chihuahua; and Mario Villanueva Madrid, a PRI senator whose hardline credentials were strong enough that he could be trusted to execute the office of Governor of Quintana Roo unfaithfully and with exorbitant regard to his personal finances. Plans were also discussed to install an “associate” governor in Baja California (the incumbent panista, Ernesto Ruffo Appel, still had three years left in his term, but his removal on “corruption” charges would be easy enough to arrange, provided the PRI seized control of the State Congress in July’s elections).

    Then, suddenly, the meeting began to outlast its fruitfulness. The chatter died away, leaving only the sound of flies pinging off fluorescent lights—a sound which reminded all four of the meeting’s attendees of just how much luxury had been lost between the Las Americas Hotel and this godforsaken shack, and of how debasing it was for these men of power to appear before each other not surrounded by teams of servants. Bartlett, who had spent much of his federal career watching highbrow criminals bicker with each other in cabinet meetings, could tell when it was time for everyone to go home. “Well, gentlemen,” he announced, his voice cutting through the thick silence, “it would seem that we have reached an understanding. I will work to ensure that my responsibilities under it are met, just as I trust you all will do.” Taking the hint, Miguel Caro Quintero rose wordlessly from his seat, walked to the door and left the shack. He was followed in short order by the other two traffickers and then by Bartlett himself, who watched by the harsh blue glare of the shack lights as they each climbed into the backs of their Aston Martins and Rolls-Royces and sped off into the night. He then returned to his waiting SUV, flanked on each side by a stoic soldier.

    Relaxing his neck on the headrest as the convoy started up again, Bartlett observed from the window as the artificial light was extinguished and the cabin vanished into the black. Barely noticing as his eyelids floated magnetically downward, he preoccupied himself with the thought of turning smugglers into governors. Might they become more loyal to the drug lords than to him?

    No, he assured himself. Not a chance. These men had built their entire careers within a system that worshipped obedience to the President, and no amount of bribes was going to change that. Carrillo could yammer on and on about buying politicians, but at the end of the day, his “associates” were loyal priístas through and through. And when push came to shove, they’d choose the President of the Republic over a gang of thugs whose only chance at the history books would be if they could find particularly interesting ways of dismembering each other’s corpses.

    As he was enveloped by the tendrils of dreams and slumber, a grain of doubt germinated in the forefront of Bartlett’s mind. Could it be that the bonds of loyalty between the President and his governors were not as iron as he believed?

    And then he fell back through time. A valve opened up in his mind and the memory came flooding in. Through closed eyes, he perceived the image of a former Governor of Tabasco long since swept away by the tide of mortality setting a telephone receiver down on its cradle. He suddenly became aware that it was 1955 again, and that he was once more a lanky nineteen-year-old sitting his in father’s office with a look of uncomprehending desperation on his face.

    I’m resigning, Mani, the Governor said.

    Mani was too far adrift to voice the question on his mind, and yet the phantom father answered it anyway.

    I have to do it, Mani. The President asked me to.[1]

    With that, Manuel’s doubt about the iron-bound loyalty of PRI governors dissolved. The rest of his thoughts went with it, and within seconds, he floated weightlessly into a lake of dreams.
    __________
    [1] In OTL as in TTL, Bartlett's father, Manuel Bartlett Bautista, served as Governor of Tabasco from 1953 to 1955, when he was compelled to resign by President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines.
     
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    Part 16: The Battle of San Cristóbal de las Casas
  • The Palenque Peace Conference was, without a doubt, one of the most historically ambiguous moments of a conflict filled to the brim with historical ambiguities. Even today, there is little historical consensus as to who was really behind the events of March 22, 1992. Some blame one of Zapata’s internal factions, several of which were dead-set against any kind of peace agreement with Mexico City. Many, however, point the finger at President Bartlett, saying he took the very existence of the State of Zapata as a personal insult and would have done anything for a raison de guerre. Others blame the DFS, which knew it stood to gain power from increased hostilities between the government and the Zapatistas; still others blame Fidel Castro, claiming he wanted to rein in the Zapatistas’ newfound independent streak by prolonging the conflict and thereby increasing their reliance on Cuban military aid. And a few maverick historians persist that the men who shaped history on that day were not agents of some shadowy, sinister power, but just two ordinary, impoverished Mexicans who saw a chance to strike back at the authoritarian system which had oppressed them for so long and took it, paying the ultimate price in the process.

    Unlike with most such mysteries, the hard facts do disappointingly little to clarify the situation. If anything, they actually make it even more confusing. For example, everyone knows that, on the morning of March 16, two men—ostensibly peace delegates from the UE Quiptic faction—walked into the Casa del Pueblo in Carranza for the ceasefire negotiations. Yet no one knows for sure whether the soldiers who searched these two men were complicit in the scheme, or just bad at their jobs. Likewise, no one has ever identified the two men as Mexican citizens, but whether that means they were Cuban secret agents or just unregistered Mexicans remains a point of contention. The only thing that is clear is that multiple different entities might have had a vested interest in sabotaging the peace conference, and enough evidence exists to either implicate or exonerate each and every one of them, depending on one’s outlook.

    In any case, the two men (whoever they were) spent the first half-hour of the negotiations observing as Governor Albores, Subcomandante Marcos and Government Secretary “Don” Fernando Gutiérrez bickered under the careful mediation of Canadian Ambassador Raymond Chrétien and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who had returned from his self-imposed exile to perform what he saw as a public service. Then, roughly thirty-four minutes in, the two men suddenly rose from their seats, drew semi-automatic pistols and began firing wildly at the delegates. Two soldiers standing guard outside the door heard the gunshots, burst into the room, and shot the attackers dead in a matter of seconds; but within that span of time, seven peace negotiators were shot, three of whom—Gutiérrez, Chrétien, and former Governor of Chiapas Absalón Castellanos Domínguez—would later die of their wounds.

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    General Absalón Castellanos had ruled Chiapas from 1982 to 1988 with an iron fist, earning him the universal hatred of the state’s campesinos. He was one of three delegates killed at the Palenque Conference, lending credence to the theory that the attackers were native chiapanecos rather than federal or Cuban agents.

    Needless to say, the negotiations took a rather sharp turn for the worse after that. Not four hours later, President Bartlett was giving a live, fiery speech on nationwide TV in which he blamed the Zapatistas for the attack and called it a “declaration of war upon the civilized world". News of the attack hit global headlines the following day, and although Governor Albores and Subcomandante Marcos vigorously denied all claims of Zapatista involvement, they had no means of communicating with the international media and were therefore powerless to challenge Bartlett’s narrative. Thus, when President Bartlett announced plans for a military offensive against the rebels, he had the tacit (if reluctant) support of President Bush and the vocal support of several prominent Latin American countries, including Guatemala, Peru, Honduras, Ecuador and Colombia.

    However, Bartlett would soon run into trouble mobilizing enough troops for his counterinsurgency. Ever since the Law of Regional Security had been passed in 1990, each of the Army's eight Independent Brigades had been permanently deployed throughout the country to keep order in several of Mexico's more seditious cities. Over time, the brigades began to function less like military units and more like crime syndicates—in the hallowed Mexican tradition of exploiting power for profit, the commanding general would divide the city up into sections and give control over each to one of his coroneles. Each coronel, in turn, would partition that authority among various capitanos, tenientes and sargentos, who would spend their days shaking down the city for all it was worth. The Army had refined its methods considerably since the crude extortion of the Autumn of Terrors; no longer targeting ordinary citizens on the street for the pesos in their pockets, it now concentrated solely on local businesses, criminal gangs, and even underground political dissident groups, all of which were happy to pay hefty bribes if it meant they would be left alone.


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    A patrol unit of the 2nd Independent Brigade rolls down a highway in the Federal District in November of 1991.

    Surprisingly enough, this arrangement made for highly effective peacekeeping. Indeed, many scholars attribute the lack of significant political unrest in Mexico City between 1990 and 1992 to the relatively permissive dominion of the 1st, 2nd and 7th Brigades, which were happy to let the City’s many “independent revolutionary committees” hold meetings and adopt resolutions, so long as they paid their bribes and kept a low profile. The system also allowed high-ranking officers to accumulate vast personal fortunes as bribes, kickbacks and other such tributes crept up the military ladder, making each rung richer than the last. By 1992, many of these officers had bought homes and begun extramarital affairs in their adoptive cities, settling into lives of such power and comfort that, when President Bartlett announced plans for a new assault on the rebel state, they shuddered at the thought of leaving their mansions and mistresses for a hot, humid jungle infested with insects and insurgents. The more senior officers pulled every possible string to resist reassignment, and Defense Secretary Juan Arévalo Gardoqui soon realized that the only units he could mobilize without antagonizing his own staff (other than the Armored Brigade, which was the least useful for keeping order in urban areas) would be the ones with the least seniority: the 8th Independent Brigade from Guadalajara, which had been created just two years before in response to heightened social unrest; and the 4th Light Infantry Brigade from Tijuana, which was headquartered the farthest away from Mexico City and therefore had the fewest links to the highly centralized Army bureaucracy.

    Meanwhile, as the Army was working to sort out its bureaucratic logjams, the Zapatistas were rushing to prepare for the invasion. Since mid-1991, Cuba had been embroiled a severe economic depression which Fidel Castro had euphemistically called the “Special Period”, leaving the fledgling State of Zapata to subsist without help from its patron for the first eight months of its existence. After the Palenque attacks, Havana reluctantly stepped up its shipments of military aid, which mostly took the form of weapons and combat advisors (two of the few things of which Cuba did not have a chronic shortage now that the Cold War was over).

    No sooner had the Zapatistas finished arming themselves than the Army was ready to press ahead with the offensive. The plan was fairly simple: the attacking troops would assemble in southern Veracruz and blitz through a narrow corridor of Zapatista territory, slicing the rebel state in half and opening up a land route to southern Chiapas, which had been cut off from the rest of the country since July of 1991. These forces would then regroup in the federally-held city of Tuxtla Gutiérrez and proceed thence to San Cristóbal de las Casas (or Jovel, as the Tzotzil called it), the largest city in rebel-held territory and the "cultural capital" of Chiapas. After taking Jovel, the Army would have a base of operations from which to reconquer the highlands, while the rebels’ ability to counterattack would be crippled with their territory divided into two pieces—or so the plan went. Despite warnings from Secretary Arévalo, Bartlett expected it to be an easy fight, remembering how the Zapatistas had struggled to fight back during the Selva Rebellion and believing they would crumble at the first application of substantial military force. Hoping that a widely-publicized victory would bolster his international support, Bartlett invited journalists from several international news agencies to cover the offensive so that they could broadcast his triumph to the world.

    On May 2, an armored brigade led by General Miguel Ángel Godínez Bravo crossed into a rebel territory, followed one day later by two infantry brigades under the respective command of Generals Horacio Montenegro and Luis Humberto López Portillo. The first three days of the campaign were a great success: the ELM had few forces concentrated in the area, allowing the brigades to march right across Zapata with practically no resistance. On May 4, López Portillo’s company of 2,600 men encountered a team of 15 ELM guerrillas and pounded it into blood and bonemeal; that evening, President Bartlett held a press conference to announce the Army’s “crushing and decisive victory” to the public.

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    Federal APCs blitz through the jungle of eastern Oaxaca after a bloody battle with an ELM fireteams.

    But beneath this pompous veneer, tensions lurked. Over the preceding two years, each brigade’s officer corps had devolved into an exclusive clique built on patronage and trust—a setup which worked perfectly for the extraction and distribution of bribes, but was decidedly ill-suited for cooperation in the field, as the commanding officers of each brigade barely communicated with and actively mistrusted one another. On top of that, the troops’ enthusiasm to fight was dubious at best: the officers were bitter at President Bartlett for ripping them away from their money-making machines, while many enlisted men were draftees from humble backgrounds who resented Bartlett’s apparent indifference to their problems of poverty and political corruption. When these units entered San Cristóbal on May 13, they expected to find it garrisoned by no more than a few hundred lightly-armed ELM guerrillas, but they quickly found themselves surrounded by an enemy that knew the city far better than they did and had enough Cuban-supplied weapons and advisors to suspend each attacking soldier within the confines of a personal, bloody hell.

    Within an hour of entering San Cristóbal, General Godínez’s armored columns were hit by a ubiquitous barrage of Chinese-made anti-armor rockets which seemed to rain down from every building on every street. Within four days, so many armored vehicles had been lost that the Army was forced to adopt a horribly destructive strategy of taking the city house by house, block by block. Entire neighborhoods were leveled and over 2,000 ELM fighters killed or captured (not to mention 2,200 civilians, of whom over 300 were children), but the Zapatistas dug in, defended every inch of their city with blood and steel and gave nearly as good as they got. After three weeks, the Army controlled less than a third of the city with nothing to show for it but bad press. The mistrust between the 8th and 4th Brigades flared into open hostility, as Generals Godínez and Montenegro blamed each other for the grinding costs to manpower and material. Two battalions under Colonel Genaro Robles Casillas were called in from southern Chiapas as reinforcements, but this only added to the tension as the brigade commanders looked down their noses at the chiapaneco soldiers, whom they saw as impoverished, uncivilized bumpkins.

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    Eliminating federal armored cars was key to halting the Army's advance into San Cristóbal. At the prompting of Cuban advisors, ELM Comandante Ramona adopted a strategy of luring entire armored columns into narrow alleyways and picking off the first and last vehicles in the line, thereby trapping the rest of the battalion in the middle for easy destruction.

    By mid-June, much of the city lay in ruins and more than 1,400 federal troops had been killed or wounded. The strain between the brigade commanders finally came to a head: Godínez and López Portillo wanted to cut their losses and retreat, while Montenegro was determined to capture San Cristóbal at any cost, even if it meant turning the city into a corpse-riddled crater. After bickering for two days, Godínez and López became fed up with Montenegro’s arrogance and withdrew the 8th and Armored Brigades on June 9; knowing his forces stood no chance alone, Montenegro was forced to pull his remaining troops just two days later. The Battle of San Cristóbal was over, and the mighty Mexican Army had found itself routed by a rinky-dink troupe of minimally-trained guerrillas. President Bartlett was humiliated, while the Zapatistas saw their reputation grow almost overnight from that of a brutal terrorist militia to that of a plucky David standing up to a repressive, authoritarian Goliath. Against all odds, the Zapatistas had prevailed, and although their victory came at a pyrrhic cost to their core strength and a tragic loss of life, the dream of a Mexico which truly embodied the ideals of Villa and Zapata lived on—for now, at least.

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    [1] Many, many thanks to the amazing @RamscoopRaider for putting up with my stunning ignorance on all military matters, and giving me some truly invaluable advice without which this update would have been a steaming heap of implausibility. This one's dedicated to you, Ramscoop!
     
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    Part 17: 1992 Canadian federal election, 1992 Chihuahua gubernatorial election
  • By March of 1992, John Turner’s second term as Prime Minister of Canada was going almost as badly as his first. His attempts to foster national unity had failed due to the collapse of the Meech Lake Accords, a set of proposed constitutional amendments which many Quebecois had regarded as the “last chance” to keep their province an integrated part of Canadian society. [1] Now, rather than holding the country together as he had originally intended, Turner found himself struggling just to hold his own Party together as more and more Liberal MPs from Quebec defected to the Progressive Conservative Party, led by moderate Quebec nationalist Marcel Masse. Ironically, Turner’s most valuable political ally was one of his fiercest personal enemies: Jean Chrétien, a staunch Canadian loyalist who hated Turner, yet supported him politically, because he knew that if Masse became Prime Minister the divisions between Quebec and the rest of the country would only grow deeper.

    However, all of that would change when the Palenque Conference ended in disaster and took the life one of Canada’s most distinguished diplomats. The death of Raymond Chrétien shocked the entire nation, but no one took it harder than Jean Chrétien (who just so happened to be the late Raymond’s beloved uncle). On March 21, a no-confidence motion was tabled in the House of Commons, and when a choked-up Chrétien voted against the government and inspired 11 of Quebec’s 20 remaining Liberals to do the same, it was all over for Prime Minister Turner.

    The ensuing federal election wasn’t much of a contest, as the Liberals were too riven with infighting to wage a cohesive campaign. Knowing Quebec was all but lost, Turner desperately hoped that the populist Reform Party would cut into the PC vote share in the western provinces. In the end, however, the coalition which had delivered a Tory landslide in 1984 held firm. With a comfortable 40-seat majority, Masse would be inducted as Prime Minister on May 19, and immediately set about negotiating a modified version of Meech Lake known as the Moncton Accord which narrowly passed a public referendum in January. However, the relationship between Masse’s government and his home province would not remain smooth for long: within a year, Jean Chrétien would be elected Premier of Quebec, and would go on to spend his entire ten-year term passionately resisting any further attempts to widen the gulf between Canada’s two “distinct societies”.

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    Masse was not the only North American leader struggling to keep constituent provinces under friendly control. In his talks with the drug kingpins, Bartlett had agreed to appoint various corrupt officials as state governors in order to abet the illegal drug trade; getting these men selected as PRI nominees was easy as pie, but the elections themselves—which in decades past had been mere formalities—now posed a significant challenge because the PRI’s popularity was at an all-time low, and several of the elections would be held in northern border states, where the opposition PAN was stronger and better-organized than anywhere else in the country. How to pull off a string of victories under such hostile political conditions? For Bartlett, the answer was simple: make the local party grassroots get off its ass and work harder than it had ever worked before.

    After Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios was killed in the Palenque attacks, Bartlett had appointed Carlos “El Profesor” Hank González—a former Mayor of Mexico City and arch-godfather of the PRI hardline—to take Guitérrez's place as Secretary of Government. This put Hank González in charge of the Office of Political Integrity (OIP), a new intelligence agency which had been formed after the Selva Rebellion to root out ELM moles within the ruling party. However, Hank González quickly found a new use for the OIP: in May of 1992, two months before the state of Chihuahua was to elect its next governor, 32 local PRI officials (those most notorious for skipping the weekly Party meetings to go to drug-fueled orgies) were arrested, hauled before OIP committees and given harsh prison sentences. Though widely publicized as an anti-corruption measure, party members well understood the hidden meaning behind the crackdown: any PRI member not seen devoting every waking moment to the election campaign would be at the cruel mercies of El Profesor. For the next two months, every priísta in Chihuahua kicked into election mode, scrambling twelve hours a day, seven days a week to get their candidate into the governor’s mansion.

    Yet the race would still be an uphill battle because the PAN candidate, Francisco Barrio Terrazas, had already run for Governor in 1986 and had massive name recognition, while the PRI candidate, Miguel Lerma Candelaria, was a faceless bureaucrat. To improve Lerma's chances, Bartlett directed DFS agents in Chihuahua to disrupt Barrio’s campaign at every possible turn. Barrio would later describe the race as "the worst months of my life", as he would routinely show up at scheduled campaign stops to find all his supporters had been scared away by pushy DFS toughs, and twice was arrested before he could even begin speaking. Lerma, meanwhile, received some very generous (and very secret) campaign donations from the Juárez Cartel, which he used to buy the votes of some 30,000 desperate Chihuahuans. When election day came on July 12, Lerma declared victory before the polls had even closed, ultimately winning with less than 60% of the vote. [2] Pro-democracy activist Sergio Aguayo led a wave of sit-ins and civil demonstrations across the state to protest the results, but the protests petered out within a month and Lerma took office as scheduled.

    Chihuahua1992.png

    A similar scene would play out three weeks later, when nearby Baja California held its midterm elections. The incumbent panista Governor, Ernesto Ruffo Appel, was only halfway through his term, but on August 2 the PRI regained its majority in the State Congress after three years of PAN control. On September 9, one week after the new State Congress sat, Bartlett's Attorney General announced he was filing corruption charges against Governor Ruffo Appel and recommended that the Congress remove him immediately (these charges were, of course, completely false, but that hardly mattered because the local newspapers, which depended on the government for advertising revenue, parroted the narrative that Ruffo was guilty on all fronts).

    Bartlett tried to persuade Ruffo Appel to resign voluntarily, but the Governor refused, and so on September 18, the PRI-controlled Congress voted to remove him from office with immediate effect. The following day, front pages all over Mexico carried the image of a stoic Ruffo Appel being dragged out of the governor’s mansion in Mexicali by DFS agents. The replacement governor, Tijuana Mayor Daniel Quintero Peña, quickly proved to be far more corrupt than the federal charges had alleged of Ruffo Appel.

    90.jpeg


    When Governor Ernesto Ruffo Appel was removed from office by the PRI-dominated State Congress, Tijuana erupted into street protests. These proved much more destructive than previous civil disturbances because, after the humiliating defeat at San Cristóbal de las Casas, all Army units throughout the country had been relieved of their peacekeeping duties to go through rigorous retraining exercises. This left the city in the hands of the DFS, whose leaders were much less adept at calming civil unrest, responding to even the smallest protests with brutal crackdowns rather than negotiating with opposition figures as the Army had done.

    Though Bartlett was pleased at his success in wresting states away from PAN control, he soon began to worry that he was alienating the Mexican people from their Party. He needed something to galvanize the public behind him, something to revitalize the grand, revolutionary consensus that had legitimized decades of seamless PRI hegemony. And when the crème de la crème of Mexico’s literary elite announced plans to hold an international literary symposium in Mexico City, Bartlett could hardly believe his luck. Called “The Experience of Liberty”, the grandiose cultural summit would be held in October at the UNAM campus, [3] and would attract prominent intellectuals from all over Latin America to discuss the state of the world now that the Cold War was over (the so-called "Union of Sovereign States" may have been the USSR’s official successor state, but no one considered it to be a significant ideological player on the world stage, particularly as President Gorbachev’s Communist Party collapsed around him and most republics elected liberal or nationalist governments). Bartlett, however, saw the summit as a golden opportunity to shift popular opinion in his favor with the help of a secret weapon: Octavio Paz.

    Octavio Paz was perhaps the most famous poet and writer in modern Mexican history. Through his control of the literary magazine Vuelta he dominated intellectual debate in his country, and his reputation grew even further when was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1990. [4] And, best of all (at least from Bartlett's point of view), he was firmly pro-PRI, having strongly defended Carlos Salinas's presidency from leftist critics. After being personally assured by Paz that the author would not speak ill of the government, Bartlett gladly allowed the symposium to go ahead and even arranged for its proceedings to be broadcast live on the TV network Televisa, knowing his popularity would improve immensely if Mexico's greatest thinker endorsed him on national television.

    OctavioPaz1992.png


    Between 1988 and 1990, Mexico's literary world had been locked in a war of words between anti-PRI leftists, and pro-PRI moderates. Open dissent had largely disappeared since Manuel Bartlett was sworn in as President, but rumblings of discontent were growing louder by the month, and Bartlett hoped that opposition voices would be cowed if Octavio Paz publicly reaffirmed his support for the government.

    As expected, Paz’s enormous literary stature allowed him to dominate the conference. There were surprisingly few open condemnations of Bartlett's regime; indeed, the most climactic censure came not from a Mexican leftist but from a foreign moderate, the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. [5] In a televised discussion with Paz and several other Mexicans, Vargas Llosa opined that, “for many years, the perfect dictatorship wasn’t Cuba or the Soviet Union, it was Mexico—because this dictatorship was often camouflaged in such a way that it seemed like it wasn’t one. But in the past two or three years, the cosmetic trappings of democracy that disguised this dictatorship for so long have begun to fade and expose it for what it truly is.” [6]

    The Mexican moderates squirmed in their seats at Vargas Llosa’s brazen condemnation of the PRI regime; several turned anxiously to Octavio Paz, expecting the venerated poet to cut in and put the upstart Peruvian in his place. But, instead, Paz allowed Vargas Llosa to finish his argument, then responded with a point of his own: “To liken our country to Cuba or the Soviet Union is to compare Abraham Lincoln with Adolf Hitler. Yet I must agree that this system of hegemonic domination has many flaws. If wrongs are being committed against the Mexican people, I call on them to right those wrongs on an individual basis, and to resist any encroachment upon their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal.” [7]

    Subdued though they were, Paz’s words rippled instantly to all corners of Mexico. Mere seconds later, an incensed President Bartlett ordered Televisa to cut away from the discussion, but it was too late—tens of thousands of free-dreaming souls had already been awoken from their authoritarian slumber. Sergio Aguayo’s anti-fraud movement instantly spiked in support, and on November 16, he led a 17,000-man march in the border state of Tamaulipas to beseech President Bartlett not to rig the upcoming gubernatorial election (PRI candidate Tomás Yarrington [8] would end up winning anyway, but the ruling party's vulnerability in the state was made abundantly clear).

    SergioAguayo1992.jpg


    Democracy and human rights activist Sergio Aguayo had been fighting the PRI system for decades, having founded the Mexican Academy for Human Rights in 1984. Though not an orator by nature, Aguayo eventually thrust himself into the spotlight and became the leader of an anti-fraud movement in Mexico's northern states that would play an increasingly vital role in the months to come.

    Meanwhile, on the other side of the Gulf, one person who took Octavio Paz’s message to heart was a journalist named Lydia Cacho. Since accepting a job with a local newspaper in Cancún 1986, Cacho had mostly stuck to light-hearted topics like arts and entertainment. But as she watched one of her literary idols emboldened her to resist authoritarianism “with any means at [her] disposal”, a flame awoke within Cacho’s belly, a burning need to sift through the vast haystacks of government lies and pluck out precious needles of truth. She quickly found her story: like Chihuahua and Tamaulipas, her home state of Quintana Roo would soon be electing a new governor, and it was quietly rumored that PRI nominee Mario Villanueva Madrid was a stooge of the Juárez Cartel. As the election approached, Cacho began to do some digging, hoping to find something that would permanently wreck Villanueva’s credibility and hobble the PRI’s seemingly-invincible fraud machine.

    In the meantime, though, four of Mexico’s five northern border states were now governed by the handpicked puppets of the cartels, whose drug routes quickly exploded into narcotic superhighways. By early autumn, the Transamerican drug trade was working like a well-oiled machine: Every week, mountains of cocaine, heroin and marijuana would be flown 5,000 kilometers from the jungles of Colombia to the deserts of northern Mexico, touching down at airports in Chihuahua, Sonora, Baja California or Tamaulipas with the guidance of state-appointed air traffic controllers. Then, the illicit cargo would be loaded onto DFS vans and trucked up to the border, where it would cross into the United States with the help of state-appointed customs officials.

    Day after day, the cycle continued, dumping hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of illegal drugs on American shores for the voracious consumption of American drug addicts. A DEA report estimated that 324 kilograms of heroin, 83 metric tons of cocaine and 435 metric tons of marijuana had entered the United States in September alone, and as drug abuse rates soared and American cities exploded with drug-related violence, more fuel was thrown onto the flames of an already-murky presidential race. As election day 1992 approached, no one seemed quite sure whether President Bush, his Democratic challenger, or the renegade, populist independent candidate would emerge victorious.
    __________
    [1] The Meech Lake Accord also failed in OTL when the legislatures of Manitoba and Newfoundland failed to ratify the agreement.
    [2] In OTL, Francisco Barrio Terrazas did run as the PAN candidate in 1992, and not only did he win a majority of the votes, but Carlos Salinas (who was still President at that point IOTL) recognized the results as valid and allowed him to take office as Governor.
    [3] In OTL, “The Experience of Liberty” was held in August of 1990. In TTL, the ideological upheavals of that year, not to mention the troubles at the UNAM, cause the summit to be delayed two years.
    [4] As he was in OTL.
    [5] I initially toyed with the idea of having Mario Vargas Llosa win the 1990 Peruvian Presidential election in TTL, but I eventually decided against it because it would be too much of a stretch with a POD in 1988, and because it would butterfly away this incident, which I believe is important to the story.
    [6] In OTL, Vargas Llosa's said this: "Mexico is the perfect dictatorship. The perfect dictatorship isn't Communism, it isn't the Soviet Union, it's not Fidel Castro, it's Mexico. Because this dictatorship is camouflaged in such a way that it often seems like it's not one." The phrase 'perfect dictatorship' has since become popular shorthand among historians and ordinary Mexicans for the PRI regime as a whole.
    [7] In OTL, after Vargas made his "perfect dictatorship" remark, Octavio Paz offered a much firmer defense of the PRI regime: "...in Mexico we have a hegemonic system of domination. We cannot speak of a dictatorship." You can watch the full exchange (in Spanish) here on YouTube.
    [8] In OTL, Yárrington was elected Governor of Tamaulipas in 1998, six years later than in TTL. In 2013, he made Forbes's list of the 10 Most Corrupt Mexicans (which also happens to include Raúl Salinas de Gortari and Elba Esther Gordillo).
     
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    Part 18: 1992 United States presidential election
  • As 1991 dawned and election season began once again, the question on many Americans’ minds was not whether George Bush would lose re-election, but rather which Democrat he would lose to. His term had widely been deemed subpar: the economy was mediocre, and America’s lackluster performance in the Gulf War was seen as an embarrassment to a President who had campaigned heavily on his foreign policy credentials. Despite Bush’s unpopularity, however, several Democratic heavyweights hesitated to declare their candidacies out of fear that Mario Cuomo, the immensely popular Governor of New York, would enter the race and sweep them all aside. But in November, after FBI investigators uncovered a drug-smuggling ring within the New York City Police Department headed by corrupt NYPD officer Michael Dowd, [1] Cuomo announced that he would not be running for President so that he could address his state’s growing problems with drug abuse and corruption.

    Within two weeks of Cuomo’s announcement, five high-profile Democrats threw their hats into the ring and began campaigning feverishly. However, they were at a disadvantage to the candidates who had been in the race since the spring—especially former Massachusetts Senator Paul Tsongas, who, despite being described as a “long-shot candidate” by the New York Times, instantly became the frontrunner when he won the New Hampshire primary in February. Tsongas initially saw a strong challenge from Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, but Clinton’s campaign fell behind after reports surfaced of an extramarital affair between him and actress Gennifer Flowers. Clinton hoped he could stage a comeback by sweeping the South as a favorite son, but this strategy only drew concerted attacks from the other southern candidates, particularly Chuck Robb and Bob Graham, [2] allowing Senator Tsongas to take the lead while his opponents bickered amongst themselves.

    With the southern moderates busy tearing each other to pieces, Tsongas had all the momentum as the impetus of the primaries shifted north. It was believed that the union strongholds of the Midwest would serve as a stumbling block for Tsongas, who was unpopular among organized labor. But, to many pundits’ surprise, the labor vote fractured three ways, with black union members overwhelmingly supporting Jesse Jackson while white union members broke evenly for George Mitchell and Bill Bradley. Tsongas, by contrast, had a monopoly over the white-collar middle class, increasingly embodying the role of the moderate, “new Democrat” which Clinton, Robb and Graham had tried to appropriate for themselves. Tsongas would go on to win a narrow first place in Illinois and a close second in Michigan, and after he took New York by a sizable margin in April, many news outlets began to view him as the likely nominee; Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey still challenged him in the Plains, but by late May, Tsongas had amassed enough delegates to form a narrow majority. In a matter of months, the former Senator from Massachusetts had gone from long-shot candidate to presidential nominee. Not everything would go quite so splendidly for the Tsongas campaign, however—his first choice of running mate, Senator Henry Cisneros, declined the offer, intending to serve out his Senate term before moving on to any higher political office. A disappointed Tsongas instead picked Senator Kerrey, who was formally ordained as vice-presidential nominee at the Democratic National Convention in July.

    CisnerosDNC92.png


    Southern, Hispanic, socially moderate, fiscally progressive and an engaging speaker, Henry Cisneros was everything Paul Tsongas wasn’t. While he had no interest in being Tsongas’s running mate, Senator Cisneros happily agreed to formally nominate Tsongas at the Democratic National Convention, giving a well-received speech that criticized President Bush for not standing up to the authoritarian regime of Mexican President Manuel Bartlett.

    Things were hairier on the Republican side. President Bush saw an unexpectedly strong primary challenge from conservative pundit Pat Buchanan, who lambasted Bush for breaking the promise he’d made in 1988 not to raise taxes. Though he won no statewide contests, Buchanan did manage to win over more than a quarter of Republican primary voters nationwide, [3] causing Bush to fear that the party’s conservative base was abandoning him. Indeed, after Buchanan’s insurgent run fizzled out, many suburban Republicans shifted their support to Tsongas, seeing him as the candidate more likely to hold taxes down without bowing to pressure from the religious right. Early polls put Tsongas well ahead of Bush, with almost a ten-point lead at the end of July.

    Under normal circumstances, Tsongas might have been declared the frontrunner right then and there. This time, however, here was a new dog in the race—a candidate who claimed allegiance to no party, large or small. This man had never held elected office, but the American people had known his name for decades as that of a professional wave-maker, a man unafraid to call out corporate and governmental subterfuge whenever and wherever he saw it. In a success-studded career stretching back decades, he had made headlines time and time again by exposing malfeasance, negligence and corruption on the part of powerful figures in both the public and private sectors. This had netted him many enemies over the course of his career, but that hardly mattered to him as he watched the major parties’ nomination processes play out with growing disdain. And when he finally gathered enough signatures to appear on the ballot in thirty-two states, there would be no stopping the populist tide: Ralph Nader was running for President. [4]

    NaderSpeaking.jpeg


    Ralph Nader's independent candidacy embodied popular disillusionment with the two-party system, which many Americans believed had failed to provide political solutions to the nation's problems. His statements on drug policy soon became rallying cries for progressive activists, particularly as narcotic use became a pandemic spreading out across the nation.

    With Philadelphia Mayor Wilson Goode as his running mate and workers’ rights, universal healthcare and electoral reform at the top of his agenda, Nader set off across the country, giving a series of speeches in packed venues in which he slammed the two-party system and claimed that the major candidates were indistinguishable in terms of policy. The Tsongas campaign fought fervently against this charge, but many progressive voters couldn’t help but see Nader’s point—after all, Tsongas and Bush did seem to agree on a remarkable array of issues: Tsongas wanted to lower the capital gains tax, and so did Bush; Tsongas had frequently spoken out in favor of a balanced budget, and so had Bush; and Tsongas had repeatedly described himself as “pro-business”, a label which every Republican President from Abraham Lincoln to Ronald Reagan would have worn with pride and gusto. The Tsongas/Kerrey ticket's lead soon shrank to five percent, just in time for accusations to emerge that Senator Kerrey, a Vietnam veteran, had knowingly killed several Vietnamese women and children while serving in the Army in 1969. [5] No sooner had Kerrey denied those allegations than questions began to surface over whether or not Senator Tsongas truly was free of the lymphoma that had pushed him out of the Senate eight years prior. By October, the race was neck-and-neck, just in time for the drug issue to spin out of control and dominate the last month of the presidential campaign.

    Drug abuse rates had already been high for much of Bush’s presidency, but they suddenly exploded in the summer of 1992, and by autumn they were beginning to reach terrifying new heights. A report by the Los Angeles Times found that fatal overdose rates had more than doubled since 1989, and between July and October, DEA agents discovered half a dozen illicit, cartel-run storehouses, each located near a major city and containing up to $312 million worth of cocaine, marijuana, heroin or amphetamines. President Bush advocated imposing harsh criminal punishments as a deterrent to drug use, while Tsongas blamed Bush for the crisis but stopped short of calling for reduced sentences for non-violent drug offenses, fearing he would alienate his newfound conservative base by appearing “soft on crime”. Nader, however, used his opponents’ responses against them, alleging that “tough on crime” was just an excuse to preserve draconian drug laws that unfairly discriminated against African-Americans. Tsongas soon found himself slipping even further in the polls as urban voters—particularly urban black voters—began to suspect he was throwing them under the bus for the sake of a bunch of rich, white suburbanites. As election day hurtled ever closer, it began to seem as though, for the second time in four years, George Bush would win an all-expenses-paid stay in a large, white house by narrowly edging out a sanctimonious Greek from Massachusetts.

    To this day, some Democrats bitterly persist that Tsongas could have won the election had Nader not siphoned so may progressive votes away from him. Nader, for his part, stubbornly rejects these allegations, arguing that if Tsongas had really wanted to win, he should have run a better campaign. Yet, even if Mayor Goode’s presence on the ticket did manage to win over just enough Philadelphians to throw Pennsylvania’s 23 electoral votes to President Bush (without which he would have been one shy of the coveted 270), most political analysts have concluded that what really sunk Tsongas was the low turnout—the lowest recorded turnout, in fact, for any presidential election in American history—which itself was brought on by a general sense of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with the political system at large. President Bush would spend another four years the White House, but only because the people were too exhausted and disillusioned to throw him out.

    USA1992.png

    For a certain subset of the Democrats, Tsongas’s loss was particularly biting because 1992 was supposed to be their year. Ever since Walter Mondale’s ignominious flop against Ronald Reagan in 1984, a clique of moderate southerners including Clinton, Robb, Graham, and many others had been itching to pull the Party to the center, win back the South and and break the Republican lock on the White House. Their moment had come, but they had tripped over each other in their eagerness, and when Tsongas had tried to mimic their policies, rather than reuniting the New Deal Coalition behind a glorious banner of centrism and moderation, he had succeeded only in alienating one of the Party’s most important voter blocs. Before Bush had even been sworn in for his second term, some had already begun desperately searching for a suitable nominee for 1996, a mystery candidate who could appeal to southerners, northerners, city-dwellers and minorities all at once and bring the Democratic Party back from its decade-and-a-half-long stint in the woods.

    Meanwhile, now that he knew he would have another four years at the helm, Bush set about trying to find a lasting solution to the drug issue. It was common knowledge that Mexican cartels had a near-monopolistic grip over the American drug market, and while Bush had refused to meet personally with Mexican President Manuel Bartlett during the election campaign (he feared it would damage his popularity to be photographed standing next to an authoritarian leader), now that he was safely re-elected, Bush immediately arranged an official state visit to Mexico. On November 28, 1992, Air Force One touched down at Benito Juárez International Airport with a stern-looking George Bush in tow, intending to extract some serious promises from Latin America’s newest and most notorious strongman.
    __________
    [1] In OTL, the incredibly corrupt NYPD Officer Michael Dowd wasn't arrested until 1992. With the sheer volume of drugs moving through New York City in TTL, Dowd's activities are noticed earlier and his ring of corrupt officers is exposed in 1991.
    [2] In OTL, neither Robb nor Graham ran because they believed Bush was unbeatable.
    [3] In OTL, Buchanan won less than 25% of the nationwide vote.
    [4] You’re probably wondering why Ross Perot hasn’t entered the race yet. Well, his motivation to run in OTL was his opposition to NAFTA and his wariness of the example set by the Gulf War, which he feared would lead to more U.S. involvement in global conflicts. In TTL, the Gulf War’s less triumphant air means that interventionism has become far less popular a philosophy in the United States, and there has certainly been no NAFTA for obvious reasons. In addition, by the time Perot even starts to consider running, Nader has already occupied the role of the anti-establishment independent candidate. So, despite his dislike of President Bush, Perot doesn't sense a place for himself in the race and decides not to run for President.
    [5] This incident, also known as the Thanh Phong raid, came out in 2001 in OTL. Kerrey says he thought he was shooting at Viet Cong soldiers, but a member of the SEAL team he was commanding alleges that Kerrey specifically ordered his men to kill the civilians.
     
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    Narrative Interlude #6
  • November 28, 1992
    Los Pinos, Bosque de Chapultepec
    Mexico City, Federal District

    “George, I share your concerns with the utmost solemnity: the drug trade is a menacing threat to order and security in both of our nations,” Manuel Bartlett proclaimed from the cushioned comfort of his presidential throne. “But I am already doing everything within my power to combat the cartels.”

    George Bush stared, baffled, at the bespectacled Mexican. He probed the ludicrous statement but detected no irony, no hidden meaning, no coy invitation to press on. Does he actually think he’s fooling me?

    Bush looked around him for a moment. Everything in the Mexican President’s private study was reflective: the elegant mosaic of floor tiles buffed to a mirrorlike shine, the satin tricolor imbued with an imperial sheen, the ubiquitous cherry oak paneling that clung to every surface and was varnished almost to the point of impracticability. Every inch of the room, Bush realized, was specifically designed to throw light into the eyes of its occupants, to blind them with gaudy shows of grandeur.

    Bush drew in a sharp breath. Okay, Manny. We can play this game if you want to.

    “I appreciate everything you’ve accomplished so far, Manuel,” he lied. “But I think if we work together, we can turn both of our countries into much safer places. My government would be happy to share intelligence on cartel members and their movements, and I’m prepared to contribute at least two teams of federal narcotics inspectors to assist in their apprehension.”

    The thought of nosy DEA agents poking around states where he had installed "associate" governors sent Bartlett into a momentary panic attack, but he suppressed it in time to give a fittingly stoic response: “While I welcome any new information concerning the cartels and their activities, no American should ever have to risk his life pursuing Mexican criminals.”

    Bush found it ironic to hear such magnanimous words coming from a man who had once tried to cover up the murder of a DEA agent to save his own ass. [1] Bush's patience for the game was rapidly draining, but he had no chance to cut in because Bartlett had already started his pitch.

    “You see, George, if my government had the resources to go after the cartels, they would have gone extinct by week two of my administration. Our problem isn’t intelligence or manpower; it’s funding,” he explained. “As you’re most surely aware, the most infamous kingpins have used their vast riches to construct enormous legal barriers that shield them from all forms of punishment. And the only way to topple those walls of money is with battering rams of...uh…m-money,” he concluded, cringing slightly at the way he’d fumbled his own metaphor.

    But the momentary look of embarrassment quickly changed to one of decisiveness as Bartlett clasped his hands together, slammed them with a thud on the varnished wood of the desktop and leaned forward to stare his guest straight in the eyes.

    “My Defense Secretariat informs me that to defeat the cartels within a decade—not just to dispose of their leadership, but to salt the earth from which they sprang—will cost as much as twelve billion dollars every year. And yet we toil to come up with even a third of that sum because we must sacrifice so much of our budget upon the pagan altar of debt repayments,” he continued, accentuating every consonant like Laurence Olivier in a particularly dull reimagining of Hamlet.

    “Last year, as you’ll surely recall, my government paid yours well over four billion dollars in return for the loan so generously extended to us by your predecessor. But it may surprise you to hear that, because of that obligation, we barely had three billion dollars left over this year to fight the cartels. It should be obvious how hard-pressed we are to mount a real counter-offensive against these menaces when so much of our annual budget goes directly into your government’s pockets!” Bartlett declared, oblivious to the droplet of spit that flew from his lip to Bush’s nose as he pronounced the p in ‘pockets’.

    Bush wiped off the saliva with a discreet flick of the finger. Going into this conference, he hadn’t been expecting a master of Platonic diplomacy, and yet he was growing astonished by the bespectacled Mexican President’s lack of tact. Against his better judgement, he decided to give Bartlett one last chance: “Are you suggesting,” he asked, evenly extracting the ice from his tone, “that we help your administration find a more sustainable means of servicing its debt?”

    “I am merely suggesting, Mr. President,” Bartlett replied as he leaned back into his armchair with all the self-satisfied condescension of a retired philosophy professor, “that you may be surprised how well it would serve America’s long-term interests if Mexico were relieved of some of its monetary obligations in order to focus every possible resource on securing a final and decisive victory over the cartels.”

    And there it went.

    Sighing, Bush deposited his elbows onto the ancient desk and leaned forward to meet his adversary. “You know, Manuel, I’m not at all surprised that you would suggest such a thing,” he replied. “After all, your government has already been acting as though it were relieved of its monetary obligations for several years now.” Now it was Bush’s turn to stare Bartlett through the eyes.

    “It’s true your government paid mine four billion dollars last year,” Bush continued. “What you seem to have forgotten is that you owed us five billion—and that was after my administration agreed to forgive almost twenty percent of your outstanding debt two years ago.” The gloves were coming off now. “I remember when Secretary Baker asked your ambassador why you needed the money so badly, he said ‘communist subversion’. It was so soon after poor Carlos bit it, I didn’t ask too many questions,” he recalled with seemingly genuine regret over the younger Salinas brother’s death. “Perhaps,” he said, glaring, “I should have.”

    Bartlett shifted uncomfortably in his chair as Bush leaned in further.

    “And another thing: this report of yours, the one that puts a twelve-billion-dollar price tag on confronting the cartels? That’s one hell of a number, I’ll give you that. But a few months ago, I had the DEA draw up a report of its own, and it estimates that as many as thirty-nine percent of the officers in your Federal Security Directorate—which, I’m to understand, is chiefly responsible for fighting your side of the Drug War—double as enforcers for their friendly neighborhood cartels. And, what’s more, twenty-seven centavos of every peso your government spends on fighting the cartels ends up finding its way into Miguel Caro or Amado Carrillo’s pocket. Now, I can’t in good conscience ask the American people to foot the bill for a crackdown when more than a quarter of that money will be used to funnel more drugs into their neighborhoods and schools.”

    He leaned forward even further.

    “The fact is, Manuel, you know as well as I do that your entire security system is one giant shitshow. It might be convenient to sweep that shitshow under the rug and pretend it doesn’t exist, but you’re not fooling me or anyone else with two brain cells to rub together.” Bartlett grabbed the seat of his throne and gripped it until his knuckles went white; the two world leaders were almost kissing now. “You want less debt, Manuel? Earn it. Set an example. Put two or three hundred of your federal agents behind bars, then we can discuss debt reductions. But until you get your house in order, the only thing I want to hear out of you is 'check’s in the mail, George!’

    Bartlett suddenly realized he was trembling. Still staring Bush in the eyes, he took a few deep breaths to steady himself. Then, like a cowboy trying to draw his gun without spooking a rattlesnake, he reached into his desk, opened a chiseled, cherry-paneled drawer which dated to the 1830s, pulled out an olive-green rectangle and handed it to Bush. “Do you know what this is, George?”

    Bush examined the object in his hand. It was a swatch of olive-green fabric wrapped around a rigid, rectangular frame; three bars and a wreathed shield were embroidered onto it in yellow thread. He had a pretty good idea of what it was, but somehow found himself morbidly interested enough to hear Bartlett’s explanation.

    “Enlighten me.”

    “What you are holding in your hand is an epaulet torn from the uniform of a sergeant in the Cuban Army.”

    Bush had to suppress the urge to scoff. So what? The Cubans are helping the rebels down south? Bush had known that even before the Mexican Army was routed at the Battle of San Cristóbal. If Bartlett meant this to be his big reveal, Bush was thoroughly unimpressed.

    “A Federal Security Directorate fireteam discovered this while raiding an ELM hideout in northern Tamaulipas.”

    Hang on—Tamaulipas? Bush had never had much of a mind for geography, but wasn’t that awfully far from Zapatista territory and awfully close to American territory?

    “These roving packs of schoolboys were enough of a nuisance when the Cubans were just shipping them arms. I’m sure you’ll remember how much blood they spilled during their little ‘rebellions’ three Decembers ago,” Bartlett said, recalling the dozens of towns in Guerrero and Michoacán which had been taken over by ELM militias following the rigged municipal elections of 1989. “And those were planned with little, if any, direct involvement from the Cuban high command. Then, last February, when Havana sent its own men to do the dirty work, twenty-one Mexican citizens across four states were systematically murdered within a single night.” Bush did indeed remember the Night of the Long Guns. He remembered assuming that the Cubans were somehow involved, but as long as they kept a good distance from the border, he’d felt that the cost of an intervention would have far outweighed its benefits.

    “Nothing in this particular rathole," Bartlett continued, motioning to the insignia in Bush’s hand, "gave any indication of what exactly our friend Fidel is planning next. But the fact remains that it was located only thirty-four miles from the Rio Grande. The only reason I see for a Cuban soldier to be meddling so close to the border is if their next target is American property, or worse—American citizens.” Bush, to his own chagrin, had drawn the same conclusion.

    “Now, I am doing everything I can to mitigate the threat posed by these terrorists. But, because the various state police agencies are chronically underfunded, and the Army is currently undergoing a rigorous regimen of…” (Bartlett trailed off for a moment as he cringed in remembrance of the humiliation at San Cristóbal) “…retraining, the Federal Security Directorate—corrupt though some of its members may be—is the last line of defense against the insurgents. As you can see, the DFS has thus far been highly effective at locating and destroying rebel hideouts. But they are effective only as long as they are loyal, and they are loyal only as long as they can reap the financial spoils of their power. Exploitation of office for monetary gain is an odious, but nevertheless an integral, part of Mexican political culture,” he claimed, hoping the appeal to stereotype would soften Bush’s ardor, “and many of my security agents have simply grown accustomed to profiting off the drug trade. To be frank, with Mexico as cash-strapped as it is today, some might struggle to feed their families without the extra pesos,” he explained in what he imagined was a meaningful tone.

    “I am fighting this corruption,” he continued. “In the past three months, no fewer than seventy-eight DFS agents have been guided into very quiet retirements, as have cartel collaborators from every sector of public life. But if, as you demand, I purge my agents with all the ruthlessness of Stalin, then the entire Directorate will fall apart. Hundreds of agents will disappear into prison cells, while hundreds more, fleeing that ignoble fate, will abandon the Directorate entirely and devote their talents full-time to the drug trade. The cartels will hardly see a dent in their profit margins. My government, meanwhile will be left without a functioning security apparatus and there will be no one left to stand between communist terrorists and innocent civilians—civilians who, if I may remind you,” he said, pointing once again to the dogtag in Bush’s hand, “may not all be Mexican.”

    Without breaking from Bartlett’s stare, Bush ran his thumb across the battered strip of metal, feeling the scratches and dents etched in over years of loyal service to a lost cause. I have to be corrupt, or else the dirty commies’ll get us! He’d heard Mobutu give that excuse half a dozen times, and he was getting mighty tired of it. It was clear to Bush that the real reason Bartlett refused to get serious with the DFS was that he wanted as many men with guns as possible on his side when 80 million angry Mexicans showed up at his door with torches and pitchforks.

    And—he realized to his own disgust—Bush wanted that too. The political opposition in Mexico was so powerless and divided that if Bartlett and his coterie were overthrown, they would leave a power vacuum as wide as the Gulf of Mexico. At best, the Army would take over and maintain some semblance of order, at the cost of whatever paltry rights and freedoms the Mexican people still had left. At worst, the entire country would fall into chaos—a scenario that would threaten U.S. interests so severely that Bush would have no other choice (according to Secretary Cheney, at least) but to order a full-scale military intervention.

    The whole thing sickened him. As the first post-Cold War President, Bush had hoped he could put an end to the odious practice of cozying up to dictators just because they were on the “right” side of the fence. And yet, here he was, playing diplomatic footsie with a tinpot tyrant. Before he left Mexico City, Bush would be sure to pay a visit to the Embassy and instruct Ambassador Negroponte to begin profiling potential opposition candidates for the presidential election of 1994. As soon as he got back to Washington, he would ask Secretary Baker to start feeling out ways to get Bartlett thrown out on his ass next July. But, for the moment, it would be foolish to force Bartlett to antagonize his own security forces with things as unstable as they were.

    Bush realized that he had allowed his eyes to sink down to the dogtag in his hand. Upon reestablishing eye contact, he was unfazed to see Bartlett still trying to pierce him with his stare. Circumstance may have turned him into this year’s lesser evil, but that certainly didn’t give him a free pass to let the cartels treat his country like their private playground.

    “All I’m asking of you, Manuel, is to be a leader. Deal with the cartels. Start putting kingpins behind bars, and once they’re there, keep ‘em there. I don’t care how you do it,” Bush declared, narrow-arrow-eyed, almost growling, “but if you don’t, my administration will find it a whole hell of a lot harder to overlook the next time your check comes up a billion dollars short.”

    Bartlett leaned back, relishing the instruction. For the first time since the beginning of the conversation, he broke gaze with Bush, allowing his eyes to wander around his office and admire all the exquisite little details purpose-built, as the American President himself had noticed, to deflect, distract and conceal. Despite his own diplomatic incompetence, he'd heard what he'd been hoping to hear. So Bush didn’t care how he intended to go about imprisoning top cartel leaders?

    Good, he thought, his outward, stony expression concealing an inward, devilish grin. He wouldn’t like it if he knew.
    __________

    [1] At this point in OTL as well as in TTL, it was still a well-kept secret that Manuel Bartlett had been directly involved in planning the murder of Kiki Camarena. Bush is well aware that Bartlett tried to cover up Camarena’s death, but he thinks that Bartlett (who, at the time, was in charge of the DFS in his capacity as Government Secretary) only found out about the murder after it happened, and subsequently covered it up to protect his political career. So Bush knows that Bartlett is a corrupt bastard, but thinks he's corrupt more in the sense of "cover-your-ass-by-any-means-necessary" than of "making-crooked-deals-with-actual-international-crime-lords".
     
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    Part 19: Alcoa bombings
  • Arneses y Accesorios de México was the archetypal example of a maquiladora. Located within spitting distance of Texas in the Mexican border state of Coahuila, the enormous complex of eight factories had been built in 1982 by the Pittsburgh-based aluminum conglomerate Alcoa, so that it could manufacture its products for the U.S. market without having to worry about such pesky little things as taxes, health codes or a minimum wage. Though it was only one of thousands foreign-owned plants south of the Rio Grande, the Alcoa complex was a prime example of the exploitation which Mexican workers faced at the hands of American businesses: Alcoa’s assembly-line employees were paid subsistence-level wages that forced them to live in extreme poverty, sleeping in cardboard boxes and defecating in backyard latrines that left entire neighborhoods reeking of human excrement. Alcoa’s American managers, meanwhile, commuted daily from the border town of Del Rio, Texas, where they enjoyed the relative luxuries of unpolluted drinking water, paved roads and a functioning sewer system. Of the 60 factories in the border city of Acuña (itself little more than a squalid grid of dirt streets lined by taverns and whorehouses), Alcoa’s was by far the largest, employing well over 5,000 Mexicans to produce hundreds of miles of aluminum wire every day. It was perhaps its size and its perfect embodiment of the ugly side of capitalism that made Arneses y Accesorios de México such a tempting target.

    At approximately 1:16 in the morning on December 29, 1992, residents of both Acuña and Del Rio were awoken from their slumber by a deafening boom. When they looked in the direction of the Alcoa complex, they were stunned to see one of the eight factories ablaze, casting a pillar of black smoke into the dark winter sky. Acuña hadn't had a functioning fire engine for years, and so the Del Rio Fire Department had to send several of its own trucks across the border to extinguish the blaze. [1] By the time they arrived, additional bombs had gone off in two more factories. Despite the firefighters’ efforts, neither of the two facilities could be saved; millions of dollars’ worth of industrial machinery and equipment were destroyed. No one had been in the factories when the bombs went off, but ten Mexicans suffered severe burns when floating embers spread the fire to a nearby cluster of shacks.

    AlcoaBombings.png

    On December 30, an Acuña-based cell of the Army of Mexican Liberation (which by this point had no connection to the Zapatista ELM apart from the name) claimed responsibility for the bombings, calling them an “act of retaliation” against American big business for its “exploitative, capitalistic practices”, and against the Bush administration for its support of the “tyranno-fascistic” Manuel Bartlett. No one was surprised when the Cuban government declined to issue a formal condemnation to the bombings—indeed, by the time Cuba emerged from its “Special Period” in 1992, most ELM cells outside the State of Zapata had all but disappeared from lack of interest from their patron. Indeed, in his 2004 report on the organization, Senator Samuel del Villar hypothesized that Havana targeted the Alcoa complex primarily because the Acuña cell was one of the only ELM circles still in operation by late 1992.

    Public reactions to the Alcoa bombings were decidedly subdued. Certainly no Mexican was particularly sorry to see the factories destroyed, and because no American citizens had been harmed in the bombing (all the American staff had been safe and snug in their Texan beds), only the most die hard of Washington war hawks called for any sort of direct military intervention. Indeed, after the New York Times published an article in the wake of the bombing which described Alcoa workers’ appalling living conditions in vivid detail, many Americans began to sympathize with the perpetrators of the bombing, agreeing with their motives if not their methods. As American newspapers filled their pages with stories of leaking industrial fumes that caused one hundred workers to be hospitalized, and of janitors being posted inside factory bathrooms to make sure workers used no more than three sheets of toilet paper per visit, [2] the fount of public outrage was turned upon Alcoa, and consumer groups began threatening a public boycott unless the company agreed to improve working conditions in its factories.

    This put Alcoa in a very difficult position. A conservative estimate put the cost of rebuilding the complex at $42 million; a few years prior it would have been well worth the expense to get the factories back up and running, but by late 1992, Arneses y Accesorios de Mexico was becoming less and less profitable by the month. Alcoa had first built the complex ten years prior in order to take advantage of Acuña’s tax-free business environment, but since 1989, Manuel Bartlett had pressured the city government into levying all manner of new taxes in order to raise money for the eternally cash-strapped federal government. Shipping the manufactured goods back into the United States had once been a breeze, but ever since the intensification of the Drug War, all sorts of new regulations had been placed on incoming cargo which turned the entire transportation process into a convoluted, costly hassle. The bombings made things even more difficult: shareholders were now requesting that all Mexican employees be vetted for ELM sympathies before returning to work, while much of the American managerial staff had quit and the rest were demanding hefty pay raises to continue thoroughly coming to work. By mid-January, Alcoa’s board of directors became bitterly split between those who wanted to pay the price and keep the plant running, and those who wanted to cut their losses and abandon the complex entirely. Fortunately for them, however, a third option would soon emerge that would allow the company to save face and capital while also sidestepping the twin threats of boycotts and further terrorist attacks.

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    Paul O’Neill, the CEO of Alcoa, was steadfastly against the sale of the Acuña complex, and when the board of directors voted to sell it anyway, O’Neill resigned in protest. Lucky for him, he already had another job offer lined up: Secretary of Defense. President Bush, fed up with Secretary Dick Cheney’s constant warmongering vis-à-vis Mexico, nominated O’Neill as replacement within the first month of his second term, and he was confirmed by the Senate after two weeks of hearings. [3]​

    Even before the depression of 1988, Carlos Slim Helú had been a very rich man. But by 1992, Slim's wealth was reaching heights he would scarcely have dreamed possible just a few years before. The Salinas brothers’ frantic privatization campaigns had allowed him to buy several state-owned companies, which had turned near-immediate profits and made Slim one of the richest men in Mexico. One purchase that had not turned out to be particularly profitable, however, was the Compañía Minera de Cananea. After the government’s attempt to privatize the Sonora copper mine in 1990 had ended in massacre, [4] the Lesser Salinas had offered the mine to Slim at one-tenth its value just to get the mess off his hands. And, although the miners’ union had been surprisingly cooperative since Slim’s takeover (thanks largely to a contract in which Slim had agreed to invest heavily in education and infrastructure for the people of Cananea), profits for the mine remained disappointingly low. After the Alcoa bombings, however, Slim realized that if he could take over the Alcoa plant’s metalworking facilities, he would effectively gain control of the entire supply chain by extracting copper from his own mines, processing it in his own factories and shipping it to the United States with his own fleet of eighteen-wheelers. Delighted at the prospect of a vertical monopoly, Slim quickly made Alcoa an offer to buy the damaged complex for $92 million, hoping to get the paperwork signed by the weekend and have the factories up and running again by March.

    But Slim's "easy" catch turned out not to be so easy. Less than two days after Slim made his offer, the young magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego (who had bought the SICARTSA steel mill from the federal government earlier in the year) [5] swept in offering $102 million. Enraged, Slim quickly upped his offer to $108 million, prompting Salinas to raise his to $112 million. Within four weeks, Slim seemed to have won the corporate arms race with a $119 million offer that Salinas was hesitant to match. This made it all the more surprising when, on February 18, a labor union calling itself the Comité Fronterizo de Obreras (Border Workers' Committee, or CFO), announced very publicly and very loudly that it represented Alcoa’s employees in Acuña, and added that if it was not included in the negotiations, whoever ended up buying the complex would have a very tough time indeed getting it up and running again. [6]

    Six years before, this would have been unthinkable. For decades, Acuña had been a union-free city. Even Mexico's "official" labor movement, the CTM, had only ever reared its head in order to prevent local workers from organizing by disrupting factory meetings with swarms of hired goons. By early 1993, however, the CTM's power had atrophied so much in the border regions that the Acuña branch could scarcely mobilize enough hired goons for a single decent game of lotería, and was all but powerless to quash the CFO. President Bartlett, for his part, was appalled at this insolent defiance of PRI authority, and was sorely tempted to have his Labor Secretary, Elba Esther Gordillo, declare the CFO an illegal union and imprison its leaders for operating without a federal charter. He relented, however, on the joint request of—surprisingly enough—none other than Carlos Slim and Ricardo Salinas Pliego.

    Most outside observers were stunned to see business magnates rallying so decisively to the defense of organized labor. But Slim and Salinas Pliego both had a good reason to support fair treatment of the CFO: labor relations at Slim’s copper mine and at Salinas Pliego’s steel mill had hitherto been harmonious, but only because of the generous contracts that each billionaire had signed with the unions which promised fair wages and reasonable hours. These unions were watching the Alcoa negotiations very closely, threatening to declare a solidarity strike if they got the impression that either billionaire was treating the CFO unfairly. Thus, Slim and Salinas, despite their mutual dislike, sensed that they would both be better off inviting the upstart CFO, led by the young but fiery labor activist Julia Quiñonez, [7] to negotiate in late February in the Coahuilan capital of Saltillo.

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    A single mother with a tireless energy for grassroots organizing, Acuña native Julia Quiñonez knew the conditions in maquiladora factories very well because she had worked in several of them as a teenager to finance her university studies. She had been in charge of the CFO for less than a year when the Alcoa bombings happened, but she knew a good opportunity when she saw one, and within two months, Quiñonez had succeeded in uniting all of Alcoa’s employees under the CFO banner and securing a role for the union in the negotiations for the sale of the Acuña complex.

    At the negotiations Quiñonez and her associate Juan Tovar wasted no time laying out their demands: its members would refuse to return to work unless Slim or Salinas agreed to a contract promising ample wages and significant investment in Acuña’s local infrastructure. Many observers within the American business community doubted that the CFO would get very far, believing that either Slim or Salinas would simply buy the complex outright from Alcoa and then replace all the unionized workers with unemployed locals. But this was not an option for either billionaire, because both Slim’s copper miners and Salinas’s steel workers were watching the negotiations very carefully for any excuse to strike; this resulted in a highly bizarre situation in which two business magnates were pitted against one another in fierce competition to see which one could spend more to create safe and comfortable conditions for his workers. Finally, after two weeks of increasingly generous offers from both magnates, Quiñonez announced that the CFO had agreed to a contract with Salinas which included a 40-hour work week and a minimum hourly wage of ten pesos, [8] as well as to construct housing for employees, finance improvements to Acuña’s sewage infrastructure and even build a new school for the city’s youth. To make up for these concessions, Salinas reduced his offer to Alcoa to $81 million; the company tried to persuade Carlos Slim to buy the complex at his original price, but an irritated Slim rescinded his offer, seeing no point in buying the factory if no one would agree to work in it. The board of directors reluctantly sold the company to Salinas in March, and production resumed the following month.

    In Acuña, the outcome of the talks was celebrated as an enormous victory for the city’s workers, and Quiñonez and Tovar returned home to find they were being revered as heroes. Within a month, the CFO had gained footholds in 39 of Acuña’s 60 maquiladoras, representing tens of thousands of residents and causing several American corporations—most notably AlliedSignal and General Electric—to flee Acuña for the same reasons as Alcoa. The rapid divestments attracted further interest from Mexican magnates, including Slim (who finally acquired a complex of his own in May) and Kamel Nacif Borge, who continually competed for the favor of the newly-unionized workers. The companies which decided not to sell, meanwhile, had little choice but to revise their contracts to prevent labor unrest. By the end of 1993, average wages in Acuña had more than doubled thanks to CFO pressure, and the union had secured a long list of municipal improvements, including a renovation of much of the impoverished city’s sewage infrastructure, expansion of the city’s forty-five-bed health clinic into a two-story, general hospital, as well as the construction of over three dozen residential housing blocks, two schools, a functioning fire station and a public library—a collective investment of well over one billion pesos.

    President Bartlett tried to keep the CFO’s successes a secret by pressuring border state newspapers into dropping it from their columns. But he couldn’t keep the union isolated for long, especially as Juan Tovar and other CFO representatives began traveling from city to city to organize workers throughout the entire border region. By May, independent unions had been formed in Matamoros, Piedras Negras, Chihuahua and Ciudad Juárez. However, these unions were severely hampered by the fact that they did not possess a federal registro, or charter, meaning that if they ever tried to take industrial action, they would be declared illegal by PRI-controlled labor tribunals. The major breakthrough for the CFO came when Tovar and his colleagues arrived at the Korean-owned Han Young truck chassis plant in Tijuana, whose workers had already formed an independent union affiliated with the Frente Autentico de Trabajo, or FAT, one of the only non-PRI-affiliated labor federations in Mexico. Though strapped for cash and under constant persecution by PRI authorities, the FAT had experienced legal staff and—most vitally—a government registro. Combining the FAT’s legitimacy and legal prowess with the CFO’s talent for organization and publicity, the Han Young workers were able to extract a new contract from their Korean bosses which promised higher wages and fewer working hours. As the CFO’s first major success outside Acuña, the victory was consequential enough that, in June, the two organizations decided to formally merge, bringing the CFO’s border syndicates in line with the FAT’s widely-scattered unions and forming the basis for an independent, grassroots labor movement which was rising to take the place of the CTM. And, as Coahuila’s triennial statewide elections approached in September, Quiñonez led the FAT’s Acuña branch into an alliance with Alianza Civica, Sergio Aguayo’s pro-democracy movement, in hopes of defying PRI authority and electing an opposition governor for only the second time in recent Mexican history.


    PMLUNSpeech.png


    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, the leading opposition voice in the Senate (even though there was barely any more opposition to lead), was especially piqued when Labor Secretary Elba Esther Gordillo revoked the FAT’s registro, because he himself had granted them their first registro in 1974 while serving as President Luis Echeverría's Labor Secretary. A week after the revocation, Senator Muñoz Ledo gave a long and blistering speech in the Senate chamber in which he called it “a gross and unjust violation of constitutional labor rights”.

    President Bartlett, naturally, was almost paralyzed in fear of this threat to PRI hegemony. On his orders, Labor Secretary Elba Esther Gordillo revoked the FAT’s registro, turning it into an illegal union. In response, opposition Senator Porfirio Muñoz Ledo—who himself had served as Labor Secretary under President Luis Echeverría Álvarez, and had granted the FAT its registro in 1974—gave a long speech on the Senate floor condemning the revocation as a violation of labor rights. President Bartlett also ordered Fidel Velázquez, the 92-year-old, borderline-senile Secretary-General of the CTM, to suppress all attempts at independent organization. And when the oficialista unions proved too weak in many places to accomplish this task, Bartlett simply directed his security forces to harass, arrest, assault, pummel, pound, and otherwise disrupt the activities of independent labor organizers. Yet even the DFS was distracted in carrying out this mission by its dogged campaign against the Tijuana Cartel.

    In December of 1992, twelve of the DFS’s most seasoned operatives were sent to Tijuana, where they worked undercover for three months, tapping phones, identifying traffickers, observing the patterns and laying the groundwork for a decisive blow against the infamous Tijuana Cartel—the organization headed by the Arellano Félix brothers which dominated the trade of cocaine, heroin, marijuana and methamphetamine all along the Pacific coast. Finally, on March 12, 1993, the Governor of Baja California, Daniel Quintero Peña, publicly announced that he had invoked the Law of Regional Security and formally requested DFS assistance in dealing with the Cartel problem. Within two hours of the announcement, DFS agents assassinated Benjamin Arellano Félix by hemming his convoy of armored cars into a narrow street and destroying his car with an anti-tank rocket. Over the next few days, half a dozen of the Cartel’s comandantes were shot by DFS troops while the surviving Arellano Félix brother, Ramón, slunk from safehouse to safehouse to avoid capture. Despite the deaths of most of its leaders, however, the Cartel responded quickly to the surprise attack, digging in and fighting brutally to defend their turf; by the end of March, the DFS claimed to have killed or arrested more than forty Cartel members, and yet in that time it suffered nineteen casualties among its own ranks.

    Nevertheless, by May the Arellano Félix organization had been driven out of Tijuana. Ramón Arellano Félix was forced to flee south with his remaining manpower to Sinaloa, where he quickly came into conflict with La Alianza de Sangre, a rival cartel controlled by Héctor Luis Palma and Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán. American observers were initially astonished at the rapidity with which the DFS drove out the Tijuana Cartel, but the amazement soon turned into skepticism as drug abuse rates quickly rose back to their previous levels; Washington didn’t know it yet, but it would eventually be revealed that the entire operation had been financed by the drug lord Miguel Caro Quintero so that his Sonora Cartel could take over Tijuana. The DFS agents who remained in the city soon began taking generous cuts of the Sonora Cartel’s flourishing profits in exchange for their help in transporting drugs across the border. The Army, meanwhile, looked upon this arrangement with the green eye of envy. In decades past, the Army had profited immensely off the drug trade with minimal competition, and thousands of officers had built their entire careers around this lucrative source of wealth. Now, entire battalions were being forced through humiliating “retraining” regimens just so that they could spend months camping outside Zapatista ratholes in a mosquito-infested jungle, while Bartlett ensured his pretty boys in the DFS grew rich and fat off drug money that rightfully belonged to the Army.

    Several of the Army’s most prominent leaders, including Generals Alfredo Navarro Lara, Horacio Montenegro and Jesus Gutiérrez Rebollo, were growing sorely resentful of President Bartlett. For the moment, though, they would have little time to reflect on their grievances because a renewed push was being planned against the State of Zapata. Abandoning conventional approaches, the Defense Secretariat had designed a new offensive which would isolate the rebellious communities and force them to surrender, all while avoiding the large-scale maneuvers which had led to the disaster at San Cristóbal the previous year. On April 4, the Army marched once again into Zapatista territory, intending to put an end to the rebellion once and for all and force the ELM rebels back under Mexico City's firm and unforgiving rule.
    __________
    [1] This was also the case by the OTL 1990s—Acuña had no functioning fire trucks and couldn’t afford to buy new ones or fix the ones they had, so Del Rio had to send in its own trucks to fight Mexican fires.
    [2] Both actual things that Alcoa’s Mexican workers had to contend with, and most likely still do.
    [3] In OTL as well as TTL, Bush the Elder offered O’Neill the post of Secretary of Defense in 1988, but he declined. In OTL, O’Neill would eventually serve in the Cabinet as Bush the Younger's Treasury Secretary.
    [4] See Part Twelve!
    [5] In OTL, SICARTSA was sold to a steel conglomerate in 1991 for $22 million.
    [6] The CFO is an actual organization, formed before TTL’s POD. They have a website which is available in both Spanish and English, though it hasn’t been updated in a very long time.
    [7] Quiñonez was a leader of the CFO in real life, and in 1996 she helped arrange for Juan Tovar to go to Alcoa’s annual meeting in Pittsburgh in order to publicly call out Paul O’Neill on the horrible working conditions in front of a convention full of shareholders.
    [8] A marked improvement over the three-peso-an-hour, 48-hour work weeks Alcoa workers faced in OTL 1993.
     
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    Narrative Interlude #7
  • March 7, 1993
    Cancún, Quintana Roo

    Thud.

    The rickety desk shook as the manuscript struck it, causing the lamp to tremble and shadows to quiver around every corner of the dimly-lit office.

    “There it is,” said Lydia Cacho as she leaned back in her chair.

    The editor picked up the thick sheaf of papers and studied the cover. “MARIO VILLANUEVA: EL CHUECO?” was neatly stamped across the middle of the page. He winced. Mario Villanueva Madrid—the PRI senator who had just been elected Governor of Quintana Roo in a near-uncontested race—was known for his unsettlingly asymmetrical facial features, and he was likely to take the phrase “EL CHUECO” (“the crooked one”) as a personal insult rather than an ethical slight.

    Swallowing his reservations, the editor peeled back the cover and started reading. The opening line was bold in substance but subdued in rhetoric: “Though his campaign projected a clean and orderly image, a closer look at our soon-to-be governor’s background suggests that certain criminal interests may assume a commanding influence in his administration”. The rest of the article took a similar style: intensive speculation about all the corrupt, shady and amoral things Villanueva was probably going to do as Governor of Quintana Roo, peppered in with the occasional disclaimer that he wasn’t in office yet and so it was still impossible to know for sure. As he read on, the editor realized that Lydia’s predictions were becoming uncomfortably specific: not only did she accuse Villanueva of having contacts with the Juárez Cartel, she went on to claim that Amado Carrillo Fuentes had been one of Villanueva’s largest campaign donors, and that, once inaugurated, Villanueva would rent out the Quintana Roo's airstrips to Carrillo’s cocaine-carrying cargo jets.

    He felt a spidery chill crawl up his spine as he reached the last page. Even in a country with a fair court system, this sort of ungrounded speculation would be grounds for a libel suit; in Manuel Bartlett’s Mexico, it was probably punishable by crucifixion. He looked back up at Lydia, still watching him intently.

    “Lydia, you know I can’t print this,” he said. “It’s all guesswork. Everyone knows Villanueva’s a corrupt pendejo, but until he actually starts doing all of these shady things, you might as well be screaming into a brick wall.”

    Lydia, hands clasped and resting on her lap, was unfazed. “Turn the page,” she said simply.

    Reluctantly, the editor did. The rest of the packet consisted not of tidy typescript, but of official documents from many different firms and institutions, interspersed with wrinkled, handwritten notes. The first page of this section was a police description of one José González Rosas, an associate of the Juárez Cartel who had been arrested in Mexico City in November, and then released suddenly after just three days in custody. This information seemed entirely inconsequential until one read Lydia’s notes from her interview with Villanueva's secretary in the Federal District, who recalled that the day before his arrest, a man perfectly matching González Rosas's description had visited the office to have a three-hour-long discussion with Senator Villanueva. This was followed by a bank report showing that, the day after this conversation, Villanueva’s campaign had received a donation of three million U.S. dollars from a suspicious-looking bank account in Switzerland. Now, the story was starting to come together.

    Equally unremarkable at first glance was an invoice for the purchase of twelve million pesos's worth of asphalt and heavy equipment by a Puerto Juárez construction firm, presumably to be used on state-funded construction projects. Nor did the editor bat an eye at a certificate proving that Senator Villanueva was one of this firm’s largest shareholders; for an American or a European politician, that sort of conflict of interest would be considered a scandal, but for a priísta, it was, at best, a lack of imagination. What gave him pause, however, was the memo from Villanueva to the Quintana Roo air traffic controllers’ union, informing them that many of the state’s airstrips were to be extended and re-paved under his watch, and that they could expect to be handling many more cargo flights once he took office. Anyone who knew why Amado Carrillo Fuentes was called “Lord of the Skies” would find that suspicious, particularly if they’d just seen the bank report.

    The editor looked back up at Lydia, who was no longer staring at him, but at the papers in his hand. He was in awe that she'd managed to gather all of this evidence and somehow keep it all straight. As he turned back and reread the middle pages of the article, every one of her claims now seemed startlingly well-founded.

    He could feel the heat rising as his heart pounded on the walls of his chest. He probably had some sort of moral imperative to publish the article, and yet—he realized as he thought through the impact of this story—he could not. He suddenly became aware that what he was holding in his hands was not simply a sheaf of papers, but power: the power to ruin a chueco’s political career, and to get himself thrown in some hellhole prison for God knew how long. Could he send this story to the press, knowing that he and most of his staff would, in all likelihood, be incarcerated for it?

    Frantically he seized upon the nearest rationalization.

    “I’m impressed. Actually, I’m a hell of a lot more than impressed,” he said. Lydia tightened her lips in affirmation. “But it’s all circumstantial," he continued. "There’s nothing in here that some coño lawyer couldn’t weasel his way out of. We’ll probably get our asses thrown in Lecumberri for this anyway, but if I’m going to be locked up for a story, it’s going to be a story no one can deny—not even someone with his head as far up his ass as Manolito,” he explained, using the popular, less-than-affectionate nickname for President Bartlett. “I really want to print this, Lydia," he said. "Find me a prueba tangible, and I’ll make sure this article gets put on every newsstand in the state.”

    Wordlessly, Lydia nodded, rose and held out her hand. The editor handed back the papers. She took them and walked out of the office, closing the door behind her.

    The editor sighed. He’d bought himself some time. But what would happen if—when—she found that smoking gun? Would he still be able to find an excuse?

    Well, he thought grimly, she might just get herself killed and save me the trouble.
    __________

    Lydia looked up at the soldier with an iron-hewed gaze. Expecting an equally stern pair of eyes, she instead found herself face-to-face with a nervous, young man, clearly one of the thousands of new recruits President Bartlett had mobilized to fight his two-front war against the Zapatistas and against common decency.

    Lydia felt her expression soften. She almost felt sorry for the boy—he surely hadn’t asked to be in the Army, and yet here he was, invading a bus and disturbing innocent strangers’ travel plans. A more confident soldier would see this security check as a prime opportunity for extortion; this boy, however, was so hesitant that he trembled when he asked for Lydia’s passport. But, as she handed it over, Lydia stiffened up once again. She remembered the message Octavio Paz had sent to the country in October: “If wrongs are being committed against the Mexican people, I call on them to right those wrongs on an individual basis, and to resist any encroachment upon their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal”. Her freedom of movement was being encroached, and it was her civic duty to resist. She would have liked to refuse to show her passport outright, but she did need to get where she was going somehow. So instead she resisted, as she often did, with her eyes. As he compared Lydia face with the image on her passport, she ensured her stare was powerful enough to chill the boy's blood.

    His shiver was barely perceptible, but it was enough. The soldier handed back her passport without another word, and within ten minutes he’d finished his duties and scampered off the bus. A moment later, the doors shut, and the rusty coach pulled out onto the road and shunted off toward the highway.

    Off she went to Chihuahua.
     
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    Part 20: Hugo Chávez, Assassination of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo
  • In many ways, the offensive launched against the State of Zapata in mid-1993 was as much a PR campaign as it was a military campaign. Ever since its humiliating defeat at the Battle of San Cristóbal eight months earlier, the Mexican Army—and, by extension, President Bartlett—had been tainted with an image of weakness and incompetence. Determined to dispel this embarrassing image, Bartlett had ordered Defense Secretary Juan Arévalo Gardoquí to design a new assault on the Zapatistas that would leave the ELM broken, bloodied and reeling with no hope for a counterattack. Thus, on April 4, 42,000 well-armed and well-supplied soldiers under General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo marched into Zapatista territory once again to take on a grand total of 8,000 guerrillas, spread thin across the state and running low on weapons and ammunition.

    The Army had learned from its defeat at San Cristóbal. Rather than attempting to defeat the ELM in a major, pitched battle, the attacking force split itself up into six columns and began retaking the rebellious municipalities one by one. Many Zapatista communities were too far up in the mountains for a direct assault, but those at a lower elevation were easy prey, and with these, the Army took no chances. In one such community, Plan de Ayala (formerly known as Juan Sabines Gutiérrez), the 327 inhabitants came under attack by an entire company of 140 soldiers, who, after evacuating the residents and stripping their homes of most items of value, arrested more than 40% of the adult population on suspicion of being ELM guerrillas. Village after village fell in this way; the ELM’s commanders desperately hoped that they could pull off a second San Cristóbal, but the armored cars which had failed so badly in the city’s narrow alleyways performed much better in the wide-open Selva, especially because the ELM had nearly depleted its stock of anti-armor rockets the previous summer.

    By the end of June, more than thirty Zapatista communities had been reconquered by the Army. The ELM did its best to harass the occupying force and even managed to briefly retake a few municipalities, but there was little they could do without resupplying their weapons and equipment, and despite Governor Albores’s persistent requests, shipments from Havana were maddeningly slow to arrive. Finally, in July, Subcomandante Marcos decided to abandon the low-lying areas entirely, ordering his forces to retreat into the mountains and entrench themselves in communities where the terrain was rough enough that General Gutiérrez Rebollo would have a difficult time bringing his superior forces to bear. The Zapotecs in southwestern Zapata, meanwhile, hunkered down and prepared for a state of siege. At long last, the administration had achieved its strategic goal of slicing the rebel state in half, and although the remaining two halves would prove to be very tough nuts to crack, the Army had finally won back its swagger in the minds of the Mexican people. [1]

    In one particular part of Latin America, though, this strategic victory was overshadowed by the news that one particular ELM casualty had been identified: Hugo Chávez—the Venezuelan Army officer and would-be revolutionary who had dropped off the map following a botched coup attempt in 1991—had turned up dead and in uniform in the State of Zapata, shot by Mexican troops in the defense of the Zapatista village of Tapalapa. There are a few competing theories as to how exactly he got there, but since 1995, Caracas has accepted the following explanation: after failing to take over Venezuela, Chávez fled to Cuba (whose intelligence services had secretly supported his coup), where he brooded for a year until, after hearing about the Zapatistas’ success at the Battle of San Cristóbal, his ambition got the better of him. On his own request, the Cuban Army sent Chávez to Zapata in 1992 as a military advisor, where he had apparently hoped to satisfy his hunger for power by taking on some kind of leadership role within the Zapatista movement. [2] News of Chávez’s death shocked and polarized the Venezuelan socialist movement: moderates who had not supported the attempted coup were relatively unmoved, while a smaller, more militant faction mourned the spiritual leader whom many had hoped would one day return to lead their country in revolution. The schism soon worsened into an ideological split, and as Venezuela prepared to elect its next president in December, it became clear that, even beyond the grave, Chávez would continue to exert a significant influence on his country’s politics.

    HugoChavez.png

    Not two months after Chávez bit the dust, another death occurred on Mexican soil that would have subtler, but even more significant ramifications. On August 14, 1993, Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, the Archbishop of Guadalajara, was shot to death along with four others as he pulled into the parking lot of Guadalajara International Airport. [3] Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had been one of Mexico’s most respected clerics—known for his humble background as well as for his crusades against corruption—and the news of his death enraged and appalled the Mexican people more than any assassination since that of Celeste Batel more than five years earlier. His funeral in Guadalajara attracted over 110,000 mourners, and when Government Secretary Carlos Hank González (whom President Bartlett had sent to present an appearance of government sympathy) tried to give a speech at the memorial service, he was unable to finish his perfunctory drone of a eulogy because was interrupted so many times by furious cries for “¡Justicia!”[4]

    That justice was predictably slow to arrive. Authorities quickly blamed the Tijuana Cartel for the execution, saying they had killed the Cardinal after mistaking him for Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán, head of the rival Sinaloa Cartel. But that explanation left the Mexican people wondering how professional killers could possibly have confused a vicious drug lord with an elderly gentleman in a flowing black habit. Soon, rumors began to emerge that Cardinal Posadas Ocampo had come across information that would have implicated dozens of PRI officials in a narcotics scandal, and that President Bartlett had ordered the Archbishop killed to keep him quiet. [5] The government, of course, rejected this notion outright, and after a ten-day-long “federal investigation” (which resulted in the arrest and conviction of Alfredo Hodoyán Palacios, a young member of one of Ramón Arellano Félix's death squads), President Bartlett declared the case closed, and pressured the country’s major news sources into dropping all mention of the assassination from its pages. El Informador, Guadalajara’s largest newspaper, complied with this directive so willingly that the 26-year Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, the paper’s youngest yet most diligent and industrious journalist, quit her job in disgust. Xanic's interest in the Cardinal’s death, however, persisted, and she immediately set about conducting her own investigation into the murder, hoping to dig up proof that there was more to the assassination than President Bartlett was willing to admit.

    CardinalAssassination.png

    Though the initial public reaction fizzled out within a few weeks, the assassination of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo would have momentous consequences for Mexico. Ever since the 1930s, the PRI had had a decidedly unfriendly relationship with the Catholic Church, imposing laws which prohibited the Church from owning property or running schools, and which banned priests from wearing their robes in public or voting in elections. Some of the tension had been released in 1989, when Carlos Salinas had repealed some of the more extreme anti-clerical measures. But the Archbishop’s assassination (which a large majority of Mexicans still believed had been a government job) was a watershed moment. The clergy could tolerate restrictions on their rights to vote and own property, as well as President Bartlett’s general disregard for civil liberties. But murdering a man of the cloth for threatening to expose government corruption? That was a step too far. In the weeks after the Archbishop's assassination, the sermons heard by Mexican churchgoers began to change subtly in tone. Before Cardinal Posadas’s assassination, most preachers had been urging their flocks to turn the other cheek in the face of government repression and avoid stirring up trouble, but now they began to emphasize more “rebellious” sections of the scripture; according to historian Enrique Krauze, Isaiah 61:1 (…for the Lord hath anointed me to preach good tidings unto the disheartened…to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them who are bound”) became a particularly popular verse following the Cardinal’s death.

    This subtle change would have enormous historical impact. After so many years of tyranny and deprivation, a large majority of Mexicans—including millions of once-loyal priístas—had grown profoundly disillusioned with President Bartlett and the ruling the party. Up until now, most of these “ordinary” Mexicans had been keeping their heads down and their mouths shut, fearing that any signs of disloyalty would put themselves and their families in danger. But many millions of them were devout Catholics, and millions more had turned to religion for comfort in these times of strife. And when those millions of Mexicans heard their priests subtly connect acts of resistance with acts of godliness, they suddenly remembered the firmness with which their poet laureate, Octavio Paz, had urged them “to resist any encroachment on their freedoms with whatever means lay at their disposal”. By October, church basements everywhere from Cancún to Culiacán were holding hushed, late-night meetings in which hundreds of thousands of citizens, many of whom had scarcely entertained a political thought in their lives, gathered to discuss the manifold ways in which the government had trampled on their rights and liberties. And as these hushed discussions spread from church basements to restaurants, shops, garages and workplaces, the raucous, rebellious, revolutionary flair within the Mexican national spirit was beginning to awaken once more.

    Anti-PRI Sign.jpeg


    Anti-PRI graffiti became increasingly common on Mexican streets during the latter half of 1993. DFS agents arrested as many as two thousand street artists over the course of the year, but were ultimately powerless to stop the wave of vandalism, covering up anti-government slogans only to find a dozen more scrawled across the same wall the next day.

    This spirit of sedition would find a home not only among ordinary Mexicans, but also among the highest ranks of the Army. After the April campaign against the Zapatistas succeeded, many officers had hoped that they would be transferred back to civilian peacekeeping duty, so that they could rebuild the massive, city-wide profit-making machines that had made so many of them rich after the Autumn of Terrors. A few optimistic officers even hoped that they would be sent to the border regions so that they could ingratiate themselves with the drug cartels and get in on the action. President Bartlett, however, had other ideas. Though he was pleased at the success of the spring offensive, Bartlett recognized that it had been a relatively easy victory, and he knew that it would be much harder to dislodge the Zapotecs and Zapatistas from their new hiding places. He also believed (correctly) that a root cause for the defeat at San Cristóbal was that urban peacekeeping had made the Army corrupt and inert, and he feared that if the soldiers were allowed to grow fat and lazy again, then the Zapatistas would be able to inflict another national humiliation. So Bartlett steadfastly refused to allow the Army to come anywhere near the cartels, and although he did permit a few brigades to return to their peacekeeping duties, he made them compete for territory and kickbacks with the much-despised DFS, whose agents he had given preferential powers and jurisdiction. Even as a dispute over meth distribution rights in September erupted into a bloody war between the Sonora Cartel and the Juárez Cartel, and the DFS began to fracture into opposing factions, Bartlett was hesitant to allow the Army to gluttonize itself upon the fruitful fount of drug money.

    By late autumn, the Army’s leading generals—including Alfredo Navarro Lara, Vinicio Santoyo, and even Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, fresh from his victory over the Zapatistas—were beginning to ask themselves (and, increasingly, each other) whether it was really worth their while to have Bartlett in charge if it meant that they would be cut off from their most lucrative source of wealth. Meanwhile, hundreds of capitanos and tenientes throughout Mexico were stuck drowning their bitterness in the very same bars where, not two years earlier, they had been running profitable protection rackets. So when they overheard common citizens airing their grievances with the PRI regime in increasingly loud and emphatic tones, these disgruntled soldiers found themselves joining in on the discussions. And, as word crept up the military hierarchy that a long-simmering groundswell of anti-government anger was finally beginning to bubble up to the surface, the top generals began to formulate a plan: in the preceding months, the Army had detained three supposed American “tourists” who had, in fact, turned out to be CIA agents, sent to Mexico at George Bush’s behest to explore the possibility of effecting a regime change; in October 1993, a few high-ranking officers resolved to make contact with this CIA presence and inform the U.S. intelligence community that they would be willing to consider any plans which might result in the permanent retirement of President Bartlett and his political retinue from the public service. The generals were confident that Washington would take an interest in this proposal—particularly as the presidential election of 1994 hurtled ever closer and President Bartlett prepared for the ritual of destape, or unveiling, in which he would reveal to the world his preferred candidate for the PRI presidential nomination, heir apparent to the throne of the Mexican presidency.
    __________
    [1] As in Part Sixteen, special thanks to @RamscoopRaider for supplying me with much-needed advice on how to make the military side of this part realistic. I couldn’t have written it without you, Ramscoop!
    [2] You may be thinking that it would make more sense for the Cubans to hold on to Chávez, in hopes of sending him back to Venezuela in the near future to lead the people's revolution. However, things are significantly better in Venezuela than they were in OTL 1993, thanks to much higher U.S. purchases of Venezuelan petroleum and the reversal of Carlos Andrés Pérez’s privatization program. As a result, only a small fraction of society (and a minority of socialists), view Chávez in a positive light, and by the time things start to get really bad again, Chávez will have been forgotten. Yet it’s a liability to have him just hanging around, so Castro sends him to Zapata under a false name hoping he’ll die without being identified. He gets exactly half of his wish.
    [3] In OTL, Cardinal Posadas Ocampo was shot in the same location a few months earlier, on May 24, 1993.
    [4] This happened in OTL to President Carlos Salinas, who happened to be visiting Guadalajara the day after Cardinal was shot.
    [5] In OTL, the "Tijuana Cartel trying to bump off El Chapo" story was also tendered as the “official” explanation, but many believe to this day that the assassination was an inside job.
     
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    Narrative Interlude #8
  • Guadalajara, Jalisco
    October 8, 1993
    3:43 PM

    “I don’t have it,” said the banker.

    Lydia Cacho leaned forward. “You mean you won’t give it to me.”

    “No,” the banker replied angrily, “I mean I don’t have it.”

    Cacho fretted beneath her icy exterior. The Bartlett administration was horrible at hiding its secrets—she marveled at just how much sensitive information she’d already uncovered just by asking (or bribing) lowly officials who didn’t know any better. But when polite requests and bribery both failed, she had few other tools at her disposal but blunt intimidation. And when none of those things work, she found herself at a dead end. She’d already left Sonora empty-handed after a two-month long hunt for evidence had been thwarted by the stubbornness of a single, stubborn functionary. If the trail went cold again here, she didn’t know where she could turn next.

    “Where is it?” she snarled at the banker with enough frost in her voice to freeze the tip of the man’s nose.

    “I already gave it away to another woman,” he said gloatingly, folding his arms to conceal his slight. “A journalist.”

    Cacho refused to move. “Which journalist?” she spat.

    “And why should I tell you, you pushy puta?” He spat with the caustic tone of a man who’d already allowed himself to be intimidated by a woman this week, and wasn’t about to let it happen again.

    Maintaining her cold stare, Cacho reached into her pocket and pulled out a sheaf of bills. She hoped she wouldn’t have to give away more than two days’ worth of motel fare to this cockroach.

    11:12 PM

    Thump thump thump.

    Xanic von Bertrab froze. [1] Her hands began to tremble as she stared back down at the paper they held. Instinctively she reread the title: “BALANCE STATEMENT AND SUMMARY FOR THE ACCOUNT OF JUAN GUTIÉRREZ GOMEZ”.

    Juan Gutiérrez Gomez, of course, was the alias of Rubén Zuno Arce, a local heroin trafficker who had recently been named as a PRI candidate for the federal Congress. The government, therefore, would have liked very much to keep the details of his financial transactions far, far away from prying eyes like Xanic’s. Anyone with a prying interest in Zuno’s bank statements could expect a midnight visit from men in dark uniforms; anyone who had gone so far as to procure hard copies of said statements could only hope those men would leave her in as many pieces as they found her.

    Xanic was suddenly flooded with terror as she remembered the sequence of rash decisions that had brought her to this moment. When Cardinal Posadas had been assassinated in August, she had instantly sensed a massive story lingering just below the surface, but her editor at El Informador was too cautious—too cowardly, she had thought at the time—to print it. So she quit her job and embarked on a freelance spree, unearthing mountains of sordid facts and evidence. The manic thrill of chasing a story of her own had pushed Xanic to search for clues in every bank and cut-rate construction firm in Jalisco, heedless of the sinister eyes she must have drawn at every step. Only now, as the incriminating pages rustled between her fingers and an unknown menace stood outside the door, waiting to dismember her, did the high vanish like the golden sheen from a shattered lightbulb and leave her cruelly in thrall to cold, blue terror.

    Thump thump thump.

    Her whole body convulsed in fright. Shivering with fear, Xanic momentarily considered stashing the documents in a drawer, or tearing them up into pieces, or compressing them into a compact ball and swallowing them whole. But she knew that any attempt to hide the damning papers would not only be futile, but would incriminate her further in the eyes of whoever stood behind the door. With tears welling up her eyes and her heartbeat climbing up to her ears, she rose from the chair and forced herself, step by robotic step, toward the door. Finally she reached it and twisted the doorknob; the hinges creaked and whined as Xanic pulled it open, motionless as a deer in pair of headlights.

    She couldn’t bring herself to be relieved, but she was at least a little surprised. The figure standing before her was not an angry-eyed man in a menacing black uniform but a woman, barely older than Xanic herself, in normal, almost shabby, clothes. She’d heard that DFS casualties were growing by the month because of the drug war, but were they really that desperate for new recruits?

    “Are you Alejandra?” The woman asked. Xanic registered the question, but found herself transfixed by the woman’s gaze. It was intense, but not quite cold—the eyes of a person accustomed to turning rivals to stone with her glare. “Xanic,” she responded simply.

    The woman continued her line of inquiry. “I was told you have some information I’ve been looking for,” she said in an even voice, “concerning a certain Juan Gutiérrez Gomez.”

    Xanic felt her neck tighten up again. Surely this was some sort of trap; this time next week, she would be rotting in a jail cell awaiting trial before a DFS tribunal. And yet, despite every obvious, logical impulse, something about this woman—she couldn’t exactly say what—put Xanic at ease, whether it was the seemingly sincere gravity behind her gaze or her surprising bluntness. Xanic still wasn’t quite certain, though, and so she asked the first question she thought of:

    “Are you DFS?”

    “No,” the woman replied. “I’m a journalist.”

    Suddenly Xanic discerned a new dimension in those eyes: a certain inquisitiveness, a desire to pierce the minds of her adversaries not merely to unnerve them, but to understand them better. She pictured the papers still lying on the table just a few feet behind her. The woman simply stared, as if reading her thoughts.

    “Please come in,” said Xanic, stepping to the side.

    11:17 PM
    Five kilometers to the east

    “I bet he's already bought himself five houses—one for every minute he’ll live after he walks out of Los Pinos for the last time!”

    The burly Mexican slammed his glass down on the table, sending the rest of his tequila sloshing out onto the table. He had clearly imbibed too much for his own political good, but his equally-inebriated comrades didn’t seem to mind, responding to his joke with peals of loud, drunken laughter. The barkeep didn’t care either, it seemed, as he was already filling up another glass for his loose-walleted patron. The only person who particularly cared what this stained-overall-clad Mexican had to say about Manuel Bartlett was the American “tourist” hunched over the bar.

    The “tourist" stared down at his glass, which he’d barely touched in twenty-five minutes. As far as he was concerned, tequila was one of the vilest liquids God had ever cursed upon the human race, but it was the only thing any watering hole in Mexico seemed to have in stock these days. Still, he had to keep up an image. Bracing himself, he picked up the glass and took a third sip, wincing as he forced it down his throat.

    It was the sixth bar he’d visited that week, and each night, the pattern was the same: weary, ragged Mexicans would start filtering in late in the day; those with jobs would start arriving at about nine or nine-thirty, those without them around six or seven. At first, quiet would reign as the disaffected patrons slowly drank away their senses. But as the mezcal flowed and inhibitions joined sorrows in a wet, alcoholic death, the discussion became much louder and much more political. In every city he’d visited during his four-state trek across central Mexico, the topic of conversation was the same: abajo Bartlett, abajo el PRI, complaints about how miserable things were and how miserable they would continue to be if el partido oficial maintained its stranglehold on power. He already had mounrains of material for his report—the manuscript of his first draft was approaching 120 pages—but the gist would be simple: a political maelstrom was brewing in Mexico. If he was planning to have his pet candidate elected President in August, Manuel Bartlett would have to deal with a massive, growing wave of popular discontentment, whether he knew it yet or not.

    The man was so focused on appearing indifferent that, at first, he barely noticed when a woman took a seat on the stool next to him. As he tried to listen, however, he found it harder and harder to concentrate on what the drunken patron was saying. Suddenly he realized that the woman sitting beside him, despite her silence, was screaming to be noticed. He knew it was probably just a prostitute preying on drunk gringos—he’d already encountered four of those so far on this excursion. But something felt...different this time. If she was a hooker, she would have gotten impatient by now and made an advance. This woman, whoever or whatever she was, seemed more than happy to wait for him to make the first move. His instincts seized up and his stomach tightened. Was this a trap? Had his cover been blown? As far as he knew, he hadn’t ever come close to revealing his true purposes, aside from one unpleasantly close encounter with one unpleasantly drunk man. Had the government or the DFS somehow found out anyway?

    For a moment, he considered simply getting up and strolling out of the bar without looking at the woman. But he quickly realized he had no choice. If he ran away from this woman tonight, they’d send someone a lot bigger and a lot uglier to chase him down tomorrow. Slowly, mechanically, tremblingly, he turned his head and looked at the woman beside him.

    Her beauty was paralyzing. The gleaming, opal eyes would have been entrancing enough on their own, but they were matched by twin tapestries of flowing, jet-black hair and supported by a statuesque pair of cheekbones that bent down into a bold chin, projecting elegance and confidence in equal measure. It was obvious her most youthful years were behind her—she was probably in her mid-thirties, at least—but time had left her beauty so undiminished that she clearly felt no pressure to hide that fact. The man just stared. Almost never in his life had he seen a woman quite like this one.

    “Good evening,” she said, smiling, in accented English. “I am Irma.” [2]

    After momentarily deserting him, the man’s instincts came flooding back in. He was being set up for something. Had the door already been blocked off? If he looked behind him, would he see the loud drunk from earlier walking towards him and pulling a pistol out of his overalls? He felt his blood racing. How in the hell was he going to get out of this?

    “I have been sent to speak on behalf of a very powerful interest,” the goddess continued, “and we have an important message which we would like you to pass on to your superiors.”


    Shit shit shit shit shit.

    “I’m, uh, I’m sorry, señorita, but I don’t have any idea what the h-hell you’re talking about,” he managed, barely keeping himself from whimpering.

    She didn’t respond. Instead, her eyes darted behind him and her hand sent a near-imperceptible signal to someone at the back of the room.

    This was it. He saw it vividly: in a moment, a bag would be thrust over his head, he’d be dragged away from the bar and shoved into the bag of an unmarked van, and would spend the last few hours of his life in a concrete cell being beaten, tortured, and cut into progressively smaller pieces before being mailed back home in a series of bloodstained suitcases. He was so wrapped up in his vision that he jumped when he felt a heavy hand slap him on the back, and almost jumped again when the voice that followed it was friendly rather than threatening.

    “Good evening, friend!” He turned to see a very large man, with a bald, rocklike mass of a head and an enormous pair of eyeglasses resting upon a great, hulking, sausage-like mass of a nose, take the seat beside him. “I buy you drink?” He asked in convivial, if broken, English, already signaling the bartender with a wave of his hand.

    The gringo simply stared. The man’s mug was fascinating enough in and of itself, but he knew it from somewhere, and he quickly remembered where: its image had been in the briefing binder he’d memorized. Unless he was very, very badly mistaken, the plainclothed man sitting beside him was General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, champion of the Army’s summer campaign against the Zapatistas and winner of the government’s only major victory over the rebels since the start of the rebellion.

    His introduction over with and his English skills exhausted, the General switched back to Spanish. “Listen, my friend,” he said with in a surprisingly unthreatening tone, “I know your boss Mr. Bush wants to see a few things change down here in Mexico.”

    The gringo had just enough presence of mind to mumble that he was about thirty levels removed from Presidential Bush in the governmental pecking order.

    “Well, whoever your boss is,” the General allowed, “tell him—and I speak for the Army when I say this—that we want Bartlett, Hank and the rest of those cocksuckers out just as much as you do. And we’re ready to make good on that promise. You find someone to run for President against the PRI next year—you’ll have to be the ones to do it, the opposition here is a bunch of dickless monkeys and they won’t come within ten meters of us—and we’ll make sure he wins.”

    The gringo blinked. He could barely believe what he was hearing.

    “Any questions?” Asked the General as a fresh glass of tequila was set down upon the bar. The gringo couldn’t even stammer.

    “Good,” said the General. “Enjoy your tequila,” he said as he rose from his seat, strode up and ducked out the door. Still slumped on his stool, the gringo looked to his right; Irma, or whatever her name was, had vanished without a trace.

    He looked around him. The bar had just as many people in it as it had before (minus two), but now it was completely and totally empty to him.

    He looked back down at the liquid reposing within his glass. He grabbed the glass, raised it to his lips and swallowed it all in a single gulp.

    God, he loved tequila.

    Mexico City, Federal District
    November 3, 1993
    9:34 PM

    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo had been tailed many times before. Five years as an opposition senator in Manuel Bartlett’s Mexico had taught him the secrets to avoid being followed too closely: don’t look back, duck a corner here, dip out of the light there. These days, though, the DFS didn’t seem all that interested in stopping or harassing him—they just wanted to make sure he went home every night after performing his senatorial duties, instead of leading an underground meeting of anti-government satanists. In fact, he’d racked up such a strong record of good behavior that, most nights, they didn’t even bother sending anyone to follow him anymore. Only once or twice a week was he tailed on his walk home, and it was always the same guy doing the tailing. They’d never spoken, but Porfirio had taken to calling the man Pedro in his head, and he liked to think they were friends now.

    Something was different today, though. He’d caught a glimpse of the man out of the corner of his eye, and it sure as hell wasn’t Pedro. Pedro kept his distance. This guy was so close behind, Porfirio could hear his footsteps. With each step, the back of Porfirio’s neck grew tighter and tighter, and by the time he approached his front door, he had already accepted that he was about to spend the foreseeable part of his future rotting away in Lecumberri as an enemy of the state. Reaching the doorstep, he spun around to face his fate.

    “Just arrest me,” he said without mirth or merriment, hoping they’d at least let him see his children one last time before they locked him up.

    “I couldn’t arrest you even if I wanted to, senador,” the man responded. As taken aback as he was by the response, Porfirio found himself even more surprised to find that the man’s Spanish, while grammatically impeccable, had a slight American accent.

    “I’m not going to bother with pleasantries,” not-Pedro went on. “I represent the U.S. foreign intelligence service and we want you to run for President of Mexico.”

    Porfirio stiffened up even further. He’d been thinking about running for President since 1991. As the most prominent opposition politician in country (other than Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, of course), he would certainly be well-placed to run in 1994, but he had decided it would be a pointless risk. Bartlett had already barred the PAN and the Frente—what was left of it, anyway—from fielding a presidential candidate, so he clearly was not in the mood for even the pretext of a fair fight. And even if Porfirio did manage to win over the people’s hearts, Bartlett and his cronies would cheat him out of victory just as they’d done to Cárdenas, and in the meantime he would be putting himself, and, more importantly, his wife and children, in potentially mortal danger.

    “I have no intention whatsoever of contesting the presidential elections next summer,” Porfirio announced, entirely unconvinced that not-Pedro wasn’t a DFS double-agent trying to bait him into saying something treasonous.

    The man was unfazed. “You can win. You will win,” he continued, disregarding Porfirio’s uninterested response. “We’ve had our ears to the ground for months. The people are furious with the PRI. They’re poorer and more frightened than they’ve ever been, and they don’t trust anything that Bartlett or any other príista says. They want change. If you run, they will elect you.”

    Porfirio was unmoved. “If you think that the people pick the President in this country, you haven’t been looking very closely,” he scoffed.

    “Oh, yes we have,” said not-Pedro. “The PRI is ceasing to function as an organization. It’s falling apart. Bartlett doesn’t know it yet, but he’s already squandered the labor vote—he lost half the unions after Cananea, and the other half can’t scrape together enough muscle for an amateur arm-wrestling match,” he claimed. “We’ve seen the PRI’s membership rolls, too. Every day, two hundred priístas decide not to renew their membership because they don’t want to risk getting hauled in front of an OIP kangaroo court,” he continued. “Oh, and they’re almost completely broke. In Coahuila, their candidate for governor invited ten thousand people to a rally but they only had enough money for four hundred free sandwiches. The place was almost empty after twenty minutes.” Porfirio knew this was probably all horseshit, but as a former President of the PRI, he couldn’t help but feel a bit distressed at the thought of sixty years’ worth of accumulated political wisdom and time-honored electioneering tactics being completely squandered over the course of a single sexenio. Still, even if it all was true, why in the hell would anyone in Washington care? If Bush was expecting cheap oil in exchange for his support, he’d be better off finding himself another stooge.

    “So what’s in it for you?” Porfirio asked as a cool breeze wafted through the night air.

    Not-Pedro allowed himself a slight smirk. “Well, you know, there’s nothing we Americans love more than democracy—especially in Latin America.” Porfirio chuckled. If nothing else, Not-Pedro had a sense of humor.

    “That, and the drug trade has spiraled completely out of control, and we couldn’t get Bartlett to do anything about it if we gave him the keys to the foreign aid safe,” Not-Pedro continued. “We want a President who’ll strangle the DFS and put its capitanos into concrete cells.” Porfirio demurred. He wanted that too, actually, but he doubted the DFS would want to see anyone with those kinds of priorities get within a hundred kilometers of Los Pinos.

    “And what if the DFS decides it doesn’t like that idea and has me killed?” He asked with a scowl.

    “If you run,” not-Pedro replied evenly, “you will have the full support and protection of the Army.”

    Porfirio blinked. “The U.S. Army?” he asked, not quite incredulously.

    “No,” said not-Pedro. “The Mexican Army.”

    Now this guy was really pushing it. So the Army cared about politics now? Since when did anyone in the Army care about anything other than his paycheck? And even if they did have a stake in the election, what reason could they possibly have not to support the status quo?

    Not-Pedro could sense Porfirio’s bewilderment. “I know what you’re thinking,” he said, “but Bartlett hasn’t trusted the Army since San Cristóbal. Even after they finally won a few battles in June, he still hasn’t given them back a sliver of the power they had before he took office, and they want it back.They’ll make sure you win because they know that anyone of Bartlett’s puppets would keep them en la cucha for the next six years.”

    Porfirio's brow furrowed. ‘En la cucha’? ‘In the doghouse’? Was that some sort of Americanism? If this guy was a DFS double agent pretending to be American, he was doing a damned fine job of it—a finer job than he imagined anyone in the DFS could ever do. He was starting to believe this guy really had been sent by the CIA and that they really did want him to run. And yet, he still had one burning question.

    “But why me?” He asked not-Pedro. “Why don’t you ask Cárdenas to run instead? Everyone in the country knows his name, and he’s probably the one opposition politician in this country that Bartlett wouldn’t kill if he had the chance.”

    Not-Pedro frowned wistfully. “We already asked him. He doesn’t want to run. He’s afraid if he enters politics again, he or someone he loves will get hurt, or worse.”

    Porfirio nodded gravely. He certainly didn’t blame Cuauhtémoc. The PRI had already murdered the love of his life, and when he’d finally stuck his head out again a few years later with the noblest of aims—to help broker peace between the government and the Zapatistas—he’d come within an inch or two of getting killed himself. Perhaps he was right to fear for his life. But no other opposition man, aside from Porfirio himself, had any sort of nationwide recognition. If anyone was going to challenge the PRI in the election, Porfirio realized, it would have to be him. But, he began to ask himself, was it worth the sacrifice? Even with the support of the Army, even with the support of the people, the PRI had a thousand ways of wrenching the election away from him, just like they’d done to God knew how many opposition candidates for the past six decades. He knew that better than just about anyone—he’d been in charge of the party once before, and he’d presided over more than his share of fraud and vote-rigging. If he ran, he’d be putting himself, his family, his friends, everyone he loved at mortal risk, all for the sake of an election he probably wouldn’t win.

    And yet, he began to wonder, perhaps it was worth it anyway. When he’d first entered politics thirty years before, the Institutional Revolutionary Party had been a flawed, yet dynamic coalition of workers, farmers and intellectuals that was spearheading Mexico’s transition from an agrarian backwater to an industrialized middle power. But, over the course of his career, he’d watched with dismay as his party decayed into a brutal, power-hoarding ogre whose leaders no longer cared about anything but lining their pockets. Porfirio had already sensed that the people were turning against the PRI, and what not-Pedro had said only bolstered his conviction. But he’d read too much history not to know that, sometimes, the fate of a nation hinges on the decisions of a single individual. If no one stepped up now, Porfirio thought, if another PRI hack was permitted to waltz his way to the presidency without even a pretense of opposition, then all the anti-government energy built up by Bartlett’s rule might just dissipate. The opposition was fractured and leaderless, and it could very easily run out of steam over the next six years. If no one ran against the PRI (if he didn’t run against the PRI), then the nation’s best-ever shot at overthrowing the established order would be squandered.

    And then Porfirio struck upon a realization that scared him more than anything else he’d thought so far: if he ran, and everything this man had said was true, then he might just win. Did he actually want to be President? Eighteen years ago, when he was the Secretary of Labor and a leading contender for the PRI nomination in 1976, when the job was all about jet-setting around the country in Armani suits and Rolex watches, attending banquets and giving speeches, Porfirio would have probably blown up an orphanage if it’d meant President Echeverría would have handpicked him as his successor. But if he became President now, he’d be faced with a stagnant economy, an angry population, a treasury drowning in foreign debt, and a security apparatus utterly in thrall to the drug cartels. What truly sane man could possibly wish that on himself?

    Not-Pedro checked his watch. Porfirio almost jumped at the motion; he’d all but forgotten there was another person in front of him.
    “I’ll have to give it some thought,” Porfirio announced.

    Not-Pedro nodded. “I’ll be back in a week. Make up your mind by then.” With that, he spun on his heel and set back off down the street.

    Porfirio watched him for a moment, then set off toward the front door. But as he pulled out his key, he was suddenly overwhelmed with curiosity. He turned back to face the man, now almost around the corner.

    “Hey!” He shouted at Not-Pedro. “What’s your name?”

    “Malcolm!” he shouted as he continued on down the street.

    Dammit, Porfirio muttered, and walked inside.
    __________
    [1] Xanic von Bertrab is one of Mexico's most famous investigative journalists. In the mid-90s, having recently graduated from university, she held jobs with various publications in Guadalajara, including for the city's first big independent newspaper, Siglo 21. In 1992, when negligent handling of flammable liquids at a local Pemex facility caused Guadalajara's sewers to explode, taking out several of the city's streets and killing over 200 people, she was the one who uncovered the evidence of negligence. In 2012, she worked with American journalist David Barstow to expose the evil practices of Mexican Walmart stores, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting. She's about to have a late-entry role in TTL's drama of Mexican political history.
    [2] Irma Lizette Ibarra Naveja was one of the most beautiful and charming women of her time and place. She was crowned Miss Jalisco in 1970, and by the mid-1980s she was the première dame of Guadalajara high society. In what was then the capital of the Mexican drug trade, she danced-and-romanced everyone from drug lords to generals, and within a few years she would become a self-appointed intermediary between the cartels and the Army. Whenever a new regional Army commander arrived in town, she would organize an elegant dinner for him and his staff, and would make a point of inviting the city’s most influential traffickers so that the two sides could get acquainted with each other. On July 28, 1997, after announcing that she would be holding a press conference to reveal her connections with the recently-deceased trafficker Amado Carrillo Fuentes and the disgraced General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, Irma Ibarra was shot eight times in her car. A newspaper article detailing her assassination is available (in Spanish) here.
     
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    Part 21: 1993 Venezuelan presidential election
  • The death of Hugo Chávez had little direct impact on Venezuela’s political landscape. Most Venezuelans still saw Chávez as a dangerous demagogue for his attempt to overthrow the government in September of 1991, while those who agreed with his socialist agenda resented him for having abandoned the country after the failure of the abortive coup. Most of Chávez’s high-ranking supporters within the Army had been imprisoned, and no politician was willing to associate himself publicly with such an unpopular figure. But even though Chávez himself was gone, the disaffected lower class from which he had drawn his political support was very much still around. And as Venezuela’s impoverished voters watched inflation eat away at their meager savings while President Carlos Andrés Pérez resigned in disgrace for mass embezzlement, they began to search for a viable political alternative to the two establishment parties which had had a stronghold on power for over three decades.

    The void was quickly filled by Radical Cause (La Causa Radical, or La Causa Я, as its more enthusiastic supporters insisted it be spelled). La Causa had started off as a fairly minor socialist party in the 1970s, based mainly in the industrial hubs of Caracas and Bolivar State. But, as the establishment’s power waned, La Causa’s popularity grew. By 1993, the party had elected several candidates to high office, and its presidential nominee, Bolivar Governor Andrés Velásquez, was believed to have a real, if remote, shot at the presidency. When election day finally rolled around and the results started pouring in, they weren’t quite earth-shattering, but they were nevertheless surprising: Velásquez had taken almost a quarter of the vote nationwide. This put him five percentage points behind Claudio Fermín, nominee of the establishment center-left party Democratic Action, but it was still a larger share of the vote than any third-party candidate had ever achieved since the start of the two-party system (To this day, Velásquez alleges that he would have come in second if not for rampant electoral fraud). Oswaldo Álvarez Paz, the nominee of the establishment center-right party COPEI, won the presidency thanks to the split in the left-wing vote, but his unimpressive 38% vote share was an ominous sign for what had historically been Venezuela’s second-largest political party.

    The elites in both major parties, disturbed at the meteoric rise of La Causa, quietly hoped to themselves that this upstart political movement would fade into nothingness by the time of the next election. But their hopes would be in vain. President Álvarez Paz would do little over the course of his term to improve the lives of poor Venezuelans, and in the presidential election of 1998, La Causa’s Francisco Arías Cárdenas won the presidency by a very narrow margin, beating out COPEI and Democratic Action with only 36% of the vote. That election would mark Venezuela’s transition from a party system based on familial allegiance and machine politics to one based on ideological competition. Over the course of Francisco Arías’s term, as La Causa (which soon adopted the slightly more orthodox name of Radical Movement) established itself as the dominant party of the Venezuelan left, while COPEI shifted to the right and Democratic Action staked out a position in the liberal, center ground of Venezuelan politics. Venezuela remains one of Latin America’s oldest and stablest democracies, yet many have grown disillusioned with the current three-party system, just as they did with the two-party system before it. As disaffection increases, Hugo Chávez’s historical reputation has improved; the negative memories of his attempted coup have faded and a new admiration has taken its place. Today, some of Venezuela’s more fervent leftists hold up Hugo Chávez as a martyr to the socialist cause, a true revolutionary willing to challenge the system and push for genuine change. A few of his most dedicated adherents believe he’s still out there somewhere, hiding out in the remote jungles of Colombia or El Salvador with a band of fearless followers, watching and waiting for the right moment to come out of hiding and lead Venezuela in a glorious, Bolivarian revolution.

    Venezuela1993.png

    Chávez had ventured forth to rebel-run Mexico to try and carve out for himself a little patch of power, and had died for his troubles. But he would be far from the only Zapatista to suffer such a fate. On October 6, 1993, Arturo Albores Velasco, Governor of the State of Zapata, was shot in the back five times in the state’s de facto capital of Venustiano Carranza. [1] Life had been pretty tough for Governor Albores ever since the Battle of San Cristóbal a year and a half before—even though the Zapatistas had won, the Battle had ravaged the city of San Cristóbal, which up until then had been the main hub of Albores’s OCEZ-CNPA faction and his strongest base of political support. Rival factions, OCEZ-Centro and CIOAC, had remained in control the State’s Congress, blocking most of Albores’s attempts to make any effective use of the governorship. His efforts to promote indigenous culture had initially been successful (Albores’s artistic workshop, the Taller de Expresión Artistica Popular, recorded hundreds of songs and oral traditions in the Chol, Tsotsil, Mame and Kanjobal languages and produced paintings which now hang in museums from Bilbao to Buenos Aires). [2] But Albores’s leadership was called seriously into question after the Mexican Army launched a renewed offensive in June and recaptured dozens of Zapatista communities. His attempts to organize a new round of peace talks with the Bartlett administration went nowhere, and yet they deeply angered his anti-peace factional enemies. After Albores was shot, OCEZ-Centro and CIOAC vigorously denied all involvement in his assassination, blaming it instead on DFS assassins, but that certainly didn’t stop gun battles from erupting between rival State Congressmen for weeks afterward.

    Nevertheless, Albores’s death had a negligible impact outside Carranza. For the previous two years, the Zapata state government had been too paralyzed by factional gridlock to do anything worthwhile, and virtually all the individual municipalities were self-governing and self-sufficient in every meaningful way. Many communities—especially those under siege by the Mexican Army—had bigger things to worry about than the internal affairs of a state government which they had never trusted or wanted in the first place. In the wake of Albores’s death, each of the major factions tried to take control of the governorship, but none could persuade a majority of the bitterly fractured State Congress to appoint its leader as provisional governor. As weeks went by with no resolution, many legislators began calling on the ELM to take over the state and form a military government, but Subcomandante Marcos adamantly refused, stating that the ELM had no place in the internal politics of the state. Finally, after two months of fruitless partisan wrangling, the Congress appointed a governor whose sole allegiance lay not with a faction, but with God: Samuel Ruiz García, the long-serving Bishop of San Cristóbal de las Casas.

    Appointed in 1959, Bishop Ruiz was a progressive prelate who sympathized with the poor and oppressed indigenous people of southern Mexico. A staunch liberation theologist, he saw the Catholic Church as a means to help the Mayans build for themselves “a new society, structured on justice and fraternity”. To that end, since 1960, the Diocese of San Cristóbal under Ruiz’s direction had trained up a whole new generation of catechists, deacons and lay preachers, and sent them out to indigenous communities all over northeastern Chiapas to spread La Palabra de Dios, the Word of God. But rather than simply teaching indigenous people the “correct” interpretation of the Bible, these clergymen encouraged them to methodically discuss and reflect upon the problems facing their communities, and use their own understanding of the holy scripture to develop concrete solutions to those issues. This idea of tijwanej (“to bring out what’s in another’s heart” in Tsotsil), of helping the Indianas find divine guidance within themselves rather than imposing on them from the outside, inspired a powerful civic and political awakening among the indigenous people of Chiapas, laying the groundwork for what would eventually become the Zapatista movement. [3] Twenty years later, Ruiz’s army of 8,000 catequistas was well-known and respected in every village and ejido from Simojovel to Comitán. Almost 90% were indigenous themselves, and most of them had mastered multiple indigenous languages, a skill which made them important intermediaries between villages dominated by different ethnicities. That made them a vital force of peacekeeping and moderation amid the endless factional struggles that defined Zapatista politics. And when Ruiz was appointed governor, the catequistas became, for all intents and purposes, the Zapatista civil service. While the ELM worked to free villages under siege by the Army, priests and deacons under Governor Ruiz’s careful direction embarked on seven-hour treks up craggy mountainsides to bring them letters, medicine and food supplies to the besieged residents. Usually, officers would let the clerics pass through their cordons in exchange for little more than a bribe; when the Diocese was running low on cash, the more bold-hearted priests would simply walk past the Army’s blockade, confident that no good Mexican soldier would dare shoot a man of God.

    SiegeOfPolho.jpeg


    Zapatista children play with an unwilling soldier during the siege of Oventic municipality. The Zapatista communities proved remarkable resilient during the months of siege, even despite critical shortages of food and medicine that pushed them nearly to the brink of collapse.

    Despite these new developments, Manuel Bartlett was much too busy to pay attention to the Zapatistas. His time as President of Mexico was entering its final year, and would soon come time for Bartlett to exercise the time-honored tradition of dedazo (“finger-tap”) and handpick a member of his inner circle as his successor. Bartlett thought long and hard about whom to nominate for the presidential election, which was to be held in August of 1994. One strong contender was Government Secretary Carlos Hank González, who had decades of experience in politics and government, and, as a fierce PRI hardliner, could be trusted to defend the sacred principles of the Mexican Revolution. But Hank also had one crippling flaw—his father had been an immigrant from Germany, and the Constitution required that both of the President’s parents be native-born Mexicans. It would be easy enough to get rid of this requirement through a Constitutional amendment, but Bartlett felt that such a change would be disrespectful to the nationalist legacy of the Revolution. Also, Hank was nearing his seventieth birthday, and Bartlett felt that Mexico needed a more youthful leader to guide it into the new millennium. He soon found the perfect candidate: Elba Esther Gordillo, his Secretary of Labor. Esther Gordillo was a shrewd and accomplished politician, having served as President of the Chamber of Deputies and head of the National Teachers’ Union until Bartlett named her as his Labor Secretary in 1991. Esther Gordillo had served adeptly and ably in her role, helping Bartlett privatize many state-owned businesses by smoothing things over with the unions and preventing a new round of strikes. She also had considerable symbolic appeal: the most recent former Labor Secretary to serve as President, Adolfo López Mateos, was still held in high esteem 35 years after his death, and Esther Gordillo would surely attract favorable comparisons. And, best of all, she was a woman! Bartlett was sure that by naming Esther as the PRI nominee, he would not only capture an overwhelming majority of the female vote, but would cement his place in history as an enlightened progressive who had helped elect Mexico’s first-ever female head of state.

    gordillo_historia_16.jpg


    Although she had displayed a sharp political acumen as Secretary Labor, Elba Esther Gordillo’s shrewd intelligence did not translate well into campaign charisma. Those who heard Esther Gordillo speak found her unengaging and disingenuous, and she had trouble whipping up the traditional PRI fervor at her rallies.

    In late November, Bartlett revealed his choice of successor to the PRI’s most venerated elders, who quickly ordained Esther Gordillo as their party’s nominee. But her official destape, or “unveiling”, to the public was overshadowed when Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, an opposition senator from Mexico City, announced on December 5, 1993 that he would be running for president as an independent candidate. President Bartlett was surprised at the announcement—though he had turned against the PRI in recent years, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo (himself a former President of the PRI and one-time contender for the party’s presidential nomination) was still a priísta at heart, Bartlett was certain of it. Surely Muñoz Ledo had some sort of hidden agenda; Bartlett initially considered trying to buy him off with a cabinet position or ambassadorship. In the end, though, Bartlett decided to let Muñoz Ledo continue his campaign because it would allow him to shut out the National Action Party, which had been building up its organizational strength in the north, and had even come uncomfortably close to poaching a few governorships. Bartlett had already been looking for an excuse to ban the PAN from contesting the presidential election, and Muñoz Ledo’s candidacy would allow him to do so while still at least pretending to give voters a free choice.

    Indeed, on the surface this election seemed near-identical to almost every single one that had come before it. But to the old timers, to the people who had been watching the PRI conduct its electoral business for decades and knew what a “normal” presidential election looked like, this one was different. In elections past, when the PRI presidential candidate rolled into town on a campaign stop, he’d strut down the street with a huge grin and a squadron of suit-clad bodyguards, shaking hands and kissing babies as he went. Admirers of all ages would flock from miles around to see him in the flesh, screaming with excitement at their community’s fleeting moment in the spotlight. He would give his speeches in auditoriums and gymnasiums stuffed far beyond capacity with thousands of supporters, some hauled in by their union bosses, others attracted by promises of free beer and sandwiches, and the rest compelled by the sheer, multigenerational force of party loyalty. But when Elba Esther Gordillo marched down the street on her way to a speaking engagement, the people would jeer and whistle at her from the sidewalks, and when she arrived at the venue, often as not, half the seats would be empty. For millions of voters, the generational ties that had bound them to the PRI through crisis after crisis had bent, frayed and finally snapped under the weight of Manuel Bartlett’s excesses, and now his designated heiress was getting hung out to dry; After every desperate attempt to attract crowds to Esther Gordillo’s rallies failed, her staff eventually started busing in the most fervent and dedicated príistas from other cities and, sometimes, other states (one campaign event in Zacatecas attracted so few locals that Esther Gordillo’s campaign manager, Liébano Sáenz, brought in two hundred PRI ward heelers from Mazatlán, over 500 kilometers away).

    But when Porfirio Muñoz Ledo went out campaigning, it was different. As per President Bartlett’s strict orders, Televisa and the PRI-friendly newspapers gave Muñoz Ledo about as much airtime as they would normally devote to Jay Leno’s newest hernia. And yet, somehow, everywhere he went, the people seemed to know him. Some remembered him from 1988, when he’d been the only PRI politician of any stature to back Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas for the presidency, even though it meant giving up all his power and spending six long years locked in the political doghouse. Others remembered how, for the entirety of Manuel Bartlett’s sexenio, he had been the leading (and, at times, the only) voice of reason in the PRI-dominated federal Congress. For those with short memories, word of mouth made up the difference: this guy is on our side, said friends to friends, sisters to brothers, sons to fathers, and daughters to mothers. Wherever Muñoz Ledo’s campaign took him, thousands—sometimes tens of thousands—of people would come and listen not with admiration, but with hope: a doubtful, skeptical hope that this baby-faced ex-President of the PRI might actually be capable of building a future for their country. And what he said, at least, did not disappoint that hope. While Elba Esther Gordillo, with her Chanel dresses and facelift-assisted smile (some voters had given her the mildly misogynistic moniker of Señora Sephora for her obsession with luxury brands and cosmetics) spun long, empty yarns about the glorious legacy of the Revolution, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo looked out upon the masses and talked to them straight. I see your pain, he said in his deep, thundering baritone. I know the system. I want to change it, I know how to change it, and, if you elect me, I will change it.

    PMLCrowd.jpg


    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s promises to reinvest in social welfare programs, democratize the labor movement, and reestablish civil liberties resonated well with Mexico’s impoverished and oppressed, who were eager to embrace any candidate who might bring an end to the corrupt, sixty-year reign of the PRI.

    Esther Gordillo’s campaign was faltering at the bottom as well as at the top. In campaigns past, welfare agencies, public utilities, and other fertile founts of PRI patronage would throw open their doors to Mexico’s poor, lavishing them with all sorts of favors and goodies—everything from sacks of rice and Portland cement to washing machines and underground telephone lines—in exchange for their votes. This vast, intricate vote-buying machine had allowed the PRI to rack up Stalinesque landslides in every election for sixty years, and made the rural and urban poor into the most dependable voting bloc in the PRI coalition. But by 1994, Manuel Bartlett and his predecessors had ripped so many parts out of the machine that it was violently rattling off its hinges. The welfare agencies, gutted by Carlos Salinas’s budget cuts and then squeezed almost dry by Bartlett’s obsession with enlarging the security budget, could barely afford to hand out business cards, let alone washing machines. Most of the big public utilities had been privatized during Bartlett’s great government clearance sale in 1991, and the billionaires who now owned them were unenthusiastic about the idea of giving away their services for free to millions of voters.

    In years past, these obstacles would have been offset by poor Mexicans’ knee-jerk, generational loyalty to the PRI. But by 1994, this goodwill had almost completely evaporated. Carlos Salinas’s systematic dismantling of the Mexican welfare state had left millions of poor voters with the impression that the PRI no longer gave a damn about their problems, and Manuel Bartlett’s aggressive use of physical force against even the faintest whisper of dissent disgusted those who remembered the murders of Celeste Batel and Cardinal Posadas Ocampo. The PRI had an emergency reserve for situations like this—a secret, discretionary fund, controlled by the president and containing almost four billion dollars, which the party had set aside specifically for campaign purposes—but when President Bartlett reached into this fund to boost Esther Gordillo’s campaign, he was shocked to discover that almost all of the money had somehow vanished since 1990 (former President Raúl Salinas, sixteen countries into a two-year world tour on his $253 million mega-yacht, was too busy touring mansions in New Zealand to return Bartlett’s calls).

    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s campaign, on the other hand, was running like a well-oiled machine. Since 1989, the PAN, largely under the direction of human rights activist Sergio Aguayo, had constructed a formidable network of canvassers and campaign volunteers stretching all across the northern border states. And when President Bartlett banned the PAN from fielding a presidential candidate of their own, that network put its energies squarely behind Muñoz Ledo's campaign (Muñoz Ledo had already agreed with PAN officials that, if elected, he would incorporate several high-ranking panistas into his cabinet). As the hot desert spring wore on, teams of volunteers under Aguayo’s studious management piled into old Jeeps and Chevys and drove out to campaign for Muñoz Ledo in the isolated villages of the vast Sierra Madre. Meanwhile, all throughout April and May, members of the Frente Autentico de Trabajo—the federation of independent labor unions led by Julia Quiñónez in Ciudad Acuña—were canvassing for Muñoz Ledo in every border city from Tijuana to Matamoros. Dozens of independent unions were also being formed in the Federal District, and their members campaigned for Muñoz Ledo not only in Mexico City’s sixteen densely-populated boroughs, but also in the remote municipalities of Guerrero, Michoacán and Oaxaca, where the candidate’s promises to reinvest in social welfare and reform the ejido system played very well with the region’s impoverished coffee farmers.

    Misa.png


    Priests had been inserting subtle anti-government messages into their sermons ever since the murder of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo in 1993, and after Porfirio Muñoz Ledo began his presidential candidacy, Sunday morning Mass became an important focal point for his campaign. Muñoz Ledo’s campaign manager, Jorge Castañeda (himself a future President), would remark in 2011 that “the whole campaign was run out of Church basements and backrooms”.

    Under normal circumstances, these bold campaign volunteers would be harassed at every turn by security and police forces. Indeed, President Bartlett had ordered the DFS to disrupt and harass the Muñoz Ledo campaign as much as they possibly could. But, by 1994, most DFS agents were busy with much bloodier matters. In early 1993, the DFS had launched a dazzlingly successful campaign against the Tijuana Cartel, decapitating the syndicate and expelling its remnants from Tijuana while Americans just over the border looked on, impressed and amazed. [4] But no sooner was the Tijuana Cartel driven out than Miguel Caro Quintero’s Sonora boys rolled into town, picking up right where the Tijuanitos had left off. And while one half of the DFS stayed behind in Chihuahua with the Juárez Cartel, the other half joined Caro Quintero in Tijuana to share in the spoils of his lucrative business. But this arrangement would not hold for long. In October of 1993, a pair of Chilean businessmen, Gustavo Fring and Max Arciniega, approached Miguel Caro Quintero (whose syndicate had practically cornered the market on meth) in an attempt to persuade him to distribute a new variety of methamphetamine they had developed. When Caro laughed them off, Fring and Arciniega turned instead to Amado Carrillo Fuentes, the leader of the Juárez Cartel, who knew a good opportunity when he saw one and immediately pounced on the offer.

    By the end of the year, the Juárez Cartel (with the dutiful aid of Governor Miguel Lerma in Chihuahua) was selling hundreds of pounds of meth every month and cutting a serious hole in the Sonora Cartel’s profits. Relations between the two cartels quickly frosted over; Caro angrily asked Carrillo to stop interfering with his business, and Carrillo told Caro that he’d had his chance with the new product, and if he didn’t like it, he could pound sand. Caro didn’t like that answer. In February of 1994, a northbound shipment of Carrillo’s meth was ambushed and the decapitated corpse of the driver left to molder in the Chihuahuan desert. Five days later, one of Caro’s subcomandantes was blown to fiery bits by a car bomb in Ensenada. Six days after that, gunmen under Caro’s command stormed one of Carrillo’s meth kitchens and burned it to the ground with the cooks locked inside. Finally, on March 5, Miguel Caro Quintero himself was ambushed while his convoy of armored Jeeps rolled through Nogales, resulting in twenty-one deaths: seven civilians, two of Caro’s personal bodyguards, and twelve DFS agents—most of them killed by their supposed comrades-in-arms.

    For all that they’d been Manuel Bartlett’s personal army in 1989, by 1994, the DFS was for all intents and purposes the paramilitary wing of the drug trade, and every individual agent’s loyalties lay with whichever cartel he’d happened to shack up with. After Caro Quintero just barely escaped from Nogales with his life and committed his own DFS forces to a full-scale retaliation campaign against the Juárez Cartel, the federal agency found itself split on opposite sides of a rapidly deteriorating bloodbath. So, when Manuel Bartlett nicely asked the DFS in May if it could please interfere just a little bit with Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s presidential campaign, he found that most DFS agents were too busy slaughtering each other to care about politics (Bartlett asked the Army if it could fill in where the DFS fell short, but every general seemed to have an excuse for why he just couldn’t spare the manpower).

    ElChapoPedostache.jpeg


    The war that erupted between the Sonora Cartel and the Juárez Cartel in April of 1994 fit into a context of violence and bloodshed affecting Mexico’s narcotic underworld. Since being driven off their native territory in 1993, the Tijuana Cartel under the aggressive Ramón Arellano Félix had waged a vicious war against the rival Sinaloa Cartel, culminating in the creatively brutal slaying of its leader, Joaquín Guzmán (also known as “El Chapo” for his short stature).

    Still, even as his entire security apparatus collapsed in on itself, President Bartlett remained confident that Elba Esther Gordillo would win with the election in a typical PRI landslide. The press remained obligingly silent on Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s candidacy, and throughout the entire campaign Elba Esther Gordillo barely even acknowledged that she had an opponent, aside from endless repeating her zinger that he would bring about a new Porfiriato (referring to the 35-year dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz). Word of mouth was powerful, but on its own, it could only go so far; without some degree of coverage by Televisa and the major newspapers, Muñoz Ledo would be hard-pressed to reach a majority of Mexicans and break the PRI’s stranglehold on political discourse.

    On May 29, 1994, the international press would give Muñoz Ledo the biggest gift of his political career.
    __________
    [1] In OTL, Albores was shot in the back eight times on March 6, 1989. Say what you want about Mexican assassins, they know how to get the job done.
    [2] The Taller de Expression Artistica Popular existed in OTL, and indeed it predates the point of divergence. Sadly, though, nothing it produced ever went to a museum as far as I’m aware.
    [3] To any Catholics seeking proof that the Church can indeed do great things under the right circumstances, look no further. Ruiz's army of catequistas provided an important spark for the Zapatista movement's strong emphasis on civic engagement. You can read a brief account of the Diocese's efforts here.
    [4] See Part Nineteen.
     
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    Narrative Interlude #9
  • Parque Bicentenario
    Mexico City, Federal District
    March 21, 1994
    11:15 AM

    Ernesto Zedillo shivered with agitation as he walked along the unkempt pathway. Shoulders bunched up almost to his ears, gaze set straight ahead to avoid the sinister eyes he was sure were watching him from behind every trash can and tree branch, Zedillo could feel his nerves dancing the zapateado on the back of his neck as he adjusted his arm, keeping the leather-bound binder carefully concealed beneath his blazer.

    He was really worrying himself too much. With his graying hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and near-constant look of befuddlement, the rabbity economist was probably one of the least conspicuous men in North America. Besides, Mexico City’s finest had far more profitable things to worry about than an ex-cabinet secretary taking a midday stroll through the park. And, yet, Zedillo couldn’t help but fear that his every step struck the ground with enough force to shake the Earth below it, alerting the entire capital to the fact that he carried in his hand the dynamite that would blow the corrupt edifice of PRI power to smithereens and bring the entire system crashing down in massive a ball of flame.

    As he walked, he lamented just how far he’d seen the PRI fall over the course of his career. Until age fourteen, Zedillo had been a humble mechanic’s son from Mexicali, just another boy adrift in the wayward poverty of Mexico’s outermost fringes. Then, the system, recognizing talents Zedillo himself hadn’t even noticed, had plucked him out of the rabble and whisked him off to Mexico City, putting him through high school, the National Polytechnic Institute, and Yale’s Department of Economics on full scholarships. In his time at the Central Bank and the Budget Secretariat, he’d seen more than his share of partisan sleaze, but the politicos had typically let him and his colleagues do their work without too much hassle. By now, though, the PRI had degenerated to such an extent that it was unrecognizable. The system had always had a kleptocratic edge to it, but now, the average priísta seemed to have no other objectives in life but to gorge himself on public resources. The PRI had never been particularly kind to the opposition, but now, it seemed that all independent political organization was punishable by imprisonment, while the faintest whisper of dissent meant a swift visit from one of Secretary Hank’s OIP goon squads. And while the seedier elements of el sistema had always had nebulous ties to the drug trade, these days Zedillo found himself wondering whether the Government Secretariat even bothered sending DFS agents paychecks anymore.

    Zedillo had hoped he could forget his disgust with the system by resigning from the Cabinet. But he knew from his old colleagues at the Budget Secretariat—his old subordinates, really, though Zedillo didn’t like to think in those terms—that the depravity of the system had reached heights that were impossible to ignore. Despite Manuel Bartlett’s best efforts to conceal it, his Faustian bargain with the drug cartels had become common knowledge among the high-ranking bureaucrats (someone had to actually manage the government’s ultra-top-secret accounts, after all), and when Zedillo first caught wind of it, he’d refused to believe it. For all that Manuel Bartlett was a ruthless, domineering authoritarian, the man had always seemed to truly believe he was acting in the best interests of Mexico. For Bartlett to knowingly, consciously barter away the country's national security to a cabal of murderous drug lords was simply unthinkable. Zedillo had pleaded with his former coworkers for proof, and, out of respect, they’d handed it over. And as the former Budget Secretary pored over the thick sheaf of charts, rubrics, and bank statements, he had gradually forced himself to accept that the regime’s most generous supporters were international criminals.

    As terrifying as this truth was, Zedillo knew better than to expect his fellow bureaucrats to do anything about it. Not because they were fierce, partisan loyalists—indeed, after enduring four straight years of outrageous graft and fiscal depravity, many had told Zedillo point blank that they would be voting for Porfirio Muñoz Ledo. But however these men had come to feel about the system, they were still part of it. Some had been born into it, the sons of well-to-do families whose UNAM acceptance letters had come enclosed with the thank-you letters from local PRI fundraising committees. Others, like Zedillo, had worked their way up, scrimming and scrounging for years until the established powers finally noticed them and gave them a spot in the hierarchy. But wherever they came from, for these men to betray the PRI’s darkest secrets—not just by whispering them into each others’ ears, but by releasing them to the world—would mean undermining the order to which they had devoted their entire professional lives. Now, if someone else were to expose those secrets, they certainly wouldn’t rush to defend the system, nor would they weep for its demise. But neither would they go out of their way to risk their careers or their reputations. These weren’t men of action, they were men of reaction.

    For twenty years, Zedillo had been the exact same way. The mindset had stayed with him even after he left the cabinet; the thought of single-handedly torpedoing the Mexican political system shook every bone in Zedillo’s instinctively conservative body, and when he’d first received the incriminating binder, he had kept it hidden under his pillow for months, fearing the enormous repercussions if its contents escaped to public scrutiny. But the great, imposing ziggurat of PRI hegemony was best viewed from the outside, and as an insider-turned-outsider, Zedillo had been forced to accept that some systems are worth destroying, no matter what sort of Shelleyan monster takes their place.

    Zedillo was suddenly brought back from his ruminations when he saw the woman sitting on the appointed park bench, casually clad in shorts and a white muslin shirt. She turned to look in his direction and he did everything he could to avoid returning her gaze; as his feet brought him closer, the binder he still carried beneath his jacket seemed to grow heavier and heavier with every step. Finally, as he prepared to pass the bench, he undid his button, stiffened up and prepared to make the drop.
    __________

    Xanic von Bertrab bristled as she saw the man out of the corner of her eye. She turned to look, but she could barely believe her eyes. Was he…was he wearing a suit? To the park? In thirty-degree weather?

    Well, at least she knew for sure that it was him. Come to think of it, now that she was actually looking at the guy, she had a tough time imagining him sashaying down the street in jeans and a camiseta.

    The leather-bound object poking out from underneath the man’s jacket snapped Xanic back into focus. As the man approached the bench and opened his blazer, Xanic calmly turned to face forward. The man passed and the binder fell out and struck the bench with a thud loud enough to alert anyone who was paying attention; luckily, no one was paying attention. Xanic quickly scooped up the binder and deposited it into her lap while the man buttoned up his jacket and scurried along down the path. Xanic waited until he had disappeared around a corner, then got up and started back in the opposite direction.

    She couldn’t hide the binder under a jacket, so instead she held it close to her chest like a sacred talisman. If the mysterious, suited man had told the truth during their phone conversation, then the information in this binder, when paired with the river of muck Lydia and Xanic had raked up in their months-long hunt for evidence, would be enough to shatter the international community’s trust in Manuel Bartlett, crush Señora Sephora’s chances of winning the presidential election, and quite possibly set the PRI at war with itself. But only if the entire world could be made to see it. And that meant getting it back to the two-room rathole Xanic and Lydia rented quickly, safely and without any distractions. So, when Xanic exited the park and got onto the street, her first and only priority was keeping the binder safe. But with every step, it seemed to grow hotter and heavier in her hands. She was holding what might end up being the biggest single scoop in Mexican political history. How could she reasonably expect herself not to immediately tear it open and start devouring its contents? Every second she resisted the urge was a singular agony.

    For perhaps seven minutes, Xanic withstood the compulsion to stop and read and read and read until her eyeballs burst from the strain. But resistance was futile. Finally overtaken by impatience, Xanic ducked into an empty alleyway, leaned against a mud-brick wall, and opened to the first page…


    Mexico City, Federal District
    April 5, 1994
    3:03 PM

    “So you will support us?”

    General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo’s bald head was shiny enough on its own, but the globules of sweat which had emerged on his scalp in response the stuffiness of the room and the glare of the overhanging light made it even more reflective. As he nodded his response to Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s question, little pinpricks of light danced and bounced off his head, magnified through the wide lenses of his coke-bottle glasses.

    General Vinicio Santoyo Feria, seated beside General Gutiérrez, spoke up. “If, after the presidential election, you need us to ensure a peaceful and harmonious transfer of power,” Santoyo said, “we’ll be there.” General Alfredo Navarro Lara, seated to the left of his colleagues, signaled his agreement.

    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo returned Navarro’s nod. “I sincerely appreciate your commitment to democratic principles,” he replied, more than a bit disingenuously. “Now,” he began, clearing his throat, “what will you gentlemen be expecting in return? Federal appointments, perhaps? If I do win the presidency, I’ll certainly need men of honor and integrity to run the Defense Secretariat.” That single criterion alone would have excluded all three Generals from government service, but beggars couldn’t be choosers.

    Not that it mattered anyway. “Oh, fuck no,” said General Gutiérrez as the other generals physically recoiled at the thought of that much work. “All we want is for you to end this stupid war against the carranclanes down south. Send us up north where the narcos are.” Porfirio’s jaw tightened as he spared a glance to the left. Malcolm (or whatever the CIA operative’s real name was) was watching tufts of smoke twist and climb their way out of the end of his cigarette. Had he caught the hidden meaning?

    If he hadn’t, he would in a moment. Ending the war against the Zapatistas would be no trouble at all, but giving the Army free license to fraternize with the cartels was going to be a lot more problematic. Still, Porfirio had known this was coming. The loyalties of these fine men in uniform lay with the highest bidder, and if the opposition presidential candidate wanted their support, he’d better be prepared to shell out for it.

    “You’d like to fight the drug syndicates?” Porfirio asked, grinning in faux admiration. “How very noble of you. Naturally, I assume you’d prefer a free hand in dealing with them—no pesky bureaucrats breathing down your necks about little trivialities and technicalities, right?” That got Malcolm’s attention. Nothing had moved but his eyes, but they were drilling a hole into Porfirio’s skull.

    General Santoyo cleared his throat. “Well, of course, senador, if we were to speculate in any legitimate business ventures during our service,” he replied as the trail of smoke from Malcolm’s cigarette tapered off, “we hope that your government would respect those interests.”

    For several years in the mid-1980s, General Santoyo had been Chief of Staff to the Defense Secretariat, serving as the Army’s official liaison to the press and earning a reputation as a smooth talker. Then, in 1985, with the drug trade rapidly spiraling out of control, Miguel de la Madrid had transferred General Santoyo to the nation’s narcotics capital of Guadalajara to show how serious he was about solving the problem. After four years spent snorting coke and cavorting with prostitutes alongside Mexico’s best-renowned drug lords, Santoyo’s strenuous devotion to Army work had been replaced by an addiction to the luxuries of the high life. But beneath the materialistic shell, the way with words remained.

    Porfirio shifted in his chair and stole a glance back at Malcolm, who was now staring at the three men in uniform with extreme suspicion. Now came the tough part. Porfirio needed to give the generals what they wanted, so that he could count on their support in case things got ugly on election day. But if he wanted to have anything resembling an effective presidency, he’d also need a whole lot of goodwill from the big, not-always-friendly giant up north, which was personified in this room by Malcolm. If he gave these uniformed greedbags too much freedom to putz around with drug lords, Washington’s trust in him would be poisoned before he even stepped into Los Pinos. Porfirio had already decided how he was going to thread this needle—he just had to pray that it would work.

    He sucked in a breath. “Of course, General,” he said, soothingly. “You can rest assured my administration will respect your property rights.” He resisted the urge to check in on Malcolm, who was surely glaring with horror. “Yours,” he continued, “and no one else’s.”

    General Navarro furrowed his brow. Porfirio spoke on, swapping out the smooth, euphemistic tone for flat, unadorned matter-of-factness.

    “If I win, you three can do whatever the hell you want. I’ll set the Army loose on the cartels for a while, let you and your underlings fool around with the traffickers, buy your vacation homes and hold your coke-fueled orgies.” Malcolm was probably balling his fist tight enough to bend his cigarette in half. Hopefully, the next part would cool the CIA envoy’s passions.

    “But you all know I can’t let that go on forever,” Porfirio continued. “I won’t stand for it, and our fine friends up north,” he nodded to Malcolm, “certainly won’t stand for it. A year or two at most, and the knives are going to come out. Now, everyone in this room will be safe—I swear to God that as long as I’m President, you three can extort and abuse and profiteer until your hearts give out. But don’t go around telling all your underlings that they have the same privileges. When federal agents pull Captain Pepito out from under a pile of hookers with his nose covered in cocaine, don’t expect me to come running to the rescue.”

    Silent air as the generals took in the terms of the offer, exchanging a cryptic, hushed series of whispers, shrugs and nods. Porfirio, meanwhile, finally spared a glance at Malcolm. He was the picture of serenity, watching the generals murmur in perfect quietude as the trail from his cigarette thinned and died off. After a minute or two of whispering, General Santoyo turned back to Porfirio and spoke up. “Senator,” he began, “we have considered the virtues of your proposal, and they are numerous. But there’s one part of it that we can’t bring ourselves to countenance. If you maintain the power to effectively prosecute lesser officers, what assurance do we have that you won’t turn that power on us once your authority is secure?”

    Dammit.

    Well, it was a good point. Porfirio rested his elbows on the table and clasped his hands, using his thumbs as a makeshift chin rest. The silence hung hot in the cramped room, and to escape the generals’ probing gazes, Porfirio dared another glance at Malcolm. His brow was bent in contemplation. Was he—was he going to say something?

    Shit. Porfirio started to panic. If he let this CIA spook dictate his policy to the men whose support he needed desperately, what reason would they have to suspect he was anything more than George Bush’s puppet? What reason would they have to respect him or his promises?

    Malcolm’s lips parted. He drew in a breath and readied his vocal cords. Overtaken by impulse, Porfirio slashed through the humid silence, almost yelling: “HOW ABOUT THIS!”

    The generals flinched. Malcolm stopped short. Porfirio tightened his jaw.

    Well, he’d have to say something now. Hopefully it didn’t come out too crazy.

    “How about this,” he repeated, considerably calmer this time. Then he launched into an improvised spiel. “If I win, then I make you three my drug czars. Undersecretaries of Defense or something like that, or maybe I’ll make a whole new secretariat and put you in charge. Either way, it’ll pay well.” As every new facet of the plan revealed itself, Porfirio noticed each of the generals becoming visibly more excited.

    “You’ll all preside over an unprecedented decline in cartel activity—that won’t be hard at all, since Caro and Carrillo are too busy killing each other at the moment to do any business, and it’ll take at least a year or two for their henchmen to pick up all the pieces.” The words were coming out as fast as Porfirio could think of them. “As for the power, do whatever you want with it. Skim as much off the traffickers you can, do all the cocaine your shriveled old livers can handle. I’ll even send you on business trips if you want—five-star suites at the Washington Hilton, all on the government’s tab.” General Navarro’s eyes lit up. The words were spilling out so fast now, Porfirio was struggling to avoid tripping over his own tongue.

    “Then, in a year or two, you’ll all retire with honor. Buy yourselves retirement homes—I mean, hell, buy yourselves retirement compounds—burn any file that makes you nervous about incrimination, and ride off into the sunset with your trophy wives and military pensions.” Porfirio paused for a breath and a grin. Wrapping up his pitch, he finally permitted himself to slow down: “Power. Prestige. Generous salaries, and not too much work”, he recapped, holding up his hand and ticking off a finger for each perk. What do you think?”

    Porfirio expected another thoughtful pause, but there was none.

    “We’ll do it!” Exclaimed General Navarro with childlike enthusiasm. The hasty nods of the other two officers confirmed that the sentiment was unanimous. Malcolm was characteristically silent, but his widened eyes betrayed a sense of humbled shock and awe.

    It was only then that Porfirio Muñoz Ledo realized what exactly he had said to the assembled officers. He had just auctioned off a position of immense power and influence to men he knew were rotten to the core, in exchange for political support. Would Manuel Bartlett even stoop that low?

    Porfirio reached out to shake General Navarro’s outstretched hand. Yes, Manuel Bartlett most certainly would stoop this low. And if he did, it would be for no other reason than to maintain his desperate grip on power. Porfirio, on the other hand, had made this deal with devil because the country required it of him. Mexico simply could not take another six years of PRI despotism, and so Porfirio simply had to win the presidential election. And to do that, he had to shake hands with crooked, greedy generals. It was unsavory, it was dodgy, and it was disreputable. But it was for the good of Mexico, and that outweighed all else.

    Right?

    Porfirio froze mid-handshake.

    Bartlett would say the exact same thing.

    That much, Porfirio knew for sure. Embarrassing as it was to admit, Manuel Bartlett and Porfirio Muñoz Ledo went way back. Despite the vast political gulf which divided the two men today, there had been a time when they had both been young, rising stars in the PRI hierarchy in search of alliances and allegiances. They had never been particularly close, but they’d rubbed shoulders plenty of times, and over the decades, Porfirio had gotten to know Bartlett just about well enough to make personal judgements. Manolito’s fanatic, almost religious devotion to the ruling party had always seemed just a little bit…out there. Yet it had always seemed rooted in the firm belief that eternal, unchallenged PRI hegemony was the best-case scenario for Mexico. Sure, every one of Bartlett’s corrupt decisions was designed specifically to preserve and perpetuate his own unrivaled dominance. But behind Bartlett’s Nietzschean will to power, Porfirio realized, there lay a sincere, earnest conviction that by trampling over free speech, spitting on democracy and locking up everyone who looked at him funny, he was doing what was right for Mexico. Bartlett was wrong, of course. But then, how did Porfirio know that he was right?

    General Navarro, slightly confused by the stiffness in the opposition senator’s arm, nevertheless shook it and passed it on to his colleague. Under his breath, Porfirio sighed. Well, he didn’t know. He couldn’t know, not in complete and total certainty. All he could do was believe in his heart of hearts that his being elected president would indeed be the best thing for Mexico, and hope with equal might that history ended up agreeing with him.


    Mexico City, Federal District
    April 12, 1994
    3:03 PM


    Sam Dillon, chief correspondent for The New York Times’s Mexico City bureau, shut the binder and looked back across the table.

    “This is…” he trailed off while he rummaged around in his journalistic vocabulary for a suitable adjective.

    “This is fucking huge.” Sam’s wife and co-correspondent, Julia Preston, [1] got it in two.

    Lydia Cacho nodded. “It will be fucking huge, if you convince your editors to print it.”

    Julia nodded in contemplative agreement. “You say you got this from a government employee?” She asked in her slightly-broken Spanish.

    “Not just an employee,” Xanic von Bertrab replied. “A Secretary. Well, a former Secretary. Ernesto Zedillo, he ran the Budget Secretariat for two years under los hermanos Salinas.”

    Julia’s eyes widened. “That certainly helps this,” she noted. “If it came from a small employee of the government, that would be less trusting. But from a former Secretary, that will mean a lot more.”

    “But there is still a problem,” Sam sighed in his considerably more disjointed Spanish. “The banking records you have produced to us here, they are only saying one half of the story. You prove that these bank accounts have been contributing donations to the PRI, yes, and that these accounts are probably being puppeteered by the narcos. But it is not certain completely. Before publishing, we would have to prove this almost until no doubt.”

    Xanic clenched her jaw and looked over at Lydia, who simply stared.

    “Second,” Sam continued, “you do a good job to document that these governors are corrupt in favor of the narcos. And you show that these governors were all appointed by Bartlett after the money transfers were happening. But this does not say that the one thing has caused the other. What is it? Cum hoc ergo propter hoc.” That confused Xanic a little bit (she had never taken a Latin class). “Even if Julia and me give these findings to our editors, I have no guarantee that it will be printed.”

    If she had been paying attention to her husband’s objections from the beginning, Julia probably would have agreed with him. But she hadn’t been. Her mind had been elsewhere—in the dense, sprawling Mexico City suburb of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, whose air was continually poisoned by the garbage-filled sea of sewage which had colonized the adjacent lake bed. While Sam explained the problems with Xanic’s and Lydia’s scoop, Julia had been walking with Alejandra Pérez, an eighteen-year-old native of Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl who saw no point in using civic organization to improve her city’s atmosphere because under the PRI system, “no one in power would pay any attention to us”. As Sam outlined his objections, Julia had been wandering the small mountain town of Santa Catarina Juquila, whose people had been saving up what little money they had for over fifteen years, in hopes of bribing the local PRI bureaucracy into building them the hospital they so desperately needed. [2] And just as Sam was wrapping up his second point, Julia had been interviewing Rosario Ibarra de Piedra, a mother-turned-activist whose only son had disappeared into a prison camp in 1975, and who was still searching for him almost twenty years later despite never having received the slightest shred of answer from any PRI administration.

    When Julia finally roused herself back to the present moment, Sam was finishing up his spiel. “I know this findings are of great importance, but there is a large danger associa—”

    We’ll do it!

    The sudden change in volume made Sam’s heart do a cartwheel.

    “I don’t know how, but we’ll do it! We’ll convince them to put this all in print!” Julia affirmed, breathless. “One way or another, we’ll make sure that before the election is happening, everyone in the world is going to know Manuel Bartlett is a corrupt son of a bitch!”

    Xanic and Lydia smiled in unison. Sam turned and stared at his wife, stunned. He tried to respond, but was cut off once again.

    “I don’t care what you say, Sam, we’re doing this,” Julia informed him in English in the same tone she used when he forgot to bring his dishes to the sink after dinner. “We’re bringing this straight to Max Frankel’s desk and we’ll threatening to resign if he doesn’t print it. I know the scoop has problems, Sam. Every scoop does. But this is way, way too big to start fussing over every little bit of journalistic procedure in the AP handbook. If we want the PRI to lose, we have to break this story. We’re the only ones who can, and if we don’t, then we’ll be leaving an entire nation out to rot!”

    Sam didn’t even bother opening his mouth this time. There was no stopping her now. “Every night for the last six years, you’ve nagged me about how much trouble you have getting to sleep. Well, how in the hell do you expect to get a good night’s sleep ever again in your life if you ignored an opportunity to help overthrow a dictator as vicious as Genghis Khan?”

    Sam sunk back into his chair. He didn’t even bother nodding, he knew what was going to happen.

    Julia turned back to face Lydia and Xanic. She smiled and spoke once more to them in Spanish. “You can depend on us. We will make sure everyone reads your story and knows to see Bartlett and the PRI as just as corrupt as they truly are.”

    Xanic beamed. Lydia beamed even wider and removed the arrows from her eyes, giving Julia the rare honor of being embraced, rather than pierced, by a Cacho stare. Both journalists were overcome by a feeling which washed over them and warmed them right down to the bone: catharsis. A sudden, soothing sense that their untiring efforts over the preceding months—the emotional and physical hunger they’d endured, the countless late nights that far too often bled into early mornings, the endless hours spent scrounging for evidence and chasing tantalizing trails of evidence into pitiful dead ends—had been worth it. That their shared passion for plucking needles of truth from haystacks of deception had at long last paid off. That finally, finally, someone with just the right connections was going to fast-track their mammoth of a scoop to the absolute apogee of global journalism for the entire world to see.

    If only, Xanic and Lydia fretted as one mind, that feeling were strong enough to assure them that it would be enough to swing the election.
    __________

    [1] It’s at this point that I’d like to say a massive thank you to Julia Preston and Sam Dillon. Their book Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy was what got me into Mexico in the first place, and out of every source I’ve used to research this project, it is far and away the one I’ve referenced the most. The book has also given me in-depth character studies of relatively obscure, but extremely unique and talented individuals whose stories I’ve put to good use in this timeline. Hopefully this little tribute here makes up a little bit for the immense service Preston and Dillon have rendered to me and to the English-speaking world by chronicling Mexico’s transition to democracy in an engaging and in-depth way.
    [2] A word about that: in OTL, Santa Catarina Juquila did eventually get its hospital, a twelve-bed clinic which cost $2 million and took seven years to build. It opened on September 27, 1999, and then-President Ernesto Zedillo himself was there to cut the ribbon. Three days later, an earthquake hit, the hospital’s flimsily-constructed walls split right down the middle, injuring ten patients (over $1.7 million of the budget had been siphoned off by corrupt officials), and the building had to be condemned. It’s a pretty illustrative, if very depressing, anecdote about how impoverished Mexicans were hurt by endemic corruption.
     
    Part 22: 1994 Mexican presidential election
  • On April 29, 1994, The New York Times broke a story that tore through Mexico’s political landscape like the earthquake of September 1985 had torn through Mexico’s physical landscape. Using information supplied by an anonymous, formerly high-ranking government official, Times reporters Julia Preston and Sam Dillon (writing on behalf two Mexican journalists whose identities had been concealed) revealed that, in exchange for financial donations from various drug cartels—particularly those headed by Amado Carrillo Fuentes and Miguel Caro Quintero—Mexican President Manuel Bartlett had knowingly appointed corrupt officials as governors of various Mexican states, specifically with the intent of aiding and abetting the drug cartels. The article further charged that Bartlett had turned the DFS into a breeding ground for cartoonish levels of violence and corruption, to the point that it was not so much a security agency as it was a loose, warring confederation of coke-addled mercenaries whose loyalties lay with whichever drug lord paid them the most. In other words, Bartlett had subjected his prerogatives as President to the fickle whims of international crime lords, for no apparent reason aside from political and financial gain.

    First reactions to the article were of disbelief. Even before the story broke, the American people had trusted the Mexican government about as much they trusted O.J. Simpson’s lawyer. But selling off Mexico’s entire national security apparatus to Al Pacino’s character from Scarface? That seemed beyond the pale, even for Manuel Bartlett. Yet, as the Times’s report was substantiated in the international press and confirmed by a hastily-compiled State Department report in June, and as Bartlett’s government seemed incapable of producing any evidence to back up its half-hearted denials, the national mood morphed into an uncontained, fiery rage. Since 1992, the deluge of drugs flowing in from Mexico had scourged American cities and towns and ruined hundreds of thousands of Americans’ lives. And when the American people found out that Manuel Bartlett had not only failed to stop this avalanche, but in fact had exploited it for personal enrichment, they didn’t want measured, diplomatic retribution—they wanted revenge.

    And, for once, the establishment agreed. Though a few Congressmen and senators bowed to pressure from corporations which did business in Mexico, [1] most politicians of both parties were soon racing to see who could come up with the most interesting adjectives with which to condemn Manuel Bartlett’s crimes. The lingering bad taste of the Gulf War meant that a full-scale military intervention was off the table, but everything short of that was fair game. For weeks, Congress debated every possible proposal, from cutting off diplomatic relations to a naval blockade of Mexican ports, until finally settling on something a bit more restrained: sanctions. On June 15, the MEXICO ROGUE STATES Act [2]—passed with near-unanimous support in Congress and signed by President Bush the same day—went into effect. Inspired by the Anti-Apartheid Act of 1986, the MRSA imposed a harsh regime of tariffs and quotas on just about every Mexican import, banned the sale of arms and munitions to Mexico, froze Mexican government assets in the United States, and forbade companies whose boards of directors contained any active members of the PRI from being listed on U.S. stock exchanges. And while U.N. Ambassador Winston Lord could not quite convince the Security Council to do to Mexico what it had done to Iraq three years earlier, twenty-three countries across Europe and the Americas imposed sanctions of their own, both due to pressure from the State Department and sheer horror at Manuel Bartlett’s active role in abetting the drug trade. These measures differed in severity from country to country, but they all had two things in common: all of them went into effect before the Mexican presidential election on August 21, and were to remain in effect only as long as the “criminal regime of the Institutional Revolutionary Party”, as President Bush called it in a speech July, was in place. By creating what amounted to an embargo, Mexico’s largest trading partners were leveraging their economic might to create an embargo on Mexican goods, hoping to embolden Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s presidential campaign and kick Manuel Bartlett and his kleptocratic friends out of power.

    Cisneros1994.png


    Although Senator Henry Cisneros had been Manuel Bartlett’s most fierce and vocal critic in Washington for years, he criticized the international embargo on Mexico, arguing that it would hurt Mexico’s people more than its government. Nevertheless, he voted for the Rogue States Act when it was put before the Senate in May.

    Shocking and damning as this news was, pessimists the world over surmised that Bartlett would bluff, lie, cheat, deny, rig, cover-up, and suppress his way to untouchability, and that his regime founded on fraud and crime would long endure. But they missed one crucial factor—this time, Bartlett had pissed off the billionaires.

    Whether he realized it or not, Manuel Bartlett’s power had always been insured by the tacit support of Mexico’s ultra-ultra-wealthy. That upper crust within the upper crust, the owners of Mexico’s largest conglomerates and corporations, had supported el partido oficial since the 1940s, head-over-heels in love with the stability and protectionism provided by PRI administrations. Even as Miguel de la Madrid and Carlos Salinas’s dismantling of the social safety net incited riots and recessions that were very bad for business, the great corporate magnates continued to throw their weight behind the PRI out of sheer inertia and fear of the alternative. But as Bartlett’s increasingly ludicrous antics alienated country after country and destroyed any chance of an advantageous trade deal, the copper and car magnates began to wonder to themselves whether they were really getting their money’s worth. And after Carrillogate caused almost all of their overseas customers to cut economic ties with Mexico, these shrewd businessmen took a long, hard look at the situation and made a cost-benefit analysis.

    Saturday, July 16, 1994 was a surprising evening for viewers of TV Azteca, a formerly state-owned broadcaster now owned by the magnate Ricardo Salinas Pliego, who also operated a large network of export factories along the U.S. border. [3] Rather than the typical soap opera or poorly-dubbed Jean-Claude van Damme movie, those who tuned in on that night were instead treated to El poder detrás del trono, a two-hour-long documentary which chronicled in vivid detail the political career and rise to power of Manuel Bartlett. Hastily-developed but well-written and masterfully edited (Salinas would later admit to having paid Paramount Pictures over six million dollars to produce it), the film presented Bartlett as a despot of Shakespearean proportions, projecting onto him the most sinister qualities of Brutus, Richard, Claudius and Iago. After a broad overview of Bartlett’s past sins, from his role in the murder of Kiki Camarena in 1985 to his supposed masterminding of the death of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, the film delved deep into the charges leveled against Bartlett by the international community. Through a series of slightly-questionable interviews, dramatic soundtrack choices and editing flourishes, the film eventually concluded that Bartlett had not only struck a corrupt, financial bargain with the cartels to preserve his own power, but had spent the proceeds on sports cars, yachts and Mediterranean mansions. There was little, if any, truth to this last assertion, but its effect on the millions who heard it was undeniable; by the time a furious President Bartlett ordered the film banned from public television, hundreds of thousands of VHS copies had already been sold at open-air tianguis markets everywhere from Tuxtla to Tijuana.

    While Televisa, the main state-affiliated TV broadcaster (owned by the Azcárraga family, which was spectacularly rich but had few interests abroad) remained loyal to the government, TV Azteca’s ratings skyrocketed as it dispensed a continuous stream of anti-PRI content in the weeks leading up to election day—including interviews with Octavio Paz, Carlos Monsiváis and half a dozen other influential academics who denounced the PRI and urged Mexicans not to vote for it. But the hidden war of wealth against Bartlett and the PRI did not confine itself to the visual arts. In the weeks before the presidential election, banking magnate Kamel Nacif Borge saw to it that huge binders loaded with incriminating evidence showed up at newspaper offices in Chihuahua, Guadalajara, Monterrey, Cancún and many other cities, identifying over a dozen PRI governors as puppets of Amado Carrillo Fuentes or Miguel Caro Quintero and willing pawns in the international drug trade. The charges also went went well beyond what the New York Times had revealed in April, containing proof that PRI presidential nominee Elba Esther Gordillo had, while serving as Labor Secretary, accepted hefty bribes from magnates looking to buy up government assets (since Nacif himself had been one such magnate, he had no trouble coming up with this proof). And while newspapers all over the country were putting the sordid details of PRI corruption in print (encouraged to break from self-censorship by the wads of U.S. dollars that came packaged with the evidence), Telmex owner Carlos Slim occupied himself with strictly humanitarian pursuits: paying Mexico’s unemployed—of which there was no shortage as the embargo set in—to pass out flyers, put up posters, and canvass entire neighborhoods for Porfirio Muñoz Ledo.


    policías.jpg


    In the last few weeks before the presidential election, anti-PRI slogans began to show up everywhere in Mexico City, including, suspiciously enough, in the windows of military vehicles. Army spokesmen insisted that these messages were the work of “political vandals” and not at all reflective of the military’s position in the presidential election.

    More cynically-minded historians tend to focus solely on this sudden glut of cash, arguing that the presidential election of 1994 was just a typical case of the moneyed elite guarding their interests. But to take this view is to ignore the very real and impactful actions taken by the common people in the weeks leading up to election day. For the preceding five years, the Mexican people had, by and large, lived in docile fear of the PRI jackboot. Aside from brief, periodic bursts of localized unrest, organized protest had mostly disappeared since 1989. Even as the people’s remaining faith in the PRI was ripped to shreds and public places became forums for increasingly open anti-government chatter, most ordinary Mexicans had declined to take to the streets, resigned to the belief that the PRI’s hold on power was eternal and that open dissent would only invite repression and brutality.

    But the embargo changed everything. As country after country cut economic ties with Mexico, the value of the peso cratered, unemployment leapt overnight, and food prices doubled, tripled, and then quadrupled in less than three weeks. For millions of otherwise-apolitical men and women, their tolerance of PRI excesses ended when they could no longer feed their families, and when they read in their local papers about the full extent of Manuel Bartlett’s vast corruption and found that their wages could barely procure enough beans and corn tortillas to sate their children’s hungry bellies, they decided that enough was enough. By early August, all across Mexico, practically every city was swelling up with protesters. Not ideologues, guerrillas or ward heelers, but millions of schoolteachers, factory workers, farmers, and streetside junk-hawkers who, after five years of silence, were starting to remember how to use their voices.

    And once the people had their voice back, they used it to enormous effect. On July 31, a week after El Diario de Juárez revealed that Chihuahua Governor Miguel Lerma had personally pocketed over $17 million in his corrupt dealings with the cartels, a crowd of 19,000 protesters assembled in the state capital of Chihuahua and overran the governor’s mansion, forcing Governor Lerma to flee the scene a DFS helicopter. On August 3, protesters in the state of Morelos tried to do the same, only to find out that the cartoonishly corrupt governor Jorge Carrillo Olea had already left the state two days earlier (he would be arrested in Costa Rica less than a month later). [4] Only a truly massive Army contingent outside Los Pinos saved President Bartlett from a similar fate during the first weeks of August.

    Bartlett’s immediate instinct was to crush the protests with the same brutality he had used as Government Secretary back in 1988. He soon found, however, that he could not simply call up a few hundred men with guns to crush the demonstrations within an hour. The DFS had tied itself so intimately to the cartels that it no longer functioned as a security organization (or any kind of organization, for that matter). Almost all of the DFS’s manpower was concentrated in Chihuahua, Sonora and Baja California, where individual units were too busy fighting opposite sides of the Caro-Carrillo drug war to heed orders from Mexico City. As the hot, August days ticked on and Mexican streets began to swell with angry men and women with sharp stones and sharper slogans, Bartlett increasingly found himself relying on the Army, which had a suspiciously light touch in dealing with protesters—for some reason, even when Bartlett ordered his generals to rain fire and brimstone onto the protesters, the troops who showed to the protests up didn’t seem to do much more than observe the demonstration and make sure that they didn’t do too much in the way of property damage.

    Zocalo1994.jpg


    By 1994, the radical student network which had provided an organizational foundation for the Army of Mexican Liberation was mostly moribund. However, enough active members remained in Mexico City to organize a 220,000-person, anti-PRI rally in the Zócalo two days before the presidential election.

    Yet, even despite these difficulties, Bartlett remained in denial that the PRI could possibly lose. Right up until the end of July, the President assured himself that, for all their noises of discontentment, the people knew deep down that only el partido oficial was capable of running the country right, and that, come election day, they would flock as they always had to the sole, rightful standard bearer of the Mexican Revolution. But when he finally sat down for a long-overdue meeting with Liébano Sáenz, Elba Esther Gordillo’s campaign manager, he was petrified by what he heard. For one thing, the PRI’s support among organized labor had almost totally disappeared. In decades past, the government-backed unions had been a bedrock of PRI support, supplying millions of votes election after election. By now, though, Bartlett had so thoroughly angered organized labor with his ruthless agenda of privatizations and strikebreaking that most of the powerful unions had no interest whatsoever in cooperating with the partido oficial. The few unions which were still loyal to the PRI (such as the National Teachers’ Syndicate, which Elba Esther Gordillo herself had headed up until she became the Secretary of Labor) were utterly despised by their rank-and-file for their subservience, to the point that their endorsement would do more harm than good for Gordillo’s chances. And even if the PRI had still had the solid support of its lapdog unions, independent unions on the Acuña model had cut so far into their mobilizing power that most would have been incapable of bringing more than a fifth of their members to the polls.

    Even after hearing this unsettling news, Bartlett still tried to tell himself that victory was certain, clinging desperately to the hope that the PRI’s most loyal voter bloc, the voto verde or “green vote” from rural areas, would pull it out for Gordillo. But after twelve long years of cutbacks, selloffs and privatizations, first under de la Madrid, then the Salinas brothers and finally under Bartlett himself, the PRI had destroyed just about every social program that had won it mass support from the countryside in decades past. Under normal circumstances, the PRI might have filled in the gaps with an avalanche of goodies from the state welfare agencies, but those were equally broke or nonexistent after years of budgetary dismemberment. This meant that the ejidatarios (impoverished farmers stuck raising corn or coffee on state-owned plots of land) could no longer be held hostage by benefit-withholding PRI bureaucrats; they were free to vote their conscience, or, more accurately, their aching bellies. Of the PRI’s traditionally loyal voter blocs, this left only the vocational middle class—the very same teachers, telephone workers, electricians and accountants who were currently fuming in the streets of every major city, burning Bartlett’s image in effigy.

    Eventually Bartlett forced himself to accept that a certain amount of fraud would be necessary to ensure a PRI victory. But as he tried to summon up the PRI’s infamous election-stealing powers in early August, he realized, to his growing terror, that the vast, intricate political machine which had successfully rigged the election of 1988 had since imploded into a chaotic, disorganized mess. The chronic decline of PRI-aligned unions and farmer’s groups certainly hadn’t helped, nor did but the one man most responsible for the collapse of the PRI’s organizational structure was none other than its most fervent, faithful devotee: Government Secretary Carlos Hank González. The great-grandaddy of the PRI hardline, Hank was a dinosaurio of the party’s old-school populist tradition, deeply suspicious of Carlos Salinas, Miguel de la Madrid, and the other young, new-wave technocrats which had taken over the party in the mid-1980s. And when Bartlett made Hank head of the Office of Political Integrity—a department charged with ferreting out and punishing disloyal party members—he unleashed holy hellfire on the PRI’s nouveau riche. Since 1991, Hank used his position to purge from the party rolls almost every high-ranking member he deemed insufficiently loyal, or too well-educated, or simply too young. Three years later, over twenty thousand young, ambitious priístas had been eliminated by Hank’s ideological purity drive and tens of thousands more had fled the PRI out of fear or disgust, leaving a party infrastructure made up mostly of old men with oodles of loyalty but almost no sense of how modern presidential campaigns were run. When Bartlett began frantically contacting state-level PRI affiliates in mid-August in an attempt to organize a bit of last-minute voter fraud, what he saw horrified him: the party’s most dynamic campaigners—the ones with contacts in working-class neighborhoods, the ones with the youthful energy and motivation to go out and print extra ballots for the few remaining loyal priístas, round up dependable poll-watchers, and intimidate local opposition activists—were gone, often with no one to replace them. In many towns and neighborhoods there were simply no loyal priístas left to bring out the vote, no one to stuff the boxes with PRI-marked ballots, and no one to fudge the numbers if they didn’t come out right. In short, at the grassroots, the PRI was dead.

    Cardenas and PML.jpg


    As his campaign reached its final stage, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo recruited several prominent opposition figures to campaign for him, including pro-democracy activist Sergio Aguayo, labor organizer Julia Quiñónez, leftist intellectual Carlos Monsiváis, and even (after months of persuasion) a reluctant Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. Here, Muñoz Ledo stands aside as Cárdenas addresses a crowd in Veracruz in July.

    The Muñoz Ledo campaign, on the other hand, was thriving everywhere. Millions of Mexicans had pledged their votes to Muñoz Ledo; the growing displays of civil disobedience had energized and revitalized the opposition, and in the two weeks before the election, Porfirio used his speaking skills to his advantage, giving two or three rousing speeches a day to enormous crowds of protesters. The political infrastructure of the movement was strong: Muñoz Ledo’s campaign manager Jorge Castañeda had fostered active get-out-the-vote initiatives in every state, and friendly candidates for the Senate and Chamber of Deputies had been recruited to run in 279 of 300 Congressional districts and 30 states, either as members of the PAN, the Popular Socialist Party, or as independent candidates. Just as they had done for Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in 1988, pollsters Francisco Javier Ovando Hernández and Román Gil Heraldez [5] had assembled a nationwide network of poll-watchers to keep watch for fraud and to ensure that the people would be free to cast their votes as they saw fit. A plentiful supply of cash from the billionaire donors also allowed the campaign to hire tens of thousands of part-time canvassers and flyer-passer-outers to canvass the cities. To reach the more sparsely-populated rural areas, they borrowed an admittedly unsavory tactic from the PRI: bribery. Through July and August, trucks bankrolled by various CEOs and chairmen rolled up dirt roads from the Sierra Madre to the Selva Lacandona, passing out bags of fertilizer, electric generators, and modernized farming equipment in exchange for entire villages’ worth of votes.

    By the last week of the campaign, it was clear to anyone with two eyes that a revolutionary change was coming, including, finally, President Bartlett. After weeks of resistance and denial, Bartlett had forced himself to accept that his party had practically no chance in a free and fair election. The thought genuinely terrified him. For all its shortcomings, Manuel Bartlett was earnestly convinced that the PRI was the only party which could carry out the principles of the First Mexican Revolution. To Bartlett, Mexico and the PRI were one and the same, and while he could understand why the people desired a change, he knew nevertheless in his heart of hearts that to transfer power to the opposition would only lead in the end to anarchy, bloodshed, and pseudo-fascism. For the good of the people and for the good of Mexico, the PRI simply had to remain in power. And so, on August 18, three days before the election, Bartlett took a step he had hoped he would never even need to imagine: with a voice of grave solemnity, he asked General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo, three-star general, hero of the Spring Campaign and the moral leader of the Army, to order his forces to take control of the country, impose martial law, postpone the election indefinitely, and save the people from themselves.

    General Gutiérrez told Bartlett to go fuck his mother.

    By most accounts, Manuel Bartlett spent the next 72 hours secluded in his private residence, awaiting the inevitable. Over the preceding six years, under three separate administrations, Bartlett’s sole mission had been to preserve the domination of the PRI by any means necessary. His indefatigable drive had led him to silence almost all political rivals of stature, sell off every social program for which he could find a willing buyer, and turn Mexico into a police state. And yet, in the end, all he had done was destroy the party to which he had devoted his entire adult life.

    Then the day finally arrived. Many observers had feared that election day would be pure chaos, but in fact the polling was relatively orderly and peaceful, mostly because the soldiers stationed outside polling places in most populous towns prevented any large-scale unrest from breaking out. And so, on August 21, under the faithful eye of Gil and Ovando’s poll-watching federation, 32 million Mexicans cast their votes as they saw fit. Enrique Krauze described the election of 1994 as “judgement day for the PRI and its sins; the rebirth of Mexico’s civic and political life”. Former Congressman Vicente Fox, ever the intellectual, declared in 2006 that “every chicken in Mexico was coming home not just to roost, but to shit on Manuel Bartlett’s face”.

    Mexico1994.png

    In the end, it wasn’t a landslide. It was a disgrace. By a margin of 75 percentage points, Porfirio Muñoz Ledo was the next President of Mexico. Not one single state remained loyal to the PRI, and Elba Esther Gordillo had barely captured more than 10% of the vote (to this day, the PRI’s successors occasionally grumble that Gordillo’s total would have been larger if not for voter suppression on the part of the Army, a claim which has been substantiated to a certain degree). TV Azteca’s first-ever election night special, featuring fancy computer graphics and snappy interviews with Sergio Aguayo, Julio Scherer, and other top political activists and analysts, turned out to be the most-watched television broadcast in Mexican history up to that point. For a few hours after the polls closed, Televisa pretended that the race was up in the air, but after Sinaloa—historically the most loyally green state in the country—gave only 32% of its vote to Gordillo, veteran anchorman Jacobo Zabludovsky announced that the Porfirio Muñoz Ledo had won a shutout victory. It wasn’t the first time that the PRI candidate had won fewer votes in a presidential election (as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas could attest), but it was the first time that there was no one to lie about the results.

    The Congressional elections were equally staggering. In 273 of 300 districts, opposition candidates for the Chamber of Deputies had triumphed over their PRI competitors. The other 200 seats, which were awarded by party-list proportional representation, had gone mostly to the PAN, with only 45 priístas making the cut. The Senate was similar story, with only seven of 64 PRI candidates winning their elections. The bill for six decades of repression, corruption and economic mismanagement had come due, and the PRI had paid it with an electoral wipeout.

    The public mood was one of ecstasy. After TV Azteca called the election for Muñoz Ledo, the same streets which had seen massive protests in the preceding weeks before were now filled with celebrators singing patriotic songs and hailing the downfall of the PRI. At his elaborate campaign headquarters in a downtown Mexico City hotel, Muñoz Ledo announced to a crowd of ecstatic supporters that “history has been made. Tonight, we have achieved our revolution.” He was half-right: the old system, with its outdated corporatist structures and utter disregard for freedom of speech and association, had rotted away into nothing. But the Second Mexican Revolution was only partially accomplished. To complete it, a new system would need to be erected in the place of the old. Muñoz Ledo’s assembled supporters kept this in mind even as they celebrated his victory, punctuating their cheers with cries of ¡no nos falles!—“don’t let us down!”

    But that could wait a day or two. Right now, it was time to sing, not cry. And when a crowd of 22,000 demonstrators showed up outside Los Pinos on the morning of August 22—in the very spot in which twenty-five protesters had been fatally shot in September of 1988—and found that the Army detachment which Bartlett had employed to guard him had left their posts to join in the celebration, they decided to pay a call on their soon-to-be-ex-President, to wish him well in his future endeavors, and perhaps give him a hand in moving out of the official residence. But after looking under every desk, inside every closet and behind every curtain, the people were stunned to realized that Manuel Bartlett was nowhere to be found. The news quickly spread to the streets, where within hours, stories stories were circulating that Bartlett had been executed by the Army, had fled to Bermuda with a gold bar in each pocket, or had donned a fake beard and sunglasses and joined in the protests himself. These rumors were soon dispelled, however, when the world found out exactly where Bartlett was and what had happened to him.
    __________

    [1]This kind of pressure would have been a bit more impactful before TTL’s Alcoa bombings in 1992, which caused many large U.S. corporations to divest from maquiladoras south of the Rio Grande and reduced U.S. imports from Mexico by a substantial percentage.
    [2] That, of course, stands for Modeling EXtensive Instruments to COmbat Regimes Opposed to the Good of the UnitEd STates, its Allies, TErritories and Security. Eat your heart out, Patriot Act.
    [3] And who also bought Alcoa’s industrial complex in Ciudad Acuña after most of it was destroyed in a terrorist attack (See Part 19!)
    [4] A similar thing happened in OTL to Javier Duarte, PRI Governor of Veracruz, in 2017.
    [5] The very same men who were murdered in OTL but in TTL, as a crucial part of this timeline’s point of divergence.
     
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    Narrative Interlude #10
  • Santa Lucía Air Force Base
    Zumpango, State of Mexico
    August 22, 1994
    6:14 PM

    “Right this way, Mr. President,” said the mustachioed sergeant, winking pointedly at the last two words.

    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo grinned indulgently and gave a wry salute. He knew when his ass was being kissed, but goddammit if that title wasn’t a thing of beauty.

    The sycophantic soldier returned the salute, then spun on his heel and started off down a wide, concrete corridor. Muñoz Ledo followed close behind, the staccato click of his hard, rubber soles on the linoleum floor providing a sharp refrain to the soldier’s heavy, thudding boots. After multiple twists and turns, the pair approached an out-of-the-way meeting room guarded by a pair of stone-faced, M16-wielding majors. With a precision that was too perfect not to have been rehearsed, upon sight of Muñoz Ledo and his escort, the two officers stiffened their backs, straightened out their rifles and smoothly stepped to either side, parting like a curtain to clear the way for the President-elect. Muñoz Ledo nodded in dignified admiration, then pushed open the door and stepped inside.

    The meeting room was barely furnished: humming fluorescent lights, plastic table, folding chairs, empty coffee mugs stained to a dark, caramel brown by years’ worth of caffeination. The room’s main attraction was a giant map of Mexico, worn and faded after years of wear, which took up most of the back wall. Staring at this map was the room’s only occupant, the man who (for the next three months, at least) remained the rightful President of Mexico. Seated with his back to the door, Manuel Bartlett was so transfixed by the map that he didn’t hear his successor walk in.

    “Manuel,” said Muñoz Ledo as the door swung shut.

    Bartlett turned around in his chair. His eyes remained as flat and impenetrable as marble, but his lips managed a slight smile. “Hello, Porfirio,” he said. “It’s been a while.”

    It had been, but Muñoz Ledo was not in a reminiscing mood.

    “You need to leave, Manuel,” said the President-elect.

    Bartlett’s smiled faded but his tone remained even. “Read the Constitution, Porfirio. My sexenio isn’t done yet.”

    “You mean the Constitution you’ve been wiping your ass with since day one of your presidency?” Muñoz Ledo queried.

    “I mean the Constitution you’ve been promising to uphold throughout your entire campaign,” Manuel shot back.

    Muñoz Ledo bristled. It wasn’t a terrible point, but he wasn’t about to let Bartlett quibble his way out of judgement day. “It’s over, Manuel. You’re finished. The people don’t want you anymore. If you don’t get out now, they’re going make you pay for all the pain you’ve caused them.”

    Bartlett could feel a calm, defensive rage welling up inside him. “What is your proposal?” he asked simply.

    “My proposal is that you get lost,” replied Muñoz Ledo. “And I mean really lost. Like, shave-your-head-move-to-Bora-Bora-and-spend-the-rest-of-your-life-farming-coconuts lost. So lost that no one with a working pair of eyes will ever see you again."

    Bartlett blinked. A warm tear sprung loose, turning cold as it rolled down his cheek. His anger bubbled just behind the surface as he glanced back up at Muñoz Ledo. “And if I refuse?” He asked through clenched teeth.

    Muñoz Ledo let out a scornful sigh. “If you refuse, then we get rid of you—constitutionally,” he emphasized. Still standing, he rested his hands on the table and bent forward, leaning in closer to Bartlett’s face. “The minute the new Congress sits, it impeaches you and appoints me in your place. My Procurator-General throws the book at you—murder, conspiracy, corruption, treason, the works. Then, we try you, convict you, lock you up and melt the key.” Manuel could almost feel Muñoz Ledo’s breath on his face now.

    “If you don’t leave now, Manuel, I’ll have no other choice. The people want justice, and frankly, after all the shit you’ve dragged them through, Manuel, they deserve it. Just by letting you escape, I’ll be hurting my own standing in the people's eyes.”

    Bartlett could feel his rage deflating like a punctured balloon, leaving him only with a sad, impotent bitterness. He grimaced at the stern-faced senator. “Then why give me the option?” He muttered. “I sit here before you, vanquished, broken, and useless. Why not just shoot me dead right now?”

    The President-elect took his hands off the table, straightened back up, and thought for a moment.

    “For old times’ sake, I suppose.”

    Bartlett’s grimace softened imperceptibly.

    Muñoz Ledo went on. “The Army’s got a plane ready for you. All you have to do is decide where you want to go and you’ll be on your way.”

    Six years' worth of pent-up exhaustion escaped from Manuel Bartlett’s lungs as he let out a long, solemn sigh.

    “Would you give me a moment alone?” He asked of his victorious foe. “I would like to consider my options.”

    Muñoz Ledo was amazed that Bartlett needed more than two seconds to consider those options, but decided this particular battle wasn’t worth fighting. After all, the man had just lost the love of his life (power), and he was probably still grappling with the denial phase. Turning towards the door, Muñoz Ledo pulled it open and walked out.

    Alone now, Bartlett turned back to the map. As the irreverent hum of the fluorescent lights filled up his ears, the soon-to-be-ex-President gazed at the shape of Mexico. He ran his eyes up and down the map, taking his time as he admired the curvature of the Gulf coast and imagined the geological gymnastics which must have taken place to create the picturesque peninsula of Baja California. He examined the giant splodge of beige representing Mexico City and its metropolis, and the interwoven layers of orange, brown and white indicating the peaks and valleys of the Sierra Madre. He ran his gaze westward along the zig-zaggety line drawn at the edge of American avarice in 1848.

    He also took note of the map’s faults. It was outdated, for one thing—the states of Baja California Sur and Quintana Roo, both created by presidential decree in 1974, were absent. Time had not been kind to the map; its edges were frayed, its ink was fading, and after decades of being stuck through by pin-wielding planners, had left it pockmarked by thousands of tiny holes. Its once-vibrant spectrum of colors had been reduced to a drab duopoly of brown and beige. In its heyday, this map had served as a vital reference for hundreds of military operations. Now, it was a forgotten piece of paper on a forgotten wall in a forgotten meeting room in a forgotten wing of an air force base.

    His eyes still glued to the map, Bartlett reached down, untied his right shoe and wrestled it off his foot. Crinkling his nose as the fine aroma of calfskin leather was spoiled by a whiff of toenail fungus, Bartlett reached into the shoe, dug back the insole, and pulled out from a special little compartment a tiny ball of bundled-up cellophane.

    As he started to unravel the plastic wrap, he looked back up at the map. Since he was a teenager, he thought to himself, all his worldly energies had been in put firmly in service of that shape. For forty years, as he worked his way up from a humble governor’s son all the way to the presidency, he had never had a higher ambition than to serve that horn-shaped mass of color which symbolized his homeland. The idea of Mexico, as represented by ink on paper, had always been Bartlett’s lodestar. As President, when he had made decisions that he knew caused pain to individual Mexicans, it had only been to protect the Mexico he saw in his mind’s eye. When he'd locked up political opponents and cut deals with drug lords, it had all been to preserve the Mexico he’d read about in his father’s history books—the Mexico that was an exemplar of prosperity and progress, a bulwark against demagogic extremism, a paragon of independence and stability in a Latin America full of civil wars, military dictatorships, CIA puppet states and failed Marxist experiments.

    Still working his fingers around the tightly-packed ball of cellophane, Bartlett recalled that for his entire sexenio, he had thought he knew the Mexican people better than they knew themselves. He had thought he understood his country on such a profound and fundamental level that he could sense where it was headed before it started moving—and if he judged that the country was moving in a harmful direction, it was his duty to set it back on track. But, he reflected as he pulled off the last little bit of plastic wrap, he was no better than that map: an outdated, decaying representation of a country that had long since outgrown him. At fifty-eight years old, he was an old man. A relic. A useless reminder of a bygone era, and Mexico had long since outgrown him.

    Bartlett looked down into his palm. There, freed of its plasticky constraints, was a tiny capsule filled with a fine, white powder. He opened his mouth, brought his palm to his lips, popped in the pill and swallowed it dry.

    The President glanced back up at the map one last time. “I love you,” he mumbled, then floated off into a realm of darkness.
     
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    Narrative Interlude #11
  • 22 kilometers outside Cuautla, Morelos
    August 23, 1994
    3:11 AM

    “One, two…three!

    The two men grunted with exertion as they yanked the cold, stiff remains of Manuel Bartlett Díaz out of the backseat. Despite their best efforts, the body slipped out of their grasp, tumbled out lifelessly and hit the gravel with a thud.

    They stared down at the corpse. A minute went by. Then, without a word, the pilot bent down dutifully, hoisted the former President onto his back, and trudged off into the darkness.

    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo slammed the Jeep door and squinted at the night. For a moment, the headlights were just bright enough to make out a small section of the beige-brown airstrip, the dense wall of fir trees surrounding it, and the silhouette of the plainclothed pilot as he marched headlong into those fir trees. Then the lights flicked off and suddenly Porfirio was blind, guided only by the crunch of boots on gravel as he followed the airman to the appointed spot.

    After wandering around for a minute in total blindness, Porfirio heard a ka-chunk. Then the darkness was pierced by the tinny glow of a cabin light, by which the President-elect saw his predecessor’s corpse being stuffed into the backseat of a dinged-up Cessna 152. The plane had been concealed inside a little divot carved into the forest; it probably wouldn’t have been hard to spot in broad daylight, but Porfirio was amazed that the pilot had managed to find it in so quickly in the dark (perhaps too quickly, he thought to himself—General Santoyo had insisted this airstrip hadn’t been used for trafficking since the Army had discovered it in February, but Porfirio couldn’t help wondering whether this particular flying ace hadn’t been doing a few “side missions” here and there at his higher-ups’ behest).

    Not that any of that mattered now.

    "Señor el Presidente,” the pilot called as Porfirio approached the airplane. Porfirio stopped short for a moment. Less than thirty-six hours after his election, he already knew it would be a while before he got used to that title.

    "Would you mind clearing away some of the branches while I get the plane ready, señor?” The airman asked with reasonable respect. Muñoz Ledo looked down at the ground in front of the plane, saw a pile of large sticks between it and the runway, wondered if it was possible to look presidential while cleaning up underbrush, then decided he didn’t care and got down on all fours. As he scooped the branches into his hands, he stole a glance through the windscreen and saw his rigor mortis-stricken predecessor being propped up in the backseat and buckled into place. A spidery chill crawled up his spine. Morbid.

    After a few more minutes of branch-clearing, Porfirio heard the pilot’s voice again. “Señor el Presidente, would you help me pull the plane out?”

    Without a word, he got up, brushed the dirt off his pants, and positioned himself behind the left wing. After five minutes spent writhing around in the dirt, he wasn’t too concerned with protecting his presidential dignity—and besides, he thought to himself, this guy wouldn't be telling too many tales after he accomplished this particular mission.

    "Ready,” the pilot shouted, “and…push!

    They did. Within seconds, the plane started to budge. The President-elect dug in his heels and pushed even harder. The plane nudged forward, centimeter by centimeter. Finally, after two minutes of primeval grunts and groans, the two men succeeded in pushing it past the treeline and out onto the gravel. Three more minutes and they had gotten it into position, the landing light illuminating half a kilometer of rough, unpaved runway.

    The pilot circled around the tail of the plane to face Porfirio. “Forty minutes east-by-south, señor?” He asked in confirmation. “Yes,” said the President-elect, still panting from the exertion.

    The airman smiled slightly. "I hope I get some kind of medal after this, sir,” he joked.

    "You get this done and keep the secret,” replied Porfirio, trying hard to smile while still gasping for air, “and you’ll be the next Commander of the Air Force.”

    The lieutenant chuckled appropriately, then stiffened up and gave a crisp salute, which Porfirio returned. Then the airman lowered his arm, turned around, and clambered into the cockpit. Porfirio, for his part, felt his way back to the Jeep, climbed into the driver’s seat and shut the door.

    While the pilot fiddled around with his instruments, Porfirio took stock of the exterior of the craft. It certainly matched his expectations: in the glow of the headlights he saw dings, scuffs, scratch marks, dirt, and flecks of paint missing from the livery. He felt vaguely reassured—this was the spitting image of a trafficker’s plane, a fact which would surely help build the illusion.

    Finally, after a few more minutes, the engine gasped, cranked, and sputtered its way to life. The pilot finished his last few checks, flashed one final salute to the President-elect and pushed in the throttle. The aircraft lurched forward. Porfirio caught one last glimpse of his late predecessor in the backseat as the plane sped up, lifted off, cleared the trees at the end of the runway and streaked out into the night, hovering in the sky for a minute before banking left and disappearing behind a distant mountainside.

    Porfirio sighed to himself. He reached into the glovebox, pulled out a mobile phone and punched in a number. Two rings later, the voice of General Jesús Gutiérrez Rebollo appeared on the other end. “Are they in the air?”

    "Yes, General.”

    "Good,” came the response, followed by a click and a dial tone.

    Porfirio blinked. He felt pretty certain that no self-respecting President would allow his generals to talk to him that way. For the moment, though, he wasn’t in much of a position to gripe. After all, if Gutiérrez’s flyboys didn’t do their job right tonight, Porfirio would have a hell of a lot of explaining to do tomorrow.

    He put the phone back in the glovebox and snapped it closed. He felt around for the key, found it, and put it in the ignition. Then he froze.

    The pilot.

    What the hell was his name?

    He couldn't remember. He couldn't remember the man's name. Porfirio scoured his memory but came up blank. Had the pilot forgotten to introduce himself? No, of course not. That made no sense. Had Porfirio just forgotten it? He'd spent three-and-a-half-hours in the car with this guy but couldn’t even remember his name?

    Desperate, he started searching in the dark for any name that seemed remotely familiar. It started with an L, didn’t it? Luis, Lorenzo, Lázaro…no. Well, it had an L somewhere in it, at least, didn't it? Alberto? Uh…Alfonso?

    No. Not Alberto. Not Alfonso. Porfirio sighed in resignation. He wasn’t even president yet, and somehow he’d already managed to dispose of a man whose name he couldn't remember.

    He looked back at the sky, as if the plane would somehow still be there, hanging in the air, navigation lights flashing in the air like a pair of bashful stars. But all he saw was an endless expanse of bluish-black nothingness, punctuated here and there by a star or two.

    Porfirio felt a mix of discomfort and disgust rising within his chest. If this is what it's like to President, he thought to himself, then God only knows why Bartlett wanted the job so damn badly.

    With that, he turned the key, put it the Jeep in gear and drove off into the night.
     
    Part 23: Manuel Bartlett Díaz, Carlos Hank González
  • In the early morning of August 23, 1994, the people of Tehuacán bore witness to one of the only high-speed chases in the history of Mexican aviation.

    By then, residents of this mid-sized municipality in southwest Puebla had already heard that President Bartlett had mysteriously disappeared from Los Pinos. But no one could quite agree on where exactly he had gone. Many residents of Tehuacán had traveled to Mexico City to take part in the post-election celebrations, and when they returned, they brought back rumors ranging from the plausible to the preposterous: Bartlett had either fled the country, or he’d been executed by the Army, or he’d retreated into a secret, underground lair where he was currently scheming to take back power in a military coup, or he’d been ritually sacrificed by his reptilian overlords as punishment for his loss.


    It had been a slow night at Tlaxcala Air Force Base. Really, every night was a slow night at Tlaxcala Air Force Base—it had started out as a civilian airport, but it had seen so little air traffic that in 1993 the state government had sold it to the Secretariat of National Defense. [1] During the cartels’ heyday, quite a few reconnaissance flights had taken off from Tlaxcala, but shipments along the Tabasco-Morelos route had slowed to a molasses grind since the eruption of the drug war up north, and these days, the base was seeing about as much action on a typical day as a fur coat shop in Cancun. Anything appearing on the radar screens after midnight would have been a notable occurrence, but when the Defense Secretariat ordered on August 22 that all flights be grounded until Manuel Bartlett had been apprehended, it would have been national news. The control staff at Tlaxcala’s tower were, therefore, quite surprised to see a tiny blip streaking through the middle of their radar screens around 4:41 AM, having just passed the great peak of Popocatépetl and now speeding east-by-south across the valley of central Puebla. The controllers promptly alerted their superiors, and within twenty minutes, a pair of Northrop F-5 fighter jets from Santa Lucía Air Force Base found themselves two miles above the city of Tehuacán, tailing a twin-engine Cessna 402, through the dim morning sky.

    What exactly happened next is a matter of contention. According to half a dozen separate government reports, the Cessna ignored multiple clear orders from the Northrops to land at Tehuacán’s Airport, leaving the fighter pilots no other choice but to use their weapons. In his Congressional testimony, one pilot claimed to have warned the Cessna via radio as many as nine separate times before firing, a number which was eventually substantiated by Tlaxcala air traffic control staff (reportedly after a small bit of “confusion” with some higher-ranked officers). Some eyewitnesses disputed this claim, contending that the Northrops had trailed the Cessna for at most thirty or forty seconds, nowhere near long enough for the pilots to have issued so many warnings; Air Force spokesmen countered by claiming that the early morning sky was too dark for anyone on the ground to clearly make out which plane was where and for how long, and that the scene in the air likely wouldn’t have attracted much attention until just seconds before the shooting started.

    What exactly happened next is a matter of contention. According to half a dozen separate government reports, the Cessna ignored multiple clear orders from the Northrops to land at Tehuacán’s Airport, leaving the fighter pilots no other choice but to use their weapons. In his Congressional testimony, one pilot claimed to have warned the Cessna via radio as many as nine separate times before firing, a number which was eventually substantiated by Tlaxcala air traffic control staff (reportedly after a small bit of “confusion” with some higher-ups in the Secretariat). Some eyewitnesses disputed this claim, contending that the Northrops had trailed the Cessna for at most thirty or forty seconds, nowhere near long enough for the pilots to have issued so many warnings; Air Force spokesmen countered by claiming that the early morning sky was too dark for anyone on the ground to clearly make out which plane was where and for how long, and that the scene in the air likely wouldn’t have attracted much attention until just seconds before the shooting started.

    What no one disputes is that at approximately 5:03 AM, one of the Northrops let loose a volley from one of its M39 cannons. The shells missed, and the pilot of the Cessna started maneuvering around wildly, apparently to evade more gunfire. By 5:06, several hundred tehuacanenses awoken by the sound of explosions in the sky had rushed out onto the streets, just in time to watch the other Northrop fire upon the Cessna. This one found its target, and the bullets ripped apart the Cessna’s tail, tore through the left side of the fuselage, and destroyed the left engine. The pilot banked rightward in a desperate attempt to reach the Tehuacán airstrip, but his efforts were in vain: the small aircraft crashed on a dusty hillside almost three miles short of its goal. Paramedics arrived within half an hour, but found only the corpses of the pilot and the passenger—the latter of whom, despite considerable damage from the crash, was still clearly, unmistakably identifiable as Manuel Bartlett Díaz, the late President of Mexico.


    Screen Shot 2020-12-24 at 9.10.23 PM.png


    Although President Bartlett’s plane was shot down, several other planes in the sky that night were intercepted by the Air Force and escorted to safe landings. For those who believe that Bartlett’s plane was not given adequate warning before being destroyed, this also means that the Air Force somehow knew that Bartlett would be on this particular plane, which is arguably an even scarier thought.

    The crash was national news by midmorning. After enduring six years of iron-fisted authoritarianism, most Mexicans were so happy to hear Bartlett was dead that they didn’t care how exactly it had happened—in Mexico City, people took to the streets once again to chant “¡arriba, abajo, Bartlett se va al carajo!”, and actress Sherlyn González would later recall seeing her seventy-seven-year-old great-grandfather, who couldn’t walk without the help of a cane, do a celebratory handstand when Bartlett’s death was announced on the radio. But some Mexicans weren’t satisfied with the government’s version of things. The official line was that, fearing punishment for his many crimes against the Mexican people, Bartlett had called in one last favor with his trafficker buddies and tried to flee the country on one of Amado Carrillo’s old cocaine planes. When this scheme was foiled, the Army said, Bartlett had chosen to die on his own terms (and take some poor cartel schmuck with him) rather than surrender to the forces of opposition. But a vocal minority suspected that the Army establishment had killed Bartlett in order to prevent him from going on trial and implicating them in his conspiracies. Some even went so far as to claim that Porfirio Muñoz Ledo himself had approved of the scheme, either to hasten his accession to the presidency or to cover-up his own supposed involvement in Carrillogate.

    Time seems to have shown that there is indeed something more to the story than was said at the time. In 2005, one of the fighter pilots claimed to the newspaper El Nuevo Siglo that he had issued only three verbal warnings to the Cessna, not nine. Five years after that, El Universal published an anonymous interview with a man claiming to be a retired Air Force officer, who stated that he had personally escorted then-President-elect Porfirio Muñoz Ledo into an interrogation room at Zumpango Air Force Base to speak with Bartlett the night before his death. Several conspiracy theories have also cropped up regarding the identity of the pilot—while the Army claims never to have identified the body, in 1999, the family of Luca Hernández Barragán, an Air Force lieutenant whom the Army claimed had been killed in an ambush by the Carrillo cartel in Sinaloa, publicly announced their belief that he, in fact, had been flying the plane, and that the Air Force top brass had killed him and covered up his involvement. To this day, the Army denies all such claims and theories, but its sordid record of conduct since 1994 has done little to shore up its credibility.

    The popularity of such theories has grown in recent years with the rise of the internet and social media. In 2015, an anonymous, hour-long “documentary” alleging that General Gutiérrez, Muñoz Ledo and other figures had plotted Bartlett’s death amassed over 24 million views on CoffeeShop before being taken down on defamation claims. This documentary helped give rise to Yggdrasil, a conspiracy theory which accuses Muñoz Ledo, the Mercer, Slim, and Salinas families, former President Huntsman, and various other rich and powerful entities of colluding to kill Bartlett as part of an ongoing plot to assume monopolistic control of the world’s oil supplies. A 2018 poll by the market research firm GEA-ISA suggested that almost a third of adult Mexicans doubt or disbelieve the official account of Manuel Bartlett’s death, and a few state and federal politicians have been so bold as to express their doubts in their election campaigns. These controversies remain one of the few black spots on Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s historical reputation—although no concrete evidence has emerged to implicate the former President in any kind of cover-up or subterfuge, many suspect him of at least a certain level of involvement. Even today, more than twenty years after his retirement, it seems the distinguished elder statesman, revered for all his other deeds and accomplishments, still can’t make a public appearance without being dogged by quiet whispers of “Bartlett didn’t kill himself”.

    Still, for all the questions and controversies, one thing above all was certain: Manuel Bartlett—Mexico’s longest-serving Government Secretary, its most tyrannical President since Porfirio Díaz, the man who had destroyed his party in a quixotic crusade to save it—was dead.


    ManuelBartlett.png

    Under the old Constitution, when the President died, the Secretary of Government would assume his powers until such time as the Congress of the Union could convene to name a permanent replacement. So when Bartlett’s corpse was identified amid the crumpled metal of his wrecked airplane, the acting presidency officially fell to the only priísta in Mexico who was more hardline and authoritarian than Bartlett himself: Carlos Hank González. After decades spend advising, influencing, brown-nosing and blackmailing president after president, el profesor finally (if briefly) had the title for himself. This news terrified the international community—just two days earlier, the world had been celebrating the PRI’s landslide defeat, and now they were panicking at the news that Bartlett was dead and Carlos Hank González, the Himmler to Bartlett’s Hitler, had somehow acquired the presidency for himself.

    There was really no reason to worry—Hank would spend his week-and-a-half-long “presidency” under house arrest, and the Army kept such a tight watch on him that he later complained that he couldn’t even take a piss in his own bathroom without a soldier following him inside. Yet Porfirio Muñoz Ledo would later reveal that he was more anxious during this brief period than he had ever been in his life. He knew that he needed to legitimize his authority as soon as possible, but for that, he would have to wait until the new, opposition-controlled Congress convened on September 1 to formally appoint him President. This left Mexico in constitutional limbo, a ten-day window in which the legitimate president had no power and the powerful president had no legitimacy. It was the perfect moment for everything to go terribly, horribly wrong—a counter-revolution by shadowy elements of the PRI old guard, an armed rebellion by a resurrected ELM, popular demonstrations leading to full-scale riots in the streets as in 1988, or perhaps just a general descent into anarchy and madness. Muñoz Ledo was very aware of this danger, and yet he also understood that he couldn’t rely too heavily on the Army to maintain control in case things got bad, because any hint of authoritarianism would have tainted his presidency from the start. His only option (or so he claimed in his memoirs) was to put his faith in the people who had elected him.

    So, on August 25, 1994, Muñoz Ledo gave his first public speech as President-elect. Dutifully broadcast by both Televisa and TV Azteca, he addressed himself directly to the Mexican people, urging them to finish up their celebrations, return to their families and get on with their lives as best they could. He went out of his way to stress that this was a request and not a order, and that his listeners were not bound to follow it by anything more than their sense of civic duty: “The Constitution guarantees every Mexican the right of peaceful assembly,” he noted, “and I will not ask the Army to physically prevent anyone from exercising that right, nor will I seek to punish or prosecute those who do.” But even though Bartlett’s misdeeds had turned Mexico into a pariah state, Muñoz Ledo informed his listeners that right now, the eyes of the world were upon them. “For the past five years,” he orated, reading words written for him by the leftist writer Carlos Monsiváis, “oppressed peoples everywhere have been rising up to break the chains of tyranny. Humanity is seeing an unprecedented wave of revolutions and democratization. All over the world, dictatorial regimes are being swept away as their populations rise up to demand their liberty. In some places—in South Africa, in Poland, in the Philippines, in Mongolia—the people have already triumphed over tyranny. But in other places, they struggle still to make their voices heard. At this moment, they are watching you with great anticipation. The decisions you make over the coming days will have a crucial effect on the future of democracy, not just in our country but everywhere on Earth. If the next week sees peace and tranquility followed by an orderly transition of government, our comrades in foreign nations will strengthen their resolve to fight for freedom. But if lawlessness is permitted to prevail on our streets, as it has on several occasions over the previous several years, then they will hesitate before testing out their civil powers, and their oppressors will have yet another excuse to keep them in bondage.”

    "I emphasize once again that this is not an order," he demurred. “I ask this of you not as a ruler commanding his subjects, but as a citizen imploring his compatriots. Your liberty in this matter is enshrined in the Constitution, and it is not mine to grant or revoke. But even if I possessed such a power, I would never use it. I would never need to use it. The bedrock of democracy is the wisdom of the people,” he concluded, “and I have a deep, abiding faith that the people will make the right choice.”

    Some said it was the strength of Monsiváis’s words, some said it was a general feeling of goodwill (still untainted by theories about Bartlett’s death), others said they were just tired out after months and months of riots and protests and rallies and celebrations. Whatever the reason, the end of August was the most peaceful week Mexico had seen in a very long time. By August 27, the Zócalo was almost serene, and the calles of Guadalajara, Villahermosa and Veracruz were empty except for the trash and beer bottles left behind by the departed revelers. General Gutiérrez still insisted on stationing token garrisons in a few of the large cities, but the soldiers complained more about the threat posed by boredom than by rioters.

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    Porfirio Muñoz Ledo’s oratorical skills were among the strongest of any politician, and he would use them to his advantage in shoring up his credibility with the public.

    Perhaps the least tranquil man in Mexico during this time was Porfirio Muñoz Ledo himself. Although he had secured civil order at home, he knew that he still had mountains of work to do if he wanted to restore Mexico’s place in the world and win back the trust of the international community. So, while the Mexican people went home for a well-deserved break from politics, the President-in-all-but-name had already moved into Los Pinos, where he and his not-quite-yet-official Government Secretary, Jorge Carpizo MacGregor (the ex-rector of the UNAM who had defected to the PAN way back in 1988, after De la Madrid ordered the Army to storm his campus) worked twenty-hour shifts with a small army of aides and advisors, scanning endless documents and reports, meeting with financial analysts, constitutional lawyers, senior bureaucrats and ambassadors, and making phone call after phone call to governors, mayors, and newly-elected members of Congress, working frantically to fill the power vacuum left behind by the late autocrat Bartlett.

    Meanwhile, Muñoz Ledo’s other advisors were hard at work shoring up his image abroad. On August 24, Jorge Castañeda, Muñoz Ledo’s campaign manager and not-quite-yet-official Ambassador to the United States, was sent to Washington to establish a strong rapport with the White House (and to put paid to any false notions regarding the exact circumstances of Bartlett’s demise), before jet-setting off to do the same in the capitals of Mexico’s next-largest trading partners. Adolfo Aguilar Zínser, Muñoz Ledo’s closest confidant on international affairs and not-yet-official Foreign Secretary, spent days on the phone with Mexico’s embassies in Asia, Europe, and South America, informing the diplomatic staff that if they wanted to keep their jobs, they would inform their host governments that the PRI was well and truly out of power, and that Muñoz Ledo had the country firmly under control.

    Finally, on September 1, the first opposition-controlled Congress in more than a century convened at the National Medical Center (the Legislative Palace was still a charred, decaying husk because, in the six years since it burned down, Manuel Bartlett had never quite managed to find the money to rebuild it). Although the opposition caucus was an ideological smorgasbord, its members were unanimous as to their first three priorities: bring both houses of Congress into session, elect presiding officers, and appoint Porfirio Muñoz Ledo as President of the Republic, while adhering as closely as possible to the Congress’s established procedures. But when they examined the Congress’s rulebook, they found, quite simply, that there were no established procedures. The rules of both the Senate and Chamber of Deputies had been written under the assumption that the PRI would hold onto power until the end of time, and that all important decisions would be made in backrooms by PRI power brokers. In fact, the deputies soon realized, without a PRI majority, it was technically impossible to bring either chamber into session. So before they could do anything, the opposition parties would have to come together and write entirely new rules from scratch.

    Eventually, after seven hours of rule-writing, at 5:25 PM, the LVI Legislature of the Congress of the Union was called into session. Sergio Aguayo—newly elected as a PAN deputy from Guadalajara—was named President of the Chamber of Deputies by a margin of 451 to 12, while the Senate chose Mexico City senator Pablo Gómez (a former Trotskyist who had participated in the student protests of 1968) as its President by a similar margin. Then, cramming themselves into a college auditorium built for geriatrics students, the assembled Congressmen fulfilled their duties under Article 84 of the Constitution and officially appointed Porfirio Muñoz Ledo President of Mexico. The new President raised his arm and dutifully recited the oath of office. Then he shuffled off the podium, got into his motorcade and jetted right back to Los Pinos without so much as a gracias. When questioned afterwards about the brevity of the ceremony, journalist and PAN deputy Julio Scherer stated simply that “there is too much to do”.

    And indeed there was. First, there was a significant Constitutional hurdle to overcome: since Muñoz Ledo had been appointed to fill the vacancy left by Bartlett’s death, he was technically serving as an “interim President”, which meant he would be constitutionally barred from being sworn in for a full term in December. So by the time Muñoz Ledo stepped off the stage, Gómez and Aguayo had already begun drawing up procedures for a new constitutional amendment. And as the new President sat down in his limousine, he was already busy appointing his cabinet. In order to secure PAN support for his candidacy, Muñoz Ledo had promised the party leadership that he would incorporate several panistas into his administration, and he kept his promise. Most of these appointments went to the party's northern, conservative old guard: Santiago Creel—accomplished lawyer, scion of the PAN’s prominent Creel-Terrazas dynasty, and longtime friend of Castañeda and Zínser—was tapped as Muñoz Ledo’s Attorney General, his cousin Francisco Barrio Terrazas—businessman and two-time candidate for Governor of Chihuahua—was named the Secretary of Communication, while Manuel Clouthier, the vegetable rancher and former presidential nominee, became Secretary of Agriculture. But the President also made sure to include members of the PAN’s progressive, pro-labor nouveau riche, which was rooted in the FAT and other independent labor federations and which shared Muñoz Ledo’s own social-democratic instincts. So in addition to naming PAN newcomer Jorge Carpizo MacGregor as Secretary of Government, Muñoz Ledo found his Labor Secretary in Arturo Alcalde Justiniani. A seasoned labor lawyer and a longtime associate of the FAT, Alcalde had spent more than twenty years doing battle with PRI-controlled labor tribunals and knew Mexico’s corrupt, broken labor system inside and out, making him the perfect man to carry out Muñoz Ledo’s ambitious plans for labor reform.

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    In 1974, then-Labor Secretary Porfirio Muñoz Ledo had granted a charter to one of Mexico’s only independent unions thanks to the untiring efforts of labor lawyer Arturo Alcalde. Twenty years later, Muñoz Ledo recruited Alcalde to help him clean up and democratize the labor sector.

    For two of the positions, Muñoz Ledo took the highly controversial step of reappointing former PRI cabinet members to their old jobs. For all that the PRI of the 1990s was a gerontocratic cesspool of corruption and sleaze, some of Mexico’s most competent financial analysts and civil servants were PRI members, and Muñoz Ledo desperately needed their expertise to untangle the financial spiderweb which had ensnared his administration. First was Pedro Aspe Armella, an urbane and charismatic economist with a wide network of contacts within the world’s most powerful financial institutions. As Finance Secretary, Aspe had successfully persuaded Mexico’s foreign creditors to forgive over $15 billion of debt following Carlos Salinas’s assassination. Faced now with a national debt of over $37 billion, Muñoz Ledo knew he’d need Aspe’s negotiating prowess on his side if he had any hope of bringing Mexico back from the brink of insolvency. The same logic led him to appoint Ernesto Zedillo as his Budget Secretary—although Zedillo’s straight-arrow conservatism clashed with Muñoz Ledo’s tax-and-spend agenda, he was perhaps the only man with the necessary fiscal skill to produce something approaching a sound budget. As the only competent man to serve as Budget Secretary in the previous decade, Zedillo also had the unquestioned respect of the Budget Secretariat’s senior civil servants, and any question over his loyalty was mooted when it was revealed that he had been the whistleblower who had first leaked the evidence of Carrillogate to the press.

    Muñoz Ledo’s last two major appointments were more for popularity than anything else: Jesus Gutiérrez Rebollo (still Mexico’s most popular soldier) as Secretary of Defense, and none other than Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas himself as Mayor of Mexico City. Having suffered not only his wife’s murder, but also a close brush with death himself at the Palenque Summit in 1991, it took some serious persuasion to get him to accept a job where he might once again be exposed to violence. But it was worth it in the end. No other politician was held in such high esteem by the people of Mexico City than Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas—his speech in the Zócalo in 1988 had sparked Mexico’s long, painful transition to democracy, and his leadership would help stabilize the capital city while Muñoz Ledo worked to extend his credibility and authority over the rest of the country.

    Having appointed his dream team, the new President didn’t waste a single second. George Bush, talking through ambassador Castañeda, had already relayed to Muñoz Ledo his two preconditions for the lifting of the ROGUE STATES Act sanctions: public prosecution of at least some of the PRI officials who had been involved in the drug trade, and an effective dismantling of the DFS as an armed force. No sooner had Acting President Hank been relieved of his position than he was charged by Attorney General Creel with murder, conspiracy, drug trafficking, corruption, racketeering, jaywalking, and just about every other no-no in the criminal code. Hank’s trial was broadcast live on both Televisa and TV Azteca, to cathartic effect. As a constant carousel of witnesses—political dissidents, bureaucratic schmucks, PRI moderates, low-level cartel errand-boys—took the stand to reveal the pain they’d endured at the hands of Hank’s Government Secretariat, as well as the so-called Office of Political Integrity, the Mexican people were glad to see a PRI tyrant finally get held accountable for his crimes. And while the soon-to-be established Commission on Truth and Reconciliation would dig up dirt on hundreds more PRI officials, many analysts see Hank’s trial as a stroke of particular genius: by aggressively prosecuting Hank not just for corruption and authoritarianism, but also for his ideological purity crusades against PRI members, Muñoz Ledo sent a message to moderate priístas in Congress and the bureaucracy that the days of rigid party orthodoxy were over, and that they would have nothing to fear from defying the party line to support his administration.

    After two months of testimonies and recriminations, Chief Justice Olga Sanchez Cordero decided she’d heard enough. On November 15, former Acting President Hank was indicted on twelve counts of murder, twenty-six counts of torture, and dozens of other charges, and was sentenced to life in prison without parole. By the end of the year, he had moved into a private cell at Islas Marías Federal Prison in the state of Nayarit (where he would spend just under six years before dying of an arterial embolism), and many other high-ranking officials would follow him over the next few months.

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    That satisfied President Bush’s first condition. But the second condition—dismantling the DFS—was going to be trickier. It wasn’t as simple as just disbanding the agency with the stroke of a pen. Manuel Bartlett himself had done that under U.S. pressure back in 1986, and all it had done was free up 1,500 corrupt agents to devote their talents full-time to the drug trade. Luckily, this time, Muñoz Ledo had a secret weapon on his side: the Army. Defense Secretary Gutiérrez Rebollo’s war on the remnants of the DFS was dazzlingly quick and efficient. Even considering the fact that over 35% of the agency’s manpower had already been killed fighting opposite sides of the Caro-Carrillo drug war, the fact that Gutiérrez managed to round up over 1,200 rogue agents in three months is a testament to the sheer power of his organizing abilities. Most contemporary observers agree that he was just getting rid of the competition, but at the time, the crusade won him worldwide admiration as an incorruptible, ruthlessly effective man in uniform. By the time Porfirio Muñoz Ledo was sworn in for his full sexenio on December 1, the DFS’s entire presence had dwindled down to a few roving bands of mercenaries with a couple dozen men each, scattered across the border region without any organization. In a public ceremony two weeks later, Government Secretary Carpizo signed the documents which abolished the DFS and officially cut the corrupt, authoritarian tumor out of the Government Secretariat.

    By the end of the year, Mexico had largely won back the trust of the world. Although a few contemporary leaders would later admit to having some doubts regarding the precise circumstances of Bartlett’s death, the international community could tell that the new administration represented a significant break with Bartlett’s leadership style, and much of the world was just happy enough to have sane leadership in Mexico City that they were willing to overlook such trivial matters for the time being. Mexico’s U.N. membership was restored in January of 1995, and during a state visit on January 16, President Bush announced to the world that all U.S. sanctions on Mexico would be lifted with immediate effect. The rest of the world followed suit, and by mid-April, the embargo had effectively been brought to an end. After enduring five different Presidents in as many years, followed by months of pariah status, the world was finally welcoming Mexico back with open arms.

    But all was not well. While the embargo had been lifted, Muñoz Ledo had little hope of instituting any substantial fiscal reforms until the foreign debt was paid off—which, after five years of insolvency and financial mismanagement, had ballooned up to $35 billion. Aspe, Aguilar and Zedillo were hard at work trying to bring that number down, but Muñoz Ledo knew he wouldn’t be able to pay off much of anything without tapping into Mexico’s vast oil reserves, and for that, there was one huge obstacle in his way: the oil workers’ union. Way back in 1988, Miguel de la Madrid had tried to use oil money to pay off Mexico’s foreign debt. In response, the Petroleum Workers’ Syndicate, led by labor boss Joaquín “La Quina” Hernández Galicia, had gone on strike and annihilated the national economy. After that, de la Madrid, the Salinas brothers, and Manuel Bartlett had spent the following few years tripping over themselves granting favors and concessions to keep the oil workers happy. If the union had been corrupt before the strike, by 1995, it was a septic tank of graft and bribery with practically no state oversight and no safeguards against fraud and outright thievery. With La Quina’s parasitic web of patronage sucking up most of Pemex’s profits, scraping together enough oil money to pay off the debt would be about as easy as emptying the Gulf of Mexico with a cheesecloth. And if Muñoz Ledo attempted to reassert any form of government oversight over the use of the oil funds, La Quina might lead his workers back on strike and destroy any chance of a stable economic recovery. As negotiations with La Quina bore little fruit and IMF officials bristled at the thought of forgiving any more of Mexico’s debt without something solid as collateral, President Muñoz Ledo started to worry he might never find a way to pay off the debt without straight-up selling Chihuahua to Texas.

    By his own account, on March 3, he was sitting in his office, idly considering trying to get Governor Richards on the phone, when a tragedy struck which, though it killed hundreds of Mexicans, would be the key to improving the lives of millions more.
    __________

    [1] This sale happened in 1997 in OTL, but Mexico's increased militarization, coupled with the intensified drug war and a larger role for the Air Force in the Zapatista uprising, has prompted the Secretariat of National Defense to buy the base a few years earlier.
     
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    Part 24: Salamanca disaster
  • The fireball which engulfed the town of Salamanca, Guanajuato, on March 4, 1995, killing 130 people and wounding hundreds more, was utterly and entirely preventable.

    SPTRM, the union which represented Mexico’s 300,000 public-sector oil workers, had always had a lax attitude towards safety standards. But the incendiary brew of greed, negligence, and outright cowardice which caused the tragedy in Salamanca was shocking even by Pemex standards. On the morning of March 4, a pipeline ruptured at the Antonio M. Amor Refinery in Salamanca, causing 530 cubic meters of propane gas to spill out into one of the refinery’s maintenance rooms. The faulty gas detectors failed to register the leak, and when it was finally detected, the shift supervisor decided to crack open the maintenance room door to allow the gas to dissipate, rather than risk bad publicity by telling the authorities and forcing an evacuation of the surrounding neighborhoods (this solution was technologically unsound, but the supervisor couldn’t have known that—after all, he’d gotten the job not on merit but by bribing the local STPRM boss).

    Of course, the casualty toll would not have been anywhere near as high had it not been for the greed of the refinery director, Manuel Limón Hernández. To supplement his income, Limón ran what amounted to a black market for black gold. Every other Sunday since 1992, residents of Salamanca and the surrounding communities would grab their jerry cans and line up in front of a large storage tank in the refinery's parking lot, where a surly-faced Pemex technician would dispense gasoline at racket prices under Director Limón’s watchful eye. [1] The venture drew lucrative profits to supplement Limón’s already-considerable salary, with plenty left over to keep underlings and local law enforcement quiet. By the time Limón found out about the gas leak on the afternoon of March 4th, locals were already queuing up for their share of cut-rate gasoline, and he wasn’t about to send them home and lose out on two weeks’ worth of profits. So, rather than ordering an evacuation, Limón simply called in sick, retreated to his home on Salamanca’s affluent north end, called his assistant director and instructed him to carry on like any normal Sunday.

    And then, cruel, horrible, predictable tragedy struck. At 4:53 PM, while eighty-six Salmanticenses waited their turn at the pump, the plume of propane gas from the maintenance room wafted its way up to the flare pit and ignited. The refinery was shrouded in flame. The storage tank turned into an enormous fireball, sending 93 men, women and children to an instant, scorching death. The explosion also set off another, neighboring storage tank, which killed thirteen more people and set fire to several nearby houses. By the time the blaze was put out eleven hours later, it had already raged through most of the adjacent neighborhoods, killing twenty-four residents and leaving a thousand more homeless. In the end, Salamanca lost 130 of its people and one of its main sources of employment to negligence and greed.

    Salamanca Disaster.png

    News of the disaster hit the Sunday papers the following morning. The public reacted with seething fury at Pemex, the STPRM, and their entire leadership cadre. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo had already been searching for a way to break the STPRM's stranglehold on Mexico's oil revenues, and he was determined not to let this opportunity slip by. On the morning of March 6, the President gave his first televised address since his official inauguration. In it, he drew somber comparisons to the San Juanico disaster of 1984, an explosion which had caused even more deaths and injuries but had resulted in no consequences for anyone, including its powerful leader, Joaquín “La Quina” Hernández Galicia. Muñoz Ledo went on to announce that his administration would be launching an aggressive investigation into the STPRM and its leadership, promising that history would not repeat itself and that justice would be “swift, clean and decisive”. He wasn’t exaggerating: just as he was finishing up his speech, a team of soldiers in full combat dress was busy rolling up to La Quina’s home on the outskirts of Ciudad Madero, blowing out his front door with a bazooka and dragging the king of Mexican oil outside in his bathrobe. [2]

    Enraged, the STPRM immediately declared a wildcat strike. But popular opinion was so dead-set against the oil workers that when they stormed out into the streets, they were pelted with garbage and rotten eggs. The union had already been one of the most hated institutions in Mexico for its corruption and its role in causing the recession of 1988, and the explosions in Salamanca had elevated this resentment to a white-hot, burning hatred. Within two days of La Quina’s arrest, the union backed down in the face of overwhelming public opposition. The same day, Procurator General Santiago Creel began preparing a wide array of charges against La Quina, Manuel Limón, and two dozen other Pemex and SPTRM officials, ranging from endless counts of embezzlement to grand larceny and racketeering.

    While the oil men awaited their day in court, the Congress of the Union was working to advance key democratic priorities. The first opposition-controlled Congress in Mexican history had been disappointingly sluggish in its first few months, as a majority caucus composed entirely of outsiders struggled to come to terms with the levers of power. By early 1995, though, congressional leadership had finally gotten a handle on legislative proceedings, and Muñoz Ledo was soon working in tandem with Senate President Pablo Gómez and Chamber of Deputies President Sergio Aguayo to strengthen civil liberties and government accountability. First on the list of priorities was the Freedom of Information Law, a pet project of Aguayo’s from his days as a grassroots activist, which opened up federal records to citizens and journalists. This was followed by a series of measures to officially liberalize and deregulate the print media sector, which had spent the Bartlett years suffocating under the weight of draconian security restrictions.

    Palacio de San Lazaro.png


    The Legislative Palace of San Lázaro had burned to the ground in 1988, and the cash-strapped Bartlett administration could never seem to find the money to rebuild it. One of the opposition-controlled legislature's first acts in 1994 was to appropriate funds to rebuild the Palace as a symbol of the rebirth of Mexican democracy. By mid-1995, progress was well underway, and a grand opening was planned at the inauguration of the next Congress in 1997.

    Next up on the list were the many civil liberties which had been trampled under Bartlett. In late March, the right to free expression, the right to protest and to organize political movements (already guaranteed by the Constitution but limited in practice by various lesser laws) were all re-codified in law. The many newspapers and magazines which emerged in 1995 celebrated these achievements; the zeitgeist of this new age was captured most clearly on April 2 in the inaugural issue of El Nuevo Siglo, a new, daily broadsheet based out of Guadalajara. The front page carried a joint editorial in which a pair of young, female journalists, Lydia Cacho and Xanic von Bertrab, revealed that they had been behind the investigation which had revealed Carrillogate and, indirectly, brought down the Bartlett regime. In the editorial, Cacho and von Bertrab (who soon would be awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Investigative Reporting for their efforts) praised Muñoz Ledo for liberalizing the media, while pledging to hold him and his administration to account if they ever strayed into old-style authoritarianism.

    Although these measures were passed with near-unanimous support, one proposal was far more contentious. Opposition activists in Mexico had long been advocating for the formation of a Truth Commission to investigate human rights abuses by past PRI administrations, particularly during the “Dirty War” of the 1970s and the unhappy Bartlett years. Many in the Congress and the administration, led by Sergio Aguayo and Foreign Secretary Adolfo Aguilar Zínser, supported such a commission. However, others, led by Santiago Creel and other conservative panistas, argued that it was move on and leave the past behind. Muñoz Ledo was conspicuously silent on the issue, and the new political dailies were soon accusing him of a conflict of interest, seeing as he had served in several high offices throughout the 1970s, and therefore had likely been complicit in, or at least aware of, some of the abuses of the Dirty War. When Aguayo and Gómez managed to muscle a watered-down version of the Truth Commission through the Congress, Muñoz Ledo signed it, but human rights activists such as Rosario Ibarra de Piedra interpreted his lack of enthusiasm as a black mark in and of itself.

    This controversy, however, was largely overshadowed by the Pemex trials. By the end of April, La Quina and twenty-five of his cronies had each pled guilty to multiple felony charges and been handed lengthy prison sentences. Shortly after the sentencing, El Universal published the results of a brilliant investigation which had discovered appallingly dangerous conditions at Pemex facilities all over the country (perhaps the most alarming revelation of all was that one facility in Guadalajara was a single mishap away from leaking rivers of gasoline into the sewers and causing an explosion that would have made the Salamanca disaster look like a damp firecracker [3]). In light of these revelations, President Muñoz Ledo announced in late May a complete and total shakeup of the Pemex and its leadership. The company's incumbent Director-General was sacked and an outsider, PAN-affiliated lawyer Antonio Lozano García, brought in. To wrest back financial control of the company, Lozano brought in 4,000 outside management appointees (referred to by grumbling Pemex loyalists as “smurfs” [4]) who swiftly began hacking away at the thick rot of corruption and patronage. Under pressure from Labor Secretary Arturo Alcalde, the STPRM chose an ally of the administration—Ramiro Berrón, a petroleum engineer, union dissident and newly-elected PAN deputy from Villahermosa—as its new leader. And when Director-General Lozano announced in July that all of the union’s most lucrative perks and privileges would be revoked, the once-mighty union was as docile as a lamb. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, perhaps the most pro-labor president since Lázaro Cárdenas, had broken the back of Mexico’s most powerful and most corrupt union.

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    While STPRM leader Joaquín “La Quina” Galicia Hernández (center) was not deemed personally responsible for the explosion in Salamanca, the prosecution successfully argued that he had created the “atmosphere of corruption and impunity” which led to the disaster, a charge which would earn La Quina twenty-eight years in federal prison.

    Yet as the threat from the STPRM subsided, Muñoz Ledo soon found that the kum-ba-ya, let’s-all-get-along attitude which had characterized the first year of his presidency did not extend to all issues. Now that a handful of corrupt grease monkeys no longer controlled 33% of his government’s revenue, Muñoz Ledo set out with renewed vigor to pay off the foreign debt, and in August of 1995, he unveiled a plan to settle Mexico’s $35 billion obligations over an eleven-year period. However, the plan was not as popular as Muñoz Ledo had hoped. It required him to delay many of the welfare reinvestments he’d promised on the campaign trail, drawing the ire many voters and political allies and prompting several of the more nationalistically-inclined politicians to accuse Muñoz Ledo of selling out Mexico’s sovereignty to the Pentagon. The plan eventually passed, after a majority of legislators faced up to the hard truth that there was little hope for a robust economic recovery as long as Mexico owed 40% of its GDP to foreign creditors. But the unity of the anti-PRI coalition had been challenged, in preparation for an issue that would truly test its resilience: labor reform.

    Despite the immense power held by organized labor under the PRI regime, Mexican labor laws in the 1990s were among the most authoritarian of any country in North America. Almost everyone, from garbage collectors to mariachi band members, was represented by a union of some kind. But the identities of union officials, as well as the details of the contracts they signed, were kept secret by law, thus preventing workers from holding their “representatives” accountable. The sole authority to recognize unions and authorize strikes lay with a nationwide system of labor boards, which heavily favored PRI-affiliated syndicates and routinely suppressed the activities of independent unions. Perhaps worst of all, businesses were required to fire any employee who lost his or her union membership, allowing bureaucrats in the Labor Secretariat to deprive uppity dissidents of their livelihoods with the stroke of a pen. Porfirio Muñoz Ledo was well-acquainted with theses issues from his time as Labor Secretary in the 1970s, and now that he was President, he was determined to fix them. On September 1, 1995, after months of negotiations between Labor Secretary Arturo Alcalde and various prominent labor leaders (including Julia Quiñónez, the young, fiery leader of the Border Worker’s Committee and freshman PAN deputy from Coahuila), a Labor Rights Law was formally introduced in the Congress.

    It was the first real fight of Muñoz Ledo’s presidency. As introduced, the Law was extremely ambitious: among many other things, it amended the Constitution to abolish the labor board system, codified the right to strike, raised the minimum wage, imposed hundreds of pages’ worth of detailed safety standards, and empowered the Labor Secretariat to impose hefty fines on employers that violated these rights. Unsurprisingly, it met with strident opposition from entrepreneurs; the big businesses, which had previously supported Muñoz Ledo and his policies, suddenly mobilized against him, busing in white-collar office workers from the Mexico City suburbs to protest against it. Naturally, the unions staged counter-demonstrations. But they struggled to respond in early October when TV Azteca joined the fray by introducing a new addition to its daily programming: roundtable discussions on the political and civic issues of the day, hosted by a panel of credentialed experts who all, by sheer coincidence, happened to be virulently opposed to the Labor Rights Law.

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    Outside the northern border states, most of Mexico’s independent unions were only one or two years old by 1995. The fight over the Labor Rights Law gave them their first taste of partisan, political organizing, which would prove useful as the 1997 electoral season approached.

    The Labor Rights Law also exposed fault lines in Mexico’s developing party system. Although the PAN held a commanding majority in both houses of Congress, it was split between a conservative, pro-business wing anchored in the entrepreneurial middle class, and a social-democratic, pro-labor wing rooted in the unions. Panista legislators were soon locked in increasingly heated debates with each other on the Congress floor, and finding the requisite two-thirds majority for a Constitutional amendment forced Muñoz Ledo to expend much of his political capital with the PAN’s right wing. In the end, though, pressure from the administration, from the unions, and from an aggressive public relations campaign which characterized the new Law as the only way to take back power from La Quina and his ilk, paid off. The Labor Rights Law was narrowly approved by both chambers of the Congress on November 12, 1995, just as President Muñoz Ledo was hosting a state dinner at Los Pinos in honor of Lydia Cacho and Xanic von Bertrab. For the second time in a century, labor rights in Mexico had been revolutionized.

    While the Labor Rights Law was percolating its way through the legislature, Muñoz Ledo’s administration had been taking its first baby steps toward peace with the Zapatistas. Since mid-1994, the renegade State of Zapata had been on the rebound from its Bartlett-era nadir. In July, pre-election unrest in the major cities had given Bartlett no choice but to transfer troops out of Chiapas for peacekeeping, and after Muñoz Ledo was sworn in as President in August, he made a point of prioritizing the fight against the cartels over the fight against the Zapatistas. This greatly eased the pressure on the fledgling rebel state, and by early 1995, communities which had spent over a year under siege by the Army had finally been liberated by the ELM. The state’s nominal governor, Bishop Samuel Ruiz, had succeeded in bringing together several of Zapata’s infamously-antagonistic factions, and his army of missionaries and catechists had established a network of communication and exchange which had united once-hostile villages. So when the federal government reached out to Governor Ruiz with an olive branch, he agreed from a position of strength. On September 4, 1995, at the invitation of President Muñoz Ledo, 130,000 Zapatistas and indigenous rights activists arrived in Mexico City for a mass rally at the Zócalo. And when Subcomandante Marcos, the ELM’s masked, spiritual leader, took to the stage to address the assembled throngs (just as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had done seven years prior to call his followers to revolution), he gave a passionate speech demanding that the Congress pass an “Indigenous Bill of Rights” to embed the longstanding, communal traditions of the Mayan and other indigenous peoples into the Mexican Constitution.

    Subcomandante Marcos Marcha.jpg


    Subcomandante Marcos and thousands of other Zapatistas marched all the way from Chiapas to Mexico City for the rally in September, a three-week journey which was later dubbed “La Marcha del Color de la Tierra” after a phrase in Marcos's speech.

    Legislation was soon introduced to codify these rights. But it quickly became clear that many of the Zapatistas’ most stringent demands, such as the right to communal ownership over land and the right to form autonomous regions and states within Mexico, had no chance of passing the Congress. Many deputies and senators considered the State of Zapata to be an illegitimate, treasonous entity, and were loath to formally recognize it as a negotiating partner. Conservatives, led by PAN deputy and power broker Diego Fernández de Cevallos, were dead-set against communal land ownership. And unlike with the Labor Rights Law, there was little chance of getting the left wing of the PAN to pull out all the stops in favor of the legislation, because there was very little overlap between the Zapatistas’ interests and those of the labor movement. In November of 1995, the Chamber of Deputies passed a version of the Indigenous Bill of Rights with many key provisions amended into oblivion, which Subcomandante Marcos promptly tarred as an “insult” and a “betrayal” of the Zapatista movement. Senate President Pablo Gómez, at Muñoz Ledo’s urging, declined to table the bill in his chamber. Muñoz Ledo’s policy of benign neglect would keep outright hostilities between the Zapatistas and the federal government down to a minimum, but a stable, lasting peace would have to come another day.

    Indeed, as the months ticked past and ambitious projects for reform—such as extending the social safety net, privatizing the ejido system of state-owned farmland, and decentralizing power from the capital to the states and municipalities—fizzled away in the Congress, a narrative started to form in the press. The sentiment, echoed by talking heads on Televisa and in the blossoming print media, was that the mass coalition of voters which had swept Muñoz Ledo into power had been formed to destroy the old system, not to build a new one in its place. The vast, pan-Mexican alliance of young and old, rich and poor, workers and farmers, CEOs and street cleaners which had joined forces at the ballot box in 1994 had agreed on plenty of important things, including the need to dismantle the PRI regime, construct a pluralist electoral system, and entrench in law the fundamental rights, freedoms and transparencies which had been denied to them under the PRI. But beyond those aims, visions of what a free and democratic Mexico should look like diverged wildly, both within and between parties, classes, sectors, and movements. These divergences were the reason why the 61st Congress was an incoherent mess of groups and factions which struggled to find consensus on most issues. And, to many politicians and intellectuals, the stage on which this impasse was to be settled would be the congressional elections of 1997. Whichever party or faction came out on top in those elections, the political commentators predicted, would have a mandate to rebuild Mexico from the ground up and define how the country would look as it entered the new millennium. As writer and PAN deputy Julio Scherer put it in his weekly column in La Jornada, “The Mexico of yesterday died in 1994. The Mexico of tomorrow will be born in 1997”.

    Not everyone was quite so dramatic about the Congressional elections of 1997, but it was widely agreed that, as the first-ever federal elections held under an administration ostensibly interested in making them free and fair, they would be a key moment in Mexico’s democratic transition. And so in early 1996, more than a year and a half out, various parties and factions were already preparing for what was shaping up to be the first true electoral campaign of their lifetimes. For the moment, however, many “regular” Mexicans were finding themselves more captivated by their neighbor to the north, whose own approaching election was shaping up to be historic in a way of its own.
    __________
    [1] As far as I know, in OTL, it is not a widespread practice among Pemex employees to illegally sell gasoline straight out the back door of the refinery (though illegal pipeline tapping by criminal gangs remains a significant problem). However, in TTL, the federal government removed almost all forms of oversight over the STPRM after the strike of 1988, and after six-and-a-half years, many Pemex officials have found that they can get away with just about anything as long as they don’t put up billboards advertising it.
    [2] In OTL, La Quina was arrested in pretty much the exact same way on January 10, 1989.
    [3] In OTL, such an explosion did happen. On April 22, 1992, a large amount of gasoline leaked into the Guadalajara sewers and ignited, destroying five miles’ worth of streets, killing over 200 people and gravely wounding a thousand more (Xanic von Bertrab, who was working for a local rag at the time, found out about the leak the day before the explosion, but the authorities didn’t listen to her in time to stop the tragedy). In TTL, the explosion itself has been butterflied away, but the abhorrent safety standards which let it happen have metastasized to Pemex installations in other parts of the country due to the lack of federal oversight.
    [4] Actual name used by Pemex employees to refer to outside managers, so called because they are of unknown origin and have a habit of multiplying very quickly.
     
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    Part 25: 1996 United States presidential election, Democratic Hope, Christian Democratic Party, 1997 Mexican legislative elections
  • The United States presidential election of 1996 was a foregone conclusion. After sixteen straight years in power, the Republican Party had long overstayed its welcome. The previous eight years had undermined all of the party’s traditional selling points: prudent economic stewardship? Not likely after three years of middling growth rates. Law and order? Not while the drug epidemic raged and inner cities from Harlem to Crenshaw convulsed with crime. Strong international leadership? Not from the party that had fumbled the Gulf War and stood idly by as Mexico slid into dictatorship. President Bush, for his part, did little to help things—the statesmanlike stoicism which had helped him win in 1988 now made him appear out of touch and indifferent, and his whiny insistence that the economy was already recovering rang especially hollow to the many people who were scrounging for jobs or struggling to revive their businesses. The American public showed their antipathy toward the GOP in the 1994 midterms, which saw the Democrats expand their majorities in the House and Senate.

    As election year drew closer, Republican voters and politicians alike were tired and demoralized. Just finding a nominee would be a challenge in and of itself, as potential heavy-hitters like Dan Quayle, Dick Lugar, John McCain, and Colin Powell all announced within months of the midterms that they would be sitting out the race. By New Year’s Eve 1995, the Republican field consisted almost entirely of oddballs and misfits: Pat Buchanan, the arch-conservative culture warrior who had harried President Bush in the primaries in 1992; Steve Forbes, businessman and editor of the magazine that bore his name; Bob Dornan, the California congressman best known for loudly accusing his adversaries of homosexuality; and Alan Keyes, a former U.N. official whose two previous attempts at elected office had both ended in landslide defeat. For much of the race, the only halfway “normal” candidate was former Congressman Jack Kemp, who, as Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, had taken much of the blame for the dismal situation plaguing American cities. The Republican voter base was thoroughly relieved in early 1996 when the party leadership finally managed to recruit Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole, who reluctantly entered the race in January, swept the primaries, and was formally nominated at the convention in Phoenix, choosing Education Secretary-turned-Drug Czar Bill Bennett as his running mate.

    The Democratic field grew predictably crowded as various high-profile figures launched their campaigns. Former vice presidential nominee Bob Kerrey threw his hat into the ring, as did senators Al Gore and Tom Harkin and governors Jim Blanchard and Bill Clinton. But deep down, most of the party rank-and-file knew who the nominee would be before he even declared his candidacy. Ever since his election to the Senate in 1990, Henry Cisneros had seemed to speak for America’s voiceless: Hispanic immigrants, inner-city kids, drug addicts, and those who had been left behind by the rising tide of globalization. His legislative work showed that his interest in these groups went beyond empty rhetoric—the Weldon-Cisneros Act, passed in mid-1995, had created a raft of new incentives to dissuade U.S. firms from outsourcing production, saving tens of thousands of industrial jobs and turning the freshman Texas senator into a darling of organized labor. Cisneros had also profited immensely from his opposition to the PRI regime in Mexico. From the very beginning, he had been Manuel Bartlett’s fiercest enemy in Washington, suffering the condescending scorn of those who insisted on supporting the despot as a lesser evil to anarchy or communism. So when the true extent of Bartlett’s corruption was revealed, Cisneros gained a reputation not only as a paragon of moral courage, but also an astute judge of character with a sharp mind for diplomacy. On May 14, 1995, when Cisneros officially launched his presidential campaign before a throng of 40,000 cheering supporters in HemisFair Park in his hometown of San Antonio, one devout listener claimed to the Texas Tribune that the former mayor’s candidacy was divinely ordained.

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    Though Texas state law permitted him to run simultaneously for the Senate and the presidency, Senator Cisneros chose not to run for re-election, instead passing his seat on to another public atoner: Lena Guerrero, whose career had seemingly ended in 1991 when it was revealed she had lied on her resumé, but who made a stunning comeback by riding Cisneros’s coattails to victory over businessman Robert Mosbacher, Jr.

    Cisneros’s path to the nomination was not without its obstacles. His opponents criticized him for his relative inexperience, political missteps (such as voting for the ROGUE STATES Act just days after lambasting it), and his personal failings, particularly the extramarital affair to which he had publicly confessed in 1989. But none of the critiques seemed to weigh him down. Years later, David McCullough would write that the youthful senator’s open, unqualified remorse proved an asset, rather than a liability, on the campaign trail—after four years of collective anxiety and insecurities, and with a national ego bruised and battered, the American people hungered not for the picture-perfect candidate with a model family and squeaky-clean past, but for the man who had forsaken his honor, won it back, and carried on through adversity. Henry Cisneros—a reformed adulterer, a father to a son with a horrible heart condition, and a Hispanic who had overcome the stigma of his race to reach high political office—fit the bill just perfectly.

    Beyond the candidate’s past, the Cisneros campaign embodied a distinct theme of hope, renewal and change. In contrast to his opponents, most of whom were spouting off the same dry, fiscally-conservative talking points which had kneecapped Paul Tsongas in 1992, Cisneros touted a unique blend of public-sector development and private-sector empowerment dubbed by columnists both friendly and hostile as “business populism”. Pledging to solve America’s many problems by partnering the broad powers of government with the rugged efficiency of business, Cisneros’s platform seemed to resonate with the fickle, suburban moderates who had blocked Democrats’ path to the White House time after time. And unlike Tsongas, whose aggressive appeals to those voters had turned off urban minorities and working-class whites, Cisneros could point to his work in San Antonio, which he’d transformed from a sleepy, decaying city to a vibrant center of growth and culture, as well as his efforts in the Senate to protect industrial jobs, to prove that he was an ally of the blue as well as the white-collar voter. Cisneros clinched a majority of delegates within the first month of the primaries and was crowned to plentiful fanfare at the convention in Louisville. His choice of running mate, House Speaker Dick Gephardt, drew concerns about his lack of charisma, but Gephardt’s solid support from organized labor, as well as Cisneros’s own vast personal charms, put paid to those fears.

    As the conventions gave way to full-on campaign season, some Democratic analysts worried Cisneros would look inexperienced next to the accomplished statesman Dole. But these fears were unfounded. In the debates, the septuagenarian Republican seemed tired and supercilious while the scion of San Antonio was enthusiastic and passionate. Nor were Cisneros’s strengths solely cosmetic: When Senator Dole attacked Cisneros’s plan to forgive most of Mexico’s debt, Senator Cisneros made a persuasive case that debt amnesty was necessary to restore stability and prosperity to Mexico and cut down on illegal immigration. While a lethargic Dole invoked high urban crime rates to frighten rural and suburban whites (a Nixonesque strategy which may indeed have helped him win a state or two), Cisneros placed himself above petty racial rivalries and promised to fundamentally reconstruct the American city while delivering solutions for all Americans. While Dole defended the tough-on-crime laws which had put hundreds of thousands of nonviolent offenders behind bars while utterly failing to solve the drug crisis, Cisneros expressed compassion for drug addicts and pledged to treat them not as criminals, but as victims. Vice presidential nominee Bill Bennett, whom Dole had chosen to add credibility on the drug issue, instead drew strident criticism for his part in allowing the crisis to spiral out of control.

    On election day, the question was not whether or not Cisneros would win but how big of a margin he would win by. The answer, as it turned out, was pretty big: 402 votes in the electoral college and an eleven-point margin of the popular vote. Cisneros’s campaign not only won back all of the traditional Democratic strongholds, but also narrowly flipped several states which hadn’t voted blue in decades: Louisiana, Kentucky, as well as (thanks to high turnout among Latino voters, over 80% of whom cast their ballots for Cisneros) Arizona, Florida, and the senator’s own home state of Texas. History had been made—for the first time since its founding, the United States of America had elected a non-white President.

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    South of the border, reactions to the victory were ecstatic—not just because of the new President’s heritage, but also because of his promise to significantly reduce Mexican debt. For the moment, though, most Mexicans were far more preoccupied with political developments in their own country, particularly as the post-PRI party system began to take shape ahead of the hotly-anticipated Congressional elections of 1997.

    For three years, the PAN had held a commanding presence in Mexican politics. As the only opposition party in the election of 1994, the PAN had reaped almost all of the benefits from the PRI’s landslide defeat, capturing 413 seats in the Chamber of Deputies and 112 in the Senate. But the following years would show just how disorganized and incoherent the party had become. Over the course of the 61st Congress, as the PAN’s social democratic left wing clashed with the conservative old guard over everything from labor reform, foreign policy, the Zapatistas and the welfare state, the burgeoning community of political columnists began to predict that a split of some kind was inevitable. It came sooner than expected. On April 13, 1996, more than a year out from the elections of 1997, several prominent panista progressives, including Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Senate President Pablo Gómez and Chamber of Deputies President Sergio Aguayo, announced the formation of a new political party: Esperanza Democrática, or Democratic Hope. Pledging to stand for the “rights of all workers and farmers” and the “principles of Cárdenas and Madero,” ED, as it soon became known, was instantly endorsed by all the major labor unions, and President Muñoz Ledo lent the new party his tacit support (though he stopped short of joining, determined as he was to rule as an independent).

    Within two weeks, 136 panista deputies—one-third of the entire PAN caucus—had joined the new, left-wing party, as had 57 of the 72 remaining priístas. In the Senate, the picture was even worse, as 43 of the PAN’s 112 senators announced their defection. Aguayo and Gómez instantly lost their leadership positions in the Chamber and the Senate and were replaced, respectively, by conservative panistas Carlos Medina Plascencia and Ernesto Ruffo Appel. But the new party had left its mark: though it had kept its majorities in both chambers, the PAN presence was greatly reduced, and its credibility as a governing party had taken a serious hit.

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    Perhaps more damaging, however, was the response of the party leaders. Within weeks of the split, PAN godfather Diego Fernández de Cevallos called a conclave of the most prominent panistas at his home in the Bosque de Chapultepec, where it became clear that, even without the breakaway left, the PAN’s remaining faithfuls did not agree on how the party should face the future. Fernández de Cevallos, Luis Álvarez, and other old-liners demanded that the PAN become the “conscience of Mexico” by returning to its traditional, Catholic roots. But younger, more technocratic members insisted that the party should work to capture the liberal-minded, white-collar middle class by modernizing and moving to the center. Press correspondents noted the suspicion with which senators, deputies and activists needled each other over their partisan loyalties, with deputy Carlos María Abascal declaring that there were “traitors still in our midst”. In a column in the left-leaning newspaper Nuevo Siglo, PAN-turned-ED deputy Julio Scherer sneered that the PAN’s attitude toward dissent was little more tolerant than that of the PRI under Bartlett.

    For several months, the PAN’s two remaining factions battled over policy, messaging, and control over the Congressional legislative calendar. The repeated recriminations cost the party a further eighteen seats in the Chamber of Deputies and six in the Senate. Through most of the fall 1996 session, ortodoxo and modernista legislators squabbled over votes and committee assignments, culminating in a dramatic attempt in October to unseat Carlos Medina Plascencia and Ernesto Ruffo Appel from their leadership positions. The bid failed, and some overly optimistic technocrats declared that their camp had triumphed. Three days later, Fernández de Cevallos, Carlos María Abascal and several other prominent ortodoxos declared the birth of yet another breakaway group: the Christian Democratic Party. Twenty-four of the PAN’s 277 remaining deputies jumped ship, as did nine of its 63 remaining senators—not quite the massacre some had expected, but enough to cut down the PAN majority in the Chamber to a measly eight seats and remove it entirely in the Senate (where Ruffo Appel survived as president only by making a deal with the ED caucus to advance legislation creating a permanent envoy from Los Pinos to the State of Zapata). The resulting ideological chaos would consume the PAN for most of 1997.

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    Meanwhile, as the PAN convulsed, Democratic Hope was busy rediscovering the time-aged art of electioneering. Elections to the Chamber of Deputies were scheduled for July 6, 1997, and the fledgling party’s leadership set to work rebuilding and refining the well-oiled electoral machine which had delivered Muñoz Ledo’s staggering landslide three years earlier. ED was well-equipped for election season: the activist labor unions, whose strident campaigning efforts on Muñoz Ledo’s behalf had delivered millions of votes back in 1994, had all announced their support. Many of the party’s new deputies hailed from rural districts where they had extensive contacts with local power brokers, allowing them to access isolated communities which would otherwise have been politically inaccessible. In addition, many of post-PRI Mexico’s most popular political figures, including President Muñoz Ledo, Sergio Aguayo and Mexico City Mayor Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, had either joined the party or lent it their unspoken support. And the momentum was showing. By March of 1997, ED legislators had taken control of the state legislatures of Coahuila and Morelos and had nominated a full slate of candidates for the federal elections.

    While ED prepared itself, President Muñoz Ledo worked to make the elections of 1997 the most free and fair in Mexican history. In 1995, Muñoz Ledo’s administration had formed the Institute of Electoral Security under the leadership of political scientist José Woldenberg. Armed with a $1.2 billion budget, the Institute had trained nearly half a million people, chosen at random from the voter registration rolls, to man the polls, backed up by opposition poll-watchers in almost every voting place from Tijuana to Cancun. The Institute had also designed a special, narrow voting booth wide enough to fit only one person, allowing every voter to cast their ballot without fear of being watched. When election day came on July 6, the polling went very smoothly. TV Azteca reported a few “irregularities”—a sudden power outage at one polling place in Tonatico, ballot boxes pre-stuffed for the PAN at a few stations in suburban Monterrey, and one quixotic, pistol-brandishing PRI holdover in rural Campeche who made off with a few boxes—but overall, the vote was cleaner and more orderly than it had ever been in Mexican history. President Muñoz Ledo would later write about how proud he had been to turn down Defense Secretary Gutiérrez Rebollo’s offer to have the Army watch over the polls as it had done in 1994, a decision which drew praise from international observers (although some have since pointed out that the Army only felt comfortable with Muñoz Ledo’s refusal because it feared no threat to its drug-trafficking activities from any of the competing parties).

    To this day, the election results remain a matter of debate. Many panistas still grumble that they might have done better if the PDC hadn’t split the right-wing vote, but subsequent analyses have shown that the Christian Democrats did not run candidates in enough seats to cause a large-scale defeat. Edecos have found other explanations: that ED had a more solid lock over its key constituencies than the PAN did over its own, or that voters had grown tired with the PAN’s dysfunctionality and factionalism. But among supporters, the most popular narrative is that ED’s message simply resonated better with the electorate. Since mid-1996, when key elements of his agenda stalled in the increasingly fractious Congress, President Muñoz Ledo had been advocating for an entirely new constitution, claiming that the Constitution of 1917 was too limited and too easily-abused to allow for the kind of sweeping changes Mexico demanded. Democratic Hope had made this the central plank of their platform, calling for a constitutional convention which they hoped would allow for deep, fundamental reforms to the welfare state, the ejido system, and the balance of power between the states and the federal government. In contrast to the PAN, which (during the short interludes between its intraparty squabbles) offered a more restrained, liberal platform involving a lowering of barriers to international trade, deregulation of business and privatization of some state-owned enterprises, ED promised to strive boldly ahead to forge the institutional structure of post-PRI Mexico and continue the work of what Octavio Paz had already dubbed “the Second Mexican Revolution”. Democratic Hope won, supporters say, because it embodied just that: hope.

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    Whatever the reason, ED’s victory was decisive. With 53% of the popular vote, the party captured 323 seats in the Chamber of Deputies, just shy of the two-thirds needed to amend the Constitution but still more than enough to pass crucial legislation. The Senate, which was not due for re-election until 2000, remained under split control, but a partnership with the Christian Democrats soon gave ED the leadership of the upper chamber. In the concurrent state elections, things were less bleak for the PAN, which captured the governorships of Querérato, Nuevo León and San Luis Potosí and retaining control of the state legislatures in Guanajuato and Baja California. But ED held its own both outside the capital city (where edecos were elected governor in Colima and Campeche) and inside it (where Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas won the first-ever election for Mayor of Mexico City).

    But while the winners and losers were clear, the elections of 1997 were a triumph for everyone in Mexico. By far the freest and the most pluralistic in Mexican history, they proved that the country could function and thrive without PRI leadership, and the PAN’s and PDC’s genuine, if begrudging, concessions showed that the leaders of opposing parties could be trusted to win and lose with grace. Perhaps the only true losers were the PRI: having lost most of its remaining legislators to the opposition over the course of the 61st Congress, the former party of power was left dazed and rudderless without a clear national leader, message, organization, or fundraising strategy. Utterly annihilated on the grassroots level, not one of the PRI’s candidates won his district, and “the party of crooks, thieves and narcotraficantes” (as dubbed by newly-elected ED deputy Carlos Monsiváis) was reduced to a pitiful eight seats, all awarded by proportional representation. The old regime was well and truly dead.

    To mark the occasion, on July 15, 1997, U.S. President Henry Cisneros signed a piece of legislation which reduced Mexico’s foreign debt from $31 billion to $10 billion. The following week, President Cisneros made his first state visit south of the Rio Grande, where he stood side-by-side with President Muñoz Ledo on the front steps of Los Pinos and declared in fluent Spanish that a new beginning had been reached in Mexican-American relations. Another beginning dawned soon after: on September 1, 1997, the 62nd Congress of the Union was sworn in at the newly-rebuilt Palace of San Lázaro, and the new President of the Chamber of Deputies, Ifigenia Martínez, declared that “the new Mexico has just been born”.

    The following three years would lay the foundation for how exactly the new Mexico would look.
     
    Part 26: 1999 Mexican constitutional referendum, 2000 Mexican legislative elections, 2000 Mexican presidential election
  • When the 62nd Congress of the Mexican Union was gaveled into session in 1997, the assembled legislators had one thing on their minds: change. The various factions of Mexico’s blossoming, multi-party system disagreed on what exactly should be changed, but everyone could see that the system needed reform, and needed it now. And while only Democratic Hope had openly campaigned on the promise of a new constitution, by the time the new legislators congregated in the rebuilt Palace of San Lázaro, most of them had more or less accepted that the changes they sought would require nothing less than a full-on rebirth of Mexican political thought.

    The problem was how to organize one. The Political Constitution of 1917 included no provision for a constitutional convention. It would be simple enough on paper to just amend the constitution and provide for one, but finding the requisite two-thirds majority in the Chamber and the Senate proved challenging. ED proposed a national convention made up of elected delegates, but the PDC and the PAN, still reeling from their landslide defeat, pushed back in fear that such a convention would be stacked against them. Instead, the Congressional right jointly proposed another model: a committee of prominent members of the civil society, half appointed by the majority in Congress and half by the opposition, which would draft a new constitution and then submit it to a national referendum for approval. ED and its allies lambasted this plan as elitist and undemocratic, but they had little choice but to take it seriously as the opposition pledged to block any other plan. Eventually, after a month of back-and-forth, the two sides agreed to a hybrid plan. The new constitution would be drafted over a twelve-month period by a constitutional convention consisting of two separate bodies—a Popular Assembly with 300 delegates elected by the people and a Council of Deliberation with 72 members appointed by the Congress—which would split up into various Committees, each equally divided between left- and right-leaning members. These Committees would investigate their respective policy areas and issue reports, which the wider Convention would then compile into a single document. Each body of the Convention would have to endorse the final draft by a majority of at least three-quarters, and the final document would have to be approved in a national referendum.

    Though the Popular Assembly were officially non-partisan, it was clear that most of the 300 delegates who were elected to the Convention in mid-January at least sympathized with ED and its principles. But that didn’t stop a substantial number of eclectic independents from being elected. Delegates like activist Marco Rascón Cordova (who showed up to the convention’s first session in character as the poverty-fighting superhero Superbarrio Gómez) and the cowboy hat-wearing Jalisco rancher José González Rosas (whose death nine years later at the hands of drug-trafficking soldiers would help ignite a fiery, public rage at the unholy union between the narcos and the Army). Characters such as these turned the Convention floor into a lively hall of raucous, often expletive-laden debate, and neither Televisa nor TV Azteca had to worry about their ratings while the Convention was in session. The Council of Deliberation, by contrast, was considerably more stodgy and sedate, as the slate of trustees approved by the Congress included such even-keeled characters as the poet laureate Octavio Paz and the matronly, ex-priísta elder stateswoman María de los Ángeles Moreno.

    Despite the stark contrast between the two deliberative bodies, they quickly became the beating heart of Mexican political life. Held in multiple different sessions at the UNAM campus over a year-long period from March 1998 to January 1999, the Constitutional Convention became the linchpin of Mexico's national renewal. Nearly all the major newspapers assigned full-time correspondents to cover the proceedings, and all major debates and hearings were broadcast live on cable news networks. Within weeks, members of Congress were complaining about how little attention they were getting from the press, as the Convention proceedings sucked up all the limelight.

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    To a nation unaccustomed to open discussion of political and social problems, the Constitutional Convention became a source of fascination. Many of Mexico’s most prominent political pundits made their bones reporting on the Convention’s many testimonies, committee hearings and tribunals, and some of modern-day Mexico's brightest political stars were involved in the Convention as delegates or council members.

    First on the agenda was civil and human rights. The most obvious ones, like assembly, speech, religion, press, and protest, had been officially enshrined since 1917, but successive PRI governments had ignored these rights whenever it suited them. Other rights, like that of citizens to access government records, had never even existed, allowing the state to maintain an impenetrable veil of secrecy over its more sinister activities. Pulitzer laureates Lydia Cacho and Xanic von Bertrab, though not delegates themselves, were very public in calling on the Convention to right those wrongs, and Council member Jorge Zepeda Patterson was swift in answering the call. As the founder and publisher of the newspaper Nuevo Siglo, Zepeda grasped how the PRI machine had been able to manipulate the press through its dominance of the paper and advertising trades. The resolution he introduced in April, which explicitly banned the state from withholding resources from a news outlet on the basis of its editorial stance, was adopted with zeal. Delegate Rosario Ibarra’s resolution that the state immediately disclose all files regarding torture, forced disappearance, the Dirty War, and other human rights abuses was approved without a single abstention. To give these provisions teeth, delegate and human rights lawyer Jorge López Vergara proposed the creation of an independent Ombudsman for Human Rights empowered to investigate government abuses, charge military and civilian officials with crimes, and refer certain cases directly to the Supreme Court of Justice. López’s plan also stated that when the high Court ruled on such questions, its decisions would be binding not just for the parties that had filed the case but also, in a reversal of the centuries-old Otero principle, for the entire country.

    Though there was broad consensus on these issues, some questions were fractious and controversial, such as the future of the welfare state. From the very beginning, Mexico’s social security system had been deeply flawed: government-funded health insurance, work injury compensation, and retirement pensions had only ever been available to members of oficialista labor unions, and the most powerful syndicates had hogged all of the best benefits while the rest offered only piecemeal coverage. Mexicans who did not belong to any union (meaning almost everyone outside the cities) had no safety net at all. The task of laying the groundwork for a new system fell to the 24-member Joint Committee on Solidarity and Social Welfare, which, in accordance with Convention rules, was equally split between left and right. The two sides disagreed profoundly on how exactly the changes should look and how far they should go—the left-leaning Committee members advocated a universal, crade-to-grave system of entitlements, while the right-leaning caucus, led by PAN economist Josefina Vázquez Mota, pushed for a much more conservative system designed only to provide the truly indigent with the minimum skills necessary to enter the workforce.

    It quickly became apparent that on this issue, the conservatives had the upper hand. The leftists were split between pro-worker delegates led by former Acuña labor leader Juan Tovar, and pro-farmer delegates led by former Guerrero Congressmen Jorge Eloy Martínez. This split allowed the conservatives to dominate the Committee proceedings, calling up a cavalcade of economists and businessmen to give favorable testimony and drafting reports and recommendations with zero involvement from the left. However, once they realized that the Committee’s final recommendation would be a right-wing wishlist, the leftist delegates came together to stonewall all Committee business and demand rewrites of all major reports. Conservative media pundits, particularly at TV Azteca, tore the delegates apart for obstructionism and immaturity, but there was little Vázquez and her team could do as long as they lacked a working majority. The leftists, meanwhile, could do little else but obstruct, since they still lacked the cohesion to put together counter-proposals of their own. The Committee eventually decided to kick the can down the road, providing the basic skeleton of a welfare state and leaving it up to future administrations to hang meat on the bones. The Committee’s final report consisted mainly of broad principles, including that all communities, whether rural or urban, must have equal access to social programs, and that employee contributions to any work-based insurance funds should never exceed employer or government contributions.

    Somewhat less acrimonious was the question of agricultural reform. Since the days of Lázaro Cárdenas, millions of Mexican farmers had been wringing their bread out of small, communal plots of state-owned land called ejidos. By 1998, this system was in crisis. Because communal farmers did not own the land they cultivated, they could not sell it or borrow money against it. The only sure source of capital was the federal government, which doled out funds only when it was politically convenient. Many ejidos lacked not just modern farming equipment but also electricity and running water, and after Carlos Salinas loosened import restrictions in 1989, millions of ejidatarios had been run out of business by foreign grain, feeding a vicious cycle of falling food production and growing import dependence. Many farmers had already been forced to leave their homes and flee into the cities, where they faced the blight of urban poverty, or to the United States, where conditions were little better. On April 6, one ejidatario delegate from Michoacán gave a moving speech to the convention, in which he described the sorrow he felt while watching his wife and children grow emaciated on a bare-bones diet of corn and beans, and begged the Convention to turn things around before it was too late.

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    For years, the farming community had been ignored by PRI governments intent on promoting industrialization and urbanization. To millions of ejidatarios, the Constitutional Convention represented the first chance in 65 years to petition the government to make genuine improvements in their lives.

    Despite the Convention’s rules on equal apportionment, the Committee on Agricultural Reform was far less partisan than most of its counterparts. Nearly all the members were from rural, ejido-heavy regions and had a visceral understanding of the problems facing rural Mexico. Within three months, the Committee had put together a detailed, ambitious set of proposals, including a program of joint state-farmer ownership to give the farmers a stake in their own production, a pledge from the federal government to provide all ejidos with electricity and running water by 2014, authorizing individual ejidos to merge with each other in order to increase production and reap economies of scale, and requiring every state to establish an agricultural college with free tuition for local farmers. Perhaps the most extraordinary proposal would have bound the federal government to set aside 3% of its total annual revenue to invest in agricultural production and “the general welfare of the ejidatarios”. While this constraint was eventually whittled down to 1.8%, the rest of the Committee’s recommendations were adopted with little modification in what was seen as a major triumph for the farmers.

    Perhaps the most dramatic moment of the Convention concerned the matter of the Zapatistas. Since Subcomandante Marcos’ march on Mexico City in 1995, little had changed between Mexico City and San Cristóbal. President Muñoz Ledo had continued his benign neglect of the State of Zapata, which continued to exist as an autarkic confederation of self-sufficient communes, and which was growing increasingly isolated from the rest of the country. No attempts had been made to negotiate, as the federal government did not recognize the authority of Bishop Samuel Ruiz, the State’s nominal governor. The Mayan delegation to the Constitutional Convention, consisting of 12 delegates from majority-Indian constituencies in the south, pressed hard for the recognition of Zapata as a full-fledged state with special constitutional status, and for the adoption of the Indigenous Bill of Rights, which had failed in the Senate two years earlier. But these efforts led nowhere. Recognizing Zapata was a bridge too far even for many of the more left-leaning delegates, and the Bill of Rights seemed equally unpalatable.

    Then, on June 8, 1998, Mayan caucus leader and human rights activist María de Patricio Martínez read out to the Convention a letter from Subcomandante Marcos, pledging that the ELM would launch a renewed military offensive within week unless the Convention showed “the faintest interest in the well-being of the people of the State of Zapata”. Within hours, stock prices were dropping, and within days, President Muñoz Ledo was pressuring delegates to give in to the Mayans’ less outrageous demands. By June 13, the Convention’s joint committee had reached a compromise: the State of Zapata would not be officially recognized, but Mayan sovereignty over the area would be, meaning that the Zapatistas would be able to carry on in all but name. A separate legislature for the indigenous people was off the table, but legislators from Mayan-heavy districts would be permitted to form a caucus during every session of the Congress of the Union to block or approve matters affecting indigenous communities. Many indigenous rights, including the right to communal land ownership and the right of Mayan children to attend public school in their native language, would also be incorporated into the new Constitution. Critics raged in the press, accusing President Muñoz Ledo of “capitulating to the rebels”, but that didn’t stop the resolutions from being adopted by both bodies of the mildly-perturbed Convention.

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    María de Jesús Patricio Martínez, affectionately known as Marichuy, emerged as the Zapatistas’ champion in Mexico City. Her role in securing multiple key concessions at the Constitutional Convention helped pave the way for her to become one of the Mayan people’s most dedicated advocates under the new political system.

    Despite all these major, far-reaching changes, perhaps the most noticeable result of the Constitutional Convention was the fundamental restructuring of Mexico’s political system. Since the dawn of the Mexican republic, the President had always exercised an inordinate amount of power over the country. After the excesses of the Bartlett years, it was clear that such a “hyper-presidentialist” regime, as Enrique Krauze called it, could not be allowed to continue. So, at the outset of the Convention, the Committee on Political Institutions was given the formidable task of designing an entirely new political structure for 21st-century Mexico. Unlike most of the Convention’s other Committees, which were proportionally distributed between members of the Popular Assembly and the Council of Deliberation, the Committee on Political Institutions was stacked with learned academics drawn from the upper chamber. The Committee’s two vice-chairmen, Juan Molinar Horcasitas and Jorge Castañeda (both renowned political scientists who had played key roles in the downfall of the PRI), enjoyed a warm relationship, developing ideas over cordial coffee chats and hashing them out on paper with the collaborative consent of their colleagues.

    The system they eventually came up with was influenced by everything from American constitutional law to Irish naming conventions, and was approved with gusto by the Committee in November of 1998. The fundamental change was to move Mexico from a presidential to a semi-presidential regime, with a president tasked largely with ceremonial duties and political arbitration, and a prime ministerial figure charged with governing the country and implementing policies. The latter figure would take on the title of tlatoani, from the Nahuatl word for “leader”, and would be appointed by the Chamber of Deputies at the outset of every Congress. The tlatoani would be accountable to the Chamber of Deputies, which could remove him or her from office with a majority vote (although, in order to effect such a removal, the chamber would need to simultaneously appoint a new tlatoani to fill the void). The tlatoani would nominate most cabinet secretaries, all of whom would be subject to confirmation by both the Chamber and the Senate. The president would give up most administrative duties to the tlatoani, though he would still reserve some powers including the right to issue calls for new elections once per term, the right to appoint ambassadors and cabinet ministers charged with defense and foreign policy, and the right to negotiate international treaties.

    Other major changes involved elections to the Congress. In addition to proportional representation, which had already been a feature of Mexican elections since the 1970s, future Congresses would be elected by ranked-choice voting in mixed-member constituencies. This, it was hoped, would make future dictatorships unlikely by preventing any single party from acquiring sole power. The ban on consecutive re-election was lifted for deputies, who were now permitted to serve up to three terms, and for senators, who could serve up to two. Senators would serve staggered terms, and elections to the Senate would be held every three rather than every six years to make the upper chamber more sensitive to swings in the national political mood. Also changed was the process of amending the Constitution itself, which had been so easy in years past that PRI Presidents had done it whenever it suited them without a second thought. Now, in addition to a two-thirds vote in both chambers of the Congress, constitutional amendments would require the consent of at least 17 state legislatures and popular approval in a nationwide referendum. These reforms were highly popular with the rest of the delegates (many were already sizing up future Congressional runs, and they liked any plan which gave more power to the legislative branch), and the Committee’s plan was adopted by the wider Convention with almost no modifications.

    MolinarAndCastaneda.png


    Because of their prominent role in crafting the new constitution’s political institutions, Juan Molinar Horcasitas (left) and Jorge Castañeda (right) were hailed as Mexico’s newest founding fathers. Both men would later hold positions of leadership in the system they helped design.

    Not every aspect of the Convention was a triumph. Aside from the acrimonies gripping the welfare committee, the difficulties faced by delegate Samuel del Villar would foreshadow future political crises. As a vice-chairman of the Committee on Corruption Reform, del Villar hoped he could muscle through some measures to increase oversight over corrupt military officials. But when he tried to demand that all high-ranking Army officers submit twice a year to an audit by an independent, anti-corruption commission, he found it strangely impossible to get the rest of the Committee on his side. His proposal for a permanent prosecutor’s office to investigate civilian corruption was accepted unanimously, but when he tried to establish a similar office for the Army, several of his colleagues (particularly delegate Juan Galvan, an associate of former Defense Secretary Juan Gutiérrez Rebollo), insisted that the Army should have the right to investigate its own affairs, claiming that civilian prosecution would caused the Army to become politicized. del Villar’s many counterarguments proved inexplicably useless, as a sizable majority of the Committee’s members voted to make the Constitution almost entirely toothless regarding the issue of Army corruption. By 2008, an investigation by El Universal would reveal that over half of the members of the Committee on Corruption Reform had accepted bribes from cartel-affiliated Army officers (which would form just one piece of the massive wave of scandals that would rattle the foundations of the new republic just a few years after its inception).

    Despite these difficulties, by late 1998, the Convention had pieced together all of the various Committees’ reports and recommendations into vast, sprawling document that touched every policy area from health care to press freedom to minority rights. The result was wildly imperfect, and no one side was entirely pleased with it, but in a system built for compromise, there could hardly have been a better outcome. The final document was approved near-unanimously by both Chambers of the Convention on January 13, 1999, two months ahead of schedule. Within two weeks, both chambers of the Congress had approved the new Constitution. The public referendum was scheduled for May, with the intention that the new system, if approved, would enter into force on the first day of the new millennium.

    Though the people had three months to consider the new Constitution, three days would have been just as good. Nearly every day of the Convention had been broadcast live on cable TV, and every aspect of the writing process had been carefully analyzed by every pundit and politician in Mexico. By the time it the Convention was over, most of the people had already made up their minds about the new Constitution. And with all of the major political parties backing it to the hilt, there was little doubt as to the outcome of the referendum.

    MexicanConstitutionalReferendum1999.png

    With over 80% of the vote, the Millennial Constitution received a resounding endorsement from the Mexican people and went into effect on January 1, 2000. That year would see the first federal elections under the new system, and Democratic Hope knew exactly whom to pick as their standard-bearers. For the new position of tlatoani, there was perhaps no man better suited than Sergio Aguayo. For years under the PRI, the human rights activist from Guadalajara had been one of the most passionate advocates for political change. As President of the Chamber of Deputies following the crucial election of 1994, Aguayo had pioneered the art of parliamentary wrangling while setting many important precedents, and as one of ED’s founding members, he could be trusted to govern responsibly while advancing the party’s core priorities.

    The PAN did its best to oppose ED at the polls. By this point, the party leadership had managed to paper over most of the factional divisions, and tlatoani candidate Carlos Medina Plascencia forced the appearance of unity by demanding iron adherence to the party line. There were some rumblings of discontent (most conspicuously from Conchalupe Garza, a PAN Congressional candidate from suburban Monterrey, who was recorded on a hot mic comparing Medina and his staff to the Gestapo), but on the surface, the party held together well enough to increase its presence in the chamber by 22 seats and stave off a widely-expected threat from the Christian Democrats. But it just wasn’t enough. For all the PAN’s ideological coherence, Sergio Aguayo was simply too popular and ED had a lock on too many rural and urban districts to lose control. While ED won an outright majority in the Senate, allowing Senate President Adolfo Aguilar Zínser taking office as the first cuauhtlatoani, or vice-leader, the party would maintain control of the Chamber of Deputies with a reduced, but still commanding majority, and Sergio Aguayo would take office as the first tlatoani of 21st-century Mexico.

    Mexico2000(COD).png

    As for the Presidency, ED was represented by one of the most popular men in Mexico. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had always been reluctant to re-enter politics after his wife’s assassination. He had agreed to serve as Mayor of Mexico City only because he was assured that he would not be asked to run for a full term once direct elections were instituted. But, as he worked to cleanse the city government of corruption and graft, Cárdenas had slowly rediscovered the zeal for change that had first attracted him to seek public office in the 1970s. ED officials had approached Cárdenas about a presidential run as early 1997, and he had initially been skeptical about committing to such a responsibility. But once he realized that the new Constitution would turn the presidency into more of a ceremonial arbiter than the administrative and political epicenter of the country, he could barely declare his candidacy fast enough.

    His victory wasn’t quite a 1994-style landslide, but it was still a resounding mandate. He captured an outright majority of the vote and won all but four states, surpassing ED’s share of the Congressional vote by two percentage points. It wasn’t the first time Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had won a presidential election, but it was the first time he would be allowed to take office. The general’s son was on his way to Los Pinos, where he would set many precedents that would help define the presidency in post-PRI Mexico as a dignified figure above the political fray.

    Mexico2000.png

    As per the provisions of the Millennial Constitution, Cárdenas was to be inaugurated not in December but in September, two weeks after the installation of the new Congress. In contrast to 1994, when Muñoz Ledo and his allies in the Congress had been too busy to stage even the most paltry of inauguration ceremonies, Cárdenas was determined to make his investiture one for the history books. Dignitaries from all over the Western Hemisphere were invited, including Prime Minister Tobin from Ottawa, President Cisneros from Washington, and President Arías Cárdenas from Caracas. The swearing-in was to take place not within the Chamber of Deputies, as was customary, but in the center of Mexico City, where the masses could gather together and watch it for themselves. As 250,000 Mexicans gathered in the Zócalo to watch a man they had elected get duly sworn in as head of state, the air was imbued with a distinct sense of optimism and hope. Mothers and fathers lifted their children up onto their shoulders so that they could watch the new president take the oath of office. After decades of struggling and striving, democracy had well and truly arrived in Mexico. But if the hard-won achievements of millions of activists and protesters were to survive, then the younger generation would have to understand the value of the gift they had been given, and they would have to work even harder than their parents had to preserve it.
     
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    Epilogue
  • September 15, 2000
    Mexico City

    Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had been here before, though it had been a long time.

    Had it really been twelve years? No, it couldn’t have been. He remembered it all so clearly—the scorching heat, the oppressive, late-summer sun, the grief crushing him like a mountain of granite. But most of all, he remembered the rage. The blinding, convulsing, spasm-inducing, all-consuming rage. His own rage—at being cheated out of power, at his wife’s murder—but also the people’s rage. Rage at being cheated, at being lied to, and being taken for fools. The rage of a people that had been abused, robbed, and deceived year after year, decade after decade, by the same pack of criminals. The bloodlust of a battered dog that growls silently at its master and dreams of one day turning around, baring its teeth and tearing flesh from bone.

    Cuauhtémoc had felt that rage. He had seen it in their eyes. He had known its power. It had disturbed him, and he had taken to the stage to calm it down. But he had lost control of himself. He had let his rage consume him. For a single moment, this satanic, volatile rage had found in him its earthly instrument. Instead of calming his supporters’ lust for revenge, he had told them to unleash fountains of blood—fountains of blood—from the necks of their enemies. For a single moment, he had held his nation’s future in his hands, and with a single speech, he had set it aflame.

    Everything that had happened in Mexico since then—the autumn of terrors, the recession, the killing of Salinas, the fascistic hell of the Bartlett years—all of it could be traced back to that speech. For years, Cuauhtémoc had blamed himself for all of the death and bloodshed. Why hadn’t he been more careful with his words? Why hadn’t he had urged caution, restraint, and nonviolence, like he had planned to do?

    Day after day, year after year, as he watched his country slide down the path of damnation, the guilt had paralyzed him. Time and time again he had felt the urge to get back into politics, to be a leader, but every time he had resisted. When asked, he’d said he was still struggling with the grief, which was true. But really, he’d resisted because he feared the damage he might cause if he were ever given any kind of power again. What if he lost control? What if another speech went wrong? What if…

    Celeste.

    Twelve years later, she was still there. Every time he blinked, for half a second, there she was, her eyes gazing lovingly into his. Time had dulled and buried the pain, but had not erased it, and being up here on this stage so many years later sharpened its edges. He closed his eyes for a moment to appreciate her beauty. If he had urged caution and restraint, maybe things would have been quieter that day. But would he have done right by her memory to let her killers off that easy?

    Suddenly he snapped back to reality. He remembered where he was: at a public ceremony to initiate him into the very office for which Celeste had been killed. He felt the presence of the TV cameras, the gentle breeze, the vast sea of supporters standing before him. To take his mind off Celeste, he started scanning the faces of the people around him.

    To his left was Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, standing at the podium and delivering the last speech of his presidency in his rich, thundering baritone. He’d been a good president. Actually, he’d been a great president, the kind of President they wrote legends about. Cuauhtémoc couldn’t help but feel the tiniest twinge of jealousy. Hadn’t he been the one who was going to lay the foundation for liberty and democracy? Hadn’t he been the one who was destined to ride in on a white stallion and save Mexico from itself?

    He sighed. Well, yes, perhaps. But could he really have done it? As Mayor, he’d watched Porfirio work his fingers to the bone trying to change the system, and that was after the PRI had degenerated into a burning pile of excrement. Things had been bad in 1988, but that was nothing compared to the nightmare of the Bartlett years. To take on el sistema back then, when it still had most of its strength? It wouldn’t have been suicidal, but he’d have had his work cut out for him.

    He shifted his gaze. There was Sergio Aguayo, the Tlatoani, the unlikely hero of tomorrow. Soft-spoken and serene with wire-rimmed spectacles and elephant ears, the man looked more like a librarian than a politician. But, as Cuauhtémoc had learned, behind those wire rims there burned a fire, a passion for justice as hard and immutable as a block of Spanish marble. Every time he and Sergio shared a conversation, Cuauhtémoc left the room struck dumb by awe and admiration; he could only hope that he would never have to confront the Tlatoani in his presidential capacity.

    He shifted his gaze again. There was Henry Cisneros. Cuauhtémoc looked forward to working with the U.S. President, having met him a couple of times as Mayor and found him to be endlessly affable and respectful. Of course, there was a chance that he wouldn’t be around much longer—every poll put him ahead of Governor Wilson by at least ten percentage points, but if Cuauhtémoc knew anything about American politics, it was that you never knew what was going to happen next week, let alone next year. But he wasn’t worried. In any case, as President of the new Mexico, the most he would ever have to do was shake hands and look good at a state dinner, so it really didn't matter all that much to him who occupied the Oval Office.

    He looked away from the distinguished guests and out into the crowd. It truly was an ocean of humanity, filling every inch of space from the Portal de Mercaderes to the Palacio Nacional and spilling out into the streets. He scanned the surface, pausing to gaze at the children hoisted up on their parents’ shoulders, the Kodaks and Canons raised up high to get a better shot, the signs held aloft with sweet slogans of love and support. He looked into hundreds of thousands of faces, half-expecting to see balled fists, clenched jaws, eyes full of spite, signs of that same blood-soaked, hateful rage. But he didn’t. The hands he could see were clasped in grateful prayer. The jaws were relaxed, some lips even drawn back into smiles. And the eyes he saw were filled not with hate but with hope—an anxious, longing, insecure hope, but a hope nonetheless. Hope that after years and years of pain, of anguish, of lies, of fear and broken promises, something good had finally come. Silent in his seat, Cuauhtémoc wondered to himself how many of them had been here with him all those years ago, and whether they were pleased with what they saw today.

    Cuauhtémoc suddenly sensed that it was time for him to get up. Looking over, he saw Porfirio winding up his speech and tuned in just in time to catch the last few words: “…the citizen President of the United Mexican States, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solorzano!”

    Cuauhtémoc rose from his seat, the applause so loud he could feel it rattling the soles of his shoes. He shook Porfirio’s hand, feeling a slight chill as his predecessor removed the presidential sash and draped it over his shoulder.

    He turned to the podium. On it was an attractive piece of stationery with the oath of office printed in neat, richly-ornamented font. Aside from a few tweaks, it was the same oath every president had taken since Madero—there had been some talk during the Convention of replacing it entirely, but the words were pretty enough on their own, even if they had rarely been respected.

    Cuauhtémoc waited for the applause to die down, then raised his right arm and began:

    “I hereby swear to honor the Millennial Constitution of the United Mexican States and the laws emanating thereof, and to ensure that they are honored.”

    He stared into the crowd in fear that the hope, that beautiful hope of theirs, might already be fading away. But he found no such sign. With every word, the eyes seemed to widen and the smiles seemed to grow.

    “…I swear to loyally and patriotically carry out the responsibilities conferred upon me by the people, thinking at all times of the good and the prosperity of the Union.”

    Suddenly he saw Celeste one last time. But this time, she was different. This time, she wasn’t simply loving. She was imploring. Her eyes were filled with longing, a deep longing that seemed to ask, “was my sacrifice worth it? Did your speech really change things for the better?”

    Cuauhtémoc paused his oath for a moment and looked out one last time at the mass of humanity. He noticed a small child hovering above the crowd on her mother’s shoulders, just a few meters away from the stage. She was too young to understand what was happening or why she was watching it. But by the youthful wonder in her eyes, Cuauhtémoc could tell she knew that whatever it was, it was important, and it was good.

    He blinked to force back a tear and there was Celeste, still staring back at him expectantly. Still silent, he answered her question: I don’t know yet. I don't know yet if it was worth it or not. But I’m going to fight like hell for the rest of my life to make sure it is—and I won’t be fighting alone.

    He smiled. Celeste smiled back and then, for one, last time, she faded away.

    He looked back down at the page, opened his mouth and finished the oath.

    “…And if I were not to carry out these duties with honor and solemnity, may the Nation and all of its children demand it of me.”

    And so be it.

    THE END
     
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    Acknowledgments
  • Having finally concluded my story, I would like to say a few thank yous.

    First and foremost, thank you to Julia Preston and Sam Dillon, authors of Opening Mexico: the Making of a Democracy. Without that book, this timeline would not exist. It got me interested in Mexico in the first place, it gave me the idea for the Point of Divergence, it shone a spotlight on multiple important figures of whom I would otherwise have been ignorant, and it provided invaluable insight into the power structures which I explored over the course of the story. Time and time again and for guidance and inspiration, analyzing key sentences and paragraphs with the same care and attention as one would an old copy of the King James.

    I would also like to express my gratitude to the authors of the other various sources I consulted. Without their research and findings, I would never have been able to make this story as detailed as I did. Neil Harvey, author of Rebellion in Chiapas and The Chiapas Rebellion: the Struggle for Land and Democracy, and Henry C. Schmidt, "The Mexican Foreign Debt in the Transition from López Portillo to de la Madrid", stand out particularly, but all of the cited sources contributed in a meaningful way.

    Thank you also to the Mexican people I interviewed over the course of my research: Antonia, David, Oriel, each of you added a human element that otherwise would have been absent from the story.

    Thank you to the unfortunately-banned @Md139115, who helped convinced me over PM to continue this story after I received some particularly harsh feedback on my initial first posting.

    Thank you to @RamscoopRaider, who helped me make the military aspects of this timeline grounded and believable.

    Thank you to @Yes, who provided valuable insights into the character of Henry Cisneros.

    Thank you to my family and friends, who provided endless emotional support (despite their complete lack of interest in Mexican history) and created a warm personal environment conducive to creativity.

    Thank you to @Allochronian, whose excellent opening graphic is still my favorite thing anyone's made based off one of my projects.

    And lastly, thank you to the members of this community. Without your support and attention, I wouldn't have had the energy or the inclination to finish this timeline. Your thought-provoking questions and comments have validated my efforts and helped me refine the story into a more readable, digestible form. Without this site, I would never have gotten into alternate history, and for that I will be eternally grateful.

    If I overlooked anyone, I am sorry—in all likelihood I will realize it soon and edit this post to reflect it. It has been a true blessing to finish a timeline on this site and I couldn't have done it without the support of my friends, family and peers.
     
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