A repeat of history?

Carlos Alberto Montaner

The first time a president of the United States met with his Mexican counterpart was in 1909. William Taft had breakfast with Porfirio Díaz at a hotel in El Paso, and later accompanied him to the Customs building in Ciudad Juárez, across the border in Mexico, where the Mexicans had built a replica of a hall in the Palace of Versailles to impress the American leader with a sumptuous luncheon served on gold- and silver-trimmed dishes.

Taft felt flattered. Díaz was the dean of world leaders. He had been in power for 30 years, and Mexico seemed to be on the road to progress and development. Under Díaz's iron hand, several decades of civil wars and chaos had been brought to a halt. The newspapers that reported the presidents' meeting told of an organized and happy nation, crisscrossed by numerous efficient railways, presided by a universally respected octogenarian. The country was the leading recipient of U.S. investment, and few signs remained of the mid-19th Century war during which Washington seized half of its neighbor's territory in one imperial gulp.

It was all a mirage. Some months later in 1911, after Díaz's hasty departure, a flight preceded by rural uprisings and military conspiracies, Mexico plunged into a period of convulsions that would last almost two decades. The period ended with a devastated country and a ravaged economy that would not regain the levels of prerevolutionary prosperity until approximately 1935.

Suddenly, the institutions collapsed and the government toppled. Why? Apparently, because of an alleged electoral fraud that delegitimized Porfirio Díaz's presidency and pushed a large part of society into insurrection. In effect, the gap between the government and the people of Mexico had become an abyss.

Fortunately, 2006 is not 1911. President Vicente Fox, an unswerving democrat, is not Porfirio Díaz. And there is no serious evidence that Felipe Calderón, expected to be named president-elect today, achieved his victory through fraud.

But Andrés Manuel López Obrador, known as AMLO, the defeated contender, is behaving as if he were Francisco I. Madero, the politician who refused to accept Díaz's fraudulent triumph, declared himself president and unwittingly opened the door to a civil war that took his life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and a great many members of the ruling class.

While Mexico in the early 20th Century was substantially different from Mexico in the early 21st, one aspect has changed hardly at all: Then and now, there was and there is a notorious gap between society and state. Mexicans one century ago, like Mexicans today, did not believe in the honesty of their politicians, the efficacy of their representatives, the rectitude of their judges and the probity of their men in uniform.

For decades, especially during the 70 years of government by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), relations between the rulers and the ruled were based on a system of patronage and subsidies designed to reward the courtier and punish the adversary or the indifferent. The system left very little space for meritocracy or the rule of fair play, thoroughly rotting the moral foundations of the republican system of government.

Evidently, AMLO is trying to provoke a confrontation with the forces of public order and he will most assuredly cause it. How? By ignoring the tribunals' rulings and rejecting the legitimacy of the institutions. He has summoned a convention for Sept. 16 for the purpose of launching a general insurrection.

At that ceremony, he says, he will form a parallel government, thus totally destabilizing the country. At some time, the police and the army will have to evict the mutineers, and it's not hard to foresee that their repressive action, despite every caution the officers may exercise, will leave quite a few wounded and dead people on the pavement. What will happen after that, no one can predict.

This column began with a remote historical reference to underscore something that no one should ignore: There is nothing more fragile than the peace of a nation or weaker than the structure of a republic. For the most part, Mexican society -- including a good many of AMLO's supporters -- wants neither a bloody revolution nor a violent breakdown of the institutional order. But that collective spirit probably also existed in 1910, at the outset of that spectacular blood bath that inspired so many movies, ballads and legends. History could repeat itself.

September 5, 2006

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