The election of Vicente Fox to the presidency of Mexico is a wonderful thing. In a few months something will happen in Mexico that we in the United States have taken for granted since 1789: a ruling party peacefully giving up power to the opposition. This has never before happened in Mexico’s more than 700 years of recorded history.The Institution Revolutionary Party, or PRI, the party that lost the election, has run Mexico for 71 years, only one year shy of the 72 years the Communist Party ruled Russia, but this year is not the first time the PRI has lost a presidential election. It got fewer votes than opposition candidate Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1988, but through massive election fraud it still gave the presidency to its own candidate, Carlos Salinas.Corruption reached new heights during the six-year Salinas administration. Salinas, his brother Raul and other high-ranking members of the PRI embezzled untold billions from Mexico’s banks and state-owned enterprises, while lower-ranking members of the party engaged in extortion, kidnapping, drug-trafficking and bribery of all sorts. Salinas now lives in Ireland, never returning to his native soil for fear that he will be arrested for his many crimes. His brother is now spending the rest of his life in a Mexican prison after being convicted of murder.By 1990 the Mexican people had had enough of all this and began electing opposition candidates in large numbers, though they were usually denied their offices through more vote fraud, so the crime and corruption continued. The beginning of the end for the PRI occurred when it made economist Ernesto Zedillo president. Unlike previous presidents, he was an honest man and began reforming Mexico’s economy and election system.With elections now fair, the PRI began its rapid decline, losing congressional, mayoral and gubernatorial races all over Mexico. The economic reforms also split the PRI in half, between the old corrupt socialists, who became known as “dinosaurs,” and the American-educated free-market reformers, or “technocrats,” who supported Zedillo.While the PRI was split, so was the opposition, and this gave the PRI a chance to win the 2000 Presidential Election despite its unpopularity. On the left, running on the Democratic Revolutionary Party ticket, was Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the man who lost the election in 1988 and had since become Mexico City’s mayor. On the right was Vicente Fox, the tall, flamboyant, cowboy-hat-and-boots-wearing Coca-Cola executive from Monterrey, Mexico. The two opposition candidates tried to unite together, but the differences between Fox, the conservative businessman, and Cardenas, the radical socialist, were just too great to bridge. In the end this didn’t matter because many Cardenas supporters realized that their candidate couldn’t win and the real choice was between Fox and the corrupt PRI candidate, Francisco Labastida, so they held their noses and voted for honest conservatism over the PRI’s corrupt leftism.I watched all this happen on a small scale in a village in southern Mexico in 1999, when the PRI lost the mayor’s office to a left-wing candidate from the PRD. The minute the results of the election were posted in the town square, a party broke out on the streets, the cheering echoing up and down the streets well into the night. The same thing happened late July 2 as exit polls blurted out early the election results, but this time the whole country celebrated.
Greg Weston is a senior economics major and Spanish and philosophy minor.