Billboard Toño, the "little chicken" and a clean sweep

I am writing again about Mexican politics, because one recent Sunday evening we met the local candidate for the federal congress of the MORENA party of Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO).

Yolanda Guerrero Barrera with her election certificate

The candidate was meeting voters in the plaza at the end of the street. Her name is Yolanda Guerrrero Barrera. She is the regional officer of STASPE, the federal workers’s union. She told me that she had studied for a law degree but had been unable to complete her studies, and had later acquired an accounting qualification. Yolanda told me that she has never held public office before, in contrast to her PRI rival, whom she clearly regards as her principal opponent: I think her chances are slim, but she seemed positive and energetic.

In July Mexicans elect their new President, who will take office in November. If the polls are to be believed the next President will be AMLO.

On the local level the smiling face that beams at us from most billboards is that of Toño Ixtláhuac, who stands for “A strong Michoacán with a future”.

 

Toño's billboard

Mexico is a federal republic. Under the 1917 constitution, the President is elected for a single term of six years. State Governors and Federal Senators also serve six-year terms. Diputados (congresswomen/men), state legislators and Presidentes Municipales (mayors of towns, large and small) are elected for three years. All are limited to a single term: nobody can hold the same elected office more than once, but they can (and do) hold many different elected offices in succession. The reason for the single term limits lies deep in the history of the Mexican Revolution: once the great dictator Porfirio Díaz had been toppled in 1911, no politician in the land dare ignore the revolutionary slogan “A free vote and no reelection.”

At least no politician dare contravene the “no reelection” part. The”free vote” has been much less well observed. From roughly 1930 to 2000, the election of the President was theoretically achieved by a free vote of the people. In practice, the ruling party (PRI: Insitutional Revolutionary Party) saved

A cartoon destape

the people from excessive choice by selecting the new President through an elaborate mechanism of internal negotiation and alliance-making. Ambitious candidates, business groups, union leaders, peasant confederations and the like jostled behind the scenes, finally to declare themselves enthusiastic supporters of the chosen candidate. The destape (“unveiling”) of the President-to-be was a national guessing game.

The system worked well for many decades. Mexico developed a relatively modern economy and, compared to other Latin American countries, enjoyed a degree of freedom, and an absence of nasty military rulers. However, by 1968 the system was under strain. In the year that Mexico hosted the Olympic Games, students decided to protest the limits of freedom in Mexico. The protests, conducted in disciplined silence, came to a violent end on the Night of Tlatelolco, October 1968. Students gathered in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas (“Square of the Three Cultures”, on the site of the ancient city of Tlatelolco) were ambushed by the Mexican army. Nobody knows how many died. Many were arrested. Others went into hiding.

 

The Night of Tlatelolco 1968

For a time ,the regime remained strong enough to destapar (“unveil”) as the new President from 1970 to 1976 Luis Echeverría Álvarez, the organizer of the Tlatelolco massacre. However, on the night of the July 1988 elections, the counting system mysteriously crashed. The reason was simple.

Luis Echeverría Álvarez

The Mexican people had done something unprecedented: they had exercised their free vote to elect the opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas of Michoacán. When the system was restored to its proper working order, the people had, after all, chosen the PRI’s destapado Carlos Salinas de Gortari.

In 2000, Vicente Fox, of the conservative opposition Partido Acción Nacional (National Action Party: PAN), was elected. A new democratic dawn seemed about to brighten Mexican public life. However, like a time traveller arriving from a distant past, I have been observing the political scene from our provincial city: and it seems strangely familiar. Enrique Peña Nieto, a young and photogenic politican from the populous State of Mexico, brought the PRI back to power. However, the whiffs of corruption and cronyism, and a lack of solutions for Mexico’s social problems, have left many disenchanted with the PRI’s return.

Toño Ixtláhuac

This brings us back to the smiling Toño, 38 years old and currently a federal Congressman. To judge from his congressional photo and press images, the designer of Toño’s billboard decided to make him still younger. Billboard Toño is rather fairer of complexion, his hair less coarse, his teeth a radiant white.

Toño made a good start to his political career. He has been a state congressman in Michoacán and Presidente Municipal of Zitácuaro. He is very well connected: if he is elected he will replace his uncle in the Senate. However, Toño’s past is not quite as bight and shiny as his billboard image. In 2009 the Procurador General de la Nación (“Federal Prosecutor”) imprisoned him, accused of receiving 300,000 pesos (about £12,000) per month from drug gangs. Later, he was barred from office for three years in connection with the unexplained disappearance from the coffers of Zitácuaro of 12 million pesos (roughly £450,000). Fortunately, Toño was able to persuade a civil tribunal that he was only active as Presidente Municipal for a few months and was absent when the financial shorfall occurred.

Sergio's billboard

The candidate for the Federal Congress district that includes Zamora is Sergio Flores,whose slogan is: Juntos podemos, experiencia, compromiso y juventud (“Together we can, experience, commitment and youth”). Sergio is a native of Zamora and has a master’s degree in political law, public administration, prosecution and administration of justice. He is also the son of a powerful Zamoran PRI politician known locally as el pollo (“the chicken”). Sergio, in turn, is el pollito (the little chicken). He started his political career as the Michoacán manager of LICONSA, a federal agency that distributes low cost milk to poor communities. In short, like Toño, Sergio is a scion of a powerful local PRI family. He seems to be campaigning vigorously: meeting business groups, visiting factories, calling on market traders in the Mercado Hidalgo, and so on. We have seen Sergio’s pubilicity van touring our neighbourhood, and he and Toño dominate the billboards.

Since I have not been entirely complimentary about PRI politicians, in the interests of balance I should mention that Zamora’s most famous son (possibly second-most-famous if we include the footballer Rafael Márquez) was Alfonso García Robles, a diplomat and PRI politician, given the Nobel Peace Prize in 1982. He was a delegate to the founding meeting of the UN. His greatest achievement was the Treaty of Tlatelolco which, in 1967, established a nuclear free zone in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Cuban Missile Crisis had happened only five years previously).

 

Alfonso García Robles with his Nobel Peace Prize

The other Mexican recipient of a Nobel prize, in this case for literature in 1990, was the poet and diplomat Octavio Paz. In 1945 he published an essay entitled El Laberinto de la Soledad (“The Labyrinth of Solitude”) a wonderfully insightful discussion of Mexican culture and society. One of the most entertaining passages is his discussion of the immensely rich use of the verb chingar in Mexican Spanish. Those curious to know more must read the book (there is an English translation). I heartily recommend it.

A 2019 Update

I was wrong about Yolanda Guerrrero Barrera’s chances. She won her seat. Indeed MORENA swept the bopard in Zamora, winning all the office up for election. AMLO is now president. He won a landslide and now plays a strong political hand. It is too early to judge how well he plays it.