Waking from the Dream

Mexico's Middle Classes after 1968

Louise E. Walker

• Editore: Stanford University Press
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780804784573
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: History
• Categoria: Mexican History

When the postwar boom began to dissipate in the late 1960s, Mexico's middle classes awoke to a new, economically terrifying world. And following massacres of students at peaceful protests in 1968 and 1971, one-party control of Mexican politics dissipated as well. The ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party struggled to recover its legitimacy, but instead saw its support begin to erode. In the following decades, Mexico's middle classes ended up shaping the history of economic and political crisis, facilitating the emergence of neo-liberalism and the transition to democracy.

Waking from the Dream tells the story of this profound change from state-led development to neo-liberalism, and from a one-party state to electoral democracy. It describes the fraught history of these tectonic shifts, as politicians and citizens experimented with different strategies to end a series of crises. In the first study to dig deeply into the drama of the middle classes in this period, Walker shows how the most consequential struggles over Mexico's economy and political system occurred between the middle classes and the ruling party.

Part I

UPHEAVALS

On 17 September 1973, one of Mexico’s leading industrialists died in a botched kidnapping attempt. The radical urban guerrilla group, Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre (Communist League 23rd of September), attempted to kidnap Eugenio Garza Sada in order to secure the release of political prisoners, raise funds, and announce the arrival of the Liga as an important player on the national stage. Garza Sada’s bodyguard fought back, and the ensuing shoot-out killed the patriarch of the Monterrey Group, one of Mexico’s most powerful family dynasties.

A few days later, Luis Echeverría Álvarez, president of Mexico from 1970 to 1976, attended the funeral. He sat in the front row as prominent business leaders blamed him personally for the death of their colleague. These leaders believed the president was too tolerant of the radical Left. From the podium, Ricardo Margáin Zozaya, a representative of the Monterrey Group, accused the president of “encouraging deliberate attacks on the private sector, in order to foment division and hatred between social classes. We have suffered kidnappings, dynamite explosions, bank robberies, destruction and death.”* This public excoriation of the president by some of the most powerful economic groups in the country, televised across the nation, was unprecedented in Mexican history.

Perhaps more than any other event, the funeral epitomized the political upheaval of the 1970s. Across the political spectrum, radicals and conservatives challenged the PRI’s one-party system. Dramatic rupture between the PRI and the middle classes occurred when university students joined armed guerrilla groups. A more mundane form of protest manifested in the jokes, rumors, and whispered threats of car owners at gas stations. These forces collided at the Garza Sada funeral, where the president seemed caught in the middle of escalating tensions between the Left and the Right. The event revealed a weakened PRI, struggling to reestablish its midcentury pact with the middle classes.

1

Rebel Generation

BEING A MIDDLECLASS RADICAL, 1971–1976

On 14 March 1975, President Luis Echeverría visited Mexico’s leading university to inaugurate the spring semester classes. Only a few years after several massacres of peaceful student protestors by police and military forces, this was a gesture of goodwill to a student population rife with political discontent. In preparation for the presidential visit, workers at the UNAM (National Autonomous University of Mexico) in Mexico City cleaned up the campus, scrubbing graffiti off the buildings. But on the morning of Echeverría’s visit, small groups of students nervously attacked the walls once more: “Repudiate the assassin,” read one graffito; “LEA out of the UNAM,” read another, using the initials of the president’s full name, Luis Echeverría Álvarez.¹ Perhaps the most provocative jabs were made by flyers that circulated in the university bus station: they featured an image of Echeverría with a falcon near his head and a puppet of the university rector hanging from his right hand. A chain linked the rector to a gorilla, symbolizing his complicity with the porra (individuals and groups funded by the government to intimidate students in the university).² The image of the falcon referred to the Halcones, a paramilitary force trained by the city government and responsible for a massacre of students on 10 June 1971. “LEA Halcón, Ave de Rapiña,” the graffiti read: Echeverría is a falcon, a bird of prey. Police and riot troops circled the university but did not enter the campus.³

In the large auditorium of the medical school, Echeverría spoke to students about his program of apertura democrática—a program of “democratic opening” to lower voting ages and grant amnesty to students jailed in the 1960s and 1970s student movements. In turn, students took the microphone and accused the president and the university rector of being responsible for massacres in 1968 and 1971. Echeverría listened to these accusations and then insisted that he had come to establish a dialogue with the students. While some students seemed willing to engage with the president, they were drowned out by boos, hisses, and shouts of “Assassin!” from other, more radical students. Divisions that riddled the UNAM emerged for all to see.

As Echeverría left the auditorium, students crowded the doorway chanting: “Che Che Che Guevara, Echeverría a la chingada [go fuck yourself]!” A large banner greeted the president as he exited: “Echeverría is an assassin; fascism will not prevail; we revolutionary students do not deal with assassins; students do not want dialogue, we do not want opening, we want revolution.”⁴ A fight broke out between these radical students and those who supported dialogue with Echeverría; rocks flew through the air and one hit the president in the forehead. With difficulty, his bodyguards rushed the president, blood dripping down his face onto his suit, through the riotous crowd.⁵

After the stoning of the president at the UNAM, government spies—some were former police officers, others had worked in government bureaucracies—set about to gather reactions from the student body, sometimes by direct eavesdropping and other times through informants. Many students described Echeverría as valiant for coming to the university. Some accused him of planning the event to generate publicity and claimed it was nothing more than a premeditated farce. Others claimed that the debacle was the work of provocateurs who had infiltrated the Left and purposely pushed the situation too far. The spies also reported that a significant portion of students showed very little interest in the event.⁶ Journalists, on the other hand, reported that all sectors of society were calling for an exhaustive investigation to determine those responsible for the shameful acts, and some in society raised the possibility of CIA involvement.⁷ The remarkable events on campus demonstrated the difficulty of establishing common ground—between those students interested in dialogue and those who refused to grant Echeverría any legitimacy. The latter accused the former of allowing themselves to be co-opted by Echeverría’s symbolic gestures.

The fissures among students extended beyond the UNAM campus. The rebel generation—politically active leftist students in the late 1960s and early 1970s—was divided between moderates and radicals.⁸ During the early 1970s, in an environment of political and economic instability, these middleclass students had to decide whether to accept Echeverría’s offer of dialogue. To accept would mean letting go of a past in which the PRI’s highest-ranking politicians had ordered the massacre of peaceful protesters; to accept would mean accepting that the PRI could change. To refuse would mean rejecting the moral authority of the president and the legitimacy of the one-party system; to refuse would mean disavowing the PRI as the legitimate custodian of the Mexican Revolution. While some students responded to Echeverría’s democratic opening by attempting revolution, others attempted reform. Still others sank into resignation.

The middleclass backgrounds of these students defined the perimeters of their response, whether it was action or inaction. Some students, ashamed of their middleclass identity, opted to proletarizarse, to “become proletarian,” as they mobilized workers and shantytown residents. A few students reformulated revolutionary theory so that they themselves—students—would supplant workers or peasants as the vanguard of a socialist revolution, and, within this theoretical framework, formed armed guerrilla groups to overthrow the state. Still others sought to protect their middleclass status and worked for reform. These moderate students worked with the PRI to rebuild bridges between the party and the student population more generally, while demanding material improvements in their schools as well as respect for the rights guaranteed in the 1917 Constitution.

Banishing the Emissaries from the Past

Why was Echeverría in the UNAM in March 1975? His appeal to students was part of his prolonged endeavor to mend the relationship between the PRI and the middle classes. After the 1968 massacre, many within the PRI worried about left-leaning, intellectual middleclass discontent. One consultant to the party described the middle classes as “aggressive, violent, unsatisfied, [and] critical,” worrying that they represented a “social bomb whose ultimate consequences are still unforeseeable.”⁹ In this context, the party chose Echeverría as its candidate in the 1970 elections. He had one foot inside the conservative PRI, owing to his role in the Tlatelolco massacre on 2 October 1968 (as minister of the interior, he condoned the attack on students). But he was also considered a liberal, because his brother-in-law had been jailed in the 1959 railway worker conflict.¹⁰

Echeverría designed a series of reforms meant to reach out to the students, teachers, and young professionals who had taken to the streets in 1968. His so-called democratic opening granted amnesty for many political prisoners arrested during the student movement. He lowered the voting age as well as the minimum age for congressmen and senators, a move he hoped would placate students and intellectuals. He also sought to increase the political representation of the middle classes. In theory, the CNOP (National Confederation of Popular Organizations) ought to have advocated for the interests of everyone from shopkeepers to civil servants, because it had been created in 1943 to represent them within the PRI’s corporatist system. The confederation, however, had become a powerful lobbyist for bureaucrats; many nonbureaucrat members of the middle classes might have felt marginalized within both the CNOP’s and the PRI’s corporatist structures (indeed, several analysts point to the late 1960s as the beginning of the CNOP’s decline).¹¹ Echeverría attempted to reform the CNOP from within by incorporating new cadres of professionals, often from the ranks of formerly discontented students.¹²

In addition to the democratic opening, the Echeverría administration attempted to reconcile with students through his educational reform program, an ambitious set of initiatives that culminated in the 1973 Federal Law of Education. This program meant a fourteenfold increase in the education budget, the opening of new schools and university campuses, higher salaries for professors, and new financial resources for students, especially scholarships to study abroad.¹³ By shoring up support for education, Echeverría and his advisors hoped to appease students.¹⁴

The president also emphasized his leftist heritage in symbolic ways. He attempted to ingratiate himself with the leftist students and the burgeoning hippie movement and wove indigenous tropes into this image: he had the presidential residence decorated with Mexican furniture and handicrafts and drank agua de horchata instead of brandy at official parties. In popular revolutionary style, he referred to his wife, María Esther Zuno de Echeverría, as “la compañera Esther.” (She referred to him by his surname.) Echoing her husband’s sometimes backfiring efforts, Zuno de Echeverría wore traditional indigenous clothes. This style, though, did not always remind people of Frida Kahlo, as may have been intended, but rather called to mind the elaborate uniforms of waitresses in the middle-brow Sanborns restaurants; consequently, the waitresses were often referred to as “las Esthercitas” (the little Esthers).¹⁵

Echeverría cast himself as the defender of the weak against imperialism on the international stage. He envisioned Mexico as the leader and protector of the developing world—a radical shift from the first-world ambitions of earlier administrations. During his presidency, which ended in 1976, Mexico welcomed leftist political exiles from other Latin American countries. Echeverría even imagined himself a candidate for secretary-general of the United Nations. But his third-worldism, which coincided with the growing internationalism of the student movement, had greater impact within Mexico than abroad. Some activists accused the president of organizing the Vietnam solidarity protests, to demonstrate the alignment between student demands and official policy.¹⁶ Among leftist students, solidarity with Vietnam was manifest and students drew connections between Ho Chi Minh’s guerrilla war and guerrilla movements in Mexico, as demonstrated by this chant connecting the Vietnamese leader with Lucio Cabañas in the state of Guerrero: “Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh; Echeverría go fuck yourself; Lucio Lucio give it to them hard; we will triumph.”¹⁷

Echeverría’s rhetoric and reforms marked a significant change in PRI policies—the supposedly all-powerful party had acknowledged its weakness and curbed its power in response to popular pressure. As Porfirio Muñoz Ledo, one of Echeverría’s chief advisors, put it, Echeverría was the first president willing to admit that the Mexican Miracle had a darker side: Echeverría was working “to dispel the persistent myth developed over many years of the so-called ‘Mexican Miracle,’ and not because he [was] unaware of the real achievements which [had] been made, but rather because he [felt] that the persistence of such a myth, in the final analysis, can only favor those sectors that have obtained the greatest benefits from this growth.” Muñoz Ledo argued that complacency had given way to self-criticism: “The ritualistic exaltation of the achievements of the government,” he said, “is being replaced by a more rigorous analysis of the functioning of institutions.”¹⁸

But the president soon encountered serious resistance within the PRI to these political reforms and symbolic gestures. Old-guard Priístas, under the influence of former president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and with the support (and funding) of many leading businessm...