MEXICO: THE CRUMBLING OF THE "PERFECT DICTATORSHIP"

Abstract

The November 1990 meetings between Presidents George Bush and Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Monterrey reflected web of contradictions that enmesh U.S.-Mexican relations today. Only a week earlier, Mexico's longruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) had announced an implausible clean sweep of all 34 legislative districts in state of Mexico, where only two years before opposition leader Cuauhtemoc Cardenas had beaten Salinas in a two-to-one landslide. The elections in state of Mexico had been first test of Salinas administration's much-vaunted electoral reform legislation,1 and even ordinarily sympathetic foreign observers quickly concluded that Salinas had flunked. According to New York Times, the huge pluralities, 90 percent in many cases, suggested] systematic electoral fraud/'2 Across Atlantic, Economist argued that Mr. Salinas cannot separate political from economic reform. If he is truly trying to do both at once, he would do well to encourage international supervision of elections that he says are no longer fraudulent.3 Curiously, President Bush, who had earlier insisted on free elections in Nicaragua and had used fraudulent 1989 Panamanian elections as a justification for invasion, kept his silence on Mexico's electoral fraud. Moreover, he chose that critical moment to reemphasize his close ties with President Salinas and to reward Mexican government with a $5.6 billion loan guaranteed by Export-Import Bank. Bush also used Monterrey summit to restate his proposal for a hemispheric free-trade zone, beginning with a free-trade agreement with Salinas's Mexico that would serve as both model and gateway for Latin American economic integration with United States.