Next Step : Mexico’s PRI at Crisis Point: Will It Choose Democracy? : Colosio’s killing and the Chiapas revolt have shaken the political juggernaut as never before.

MEXICO CITY — The last time a virtual president was assassinated in Mexico, the course of the country’s political history was changed forever.

The year was 1928. A religious fanatic, gaining access by impersonating a cartoonist, shot and killed President-elect Alvaro Obregon. To guarantee the ruling elite’s hold on power in the wake of Obregon’s murder, strongman Plutarco Elias Calles the next year decreed into existence the vast, all-consuming political party that has governed Mexico ever since.

Last week’s assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, who as presidential candidate for the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party was the heir apparent to President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, has once again plunged Mexico into the kind of pivotal crisis that could spell long-sought political progress--or political disaster.

Colosio’s death in Tijuana at the hands of a young gunman is the most shocking in a series of recent events that have driven wedges into the solidarity of the PRI, as the ruling party is known. They have exposed a vicious internal debate and underscored the failure of the party to adopt truly democratic reforms. Still reeling from a bloody peasant uprising in the southern state of Chiapas, the PRI, and the party-state system through which it has controlled Mexico for 65 years, are under threat.

Even within the party, the voice of dissent has swelled as never before as young, disaffected members are breaking ranks and challenging the hierarchy.

Senior party leaders, struggling to contain the crisis, are emphasizing the party’s position as the one Mexican institution that has traditionally guaranteed stability and order.

“In the PRI, there is loyalty,” Party Chairman Fernando Ortiz Arana said last week. “There is loyalty to the ideals of democracy and liberty that the party proposes. There is loyalty to the president of the republic, Carlos Salinas de Gortari, as the keeper of national trust and guarantor of rule of law and justice.”

After years of lip service to the need for democracy, the trauma of the murder of Colosio may be the catalyst that forces the PRI to change, analysts say. But some observers say it is just as likely that the party, besieged and fearful of facing a disgruntled electorate on a level playing field, may instead close ranks and retrench. The drama will be played out in coming months.

“This is a profound crisis that does not seem to have any alternative for the governing group other than an authoritarian hardening, or an acceptance that Mexico must move toward democracy,” said political scientist Luis Javier Garrido, a prominent critic of the PRI.

Calles founded the National Revolutionary Party in 1929, and its name was changed to the current Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1946. From the outset, the party was designed to incorporate--in some cases, co-opt--hundreds of tiny parties and movements that emerged from Mexico’s 1910 Revolution.

Waving the banners of social justice and anti-imperialism, the PRI became an organization based on tightly controlled sectors--labor, peasant farmers, bureaucrats and, until the 1940s, the army--where members are kept in line through a paternalistic system of patronage, where corruption flourishes and where decisions are made at the top with little input from the bottom.

Thanks in part to a sophisticated system of what observers call brazen vote fraud, the PRI has won every national election and most regional elections since 1929. The Congress, the judiciary system and most of the press are controlled or at least heavily influenced by the PRI.

Perhaps the single most anti-democratic tendency of the party is the presidential succession. Each president, as he nears the end of his six-year term, names an heir apparent. And each time, that man is elected president.

The killing of Colosio, then, was not just the elimination of a candidate but the murder of the man everyone expected to be the next president.

Much of Mexico for many years readily accepted the system, sacrificing participatory democracy for a semblance of stability and peace. But that part of the equation--stability and peace--seemed to dissolve this year when rebels of the Zapatista National Liberation Army seized a string of towns in Chiapas, demanding justice and social equity for some of Mexico’s most impoverished people.

Suddenly, the myths of a “modern Mexico”--the myths that Salinas used to catapult Mexico into partnership with the United States and Canada in the world’s largest trading bloc--were dashed. The credibility of Salinas, and the PRI, were called into question, deepening an already festering crisis caused by opposition in many circles to Salinas’ free-market economic policies and the persistent cry for democracy.

Now, say analysts, simple reform may not be enough.

A New Chorus for Change

Mexico, economist Luis Rubio said, must “build a new political system based on radically different assumptions. The current political system is based on the objective of stability and governability on the basis of control. We need stability and governability on the basis of participation.”

People who hold political office must be made accountable, he said. The political process must be completely redefined, eliminating the privileges that the political class traditionally has enjoyed, and new parties, based on ideologies rather than on factions, should be created and patterned after parties in most Western democracies.

In other words, Rubio and other analysts said, defusing the crisis this time will require concrete steps toward democratization, not the largely empty political promises that Salinas has made while keeping his focus on economic reform since his 1988 inauguration.

“President Salinas has already had two dramatic warnings to remind him that democracy is the best way to attenuate the costs of destabilization. There may not be a third chance,” said Carlos Ramirez, an editor of the independent El Financiero newspaper.

“The death of Colosio represents a political challenge of enormous magnitude. It is not about rebuilding the popularity of a government that sees its happy world crumbling into pieces. This is about advancing in the construction of a political system that restores the faith of the Mexican people.”

The calls for reform within the PRI and, by extension, throughout Mexican political society, are not new. There have always been fledgling reform movements that are allowed to go just so far, before they are bought off, co-opted or crushed. They struggle against the “dinosaurs” of the party, the traditional sectors such as the decision-making National Political Committee, which fight any erosion of their considerable power.

The central agenda of the dissidents has not changed much: separation of party from state; clean elections; internal consultation on candidates for public office.

The first dissident movement within the PRI was formed in August, 1986, by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the son of a revered former president, Lazaro Cardenas, who is remembered for nationalization of the oil industry and massive agricultural reform that gave land to landless peasants. The younger Cardenas advocated change from within, but, utterly frustrated, resigned from the party in 1987.

The next year, Cardenas challenged Salinas, the PRI’s candidate, in presidential elections that many Mexicans believe Salinas won only through widespread fraud.

Cardenas has since formed his own party, the leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party, and will again compete against the PRI candidate in the August presidential elections.

After Cardenas left the PRI, the banner of internal dissent was taken up by Rodolfo Gonzalez Guevara, who in late 1987 formed the Critical Current faction within the PRI. Three years later, he too left, giving up on the notion of democracy inside the PRI.

As PRI chairman in 1990, Colosio proposed a radical reorganization of the party, eliminating the power-based factions and encouraging individual party memberships that could incorporate new groups that do not fit into the existing PRI structure.

He framed the reform as a matter of survival: In the four decades since the last significant party restructuring, most Mexicans have moved from the farm to the cities, the unionized share of the work force has dropped, and Salinas’ free-market policies are creating a new class of entrepreneurs. The PRI, heavily weighted toward official unions and peasant farmers, no longer reflected Mexican society.

Labor and peasant leaders, whose power is based on steep pyramids of the traditional hierarchy, blocked the changes. Even the top-down attempt to change achieved only a nominal strengthening of the state-level party organizations, which are controlled by local bosses tied to longtime PRI leaders.

The push for reform was then assumed by a group of mostly young PRI militants. Taking advantage of the taint on the Salinas presidency because of his questioned electoral victory, the new movement, called Democracia 2000, became vocal advocates of greater participation. They vowed not to desert but to fight from within.

“Young people who want to get into politics in Mexico and change this country have two options: the PRI, and the PRI,” said Josue Romero, a member of the movement.

Their efforts culminated last October and November, just before Salinas named Colosio as the PRI candidate, when they staged rallies in the public plazas of about 500 cities and towns across the country, agitating for honest elections and popular participation.

Then, said Ramiro de la Rosa, political action secretary of Democracia 2000, the harassment and death threats began. Fidel Velazquez, the 93-year-old labor leader and one of the most rigid party hard-liners, demanded their expulsion.

De la Rosa, 25, was not deterred.

“Why haven’t they expelled us?” he asked over coffee at a Sanborn’s across the street from the mammoth PRI headquarters. “Because it would expose them. It would show that they don’t want to change. They know that if they expel us, we would laugh. We would name names. Are the corrupt ones going to expel us?”

The Troubles Within PRI

One sign of the rapid unraveling of the PRI is the evaporation of its vaunted party discipline.

In part, the lapses reflect the effort to incorporate into the PRI new groups that seem to be natural constituencies because they have benefited from the Salinas Administration’s free-market policies. However, those new prospects often do not share the longtime members’ standards of loyalty and appreciation.

Last year, for example, PRI stalwarts hosted a dinner for prominent businessmen who had purchased formerly government-owned companies or had other financial dealings with the government. They were asked to contribute millions of dollars each to a fund that would become an endowment for campaign financing.

But instead of coughing up the cash, several infuriated dinner guests leaked the story to the press, setting off a scandal that forced the party chairman to resign.

The trend away from discipline is spreading.

Militants are breaking rank in unprecedented numbers and with unprecedented fervor, first with the Zapatista rebellion and now with the Colosio murder. They openly criticize. They challenge. Some even go so far as to publicly blame the Salinas government for the assassination, suggesting Colosio’s purported insistence on honest elections may have cost him his life.

“The lack of pluralism and democracy, and the lack of respect for what a party is, have produced this whole situation of violence, which will not end here,” de la Rosa said energetically, ignoring his companions’ admonitions to tone down his comments.

“We are at the beginning of a long night for this country, a night that can be stopped if Salinas can be made to understand that it is no longer a matter of simply fulfilling his will in Mexico, but allowing the will of the people of Mexico to be fulfilled.”

The tumult within the party was evident again over the weekend. Flying in the face of the traditional selection process, party rank-and-file and mid-level leaders began to talk publicly about who they wanted to see as the next presidential candidate. Democracia 2000 began demanding that a convention be held to name the candidate.

Quickly, the party hierarchy issued a statement “disauthorizing” any statements by anybody connected with the PRI. Democracia 2000 responded, issuing its own “disauthorization” of the party leadership.

Another rift within the party was aired before Colosio’s death. Manuel Camacho Solis, a former Mexico City mayor passed over by Salinas as the PRI candidate, was named by the president as a special mediator to handle the Zapatista uprising. Camacho Solis’ success in that position fueled speculation that he would try an independent bid for the presidency, conjecture that increased when Camacho Solis refused to toe the party line and publicly support Colosio.

Finally, Camacho Solis relented, saying he would not run for president. His announcement came one day before Colosio’s killing, and many party stalwarts are very resentful of his reticence. He was booed when he appeared at Colosio’s wake--regrettable, say supporters, because Camacho Solis, like Colosio, backed democratic reform.

The reform-minded Priistas admit that they have not gotten very far. Under Salinas, there has been just a smattering of democratizing measures. The party statutes were changed in 1988, when Colosio headed the PRI, to allow some popular consultation on the selection of local candidates. And just last week, Congress passed a package of electoral reforms that raises fines for fraud and reduces PRI influence on the committee that oversees elections.

Yet in both these cases and others, dissidents see the changes as largely cosmetic. The divisions and emotions within the party now appear to run so deep, analysts say, simple cosmetics may no longer do the trick.

“In six years of work . . . we have failed in making the PRI change, that is true,” said de la Rosa. “Where we have not failed is in helping make civil society stronger and better informed. People don’t swallow the lies so easily any more.”