Nation Awakens From Era of Repression Under PRI

MEXICO CITY —  Call it velvet repression. An intellectual found that he was no longer welcome on a popular radio show. A publisher discovered that newsstands wouldn’t distribute his feisty daily. A congressman was quietly warned that his anti-corruption probe could be hazardous to his health.

Mexico, although long a one-party state, didn’t feature the widespread, ironfisted repression of Communist countries. But for the writers, thinkers and activists who confronted the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, there was a price to pay--ranging from a loss of privileges to, occasionally, a brutal beating or even death.

Today, after the party’s first presidential defeat in 71 years, many government critics are jubilant. The president-elect, centrist businessman Vicente Fox, has pledged to make the country a full democracy, with a government that is “strong but serene.”

“Those who expect a draconian government, a government of repression, a government that will use its power and force to keep people in line--well, this is not going to be our way of governing,” Fox said in a recent newspaper interview.

How much will he have to change? The stories of those who confronted the system indicate how sweeping Mexico’s transformation could be.

The Historian

Lorenzo Meyer, a prominent historian, is still marveling about the July 2 election. It is as awe-inspiring as the birth of a baby, he says.

“You know it will be born. But you don’t know the day. And when it’s born, you can’t avoid a feeling of surprise,” he exults. “From one moment to the next, you have a new human being, with little feet, little hands. You can feel it.

“That’s what happened to me.”

A bespectacled man whose voice soars like a choirboy’s, Meyer has frequently criticized the government in his weekly newspaper column and in media appearances.

He never had to fear the gulag for his tart remarks. But he found himself bumping up against the limits of permissible criticism. In 1997, for example, he bashed President Ernesto Zedillo in two consecutive appearances on a national radio show. It was two times too many.

The show’s director informed him, “This is against our editorial line” and fired him from his weekly slot, Meyer says. He later was told that the president’s office was behind the move.

A Zedillo spokesman, Marco Provencio, denies that the president gave such orders, saying he has “always been respectful of what the media say.” But government intervention in the media has been common for decades. And until recently, an unwritten rule applied in Mexico: No one criticized the president, the army or the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Generally, though, the pressures against academics have been far subtler. Professors who supported the government were invited to be official advisors, edit textbooks and speak on popular television programs. Their journals flourished, thanks to government ads. Critics were left out in the cold.

One of the ironies of the old system, Meyer says, is that he felt free to assail the president on the state-owned television channel. But he wasn’t welcome on the big commercial stations, which reach the bulk of Mexicans.

“Freedom of speech was absolute” on the public channel, he says. “That’s because no one watched it.”

The Political Activist

Adolfo Aguilar Zinser also is an academic, a slender, silver-haired political scientist from a prominent family. He was an advisor to President Luis Echeverria in the mid-70s and later fell out with the PRI-dominated system.

As a professor and congressman, he has been threatened, chased by strange cars, and targeted in hostile press campaigns for his anti-corruption efforts, he says.

“This is the system,” he says. “The system had ways that weren’t sending the army to your house--although they did that once to me, and it was chilling.”

It was in 1984, and Aguilar Zinser had gone to foreign correspondents with his complaints that the government was abusing the Guatemalan refugees who were flooding into southern Mexico. “This was a very serious offense to the regime,” which was highly sensitive to its reputation abroad, Aguilar Zinser says.

The response was swift. One July evening, Aguilar Zinser answered the door of his apartment to find armed men in black jackets.

“They grabbed me,” he recalls. “I was blindfolded, wrapped in a sheet and put in a car.” He was whisked to what he suspects was a military base.

But a vigorous campaign by his friends and father, a well-known lawyer, resulted in his release after 14 hours. Authorities never acknowledged a role in Aguilar Zinser’s abduction, one of several apparently politically inspired kidnappings at the time. They ceased after then-President Miguel de la Madrid gave a speech condemning practices against the “objectives of the Mexican state.”

Last year, Aguilar Zinser decided that the best way to oust the PRI was to support Fox. Although a longtime leftist, Aguilar Zinser became a close advisor to the candidate of the center-right National Action Party, or PAN. The onetime dissident is now on Fox’s transition team.

Aguilar Zinser says he believes that politically motivated harassment will end under Fox, both because the candidate was elected with a mandate for greater democracy and because his powers will be limited. Fox lacks a majority in Congress and a vast party machine such as the PRI.

“Our children will be a generation of Mexicans with a degree of freedom we didn’t have,” Aguilar Zinser says. “People will realize this. They’ll see that now they can speak their minds. There will be nobody telling them that, because they spoke their minds, they will lose something.”

The Publisher

Reforma, a Mexico City newspaper, is housed in a massive colonial-style building that projects a Washingtonian sense of institutionalism. But Alejandro Junco knows that appearances can be deceiving.

As the publisher of a chain of independent newspapers, Junco has felt crushing pressure to toe the government line. There was the time in 1974 when his paper El Norte, in the northern city of Monterrey, criticized the president’s policies. The response: a gradual shutdown of newsprint supplies from the government monopoly.

“You didn’t need bayonets and soldiers in the newsroom” to intimidate, recalls the publisher, a short, bespectacled 51-year-old with a heart-shaped face rimmed by dark hair and a beard.

Then there was the time in 1982 when El Norte ran a headline critical of President Jose Lopez Portillo. Armed federal police began snooping around Junco’s office and his children’s school, asking about their personal lives. Terrified, the publisher fled with his family to Texas. He says he returned two weeks later, after U.S. newspapers publicized the threat and the president assured him that it had been a mistake.

But Junco’s biggest battle wasn’t with the president. Instead, it involved the PRI machine that controlled so much of Mexican life.

In 1993, after founding Reforma, Junco began to clash with Mexico City newsstand owners, who belonged to a pro-PRI union. Some differences were technical. But others were ideological: When Reforma ran a headline critical of the government, the newsstands would return the papers in bulk, still bound by the plastic strap, Junco says. (Jose Adalberto Santoyo, the union’s leader in the capital, denies that the group exercised censorship.)

“We did not want to depend on the union and their criteria of what should be for sale,” Junco says. “Historically, that has been a very important tool of the government.”

So, when the union announced a boycott against Reforma in 1994 for its insistence on publishing on holidays, the newspaper struck back. Junco, his wife and the reporters hit the streets to sell the paper--and were soon joined by prominent intellectuals and artists.

But the battle wasn’t over. Reforma vendors were systematically beaten up. The newspaper responded by hiring scores of photography students and assigning them to vendors, Junco recalls. Every time a Reforma salesman was attacked, the paper ran a photo. The violence eventually stopped--although the newsstands still don’t carry Reforma.

“As the years have passed, and with international mechanisms like NAFTA,” Junco says, “the government doesn’t control the newsprint, they don’t have the monopoly on telecommunications, there’s a consciousness among citizens that the president can’t control everybody.”

About the change in leadership, he says: “I have my fingers crossed. I hope Fox has a new attitude. But it’s too early to tell.”

The Union Organizer

It was rare that the PRI system resorted to bloodshed. Party bosses and politicians negotiated with the finesse of ballroom dancers--a bribe here, a concession there, a quiet warning to someone who stepped out of line. But there were days when the regime shed its velvet gloves. Jan. 8, 1990, was one of them.

Raul Escobar will never forget it. The auto worker and several colleagues were holding daily protests outside the Ford plant in Cuautitlan, in the Mexico City suburbs. They had been dismissed seven months earlier, Escobar says, for seeking to replace their union boss.

The union leader was a sore point for many Ford workers. He was an apparatchik of the giant Mexican Workers Federation, or CTM, a pillar of the PRI system. According to the unwritten rules of Mexican politics, the labor federation turned out armies of workers for PRI rallies and elections. In exchange, union leaders received benefits and the right to control workers. And the government gained a docile work force that appealed to foreign investors.

On Jan. 8, the morning-shift workers were streaming in about 6:30 a.m. as usual. But Escobar knew that the situation at the plant was anything but normal. The employees were demanding a democratic election to replace the union boss. And they were outraged about the suspension of their Christmas bonuses.

Suddenly, a fracas broke out inside the plant. Employees heading to the assembly line were astonished to find strangers in Ford uniforms, swinging clubs and yelling at them to stop causing problems, according press reports at the time.

Workers began to surround and threaten their assailants. The goons responded by whipping out pistols. As the shrieking workers ran, the gunmen opened fire, hitting nine workers. One of them, Cleto Nigmo Urbina, 35, a father of two who was so quiet he was nicknamed “El Mudo” (The Mute), was shot in the neck and stomach and died three days later. He had never taken part in the union activism.

When word of the shooting reached Escobar, he was horrified.

“I felt so impotent,” he recalls. He remembers thinking, “Only in a fascist country do they do this.”

Workers quickly identified the culprits: the union federation. The goons had arrived in union trucks, and several who were captured told judicial authorities that they had been hired by CTM officials, according to press reports. They were jailed, but charges were later dropped, Escobar says, after union thugs intimidated employees into refusing to testify. CTM officials at the time refused to accept responsibility.

Escobar long ago gave up on the system. He had decided that only radical solutions could bring change--like the left-wing Zapatista rebels who launched an uprising in 1994 in southern Chiapas state.

So he was incredulous when he saw President Ernesto Zedillo announcing on television that the PRI had lost the presidency.

“I said: ‘There will be a coup. They won’t give up power so easily,’ ” says Escobar, 43, who now works at a center that advises union workers.

Escobar is thrilled by the peaceful transition but says real change has only just begun. “There was a democratic process to elect a president. But in order for democracy to take root in the country, it needs to spread to all parts of society--to the workers, to their unions, to their neighborhoods, to citizens groups and the farms,” he says.

“That’s when democracy will have a different meaning.”

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* WARNING SHOTS

Rebel attack is a reminder that Mexico’s postelection euphoria may be short-lived. A2