PROJECT: “ CIVIL SOCIETY AND GOVERNABILITY IN
MEXICO”
F I N A L R E P O R T
Dr. Alberto J. Olvera, National Coordinator
Institute of Historical and Social Research
Universidad Veracruzana
August, 2000
INTRODUCTION: CIVIL SOCIETY’S GENERAL DEVELOPMENT TENDENCIES.
Today, Mexico is experiencing the end of an era. The defeat of the official party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, in the presidential elections on 2 July 2000, marks the decline of the 20th century's longest lasting authoritarian régime. The electoral phase of the long democratic transition process has almost come to an end, although the legality and fairness of state and municipal elections in the southeast of the country remain unguaranteed. That said, the new defeat of the PRI in the Chiapas elections on August 20 indicates that vote buying and coercion are already insufficient strategies for maintaining the hegemony of the PRI. A phase is now beginning in which the relationships between the State and society will have to be radically reformed, along with the rules, customs, practices and institutions that allowed corporatism and patron-client relationships to continue. There will also have to be a genuine rule of law. It is safe to say that the defeat of the régime is a result of the prolonged mobilization of Mexican civil society in favor of democracy.
This study has concentrated on precisely this transitional phase of Mexican contemporary history. The composition, areas of struggle, list of demands and contributions to democratic governability by civil society have been clearly determined, on the one hand, by the central role of the struggles for electoral democracy, and on the other, by the resistance of the authoritarian régime to civil initiatives to reform areas such as labor, agriculture, social policy and indigenous rights. This process has taken place at the same time as the full implementation of neoliberal economic policies that undermined the material basis of the old client-patron arrangements upon which the old régime was founded, but that also destroyed ways of life, forms of solidarity and the survival strategies of those on low incomes. The social cost of neoliberal structural adjustment has been enormous, since it has increased levels of poverty and misery in the whole country and polarized even more an already divided society.
The simultaneous existence of neoliberal adjustment and democratic transition closed some areas of action and opened others, changing the form of Mexican civil society. The struggles of grassroots sectors such as unions, rural organizations and urban working class movements that had been central in the seventies and early eighties, giving place to a popular civil society, lost their political and symbolic effectiveness in the second half of the eighties and, in particular, the nineties. In contrast, the electoral struggles became more central during the same period, attracting very diverse elements from civil society to the party political arena or the formation of pro-democracy social movements. The success of these struggles gave emerging civil society elites access to municipal and state governments, giving way to the phenomenon, already well-known in other countries, of new democratic governments absorbing many of the leaders and initiatives for change that were formerly in civil society.
In this long and as yet unfinished transition to democracy two classic dimensions of civil society (that emerge with greater clarity during a change of political régime) clearly stand out: the growing autonomy of society in relation to the State and the self-restriction of social actors in their respective ways of working and political agendas. Indeed, the fact that the authoritarian régime has gone through a long period of internal crisis since 1982 and that this process has been accompanied by a slow cycle of progressive liberalization and electoral democratization, led to the emergency of a civil society in the form of a demarcation between society and the state. This process took place in the context of social struggles that were dispersed in social and geographical terms, but had common objectives in relation to the respect for the social and political rights of the citizenry and the defense of immediate material interests through successive reforms and negotiations with the régime.
In Mexico, the structural weakness of grassroots social actors and the lack of alternative public spaces for political activity led to municipal, state and federal elections being the main political arena for this extensive process since 1986. Leaders from the business world and grassroots civil movements from both urban and rural areas, who had become tired of enduring countless restrictions and obstacles in their different areas of struggle, began to participate in political opposition parties, giving them the legitimacy and representativity that they had historically lacked. Big social movements forced the régime to accelerate the pace of liberalization in the early nineties and move into a democratization phase from 1995 onwards.
Contemporary civil society emerged in Mexico in the seventies in the form of big grassroots social movements, as well as an initial movement amongst business groups to gain greater autonomy from the state. These class movements saw their area of activity restricted as a consequence of the structural economic crisis that began in 1982, and the regime's decision not to create electoral opportunities for competition between parties. This situation resulted in the political radicalization of grassroots movements leading to greater isolation from the rest of the population and repression. Meanwhile, business and middle class movements from the North became pioneers in the use of elections as battle fields for opening the régime and modifying its economic policies.
This fact is explained by the long presence of the National Action Party (founded in 1939) in the political arena. Historically comprised of a small conservative elite with few links to civil society, the PAN became the vehicle through which emerging urban elites were able to politically struggle against the régime. The PAN always defended the need for electoral democracy and recuperating the link between legality and legitimacy, which had been removed from its origins by the authoritarian régime. Between 1986 and 1992 this alliance between emerging elites and an old opposing political class led a range of grassroots democracy movements in the Center-north of the country and the Yucatan peninsula. These movements gave legitimacy to the democratic nature of the PAN and allowed these new actors to win progressively important electoral victories at municipal and state level until they accumulated a critical mass of votes and political positions in 1997 that facilitated the quest for the presidency of the republic in the year 2000. The unique thing about this process is that despite representing real grassroots movements, its political direction was very centralized and elitist and was founded on the basis of a strategic agreement with the authoritarian régime on economic policy, an area in which the PAN and the government coincided. This gradualist approach along with high level negotiations allowed the PAN to advance quickly up the ladder of political power, but demobilized the grassroots participation that had given it its strength. Around 1997 the relationship between the democratic social movement in the cities and the PAN had disappeared, opening the way for the creation of a professional political-electoral machinery that was efficient but elitist . However, the populist origins behind the PAN's legitimacy, combined with the relative effectiveness of PAN governments, gave the Mexican right significant political strength and moderated the most reactionary aspects of its doctrine. This democratic right wing has not been able to promote significant changes in government institutions, in which an efficiency-led vision of public administration that also contains innovative elements worthy of recognition would prevail: a greater transparency in government business, greater respect for the law and an explicit intention to break with client-patron relationships between the State and society.
As demonstrated by the case study of conservative groups in Guadalajara, the right wing civil groups went through a process of normative learning in a good part of the country that was converted into a revaluation of electoral democracy and an intention to promote the creation of new public spaces for facilitating communication between government and society. These kinds of groups, however, lack proposals for institutional innovation, having restricted themselves above all to postures of a legalistic or ethical character which, although important, are not necessarily translated into a real democratization of public life. This relatively limited vision was reflected in the series of constitutional reform proposals in Jalisco in 1995-1996 that were finally converted into a new state constitution. Being as it is a significant legal advance, it does not have relevant innovations in terms of contact institutions between society and government (Marván, 1997).
The trajectory of the Mexican left is different. Their democratic aggiornamiento was a consequence of the sudden electoral insurrection of 1988, when the popular vote went in favor of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the representative of a wide coalition of center-left forces. On that occasion the protest vote against the régime was channeled on block towards the candidate that represented a symbolic rescue of revolutionary principals. The electorate used the vote to communicate their desire to return to a mythical past in which there was at least some hope of social upward mobility and a paternalistic state that would tend to welfare needs. The leaders of the popular movements that had been diminished by economic crisis and rutinized by political marginalization were replaced on a large scale by the formation of the Party of the Democratic Revolution which had condensed the national left's numerous currents and groups.
In this way, the 1988 elections launched citizens of the center and south of the country (that up until then had been marginalized from the mobilization of the north) into the political arena. The supposition that this new front was some kind of automatic electoral majority fed intestinal wars within the new party and strengthened a series of massive post-electoral struggles that took place between 1990 and 1994. The combination of the weakening of grassroots movements and the electoral arena taking center stage led to a greater loss of visibility for popular movements as civil actors, their over-politicization, and the reproduction of the kind of client-patron and corporatist practices that had characterized the governing party.
As the Mexico City case study demonstrates, these political inertias became ballast for the Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas government between 1997 and 1999. The PRD lacked the institutional strength of the PAN and depended too much on Cardenas's personal charisma and prestige. By 1997 the PRD had been unable to win in any state in the republic, state capital or important city, an indication that the political organization was systematically failing to attract the emerging city elites, and was almost exclusively made up of pre-existenting groups and political currents or grassroots groups that were more or less involved in client-patron relationships with local populist leaders. The great majority of these were linked to the old working class urban movement or rural groups with left leaning trajectories.
Both the right and left wing parties took civil society leaders that were in tune with their political programs into government. The PAN found a source for their new political personnel in the leaders of conservative business associations, heads of families and conservative religious groups, and in so doing created a new bond between government and local civil society. The absence of relationships with other social groups was progressively covered by a social policy that was not based on client-patron relationships, but directed towards the formation of civic associations whose role would be to facilitate the communication of social demands to the government, while the latter maintained the capacity to make decisions and implement policies.
The PRD, on the other hand, incorporated the leaders of its numerous internal factions into leadership positions and tried to attract the heads of some non- governmental organizations into managerial and advisory roles. In this case the relationship between real civil society and the government took on a more organic character due to the previous militancy of the PRD's grassroots urban leaders. The only external actors were the leaders of some NGOs who entered into government under their own name and without specific agreements between the government and this particular sector of civil society in relation to public policy.
In both cases there have been few institutional innovations, as we will see later, although advances in civil rights and the rule of law have been important. These areas of democratic governability are correlated positively with greater transparency in government. Democratic transition can therefore be interpreted as being a process of constructing new forms of government, even in the absence of institutional innovation at a national level.
We will now analyze in more detail the lessons that have been learned from each one of the case studies included in this volume. The axes of this analysis are the following: the nature of the social and political actors studied; the common spaces and forms of interaction between civil society and the government; the effects of this relationship in terms of the collective learning of the actors involved and of society in general, as well as in terms of institutional innovation with a capacity for permanency; and finally, the contribution made to the construction of democratic governability.
CASE STUDY LESSONS.
Conservative civil groups in Guadalajara.
The study of conservative groups in the second most important city in Mexico, has the merit of being original, in the sense that a common prejudice exists in our country of thinking that conservative groups do not belong in civil society. What is more, those same groups have not incorporated this notion into their self-identifying language, since for them their demarcation from the state was a characteristic feature of their very nature. In fact, this type of group has its ideological and organizational origins in the traditional currents of the Catholic church, which considered themselves as being wrongly displaced by the Mexican revolutionary regime and even victims of the historic repression on the Catholic Church by Mexican governments since the 19th century.
This situation of exclusion led to the Mexican church having little economic and cultural power in Mexico compared to the rest of Latin America. Schools run by religious orders have been scarce in the country, as have the small groups that actively promote traditional Catholic values. Other groups of a more ideological nature, like Integral Human Development (DHIAC), the National Parents Association and the Unitary Movement of Renovating Orientation (which disappeared a decade ago), have grown up in the last three decades, and have openly tried to intervene in public life by attacking the ideological principles of the régime and promoting a conservative agenda. Important segments of big and medium sized business people in the west and north of the country were formed within this type of groups and adopted a in increasing level of public involvement from 1975 onwards.
In the case of Guadalajara, the diverse conservative groups had been able to live harmoniously with the PRI governments as long as they did not invade their areas of activity and respected their material and cultural interests. The PAN was basically weak in the state of Jalisco, to the degree that, when the nineties began, it had still not achieved important electoral victories in the region, despite the fact that as of 1983 important democratic struggles had been headed by conservative and business groups in Chihuahua, Nuevo León, Guanajuato, Sonora, Sinaloa and Baja California.
The political crisis in Jalisco blew up because of a terrible tragedy: the explosion of a drainage collector in the city center in April 1992. This event activated local civil society and made transparent the inefficiency and corruption of the state and municipal governments. As part of the social response to the crisis, the conservative groups acquired a public and civil dimension. Business people, opinion leaders and religious workers organized themselves and shared public forums with grassroots movements that emerged simultaneously.
The study shows the remarkable afinity that exists between moral, political, economic and social conservatism. The Guadalajara elites are recognizably conservative in each one of these dimensions, but up until 1992 had acted mostly in the private rather than the public sphere. After that, they supplemented their discourse with a demand for democracy, considering it to be the only possible response to the regime's moral and ideological debacle. In this way the social right wing became a liberal-democratic right wing. In 1995 the PAN won the state government and the municipal presidencies of Jalisco’s main cities.