I. Every quixotic idea has its origins in books of chivalry. Mine began in reading about English political history in the eighteenth century. From Macaulay and Namier, I learned how the Whig Party governed England for seventy years on the basis of a parliamentary majority secured through a corrupt system and fraudulent elections. This strange situation was most memorably portrayed by Hogarth, with his scathing paintings and engravings of rotten boroughs where even the dead were allowed a vote. But then a set of sudden reforms, allied with the emergence of a free press, ushered in genuine competition between parties. The story ended well. Reading this in Mexico, reflecting on this saga of political progress, an obvious thought immediately occurred to me: if this happened in England two centuries ago, why not in Mexico now? The result was an essay called “For a Democracy Without Adjectives,” which I published in 1984 in Vuelta, an extraordinary journal founded in 1976 by Octavio Paz, where I worked as deputy editor. In left-wing circles, it was common to degrade democracy by adding adjectives such as “bourgeois” and “formal.” What we needed, in my view, was democracy, period. Without adjectives, without condescension, without the fantasy that there is something better. No sooner had my essay appeared than the government instructed its hired writers to attack my proposal as both senseless and dangerous. The journalistic, academic, and political Left, still wedded to the paradigm of the socialist revolution, came out against me as well, trotting out the old Marxist cliches about the falsity and inadequacy of democracy. The National Action Party (PAN), which since 1939 had gradually sought to construct a citizenry that recognized the worth of free elections, was at that time a center-right presence in Mexican politics, but it was weak. Nobody, or almost nobody, saw that the democratic liberal alterna-tive proposed in 1910 by Francisco I. Madero to counteract the dictator Porfirio Díaz was the right and proper way out for Mexico. Madero led the first and very brief phase of the Mexican Revolution. In 1911, he was elected president in fair and free elections. He presided over a purely democratic regime for fifteen months and was overthrown and murdered in a coup backed by the American ambassador. This started the violent phase of the revolution that lasted until 1920 and left one million people dead, after which Mexico abandoned Madero’s democratic ideal. The PRI was founded in 1929 and held total power until the end of the century. Liberal democracy, I argued, was also a solution for Latin America more generally, as it seemed to be indicated by the rejection of military governments in the 1980s in Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Uruguay. These countries, each by degrees and all by the holding of elections, were moving in that direction. But liberal democracy was still not viewed positively by the region as a whole, with the notable exceptions of Venezuela and Costa Rica. In fact, in Colombia and Peru, as well as in Central America, the most viable means to power was still the one mapped out by the Cuban revolution, whose prestige remained intact in Latin American universities and among Latin American intellectuals. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, for example. In 1984, Vuelta published Gabriel Zaid’s “Nicaragua: The Enigma of the Elections,” in which Zaid declared that the Sandinistas had the perfect card to play in order to discredit American “aggression”: they could simply call elections, from which one of their number would undoubtedly emerge triumphant. They used liberal means for illiberal — more precisely, dictato-rial — ends. This anti-Sandinista heresy cost Zaid dear: in Mexico, and across Latin America, the left vilified him as an ally of Reagan. That same year, on being awarded the Frankfurt International Book Fair Prize, Octavio Paz called for exactly the same thing: democracy in Nicaragua. The response to his challenge was a symbolic lynching: outside his home on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City, protestors burned posters bearing the image of his face. The next year, the front cover of Vuelta’s April issue was devoted to an essay by Octavio Paz called “PRI: Time’s Up.” Paz bravely argued that the PRI must open the way for profound political reform. The PRI was an ingenious kind of dictator ship, but a dictatorship nonetheless. Elections were organized by the Interior Ministry, and the PRI won every legislative and executive position all over the country. This closed political structure, which had been in operation for six decades, struck Paz as unsustainable and wrong. And indeed it was. The power wielded by the president was not only excessive, it bordered on the imperial: the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, the Supreme Court of Justice, the governors and legislatures of all thirty-two states, answered directly to him. The so-called “Mexican Republic,” which on paper, in the Constitution, was “representative, democratic, and federal,” in practice verged on an absolute monarchy, a monarchy of a party, with the outgoing president choosing his successor at six-year intervals. The single lever of power in Mexico was the PRI, the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution, which properly speaking was not a party at all, but rather a machine geared for the winning of elections, as well as an efficient social mobility agency and patronage network in the way that it doled out public money and public positions. And there was yet another undemocratic feature to this alleged democracy: freedom of expression was limited to a few newspapers. (It was little more than a whimper on radio and it was non-existent on television.) The history of dissent is often best documented in journals, and so Vuelta again: in that same issue in April 1985, Zaid had a piece called “Scenarios For The End of The PRI,” among which he included a major earthquake — an actual earthquake, he was not speaking metaphorically — that would lead to the total discrediting of the political system. He was prophetic: the earthquake came to pass
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