Mexico's Election and the Continuing Revolution

Report Outline
Presidential Campaign and Current Issues
Mexican Herita and the 1910 Revolution
Basic Political and Economic Factors

Presidential Campaign and Current Issues

Certainity of Victory for Government Candidate

Every six years, the voters of Mexico go to the polls in a ritualized imitation of a free election. The exercise has been likened to a Mexican hat dance, because the outcome is never in doubt. This year, on Sunday, July 5, the winning candidate for President will be 47-year-old Luis Echeverria, now Minister of the Interior in the Cabinet of outgoing President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz. Echeverria is the hand-picked selection of a small coterie of ex-Presidents and high officials of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), He has opposition only from a group of tiny minority parties, chief among them the conservative National Action Party (PAN).

Mexico is not a democracy as the terra is understood in this country. The PRI is an all-powerful, monolithic organization. Nomination by the elders of the party is tantamount to election by what would be an astounding electoral majority in the United States. But if Mexico is not a democracy, neither is it wholly a totalitarian state; the government is omnipresent—in economic as well as political life—but it is not omnipotent; freedom lives side by side with repression; progress and pretense go hand in hand.

The PRI is a uniquely Mexican institution which has given the country several decades of stability, rapid economic growth, and a sense of national dignity and pride. It embraces nearly all social sectors: peons, labor, civil servants, co-ops, small farmers, small businessmen, professions, youth and women. The PRI excludes only big business, foreign interests, the military and the Roman Catholic Church, and they are informally consulted by party leaders.