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La Herencia: Arqueología de la
Sucesión Presidencial en México
(The Inheritance: Archaeology of the Presidential Succession in
Mexico)
By Jorge G. Castañeda
Reviewed by Denise Dresser*
According to a popular maxim, “those who think they understand Mexican politics are ill-informed.” Infamous for its opaque and convoluted political culture, Mexico is comparable to China and Russia in its reliance on conspiracy theories as a form of political analysis. But whereas the Russians engage in Kremlinology, and the Chinese focus on the politics of geriatric rule, the Mexicans have spent 70 years delving into the dynamics of the dedazo, the tradition whereby incumbent presidents handpicked their successors. Since their votes did not count until the late 1980s, voters tried to read the minds of the man in the presidential chair and those who aspired to replace him. They gambled on their favorites and, every six years, sat back and watched the games begin.
Mexico’s obsession with succession politics explains the uproar surrounding the release of public intellectual Jorge Castañeda’s stunning new book, The Inheritance: Archaeology of the Presidential Succession in Mexico. It has become an instant bestseller—150,000 copies have sold in a mere two months—and seems destined to become the most important political book of the decade. The Inheritance contains lengthy interviews with Mexico’s last four presidents and explains how and why they chose their successors. After years of being left in the dark, Mexicans apparently feel a morbid need to understand the hearts and souls of the presidents who have wreaked havoc on the country.
The dedazo—or “finger pointing”—helped the Institutional Revolutionary Party (pri) but hurt the country. It turned presidents into gods who, as time passed, looked more and more like monsters. Although in his interviews, Castañeda lets the former presidents dissemble and deceive, avoid and reinvent, he is too cunning to let them off the hook. In a second section of the book, he adds his own interpretation and consults key players from past successions. What emerges is a devastating portrait of a deeply flawed mechanism.
The dedazo involved a peculiar process of consultation and behind-closed-doors competition among presidential contenders. Candidates formed camarillas (cliques) to advance their own interests in the succession struggle and destroy each other. Castañeda suggests that the dedazo usually followed one of two routes: election or elimination. In the first scenario, the incumbent president seemed to promote a race among his underlings but had already chosen his successor and groomed him for office. In the second, the president had no “good son” and was forced to choose from among those left standing after a bloody battle.
Both methods had costs and consequences. The dedazo by election left a trail of betrayed, embittered losers who were reluctant to abide by the results. Former mayor of Mexico City Manuel Camacho is an example. Feeling betrayed when his college friend Carlos Salinas passed him over, Camacho recast his role as peace commissioner for Chiapas into a potential presidential bid, thus undermining Luis Donaldo Colosio (who was subsequently assassinated). The second method, the dedazo by elimination, usually empowered a man with little loyalty to his predecessor. Ernesto Zedillo, chosen because no one else was left, has spent his term exiling, harassing, and imprisoning members of the Salinas family.
Time and again, Mexicans were short-changed by a megalomaniacal political class that put national interests on the back burner every six years in order to play succession politics. As minister of the interior, Luis Echeverría refused to negotiate with leaders of the 1968 student movement because he knew that a conciliatory stance could weaken his chances of being selected. As minister of planning and federal budget, Salinas recklessly manipulated the economy—in a chilling prelude to the crash of 1994—to bolster a network of political patronage that could propel him to the presidency. Miguel de la Madrid freely admits that throughout its history the pri stuffed ballot boxes and bought votes. Mexico’s leaders were willing to sacrifice the country in order to rule it.
The Inheritance provides more than a user’s guide to the dedazo. It also sheds light on Castañeda, Mexico’s most controversial left-leaning intellectual. The author has played an enigmatic role in Mexican politics and U.S.–Mexico relations: He argued that nafta was bad for Mexico but ended up siding with Mexico bashers during the debate over free trade. He is a man of the Left, but his book wounded leftist Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas by revealing a secret meeting between Cárdenas and Salinas in the aftermath of their turbulent 1988 presidential race.
As such, the book reveals an unreconciled tension between Castañeda the independent critic and Castañeda the politician-in-waiting. He exposes the flaws and foibles of the mighty, but wants to keep on rubbing elbows with them. Thus, Castañeda ultimately allows the emperors to walk away with their underwear still on. The interviews are less provocative and confrontational than one would want or expect, and Castañeda admits that he sent them back to each one of the ex-presidents for final approval. It seems that he was willing to avoid the questions that needed to be asked for the sake of access.
Castañeda may be looking ahead to the next administration and positioning himself as a “respectable” intellectual—one who can keep the secrets that make key players uncomfortable. His political sympathies lie with center-right presidential candidate Vicente Fox. In all likelihood, Castañeda aspires to the Ministry of Foreign Relations or another cabinet position. Could it be that after spending the past decade beating on the doors of the political establishment, what he wanted all along was to be let in? One hopes that will not be the case—that Castañeda will not give up critical distance for the sake of sitting next to the prince and whispering into his ear. As a fearless provocateur, Castañeda has done his country a great service. It would be a shame if he turned into just another politician, like the many he has so skillfully unmasked.
As for Mexico’s future, Castañeda suggests that only a strong dose of democracy will heal the wounds inflicted by the dedazo. Mexico appears to be on the mend, more slowly than Castañeda would like, but faster than the pri seems ready for. The president can no longer impose his choice on a pliant party, and whoever the pri selects will have to contend with opposition candidates and their strategies. The pri has lost its relative majority in Congress, a left-leaning politician governs Mexico City, and opposition governments rule over half of the Mexican people.
Even though President Zedillo has declared the dedazo dead, the country may still witness its reincarnation. No one knows how effectively the new system—a primary within the pri—will replace time-honored traditions. Zedillo has announced that he will maintain a hands-off approach to the succession and let the best man win. But if the pri’s primary ends up empowering dinosaurs instead of democrats, the president may intervene after all. The pri has new rules but old players, and pri hardliners could orchestrate a fraudulent primary. Plus, Zedillo and former president Salinas are still at each other’s throats.
Castañeda’s extraordinary book shows us that in Mexico, the art of picking the president has been a Roman circus, and the succession of 1999–2000 will be no different. Only this time, the stakes will be even higher. If the primary is poorly run, if there are accusations of fraud, or if somebody gets killed, the pri could implode—and with it, an important further step toward real democracy in Mexico.