An Election In Mexico

     I thought this experience might be apropos given the recent presidential election in the USA. It concerns an election for Mayor I witnessed first hand in Tenancingo 12 years ago. I just wanted everyone to  taste the flavor of politics on the other side of the border.

    First a brief  lesson in mexican politics:
     Twelve years ago there were a just four or so political parties in Mexico but only three of any importance, PRI, PAN, and PRD.  PAN is supposed to be the conservative party, PRD the supposed leftists, and PRI, which rarely supposes anything. PRI is the oldest, the most powerful, the best organized and the most authoritarian,, unafraid to use violence to control its subordinates. It is a political cartel, much like the axel of a giant wheel. The spokes of the wheel are smaller cartels created by PRI that radiate outward towards the madding crowd on the rim but no one forgets that the force begins at the center. The army, the police, Pemex, the election commission (INE), the press, the unions, intellectuals, and the students are all spokes of different thicknesses on that wheel. Paid pastors in every corner of the realm keep the wheel greased. In the twelve years since that mayoral election that I experienced in Tenancingo the political landscape has changed but not for the better. There are more parties than ever before. PRI, PAN, PRD, MORENA, NUEVO ALLIANZA, PARTIDO DE TRABAJO, MC, PARTIDO VERDE, ENCUENTRO SOCIAL, and PARTIDO HUMANISTA. The proliferation of parties has proved a benefit to the party PRI. There is no "electoral college" in Mexico.  A simple majority wins an election with so the bulk vote divided more and more between the myriad lesser parties, PRI only need garner 30% of the vote which is a cakewalk for them given their vast political machine. PRI makes Chicago politics look tame. 
      The Election: 
     Twelve years ago in Tenancingo PRI and PAN were the only two viable horses in the political race. After countless kitchen debates my mexican family cast their lot and their precious time with a candidate from PAN. PRI had ruled Tenancingo uninterrupted for 77 years and given very little to a town of such commercial dominance in the region. The last president, a PRISTA (person in the PRI party), had fundamentally sacked the town for the duration of his three year administration. He was a campesino,,, one of "US" they thought. He ended his regime with a thick wad of cash, properties from Tenancingo to Acapulco, and finally a cash gift from the party to him for services well rendered. The population really knew this would happen and they expected it.  Routine had become a comfort zone. Altruism, if it exists in a candidate will either get him killed,, or the altruism turns to greed when a candidate realizes what is really expected of him,, that is to maintain the machine, and taking what you can yet not so much as to jeopardize the reign of the next candidate. This time around though a group of fed up citizens decided to mount a fight. Some who work hard in Tenancingo were sick of this pattern of grossness including my family so they backed the candidate from PAN. This is unusual for a middleclass business family like mine in Tenancingo where almost everyone is a PRISTA. The rule states that it is better to be connected than to be left behind. The more disaffected voters came from the urban center. It is unusual for country people or campesinos to vote outside of the PRI corral.  Campesinos have always been the bread and butter of PRI. A high percentage vote and their votes are cheaper to buy. A bag of cement, or some re-bar, occaisionally a tractor for the super faithful, and you have captured the entire family. 
      My mother-in-law has built a lifetime of connections here through her work and ability to speak to all classes. She walks through the town, well respected and proud, like a political princess, greeting all levels of society, ,,,,,as if she were "combing the air for grace".  Really she has constructed a grand list of friends from her working life and the life of her parents,,,and in Tenancingo, a city in which familiarity breeds "contentment",,and the language spoken is gossip, this is real banking! Social bonds are perpetuated through an active network of gossip. In this sense it possesses the intimacy of  a small New England town but with lots more intrigue and bales of up front corruption to keep it all in motion.
     Tenancingo is nestled in a high semi-isolated valley, populated by industrious people and commercial activity. Topography gave it space to grow. It is the best situated town in the region. It made the best of its natural resources and this with the energy of its citizenry preserved its position economically. Now it is the center of the region for its markets and stores. It prospers in spite of its government yet it deserves more than the misery it receives from its government. Naturally my mother-in-law was courted by the political parties for the votes she might be capable of delivering. This led her into the race. I became the inertial observer.
     My wife and her mother were taken with the candidate from PAN.  He appeared to be sophisticated enough to cure the city's ills. I'm sure this couded my family's vision already fogged by desperation. He visited the house with his mother various times to comb my mother-in-law's vivacity in his direction. She was wary at first. She knows well the mexican political coyote but decided PAN Man had some potential, and if she could garnish his ear now before the victory well then perhaps it would benefit Tenancingo, and of course herself.  
     All my family, mother-in-law, wife, aunts, uncles, and cousins decided to pool their energy and focus on PAN Man. It began with nightly rallies. Each night we traveled to one or two barrios for political gatherings. Campaign music announced our presence like call to arms. The speakers blared a jingle "Yo voto por El PAN vota todos juntos votaremos por El PAN" as we caravaned towards a selected barrio. Later in the campaign there would be sound and light effects to capture the ever shorter attention span of the young. The faces I saw in the crowd were not from the middle or upperclasses. Women in rebozos, reticent wizened workers in sombreros, drunken  men, crazy men with hidden pistols a few times, youths and the regular groupies, my family included.The residents of the barrio all came out in the cool evening air to see the spectacle. People gathered in their town plazas or in the streets of their barrios to bathe in the three year cycle of very temporary attention, to hear the candidate and to have a chance at the microphone in order to ask a few safe questions. Most of the concerns seemed modest yet fundamental to me,,  like having a sidewalk, a sewer, or clean water. 
     We arrived in a train of cars, blue PAN flags a- flying, horns a-wailing in a dada da, da, da, tatoo to hear a speech that I had fairly memorized by voting day.  All this hoopla was to demonstrate to the people that there were people from the "center" of town, business people, who thought the best candidate for Tenancingo was PAN Man. They listened quietly as people from the outer reaches usually do here. PAN Man was soft spoken with a smooth "radio" voice, who spoke with ease and clarity and some charisma. His promises, similar those of  his PRISTA counterpart, were the usual electricity, pavement, and water. As a PANISTA though he added that he  would expand the market of goods from Tenancingo such as flowers and furniture, and he invoked the almighty saviour of all places, that is "tourism". He gave his speeches smoothly never speaking down to the down trodden. I was not sure what they thought. I wondered if they already knew for whom they would vote. PAN Man delivered the spoken taco,,,,"suave". He worked the crowd, like a too soft spoken barker exhorting what looked to me to be a circle of unemotional faces. I am not sure his class was communicating with theirs. 
     PAN Man was always running for office even before he ran, shaking hands with just about anyone who wasn't a leper. In private he seemed to me just another politician,,, a bit elitist and perhaps occaisionally honest. He was a self styled obstinate pedqagogic expert on mexican history. His version, a very catholic one, ruled in any discussion. Privately I heard him make some comments about "these indios" that rubbed me the wrong way. I found I couldn't ever know him. He was a broad smile, a big hand, and a lot of teeth with legs. That was his shield. The only one who knew him was perhaps his mother. A true politician knows how to cater and appeal to the public, to be a kind of showman, yet in reality he is like a greased pig, very hard to trap, always with an eye to the route of the easiest escape. They are highly instinctual animals and the sucessful ones know how to get elected by whatever means. They may be rats but rats are known for their intelligence and avoidance of box canyons. 
     The opponent from PRI, PRI Man, was a well documented scoundrel and came to be demonized by PAN Man and my family, but with good reason. The truth is that this PRISTA" sold his practically invisible soul years ago for the great promise held dear by anyone who chooses politics as a profession, that is, a future in "suction". When PRI finally won the election Tenancingo found out what an incorrigible human being he was. He packed his government with corrupt family members. They embezzled their own corporation on a grand scale. Garbage collection was suspended for months. (The mayor's brother was head of sanitation). The city smelled like a sewer and plumes of smoke from burning garbage filled the city with that other smell. The brother took over construction of the "new" highway being built out of Tenancingo then promptly shut down work idling the machines for 7 months while still charging for work not done. Some of the machines strung along the highway became familiar landmarks rusting and slowly sinking into the mud by the rainy season. He stole properties all over Tenancingo. After his term ended Tenancingo finally voted in a person from PRD. The PRI Man was punished forgoing too far and really making the citizens angry. His penance was a new job as a hidden functionary somewhere else in the party. The party handles errants like the catholic church handles pedophiles.They are transferred. The PRD mayor turned out to be a robber baron as well equal if not worse than PRI Man.       
     Elections are transparently dirty affairs in Mexico. The election commission, another  spoke in the PRI wheel, seems to ignore fraud which is blatantly conducted. All parties dispense freebies to the public, but PRI fatted with tax dollars and extreme "skimming" from work projects is by far the grossest giving out vouchers for a meagre amount of food, televisions, construction materials, jobs, occaisionally tractors, and just plain cash.  
      To show you the value of a peso let me tell a little story. A couple of months before the mayoral election  my wife and I visited Acatzingo, a poor barrio of Tenancingo about five kilometers from the center of town,,,yet which might as well be a distant planet. It is in this pueblo called Acatzingo on the side of a mountain that flows a spring. Above this spring stands guard “The Malinche”. This is the name given to a hieroglyph carved into the stone below which the spring flows. It is of a women-man in the Aztec “square “format  with what seems a symbol of corn on one side and what looks like a rabbit below that. Acatzingo is the ancient Indian site that predates the founding of Tenancingo by who knows how many years. No one knows much about this virtually unexplored site, least of all the inhabitants of Acatzingo. Acatzingo has more deformed people than their meager population should allow. It is rumored that there are heavy metals and pesticides in the drinking water. It is such a forgotten place, forgotten for 500 years as Tenancingo has been forgotten for the last 70. 
       My wife and I visited Acatzingo on behalf of PAN Man to distribute food coupons and ten pesos to any of the women who might attend. That may not sound like much but I have seen people scrambling in the streets for some bottles of Coca-Cola tossed by a company truck as a promotion. It was the dry season, april,  and it had not rained since October. April is the hottest time of year and during the dry months the intense sun is a very reliable daily guest. The cornstalks and grasses were desiccated to the point of fragile sticks that touched in the light wind  and sounded out a dull wooden percussion. Everything rattled like bones. The once lush green trees had faded to a sick gray. Everything was stiff and arthritic. The dirt roads were thick with two or three inches of powdery sienna dust that liberated itself into the air with the slightest incentive. The bushes alongside the road were almost indistinguishable from the road itself they are so salted with fine brown powder.  We wended our way towards the meeting point, Coco’s house. My wife was a little confused about the direction. This flat area of Acatzingo is surrounded by those special Mexican hills, the ones laced with tree lines and laid out in oblique parched plaques that are actually toasted fields. It is as if one had placed a crocheted green cloth, like a loose net, over a brown peak rising out of the plain. About us were the remnants of last season’s corn, dry crackly stalks that shivered in arthritic harmony.  Women swaddled in rebozos ambled,, unknown, and peasasnt men lead burros laden with oversize bundles of the stiff cornstalks. The landscape swept before us and then rose a little in the distance wherein lies the center of the pueblo of Acatzingo which revealed itself by the highly visible red domed church. It beckoned like a shimmering promise. 
     A little lost at a questionable crossroad it became necessary to ask a man with a burro  directions. Directions are always a mystery in Mexico, much more so than, shall we say even Boston where people seem to want to help but are incapable of explaining its maddening streets. In Mexico there are no street signs, few house numbers, and people rarely know each other’s last names. One is located by an inference of relatives or profession,,,,the Mexican directory. “She is the daughter of Don Jorge, El Chiflon, nephew of  La Sourda .He works in Zumpahuacan as a mason” . Imagine UPS here. The man with the burro to whom the question was put had been following his zacate laden beast who ignored him and seemed to know the way home. My wife greeted him with the usual civilty,,”Disculpe, Don, cual es la direction a Acatzingo” He casually indicated one of the two roads as the burro continued, waddling quite confident in the routine overloaded and obscured by the corn stalks looking like a trotting Hawaiian princess headed for the luau. The man had one concerned eye on the burro and the other on us. The directions turned more specific as my wife narrowed the field of participants trying to locate Coco's house. Finally after two more relatives and three more nicknames were traded between the man and my wife, the peso dropped and the man was able to direct us. "No es La Guera! Claro que no." "Si Si La Guera:" His burro was now just a hind quarter in the distance waddling and bouncing side to side  towards her memory of a shade tree or a pail of water. The man left us and began jogging towards his ever fading ass. We continued to Coco’s house where already there was a congregation of women some old and some young. We gathered in the hand of Coco’s weedy yard with the traditionally modern unfinished flat roofed Mexican house framing two sides of their lot. My wife began to explain that she was not part of the cabinet that is running for office only a citizen who is distributing these coupons on behalf of PAN Man, and also that she is a Pan Man supporter because he is the best choice for Tenancingo. Dispensing gifts for votes is really an illegal tactic, even here in Mexico, but all parties use it. It is just that PRI has much more money. For us that day it was just a "cheap" form of persuasion,,,,cheaper let us say than the competition and with the future promise of something porky more likely for the candidate than for the citizens. The mexican political fiesta costs a business man's lunch. I think that you can buy the votes of five municipalities here for one businessman’s lunch at Masa in NYC. A mexican campaign entails hob-nobbing and promises. Other politicians, police,  judges, and low level political groupie-workers are bought with cash, women, drugs, and a chance to glimpse the “master” candidate.In Acatzingo the "buy off" is much more modest in scale.

     It is a quiet gathering in Coco's patch of heaven, as with many indigenous campesinos who are quiet people. I can read into this so much but let us save that for another entry. Coco had set out a tubular steel chair with a red padded vinyl seat edged in white piping. Some of the women were swaddling babies in rebozos, the universal mexican scarf. The babies were all but invisible except for the bulge. Others smiled through gaps in their teeth, some older women approached in worn shoes and aprons. There were a few younger women with exposed proto-bellies and dark red lipstick. They seemed out of place. Chickens paddled their legs darting here and there. The grunt of a pig and the bleating of sheep came from behind the house. My wife was decked out in her blue shirt with white pants, gold earrings, and gold bracelet. Everyone seemed patient to listen but you could see their eyes were awaiting the premium. It seemed more like an open air class given by the regional coordinator of Health and Well-Being for Indigenous women. “This is how you properly wash a ji-tomate . Guadalupe please demonstrate for Maria” . A good fresh squeezed juice is better for the children than a Coke or pulque deary. The women clustered in small groups probably by family. They each were to come forth and sign a register to receive the coupons and 10 pesos. I held the ledger and pen like the designated official monkey. Wizened older hands made “X’s”, and younger smoother hands less irrigated by work scratched a signature,,,many times one of the most unique of Mexican identifications, never legible  but always a very stylistic form of “ME”. By the way Acatzingo was one of the few barrios that went for PAN instead of PRI,,,probably a 10 pesos well spent for the losers. 
      Near the end of the campaign PAN organized nightly classes to train those believers who were to become representatives of the party and who would monitor the election, a nearly impossible task. They were dubbed "Caza Mapaches" or racoon hunters. Each one was given a walkie talkie and a nickname in order to coordinate efforts on election day. El Piton, La Ardilla, El Tlacuache, La Rana, and El Nena became their new identities.Of course my wife and her mother enrolled. I think that it may be an easy jump from religion to politics,,,one just rolls over in bed and atop another mistress. I would go each night to the classes with them and wait for two or three hours until my own patience wore thin with the waiting and the added feeling of exclusion. I was not yet a mexican citizen and could only participate as an inertial observer who didn't always understand what was being said. 

      Election day itself was a battle not unlike "capture the flag" but with more serious consequeces and more serious players. I spent election day and evening shuttling my wife and a few others from one voting booth to another. As the day wore into night the walkie takies were abuzz with activity. Confrontations, voting booth fights between Mapaches and Pristas, and reports of outright cheating, filled the airwaves. It seemed just one urgency after another. The fight was on in earnest. The central coordinator El Nena was receiving reports from various agents at different voting stations. At about 8:00 PM he jubilantly announced that PAN Man might win. Then a few minutes later,, "Ganamos Ganamos!" There was energy in the air,, a true "we" moment. By 10:30 he turned off his radio because it was certain PAN Man had lost. The following silence and the deflation were almost too much to bear for the participants. The once singing radios went silent one by one until there was nothing. I still don't know what exactly happened.
     Elections are often a non-choice, that is between sour oranges and sour apples so one always seems reduced to choose between what one thinks may be the lesser of two evils If one adds to the recipe the facts that for most of the population real information is nonexistent and unattainable and then voter apathy as a viral disease how is any election a reflection of democracy,,,yet after all the months i had been on the sidelines I, perhaps stupidly, admired the belief and the hope my family placed in their candidate and his potential, for they truly care about the future of Tenancingo. They allowed themselves the three year swindle with eyes wide open.They truly believed, as many do in this city, that it cannot tolerate another PRI administration with its economic rascalry. That is the hope of the faithful. They put as much into their politicians as they do in their priests whoever they may be, meanwhile the citiy putrefies all about us. The governor of the state of Mexico, a Prista, and now president of the republic, poured a great deal of money and materials into Tenancingo to maintain the PRI power. It was rumored to be 6,000,000 pesos, ( and that twelve years ago) for his personal capon reprobate. This is money was spent on bribes, first to the PRI caciques and then to the party faithful, then to the public at large. I don't know what an election really costs in Mexico. One could never access that information,, but it is a fact that the side with the most to spend will win.  PRI can always find money to perpetuate their machine, much more than any other party,, and there is no freedom of information act here that allows an enlightened citizen to create a balance sheet. This is the citizen's money which could have been spent on delivering clean water, or sewage to some of these communities which after 70 something years of graft have very low expectations. They fully realize the politics won't suddenly one day become honest. They are resolved and have been trained to wait for the cyclical hand out that is barter for votes. They take what is offered and return to the routine of daily survival.

     About two months before voting day my young sister-in-law fled home leaving just a note. She wanted her freedom and not to be overseen by a mother who had invested so much emotionally in her because of that mother's own self doubts. It was a kind of family crisis because we found out that she was headed for the states as a wetback. My wife had also fled to the states in this fashion 28 years ago, and she knew firsthand the hardship and potential danger of the crossing. Nobody felt my sister-in-law, the delicate one, had the endurance for the voyage to freedom. ( It turned out she bought a fake ID and smoothly drove through telling the border guards stating she was an american citizen. Like shit through a goose). My wife's mother was shattered and hollowed by the abandonment. After questioning my sister-in-law's friends the family discovered that she was headed towards Washington, D.C. and a rendez-vous with a man from Tenancingo. Before the arrival of this information there were flurries of phonecalls, silence, and emotional bedlam. When PAN Man lost the election or had the election stolen (all elections here are stolen), the crash was grave for my mother-in-law. She became sick and bedridden for weeks. She showed signs of depression not at all her former robust self. Her voice that used to ring out in the shop calling her employees,,,,RAAAAAAAAAFFFFA,,or ANGEEEEEELLLLLL was weakened. Her energy had been sacked. She brightened a little with certain people and at certain times but crawled back into her shell without notice. The loss of her prodigious appetite (everyone in the family has this affliction) was the indication of a retreat from civilization. She answered requests for voyages outside the house with that faint "no" that commenced on a high note and then softly descended and faded like a cat's meow.
     Pan Man indicated he might just contest the election. Soon he received threats that warned of death if he pursued justice.