By Pip Hunter
On April 10, more than 100,000 people rallied in Mexico City in front of the National Palace to mark the 75th anniversary of the death of nationalist hero Emiliano Zapata. Tens of thousands also demonstrated in Michoacan, Jalisco, Guerrero, Yucatan and other areas.
"If there's no solution, there'll be revolution!", "Zapata lives and lives, the struggle continues and continues" and "Workers and peasants to power" were the main rallying cries from workers and peasants, some of whom had travelled since the beginning of April to attend the Mexico City demonstration. Tens of thousands of indigenous people and peasants led the march.
US and Mexican military were on full alert outside the US Embassy, as teams of young people spray-painted anti-imperialist slogans everywhere. Posters and banners with pictures of both Zapata and the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN)'s Subcomandante Marcos were frequent.
Just a few weeks before, on March 23, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI)'s presidential candidate was assassinated while attending a rally. Luis Donaldo Colosio was the front-runner in the presidential race, although without a clear majority. A close friend of President Carlos Salinas de Gotari, Colosio was the PRI's 1988 and 1991 campaign manager in elections widely regarded as fraudulent.
By tradition, the current president hand-picks his successor. Some of the PRI old guard were displeased when Salinas chose Colosio, who, as the former social development secretary, enraged by pushing Salinas to continue negotiations with the Zapatistas.
While the government tried to pin the assassination on one man, a mechanic with no apparent motive, the Mexican daily Reforma published a poll on March 25 which showed that about 80% of respondents assumed a conspiracy. According to the conservative Economist, there is a growing consensus that the PRI "dinosaurs", upset with the government's ratification of some electoral reforms on March 23, masterminded the assassination.
Another headache for the increasingly factionalised PRI was the threat by former Mexico City mayor and the PRI's official peace negotiator, Manuel Camacho Solis, to run an independent campaign.
Opinion polls give Camacho Solis a two-to-one lead over his nearest rival, with five months to go before the August 21 presidential election. By law, leading public servants, including ministers and deputy ministers, must resign six months before the elections to qualify as candidates. Many of the most obvious substitutes for Colosio were therefore automatically ruled out. Since Colosio's death, Camacho has refused to re-enter the race, but his statements have not quelled speculation.
The Colosio camp has selected a former education minister and manager of the Colosio campaign, Ernesto Zedillo, as the replacement candidate.
Regardless of the candidate, the April 10 demonstrations made it clear that Mexicans have no faith in the PRI's ability to carry out free and fair elections.
Having hitched its political future to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the PRI is looking increasingly vulnerable as Mexico's economy continues to shrink. Pundits had Mexico's growth at 5% due to NAFTA, but official statistics show that the economy shrank during both the last two quarters of 1993. Real growth for 1994 is more likely to be around 1%. Mexico's foreign debt — mostly to US banks — is US$118.9 billion, the biggest after Brazil.
NAFTA was to be about security for US investors in Mexico. But the wholesale relocations of US plants to Mexico have not happened. Instead, the major effect has been the purchase of US or Canadian firms by Mexican companies seeking to escape the Mexican recession and/or their fears of the Zapatista uprising.
Following Colosio's assassination, the US government moved quickly to calm Mexico's nervous financial markets. On March 24, the US gave Mexico a short-term US$6 billion credit line in what the Spanish newsagency EFE described as "an attitude without precedent in the history of Washington's relations with the countries of Ibero-America".
US President Clinton assured investors that Mexico's government was in "sound shape". "Mexico: Shaken but Strong" was the line of the New York Times editorial, while the Wall Street Journal asserted that "Mexico in fact is a fundamentally stable country".
Mexico's stock exchange, already shaken by the Zapatista rebels' campaign, had fallen further following the March 4 kidnapping of a leading banker. Salinas ordered a one-day suspension of trading after the Colosio assassination.
Following the assassination, the EZLN released a communique accusing PRI hardliners of concocting a pretext to break off talks and resort to the military option. The EZLN condemned "the use of terrorism for the accomplishment of any end" and pledged not to impede the elections.
They added that their forces are on "red alert" against further attacks by the Mexican army, which, despite the official January 17 cease-fire, has been carrying out aerial attacks on Chiapas, the rebel stronghold in southern Mexico.
The Mexican press has reported troop movements and a build-up in Chiapas. Indigenous peasants in Chiapas have carried out land seizures. Campesino organisations in other parts of the country warned the secretary of agrarian reform that if 300 neglected cases are not settled soon, they will dispense justice with their own hands.