Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 08:10:03 -0600 (CST)
From: Sendic Estrada Jimenez <sestrada-AT-fcfm.buap.mx>
Subject: M-NEWS: E;NYT<C.Cardenas: Mexico City> (FWD)
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Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 12:20:08 -0500 (CDT)
From: Chiapas95 <owner-chiapas95-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu>
To: chiapas95-AT-mundo.eco.utexas.edu
Subject: E;NYT<C.Cardenas: Mexico City's New Mayor,Jul 8
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Date: Tue, 8 Jul 1997 08:42:30 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Victor M. Martinez, Jr." <martiv-AT-che.utexas.edu>
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Subject: Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano: Mexico City's New Mayor (NYT)
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July 8, 1997
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano: Mexico City's New Mayor
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By SAM DILLON
[M] EXICO CITY -- During much of the decade since he
broke with Mexico's longtime governing party to
become a leader of the fledgling opposition, Cuauhtemoc
Cardenas Solorzano has been scowling.
Cardenas Solorzano has been scowling.
------------------
He was scowling in 1988 when he lost MAN IN THE NEWS
his first presidential bid, in an
apparently fraudulent election. He Cuauhtemoc
was scowling for most of the next six Cardenas
years as the government imposed an Solorzano
economic modernization campaign that ------------------
he opposed. And he was scowling in
1994, when he fell short of the presidency again and
heard grumblings about his leadership from erstwhile
supporters.
But after Cardenas became Mexico City's mayor-elect on
Sunday by a landslide vote, he stood before supporters,
journalists and the nation's television cameras and
cracked an ear-to-ear grin.
"After 10 years, Cuauhtemoc is smiling," said Homero
Aridjis, a prominent poet and environmentalist. "That's
a smile for history."
Cardenas, 63, son of the president who nationalized
Mexico's oilfields, has emerged from Sunday's triumph as
the most powerful elected opposition figure since
Francisco Madero was elected president in 1911 at the
close of a 35-year dictatorship.
If he rises to the vast challenges of his new post, he
stands a chance three years from now to become the first
president in seven decades from outside the governing
Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI.
He will be an obvious rival to President Ernesto
Zedillo, who defeated him in 1994, but the two men have
begun a cordial new relationship.
"I think I can have constructive, collaborative
relations with the president," Cardenas said in an
interview on Friday in his car, which was moving through
honking traffic in the chaotic city he will govern. "And
I'm going to do my part so we can work together to
resolve the city's problems."
Cardenas campaigned as an honest, anti-corruption
pragmatist, a stand that appealed to middle-class
Mexicans, many of whom voted against him during his two
unsuccessful presidential bids.
But he forged his opposition party in alliance with
socialists and is viewed by supporters and adversaries
alike as the heir to Mexico's revolutionary tradition.
As a result there is considerable curiosity here over
how he will govern North America's largest city when he
takes office in December.
"He's a question mark," said Federico Estevez, a
political scientist here. "Will he follow an old
populist-statist line? Will he try to pass rent control,
or create make-work programs? Will he go out into the
city's nooks and crannies and try to hand out goodies to
every little group? We just don't know."
Cardenas was asked in the interview whether he would use
his post to push his party's nationalist economic
program, which calls for a tax on short-term foreign
investment and for a revision of the North American Free
Trade Agreement.
"That's not my responsibility," he said. "I won't have
anything to do with general economic policies. What will
be up to me are decisions about the city. I'm going to
have my hands full as the mayor."
During Cardenas' campaign, he won the allegiance of
kicked-around voters in the city's back streets and
slums just by listening attentively to their complaints
about PRI corruption, fears of surging crime and
criticisms of the country's $3-a-day minimum wage.
He appears to have learned his barnstorming techniques
from his father, Gen. Lazaro Cardenas del Rio, who loved
to tour backwater regions to hear the voices of Mexico's
hard-working and humble.
Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Solorzano was born on May 1, 1934,
the year his father became president, and during his
childhood he lived the life of a revolutionary prince.
After earning a civil engineering degree at Mexico's
National Autonomous University, he studied in France and
later pursued a private engineering career for nearly
two decades. He is married to Celeste Batel, 53, and
they have three children: Lazaro, 33, Cuauhtemoc, 30,
and Camila, 14.
After one failed attempt to start a political career in
1973, he won election to the Senate three years later
and, in 1980, to a six-year term as governor of his
father's native state, Michoacan.
His opponents this year dragged out property records
from that period, accusing him of enriching his family
by transferring Michoacan lands to his mother. But
voters seemed to dismiss these as nitpicking
allegations, especially in comparison with the
major-league thievery practiced by other PRI
functionaries.
In 1987, disgruntled with the growing dominance in the
PRI of foreign-trained technocrats eager to privatize
state-owned industries, many of which his father had
nationalized, Cardenas split with the PRI. The next
year, he ran for president at the head of a coalition
that included socialists and former Communists.
During the 1988 campaign, Raul Salinas de Gortari, the
brother of the PRI's candidate that year, arranged for
the Federal Police to wiretap Cardenas' phones. Just
days before the balloting, Cardenas' top campaign aide
was murdered, in what Cardenas called a "a message of
intimidation." On election night the government halted
the vote count and later declared Carlos Salinas de
Gortari the winner but most Mexicans believe that
Cardenas received the most votes.
During Salinas' six-year presidency, Cardenas actively
campaigned against government privatization efforts and
the Nafta treaty. In reprisal, Salinas' government
targeted Cardenas and his followers with vilification in
the government-controlled news media and occasional
repression. Cardenas' party keeps a list of some 500
activists slain from 1988 to 1994.
After his third-place finish in the 1994 election,
Cardenas was for a time dogged by self-doubt, associates
said.
"He is very self-critical, and he was wondering whether
his cause was worth so much suffering," said Jesus
Gonzalez Schmall, a lawyer and friend of Cardenas.
But events this year vindicated Cardenas' judgment. In
one month, he surged more than 10 percentage points in
opinion polls, taking a dominant lead that he never
lost. His stunning rise forced Mexicans who had written
him off to thoroughly re-evaluate who he was and who he
might be.
"Cardenas' opportunity has come and gone," Adolfo
Aguilar Zinser, Cardenas' 1994 campaign spokesman, wrote
in a 1995 book. "Now he should relinquish leadership of
the democratic opposition to a new generation."
Last month, Zinser reversed course: "Cardenas has shown
overwhelmingly that I was wrong, that he has a great
ability to recover, that his leadership has not been
drained, that he has a lot left to offer."
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Other Places of Interest on the Web
* Elections '97 from the Mexican newspaper Reforma
* Documents on Mexican Politics
* Mexican Government official website
* The News, Mexico City's English-language newspaper
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