Judicial Reform as Insurance Policy: Mexico in the 1990s

Domestic Political Uncertainty

As late as the end of Miguel de la Madrid's presidency (1982), guests at a PRI dinner party were discussing their political plans for the PRI's next four sexenios in power (Sous 1994, Al). The PRI had dominated Mexican politics since 1929, making Mexico's one of the longest ruling single-party governments in the world. The Mexican president was the leader of both the country and the ruling party. As a result, Mexican presidents enjoyed immense power. The PRI was built on camarillas (networks), with the president's network dominating the party during his term and dictating policy. Thus, Mexican policy during the period of PRI hegemony was both "presidential" and "of the party."

Traditionally, the PRI had used economic growth to legitimate its rule and to obtain votes. Where the PRI could not achieve victory by legitimate means, it resorted to electoral manipulation. By the mid1990s, both of these strategies were under fire. A debt crisis was undermining PRI hegemony and fundamentally altering Mexico's domestic political arena. Economic stagnation was further weakening the PRI's hold on power, and the presence of international observers to monitor elections reduced the party's ability to retain power through electoral fraud. The opposition, meanwhile, made headway in opening up the country's political playing field. The two most important opposition parties by the mid-1990s were the PAN on the right of the political spectrum and the left-leaning PRD, which began as a coalition of minor parties in the 1988 presidential election.

Mexican electoral trends from 1970 to 1994 are demonstrated in table 1, which shows the decrease in the (official) vote received by the PRI presidential candidate ewer the 25 years, from 93.6 percent in 1976 to 48.7 percent in 1994. In the June 1994 presidential election, opposition parties garnered more than 50 percent of the electorate's votes. The PAN chairman, following the party's strong showing, stated that the PAN was establishing as its goals "a majority in Congress in the 1997 elections and then the presidency in the year 2000" (Romero 1995, 12). After the 1994 results, the PRI had to take such election bravado seriously.

"In the new disorder of Mexican politics, the nation's ruling party is no longer the reassuring but undemocratic absolute," wrote the Wall Street Journal's correspondent in Mexico one month after the election that brought President Zedillo to power (Sous 1994, Al). With respect to congressional representation, the opposition made only token advances in membership until 1994, when the proportion of seats held by opposition parties began to have important consequences. In the 1994 congressional election, the PRI received a two-thirds majority in the Senate but retained only a simple majority in the Chamber of Deputies. Thus, for the first time, the PRI no longer possessed the neeessaiy two-thirds majority in the lower house required to approve changes to Mexico's constitution. These electoral changes demonstrate that by 1994, after nearly seven decades in power, the PRI could no longer unequivocally predict that it would win Mexico's presidential election in the year 2000 or continue to maintain its control of Congress.