Zedillo Leaves Behind Great Achievements--and Significant Failures

MEXICO CITY —  President Ernesto Zedillo leaves office today at the height of his popularity--esteemed by the public, praised by the opposition and hailed internationally as a democratic reformer who deserves a place in history.

Members of his own party, however, wish him a different fate.

“Death to Zedillo!” members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, cried when the president’s name was mentioned at a recent party ceremony.

Zedillo, 48, may be remembered as the president who won by losing. By encouraging free elections, he contributed to his party’s defeat after 71 years in Mexico’s powerful presidency.

Zedillo’s willingness to open a virtual one-party system to competition has won him accolades from world leaders and from President-elect Vicente Fox, the winner of July’s elections. The public is impressed too: A recent poll by the Mexico City daily Reforma showed that Zedillo has a 69% approval rating, the highest in his term.

Even so, it may be too early to define Zedillo’s place in history. His party, which still enjoys a plurality in Congress, is adrift, squabbling and angry. Many fault Zedillo for failing to build up a new PRI and other institutions to replace the authoritarian system he was ripping down.

“If there is a lot of violence, it will be Zedillo’s fault,” said political scientist Luis Rubio, head of a Mexico City think tank. “If not, Zedillo was right to let the chips fall where they may.”

Few would have imagined six years ago that the shy, politically inept economist who was thrust into the presidency would leave office achieving such dramatic results.

Zedillo not only has introduced profound democratic reforms, he also appears set to hand over a strong economy to Fox. It could be the first time in three decades that a presidential succession is not accompanied by an economic crisis.

The seeds of Zedillo’s two biggest successes may be found in the disasters that accompanied his rise to power.

Zedillo became the PRI presidential candidate in March 1994 after the party’s popular standard-bearer, Luis Donaldo Colosio, was assassinated. It was a time of political killings, kidnappings and a rebel uprising the likes of which Mexico hadn’t seen in decades.

“He [Zedillo] understood that after everything that happened in the country in 1994, if there wasn’t a real political opening, the country couldn’t move forward,” political scientist Jose Antonio Crespo said.

But political violence wasn’t the only problem buffeting Mexico. After inheriting a shaky economy, Zedillo’s team bungled a devaluation in late 1994, sending the peso plummeting and interest rates soaring to 100%. Mexico was plunged into its worst recession of modern times and had to resort to a $50-billion, U.S.-led loan package to avoid bankruptcy.

Zedillo, a Yale-educated economist, responded to the crisis with an unpopular austerity program, raising taxes and slashing spending to get the country’s finances back in shape.

The president became obsessed with not leaving a similar mess to his successor. And he appears to have succeeded.

Mexico has enjoyed 19 consecutive quarters of growth. This year, inflation is expected to be in the single digits for the first time in Zedillo’s term and national output is increasing at a rate of 7%.

But if Wall Street applauded Zedillo’s handling of the economic crisis, most citizens didn’t. Only recently have they begun to return to stores and auto dealerships as their paychecks slowly regain their lost value.

Many PRI officials aren’t impressed with Zedillo’s economic performance, either.

“In a country in which the government’s actions make people poorer, you can’t win votes,” Manuel Bartlett, a leader of the traditionalist “dinosaur” wing of the PRI, complained in a recent interview with the news weekly Proceso.

Zedillo, a member of the U.S.-educated “technocrat” wing of the PRI, was generally viewed as far more comfortable scrutinizing the budget than pressing the flesh. In part because of his limited political ambitions, he abandoned many of the imperial trappings of Mexico’s presidency, from the multimillion-dollar presidential “secret fund” to the flattering statues that leaders commissioned of themselves at the end of their terms.

The most important prerogative that Zedillo abandoned was the dedazo, or “fingering”--the right to choose his successor.

Zedillo pushed through an electoral law in 1996 that transformed Mexico’s traditionally fraud-ridden and one-sided elections. The law provided for an independent electoral board, federal campaign funds for all parties and more equitable access to the media.

Many analysts believe that Zedillo did intervene in the PRI to help his favorite candidate, career politician Francisco Labastida, become the party’s nominee in its first-ever primary. Nonetheless, Zedillo oversaw a presidential election that was unprecedented in its fairness, and he swiftly recognized Fox as the winner.

“I think history may have bifocals in this country. It depends on which part of the lens you look out of,” said Robert Pastor, a political scientist at Emory University who has written extensively on Mexico. “To the majority of people, the peaceful transfer of power which will permit modernization and democratization to occur [means] his legacy will be positive.

“Obviously, the PRI will look through a different side of the lens.”

The president rejects critics’ charges that he contributed to the PRI’s defeat by not giving it the autonomy and structure to adapt to the changing democratic times.

“Well, we lost, but this is democracy; some win, and we lost this time around. But this will bring us to a new stage,” Zedillo said in a rare television interview broadcast this week.

The president does, however, acknowledge other significant failures.

Some are the legacies of the economic crisis: Crime, for example, soared during the recession and has overwhelmed the corruption-plagued police. Mexicans are saddled with a bailout of the banking system that could top $100 billion.

On the political front, Zedillo has made little progress in solving the conflict that erupted in the southern state of Chiapas six years ago, with the short-lived uprising by left-wing Zapatista rebels. Festering tensions from that conflict exploded in December 1997 in the village of Acteal, when gunmen supported by some state police massacred 45 people, including rebel supporters.

Zedillo himself counts among his most painful moments the discovery that his anti-drug czar, Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, allegedly was working for narcotics traffickers.

Many wonder whether Zedillo, like other past Mexican presidents, could see his image tarnished after he leaves office as revelations of improprieties surface. Zedillo himself broke with the precedent of impunity for former presidents’ families by jailing Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of ex-President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, on murder and corruption charges.

Zedillo, who has an image of honesty, has said he will have to work to support his family once he leaves office. He hasn’t announced his exact plans.

In keeping with his low-key, pragmatic style, Zedillo says he never considered his place in history as he led the country through a historic period.

“I know that my name will appear in some historical register, either as good or bad. But never, in my time as a public functionary or as president, have I thought about things or made decisions based on my role in history,” he said this week in the televised interview. “Frankly, I think this is an attitude that’s tacky, or just too pretentious.”

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The Zedillo Administration

Today, outgoing President Ernesto Zedillo, 48, turns the reins of power over to Vicente Fox in Mexico.

* March 1994: Institutional Revolutionary Party presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio is assassinated in Tijuana. Zedillo, his campaign coordinator, replaces him in the contest.

* August 1994: Zedillo, a Yale-educated economist, wins the election with 50.2% of the vote, only to see the peso plummet and foreign capital flee soon after he takes office.

* December 1994: Zedillo takes office and quickly moves to deal with tension in the southern state of Chiapas by sending his interior secretary to meet for the first time with a key leader of the Zapatista National Liberation Army. Talks break down and violence flares.

* December 1994: The peso plunges after it is allowed to float freely in value against the dollar.

* February 1995: Zedillo has Raul Salinas de Gortari arrested, charging the brother of former President Carlos Salinas de Gortari with masterminding the 1994 assassination of a ruling party official.

* March 1995: The administration unveils an economic stabilization plan aimed at pulling Mexico out of its worst financial crisis in modern history.

* January 1997: Mexico announces that it is repaying the last of the U.S. emergency bailout package three years early, putting a symbolic end to its disastrous peso crisis.

* April 1997: Following the arrest on corruption charges of Gen. Jose de Jesus Gutierrez Rebollo, the nation’s anti-drug czar, the government scraps its corruption-ridden anti-drug force, purging its 1,100 agents and replacing them with a specially trained unit directly under the attorney general’s command.

* July 1997: The PRI loses its majority in the lower house of Congress for the first time and loses control of Mexico City to Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in the first direct mayoral election there.

* December 1997: Forty-five peasants in the Chiapas village of Acteal are massacred.

* 1999: Zedillo abandons the tradition of handpicking the PRI presidential nominee, setting the stage for the PRI’s first primary.

* July 2, 2000: Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party wins the presidential election.

* July 3, 2000: In announcing Fox’s victory and the end of the PRI’s 71-year presidential reign, Zedillo tells the nation: “Today we have proved that our democracy is mature.”

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Sources: The Los Angeles Times, Associated Press, Institutional Revolutionary Party and Diccionario Biografico del Gobierno Mexicano