Living Icon Cuauhtemoc Cardenas Brings His Battle For Mexican Democracy To Tucson. By Tim Vanderpool MEXICO HAS BEEN called the perfect dictatorship. Reform, when it occurs at all, is muffled by a state apparatus bent on maintaining hegemony, and democracy exists only in the hollow trappings of crooked elections. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas tested that proposition in 1987, when he raised political hell among Mexico's power elite by breaking ranks with the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI. It was a startling abdication for the soft-spoken former governor of Michoacan and son of Lazaro Cardenas, a revered populist president who nationalized Mexico's foreign-owned oil companies in 1938. Cuauhtemoc Cardenas quickly moved to head the left-center Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), and in 1988 ran a powerful presidential campaign against the PRI's Carlos Salinas de Gortari. He nearly broke the chokehold PRI has held over the Mexican people through fraud and corruption since 1929. But in the end--and true to form--the PRI pulled out all stops to put their man at the helm. Two of Cardenas' top advisors were killed shortly before the election, and when his supporters flooded the streets in a post-balloting maelstrom, Cardenas urged calm, fully aware of the PRI's fierce resolve to retain control. Since that time, Cardenas has maintained an iconic status among the country's left, even in the aftermath of his most recent, unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 1994. Today he serves primarily as founder and president of the Foundation for Democracy, a Mexico City-based think-tank. In that role, Cardenas will appear today (Thursday) on the UA campus, as part of the Latin American Studies lecture series, Hacia Donde Va Mexico (Where is Mexico Going?). He's also slated for a live appearance at 10 a.m. Friday, September 20, on Access Tucson channel 62 or 54 on Tucson Cablevision. In August, Catalina Spencer, a longtime Tucson activist and founder of the human rights and interculturally oriented Southwest Film Institute, interviewed Cardenas by telephone. During their dialogue, Cardenas painted a country grappling with daunting, rock-bottom change as it wrests itself from PRI control. "Mexico is evolving to a democracy very, very slowly and with many difficulties," he said. "Many thousands of citizens all over the country are demanding a change, but there is a lot of resistance from the government, from a system that up to now hasn't imposed what we have asked." And much blame for that stalemate lands squarely in the laps of U.S. policy-makers, he said, who need "to recognize publicly what is the quality of the Mexican regime, not trying to hide things from the public." "The Mexican system is sustained in authoritarianism and centralization of positions and very vast corruption, and doesn't want to open the system to a real democracy," he said. "The American government and many people in the United States know this, but (don't) always say clearly what the Mexican system is." Foremost is creating a U.S. approach that's not based on "racism and discrimination," a xenophobic attitude he said is now perched in the front-row of America's political theater. Cardenas called that stance both mean-spirited and historically ignorant. "The United States has been a country built with the effort of many citizens from many different parts of the world," he said, "and this I think is a very important factor, a very important basis of the U.S. democracy." And the rhetorically hyped crackdown on immigration has had little effect on his countrymen's northbound desires, he said, "because they have the need to find a way to make a living, and many, especially the young people in Mexico, find that even if there are many obstacles and many difficulties, it's in the U.S. where they can find at this moment something to do. "Go to the roots of this problem. It's not only the attraction of the U.S. economy and the opportunity that many people find in the United States, but also the need to improve the living conditions, and the possibility of finding jobs in many regions in Mexico that are very much repressed and living in conditions of stagnation." Nor does he consider the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) to be a golden panacea. "I think some aspects were left aside," he said. "Social reforms should be part of NAFTA, and also all the environmental measures that should have been included since the beginning of the NAFTA negotiations. NAFTA should also...start making considerations on migrant labor. That's a reality in our countries, and to not pay attention to this problem will not solve the problem." He says egalitarian cooperation and international investment, particularly in light of the peso's excruciating plummet in 1994, are the only paths out of Mexico's economic abyss. He also credits American human rights groups for helping prompt change. In describing his country's woes, however, he treads lightly amidst cries for all-out revolution. Despite the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas--begun the day NAFTA took effect in January 1, 1994--and the August raids of government offices by the little-known Popular Revolutionary Army, Cardenas doesn't see the seeds of widespread revolt. "I think it's very different," he said. "Even if social tensions and social problems are increasing...I don't see any reason to think that most Mexican people could be thinking of an armed revolution to solve the present economic, political or social problems." Instead, he calls the Zapatista uprising in particular "a call to the conscience of the Mexicans that the problems of low economic development, marginalization, corruption, a lack of democracy, should be dealt with. This is what characterizes many regions in Mexico, and what we can expect is more problems like the uprising of the Zapatistas." Cuauhtemoc Cardenas will speak from 7:30 to 9 p.m. tonight (Thursday) in the Harvill Auditorium on the UA Campus, and tomorrow from 7 to 8:30 p.m. in the Center for the Arts, on Pima Community College's West Campus. For information, call 325-5668. A radio interview conducted by Catalina Spencer will air on KXCI-91.3 FM at 6:30 p.m. Friday, September 20.

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