1968 - Mark Kurlansky [189]
“Let’s demand to know who is responsible.” 1968 Mexican student silk-screen poster depicting President Díaz Ordaz as a monkey.
(Amigos de la Unidad de Postgrado de la Escuela de Diseño A.C.)
Disruption would be even worse than politicization. Protesters had closed the annual Venice Biennale art show and the Cannes Film Festival, attacked the Frankfurt Book Fair, and even disrupted the Miss America pageant. Even the winner of the Kentucky Derby was disqualified for drug use. And of course there was the Chicago convention. Nothing like that was to happen in Mexico.
Díaz Ordaz, as president of Mexico, the appointed leader of the PRI, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, was heir to the revolution and guardian of the stated contradiction in the ruling party’s carefully worded name. In 1910 Mexico had been a labyrinth of political chaos and social injustice. Centuries of inept colonial rule followed by corrupt dictatorships and foreign occupations then culminated in thirty years of one-man rule. It was a familiar pattern. After years of chaos, the dictator Porfirio Díaz offered stability. But in 1910 he was eighty years old and had arranged for no successor or any institutions to outlast him. There were no political parties, and he represented no ideology. Mexico was divided by different cultures, ethnic groups, and social classes, all with dramatically different needs and demands. When the country erupted into what was called the Mexican revolution that year, it was an endless series of highly destructive civil wars, most of them fought on a regional basis. There were many leaders and many armies. But this was the Mexico Hernán Cortés had found in the early sixteenth century. The Aztecs had ruled by managing a coalition of leaders from different groups. Cortés had defeated the Aztecs by dividing his coalition, gaining the loyalty of some of the leaders. That was how politics was played in Mexico.
Francisco Madero, a bourgeois from the north, led one faction. He attracted upper-class, middle-class, and working-class Mexicans of moderate politics. Also in the north were tough, mounted guerrilla fighters—bandits who took up the cause of the revolution, in some cases as paid mercenaries. The most brilliant of these was Pancho Villa. Villa was the only revolutionary leader to get good American press. Even Madero was criticized bitterly for suggesting a minuscule tax on the Mexican oil that was controlled and imported to the United States by American oil companies. But Pancho Villa had little of the “anti-Americanism” of which Washington suspected all the others. He did personally rape hundreds of women and murder according to whim, and he was a racist who killed Chinese people whenever he found them working in mining camps. His lieutenants were even more murderous and sadistic, devising hideous tortures. But General Villa was not anti-American. The Americans supplied his weapons and ammunition. Ten thousand men rode with Villa, mostly in the northern state of Chihuahua. They robbed and raided, did as they wanted, and once even won a spectacular military victory for the revolution at Zacatecas.
In the central area, in Morelos, was Emiliano Zapata, who did not fit in with any of the others, aside from the fact that they were all mestizo—of mixed European and indigenous blood. Zapata with his big, sad eyes was leading a peasant revolt in the central highlands. His followers were agrarian Mexicans, either mestizo or from indigenous non-Spanish-speaking tribes, of which there are still many in Mexico, fighting for land. His goal was to have the arable land of Mexico taken away from wealthy landowners and distributed equally among the peasants. He and his followers intended to go on fighting regardless of what the others did, until the farmers got their land.
Fighting continued after Madero became president in 1911, and he was helpless to stop it.