Days Of Trauma and Fear

By Bruce W. Nelan

The assassin stood unnoticed in the crowd. He listened as the man he was stalking pledged to help poor people, like the 3,000 gathered in a ramshackle neighborhood near Tijuana's airport. After a chorus of vivas, the candidate stepped down from the platform and, in his populist campaign style, waded into the crush to shake hands. The assassin edged up behind him, thrust a .38-cal. pistol at his head and fired. The bullet smashed through the candidate's skull, shattering his brain. Then the gunman leaned over and fired another bullet into the fallen man's stomach.

The first shot not only killed Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ruling party's handpicked successor to Mexican President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, but it also crippled the confidence of a country striving to enter the select company of First World nations. The murder was the latest blow in a year that has . brought violent rebellion, economic uncertainty and political disruption to a land whose citizens believed they had achieved peace and stability. Mexicans grieved not just for Colosio but for themselves and a future they now viewed with trepidation. In the weeks ahead, they will discover whether their institutions and maturity are sufficient to handle the shock.

In the turmoil after the shooting, the crowd pounced on the assassin, screaming "Kill him!" and beat the man fiercely before plainclothes police hauled him away. The following morning investigators announced that the killer was Mario Aburto Martinez, 23, a poor factory mechanic who lived alone and had no obvious political links. They said he had confessed to the shooting but refused to reveal his motive.

Rumors blamed everyone: Colosio's party rivals had planned the killing, or Tijuana's notorious drug gangs did it. No one seemed to know whether there was a conspiracy or if the assassin was another of the solitary, deranged killers who disfigure history. Mexicans reacted not only with horror and outrage but also with something close to fear. No matter what the motive, the public murder of a leading politician inflicted a national trauma, a sense of disorientation that came with the recognition that things were not what they so comfortingly seemed to be.

The country had been priding itself on its stability and relative prosperity, especially since President Salinas pushed through his six-year program of free-market economic reforms and Mexico joined the U.S. and Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Last week he announced that Mexico had become the first Latin American nation to join the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development, the association of the world's leading industrial democracies.

Now an assassin's bullets reminded Mexicans again of their country's most chronic problems. For the first time in more than 20 years, guerrillas reappeared as a political force last January when an indigenous peasant movement rose up and seized several towns in the southern state of Chiapas, leaving at least 145 dead. On Friday those rebels, who call themselves the Zapatista National Liberation Army, suspended their deliberations on a peace accord with the government, citing the country's uncertainties. Taking impetus from the revolt, discontented groups rose across the country, staging sit-ins and land grabs. Then two weeks ago, Alfredo Harp Helu, president of Mexico's largest bank, was kidnapped in Mexico City.

The last murder of a national leader occurred in 1928 when President-elect Alvaro Obregon was shot. Colosio's assassination jolts Mexicans with the prospect that violence may be subverting the modern society they thought they were building. It also puts the political focus between now and the Aug. 21 presidential election on two main issues: What will be done to ease the poverty that still afflicts so many Mexicans, and how much electoral reform will the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party, or P.R.I., accept without endangering its 65-year grip on the presidency -- which opponents regularly charge has been maintained through blatant vote fraud.

Mexican Presidents cannot serve more than one term, but traditionally they have secretly selected the party's nominee and, in the process, their successor. Salinas picked Colosio, who then headed the government's social development secretariat last November, and most experts considered his election close to a sure thing. Now, only five months before the balloting, the P.R.I. has to find another candidate quickly, not only to resume campaigning but also to tamp down the tide of anxiety and insecurity. Uncharacteristically cooperative, the eight candidates suspended their campaigns.

Salinas also halted trading on the Mexican stock exchange and closed banks for a day, hoping to restore investors' confidence. Washington offered a $6 billion line of credit to support the peso. "Fundamentally," Bill Clinton said, "I think they are in sound shape." When Mexico City's market reopened Friday, the stock index -- which has been volatile all year -- initially plunged 100 points but recovered to a loss of less than 1%. "We'll see several weeks of turbulence," predicts Ernesto Cervera, an analyst at a Mexico City consulting firm. Some experts say the market may be unsettled until the August election makes it clear who will be running the country and whether free-market policies continue.

As Mexico's 90 million citizens know but sometimes try to forget, their country is not a seamless unity but a patchwork of dissimilar people and unequal progress. Roughly the top half of the country has joined the 21st century; the rest is mired in unyielding poverty. Differences among the pieces of the mosaic have increased, and the gap between rich and poor has widened during the country's economic advance. Salinas began his six-year term in & office in 1988 by selling off hundreds of bloated state-owned companies and deregulating private industry; he tightened credit to bring inflation down from 50% annually to 8% and cut public spending to produce a budget surplus. Though he also created a $2.5 billion-a-year public works program called Solidarity to cushion the effects of fiscal stringency, the poorest Mexicans' share of the national income declined in real terms from 5% in 1984 to 4.3% in 1992.

But it was boom times for those perched on the upper rungs of the economic ladder. Mexico's claim to First World status begins at its dramatic glass stock-market building towering over the capital's main artery, Paseo de la Reforma. Young brokers in horn-rimmed glasses and imported ties traded the market into a 48% gain last year, even as the national economy slid into recession. In the three months after NAFTA passed in the U.S. Congress last year, more than $7 billion in new money flowed into Mexico, most of it from the U.S.

Big industries are modernizing swiftly, and the Center of Research for Development, a Mexico City think tank, estimates that 40% of the country's industrial production now meets world standards. Even some smaller companies find they can compete. "I have 22 employees now, and a month ago I had only 12," says Jorge Hernandez Prieto, whose company is rushing to fill an order for scented candles from the Target store chain in the U.S.

A spending surge has swept through the middle class. Signs of the new consumer society are everywhere. Cruising the shopping malls has become a weekend institution, and Televisa, the Spanish-language entertainment conglomerate, in cooperation with the U.S.-owned QVC, broadcasts a home- shopping channel produced in Tijuana. People who never before had a car or a credit card now have both. The working-class suburb of Iztapalapa boasts a McDonald's and a Wal-Mart superstore, while the Mexico City slum Ciudad Nezahualcoyotl houses enough VCRS to support a branch of Blockbuster Video.

Along the 2,200 miles of the winding Rio Grande and land border with the U.S. the story is also one of sordid contrasts, but the people who live there and the thousands moving in are optimistic. "This is the best of two worlds," says Fadia Barraza, a university freshman in Juarez. "Life gets steadily better." At the maquilas, the sprawling assembly plants that produce goods for export to the U.S., parking lots filled with employees' cars suggest she is right.

^ Mexico's gross domestic product has grown from $2,525 per capita in 1989 to $4,324 last year, but the encouraging statistics are not what they seem. "Behind those numbers," development expert Alberto Diaz Cayeros wrote recently, "is hidden the sad reality -- which Chiapas has shown in its most extreme expression -- that Mexico is one of the most unequal countries in the world."

Agustin Lopez Santiz understands that all too well. He lives in the southern state of Chiapas, at the opposite end of the country from the shantytown where Colosio was shot. Santiz, 66, sits barefoot in the dust of Tuxaquilja, a village of 600 people, picking corn off a cob to feed his chickens. The earth is dry, rocky, infertile. Roads are ruts, and there are few public services. Looking down at the dirt, he says in a mixture of Spanish and Tzeltal, the local Indian tongue, "This is where we are from. We cannot leave."

His grown children, three of whom live with their wives and children in the farmer's small wooden house, also speak poor Spanish, which eliminates their chances of finding work outside subsistence farming. "There are no schools here," says a neighbor, Diego Mendez. "If we do not speak Spanish, we are lost." Lopez and Mendez are both skeptical about the government's promises to bring running water and electricity to communities like theirs.

Even if the government has the will, the local officials who control the town halls also control the flow of government money and, Mendez claims, use it to bolster their friends and freeze out villages that do not support them. It is an accusation heard throughout Mexico: public works money goes to cronies of the bosses.

The local mayor, Emilio Gomez, denies the charges of favoritism and says his opponents support the state's Indian rebels, the Zapatistas. "When the guerrillas came here," he says, "these people protected them. They only attack me because they want to take power and share it with the Zapatistas." Priests in the area say much of what the peasants claim is true. "The government gives the municipality all the repressive power of the state," says Father Antonio Garnica Lopez. But, he wonders, if an opposition group were to take power, would it behave very differently? "The wounds are very deep, and at any moment the desire for revenge can burst out like a volcano."

On New Year's Day, when the Zapatista forces, some 2,000 lightly armed Indian and peasant guerrillas, occupied small towns and one city in the Chiapas highlands, the government's response was to mobilize the army to crush them. But as the images of bombings and bloodied civilians flickered across the world's television screens, Salinas changed course. He declared a cease- fire and sent a peace negotiator to talk things over with the guerrillas.

The man Salinas chose as his negotiator was Manuel Camacho Solis, a former mayor of Mexico City who had resigned when he lost out to Colosio in the competition for Salinas' blessing as the presidential nominee. As a consolation, Salinas named Camacho Foreign Minister, then tapped him to represent the government in the peace talks. In that role he stole the limelight from Colosio, and in late February he came up with tentative agreements on improved medical care, housing and other services for impoverished communities, along with proposed reforms intended to make elections harder to rig.

Chiapas, says a diplomat in the capital, "has forced the government to be more responsive and has had a profound effect on the 1994 electoral year." Salinas introduced a package of reforms that would reduce government control of election funding and press coverage and provide for foreign observers. Opposition critics argue that the measures, passed by the legislature last Thursday, still do not curb P.R.I. influence at the local level.

Camacho infuriated much of the P.R.I. by using his position in the peacemaking spotlight to hint that he might make an independent run for the presidency. Uncertainty over his spoiler potential had ruffled the stock market and shaken the peso. Only last Tuesday, the day before Colosio was murdered, did the ex-mayor finally announce he would stick to the peace talks rather than run. But he had already made life difficult for Colosio by focusing attention on the government's failure to provide basic services for the poorest parts of the country and putting pressure on the candidate to promise more.

Camacho repeated what he had said on Tuesday, that he had no intention of seeking the presidency. With Salinas' support, he could still get the nomination, but speculation now centers on Ernesto Zedillo, the murdered candidate's campaign manager, and Fernando Ortiz Arana, the president of P.R.I. There are other potential candidates among the Cabinet ministers, but party rules say the nominee must not have held senior government positions in the six months before the election -- and voting is now closer than that.

Ironically, Colosio's murder may have given the ruling party a boost. His candidacy had not caught fire, and his image suffered by comparison with Camacho's. Now the fallen Colosio is being elevated to martyrdom, with supporters in his home state calling his death "Sonora's version of the John F. Kennedy assassination." Mourners gathered in the giant square in front of party headquarters in Mexico City, carrying banners with Colosio's name. "Justice! Justice!" they cried. Now the party may reap a sympathy vote. "Yesterday," declared Reforma columnist Raymundo Riva Palacio the day after the assassination, "the P.R.I. won the election."

More than sympathy, of course, the party symbolizes stability to an unsettled society. "The P.R.I. will be stronger," says Delal Baer, a specialist on Mexico at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. "In times of trouble, people seek refuge in what they know. They will turn to the P.R.I., with all its warts and flaws."

Baer also believes that Mexicans fear the violence they see around them and will work hard to submerge it. "They are afraid of themselves," she says, "so they are going to control themselves." If the country is to retain the confidence of overseas investors -- mainly American -- who provide the capital essential for growth, it must demonstrate its ability to maintain stability. L. Kip Smith, president of the American Chamber of Commerce of Mexico, says that will happen because of "the foundation that has been built, the spirit of the people, the desire for progress." More concretely, David West, a U.S. consultant, says, "The market is still here. The labor pool is still here."

Investors and other businessmen naturally want to see the P.R.I. candidate, whoever it is, win on Aug. 21. That will mean the ratification and continuation of Salinas' free-market policies. But the real test of Mexico's political maturity may be how free and honest the election turns out to be -- how few the charges of vote rigging are -- no matter who wins. That will measure how deeply democratic institutions have taken root.

With reporting by Laura Lopez, Elisabeth Malkin, Kieran Murray/Mexico City and Richard Woodbury/Magdalena de Kino