Tuesday, May 17, 2011

RANDOM READINGS: When Conviction Mattered

“Sobre mis pasos”
By Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas
(Aguilar 2010) 614 pages

REVIEWED BY KELLY ARTHUR GARRETT
Mexico Weekly

Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas begins his memoir just as we’d expect him to — with the account of an admired public servant who breaks with the ruling party to wage his own campaign for the presidency. His goals: a democratic opening and a reversal of the incumbent administration’s rightward drift from revolutionary ideals. The election results released by the official party were widely doubted, but the ruling PRI quickly quashed the ensuing protests and continued its grip on power under the unspectacular Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958).

The maverick candidate was not named Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. The author’s historic first run for the presidency would come 36 years later. It was Miguel Henríquez, a political friend of Cuauhtémoc’s father, the revered Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas, who served as president from 1934 to 1940. Cuauhtémoc, a teenage engineering student at the time, had sympathy for the Henríquez candidacy, but did not participate in the campaign. (His political activism would take off in 1954 when, like most of Latin America, he was horrified at Eisenhower’s gutting of the Good Neighbor Policy via a military coup in Guatemala.)

Still, his brief synopsis of the 1952 election sets the tone for the 600-page guided tour of modern Mexican political history that follows. It locates the author’s 1988 campaign in a broader historical context; his may have been the most consequential challenge to PRI authoritarianism, but it wasn’t the first. More important, in my view, is how the episode serves to introduce the implacable, almost astonishing, personal integrity of Cárdenas père and fils.

Lázaro Cárdenas had vowed to stay uninvolved in electoral politics once out of office, a precedent mostly honored by his successors until recently. Henríquez, misreading the former president’s character, assumed the policy was flexible. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas writes, “I think that General Henríquez, who before becoming a candidate and then throughout the campaign had been meeting on different occasions with my father — who had reiterated to him his unalterable decision not to participate in matters of electoral politics — firmly believed that in the end, if things weren’t going well for him, my father would intervene and fix things in his favor.” The elder Cárdenas did no such thing, and the relationship between the two generals cooled.

From cover to cover, Cuauhtémoc is consistently, sometimes frustratingly, unsentimental in matters political and personal. But his deep regard for his father is omnipresent, and it’s clear that he inherited more from him than a last name that guaranteed he would be taken seriously as a political player. Lázaro was Cuauhtémoc’s political inspiration, instilling a steel-willed commitment to citizen participation, social equality and an activist government that intervenes on behalf of the marginalized — in short, the outlook of the left. He was also his moral model, and the bequeathed integrity, respect for the law and insistence on dignified behavior present themselves on virtually every page of “Sobre mis pasos” like margin notes.

Of course, if you want to come off as ethically beyond reproach, it helps to write your own biography, with only you deciding, a la Bob Seger, what to leave in and what to leave out. But Cárdenas has earned his moral credentials over more than half a century, often under the most trying of circumstances when most mortals might consider just going with whatever works. Even his political adversaries don’t question his integrity, especially now that they assume he can no longer threaten them politically. (Cárdenas turned 77 on May 1, and in truth he neither looks, talks or acts too old for anything.)

His steadfast conviction informs many of the countless, chronologically compiled episodes that serve as the book’s infrastructure. One of my favorites, for its cinematic imagery, is a ceremony organized in 1971 by President Echeverría at the Monument to the Revolution to mark the first anniversary of the death of Gen. Cárdenas, and, simultaneously, the 26th anniversary of the death of Gen. Plutarco Elías Calles. The latter, who served as president (1924-1928) and founded the National Revolutionary Party (the future PRI), had passed away on the same date 25 years earlier.

The dual memorial was awkward for the Cárdenas family. In the 1930s, the two generals had become the bitterest of political enemies after Calles, who had developed an alarming fascination with fascist ideology, attempted to continue his strongman rule from behind the throne after President Cárdenas, his former protégé, took office. Though the rift was political and not personal, Calles’ daughter approached Cuauhtémoc before the ceremony, concerned that whoever spoke for the Cárdenas “side” might speak ill of her father. She needn’t have worried; the Cárdenas sense of decorum would never have permitted such a thing.

What he did do, however, was use his allotted time at the ceremony to present a political document that his father had prepared for the 60th anniversary of the Revolution the year before, but had not lived to deliver. Cuauhtémoc doesn’t tell us how long it took to read it aloud, but an abridged version of it fills 16 pages in an appendix of the book.

Now you and I may suspect that subjecting the gathering to a lengthy oral recitation of a political document was an unfriendly act, if not intentional cruelty, but that’s the difference between us and Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas. To him it was a fitting tribute to his father and his nation.

The high drama that day came when the government speaker, as feared, announced that with the passing of the two former presidents — on the same date, no less — their differences had been erased from history. This got President Echeverría to his feet, which meant that everyone else present also rose to applaud. But the Cárdenas contingent refused to join what was essentially an attempt to use a fluke of the calendar to celebrate away the issue of authoritarianism in Mexico. So we’re left with the image of the 36-year-old Cárdenas, along with his sister and his widowed mother, seated on the dais, somber-faced, while the president, his Cabinet members, and other high officials are standing around them, applauding. “I could feel the tension,” Cárdenas writes, “as though all or at least most eyes were fixed on those of us who remained seated.”

I describe this event at some length because it’s typical of what’s most valuable about “Sobre mis pasos” — the abundance of episodes that serve to reveal the character and motivation of a remarkable public figure. Yes, the book does live up to its difficult-to-translate title, following the footsteps of the author through his political career that included youthful activism, a brief stint as a federal senator, a position in the López Portillo administration, the governorship of Michoacán, the doomed but earthshaking presidential bid of 1988, the founding of the PRD, two more runs for the presidency in 1994 and 2000, and service as the Federal District’s first elected head of government.

And yes, there’s backstage insight and there’s detail. I promise you’ll learn more about the planning and execution of public engineering projects than you ever thought you would, or ever wanted to. The book moves forward in unembellished, matter-of-fact Spanish that highlights the man’s conviction but not his passion. Cárdenas is more comfortable telling us what he thinks than how he feels. If Mr. Spock were to write his memories of life aboard the Enterprise, it might read something like “Sobre mis pasos.”

But in the end, it’s Cardenas’ extraordinary conviction that the reader remembers. Shortly after Election Day 1988, with the Cárdenas camp and most of the nation convinced the election had been stolen from him, Cárdenas was called to a meeting with the PRI’s Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who would be sworn in as president later that year. “What do you want?” asked Salinas, who was holding the cards. “What I want,” Cárdenas replied, “is for this election to be cleaned up.” Assuming perhaps that Cárdenas was missing what the conversation was about, Salinas kept giving him chances to name his terms, repeatedly asking him what he wanted. Each time he got the same answer: Clean up this election.

Cárdenas understood only too well what the conversation was really about.

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