[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 81 (Tuesday, May 16, 1995)]
[Senate]
[Pages S6745-S6748]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]


                       MEXICO IS A LENINIST STATE

  Mr. MOYNIHAN. Mr. President, in late January I came to the floor to 
speak of our relations with Mexico in the context of the new North 
American Free-Trade Agreement. My remarks appeared in the Record under 
the heading ``Free Trade With an Unfree Society.'' I returned to a 
theme which I had stated on a number of occasions since NAFTA was first 
proposed during the administration of President Bush. I had been an 
enthusiastic supporter of the free-trade agreement with Canada, but was 
troubled by the thought of a similar arrangement with Mexico, and for 
the most elemental reason. I argued that the political and legal 
arrangements of the United States and Canada being essentially 
symmetrical, the vast involvement in one another's affairs, the partial 
ceding of sovereignty implicit in such an agreement would 
provide quite manageable. There would be no political loss 
and considerable economic gain. Optimality, as an economist might say. 
By contrast, I feared that our political and legal institutions were 
anything but symmetrical with those of Mexico. Mexico, I said, was a 
Leninist state.
  I had hoped for some response to this statement from the executive 
branch, but there was little. Indeed, apart from a gracious note from 
our distinguished Treasury Secretary, Robert E. Rubin, there was none. 
In any event, we were then, in January, caught up in an intense effort 
to save Mexico from defaulting on its foreign debt. This was the first 
of what I fear will be a sequence of such crises, and it seemed 
gratuitous to press the argument in that atmosphere. But now the first 
crisis has eased, thanks in large measure to what Alexander Hamilton, 
our first Secretary of the Treasury, termed ``energy in the 
executive,'' now embodied in his successor, Secretary Rubin. And so I 
would take this quiet morning to return to the subject.
  I would begin by calling attention to an essay by William Pfaff, 
which appeared in the International Herald Tribune on March 16. Mr. 
Pfaff, who writes from Paris, is a foreign policy analyst of unexampled 
range, depth, and experience. He would be such if he lived in Utica, 
but living abroad gives him a singular perspective on American affairs. 
His essay begins with this simple, chilling analogy.

       The commitment the United States now has made to Mexico 
     bears a distinct resemblance to the commitment it made to 
     Vietnam during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when the 
     troubles in that country were only beginning.
       That was war and this is peace. Nonetheless now, as then, 
     with as little reflection and a simplistic ideology, 
     Washington has taken on responsibility for the fortunes of 
     another nation that it scarcely knows and fails to 
     understand.
       In Mexico this American assumption of responsibility is 
     primarily economic, but Mexico's economic plight is 
     inseparable from the political crisis afflicting the eleven-
     decade-long dictatorship in Mexico of the PRI, or 
     Institutional Revolutionary Party, historically the vehicle 
     of Mexican nationalism--and of resistance to American 
     exploitation of Mexican oil resources.
       Washington has demanded, and last Friday was given, 
     Mexico's promise of a program of economic austerity with 
     distressing implications for millions of Mexicans, who only 
     weeks ago were being told that their country's membership in 
     NAFTA assured rising prosperity for them and their country. 
     One aspect of the new arrangement is that a major part of 
     Mexico's future oil revenues is pledged against the new 
     American and international loan guarantees.
       Even without the debt crisis a national upheaval is under 
     way in Mexico which not even the Mexicans can be sure they 
     can solve. Washington's commitment to a solution is an 
     engagement with the uncontrollable and unforeseeable.

  In my January statement I was unapologetic about discussing 
government in the abstract. I allowed as how Speaker Gingrich, by 
encouraging us to read or re-read The Federalist, was directing us to 
just such abstractions, which very much engaged the Founders of the 
Nation. They ransacked history for different ideal types of government 
for lessons to be learned and contrasts to be made with the new 
American Republic which they had set about constructing. Here, then, is 
a definition of Leninism from the ``Harper Dictionary of Modern 
Thought.'' The capitalized words are employed in the original for 
purposes of cross reference:

       Leninism. The term refers to the version of MARXIST thought 
     which accepts the validity of the major theoretical 
     contributions made by Lenin to revolutionary Marxism. These 
     contributions fall into two main groups. Central to the first 
     was the conception of the revolutionary party as the vanguard 
     of the PROLETARIAT. The workers, if left to their own 
     devices, would concentrate on purely economic issues and not 
     attain full political CLASS consciousness, and therefore the 
     revolutionary seizure of power needed the leadership of 
     committed Marxist ACTIVISTS to provide the appropriate 
     theoretical and tactical guidelines. The role of the party 
     was thus to be a ``vanguard'' in the revolutionary struggle 
     which would culminate in the overthrow of the CAPITALIST 
     STATE and the establishment of a DICTATORSHIP OF THE 
     PROLETARIAT under the HEGEMONY of the party.
       The second major theoretical contribution made by Lenin was 
     to draw the political consequences from an analysis of 
     CAPITALISM as both international and imperialist. The 
     phenomenon of IMPERIALISM divided the world between advanced 
     industrial nations and the colonies they were exploiting. 
     This situation was inherently unstable and led to war between 
     capitalist nations thus creating favorable conditions for 
     REVOLUTION. For Lenin, the ``weakest link'' in the capitalist 
     chain was to be found in UNDERDEVELOPED regions of the world 
     economy such as Russia where the indigenous BOURGEOISIE was 
     comparatively weak, but where there had been enough 
     INDUSTRIALIZATION to create a class-conscious proletariat. 
     The idea of world-wide SOCIALIST revolution beginning in 
     relatively backward countries led to the inclusion of the 
     peasantry as important 
     [[Page S6746]] revolutionary actors affording essential 
     support to the proletariat in establishing a socialist order. 
     Such socialist revolutions in underdeveloped countries would 
     exacerbate the contradictions inherent in advanced capitalist 
     economies and thus lead to the advent of socialism on a world 
     scale.
       As compared with the ideas of Marx and Engels, Leninism 
     gives more emphasis to the leading role of the party, to 
     backward or semi-colonial countries as the initial site of 
     revolution, and to the peasantry as potential revolutionary 
     agents. With the success of the BOLSHEVIK revolution in 1917, 
     Leninism became the dominant version of Marxism and the 
     official IDEOLOGY of the Soviet Union. Lenin's analysis of 
     imperialism and his idea of the ``weakest link'' also made 
     his version of Marxism appealing to emerging ELITES in the 
     THIRD WORLD. In the West, however, while Leninist principles 
     are maintained by the small Trotskyist parties, many 
     adherents of eurocommunism have begun to ask how far Leninist 
     ideas reflected specifically Russian circumstances and should 
     therefore be modified to fit the conditions of advanced 
     capitalist societies.

  Clearly, Leninst doctrine and Soviet example had considerable appeal 
to the revolutionary leaders and intellectuals who came to power in 
Mexico in the 1920's. It happens this was a time of artistic energy, 
perhaps especially in mural paintings of Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente 
Orozco, and David Alfonso Siquieros. To this day one can see on the 
walls of the Government buildings of Mexico City vast scenes of 
revolutionary tumult. Amid a sea of yellow sombreros and silver 
machetes there is sure to be found an incongruously bearded Lenin 
turned out in a starched collar and black necktie. That, and of course, 
swarms of red flags.
  If the Soviet experiment attracted sympathizers, even adherents, in 
the United States in those years, I would hazard that public opinion 
would have shown even greater sympathy for the goings-on in Mexico. A 
wonderful encounter came at the time of the construction of Rockefeller 
Center in New York City in the early years of the Great Depression. 
Diego Rivera was commissioned to paint a fresco for the lobby of the 
central RCA building, as it then was. Word got out that it would 
include not only red flags, but Lenin himself. Nelson A. Rockefeller, 
who was managing the enterprise, demurred. Much hullabaloo followed, 
leading in turn to the classic poem by E.B. White of the New Yorker, 
``I Paint What I See,'' describing an imagined encounter between the 
youthful scion of great wealth and the revolutionary artist. Here are 
passages.

     ``Whose is that head that I see on my wall?''
     Said John D.'s grandson Nelson.
     ``Is it anyone's head whom we know, at all?
     ``A Rensselaer, or a Saltonstall?
     ``Is it Franklin D.? Is it Mordaunt Hall?
     ``Or is it the head of a Russian?''

                           *   *   *   *   *

     ``For twenty-one thousand conservative bucks
     ``You painted a radical. I say shucks,

                           *   *   *   *   *

     ``For this, as you know, is a public hall
     ``And the people want doves, or a tree in fall,
     ``And though your art I dislike to hamper,
     ``I owe a little to God and Gramper,
     ``And after all,
     ``It's my wall. . .''

     ``We'll see if it is,'' said Rivera.

  As I noted in January, it was no accident that when Leon Trotsky fled 
the Soviet Union, having lost out to Stalin in the struggle to succeed 
Lenin, he did not settle in Paris, where failed revolutionaries were 
supposed to go. He went to Mexico City, where he set up in considerable 
style, surrounded often as not by American acolytes.
  Two things are to be said about the coming to power of the 
Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1929. First--the great English 
historian Sir John Plumb has made this point--it was a blessing for the 
Mexican people who for decades had lived through indescribably bloody 
and agonizing turmoil. Of a sudden, stability was achieved. Sir John 
makes the point that revolutions are easy; it is the onset of stability 
that is rare in human experience. The second point is that nothing like 
the Leninist terror followed the coming to power of the PRI. Diplomatic 
relations with the Papacy--severed since 1867 when Benito Juarez 
implemented strict controls of church power--became particularly 
hostile in 1926 during the rule of Plutarco Elias Calles, who would 
later organize the PRI. His strict enforcement of the anticlerical 
provisions of the Constitution sparked the Cristero rebellion which 
lasted 3 years. The Mexican Government and the church reached a modus 
vivendi in
 1929 and after that Catholicism, the religion of the people, was not 
generally speaking suppressed. But do not fail to take note of Graham 
Greene's ``The Power and The Glory.''

  Even so, one party control, and the corruption that so quickly 
follows, settled on the Republic of Mexico. The forthcoming 1994-95 
edition of ``Freedom in the World,'' the authoritative annual survey 
published by Freedom House, states:

       Since its founding in 1929, the PRI has dominated the state 
     through a top-down corporatist structure that is 
     authoritarian in nature and held together through co-
     operation, patronage, corruption and, when all else fails, 
     repression. The formal business of government takes place 
     secretly and with little legal foundation.

  I correct Leninist practice, the party controlled not only the State, 
but all the private institutions that might seem to be arrayed against 
the State, most importantly the trade unions. The Department of State 
reports in the Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 1994:

       The largest trade union central is the Confederation of 
     Mexican Workers (CTM), organizationally part of the ruling 
     PRI. CTM's major rival centrals and nearly all the 34 smaller 
     confederations, federations, and unions in the Labor Congress 
     (CT) are also allied with the ruling PRI.

  Of late, however, the Leninist state in Mexico appears to have 
entered a time of troubles, possibly of disintegration. As William 
Pfaff, writes, ``a national upheaval is underway.'' Let us turn to Tim 
Golden's account of the May Day celebrations in Mexico City this year.

         Defiant Workers in Mexico Protest Government Policies.


               may day demonstration in capital's center

       Defying the pro-Government union leaders who have dominated 
     Mexican labor since the 1930's, independent unions and 
     leftist political groups turned the celebration of Labor Day 
     today into an outpouring of anger at the economic policies of 
     President Ernesto Zedillo.
       The limited political strength of the independent labor 
     movement was evident in the colonial central square of this 
     capital, where the biggest of more than a dozen protests 
     around the country drew only about one-fifth of the 350,000 
     demonstrators that organizers had predicted. But for the 
     first time in decades, May Day's main political act was 
     something other than a loyal tribute to the Government and 
     its long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary party.
       Leaders of the pro-Government unions had canceled their 
     traditional parade through the square weeks ago, apparently 
     out of fear that they would be unable to control the critics 
     in their ranks.

  Trade union subservience to the PRI has been a settled fact for half 
a century. As I noted in January, this hardly escaped the notice of the 
American labor movement. Perhaps more recently the party seems to have 
begun parceling out hugely profitable state enterprises or resources to 
favored business leaders, who have evidently become fabulously wealthy. 
A dacha outside Moscow is one thing; $25 million a plate fundraising 
dinners in the Presidential palace are surely another.
  Such enormities, such contrasts can never be stable, and in Mexico 
the system is obviously under strain, as Pfaff observes.
  On March 23, 1994, Luis Donaldo Colosio, the Presidential candidate 
of the PRI, was assassinated in Tijuana. One Mario Aburto Martinez was 
arrested at the scene, convicted, and sentenced to 45 years in prison. 
The
 administration of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who had chosen Colosio as 
his successor, maintained that the assassination was the work of this 
lone gunman. However, on February 25, 1995, the new Mexican Attorney 
General Antonio Lozano Gracia announced the arrest of a second 
suspected gunman, Othon Cortes Vazquez, a PRI security guard.

  A second political assassination occurred on September 28, 1994, when 
Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu, the Secretary-General of the PRI was 
killed in Mexico City. On February 28, 1995, Attorney General Lozano 
Gracia announced the arrest of Raul Salinas de Gortari, the brother of 
former President Salinas, in connection with Ruiz Massieu's 
assassination. The investigation into the Ruiz Massieu assassination 
had previously been carried out by the victim's brother, Mario, who was 
soon after arrested in the Newark, NJ airport with $46,000 in 
undeclared cash. The Mexican Attorney General has since located $10 
million in United States bank accounts linked to Mario 
 Ruiz [[Page S6747]] Massieu which he apparently obtained while in 
charge of Mexico's counternarcotics program.
  Add a further twist to the tale. Former President Salinas whom the 
United States supported as our candidate to be the first president of 
the World Trade Organization until this story was revealed, is now 
living in the United States in virtual exile.
  And now another political murder would seem to have occurred. On May 
10 the former Jalisco State Attorney General, Leobardo Larios, who 
previously had been responsible for investigating the 1993 killing of 
Cardinal Juan Jesus Posadas Ocampo, was assassinated in Guadalajara. At 
the time of Cardinal Posadas Ocampo's assassination, the first official 
explanation of the killing was that the Cardinal had been accidentally 
killed in the cross-fire between two rival drug cartels. However when 
the autopsy later revealed that the Cardinal had been shot 14 times at 
close range, Leobardo Larios postulated that the Cardinal had been 
mistaken for the leader of a local drug ring, despite the fact that the 
Cardinal was wearing his clerical garb.
  Revelations such as these are familiar. Power in Mexico has resided 
within the PRI and on occasion arguments within the party settled by 
murder. These features of Leninist totalitarianism appeared early in 
the Soviet state. In ``Political Succession in the USSR'' (1965), Myron 
Rush explains,

       [W]hile Lenin still ruled, he exercised his power through 
     both the Party and the government. In the Party, formally, he 
     had no special position but was simply a member of the 
     Politburo along with six others; he headed the government, 
     however, as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars. 
     He governed through the state apparatus directly, through the 
     Party apparatus indirectly. * * * The Party, as the 
     embodiment of the Revolutionary will, decided overall policy.

After Lenin's death, no one person was in a position to consolidate 
power.
  The ensuing power struggle was waged for control of the party, not 
for control
 of the Government. At the time of Lenin's death there were six other 
members of the Politburo, the chief deliberative body in the party for 
the formation of policy, including Stalin and Trotsky. By 1929 Joseph 
Stalin had managed to expel the other five surviving members of the 
Politburo and secure unchallenged leadership of the party, and by 
extension of the state. Stalin did not take a political title until May 
7, 1941, when he became the formal head of the Government as chairman 
of the Council of People's Commissars. Mexico continues to maintain the 
Leninist model of having the President fulfill the official role of 
head of state, while controlling the party without formal title, though 
the party and the Government appear to be moving apart somewhat. Much 
of what happened of late in Mexico echoes an earlier time of change and 
violence. But there is much that promises a new era altogether.

  On May 23, 1991, as we in the Senate debated granting fast-track 
authority to enable the administration to negotiate the North American 
Free-Trade Agreement, I took to the floor to explain my opposition. I 
began, ``Mr. President, for some months now, I have made the point to 
the administration that Mexico does not have an independent 
judiciary.'' This was, and I fear still is, a matter of seeming small 
interest to our Department of State. But observe. It has become a 
matter of considerable interest to the rulers of Mexico. On May 12, 
1994, the first ever Presidential debate took place between Ernesto 
Zedioll Ponce de Leon, the PRI candidate who succeeded the assassinated 
Colosio, and his opponents from the National Action Party [PAN] and the 
Party of the Democratic Revolution [PDR]. During the debate Diego 
Fernandez de Cevallos of the National Action Party charged that Zedillo 
does not get a passing grade in democracy. If elected, Mr. Fernandez de 
Cevallos promised to form a plural government. In turn, Zedillo used 
the debate to announce his intentions to establish a truly independent 
judiciary. The CIA Foreign Broadcast Information Service records him as 
saying, ``I am proposing the total reformation of our judicial system. 
This must be a deep-rooted reform, starting virtually from ground zero, 
because we need a justice system that will function for the Mexican 
people.''
  Once elected, President Zedillo in one stroke cleared the bench of 
all 21 sitting supreme court justices. These judges had been appointed 
for life. Like most things in Mexico, while the constitution provides 
for an independent judiciary, reality is something quite different. 
Appointments to the court are made by the President and approved by the 
Senate; in which 95 of the 128 Senators belong to the PRI. Again, 
Freedom House is instructive:

       The judiciary is subordinate to the president, underscoring 
     the lack of a rule of law. Supreme Court judges are appointed 
     by the executive and rubber-stamped by the Senate. The court 
     is
      prohibited from enforcing political and labor rights, and 
     from reviewing the constitutionality of laws. Overall, the 
     judiciary system is weak, politicized and riddled with 
     corruption.

  And yet, and yet, very possibly President Zedillo means to change 
this. And to change much else. The North American Free-Trade Agreement 
surely indicated a desire by Mexican elites to begin to put the 
institutions of the Leninist state behind them; indeed, to throw in 
with the liberal democratic states that appear to have prevailed in 
that epic struggle of the 20th century. Pfaff writes:

       The new president, Ernesto Zedillo, a product of the PRI 
     system, is attempting to reform the party and the way it has 
     perpetuated itself in power. For the first time crimes 
     committed within the party leadership are being exposed to 
     public view, investigated and given the promise of 
     prosecution.

  It may be the United States can help. More to the point, we have no 
choice but to try to help. We have made a huge commitment to this 
relationship. There is no point arguing whether we should have done so. 
We did. And in no time at all we began to realize this. The Mexican 
currency crisis appears to have been the direct result of overspending 
on imported consumer goods, which the ruling party determined would 
help with yet another Presidential election, this time when there was 
serious opposition. Perhaps not least because in a North American free-
trade zone it is taken as normal for elections to involve more than one 
party! My argument is to a somewhat different point. I have been here 
on the Senate floor talking about the nature of the Mexican state for 
half a decade. Apart, as noted earlier, from a generous note from the 
Secretary of the Treasury, I have never had the least indication from 
the executive branch that anyone had the least idea what I was talking 
about. In my remarks in January, I noted that the American labor 
movement had no such difficulty. From the time of Samuel Gompers, who 
in 1924 had to be brought across the Rio Grande so that he might die on
 American soil, American labor has followed events in Mexico with clear 
understanding of the threat a Leninist state poses to a free labor 
movement. Can the Nation ever adequately express our debt to the 
leaders of the A.F. of L. and later the AFL-CIO, for their 
international activism through all those years of the cold war? But the 
Department of State? To my knowledge, there has been little or no 
interest at all in any of this.

  The President has just returned from Moscow, where the great 
transition from totalitarianism is underway, to what purpose and what 
end we do not know. But surely, we know that it matters to us. Surely, 
the Department of State has focused attention on the matter; has 
proposed policies, responses. The same intelligent, patient, persistent 
attention needs to be paid to the transition in Mexico. There is, 
perhaps, not that much America can do, especially given our long 
history of aggression against Mexico, and the consequent suspicion of 
our motives. But surely we can let it be known that we have some 
inkling what they are going through. There are small ``d'' democrats in 
Mexico who need to know this. If there is anything we have learned from 
this hideous century is that it makes all the difference when those who 
resist totalitarian regimes know that there are those abroad who know 
of their resistance. I do not wish to suggest that Mexico is in any way 
to be compared with, shall we say, East Germany. But still, it is not 
Denmark and those who would see it change need to know that we are with 
them. At the same time, we need to be very careful about the 
commitments we take on. It is perhaps a heartless thing to say of so 
rare a thinker as William Pfaff, but I 
[[Page S6748]] hope this time, for once, he does not prove to be 
prescient. But this can only happen if we attend to what he foresees.
  The financial crisis has eased. We are free to think anew and act 
anew. There was at least one such moment in our involvement with 
Vietnam. We missed it.


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