In 1994 everything happened in Mexico.
Three decades later, the reality of the country cannot be understood without looking back at those turbulent months that began on January 1 with the entry into force of a trade agreement with the United States and Canada, which opened wide the northern border. , and ended on the eve of Christmas Eve with the surprising awakening of the Popocatépetl volcano, which launched a two-kilometer column of fireworks into the air.
The volcano was alive.
But on a day like this that year, bullets filled with death Luis Donaldo Colosio, the ill-fated PRI candidate who promised to satisfy the hunger and thirst for justice of a people that has not yet recovered from the trauma;
In September, a gunman pierced the neck of the general secretary of the PRI, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, saying goodbye to another hope of political renewal.
All this was happening while Mexico tried to convince the world, that is, the United States, that it was advancing along the path of modernity while the Zapatistas, up in arms since the dawn of the new year, launched the negative of the photograph: the penury of the indigenous people to whom the benefits of the commercial treaty never reached.
Reporters from half the planet sharpened their pens.
It was the year of Mexico.
No year can be explained without the previous or subsequent ones, but 1994 wanted to concentrate everything on the fast track.
Or as the writer Carlos Monsiváis said, “we wanted the system to fall, but not on our heads.”
From that fire, like that of the gigantic volcano that presides over the center of the country, lights and ashes can still be felt.
The assassination of Colosio and that of his party colleague remain shrouded in mystery;
The Zapatista movement maintains its ideology and proclamations in force, but with less noise;
A new trade agreement has renewed the old one and promises, once again, economic prosperity;
The PRI is in serious danger of disappearing, which will be revealed in the presidential and local elections in June, but the caciquile forms that seemed to crack then refuse to disappear.
Today, when Colosio's death is still mourned, the population has become accustomed to assassinated candidates everywhere.
Luis Donaldo Colosio is helped after being shot twice, in the Lomas Taurinas neighborhood of Tijuana (State of Baja California). Víctor Florez (AFP)
“1994 was a turning point.
President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who was then finishing his term, had opted for a technocratic, economistic profile, which in some way pitted him against the old figures of the PRI, more focused on political inertia," explains Denisse Cejudo, an expert in History. Contemporary Politics of UNAM.
Those internal disputes were beginning to break the single party, the perfect Mexican dictatorship, but the left was also divided between those who did not share the armed movement of Zapatismo and those who endorsed it, says Cejudo.
In 1988, Salinas came to power surrounded by the controversy of having stolen the elections from Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, who had abandoned the PRI to found the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), the seed of the left.
“At the height of the political crisis, the PRI chose to negotiate with the PAN, a conservative party with Catholic ideology,” recalls the specialist.
It was the era of concerted concessions, in which the PAN was given access to power in exchange for “behaving well and not making waves,” adds Blanche Petrich, a veteran journalist for
La Jornada
, a newspaper that then played a crucial critical role. in a journalistic desert.
But the truth is that the alternation began, with Salinas the PAN had three local governments, and with his successor, Ernesto Zedillo, it reached 10, remembers Cejudo.
Today, PRI and PAN, close enemies, appear as allies in the elections to stop the tide of Morena, the party that ended up consolidating the Mexican left and reached the government after splitting from a PRD that today looks moribund.
The journalist Diego Enrique Osorno, who has directed the Netflix series titled
1994
, which addresses the murder of Colosio, maintains that in those years three references emerged from the left, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Subcomandante Marcos and the current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, all of them in full political force.
But many agree that the PRI is not completely gone.
Although it lost its last great bastion last year, the State of Mexico, “clientelism has not ended and the PRI's ways of doing politics are being imposed again,” says Cejudo.
“Its hegemony has been lost, but not its ways of doing politics, that culture continues to win elections,” he says.
And naming candidates, it should be added.
The murder of Colosio did not contribute to the renewing image that Salinas intended and with which he had convinced the gringos to close the trade agreement; they say that it was forged from power, as the Mexican people have always suspected, despite the fact that the assassination Mario Aburto is still in jail.
The PRI has just deepened its crisis with the crime of Ruiz Massieu, which cost Raúl Salinas, the president's brother, 10 years in prison and a million-dollar bail, in a still obscure case that at that time mixed fortune tellers and prosecutors in the same cocktail. .
A daughter of Ruiz Massieu, Claudia, has worked politically in the same party since she was young and has now joined Movimiento Ciudadano to run for a deputy position.
She is, therefore, a companion in the ranks of Luis Donaldo Colosio Jr., former mayor of Monterrey and with great political projection.
What happened then gives the keys even today: “From the figure of Camacho Solís [who wanted to run for the presidency like Colosio] we understand a player like Marcelo Ebrard [who has also not achieved it compared to Claudia Sheinbaum].
And from Colosio we understand [the governor of Sonora and former Secretary of Security] Alfonso Durazo, who was secretary of the assassinated president,” explains Diego Enrique Osorno.
The left had opposed, to a greater or lesser extent, the free trade agreement (FTA) that arrived in 1994 after long negotiations, but today there are few who deny that it shook the economy.
Mexico decided to look towards the United States, its main trading partner, to the chagrin of Latin American nations, and today it continues on the same path with a new tripartite agreement, the USMCA, which has strengthened the loose fringes of then, especially in the labor field. and environmental.
Those deficiencies were raised at the time by organizations from the three countries and are well remembered by Graciela Bensusán, a professor at the UAM Xochimilco, an expert in unionism.
“Among the Zapatistas, the motto was 'Either we all go, or no one goes', fearful that this would only benefit a small portion of the population and basically the companies, as it did," says Bensusán.
“The jobs were not enough and were of low quality and low pay, even in successful sectors such as the automotive industry, which generated frustration,” she explains.
Carlos Salinas de Gortari, George Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney at the initial signing of the Free Trade Agreement.Bettmann (Bettmann Archive)
But seen in perspective, the expert maintains, a good part of the promising economic future that is now opening up with the USMCA arises from that first treaty “from which it was not possible to take advantage due to the lack of political measures.
The necessary industrial, salary and educational reforms for job training were not carried out.
The fault was not the FTA, but the internal policies,” she adds.
Bensusán maintains that the great success of this six-year term has been in labor matters, where some of those shortcomings have been addressed and a satisfactory trade agreement has been renegotiated.
But he warns that the country still lacks complementary measures to avoid the same danger.
“Changes are missing in the industrial and educational fields and in the security conditions to take good advantage of the relocation of companies,
nearshoring
”, which is so much talked about as a new economic renaissance in Mexico of historic opportunities.
Without all of this, the professor affirms, the TMEC cannot later be blamed for being useless.
Now, she says, there is a special situation and it is about attracting high-tech investments, advancing in clean energy, integrating migrants and facilitating transportation so that the south benefits as the north once did.
The truths of the jungle
30 years later, the Zapatistas continue to dream of a different world that they have tried to found in small oases in Chiapas, to which the rest of the country pays no attention.
“The national echo has been reduced to the region, the EZLN still has great communication power, but society is less willing to listen,” says journalist Blanche Petrich.
“A shame, because the conditions in the country remain the same or similar.”
Petrich, who was almost 40 years old at the time, was a racial reporter who moved from one place to another without paying attention to the open bar and the continuous communications with which the Salinas government lulled journalists to sleep from a hotel in Chiapas.
She preferred to search for truths in the jungle, as she also did in the Central American conflicts.
“Zapatismo was a political and social force that had an impact due to its legitimacy; no Mexican could say that what was happening was not true,” she says.
Subcomandante Marcos rides a horse, in 1994. PEDRO VALTIERRA (Cuartoscuro)
“That meant a cultural change in the population and aspects such as racism were revealed, the critical consciousness of democracy was changed, Chiapas activated struggles and political change in the capital,” says Osorno.
The same capital that these election days is debating between continuing with left-wing parties or taking a turn towards conservatism.
It is one of the main unknowns that will be cleared up at the polls on June 2.
Those years, with the misery of the indigenous peoples on the table, Osorno continues, were also the beginning of the great fortunes of Mexico, through the privatizations undertaken in the Salinas era and culminated with his successor, Ernesto Zedillo, moment after From which names such as Carlos Slim, Ricardo Salinas Pliego or Germán Larrea became known, whose business and political presence continues to be fully featured in the daily news.
News is the key word that defines 1994. “At that time, Mexico had been the office of all foreign correspondents, from here they traveled to cover the Central American conflicts, but in this country stability was a total bore: PRI, more PRI and some voice subdued dissident,” laughs Petrich.
Be careful what you wish for may come true, would be the appropriate saying.
The calm gave way to a storm that did not stop throughout the year or in the following years.
The journalists had to do.
It was necessary to tell the world who those hooded men were who had come out of the jungle, who had killed Colosio and Ruiz Massieu, and it was still unknown where the 20 bullets came from that ended the days of Cardinal Juan Jesús Posadas Ocampo, in May 1993. Furthermore, the
Tequila effect
had the country plunged into an economic and financial crisis.
“Those were times of a domesticated press very accustomed to 'yes, Mr. President', when a critical in-depth study was needed to generate opinion,” explains Petrich.
“The PAN system still had well-oiled control of the media, but on the other hand there was very strong repression of reporters, they were murdered and imprisoned, and that had to do with the power of the State.
Today there is hostility towards the media on the part of the president, not even anyone who denies it, but he has nothing to do with it,” Petrich compares.
Today the drug trafficker is the actor of fear.
Journalists and candidates, women and men lose their lives with violence “without a true change having been achieved in the administration of justice, that is the great failure of the Fourth Transformation” of President López Obrador, the journalist maintains.
Mexico, as Colosio encouraged his masses, has not yet calmed its hunger and thirst for justice.
And the Popocatépetl volcano is still angry.
Popocatépetl spits out volcanic matter, on May 23, 2023. Cristopher Rogel Blanquet (Getty Images)
Subscribe to the EL PAÍS México newsletter
and the
WhatsApp channel
and receive all the key information on current events in this country.