Leticia Neria PhD thesis - Research@StAndrews:FullText ...

the political system before him, and who repressed people and restricted freedoms. 33 In
fact, he was referring to Díaz Ordaz and the older class of politicians. Echeverría
brought into his cabinet a new kind of political elite: the technocrats, young people who
studied outside the country, with no fixed ideology, and who had not worked previously
in a government office. 34 Carlos Monsiváis described the Mexican technocrats from that
time as people ‘que observan con desdén los trámites electorales, el acarreo y el
clientelismo, y profesan amor desbordado a la macroeconomía, los macroprocesos y los
macrosalarios’. 35
Luis Echeverría Álvarez
By the 1960s, the PRI’s power was consolidated. As they say in Mexico, it was a soft
dictatorship, la dictablanda: 36 it created the rules of participation in the political system,
decided policies, blocked avenues of citizen influence in decision-making. 37 There was
little effective opposition – when it appeared it was co-opted or threatened. In Mexico,
the autoritarismo was defined by ‘la carencia de canales institucionales para la
participación política autónoma y no en la supuesta pasividad de la sociedad o en la
existencia de un presidente omnipresente’. 38
During the PRI rule political opposition was not effective. There were elections
for legislators, senators, governors, the president and other public positions,
33
Patricia Cabrera López, Una inquietud de amanecer. Literatura y política en México, 1962-1987,
Debate y reflexión (Mexico: UNAM, Centro de Investigaciones Interdisciplinarias en Ciencias y
Humanidades, Plaza y Valdés, 2006), p. 210.
34
Roderic Ai Camp, La política en México, trans. by Stella Mastrangelo (Mexico: siglo veintiuno
editores, 1995), p. 145.
35
Carlos Monsiváis, ‘En virtud de las facultades…’, in La transición interrumpida… pp. 113-126 (p. 118)
36
Or to quote Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, a ‘dictadura perfecta’. Quoted in Will Fowler,
‘Goatsuckers, guerrillas and democracy: Mexico in the 1990s’, Vida Hispánica, 19 (1999), 12-16 (p. 13).
37
Alberto Aziz Nassif, ‘La construcción de la democracia electoral’, in Una historia contemporánea de
México: Transformaciones y permanencias, ed. by Ilan Bizberg, Lorenzo Meyer, Francisco Alba, 4 vols
(Mexico: Editorial Océano, 2004) 1, pp. 367-428 (p. 372).
38
Favela, Protesta y reforma en México… p. xii.
48