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A god in born

© Yhezel Armando Vargas

The process began almost a year before the Presidential elections and lasted until the new President was sworn into office. On fall of the preceding year the President had handpicked the PRI’s presidential candidate and therefore his successor.

When the President’s decision on who would be the candidate was announced a phenomenon know as the “buffalo’s stampede” took place. Thousands of politicians, artists, journalists, businessmen and celebrities went to wherever the candidate was to pledge loyalty to the new monarch.

It was then that the President really began to know the person he had chosen to continue his policies and lead the nation’s destinies. The candidate would either begin his transformation at the time he was nominated like Luis Echeverria (1970-1976) or as soon as he became President like Adolfo Ruiz Cortinez (1952-1958). But there was no doubt that he would change once in power.

It was not a rule that the candidate would turn against the man who made him President, but on recent successions this has been a common situation. Successions ranged from friendly and smooth as the one between Lazaro Cardenas and Manuel Avila Camacho in 1940 to the 1994 succession from Carlos Salinas to Ernesto Zedillo. In this last succession the clash between the two Presidents was so harsh and bitter that it destroyed forever the pact of silence and complicity that had been respected for so many decades.

The reasons for these disputes were very diverse; besides the obvious fight between the man who wants to have power and the one who refuses to give it there were many other reasons. Moral reasons like the ones that led President Ruiz Cortinez to reproach Aleman’s excesses. When Luis Echeverria showed a dramatically new attitue towards his antecessor it was supposedly because of ideologies but time has shown that Echeverria acted in a pure Machiavellian way.

At least three of these conflicts were caused or at least worsened because of the President’s attempts to hold certain amount of power over the new President. Miguel Aleman chose Ruiz Cortinez in 1952 because Ruiz Cortinez was an old man whom Aleman thought would be easily manipulated. Luis Echeverria chose Jose Lopez Portillo because, Echeverria though that Lopez Portillo’s lack of experience and political background would force him to seek Echeverria’s advice. Carlos Salinas chose Zedillo after Colosio’s assassination; Zedillo was for many months thought as a puppet that would only be a storefront to Salina’s regime. They counted on the successors to be passive; they counted wrong.