It takes an occasional catastrophe, a hurricane perhaps, to make us aware of our physical vulnerablity and goad us into taking the protective measures necessary to protect our homes and loved ones. The assassination of the front-runner for the office of president of Mexico is a catastrophe that reminds us of the vulnerablitity of our own political system.
Whether we do anything substantial to shore it up and protect it is unlikely. Mankind does not love its freedoms and institutions with anything resembling the fierce determination with which it defends its loved ones, homes or bank accounts.Mexico is so close and so big, yet we pay far less attention to it than we pay to Israel, so small and so far. The site of the assassination, Tijuana, is close enough to San Diego to be familiar to millions of U.S. citizens. Tens of thousands of U.S. servicemen have visited it for decades to sample its bawdy and often tawdry entertainments.
Until recently Mexico's image had been substantially upgraded by the international media. The North American Free Trade Agreement made it an equal trading partner with the United States and Canada. Its political leaders had begun to address the most flagrant and obvious abuses of its political system. It is no longer completely a one-party nation. Its economy had been stable. Wealthy Mexicans had stopped squirreling away their assets in the United States and Europe, but were bringing them back home to invest.
The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, while not unchallenged, had done well enough that when the campaign kicked off last November it seemed highly probable that the PRI candidate would win again. Salinas hand-picked, and the PRI confirmed, Luis Donaldo Colosio as that candidate, who on Wednesday was murdered.
Since the happier times of last November the Mexican government has been enduring rougher seas. The revolt of the Mayan Indian natives of Chiapas province in January had reminded the people that the better economic times had not been shared by all.
The PRI, by fair means or foul, has won every presidential election in Mexico for 65 years. This year they have been forced to consider the possibility that, partly because of electoral reforms they themselves had passed, they might lose this one. On Wednesday they lost their candidate.
As this is written no one is venturing an opinion as to the motivation of the killer. It could have ranged from a single act of madness to a serious effort to destabilize the government.
Nations can be destabilized. Democracy is not something we can assume to be inevitable. It is not self-sustaining, but requires a great deal of support from the people whom it serves. Two bullets can throw it into chaos.
What it needs from the people is a lessening of angry political rhetoric. We cannot expect any government today to solve the agonies of poverty and disease and hunger and hatred and injustice that never have been solved by any government throughout recorded history. We cannot expect human leaders to be inhumanly perfect. It requires an understanding of the limitations of democracy for imperfect men to realize that ballots remain a better, though slower, instrument of change than bullets can ever be.