Juan Villoro
In memory of Carlos Monsiváis and José Emilio Pacheco
One. From caudillo to licenciado
On July 4, 1976, at the age of twenty, I made my debut at the polls in a country that had only one candidate for the presidency: José López Portillo of the PRI. Our democracy was then a simulacrum of plurality where the same party won every election. Tired of the farce, the opposition parties refused to present candidates. On the eve of that one-sided contest, Jorge Ibargüengotia wrote with irony in the newspaper Excélsior: “Sunday are the elections. How exciting! Who will win?”
In that year, López Portillo’s triumph was assured, and freedom of expression was in question. Directed by Julio Scherer García, Excélsior had become one of the ten most influential newspapers in the world, and its growing impact worried the government. As Vicente Leñero narrates in his testimonial novel Los periodistas, a messenger of the president called the director of Excélsior to give him a coded piece of advice: he suggested that he dispense with his second last name. Scherer reviewed the list of those whose last name was García and understood the allusion: Gastón García Cantú’s articles had become especially uncomfortable for those in power. The editor kept his columnist, and tensions worsened.
Ibargüengoitia’s article was part of that context. Until then, the press derived its strength from the perks it received from the government. Since he took over the direction of the newspaper in 1968, Scherer set out to reverse this treatment, making journalism worth for its independence. Four days after the 1976 elections, the Echeverría government orchestrated a coup inside the newspaper. A photo that would become famous recorded the scene: the editor leaves the newsroom on Paseo de la Reforma, escorted by his loyal followers.
In solidarity with Scherer, Octavio Paz resigned from the magazine Plural, published by Excélsior. In the same week, the hegemony of the single party was consolidated, and the written discrepancy was canceled.
In 1976 I was a member of the Mexican Workers’ Party. Our main objective was to obtain enough signatures to obtain official registration. We, grassroots militants, would take advantage of the rallies to get sympathizers to give us their data. A few days later, we would visit them at their homes to obtain their voter registration number (at that remote time, no one carried a voting card with them). I will never forget the surprise with which I was received by those who had given their address at an assembly, believing that no one would come to see them. Most of the time, they reacted with distrust, if not fear. The registration card was seen as an instrument of control. The years since then have seen a decisive cultural change: the voting card would become the country’s main identity document. Today, you exist because you vote, which does not mean this guarantee covers all Mexicans.
In 2021 the Zapatista communities decided to travel to Europe to commemorate the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan. They were not guided by a revanchist spirit but by a desire for dialogue. Seven representatives of the caracoles (governing bodies) of Chiapas set sail in a ship christened La montaña (The Mountain), and about one hundred and fifty militants accompanied them by air. The collective Llegó la Hora de los Pueblos (The time for the people has arrived), of which I am a member, commissioned Carolina Coppel and me to process the documents for the trip. Most of the Zapatistas did not have documents, not because they were part of a rebel army but because a third of the peasants in Chiapas live in that situation. Strictly speaking, millions of Mexicans lack identity papers. After an arduous process to find baptismal certificates and other proof of existence, we managed to get extemporaneous birth certificates issued. In bureaucratic terms, the travelers were newborns. Also, their CURP (Unique Code of Registration ID) was extemporaneous. Subsequently, passports were processed in the Foreign Affairs Ministry, and after exhausting procedures, something that should be commonplace for any Mexican was achieved.
What happens to those who do not belong to a rebel army or have the support of collectives and journalists? In Chiapas and in other border courts, to obtain IDs, indigenous people must not only prove that they are Mexicans but also that they are not Guatemalans. The U.S. demand to control the migratory flow has caused any undocumented person to be seen as a potential migrant. Documents in order, including the voting (INE) credential, continue to be an inaccessible privilege for many Mexicans.
The construction of democracy has been slow and still lags behind. Nothing is more detrimental to the democratic spirit than to think that what has been achieved cannot be improved.
Mexican literature has recorded in detail the long period in which elections were nothing more than a simulation. In 1929, when Plutarco Elías Calles was calling to move from the politics of arms to the politics of institutions, Martín Luis Guzmán published his exceptional novel La sombra del caudillo (The Shadow of the Caudillo). Inspired by Álvaro Obregón and Calles himself, the plot deals with the new political uses of the generals who exchanged the horse for the Cadillac. Public destinies were no longer decided on the battlefront but in offices, and the fair of bullets was replaced by intrigue. It is not by chance that politics received the nickname of “la tenebra“, the space where negotiations took place in the “dark”. Under the cover of popular ideals, the victors of the Revolution sought personal benefits. For Martin Luis Guzman, the verb that defines Mexican politics is “madrugar” (Early wakeup). In the theater of conspiracy, it is decisive to get ahead of the rival; whoever fails to do so is the victim of an early bird.
In 1931, Nellie Campobello published a set of narrative prints that took a long time to be fully appreciated. The author assumes the voices that could not speak her name during the war. The official discourse sought to relegate to oblivion the versions of the defeated. Campobello adopts a perspective three times relegated, that of the children, the women, and the villistas. With the same pulse with which Elena Garro would recover the story of Felipe Ángeles, a martyr of the Revolution killed by Venustiano Carranza, Campobello wrote the dissident stories of a country that turned the Revolution into a museum, a monument, and a single party.
In 1955, Juan Rulfo published the masterpiece of our narrative: Pedro Páramo, the story of a cacique who dominates public and private affairs with patriarchal hegemony (in Comala, everyone is a son of Pedro Páramo). Rulfo portrays the caudillo who subdues others, but also his subjects, the legion of ghosts he dominates, characters so poor that they cannot even exercise their right to death. Dispossessed, with no possible redemption, they wander between life and the afterlife. Rulfo constructs an impeccable allegory about the impossibility of participating in life in common. Those who live under a cacicazgo (fiefdom) can only exist as ghosts.
The criticism of the power emanating from the Revolution continued in 1962 with The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes. The protagonist, who once believed in changing reality, has become a privileged member of the Great Revolutionary Family, the hegemonic class that enriched itself after the conflict. By then, the Official Party had already coined an unusual concept: the Institutional Revolution. Under this contradictory letterhead, it turned the notion of change into an endless bureaucratic procedure.
Two years later, in 1964, Jorge Ibargüengoita approached the Revolution as a farce in Los relámpagos de agosto. The novel records a masquerade in which all politicians are cynical, selfish rogues who confuse the public with the private and understand their job as a predation that benefits them. It was a widely read book, but it was criticized by an intelligentsia that considered it irresponsible to discredit the revolutionary cause. For the left of the sixties, the deeds of the popular armies of Villa and Zapata had been betrayed, but their transforming impetus could be retaken. When we would have a real democracy, the Revolution would fulfill its unfinished business. This position acquired relevance in 1971. Adolfo Gilly published an impassioned history of the armed struggle whose title reflected the deferred illusions of the left: The Interrupted Revolution. According to Gilly, the transforming impulse of 1910 had had a new boom in the times of General Cárdenas and had not completely vanished: the country could still retake the main claims of Villa and Zapata.
Years later, Gilly was among the first to perceive that the left could reach its long-delayed opportunity in the figure of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, son of the general, who founded the Critical Current of the PRI, broke away from that party and, quite possibly, won the 1988 elections that were snatched away from him with fraud.
On December 31, 1994, the country was about to sleep soundly and wake up in a first-world oasis: the following day, the Free Trade Agreement with the United States and Canada would come into force, which would allow the country to enter the mirage of consumption. However, the homeland’s clock struck a different time. On January 1, the new Zapatistas took up arms to denounce the abandonment suffered by indigenous communities. The Mexico in which President Carlos Salinas de Gortari intended to inaugurate modernity included the wide range of settlers that Fernando Benítez had recorded in the five volumes of Los indios de México (The Indians of Mexico). In those pioneering chronicles, a mixture of journalism and anthropology, Benítez demonstrated that millions of Mexicans still live in the Neolithic era. The duty-free dream of 1994 was replaced by the painful realization of what we really are.
After the uprising, Friedrich Katz, Pancho Villa’s exemplary biographer, pointed out that the Revolution still had exceptional political weight in Mexico. The proof was in the fact that diverse forces were claiming its legacy: from the Institutional Revolutionary Party to the Party of the Democratic Revolution, passing through the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. For Katz, the cause of this was evident: the concept of “revolution” remained valid because its main demands, democracy, and social justice, had not been fulfilled.
Mexican literature did not fail to account for these shortcomings. Daniel Sada wrote a remarkable novel about an electoral fraud, Porque parece mentira la verdad nunca se sabe (Because it looks like a lie, the truth is never known); in Arráncame la vida (tear my life away from me), Ángeles Mastretta told the story of a woman who knows impunity in the most intimate way, as the consort of a ruthless governor, and in Entrada libre: crónicas de la sociedad que se organize (Free entrance: chronicles of the society that is organized), Carlos Monsiváis recorded the movements that sought to transform an anti-democratic system.
Meanwhile, in the public arena, democracy became an ideal that all sectors defended but that each one interpreted in its own way. It was the same as with the Constitution, whose principles were considered commendable but which, in practice, were used to process amendments (more than 700 from 1917 to date).
In the seventies, the left rightly distrusted the “democratic opening” proposed by Luis Echeverría. After 1968, the government went from open repression to selective repression and co-optation of the middle class through new study and work opportunities. The “democratic opening” was essentially a simulacrum of inclusion.
A couple of decades later, things were beginning to change. In 1997, the first elections for Chief of Government were held in the then Federal District. I was working in the newspaper La Jornada, the main informative space on the left. I was in charge of the cultural supplement, but politics is not alien to the way art is practiced. We discussed the subject of the elections in the editorial office and judged that we had to deal with it. There could be nothing more important. However, not everyone shared our enthusiasm. The hard-line leftist militants felt that the PRI would make a new pretense and that celebrating the electoral process meant “playing into the hands” of the established power. Against this stance, Fabrizio Mejía Madrid and I interviewed the president of the Federal Electoral Institute (IFE), José Woldenberg, and dedicated our cover story to Democratic Culture. Rarely have we received so much criticism. We were accomplices of a farce; Woldenberg, a former militant of the left, had sold out to endorse the triumph of the PRI. Porfirio Díaz was right again: Mexico was not ready for democracy.
The next day, when it was known that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas had won the race, the most reviled issue of our supplement became the most successful; we had anticipated the news that others did not want to give: the dream of free elections was possible.
This did not lessen the resistance to talk about democracy. For many, it was a bourgeois concept destined to sweeten domination. The lack of discussion on the subject led us to do a new exercise in the supplement. We asked a young journalist, Ciro Gómez Leyva, to interview representatives of the intellectual field to reflect on the necessity of constructing democracy. When it was Héctor Aguilar Camín’s turn, the historian and novelist launched a phrase that could seem cynical and had the value of an ironic prophecy: “Let there be democracy and may the worst win”.
Twenty years had passed since my debut at the polls. During that time, I always associated the creation of a democratic order with the triumph of the best political option (which, naturally, would be mine). Aguilar Camín’s phrase anticipated the disappointment that can occur in democracy. The people express their will, and Hitler, Bolsonaro, or Trump win.
Two: The art of taking advantage of problems
Literature is a heightened mirror of reality. It deals not only with what happens but also with what could happen. In those pages, democracy has been viewed with identical doses of hope and skepticism, not least because literature predates electoral processes by centuries and thrives in all kinds of societies. One could even argue that the best works have emerged under authoritarian governments. We tell stories to bear the weight of an adverse environment. Conflict improves plots. Tolstoy says it clearly at the beginning of Anna Karenina: “Happy families have no history.” For something to be worth telling, it requires a fissure, a challenge, and a problem to overcome. Orson Welles expressed it perfectly in the film The Third Man, scripted by Graham Greene. In a scene that became canonical, he asks what the peace and stability of Switzerland have given the world. The meager result of that well-being is the cuckoo clock. By contrast, Italy’s intrigues, corruption, and injustices produced the Renaissance. Following that model, Mexican writers have no choice but to be Renaissance.
The tyranny of the Czars was the environment in which the literature of Pushkin, Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Lermontov, and Turgenev emerged. On the other hand, there is no doubt that Shakespeare’s tragic kings are better characters than the officials of democracies. In his short story “The Portrait,” Gogol has a woman defend the magnanimous protection that the aristocracy has afforded artists; he recalls that Dante could not find repose in his “republican fatherland” and concludes: “True geniuses develop only in the splendorous eras of powerful kings and monarchies”. Should we then replace grants to creators with stimuli that historically have been very effective, such as censorship and jail?
Few scenarios have been as stimulating for the novel as wars. The Napoleonic wars gave rise to The Charterhouse of Parma and War and Peace, the Mexican Revolution to Los de abajo (Those below) and El Aguila y la Serpiente (The Eagle and the Serpent), the Second World War to The Tin Drum and Catch-22. In the elegiac ending of Soldados de Salamina (Soldiers of Salamina), Javier Cercas reminds us that, at the end of the day, human history is decided by a platoon that puts its life on the line.
Literature benefits from what it opposes. No author longs for a declaration of war to produce a masterpiece or a dictatorship to narrate opprobrious events, but once the disaster has occurred, it is stimulating literary material. Words take over the waste. When Boris Pilniak states that the goddess of writers is the hyena, he does not do so with a pejorative purpose but rather recognizes the creative recycling of art, which provides a useful purpose for the carrion.
From a literary point of view, justice is less stimulating than injustice. But human beings live in reality and not in books. Democracy is worth fighting for, even at the cost of making novels worse. Moreover, contemporary Scandinavian literature shows that even welfare societies produce dramas. In this civilized environment, Henning Mankell’s detectives do not carry guns, but there are still murders.
Literature has been able to warn of the risks that the exercise of will can lead to. In his play The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Bertolt Brecht offers a parable about Hitler’s triumph. The last parable warns: “The womb from which the filthy came forth is still fertile”. National Socialism can happen again, and its womb was democratic.
In a similar vein, Sinclair Lewis recounts in his novel It Can’t Happen Here the electoral process that brings a populist to the presidency of the United States. Written when the anti-Semitic Lindbergh, a charismatic aviation hero, aspired to come to power, Lewis’ novel acquired renewed relevance with the triumph of Donald Trump.
Longing for democracy does not preclude criticizing the abuses committed in its name. In his short novel A Teller’s Journey, Italo Calvino tells the story of an electoral fraud. In the polling station supervised by the protagonist, the votes are manipulated by the Church. In post-war Italy, democracy is nothing more than a pact of conservative authoritarianism.
The solution to the social problems posed by literature lies outside the books, in the modifiable reality. When Mario Vargas Llosa asks at the beginning of Conversación en la Catedral (Conversation in the Cathedral), “At what point had Peru gone to hell?”, he is not inviting us to close the book and repudiate the country where it happens, but, on the contrary, to understand that problem in depth. Literature is one of the few spaces where criticism is associated with empathy. The writer presents a conflict that hurts him. Peru is screwed up, but that is our business.
Literature questions reality and sometimes even questions the author’s own beliefs. In 1949, in his novel Los días terrenales, José Revueltas has two characters discuss the transformation of society. One of them says ironically, “Let’s fight for a classless society! Congratulations! But no, not to make men happy, but to make them freely unhappy!” A year later, Revueltas was forced to abjure this novel in order to continue militating in the ranks of communism. His comrades on the road did not accept that the proletarian dawn would allow anyone to be “freely unhappy”.
Certain writers have criticized not only the shortcomings of democracy but its very existence, which has not detracted from the grandeur of their writing. For different reasons, Louis Fernand Céline, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Ezra Pound, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and Ernst Jünger applauded authoritarianism. The wise Seneca mentored the insane Nero, Neruda wrote an “Ode to Stalin,” and Peter Handke attended the burial of the genocidal Milosevic. Not everyone has had Victor Hugo’s courage to risk his life and endure exile to oppose Napoleon III.
People of letters are usually moved by intuitive reasons and make novels smarter than the authors. Whoever is interested in a brilliant argument in favor of anarchism can read Dostoevsky’s Demons. The author detested that movement, but he knew how to express his reasons in an unbeatable way.
Literature admits ambiguity, the contradictory, and the merely possible. In this sense it is, in itself, a democratic exercise, but different from what happens in the public arena, where ideologies do not have the luxury of being ambivalent.
It is worth reviewing the case of the greatest German-language novelist of the twentieth century, Thomas Mann, who was also a notable essayist and expositor of thought.
In his youth, when he had already written The Buddenbrooks, he reflected on the fate of Germany as it headed for World War I. Very much in his style, he did not do so lightly, but in the six hundred pages of Reflections of a Nonpolitical man. His brother Heinrich defended democracy and opposed Prussian autocracy. Thomas, on the other hand, was suspicious of majorities deciding. In his youthful diaries, which he could not destroy as he would have liked, he shows his patriotic exaltation. On March 24, 1919, he writes: “I can already see myself in the street marching and shouting, Death to the lies of Western democracy!”
Mann agreed with the enlightened Georg Christoph Lichtenberg in the idea that the tragedy of democracy consists of the fact that votes are not weighed but only counted. In the same vein, Jorge Luis Borges considered elections to be an “abuse of statistics”. A reasoned vote is worth the same as an impulsive, ignorant, or manipulated vote, and the masses easily fall into idolatry.
When speaking of politics, the master of German irony defined himself as “apolitical”. Thomas Mann claimed his right to express his opinion differently from the professionals of ideologies, which included the right to contradict himself: “Is there any situation more horrendous than that which leaves no room for doubt in the brain?” he asks. A one-track mind is the basis of authoritarianism. Democracy aims to deny it by promoting plurality, but the leader who triumphs at the polls can hypnotize the crowds.
Without knowing it, Mann anticipated Hitler’s triumph. The defense, which he judged patriotic, of a Germany free of democratic chaos, led to polarization and the advent of Nazi delirium. Arguably, history gave bitter reason to his mistrust. However, with unparalleled intellectual honesty, the novelist realized the danger he had fallen into: Hitler was not a democrat; he had used that resource to deny it later. The only way to save democracy, a necessarily imperfect formula open to the vagaries of the will, was to strengthen its exercise. After the triumph of Nazism, Mann went into exile in Switzerland, and from 1933 onwards, he devoted radio conferences and numerous articles to the struggle in favor of democracy, which he would sustain until his death in 1955. The horrors of the century educated his exceptional witness. Welcomed by the United States, Mann lived in California until McCarthyism, a new attack on democracy, made him return to Europe.
Literature is a necessarily nonconformist, rebellious, uncomfortable activity; its vision of reality can only be critical; it requires freedom to be exercised, and whoever does not have it writes in secret: Diderot left unpublished the many works that would have landed him in jail had he published them.
By eliminating social conflicts, democracy could temper the impulse to tell stories, but writers always have something to regret. Specialists in finding the fly in the soup know that everything could be different. Democracy is a stimulus insofar as it will never cease to be a problem. The seduction of wills and their mixing at the ballot box yield surprising and not always commendable results. With skillful use of polls, algorithms, and propaganda, the company Cambridge Analytica managed to distort electoral preferences in thirty-two countries. On the other hand, representative democracies allow the vote to become a blank check. The power of the voter exists on election Sunday and expires the next day. In 2006, two weeks after being elected, Felipe Calderón launched a “war against drug trafficking” that would leave thousands dead and disappeared. This issue did not appear in his campaign proposals, nor was it consulted with his party or discussed in Congress. Regardless of the general will, he militarized the country.
One of the main pending issues in the construction of democracy is to citizenshipize politics to allow voters to supervise those they elect in order to move from a merely representative democracy to a direct democracy.
I return to the personal dossier necessary for the chronicler. In 2017 and 2018, I was a vocal member of the collective Llegó la Hora de los Pueblos, which proposed the indigenous María de Jesús Patricio as an independent candidate for president. The exercise was novel, but the requirements imposed by the political parties made truly independent candidacies unfeasible. How to get close to one million signatures spread across at least seventeen states of the country? To do so, they require resources that only the established parties can count on. Thus, these candidacies lend themselves to be the Plan B of those who do not obtain the nomination of the political front to which they belong, as was the case of Margarita Zavala and Jaime Rodríguez “El Bronco”. Both presented numerous false signatures but reached the required amount of valid signatures. The Federal Electoral Tribunal did not sanction the cheating, and José Woldenberg wrote an article about it with the eloquent title of “Shame”.
For its part, INE discriminated against participants by requiring those signatures be collected on smart cell phones costing at least three minimum wages. Indigenous communities, who lack access to technology and live in regions without connectivity, participated very unevenly in the contest. Even so, María de Jesús Patricio’s campaign presented the most honest accounts, as electoral counselor Ciro Murayama acknowledged before the press.
It is clear that Mexican democracy has not ceased to be a process under construction. If it is exciting, it is, among other things, because it is perfectible.
What authority do women and men of letters have to talk about the shortcomings and lags of democracy? It is worth remembering a rare specialty of this country: to a large extent, independent Mexico was created by writers.
Three. The writers of the homeland
Our literary 19th century cannot be compared in quality with that of other latitudes. We did not have a Victor Hugo, a Dickens, a Pushkin, or a Stendhal. This was due to a peculiar circumstance: the main writers of the time were dedicated to something else: inventing a country.
The Mexican novel was founded in very precarious conditions. Faced with the lack of outlets, José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi created the most important newspaper at the time of Independence, El Pensador Mexicano, and published his extensive novel El Periquillo Sarniento in pamphlets. With risky courage, he bets that the general public, and not the patrons, will pay for his work. El Periquillo portrays the corruption and inequalities of the Novo-Hispanic world and foreshadows a country to come. It begins to be published when Morelos is defeated; the end of Spanish rule then seems elusive. José Emilio Pacheco comments: “José Joaquín Fernández de Lizardi breaks with colonial letters and founds Mexican literature five years before Mexico exists as a nation”.
The country was prefigured in literature, and the main authors of that time dedicated themselves to transforming the texts into reality. Vicente Quirarte found a perfect title for Guillermo Prieto’s endeavors: La patria como oficio (The homeland as a trade). Born in 1818, three years before the consummation of Independence, Prieto belonged to the generation of liberals who founded newspapers, enacted laws, exercised public functions with remarkable honesty, and wrote tirelessly at all times and in all forums within their reach. The independent nation depended on the “literate city”, to use Ángel Rama’s expression.
Prieto’s complete works total 39 volumes, dedicated to portraying a country that was still improvised and in its infancy, defining itself as he wrote. The copious and uneven career of the author of Memorias de mis tiempos depended on the ups and downs of the nation that served as his subject. Prieto was on the battlefront and took an active part in the transformations of the Reform. In Guadalajara, he saved the life of Benito Juarez with a phrase that would be repeated in civics classes: “The brave do not assassinate”. The weakness of the Mexican government became so great that Juarez lost control of the seat of power and decided that the presidency would travel in his carriage. Prieto accompanied him in this wandering administration. To avoid threats, the carriage windows were covered by black curtains. If someone asked who was traveling there, the writer answered: “A sick family”. The homeland of the beginnings was just that, a sick family and Prieto took on the task of giving it relief in his texts and in his acts as a congressman and Minister of Finance and Foreign Affairs. Carlos Monsiváis said of him: “Prieto synthesizes the courage, talent, good humor, enthusiasm, patriotic indignation, and generosity of a group of intellectual vanguard”.
Another notable representative of that era was Vicente Riva Palacio, who commanded the Army of the Center. Maximilian surrendered in Queretaro before his troops. Like Prieto and so many others, Riva Palacio would have dedicated himself full-time to writing had he not preferred to correct a homeland that was in draft form. In addition to his vast personal work, to which belong the lyrics of the song “¡Adiós, mamá Carlota!” with which the triumph over the French was celebrated, Riva Palacio directed the historiographic project México a través de los siglos and founded the newspaper El Ahuizote, decisive for one of the most brilliant genres of our popular culture: the cartoon. Born in 1832, at the age of fifteen, he participated in the guerrillas against the American invasion, was an alternate congressman when the Constitution of 1857 was drafted, served as governor of Michoacán and the State of Mexico and, as if that were not enough, became an exceptional Minister of Development. From that office, he commanded the exploration of the ruins of Palenque, created the National Observatory, and completed the Paseo de la Reforma. He held all possible positions except that of president, which Porfirio Diaz avoided for fear of being overshadowed by an intellectual, sending him as a diplomat to Spain, where he became director of the Circle of Fine Arts. It is almost scandalous that Riva Palacio still had time to write and that he did it brilliantly in the Cuentos del general. When he was in jail as a political prisoner, he wrote “El viento”, which in José Emilio Pacheco’s opinion, is the best Mexican sonnet between Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Manuel José Othón.
And what about Ignacio Ramírez, who revolutionized journalism with the pseudonym of El Nigromante: (The necromancer) “To speak of Ramírez, I need to purify my lips”, said Guillermo Prieto. Public activity became, for El Nigromante, a natural extension of his writings. He participated in the Ayutla Revolution as Ignacio Comonfort’s personal secretary, was a congressman in the Constituent Congress of 1857, participated in the drafting of the Reform Laws, and, as a minister of the Supreme Court, demanded educational and labor rights for women. In the preparatory discussions for the Magna Carta, he was a champion of the separation between Church and State. In his speech of July 7, 1856, he stated: “Gentlemen, I, for my part, declare that I have not come to this place prepared by ecstasy or revelations: the only mission I carry out is not as a mystic, but as a profane”. The creation of the secular state owes much to Ignacio Ramirez. He was the most radical of the liberals and associated belonging to the country with a moral condition: “The Mexican is free, and all men can be Mexicans”.
Between battles, uprisings, jails, and threats, liberal writers ran the risk that their work would not be considered. That task fell to Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, an author of indigenous origin who devised the newspaper El Renacimiento and the Teachers’ College and wrote the history of Mexican literary magazines from 1821 to 1867, which records texts that could have fallen into oblivion and defined the beginning of independent Mexico. At this point in the review, it is not surprising that he also participated in the Reform Wars and that he accompanied Riva Palacio in the triumph over the French. Congressman for Chilapa, he promoted nationalism and the secular state. Author of books of short stories such as La Navidad en las montañas and the novel Clemencia, he understood literature as an edifying pedagogy that fights social and racial discrimination. For decades, he recorded the cultural life of Mexico, exercised in a climate that conspired against it: “I love literature, and I see that misery makes it impossible,” he notes in his Diary.
After the French intervention, Altamirano refused the rank of general and, with his back wages, founded the newspaper El Correo de México. He supported Juarez against the invading army but criticized many of his measures as president. This gave rise to a scene that praises the journalists and politicians of that time and that José Emilio Pacheco recovered in his column Inventario of November 18, 1984. A representative of the Bolivian government met the writer and the politician at an official dinner. President Juarez introduced Altamirano as an intelligent opposition journalist. “Altamirano, undeterred, replies that he supported Juarez as head of the national resistance and would do so again but that he fights him on domestic politics. Juarez speaks of his respect and recognition for his critics, cordially embraces Altamirano, and both toast with the diplomat”.
The construction of democracy, which still continues, began with the liberal writers of our 19th century. One of their most faithful disciples, Carlos Monsiváis, wrote the history of those days and those ideas under the title Las herencias ocultas (The Hidden Inheritances). The most striking heroes were others, but the writers made them possible.
For his part, José Emilio Pacheco wrote an elegy to that remarkable generation. In 1984, in the time of Miguel de La Madrid, he wrote: “If all the Mexican political elite of this moment were gathered in an imaginary room and Altamirano, Ramírez, and Prieto entered, everyone without exception would have to stand up and lower their heads. Who has lived up to the ethical lesson they left us? Who could say: all the millions and millions of ecclesiastical goods passed through my hands and I did not keep a single cent; as a cabinet minister, I had to follow Juarez on foot because I did not even have enough to rent a horse; to bury me they had to sell the furniture in my house; I occupied all the public posts imaginable and always lived poorly on my strict salary and the ten pesos per chronicle that the newspapers paid me?
“If Mexico has not bled to death, it is because there were men like them. If there is still some hope in Mexico, it is because, in spite of everything, the example of the generation of 1857 is still standing”.
Literature precedes democracy and has been able to be exercised without it. However, Mexico has a rare specificity: the country’s first writers were also the promoters of democracy.
Monsiváis published Las herencias ocultas in the canonical year 2000, when the first alternation of power took place. During the campaign, I talked a lot with the greatest of our chroniclers. We were both disappointed that Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas did not win the race, but my optimism exceeded his regarding the electoral process. At José Woldenberg’s request, I wrote the text that accompanied a photographic memory of Election Day. There I wrote: “Sunday, July 2 dawned with that clean light that photographers long for. The weather, clear and calm, anticipated the most competitive election day in Mexico’s history. That photogenic Sunday, almost 60 million citizens were registered to go to the polls; for the first time in many decades, the outcome could not be predicted, and yet, this unprecedented situation arrived with the aplomb of what is becoming customary. Welcome to democratic normality! What Homer with an accreditation badge could narrate this epic without challenges?”
Less enthusiastic than I, Monsiváis judged that the triumph of the conservative Vicente Fox would turn back the clock of history. On page 13 of Las herencias ocultas, he wrote me an ironic dedication in which he refers to his book as “this story that will end forever on December 1, 2000.” The liberal dream was threatened.
The chronicler’s skepticism was based on the fact that one can triumph in democracy to destroy democracy, just as one can be unjust in the name of justice. Monsiváis feared that the hidden legacies would disappear completely and that what happened when our country was nothing more than a project would be forgotten.
My chronicle of the 2000 elections concluded with the scene in which, at 11 o’clock at night, Woldenberg said as head of the IFE: “‘I believe we have passed the test: we are a country in which the change in government can take place peacefully, through regulated competition, without recourse to force by the loser, without the risk of involutions, that is democracy'”.
I quote the end of the text I wrote at the time: “The most longed-for phrase of our common life had been pronounced. Only one Mexican was obliged to remain calm at the moment, José Woldenberg himself. The rest of us burst out in the infinite variants of emotion that allow us to ‘cut a slice from the epic’, as López Velarde wants in La suave Patria. Beyond the predictions of each one, we concluded the day with a certainty: ‘That is democracy.
“The future had begun.
Twenty-three years later, our time is difficult, “like all times,” Dickens would add. Democracy is not an essence but a process; its history is always to be written.
In an age more convulsive than ours, liberal writers imagined a republic of plurality and celebrated the benefits of dissent.
Their legacy is our future.
*Keynote lecture given on February 21 at the National Electoral Institute (INE), as part of the series “Topics of Democracy”.
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