"Misreading Mexico" by M. Delal Baer, in Foreign Policy (Fall 1997), Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1779 Massachusetts Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036.

Drugs, corruption, and the "perfect dictatorship"—that is the lurid picture of Mexico in the minds of many Americans, observes Baer, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in Washington, D.C. But the happier reality, highlighted by the historic midterm elections there last July, is that Mexico is moving from single-party rule to competitive democracy "in a way that most other developing countries can only dream about—without sudden collapses or charismatic saviors." The question now, he says, is whether Mexico will also move away from the free-market economic reforms of recent years.

When Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa said in 1990 that Mexico was a "perfect dictatorship," having all the characteristics of a dictatorship except the appearance of one, his phrase was widely repeated in Mexico. But it was already becoming out of date, Baer says. Change began in earnest "soon after an embarrassing electoral computer ‘crash’ marred the 1988 election" of Carlos Salinas de Gortari, presidential candidate of the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). (When early returns showed opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solorzano in the lead, the computerized vote tabulation system providing returns over national TV suddenly went dead. Votes were counted "the old-fashioned way.") By the 1991 elections, Baer says, the Salinas administration had overhauled the electoral system, taking needed steps such as issuing fraud-proof voter ID cards.

Still, Mexican voters did not deal the PRI any big defeats until last July. In balloting for seats in the Mexican Congress’s lower house, the Chamber of Deputies, the PRI won only 39 percent of the popular vote— the lowest level of support in its 68 years of rule—and lost 59 seats. Cárdenas’s leftist Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD) garnered 26 percent of the popular vote and gained 60 seats, while Cárdenas himself was elected Mexico City’s mayor.