The Guadalajara Reporter

Former President Miguel de la Madrid dies; his policy regarding burgeoning drug cartel influence is being recalled

Mainstream media in both Mexico and the United States lost a useful opportunity when they produced the internet era’s requisite undernourished obituaries (the best: Associated Press) of former Mexican president (1982-1988), Miguel de la Madrid, who died April 2, at 77.   He and his presidency are both basic and critical tools to understanding Mexico today – but not because de la Madrid was a dramatically innovative, or transformative chief executive. He is pertinent today primarily because his former long-ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), is expected to return to power in the mannequin-like figure of Enrique Peña Nieto, former governor of the State of Mexico, which surrounds Mexico City.  And because Latin America’s drug war isn’t working, Peña Nieto, whose PRI has a disastrous past of colluding with drug traffickers, is making grand promises to overhaul the current policy and reduce violence in general.

De la Madrid became president in the wake of three PRI presidents whose misdeeds were key factors in the toppling of the PRI’s 71-year reign in 2000:  Gustavo Diaz Ordaz (1964-’70), Luis Echeverria (1970-’76) and Jose Lopez Portillo. (1976-’82).  Each of these three left a legacy of economic chaos, bloody oppression and deep national psychological scars.

De la Madrid, often called a “caretaker president” and the “gray president,” also has been termed a “discrete and respectful man” who seemed to want, above all, a calm presidency. Yet he had been a career government bureaucrat, serving brutal, seemingly psychotic men long enough to know there was no chance of that.   Diaz Ordaz’s “Tlatelolco Massacre” and Echeverria’s Corpus Christi Day killings, Lopez Portillo’s six hallucinatory spendthrift years were too fresh in the public mind.  Another reason: while de la Madrid was trying to calm Mexico in the wake of the economic/social collapse created by Lopez Portillo, the country’s cottage industry of drug production/transport was being transformed.  It became much larger, richer, more dangerous, and so versatile it would challenge the government, though the de la Madrid administration preferred to ignore this.

De la Madrid, like his mentor Jose Lopez Portillo, had no political experience.  He had studied law at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), worked at Mexico’s central bank and taught law at UNAM.  From there he moved to the Treasury.  Next he moved to Pemex, the government-owned petroleum monopoly.  After that he held several posts in the Echeverria administration. Thus he was exposed to the iniquitous underbelly of that era’s methods of governance.

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