Mexico: Biogaphy of Power

""To continue the theater of history is to be condemned and condemn the country, dramatically or grotesquely, to endless repetition,"" writes Mexican historian Krauze in this gripping account linking Mexico's bloody past to its uncertain present, brilliantly translated by Heifetz. Setting the stage for revolutionary Miguel Hidalgo's cry for freedom from Spain in 1810, Krauze offers a pragmatic--and no doubt controversial--look at the conquest, the most benign of any in Latin America and the only one to result in a mixed-race nation, and the Viceregal period, where a rigid social structure offered the Mexican people more stability than they may ever have again. The two hero priests of independence, the eccentric, erratic Hidalgo and rational, forward-looking Jose Maria Morelos, created distinct roles that Mexican politicians have replayed ever since. To balance the great reformer Benito Juarez, there was Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna, who sacrificed a major battle for Texas in a fit of pique with his general. And for the visionary Francisco Madero, who believed that the people should rule themselves and was elected in 1911 in what is still the cleanest election in Mexican history, there were his killers, who dragged him into the countryside and shot him in the back of the neck. ""There has been a constant theatricality, sometimes deliberate, often unconscious, and evident above all in a Mexican aesthetic of death,"" Krauze says. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, the PRI, which has been in control for nearly 70 years, was embraced because it held power within the ""revolutionary family"" and slowed the slaughter that had plagued Mexican political life since the War of Independence. The unsolved murders of presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio and of PRI secretary general Jose Francisco Ruiz Massieu in 1994 may indicate a return to the bloody dramas of the past. According to Krauze, even the Zapatista guerrillas in Chiapas follow an existing script. The charismatic Subcommandante Marcos with his knit mask and pipe, he says, is trying to compose history through a theatrical use of the Mexican past. ""He portrays himself and his followers as the legitimate heirs of all the just wars in the history of Mexico,"" Krauze writes. The parade of murderers, megalomaniacs, sheer incompetents and the occasional saint across the stages of power makes for fascinating reading but terrible governing. Deception and bloodshed are two of the overwhelming themes of Mexican history. The other is that no matter who is in power, the Mexican people are still the losers. Krauze shows us how vivid, immediate and frightening history can be. (June)