Carlos Fuentes On EPN and PRI

Carlos Fuentes on EPN:

Peña Nieto slipped during the campaign. At a book fair last December he could not correctly name any volume that had marked his life. "This man hasn't read me, he has the right of not doing so," responded the literary heavyweight Carlos Fuentes. "What he doesn't have the right to do is to aspire to be president of Mexico based on ignorance." Some called him a "policy David Beckham". 

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Carlos Fuentes on PRI:

Above all, they [Mexican politicians negotiating NAFTA] were PRI-istas – members of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which ruled Mexico as a one-party, vote-buying dictatorship from 1929 to 2000. The PRI called itself the inheritor of the Mexican Revolution; but as literary giant Carlos Fuentes saw it in his epic novel The Death of Artemio Cruz, the party instead betrayed the revolution’s democratic values and stood for little more than the cynical accumulation of power and spoils – each generation of “new masters equally ambitious and rapacious.” Its regime was so crooked that when an opposition candidate looked set to win the 1988 presidential election, PRI bosses shut down the vote-tallying computers and declared their man the winner. By the 1990s, Mexico had one of the world’s highest number of billionaires even as its workers earned some of the world’s lowest wages. And its NAFTA negotiators considered themselves the smartest guys in the room – until the peso crashed in 1994, and with it the PRI dictatorship soon after.

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Carlos Fuentes passed away on in May, 2012. He would not have enjoyed the predicted outcome of today's vote.