Presidential March: Left, Right

Mexico's most popular guessing game in recent months has started with the phrase, "Quien es el tapado?"--Who is the hooded one? In other words, what man was the all-powerful Party of Revolutionary Institutions (P.R.I.) secretly choosing to be the country's next President? Last week the guessing was over. The P.R.I.'s choice is Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, 52, Secretary of Government in the Cabinet of incumbent President Adolfo Lopez Mateos. Diaz Ordaz' title obscured his real importance. As a combination Interior Minister and Home Secretary, he is Lopez Mateos' right-hand man.

Guided Democracy. Barring accidents or acts of God, the rest is foreordained. Next week Diaz Ordaz will be formally nominated at the party convention; he will then "campaign" for six months, showing himself from the back of an open truck in every important town. In elections next July, against two or three hapless opposition candidates, he will win the presidency with some 80% of the popular vote. On Dec. 1, 1964, he will take office from President Lopez Mateos.

Such is the one-party "guided democracy" that has evolved in Mexico since the Revolution of 1910, and it seems to suit the country well. The choice of a new President is as ritualistic as a papal succession. Under the rules, a candidate cannot toot his own trumpet; he must never give the slightest inkling that presidential ambitions have entered his modest head. Instead, his friends quietly start the bandwagon rolling and set about persuading the party powers that their man is ready for the No. 1 spot. The leaders of the P.R.I.'s trade-union wing, the peasant branches, P.R.I.-dominated businessmen's associations, the party's lower-echelon bureaucracy are all consulted. A half-dozen or more names may flash before the public. At last, a central core of party chieftains, a few ex-Presidents with influence and, most important, Mexico's current President, make the decision.

The one thing Mexicans could be fairly certain of was that the new man would be slightly right of center. By long tradition, Mexico's Presidents follow a political pendulum--right, left, right--and Lopez Mateos calls himself "left within the constitution." He nationalized and subdivided some 30 mil lion acres of land during his five years in office, bought out private power companies, nationalized the nation's cinemas. All the while, however, he tried to industrialize Mexico and encourage the creation of private capital. Reflecting this, his Cabinet was filled with men who stood to the right of him.

Diaz Ordaz was one of the outstanding men on the President's right. The lawyer son of a postal worker from the mountainous state of Puebla, he has built a quiet reputation for high intelligence through a steady succession of government jobs from minor state posts to Cabinet officer. He is also a shrewd politician. Though he is a practicing Catholic, he bowed to Mexico's revolutionary anticlerical tradition by standing outside Mexico City's fashionable La Profesa Church last year while his 21-year-old daughter Maria Guadalupe was inside getting married. Yet he has not pussyfooted against latter-day revolutionaries. As Lopez Mateos' Government Secretary, he crushed a 1959 railroad strike and jailed its leftist leaders. He signed the controversial warrants charging Mexico's top Communist (and top artist) David Siqueiros with "social dissolution" and confining him to jail. And Diaz Ordaz was the man who rigidly suppressed leftist demonstrations during the Cuban missile crisis.

Viva Zapata. Mexico's far left fought him bitterly. As his influence spread within P.R.I, councils, the Communist weekly Politico, printed a grotesque photograph of him on its cover with the caption: "He will not be President." Ex-President Lazaro Cardenas, the nation's foremost leftist and the man who nationalized foreign oil companies in 1938, pressed desperately for compromise candidates at least slightly to the left of Diaz Ordaz. But maturing Mexico has outgrown Cardenas; Lopez Mateos and the P.R.I.'s other leaders listened with respect, then respectfully ignored the 68-year-old leftist.

The decision to bypass Cardenas has its dangers. Though he has lost the personal power he once wielded, the revolutionary tradition he stands for still runs strong in Mexico. To flout it could split both P.R.I, and the country. Plainly, Diaz Ordaz' first duty as President-select is to bridge the division. And so he did last week, pronouncing himself "preoccupied with the campesino problem," promising that "the banner of Zapata will never be lowered" and professing sympathy for trade unionism and loyalty to the long-ago principles of the 1910 revolution.

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