parties. By doing so, the PRD signalled that while it wanted reforms, it was not dangerously radical.
Second, the PRD held occasional meetings with U.S. legislative and executive organs, including the National Security Council. Such meetings were intended to convey the PRD's program, including its demands for democracy and a more progressive economic agenda, but also to make clear the party's pragmatism, its reformist character.
Third and most important, perhaps, was the PRD's proclamation of its acceptance of capitalism and even neoliberalism. In May in New York, Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas told an assembly of bankers that he was prepared to follow the Chilean model. New York financiers reported that discussion was key in swinging capital to Cárdenas.
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, president of the PRD, met with the Mexican Co-ordinating Council of Entrepreneurs 6 International Viewpoint #292 cial, financial and industrial elite that his party represented a reasonable ap proach to Mexico's problems.
"Let nobody make a mistake," said Lopez Obrador, reading from a prepared statement, "we are not against those who with tenacity and effort risk capital, create jobs, obtain legal profits and are committed to the development of Mexico...
"We are not advocates of a moratorium [on paying the foreign debt], nor is our economic program the extreme opposite of the government's. We are not talking about a night and day change. It is only a question of getting rid of some of the sharp edges of neoliberalism and giving it a social orientation."
Cárdenas and the PRD succeeded in convincing the important players--the international bankers and the U.S government above all--that they could be trusted. The U.S. government and the banks then put pressure on Zedillo and the PRI to accept political power
PFCRN or PST) and the Partido Popular Socialista (PPS) both received less than 2% of the vote, and consequently lose their registration or ballot status.
Another PRI puppet party, the Workers Party (PT), headed by Alberto Anaya, fell from being the fourth to the fifth national political party. Anaya and the PT, once creatures of former president Carlos Salinas de Gortari, have apparently finally understood the political changes taking place in Mexico, and announce that they will not longer form alliance with the PRI.
The Mexican Democratic Party which descends from the Sinarquistas, Mexico's own quasi-tascist party of the 1930s, also got less than 2% and lost its registration. Out of tune with the times, this vestige of goose-stepping Mexican fascists seems to have gone out of business.
Posters saying "Don't vote for a politician vote for an ecologist!" touched the heart of the contempt which Mexicans have for the political fraud which permeates the political life of their country.
And the slogan "Mexico needs more green and less red" dramatised the violence which citizens suffer at the hands of the police and military. To hammer the point home, the Mexican Ecological Green Party (PVEM) held its
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