Before there was Donald Trump to call out Mexico, there was novelist Mario Vargas Llosa, who died at the age of 89 in April. Critics recalled The Time of the Hero (1963), Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (1977), The War of the End of the World (1981), and his Nobel Prize for literature in 2010. The gifted Peruvian spoke the truth to power, and one of his great insights escaped notice.

In 1990, Vargas Llosa described Mexico as “the perfect dictatorship … the permanence not of one man but of an unmovable party.” The reference was to Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which has been in power since the 1920s. The televised conference, organized by Octavio Paz, then canceled the next round of talks at which Vargas Llosa was scheduled to speak. For Mexican journalist Federico Campbell, “this proves the intolerance of the PRI.” He had a point, but there was more to it than intolerance.

The PRI began in 1929 with the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, renamed the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana in 1939 and in 1946 the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. In a practice known as el dedazo, PRI presidents picked their successors, and validated their choices in fake elections. The people were not fooled and the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City served up an opportunity for protest.

On Oct. 2, 1968, Mexican troops opened fire on “hundreds of student demonstrators, calling for greater democracy.” According to Claudia Sierra Campuzano, author of History of Mexico: An Analytical Approach, “the army surrounded the square and fired from every angle on thousands of youths, leaving hundreds of dead and wounded, thousands of arrests.” As the author told The New York Times, the regime followed with “the persecution and imprisonment of student leaders.” The attack became known as the Tlatelolco massacre, and it was covered up by the PRI regime.

President Diaz Ordaz and Interior Minister Luis Echeverria faced no charges and in 1970 Echeverria became president. On June 10, 1971, government-trained paramilitary forces attacked peaceful protesters at the Santo Tomás campus of the National Polytechnical Institute. An estimated 120 perished in what has become known as the Corpus Christi Massacre. Nobody faced charges and the PRI regime continued to quash dissent.

In 2001, president Vincente Fox of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN) ordered the creation of a “special prosecutor for the crimes of the past,” but nothing of substance came to light. The alleged reformer continued the coverup, but the people had not forgotten.

In 2014, students from the Ayotzinapa Normal School boarded busses for an event to commemorate the 1968 massacre. After an encounter with Mexican police and military forces, the group of 43 mysteriously disappeared. The PRI government of Enrique Peña Nieto charged that a drug gang killed the students and incinerated their bodies. Amnesty International charged that Peña Nieto was covering up the truth. Parents of the 43 mounted a caravan to publicize the crime but former president Vincente Fox told them they “need to accept reality” and move on.

In 2018, president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional, also known as the Morena party, pledged to “never ever use the military to repress the Mexican people.” On the other hand, he released no new information on the 1968 massacre. Enter Claudia Sheinbaum, Mexico’s first female president, also of the Morena party.

In her first press conference last Oct. 2, president Sheinbaum called the 1968 massacre “one of the greatest atrocities experienced in Mexico in the second half of the 20^th century.” According to Sheinbaum, “Gustavo Diaz Ordaz, the then president and commander in chief of the Armed Forces, ordered the repression against students to whom he had promised dialogue but who were killed and imprisoned.”

Before his death in 1979 at the age of 68, Diaz Ordaz mentioned the 1968 massacre only twice. In his memoirs, released in 1997, the former president accuses the student movement of “assassinating its own members.” Luis Echeverria denied all responsibility, never spent a day in jail, and died in 2022 at the age 100. In the manner of all Mexican presidents since the 1968 massacre, Claudia Sheinbaum failed to release a full list of the victims.

Sheinbaum apologized for the massacre and claimed that the nation’s security forces would never be used “to attack or repress the people of Mexico.” That echoed Lopez Obrador, whose pledge to uncover the truth about the students who disappeared in 2014 went unfulfilled. Last month, Mexican officials detained a retired judge over missing evidence in the case.

President Sheinbaum has kept rather quiet about the 2014 students. Felipe de la Cruz, one of the Ayotzinapa parents, told reporters that a “pact of silence continues to reign.” If that recalls the coverups of 1968 and 1971 it would be hard to blame those who see the connection.

Mexicans can be forgiven for believing that Sheinbaum, Lopez Obrador, and Vincente Fox are essentially stunt doubles for the PRI, and that Mario Vargas Llosa was right. In the style of Fox, who bitterly opposed Trump’s border wall, Sheinbaum seems more agitated about the American president than her own country’s problems. This comes after Lopez Obrador allowed cartels to transport millions of illegals through Mexico to the U.S. border, where the Biden-Harris administration let them in with no criminal background checks, health records, English language ability, or job prospects.

Last year, Mexico received $64.7 billion in remittances, the vast majority from Mexicans living in the United States. “These billions are often subsidized by U.S. taxpayers,” noted Victor Davis Hanson. “America’s local, state and federal governments provide billions of dollars in food, housing and health care entitlements that allow Mexico’s citizens, illegally residing inside the United States, to free up the cash to be sent home.”

In effect, the United States has been propping up Mexico’s perfect dictatorship for decades.

The first president to challenge the status quo is Donald Trump, who seeks to target the Mexican cartels now labeled as terrorists. Sheinbaum rejects any “opportunity for the U.S. to invade our sovereignty,” and denies charges that the Mexican government is allied with drug cartels. “If there is such an alliance anywhere,” proclaimed Sheinbaum, “it is in the U.S. gun shops that sell high-powered weapons to these criminal groups.” And so on, in classic style, with the sound of a barrel being scraped.

Like those famous San Francisco Democrats in 1984, Mexico always blames America first. For further reading on Mexico’s oldest grievance with the United States, see “The War of Mexican Aggression,” by Odie B. Faulk, which first appeared in the August 1987 edition of Chronicles.