Bicentennial Man: Ford '76 and Beyond
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El Dedazo
El Dedazo
Mexico was both an atypical Latin American country but, in other ways, fairly typical. Since the conclusion of the Mexican Revolution - a devastating war from 1913 to 1920 that broke her demographically and economically for years to come - it had not fallen victim to military coups or countercoups, and its government since 1929 had been ostensibly "revolutionary," rooted in socialist developmentalism. In practice, however, the veneer of democracy and principled, socialist-coded progressivism was just that, a veneer. The Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, had ruled without interruption or even any particularly organized opposition since 1929, a farce of a managed democracy in which aging party hacks - known colloquially as the dinosaurios, or dinosaurs - picked candidates for their loyalty and coziness with various factions. The PRI balanced genuine economic nationalism like the formation of the state oil entity of Pemex in 1937 with generally hewing to the American line in the Cold War's "Dirty War," and built their legitimacy with the Mexican public on a massive rise in the standard of living and some of the fastest economic growth in the world from the early 1940s to the mid-1970s while still retreating into a thuggish illiberalism, most typified by the brutal violence of the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968 that badly damaged the regime's reputation domestically and internationally. The PRI was referred to one time as a "perfect dictatorship," and that was perhaps true - it was a dictatorship not of a man nor a junta of military officials, but rather a dictatorship of a party, in which term limits and separation of powers were honored, but every election and transition of power was a foregone conclusion and the decisions and influence of the party superstructure sluiced through every component of society. [1]
Mexican officials of the PRI took great pride in the fact that officials served single, non-renewable six-year terms after which they were expected to retire quietly, and indeed held this up as evidence of the regime's non-authoritarianism; in December of 1982, it would be Jose Lopez Portillo whose term was coming to an end, and his successor needed to be chosen. Whatever merits there may have been to the six-year term in promoting a lack of personalism (even if it tangentially helped keep power in the hands of the dinosaurios of the party machinery and state bureaucracy), there was nothing democratic in the tradition of the incumbent President personally designating his successor, a process known as el dedazo, roughly translated as "pointing the finger." Upon taking office in 1976, Mexico had been mired in an economic crisis stemming from the quadrupling of the national external debt under his predecessor (and childhood friend) Luis Echeverria, under whom Lopez Portillo had served as finance minister. To his credit, Lopez Portillo had made attempts to significantly invest in the discovery of new oilfields across Mexico to better manage the country's economy and build out infrastructure, and had also built on small measures under Echeverria to open up the system and liberalize political opposition; however, his administration was also one of extreme corruption and the appointment of family members and friends to various crucial roles. The steady decline in oil prices beginning in August 1980 had badly damaged the country's finances as it had become even more dependent on revenues from Pemex, and by late 1981, when it was time to nominate a successor, Mexico's economy was suffering severe capital flight, brain drain, and rapid hyperinflation from the devaluation of the peso and a partial sovereign default at the start of the year.
The expected successor of Lopez Portillo for many years had been Jorge Diaz Serrano, the chief of Pemex and a long time PRI functionary who had been responsible for many of the investments in oil development and was generally regarded as one of the government's most competent administrators. However, the response to the decline in oil prices had been mismanaged, and he was quietly shunted off as ambassador to the Soviet Union in late 1981, to his deathbed in 2011 resentful at his scapegoating. Considering Lopez Portillo's deep, unyielding unpopularity and questions of corruption around his selections, that left in the fall of 1981 two viable options for him: his economic director, Miguel de la Madrid, and the Chairman of the PRI, Javier Garcia Paniagua. They were men of sharp contrasts; de la Madrid was a Harvard-educated economist, part of a young group of rising PRI reformists who were committed wholly to the system but saw severe flaws in it and viewed economic reforms first as the key to solving the spiraling crisis that had first begun in 1976 and accelerated in 1980-81. Garcia Paniagua, on the other hand, was a dinosaurio's dream, a decently accomplished former agricultural minister handed the party Presidency earlier in the year and widely viewed as being more in line with traditionally populist and distributionist PRI economic thinking, similar to Lopez Portillo himself. Though only forty-seven, he was a thorough party hack and apparatchik, exactly the kind of figure that the dinosaurios were bound to love.
A number of factors coalesced to influence Lopez Portillo's selection of Garcia Paniagua. [2] The first was that de la Madrid's "outsider-insider" status as a technocrat rather than a party figure worked against him and made him the clear second-runner of the two from the start. The second was that, post-Panama, the tide of anti-Americanism that had risen across Latin America cut against the "Hijo de Harvard" and his Amerophile economic and diplomatic philosophy, whereas Garcia Paniagua, though no Russophile, was more amenable to the trend of the Echeverria and Lopez Portillo years to continue to position Mexico as a leader of the Third World and Non-Aligned Movement. Miguel de la Madrid took his snub well, having not been expected to be chosen anyways, and his service in government ended not long thereafter.
Garcia Paniagua was forced to confront in the June 1982 Mexican elections, however, a much more fractious society than the one Lopez Portillo had faced in 1976. The economic crisis had passed its peak by that point but inflation stood at over 40%, protests and demonstrations were common, and tens of thousands of doctors, lawyers, accountants, bankers, and other professionals had decamped for greener pastures in the United States over the previous six years, a remarkable migration of brain drain. Farmers, one of the main pillars of PRI support, were demanding further land reforms; employees of the state threatened a general strike a week before the polls if they did not receive wage hikes to keep pace with skyrocketing inflation, mostly just to prove that they could. It seemed, for the first time, that the PRI needed Mexico more than Mexico needed the PRI.
The 1982 elections also featured what was, by Mexican standards, a genuinely competitive landscape. Pablo Emilio Madero, the candidate of the conservative National Action Party, once a controlled opposition that existed at the grace and pleasure of El Pri, would win thirty percent of the vote, an unprecedented performance by an opposition candidate, especially six years after the now-politically radioactive Lopez Portillo had been elected unopposed. The reforms of 1977 allowed left-wing partisans to organize, and the United Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), a communist-inspired outfit, held a massive rally on the Zocalo a few days before voting that was attended by as many as eighty thousand people in the heart of the capital. As oil prices rose and plateaued in the second half of 1982, the Mexican economy temporarily stabilized despite its chronic structural problems, offering Garcia Paniagua some relief ahead of his inauguration on December 1, but the forces that were bubbling up across Latin America - of frustrated middle and working class people rejecting the paternalist authoritarianism of the past, of economic crises, and of political violence - were coming for the Ditadura Perfecta, and 1982 had revealed the PRI creakier than ever, and in failing to earn 70% of the vote, Garcia Paniagua was immediately considered one of the politically weakest Presidents in Mexican history...
[1] Readers of Cinco de Mayo know that I find PRI-era Mexico endlessly fascinating; it's a really interesting blend of revolutionary nationalism and a vanguard one-party state, mixed in with the type of more banal corruption that unfortunately plagues a number of countries in Latin America and Asia. That is was a bunch of saggy old hacks running the show and not a junta is what I find so interesting and what sets its apart from military regimes elsewhere, and also draws some interesting parallels to the pre-1965 American South if you squint hard enough
[2] If you're not familiar with Mexican history, we've just rewritten the last forty years of Mexican political history here. No Miguel de la Madrid means the cientificos don't burrow their way into the PRI machinery, which means Carlos Salinas and Manuel Bartlett aren't running his campaign and administration, which means no disputed election of 1988, no NAFTA and thus no Chiapas Uprising or "tequila crisis" and that Luis Donaldo Colosio isn't shot in Tijuana in March 1994. This is not necessarily a good change; de la Madrid sucked as a President and Salinas, IMO, was a ruthless snake, but they did identify a number of problems in Mexico that were already coming to a head in the 1980-82 range and, whatever your thoughts on it, NAFTA has genuinely helped increase Mexico's standard of living and manufacturing prowess significantly in the years since. (And in a world where the PRC doesn't pursue Dengism and collapses instead of the USSR, as in this one, you're unlikely to see as much offshoring to Asia and so Latin America eventually is likely to benefit from that, too).
Boom, there you go. Can’t imagine Iran (a key axis of this coalition) would have much problem with that. Now just need Sadat’s sign-off…
Correct. Nowhere to hide in Rub Al-Khali
That was my thought process, yes
Some kind of shift to the right economically was probably inevitable by the time of the POD (Bob Hawke in Oz and Roger Douglas in NZ being the prime case study in this) but without the Reagan-Thatcher duo it’s probably nowhere near as hardcore or triumphalist in nature
That quote makes me wonder if you have any plans for its originator, Mario Vargas Llosa, to have a different political future here. Maybe he wins in 1990, be interesting to see him handles the Shinning Path, if they are have more power maybe they end up assassinating him or at least trying to.
I hadn’t thought about him, no, but that’s an interesting idea. Considering the shiny tailspin Peru is about to continue down he may be part of the backlash to them that coalesces in the early 1990s, sort of a conservative Luis Carlos Galán figure. With what one hopes is a more happy ending - or, as you suggest, maybe he gets capped and that inspires the backlash.
My thinking is the 1990s are when LatAm come out of their malaise/screw and the decade is more fondly remembered there than it is IOTL. Without a Tequila Crisis, Menemism, Brazil’s Cardoso-era hyperinflation, etc, and of course in Peru’s case no Fujimorismo
I think the US will be VERY interested in what happens with Mexico, maybe even floating an idea of partial privatization and economic reforms.
It’d be much harder to get Garcia Paniagua to bite on that considering which faction of the PRI old guard he hailed from compared to, say, Miguel de la Madrid (to say nothing of Salinas), but that may eventually have to be the path out
The Arabian Revolution
The Arabian Revolution
By July 30, 1982, the situation in the Middle East had changed dramatically from just a few days earlier. The Islamist, pro-Western President of Bangladesh, Ziaur Rahman, had ordered an expeditionary force of his country's soldiers to be formed and deployed to the Arabian Republic, ostensibly to defend the small number of Bangladeshi oilfield remittance workers but in practice to flex his country's muscles as a South Asian and Near Eastern power alike. The Indian subcontinent and the Persian Gulf had, since the age of antiquity, seen their economies greatly intertwined, especially during the age of British colonial rule, and now was no different. While the Bangladeshi expeditionary brigade would arrive far too late to have any impact on the Battle of Al Hofuf, which had already occurred before the announcement was made, it was taken as a clear example of what would become readily apparent throughout August 1982 - the Arabian Revolution to overthrow the House of Saud had begun, was irreversible, and the race for the rest of the Muslim world to scramble to pick at the scraps and prevent an Ikhwani state from forming in the Arabian Peninsula was wholly on.
The Saudi Loyalist force that left Riyadh on July 27 was intended to set out for the Eastern Province to seize or sabotage the oil infrastructure in an effort to punish the West for its failure to protect the House of Saud; rather than drive straight at Dammam, however, it instead deployed towards Al Hofuf, slightly south and inland. Al Hofuf was an old oasis town, critically sitting on a major road intersection that controlled routes from the Empty Quarter northwards, and from Qatar and the UAE westwards. Holding Al Hofuf would severely limit the ability of the small, poorly trained militaries of the Qataris and Emiratis from reinforcing the Sabrists by land, and would allow the SANG the ability to aggressively counterattack either north or south at their leisure. Most crucially, it was only three hundred kilometers east of Riyadh, less than a few hours' drive; it was important to both sides to hold it due to its proximity to both of their bases of power.
The Battle of Al Hofuf on July 28 was an infamous disaster for the Loyalists that essentially on that day ended the House of Saud's ability to project power. The "Sky Shield" was not named so for no reason, and as the SANG trucks and cars approached the city, the sound of sonic booms rumbled across the sky high above. The Royal Saudi Air Force was not large, but it was large enough to quickly rip through the enemy with air strikes, pounding the convoy mercilessly for ninety minutes of quick sorties as Iranian planes screened Al Jubail on their behalf and the European task force sat off the coast of Bahrain as a deterrent, a modern fleet in being. Three hundred men were killed in the initial air strikes and thousands wounded; Abdul Rahman, who was in an armored vehicle near the rear of the convoy, ordered a halt five kilometers from Al Hofuf and to dig in with mobile anti-aircraft equipment. That was when the second sortie arrived, this time including considerably more sophisticated Iranian aircraft. As many as five thousand of the elite SANG and other Loyalists were killed, and Abdul Rahman was wounded, presumed dead for several days until he reemerged in Abu Dhabi, having fled in an armored car along with several retainers. The Saudi Loyalists had, in the course of one day, been scattered and nearly totally defeated and proven the value of Sky Shield. Early in the evening of July 29, as the Loyalists retreated haphazardly back towards Riyadh or cities to its north - or fled towards the Qatari border - Sabri took to a television station in Al Jubail which was still broadcasting and announced, "God is great! By the Grace of Allah, the House of Saud has been deposed, and this Republic of Arabia is declared in all the holy lands of the Prophet!" This announcement was important for several reasons - rather than portray the Arabian Republic as secessionist it now laid claim to the whole of the Saudi territory, denounced the Sauds as completely overthrown, and in sharp contrast to the kind of Nasserist Arab socialism or its bastard cousin, Ba'athism, that was typically associated with republicanism in the Middle East, foregrounded Islam. This was meant to relieve the ulema and dissuade them from declaring a fatwa against Sabri and his co-conspirators for their role in deposing the House of Saud, but it did just as much to relieve Western powers who were quick to recognize that Sabri was no Nasser or Saddam, rather a figure not unlike Ziaur Rahman - the same Rahman who was quickly getting Bangladeshi forces deployed to Arabia as a peacekeeping force.
What unfolded over the first weeks of August, then, was nothing short of utter chaos. Western diplomats had been busy trying to hash out what a "post-Saudi Arabian peninsula" might look like. The Gulf monarchies - sparsely populated, poorly equipped - were seen as unreliable allies. In the space of a few days in July, Iranian planes had landed in Bahrain, a country with which it had close historical relations (and shared a Shia Muslim faith with) as a staging ground for operations in Sky Shield, and now it was an open question if the Iranians would ever leave the island. The biggest concern in Washington was the flow of oil from Eastern Province and how exactly Sabri would be able to control the Nejd; due to the relative lack of Arabophiles or Middle East policy experts at CIA or the State Department [1], the question of who would wind up in control of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina was less of a live concern.
That was not the case in the Levant. On August 1, 1982, a small force crossed the Jordan-Saudi Arabian border and took the city of Tabuk bloodlessly; the Jordanian Army had begun her invasion of the Hejaz, a land which its Hashemite royal family had once controlled and still regarded as having been seized from them by the House of Saud. On August 2, King Hussein of Jordan took to Jordanian television to announce a "humanitarian mission" to "preserve the Holy Cities" and prevent them falling into the hands of the Ikhwan, which was still highly active in western Saudi Arabia, especially with the collapse of state capacity over the previous six weeks. In a surprise, he further announced that Egypt would take part in this peacekeeping operation, in large part to keep "unholy" elements from socialist Yemen from threatening Mecca and Medina. On August 3, Egyptian paratroopers landed across the Saudi-Yemeni border, and Egyptian tanks joined Jordanian ones as they rolled south from Tabuk. The sign-off on this joint Jordanian-Egyptian "Mecca Mission," as it came to be known semi-officially, had come from the Carey White House directly as the live threat of the Ikhwan actually taking control of the Grand Mosque and declaring a caliphate from the ashes of the House of Saud became a live threat.
On both sides of Saudi Arabia, then, the House of Saud had seen her coasts cloven off, on one end by Sabri's new Republic and its Iranian and European aerial support, on the other a Jordanian invasion of the Hejaz that very quickly became an obvious expedition to restore Hashemite control over the Holy Cities that had been in their custody for centuries. The collapse of Saudi authority, and indeed the entire Saudi state, was accelerating as the month of August advanced, but there was yet one more factor that would provide a final death blow - Saddam Hussein, drawing down his expeditionary forces from Lebanon and Syria, who decided that the redrawing of maps in Arabia needed one more variable and on August 8 launched an invasion in the direction of Sakaka...
[1] You'd be surprised how little the US understood about this part of the world pre-1979 or even deep into the 1990s OTL, with so much focus aimed exclusively at the near abroad of LatAm or at Eastern Europe
I think a division no side is happy will happen, with Hashemites getting Hijaz, and Sabri getting the rest.
Of course, both sides will be very angry towards this compromise that is probably done under the threat of pulling support from them (Hashemites nominally, as their main goal was Hijaz and Holy Cities, while Sabri being extremely angry), but this will be the status-quo
Why would the Americans who are currently supporting the Jordanians or the British who will probably switch to supporting them cut off support in order to preserve Sabri. He initially seemed like a good bet to resolve the chaos but with an old and valued ally in play he's not needed anymore?
Because Hashemites seems not that interested in much of the Saudi Arabian land, except for Hejaz.
And currently, Sabri is the only thing that stands between Saddam and the oilfields.
I didn't read anything in the update saying that, King Hussein emphasising less mercenary reasons for the intervention is natural and the geography of the region means any intervention by the Jordanians is going to reach the Holy Cities first.
The North, possibly down to the Ha’il area
This is very possible, though poking the bear that holds the oil fields (and so far has seemed very game to play ball with the West) would be a remarkable strategic blunder on the UK’s part
I could see Jordan being totally fine with just Hijaz; this is unlikely to be an arrangement Sabri will swallow lightly
There’s really no way to avoid the Holy Cities becoming Jordanian/Hashemite at this point, the question essentially becomes A) how badly does Hussein want his family in charge of the rest of Arabia and how much blood will he spill to earn it and B) how much does Sabri’s legitimacy require him holding the cities in lieu of Jordan?
Pushing Sabri to burn the fields as a final act of spite would be disastrous but switching horses while giving Sabri a clear, safe and extremely profitable exit route could work very well
I was more thinking Hashemite monarchy with a Sabri enjoying a Bishops Avenue house and an unlimited account at Harrods.