All the Presidente's Men

Amid an international crisis, scheming politicians vie for power in Mexico.

Carlos Fuentes (© Paulina Lavista)

THE EAGLE'S THRONE

A Novel

By Carlos Fuentes

Translated from the Spanish by Kristina Cordero

Random House. 336 pp. $26.95

Every six years, a Mexican president's term comes to an end, and Mexicans turn their eyes, uneasily and even fearfully, toward the ritual of a new president's selection and ascension to the "Eagle's Throne." Officially, this has always been decided by national election, even during the 70 years when the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution held power and the only "election" that mattered was the furtive process by which the outgoing president chose his successor. Even now, as President Vicente Fox concludes his term and candidates from three different parties have a legitimate chance to win the election in July, many Mexicans still believe that the real process is happening out of sight -- "in the shadows," as Carlos Fuentes writes, "where real power is wielded."

Mexicans watch their election campaigns as if scrutinizing a murky body of water, trying to decipher what every ripple, bubble or splash indicates about what is happening beneath the surface. Rumors say the polls are manipulated by the pro-business media barons. Whom does Carlos Slim, the nation's most powerful magnate, want to win? Whom do the corrupt union bosses and the narcos favor? And isn't it true that the Machiavellian ex-president Carlos Salinas, back from his exile in Ireland, is really pulling the strings?

Such speculative machinations are the subject of Fuentes's The Eagle's Throne , published in 2002 in Mexico and now appearing for the first time in an energetic English translation by Kristina Cordero. Years ago, I sat in on a wonderful college course taught by Fuentes, and I distinctly recall him saying that he didn't like science fiction because "the future doesn't exist." The Eagle's Throne is set in 2020, but it's a futuristic novel that subverts the genre's pretensions by refusing to imagine a world much changed. In this 2020, a 93-year-old Fidel Castro still rules Cuba, the Rolling Stones are still touring, and undocumented migrants still pour across the violent U.S. border.

Alas, in this case, the world in turn has subverted the author's pretensions by changing a great deal in the short time between the novel's completion and its publication. People in Fuentes's 2020 still remember the Y2K "millennium bug" rather than 9/11, which is unmentioned in the book. It's the war on drugs, rather than any specter of terrorism, that drives the U.S. war machine. And while it's easy to believe that in 2020 Mexicans will remember George W. Bush -- just think of how that border "wall" is destined to loom in their national consciousness -- it's difficult to imagine he'll still be the subject of so many commonplace insults: "the despicable Bush Jr.," "Junior, a totally clueless man, a ventriloquist's dummy." Fuentes, writing before the 2003 Iraq invasion, misreads the nature of Bush's so-called imperial presidency, which is depicted here as driven solely by opinion polls, Congress and news media opinion: "The executive branch only gets its way in so far as it sides with all these forces."

In Fuentes's 2020, the United States has invaded and occupied Colombia. The Mexican president has called for an end to the occupation and refused to lower oil prices. In retaliation, the United States, which controls all of Mexico's communications systems, has cut off the country's Internet, telephones, faxes -- everything. ("Y2K" is invoked to provide some explanation of how this might happen.) And so the novel's characters are forced to communicate by letter, in violation of their politicians' creed never to leave anything in writing.

If this dire political crisis soon seems mostly forgotten by the book's characters, it is because this is essentially a satiric novel whose real target is the way politics and presidential succession work in Mexico now. The somewhat cumbersome futuristic framework merely provides Fuentes with a rationale for launching an epistolary novel in the exuberantly cynical manner of Les Liaisons Dangereuse s.