Victory has a thousand fathers. Defeat is an orphan.
A victory for Ernesto Zedillo. The President made sure that the vote would be clean and the results, even with the possibility of a defeat for his own party, would be respected.
Zedillo will pass into history as the President who confirmed the era of democracy in Mexico and consolidated the transition that made it possible. We citizens should be grateful to Zedillo for his conduct and protect him from the long knives of an embittered and vengeful PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party).
A victory for Jose Woldenberg and his Federal Electoral Institute.
With rigour and punctuality, they respected and demanded respect for the laws of the election. Thanks to Woldenberg and the IFE, violence was avoided in the battle, and a peaceful transition was assured up to now.
A victory for Cuauhtemoc Cardenas, the leader of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), for not having surrendered to the seduction of triumph, upholding, in contrast, a proper space for the left, without which, in ever-changing circumstances, the right can believe that it has the right to act without heeding the rights of others.
Cardenas maintained his identity and, as a consequence, a territory for the renewed left that Mexico requires. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador's PRD victory in the Federal District [Mexico City] gives the left an immediate opportunity to measure up against the PRI in defeat as well as to the triumphant PAN (National Action Party).
A victory for Vicente Fox and his obstinate tenacity to defy challenges that in his day seemed overwhelming. A victory for Fox over the shadows and suspicions that surrounded him and which the president-elect tried to eradicate in his election-night victory speech.
I think that all of us Mexicans accept his message of openness and conciliation. I think that we should also remain alert so that feeling the authority of victory - the old moralistic PAN tendencies toward clericalism, homophobia and misogyny - don't reappear.
A victory for democracy: to the degree that this vote has been abundant and free. What must be done now is to complete the triumphant picture of the opposition with the presidential race, with that of the new oppositions, the PRI and the PRD, in the legislature. Fox needs pluralist and combative houses so that the transition doesn't get lost, reverting to the historical model - almost the law of gravity - of Mexican authoritarianism. Fox's call for tolerance and dialogue does not exclude, it reclaims what PRIism took so long to accept: criticism, adversity, liberty and plurality of opinion.
A victory for all. For the first time since 1911, the opposition wins the election in credible and free elections.
This is a historical event. Confirming it demands greater vigilance than ever from the citizenry so that political practices may be in accord with democratic will.
A victory for Francisco Labastida, the PRI presidential candidate, to the paradoxical degree that his defeat forces the PRI to become the opposition and to create itself as a viable political formation in a democratic environment.
If a resentful and vengeful PRI frustrates the normal activities of a Fox presidency, it will dig its own grave. On the other hand, if the democratic and regenerating elements within the PRI take advantage of the defeat to get rid of the party's dinosaurs, they will rediscover the party's capital and its dynamics - the political, the social, the defence of the nation, the cultural impulse - that gave it legitimacy until 1960.
A victory for two opposite and now converging tendencies of Mexican history: the tradition of change and the conservative tradition.
The majority of voters who were fed up with 71 years of the PRI won the election. But they won it under the banners of a conservative tradition. How long will the marriage last? Twenty years ago I predicted - or, rather, imagined - a PAN president in my novel, Christopher Unborn. In it, the PAN president had to govern with a PRIist bureaucracy. He had to put up with the weight of PRI buffalos as well, whose considerable and instinctive loyalty always rests with the incumbent president. And finally, he had to confront Mexico's difficult and constant problems: poverty, over-population, health, housing, education, human rights, ecology, corruption, minorities.
A victory for Mexico if the new administration, from December 1st on, gives clear evidence that it wants to and knows how to bring new and firm solutions to these problems. Roosevelt did it with his "New North American Treaty" in the first 100 days of his first term. Lazaro Cardenas did it between 1934 and 1940. We hope that Vicente Fox, to whom I send my best wishes for his success and for his undeniable triumph, can also accomplish it.
(c) 2000, Carlos Fuentes. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.