Greene was right: Mexico can gain power and glory Last Sunday I went to Mexico City's Azteca football stadium to watch the finale of Enrique Peña Nieto's campaign. Mr Peña, who will probably win this weekend's presidential election, likes to present a vision of can-do modernity. His faultless skin and pomaded hair, though, give him the look of a 1950s matinee idol - a retrogression that struck me as apposite from my perch in the bleachers. From there, the Azteca looked like one of those sweeping murals painted by Diego Riviera 60 years ago. Among the 100,000-strong crowd, there were taxi drivers; wizened campesinos with the complexions of raisins; mariachi performers; families on a day outing; and well-fed men in well-cut clothes exuding a quiet air of entitlement from behind their wraparound sunglasses. These are the fat-cat union leaders, colloquially known as "dinosaurs," who seem to get their claws into whatever public money is around and form the backbone of Mr Peña's party, the Institutional Revolutionary party. The PRI governed Mexico for an impressively corrupt, uninterrupted 71 years until the 2000 election. Its defeat ushered in democracy but not the dinosaurs" extinction. That so many people came to the rally spoke of the PRI's still impressive political machinery. Yet when I asked Pompeyo Hernandez, my neighbour in the bleachers, why he was there, he said: "The bus was free but I'm not going to vote for the PRI." It made me wonder how powerful the machine really was. I had first seen it in action in the mid-1990s in a small town in the backcountry badlands of Guerrero state. I was working then as a lowly consultant at the World Bank. It had financed a local project and now the local governor was to celebrate its opening. You could see him coming from miles off in a convoy of black 4x4s churning up the dust on the horizon. A party goon barked at a squad resting in the shade of the church to get off their asses. They cheered and waved as the governor pulled into the town square. He cut the ribbon, a band ratta-tat-tatted on snare drums and oompahed on tubas, a brief speech followed and then he drove off a half-hour later. The scene could have come from the pages of Graham Greene. Politically, it was impressively efficient, in a wry and cynical way - an ambiguity apparent again two decades later at the Azteca. Watching the zeppelin with television cameras buzzing above the crowd to project the celebration on to giant screens, it was clear the PRI had spent its 12 years out of power pimping up the ol" machine so that now it was back again, apparently renewed, like one of those cruisemobiles with souped-up suspensions. Some of the men in the stadium even wore snug black plastic wigs, which mimicked Mr Peña's gleaming hair so successfully that I only then realised how ridiculous his grooming was. It would all have worked 20 years ago. But today, such slickness - combined with Mr Peña's soap-opera-star wife and reportedly cosy relationship with Televisa, Mexico's biggest TV company - gets up many Mexican noses, especially his opponents. They worry, particularly, what another PRI presidency might mean. A step forward to the future as the fresh-faced Mr Peña claims, or back to the authoritarian ways of the PRI's past? Stirring those fears is Yo Soy 132, a student protest movement. To call it a "Mexican spring" is overdoing it. But it has prodded and embarrassed the PRI during the campaign, and will continue to do so, in ways impossible only a decade ago. Mexico, in short, is becoming dinosaur-repellent. So too, is Mr Peña (he says). And we should alter our views on the country, too. Greene did. Writing The Lawless Roads, he developed an "almost pathological hatred of Mexico," "a hateful country" filled with luckless figures, a scornful view similar to what many in the US still seem to feel for Mexico, especially its immigrants. Yet only one year later Greene wrote about Mexico again in probably his best novel, the compassion-filled story of The Power And The Glory and its doomed whisky priest who has run away from what he loves most, an illegitimate child. Greene's progression suggests that transformation - personal or political - is always possible, even in a country so rich with promise and yet so apparently stuck in its past. Everywhere, there is always hope. The writer is Latin America editor