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Political Change in Mexico: Institutions and Identity

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GENERALS IN THE PALACIO: THE MILITARY IN MODERN MEXICO. By CampRoderic Ai. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. 278. $49.95 cloth.)
MEXICO'S ALTERNATIVE POLITICAL FUTURES. Edited by CorneliusWayne A., GentlemanJudith, and SmithPeter H. (La Jolla: Center for U.S.Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1989. Pp. 472. $19.95 cloth, $11.95 paper.)
THE MEXICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM IN TRANSITION. By CorneliusWayne A. and CraigAnn L. (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1991. Pp. 124. $11.95 paper.)

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Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 October 2022

Joseph L. Klesner
Joseph L. Klesner*
Affiliation:
Kenyon College
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Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 32 , Issue 2 , 1997 , pp. 184 - 200
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. Salinas said, “When you are introducing such a strong economic reform, you must make sure that you build the political consensus around it. If you are at the same time introducing additional drastic political reform, you may end up with no reform at all. And we want to have reform, not a disintegrated country.” Interview with Carlos Salinas, “A New Hope for the Hemisphere?” New Perspectives Quarterly 8, no. 1 (1991):8.

2. The terms institutions and personalism are used in different ways by students of Mexican politics. If by personalism one means the capacity to create a personal dictatorship, Mexican politics are not personalistic. Hence institutions are the sites of authority in Mexico, not individuals. But if by personalism one refers to the pervasiveness of patron-client relationships, Mexican politics are very personalistic.

3. In The Mexican Political System in Transition, Wayne Cornelius and Ann Craig place the same issues in a historically and institutionally richer context, providing perhaps the best introduction for those new to the study of Mexico. That work is drawn from Cornelius and Craig's contribution to Comparative Politics Today: A World View, 4th ed., edited by Gabriel A. Almond and G. Bingham Powell (Boston, Mass.: Little, Brown, 1988). Another excellent collection, although one benefiting more from hindsight than the one edited by Cornelius, Gentleman, and Smith, is The Politics of Economic Restructuring: State-Society Relations and Regime Change in Mexico, edited by Maria Lorena Cook, Kevin J. Middlebrook, and Juan Molinar Horcasitas (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1994).

4. Frank Brandenburg, who labeled the office of the Mexican president “the Liberal Machiavellian,” commented, “Mexicans avoid personal dictatorships by retiring their dictators every six years.” See Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 141.

5. “State and Society in Mexico: Must a Stable Polity Be Institutionalized?” World Politics 32, no. 2 (Jan. 1980):194–227.

6. Kenneth Johnson, Mexican Democracy: A Critical View (Boston, Mass.: Allyn and Bacon, 1971).

7. The destapamiento has been undergoing some change in the past two successions. Peter Smith describes the 1988 process in “The 1988 Presidential Succession in Historical Perspective,” in Cornelius, Gentleman, and Smith, Mexico's Alternative Political Futures.

8. Alan Knight, in his contribution to Mexico's Alternative Political Futures, observes about the Mexican crisis: “When did it start? Different dates have been suggested, going back at least to 1968 and even beyond. If this is indeed a period of endemic crisis, the product of serious structural faults rather than of recurrent crises, conjunctural events of the kind most political systems face, then it is a long-term crisis of at least twenty years duration. If you can have ‘permanent revolution’ …, then perhaps you can have ‘permanent crisis’ too. But eventually, ‘permanent crisis’ begins to sound self-contradictory” (p. 458). In Camp's “Political Modernization in Mexico: Through a Looking Glass” in The Evolution of the Mexican Political System, he argues that 1968 is the year from which the current political difficulties of the Mexican regime can dated. But as Jaime Rodríguez argues in the introduction to the same volume, scholars may be too inclined to interpret Mexican political history as discontinuous: “the tendency has been to interpret Mexican political history as a series of breaks with the past” (p. 7). The emphasis on crisis may grow out of an expectation of a new discontinuity, an expectation held by scholars and political actors alike.

9. Both Echeverría and López Portillo pursued electoral reform projects, and López Portillo also initiated an administrative reform program. Political as well as economic reforms have been items even higher on the agendas of de la Madrid and Salinas (1988-1994). For a discussion of political reform during the latter two presidencies and the Mexican propensity toward political reformism, see Stephen D. Morris, Political Reformism in Mexico: An Overview of Contemporary Mexican Politics (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995).

10. This theme is pursued further in Cornelius, “Mexico's Delayed Democratization,” Foreign Policy, no. 95 (Summer 1994):53–71.

11. For example, see Garrido, El partido de la revolución institucionalizada: La formación del nuevo estado en México (1928-1945) (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1982).

12. The Council of Freely Elected Heads of Government, Elections in Mexico, 3d report, 1 Aug. 1994 (Atlanta, Ga.: Carter Center, Emory University).

13. Camp notes that Salinas set a record for the most governors removed in his first year in office, exceeded only by Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) among presidents in the past half-century. See “Political Modernization in Mexico,” Evolution of the Mexican Political System, 261.

14. The most complete work on PRONASOL is Transforming State-Society Relations in Mexico: The National Solidarity Strategy, edited by Wayne A. Cornelius, Ann L. Craig, and Jonathan Fox (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1994).

15. See the studies in Opposition Government in Mexico, edited by Victoria E. Rodríguez and Peter M. Ward (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1995).

16. See Victoria E. Rodríguez and Peter M. Ward, Political Change in Baja California: Democracy in the Making? (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1994), esp. 106–16; also, Rodríguez and Ward, Policymaking, Politics, and Urban Governance in Chihuahua: The Experience of Recent PANista Governments (Austin: U.S.-Mexican Policy Studies Program, Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, University of Texas, 1992).

17. Martin C. Needier, Mexican Politics: The Containment of Conflict, 3d ed. (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), 82.

18. The Failure of Presidential Democracy, edited by Juan J. Linz and Arturo Valenzuela (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).

19. For discussion of these possibilities, see Leopoldo Gómez and Joseph L. Klesner, “Mexico's 1988 Elections: Beginning of a New Era of Mexican Politics?” LASA Forum 19, no. 3 (Fall 1988):1-8; and José Antonio Crespo, “Dominación y hegemonía en los sistemas partidistas de México y Japón,” Foro Internacional 34, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1994):437–56.

20. See Leopoldo Gómez and John Bailey, “La transición política y los dilemas del PRI,” Foro Internacional 31, no. 1 (July-Sept. 1990), 57–87, esp. p. 73.

21. Jorge Alcocer V. and Rodrigo Morales M., “Mitología y realidad del fraude electoral,” Nexos, no. 166 (Oct. 1991), 27–33, p. 30.

22. “The New PRI: Recasting Its Identity,” in Dismantling the Mexican State, edited by Rob Aitken et al. (London: Macmillan, 1995).

23. One could argue, based on the 1994 elections, that Mexico had developed two separate two-party systems, with the PAN facing the PRI in the north and the PRD facing the PRI in the south, and all three competing in a multiparty system in the Mexico City area. See Joseph L. Klesner, “The 1994 Mexican Elections: Manifestation of a Divided Society?” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 11, no. 1 (Winter 1995):137–49. More recent state-level elections seem to indicate that the PAN is penetrating the south too, while the PRD continues to sputter.

24. For a useful account by a journalist, see Alan Riding, Distant Neighbors: A Portrait of the Mexicans (New York: Vintage, 1984).

25. See, for example, Martin Edwin Anderson, “Civil-Military Relations and Internal Security in Mexico: The Undone Reform,” in The Challenge of Institutional Reform in Mexico, edited by Riordan Roett (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995); Stephen J. Wager, “The Mexican Military Approaches the Twenty-First Century: Coping with a New World Order,” and Wager and Donald E. Schultz, “The Zapatista Revolt and Its Implications for Civil-Military Relations and the Future of Mexico,” both in Mexico Faces the Twenty-First Century, edited by Donald E. Schultz and Edward J. Williams (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995). The most recent book-length treatment was The Modern Mexican Military: A Reassessment, edited by David Ronfeldt (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1984).

26. For a variety of views, mostly of Mexican scholars, on what should define Mexican national security, see Mexico: In Search of Security, edited by Bruce Michael Bagley and Sergio Aguayo Quezada (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction, 1993).

27. Wager, “The Mexican Military Approaches the Twenty-First Century,” p. 66.

28. My sense is that this observation is a little less true in Mexico than among those writing about Mexico in English. In studying a centralized authoritarian regime, scholars have analyzed politics at the center.

29. An example is Rodríguez and Ward's Opposition Government in Mexico. An earlier example of a break with the centralist tendency in political analysis is Electoral Patterns and Perspectives in Mexico, edited by Arturo Alvarado (La Jolla: Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies, University of California, San Diego, 1987), in which mostly Mexican scholars explored electoral developments in particular states and regions of Mexico in the 1980s.

30. See Purcell and Purcell, “State and Society in Mexico,” 195.