Power from Experience: Urban Popular Movements in Late Twentieth Century Mexico

Extract

Power from Experience: Urban Popular Movements in Late Twentieth Century Mexico. By Paul Lawrence Haber. University Park: Penn State Press. 2006. 320p. $55.00.

With social peace in Mexico unraveling just five years after the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was voted from power in 2000, it would seem an apt time for a new book-length study on urban popular movements in Mexico. This is ironic because by the end of the twenthieth century, most Mexicans were optimistic about the possibility that competitive, fair elections would settle questions of authority and law and that political parties would aggregate the interests of the electorate. However, half a decade later, disputes over federal elections generated mass demonstrations from primary to final balloting, urban protests repeatedly paralyzed downtown Mexico City, an ongoing war between drug cartels left thousands dead in the north and west of the country, riots in the village of Atenco near the capital turned deadly, human rights accusations marred police and military, and by the dawn of the new Calderon administration at the end of 2006, intractable plantones (occupations) and paramilitary violence were bringing federal troops into the sleepy colonial city of Oaxaca.