El régimen priísta frente a las clases medias, 1943–1964

Abstract

In this study of Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional, Tiziana Bertaccini makes the case that scholars should take the party seriously. The mid-twentieth-century PRI, she argues, was more than a hollow appendage of the presidency or the Mexican state; it had a real ideology and institutional life, an extensive organizational apparatus that reached every corner of the country, and a complex structure that was flexible enough to adapt to evolving conditions. Indeed, far from being a static, monolithic institution that dominated the country “for more than 70 years,” as is often said, the party and its forerunners, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR, 1929 – 38) and the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM, 1938 – 46), changed significantly over time. Bertaccini suggests that one such shift in the character of the party took place in the early to mid-1940s, as the PRM and later the PRI moved away from a flirtation with socialist principles under President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 40) and back toward a liberal tradition that she characterizes as the dominant ideology of the Mexican Revolution. Since Cárdenas’s nationalist, redistributive policies are often described as the delayed fulfillment of some of the promises of the revolutionary decade, Bertaccini’s assertion that cardenismo was an aberration is somewhat provocative; but leaving aside broader debates about the nature of the revolution (which are not the focus of this book), it is certainly true that both the ideological orientation and the architecture of the Mexican regime were in transition after 1940.A key part of this shift, Bertaccini goes on, is reflected in the party’s efforts at that time to incorporate the urban middle classes into its ranks. These groups were growing in numbers and influence as Mexico’s cities expanded, and party leaders worried that they could become a base of support for conservative politicians opposed to “revolutionary” principles. It was in this context that the Confederación Nacional de Organizacio-nes Populares (CNOP) was created in 1943 to represent the ruling party’s “popular sector” alongside federations representing industrial workers and the rural peasantry. The CNOP was an unwieldy and amorphous umbrella organization encompassing civil servants, professionals, intellectuals, market vendors, participants in the informal economy, residents of the colonias populares growing up on the fringes of Mexican cities, and many other groups besides. Nonetheless, it became the most powerful wing of the PRI, largely through its development of an effective web of clientelistic relationships offering assistance to its members in dealings with local and federal authorities in exchange for their political loyalty and support. Reflecting the CNOP’s clout during the decades after its establishment, members of the popular sector held many of the key executive positions in the Mexican government and the largest number of seats in congress.Bertaccini effectively draws on a range of sources, including party statutes and manifestos, recently released interior ministry political reporting, and interviews with former PRI officials, to explain both how the selection of the party’s candidates and other internal processes were meant to work in theory and how they actually worked in practice. It should be noted, however, that despite what the book’s title suggests about its subject, the author only really turns her attention to the middle classes in the second half of this work, after a lengthy analysis of the PRI’s ideology and procedures. Her attention to detail in documenting how the party was meant to function on paper is at times excruciating, but she has performed a valuable service by bringing this information together and placing it in context. Unfortunately, when Bertaccini does take up the subject of the PRI’s relations with the middle classes, the group remains vaguely defined and largely voiceless. With her focus on the CNOP, she essentially equates “middle classes” with the membership of the PRI’s popular sector, even though the two groups were clearly not coterminous. Nor is it clear how the middle classes as a whole responded to the PRI’s efforts to bring them into the party’s big tent; if some found incorporation into the CNOP to be advantageous, what of others who might have remained aloof? Moreover, this account of politics within the PRI only goes so far in revising the image of a political system dominated by the Mexican president and his closest collaborators. While Bertaccini does show that a range of actors were involved in shaping political outcomes at all levels, she also describes how the interior minister and the president of the republic did indeed have ultimate control over the selection of candidates and other key decisions. Nonetheless, this study is a welcome addition to the growing literature on postrevolutionary Mexico, and Bertaccini is ultimately successful in drawing our attention to the importance of a sound understanding of the functioning of the PRI in general and of the party’s relationship with the middle classes in particular.