Myth and Reality of the Mexican Miracle, 1946–1982

Abstract

Abstract In the decades after World War II, from the start of the Cold War to the Latin American debt crisis of 1982, Mexico’s authoritarian government, dominated by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI), made industrialization its top priority. The shift toward a manufacturing-based economy produced robust economic growth, rapid urbanization, and an array of structural changes. Simultaneously, the revolutionary efforts of the 1920s and 1930s to improve the material conditions of blue-collar workers and the rural poor were suspended or even reversed. Industrial growth took priority over increasing workers’ wages; modernist residential districts in the capital city took priority over collective ejidos in the countryside; universities took priority over rural schoolhouses; and a consumerist culture took priority over revolutionary cultural nationalism. Throughout the 1960s, many foreign and domestic observers agreed that the nation served as a model of Third World development: state-led capitalism, which combined industrial protectionism, resource nationalization, social expenditure, and foreign investment, had created an economic miracle and avoided political extremism in favor of stability. After the massacre of protesting students in the capital just days before the 1968 Olympic games, however, scholarly assessments soured. Subsequently, more evidence of political violence, media manipulation, and official corruption surfaced, leading to a crisis of political legitimacy. These sentiments were aggravated by mounting public debt, severe inequality, growing inflation, and periodic balance-of-payments crises, culminating in the region-wide collapse of 1982. The onset of a new reality, commonly called the neoliberal era, exposed the myths of the miracle as it drew to a close.