On 'Governability' in Mexico

Abstract

It is difficult to find an evaluation of the Mexican political system that is dispassionate and realistic. Mexican authors are constrained by powerful national traditions that restrict their range of discourse and by the wide embrace of official and officially-tolerated patronage systems which include a degree of censorship, sometimes none too subtle. Foreign journalists, however much they may know, generally abandon the task of overall interpretation because a broad synthesis is so hard to attain and, in any case, could require more effort from their readership than they have the right to demand. Foreign academics must therefore operate in the vacuum created by an international opinion that is (in relation to the importance of the country) remarkably uninformed, and a Mexican climate of opinion that is ultra-sensitive and to a significant extent manipulated by the national powers-that-be. It became almost a tradition in the 1950s and 1960s that visiting scholars with a liberal cast of mind would produce interpretations of the contemporary Mexican scene that were essentially optimistic and pro-government. Corruption, repression, and injustice received some attention in these studies, of course, but the dominant theme was social and economic progress, made possible by Mexico's remarkable record of political stability. The massacre of several hundred students in downtown Mexico City in October 1968 produced a revulsion against this type of interpretation during the 1970s-a change of tone made all the more drastic because the administration of President Echeverria (1970-6) itself launched vehement attacks on the record of previous administrations (notwithstanding the fact that Echeverria had been Secretary of Government in charge of internal security in 1968). The change in tone was also associated with wide intellectual trends, including a diminished confidence in the solidity of liberal values and interpretations, and the reappearance of academic Marxism after two decades of inversion.