On the political consequences of privatisation: the case of Teléfonos de México

Abstract

This article examines the political consequences of the most important single privatisation in Mexico, that of the national telecommunications company, Telmex. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, diverse observers of Mexico claimed that, as the government pursued a dramatic privatisation programme as part of a broader plan to liberalise the economy, democratic growth would be encouraged. This argument is challenged in the case of the Telmex privatisation. It is shown how privatisation generated new resources that were channelled to lubricate corporatist relations and that the so-called new unionism emerging from the telephone workers union did not represent a departure from, but a culmination of, traditional state-labour relations in Mexico.