Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968–2000

Abstract

In Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968 – 2000, Dolores Trevizo focuses on a paradox in late twentieth- century Mexico: while peasant groups constituted the base of electoral support for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), their uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s were pivotal to the demise of the regime. The author posits that by focusing on understudied nonrevolutionary social movements we can better understand how these peasant movements transformed Mexico’s political system. In particular, Trevizo argues that corporatism ultimately estranged peasants from the regime and that what began as protests by peasants over land evolved into an oppositional social movement led by agrarian capitalists. While Mexico’s implementation of International Monetary Fund – mandated austerity programs in the 1980s disproportionately affected workers and peasants, the roots of these groups’ discontent reached further back. In fact, the PRI began to lose its legitimacy among these groups when, lacking funds, the party was unable to continue its practice, begun in earnest in the 1960s and reaching its peak during Luis Echeverría’s administration (1970 – 1976), of buying support through patronage of peasants and workers. The PRI’s legitimacy further eroded when the party increasingly turned to armed suppression of social unrest. It is at this moment when, as Trevizo shows, peasants, workers, and businessmen formed independent organizations through which they sought to defend their interests.Crucially, these organizations began to voice their demands as the rights of individual citizens rather than of clients of the PRI. Eventually, discontent with the ruling party led to electoral support for two opposition parties, the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (PRD) and the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), and, as the author suggests, this protest against government institutions ultimately led to Mexico’s democratization. Trevizo demonstrates that to understand the democratization movements of the late twentieth century we must turn to the 1960s, the moment before the austerity programs of the 1980s. This is critical since these earlier, repressed social movements “still contributed to seemingly small policy shifts” (p. 40) and eventually increased the power of opposition groups in the process toward democratization. It is this latter point that is at the center of Trevizo’s contribution to scholarship: that nonviolent social movements can advance legislative change in the long run, even in politically repressive regimes. She takes care to note that while global trends certainly influenced Mexico, it was predominantly domestic social movements that had longer- lasting effects on Mexican politics. In particular, it was rural social movements, with the aid of agrarian capitalists, which led to this democratic opening.The pivot in Trevizo’s argument about Mexican democratization is the student movement of 1968. Indeed, the author cites 1968 as the seminal moment for urban protest, the linchpin that allowed radicalized social movements to focus their efforts and the event whose aftermath eventually led to the foundation of the National Commission on Human Rights. It was also, in her interpretation, the students of 1968 who crucially influenced the spread of democratic ideals beyond urban spaces. I agree up to a point with these statements, but one must be careful with placing too heavy an emphasis on the student movements of 1968 in explaining their impact on the democratization of Mexico. While the students who took up the banner of 1968 were crucial in defining late twentieth- century Mexico, too much historical weight has been placed on them for allegedly sparking prodemocracy ideals throughout Mexico. In fact, Trevizo’s own research shows that in the countryside it was peasants who began challenging the legitimacy of the state before urban students began marching for their own demands.This book is at its strongest and most convincing in the first chapter, where Trevizo expertly engages with social movements literature and paints a broad and easy- to- follow narrative of social movements in Mexico. The argument unravels a bit when attempting to explain how student identity and the ensuing student movement gave birth to Mexico’s prodemocracy movements, because Trevizo seems to accept too readily that “at all levels of the state, government officials, rank- and- file soldiers, and various police forces” believed they were protecting Mexico from communist youth in suppressing the student movement (p. 69). This was certainly the party line, and it echoed Cold War rhetoric, but the roots of the repression were certainly more complex. While Trevizo relied on documents from the US National Security Archive and materials from Mexico’s National Commission on Human Rights, she rarely mentions Mexico’s own national security archives or those materials pertaining to 1968 contained within them, which would have provided a broader perspective on the internal workings and beliefs of the Díaz Ordaz administration. Despite this, the book makes a significant contribution to our understanding of how democracy emerged from the PRI’s worn- out corporatist tactics and how a weak civil society coalesced to challenge the party’s authority and rebuild democratic institutions. The book also and especially highlights the agency of peasants in taking PRI mandates and using them to build their own arguments against the regime. The book will be of particular value to scholars interested in analyzing Mexico’s political shifts at the end of the twentieth century.