Mexican President Research Articles

Well‐being in the context of Indigenous heritage management: A Hach Winik perspective from Metzabok, Chiapas, Mexico

AbstractIn this article, we examine what local well‐being means in the contexts of collaborative heritage management and national development in Mexico. Driven by the request of Lacandon Mayas (including the second author) who live in Puerto Bello Metzabok, Chiapas, Mexico, in 2018, we engaged in archeological consolidation and heritage management to promote local tourism and sustainable economic development. This collaboration raised a series of ethical and practical questions of how to engage with the Eurocentric project of development. Addressing these issues has become critical, as the Mexican president's signature infrastructure project, Tren Maya (Maya Train), is designed to promote nationwide development via increased cultural heritage tourism in Chiapas and southern Mexico. Through critical reflection on experiences with Metzabok community members, we address Eurocentrism and colonialism by enacting a Lacandon (i.e., Hach Winik) buen vivir. This form of well‐being is relational and communal and creates a common good that includes more‐than‐humans. Via this critical perspective, we argue that a decolonial project can use the tools of development as an initial step in creating Indigenous well‐being.

The Legacy of President Lázaro Cárdenas for Health Care Reform in Today's Mexico.

Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador's historic election victory in 2018 marked a sharp break from past decades of neoliberal socioeconomic policies. López Obrador campaigned on the promise of deep reform, with health care high on his agenda. The public health care sector had been decimated by decades of budget cuts, eroding workers' morale and patients' confidence, and crippling all aspects of the system. This article looks back to the creation of the nation's public health care system in the early twentieth century during the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). This "universal" system was designed to implement a central social justice goal of the Mexican Revolution of health care for all. The program rested on two pillars: providing care to the nation's vast, impoverished rural population and actively engaging communities in their own health care. Our objective is to critically assess the two presidents' health care initiatives within the distinct historical contexts of their administrations.

La búsqueda. Siguiendo huellas metafóricas en un margen urbano

Former Mexican President Felipe Calderón launched the war ondrugs in 2006 as a strategy to dismantle vast drug trafficking networks. That war has cost the lives of thousands of people, many of whom are buried in mass graves. By focusing on a single day in the search for bodies, this ethnography describes and analyzes one of the brutal aftereffects of this security strategy. One key topic is the different ways in which actors stake out the rights of the lifeless bodies in these graves, from the mothers who dig into the earth to find tesoros(treasures) to the state apparatus that attempts to control the process.

Medals, Rings, and Olympic Dreams: A Review Essay of Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, eds., Olimpismo

Medals, Rings, and Olympic Dreams: A Review Essay of Antonio Sotomayor and Cesar R. Torres, eds., <i>Olimpismo</i>

Policing the Mexican Past: Transitional Justice in a Post-authoritarian Regime

Policing the Mexican Past: Transitional Justice in a Post-authoritarian Regime

“SUCH A RADICAL ESSENCE”: POLITICAL SOCIALIZATION AMONG VICTIMS’ RELATIVES IN THE MEXICAN WAR ON DRUGS AND CRIME*

In 2006, Mexican President Felipe Calderón started a “war” against criminal groups that led to the murder and disappearance of hundreds of thousands of people. In response, the Movement for Peace with Justice and Dignity was formed by the victims’ relatives and allied activists in 2011, giving rise to various forms of political contention to demand justice and halt the so-called war. I analyze the biographical outcomes of this type of involvement in social movements. My argument is that the participants’ lives have been affected in three main ways: a reconfiguration of their sociability networks, the development of know-how and expertise, and a renegotiation of their worldviews that has turned political contention into a crucial feature of self. Following recent calls, this research provides evidence to deepen our theoretical and empirical understanding of the effects of socialization within and by social movements and of the consolidation of biographical outcomes through cognitive-relational processes.

Using the Comparative Agendas Project to Understand Policy Priorities in Presidential Agendas in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico

The Comparative Agendas Project (CAP) is an initiative that has made the comparative study of policy agendas possible. This article introduces a dataset on three Latin American countries to describe policy priorities in presidential agendas. Therefore, we use our data to explore the policy priorities of the current Brazilian, Ecuadorian and Mexican presidents. The study offers a systematic descriptive analysis of executive policy agendas to find patterns of policy attention in presidential agendas using the CAP. The analysis starts by identifying the issues that catch most of the presidents' attention (policy priorities), and the dynamics of policy change in policy priorities in Brazil, Ecuador and Mexico presidential agendas are described. The effects of democratisation, elections, and change of political party between elections for the executive branch are some factors explaining the policy priorities and policy changes in presidential agendas. We explore the effects of political factors and cycles and whether these variables affect policy priorities. Finally, the study discusses the importance of partisan and institutional characteristics and challenges the influence of authoritative presidential powers on defining policy priorities.

The United States - Mexico Relations in the Context of the USMCA Agreement Ratification

The research is devoted to the consideration of the US-Mexican relations in the context of ratification of a new trilateral US - Mexico - Canada trade agreement - USMCA, that replaced NAFTA. Since the end of 2018, after the singing of USMCA and the general elections of Mexican President, the US-Mexican relations during 2019 developed under challenging conditions of political confrontation, which consisted in the pressure of US president D. Trump Administration and the US Congress on the Mexican government to include additional conditions in the agreement, related to the Mexican workers’ salary, new rules of origin for Mexican goods, customs duties on steel and aluminium, evaluation of the cost of pharmaceutical products, the increase in environmental standards, as well as the inclusion of government measures to stop transit migration from Central America to the USA through Mexican territory. These innovations in bilateral relations determine the relevance of this article. The purpose of the study is to assess the changes that have occurred in the bilateral relations while the states were discussing the terms of USMCA agreement and the first two years of its application. As a method, a comparative analysis of texts was used, including interim negotiations results between the heads of states, trade representatives, and the representatives of the Mexican Foreign Ministry and the US State Department, texts of speeches by parliamentarians, and materials from the American and Mexican media. The article highlights the changes in the US-Mexican relations during 2019-2021 after USMCA ratification, and provides the author’s forecast of their development in the near future, considering the strict American trade requirements to Mexico that formed in the process. The author comes to the conclusion that the United States will be guided by its own interests and may unfairly fulfil some of the conditions of USMCA agreement.

Prawo Callesa jako przyczynek do powstania Cristeros

On June 19, 1926, President Plutarco Elias Calles published a document that went down in history as the Calles Law (Ley Calles) and consisted of 33 articles. The document came into force on July 31, 1926 and in practice it sanctioned the anti-clerical constitutional provisions of 1917. It is recognized that this document was the ignite spark and the reason for the Cristero War. The presidential decree was to be nailed to the door of all Mexican temples. Between the release of the Calles Law and the beginning of Cristero War was only six months - very restless. Hence the thesis that the normative act issued by Mexican President Calles was the direct cause of the Cristero War. &nbsp;

Presidents and intermediaries: insights from clean energy policy processes in Mexico

ABSTRACT We assess whether different presidents have different “styles” of involving intermediary organizations such as trade unions or business associations in the policy process. Given that temporal variation in the relationship between presidents and intermediaries can be observed, to what extent can the intermediaries included in the policy process be explained by the respective president’s leadership style and/or political ideology? We concentrate on the process by which clean energy policies were formulated under three Mexican presidents between 2006 and 2022. We draw on original data collected through 18 semi-structured interviews carried out with intermediaries between January and July 2022. Our findings show that the different presidents had different policy styles and therefore varied in how they included climate intermediaries in the policy process. This finding has important implications for research on policy styles as well as climate intermediation. Regarding policy styles the results presented call for theorizing of the dynamics observed. As concerns climate intermediaries the corresponding literature is invited to pay more attention to the political context in which they operate.

Women in Battle

The 1910 Mexican Revolution began in protest against Mexican President Porfirio Diaz's dictatorship, unequal land distributions, and economic inequality. Split between the Diaz’s Federal army and the Rebels, led by Pancho Villa and Emiliano Zapata. Considered to be one of the most important events in modern Mexican history, the war glorified the men that fought for their country. Yet, some of the most important members were the women of the Mexican Revolution. Split into two groups, some women worked as camp-followers, Soldaderas, and others joined their male counterparts in the fight, known as Soldadas. Many of the women joined willingly to be with their husbands or for the opportunity of work and freedom, but many were forcibly taken and made to become soldaderas. The roles of the women of the Mexican Revolution were so prominent that their image was twisted in a way that romanticized and sexualized them to promote Mexican Machismo and Mexican Pride. It is the intention of this paper to explore the significant roles that the soldaderas played during the Revolutionary War.

Crisis in Mexico

This paper analyzes the relationship between the Mexican President’s discourse on COVID-19 and the use of Twitter by state officials at the start of the pandemic, through content analysis and supervised machine learning. Analyzing all tweets by state-level agencies during the first 6 months of the pandemic, we found that accounts belonging to the ruling party tweeted consistently less about COVID, compared to the opposition. Furthermore, the social-distancing hashtags endorsed by the Health Department were underused by the party’s own officials. We hypothesized that the president’s skeptical discourse on COVID-19 had a chilling effect on party officials’ use of Twitter during this period. Two random forest machine learning models were trained using the president’s words as predictors not only of the officials’ political alignment, but also of the amount of COVID tweets they posted. The models proved reliable, and the words most significant for prediction are markedly indicative of populist rhetoric. This illustrates how populist discourse from heads of government can undermine communication between institutions and citizens.

Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite

While most people are aware that Mexico was ruled by the same political party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional and its previous iterations, from 1929 to 2000, few may connect this institutionalized dictatorship to a more complicated history of economic and political cronyism. José Galindo's recent book, Ethnic Entrepreneurs, Crony Capitalism, and the Making of the Franco-Mexican Elite, explains precisely that history, using as a case study a group of French immigrants and, within this group, the Jean family, most famously connected to the Banamex banks and the Televisa media network. Galindo expands on previous efforts to look at corruption by combining political, economic, and cultural analyses with the use of UCINET software, which allows him to map the players of political and economic networks and to calculate their relative influence within each organization. Galindo's key argument is that Mexico's success in achieving greater economic and political stability during the Porfiriato (the administration of Mexican president Porfirio Díaz from 1876 to 1911) was due in large part to social networking, which contributed to today's ongoing patterns of crony capitalism or what Galindo calls “collusive corruption,” in which networked relationships between government officials and economic actors allow for the appropriation of what is public for personal benefit.Galindo is well positioned to take on this interdisciplinary approach to his topic: since 2015, he has coordinated no fewer than four interdisciplinary anthologies dealing with corruption in Mexico and published nine chapters of his own writing. Alongside publishing articles for academic journals and magazines such as Forbes, Galindo worked for Mexico's National Commission on Human Rights. The book under review here reflects Galindo's mastery of scholarship on the Mexican economy, covering the Porfiriato, the 1911 revolution, 1930s Cardenismo, 1970s efforts at implementing an import substitution industrialization model, and more recent patterns of resource privatization. Though Galindo does little to push against traditional takes on the Porfiriato as ending the “chaos” of previous eras through President Díaz's efforts to encourage foreign investment, ally with rival state governors, and follow the lead of the científicos (such as the Franco-Mexican finance minister José Yves Limantour), his discussion of the postrevolutionary era is more nuanced, especially through his analysis of Mexican economics by individual sectors (p. 77).One drawback of the book is that a key argument—pointed to by the inclusion of “ethnic entrepreneurs” and “Franco-Mexican elite” in the title—is not given sufficient attention by the author himself. As Galindo describes the rise of this Franco-Mexican elite, we note the many privileges that they enjoy simply for being French. Beginning as early as the 1830s, foreign immigrants were encouraged to colonize purportedly undeveloped agricultural areas of Mexico. Such efforts were also geared toward “improv[ing] the Mexican race” by bringing European culture, connections, know-how, and whiteness into Mexico (pp. 24, 53). Succeeding administrations continued this pattern, providing concrete incentives like the 1886 Naturalization and Aliens Act granting Mexican citizenship to purchasers of real estate or the 1884 commercial code providing tax exemptions on imported machinery. “Frenchification” of Mexican values and tastes grew under Napoleon III's supervision during the French occupation of Mexico from 1863 to 1867, followed by another resurgence of Francophilia during the Porfiriato, influenced by French positivist understandings of the role of industry in providing social welfare. Though in a few cases Galindo asserts that these proclivities for French immigration and the laws that supported them could themselves be motors of crony capitalism, even delving briefly into the role of “cultural capital” in keeping sociopolitical networks relevant, Galindo nonetheless does not make the clear connection between a history of cronyism and corruption and one of racism and imperialism, sticking instead to his insistence on the continued pervasiveness of “weak institutions” as fueling corruption's persistence (pp. 38, 142).Galindo's book is unique in its range of perspectives (cultural, political, economic) and historical scope, stretching from Mexican independence to today. Within this framework, he has nestled the history of a group of “ethnic entrepreneurs.” While an interesting case study in itself, the story of the French immigrants may actually detract from his discussion of crony capitalism in Mexico more generally, since “ethnic entrepreneurship” brings with it a variety of distinct variables of its own that Galindo does not adequately analyze. The marriage of these two topics—corruption and immigration policy—would be an absorbing contribution to a variety of fields, testing the thesis that racism and imperialism are themselves forms of corruption. Galindo chooses a different direction, contributing to Mexican economic history and the study of cronyism by tracing the roots of Mexico's multicultural elite. In doing so, he provides a text useful for graduate seminars on Latin American development, society, and economy, as well as on the methodology of prosopography.

От роста к маргинализации: компартия Мексики и профсоюзы во второй половине 1930-х гг.

The article deals with the analysis of the evolution of the relationship between the left movement and the Mexican Communist Party in the context of the policy of the Comintern and the domestic policy implemented by Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas. The author focused on the relationship between the CPM and the Confederation of Workers of Mexico, showing how the understanding of the essence of trade union unity by the communists was changing and how this evolution led to a change in the situation within the trade union movement in general and within the CTM in particular. The vision of the Popular Front by the communists (in conjunction with the development of the labor movement) of the country and the role played by the Comintern in changing this vision were also considered. In addition, the author links the events of the 1930s. with the beginning of the formation of long-term trends in the labor and trade union movement in Mexico in the following decades.

Surfing The New Wave: International Women’s Year and the Geopolitics of 1970s Mexican Feminism

Although scholars and activists point to the 1975 International Women’s Year Conference as a pivotal moment in the development of transnational feminist networks, there has been less attention paid to the importance of its taking place in Mexico City. This article explores how the “new wave” of Mexican feminism in the early 1970s shaped policy priorities within Mexico as well as how the geopolitical context informed the range of possibilities open to feminist activists. As Mexican President Luis Echeverría pursued recognition on the international stage, he sought to align Mexicanpolicies with UN priorities around population control and women’s opportunities.

Review: Risking Immeasurable Harm: Immigration Restriction and U.S.-Mexican Diplomatic Relations, 1924–1932, by Benjamin C. Montoya

Risking Immeasurable Harm makes an important contribution to the historiography by delineating the role that diplomatic pressure from the Mexican government played in limiting U.S. anti-immigrant measures in the pivotal period from 1924 to 1932. This period included the end of the so-called “Roaring Twenties” as well as the Great Depression. As historian Mai Ngai has argued, the 1920s featured attempts on a global scale to centralize the power of the nation-state—and specifically the notion of state sovereignty—by means of immigration restrictions. In 1926, B. Traven, a foreign-born resident of Mexico whose origins remain subject to debate, drove this point home in a possibly autobiographical novel, The Death Ship, which features a decrepit boat sailing the sea with a cargo of undocumented workers in search of a country to accept these migrants.Indeed, immigration restrictions were as powerful a political issue in the late 1920s and early 1930s as they are now. For Mexico, emigration to the United States served as an important escape valve at a time when three major rebellions—de la Huerta (1923–1924), Cristero (1926–1929), and Escobar (1929)—pitted citizens against a central government only gradually strengthening after the ravages of the first decade of the Mexican Revolution (1910–1920). At the same time, Mexican exiles threatened the stability of that government by plotting revolts, as Julian Dodson and others have demonstrated in recent scholarship. A well-regulated immigration policy hence benefited both governments.However, deep racial resentments precluded rational immigration policies. A State Department official considered Mexicans “backward, intellectually infantile, illiterate, prone to violence, inherently undemocratic” (p. 27). Advocates of legal restrictions believed Mexicans to be “a hazard to U.S. society and its institutions” (p. 126). Nonetheless, initial U.S. restrictions against immigrants from Mexico were “administrative” rather than “legislative” restrictions. In other words, restrictions were the result of a nascent immigration enforcement apparatus (much of which shared such ideas) rather than the product of legislation, and adherents of a quota did not get their wish, even after the onset of the Great Depression. In 1930, when a U.S. senator from Georgia, William J. Harris, proposed a bill instituting the first-ever quota system on Mexican immigration; administrative restrictions were so effective that “not a single common laborer…gained legal admittance into the United States for over a year” (p. 234). Thus, the Harris Bill failed precisely because administrative restrictions had been so effective. Not only had Mexicans been kept out, but the Great Depression had also eliminated the jobs that had attracted them in the first place. In addition, the U.S. government also removed U.S. citizens of Mexican descent from the national territory.One strength of the book is its binational lens on a topic that has usually been examined chiefly through an exclusively U.S. perspective. Montoya brings the Mexican perspective to life by drawing upon Mexican archival sources. However, these sources make fewer appearances in the notes than their U.S. counterparts. The author omits one important archive—the Fideicomiso Archivos Plutarco Elías Calles y Fernando Torreblanca, which houses the papers of several Mexican presidents and policymakers of the 1920s and 1930s and is particularly valuable for the study of foreign relations. Montoya only uses English-language scholarship, thus eliding the perspective of important Mexican scholars such as Lorenzo Meyer and many others. Therefore, Risking Immeasurable Harm is valuable as a study of U.S. immigration policy and the input in it provided by agents of the Mexican state and by the Mexican immigrants themselves. Montoya summarizes this input on p. 250 in explaining why the U.S. government opted for administrative restrictions over legislative strictures when it came to immigration from Mexico: “administrative restriction was the perfect compromise between a Westphalian sense of national sovereignty and a Wilsonian notion of more cooperative diplomatic relations.” From the Mexican perspective, the reality of how many Mexicans crossed the border was not as important as the absence of a formal discriminatory quota system and limits to a racialized discourse that discriminated against Mexicans.Taking an expansive view of immigration policies and practices beyond immigration law, this book is a valuable contribution to specialists interested in the history of immigration into the United States. It shows the complexity of the internal debates in the United States over immigration policy, as well as the role in Mexican diplomats and agents in these debates.

Revoluciónizing América: La Revolución and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz’s 1964 inaugural address

ABSTRACT This essay locates Américan entanglements in the Mexican political trope “La Revolución” (The Revolution) by examining how it was harnessed by Mexican president Gustavo Díaz Ordaz in his 1964 inaugural address. I argue that in this speech, addressed to Mexican citizens and international audiences, Ordaz navigated accumulating (inter)national pressures by stretching the nationalist boundaries of this Mexican rhetorical form. In so doing, his address (re)positioned Mexico as a prominent hemispheric voice prepared to guide other nations out of both present and future international turmoil at the same time that his use of this political trope affirmed a supposed stability in Mexico during a transition of power. In 1964, President Ordaz reimagined La Revolución as Américan rhetoric, and, I suggest, exemplified the tensions, constraints, and potentials of invoking América in Mexican rhetorics.

Morning Conferences: From Dialogue to the Sacrificial Rite and the Formation of Scapegoats

In order to achieve the objectives of transparency and accountability, Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) has offered a press conference every morning since he took office. This situation seemed to be a transcendental change in the field of democratic dynamics and political communication in Mexico; however, not merely a means of communication, these conferences have instead become a method of government. Using postulates of Mimetic Theory, this essay analyzes AMLO’s conferences, showing how this daily practice has become propaganda for the regime.

Editor's letter

Latin American Policy's (LAMP) second release for 2021 is particularly relevant, offering what can be called a double issue. In addition to bringing together a collection of seven articles on current topics that affect the region, it includes a thematic issue on the evolution of democratic practices in key Mexican states. LAMP is published twice yearly, yet the highly relevant research papers included in the thematic section make up a full issue on their own and deserve a space for publication. We are proud to present them this year as a double offering and to show that the journal boasts not only a growing audience but also a cadre of high-level researchers interested in publishing in our journal. Our first collection of works begins with Andrés Rivarola's article on regionalism and geopolitics, focusing on contributions from Latin America on the topic. Zdeněk Rod and Michal Himmer then consider the U.S. responses to a growing Chinese presence in Central America. Next, the COVID-19 pandemic is covered, through two articles that consider the regional response. Damasio Duval Rodrigues Neto analyzes the health policies Brazil adopted during the first 12 weeks of the crisis, and Luciano Ayala-Cantu, Federico Frattini, and Bruno Morando cover Mexicans' lockdown behavior as a reflection of the president's actions. Santiago L. Cunial shifts the focus to South America, covering the possible link between financing to develop solar energy in Colombian municipalities and the political alignment of these towns' mayors with the central government. On the hot topic of populism, Rubén Flores-González, Patricia Andrade del Cid, Alexia Raquel Ávalos-Rivera, and Mónica Torio-Hernández consider the Mexican president's daily speeches to draw a link between his empowerment as a leader and the populist discourse, which they say feeds and manages the anger of his constituency through communication, ideology, and strategy. Finally, Fernando Serrano and Jorge A. Schiavon argue that multiple individual and contextual factors, and what they call a perceived “Hispanic threat” in different states, have a significant effect on the attitudes of U.S. citizens toward immigration and the construction of the wall that Donald Trump promoted during his term in office. In the second section of this issue, Erika Estrada Ruiz, an electoral advisor with the Mexico City Electoral Institute, and Arturo Sánchez, a professor and researcher at the School of Government and Public Transformation of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, coordinated a thematic number entitled “Subnational Democratic Variation: A Comparative Overview of Strengths and Weaknesses of Democracy in the Mexican States.” This special issue includes 13 research papers, all of which underwent blind arbitration, on the different levels and types of advances that democratic practices have seen throughout the country. In the preamble that the coordinators have prepared for this special issue, they explain the context and history of this collection of works published here. I am deeply grateful for the professional effort they manifested in making this endeavor possible, and I thank them for having selected LAMP as the space to disseminate their research. Our readers will certainly find this thematic collection thought-provoking and useful.

The populist trinity of communication, ideology, and strategy: A proposal to enhance the analysis of populist discourses

AbstractThe academic community continues to debate what the best conceptualization of populism may be. Three definitions stand out, populism as a communication style, as a political strategy, and as an ideology. Based on a sample of 21 days of morning conferences given by the Mexican president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, we analyze his discourse for content representative of these three conceptualizations. We observe that the analysis of populist discourse is enriched when populism is considered as a product where communication, ideology, and strategy are articulated to work for the political empowerment of a leader, who fuels and manages the anger of a base of followers.