Partido Revolucionario Institucional Research Articles

Abandoning Their Beloved Land: The Politics of Bracero Migration in Mexico. By Alberto García

In a 1948 letter to Mexico’s federal agrarian officials, Cleofas Hernández and Alberto Rodríguez expressed their desire to migrate to the United States as braceros. For years, socio-economic precarity in Southern Guanajuato made it difficult for them to provide for their families. Then came the final straw: Presa del Aguacate’s ejidatarios seized their land. Authorities refused to intervene on campesinos’ behalf. And so, the pair decided, they had one choice: to “abandon their dearly beloved land.” This is one of many evocative testimonies that Alberto García skillfully mines—along with a trove of government documents from federal, state, and municipal archives—to unravel the politics of bracero migration in Mexico. For García, bracero migration was much more than a socio-economic phenomenon. Instead, it was shaped by the ideologies and ambitions of Mexican elites, Catholic activists, local powerbrokers, and migrants themselves. As the author convincingly explains, the roots of bracero migration lie in the failures of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s (PRI) agrarian reform and the upheaval generated by conservative Catholic opposition to the revolutionary state’s secular agenda. Importantly, García reveals that while politicians of all stripes treated prospective braceros like pawns, the men who wished to join the program were anything but pliable victims. At its core, the decision to migrate was a shrewd rejection of the PRI regime and the endemic corruption that gripped large swathes of Mexican society.

Robachicos: Historia del secuestro infantil en México (1900–1960)

This heartfelt and disturbing book investigates the heinous crime of child abduction from 1900 through 1960 in Mexico City. Drawing on compelling analyses of newspapers, legislation, films, comic books, and juvenile court records in Mexico City, Susana Sosenski reveals the emotional and economic connotations of abducted children as cultural symbols and how the fears about child abduction shaped the parental experience and public perception of kidnapping. Child kidnappers, or robachicos, engaged in different (if occasionally overlapping) types of abduction or kidnapping (for example, ransom kidnapping and extortion, kidnapping by women due to a “desire to be mothers,” parental kidnapping by men who inflicted gender violence on former partners, and the abduction of children for labor and sexual exploitation). Sosenski brilliantly argues that media and citizen fears in response to the abduction of children from well-to-do families resulted in prescribed harsh punishment for perpetrators of child abduction. However, such particular moments of heightened fear in moral panics paved the way for the exclusion of children from public spaces and sustained the impunity and negligence of the Mexican authorities in relation to child abduction.Sosenski has organized her primary sources in a sophisticated argument structured in five chapters that allow her to develop the thesis on how the fear of child abduction, propagated in the print media's massive coverage, increasingly expanded to new technologies of radio, movie newsreels, and comic books and exacerbated class, racial, spatial, and gender disparities in Mexican children's lives. Chapter 1 introduces the moral panics over child kidnappers in Porfirian Mexico City; Sosenski notes how anti-Blackness shaped heightened fear in reports about the abduction of poor children for work in Oaxaca and Yucatán. Chapter 2 unveils the economic and emotional value of children in working-class and middle-class households and the strangers who seized or kidnapped children for labor and sexual exploitation. Sosenski persuasively investigates how common understandings of girls' sexuality fed into family-based concepts of honor and chastity; she shows how the practices and narratives of girls' bodies have perpetuated rape culture in Mexico. Chapter 3 shows how, in the autumn of 1945, the sensational coverage of the kidnapping of Fernando Bohigas, a light-skinned two-year-old from a middle-class family, shaped the response of well-to-do Mexicans to child abduction and resulted in the formation of civic associations and support for the return of the death penalty (which had been eliminated in 1929). The middle-class 29-year-old María Elena Rivera Quiroga, the boy's kidnapper, became a cause célèbre in the public sphere by making a case that she had abducted Bohigas because of her “desire to be a mother” (p. 131). Newspapers, including La Prensa, Novedades, El Nacional, and Magazine de Policía, also encouraged readers to participate in identifying potential child kidnappers in Mexico City.In chapter 4, Sosenski highlights that, pressured by readers in the aftermath of six-year-old Norma Granat's ransom kidnapping, lawmakers increased punishment for kidnappers from five to forty years and equated the crime of child abduction with the most serious form of homicide (p. 166). The 1955 reform of the 1931 penal code after Granat's kidnapping redefined the crime of child abduction as the “unlawful removal of a child under the age of 12 by those who do not exercise full parental authority” (p. 166). In chapter 5, Sosenski highlights how the gendered perspectives of boyhood and girlhood shaped depictions of child kidnapping in press, film, radio, and comic books while promoting the enclosure of children in homes under parents' strict supervision and the surveillance of children by police in public spaces.Sosenki's main contribution to Mexican cultural history and to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions is her employment of emotions as an analytical category, which allows her to examine how new narratives and images of child abduction were disseminated in mass media and consumed avidly by urban audiences. Sosenski convincingly engages multiple historiographies and scholarship across fields in sociology, children's studies, geography, and media studies. This book is an indispensable reference for understanding the emergence of new forms of criminal behavior and police practices that revolve around child abduction and the increasingly rapacious journalistic exploitation of violence against children in Mexico City. Although the book's focus is Mexico City, it will certainly become a reference for students and scholars interested in furthering their research on the extent to which the linkages of fear and childhood in mass media and radical journalism shaped the mechanisms by which the Partido Revolucionario Institucional ruled provincial cities since the Cold War. Future studies might elucidate how the conceptions of order and fear articulated by tabloids, crime sheets, and magazines reached far beyond the middle class and shaped the experiences of youth and policing in the growing informal neighborhoods that housed the vast majority of Latin America's urban poor.

Review: Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network, by Roberto González

Review: <i>Connected: How a Mexican Village Built Its Own Cell Phone Network</i>, by Roberto González

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

Oaxaca Resurgent: Indigeneity, Development, and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Mexico

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.

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties

Yucatán as an Exception to Rising Criminal Violence in México

Yucatán state’s homicide level has remained low and steady for decades and criminal violence activity is low, even while crime rates in much of the rest of the country have increased since 2006. In this research note, we examine five main theoretical explanations for Yucatán's relative containment of violence: criminal competition, protection networks and party alternation, vertical partisan fragmentation, interagency coordination, and social cohesion among the Indigenous population. We find that in Yucatán, interagency coordination is a key explanatory variable, along with cooperation around security between Partido Revolucionario Institucional and Partido Acción Nacional governments and among federal and state authorities.

Regulating Bracero Migration: How National, Regional, and Local Political Considerations Shaped the Bracero Program

AbstractThis article examines how federal, state, and municipal governments administered the migrant worker selection process in the states of Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán during the initial phase of the Bracero Program, a bilateral initiative that allowed Mexican men to work in the United States as seasonal contract farmworkers. It argues that multiple political factors—such as the activities of groups that opposed the ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional, organized labor conflicts, and the need to respond to natural disasters—influenced how officials allocated contracts, which rural workers were deemed eligible or ineligible to migrate, and which individual rural workers ultimately received contracts. The article shows that federal authorities delegated increased administrative responsibilities to state and municipal governments as the Bracero Program progressed, which in turn allowed regional and local officials to exercise considerable influence during selection periods.

Killing a Cabby

This article looks at civil society in 1950s Mexico. To do so, it examines the popular responses to the murder of a local taxi driver, Juan Cereceres. It argues that both newspapers and civil-society organizations took the murder seriously, interrogated government findings, attempted to discover the real culprits, and sought a degree of justice. In all, the story asks historians to reassess both the extent and the force of civil society under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).

Apostle of Progress: Modesto C. Rolland, Global Progressivism, and the Engineering of Revolutionary Mexico

Apostle of Progress is a biography of Modesto C. Rolland, a propagandist of the Mexican Revolution and a noted civil engineer who played a prominent role in the modernization of Mexico in the first half of the twentieth century. Born in 1881 in La Paz, in what was then the remote territory of Baja California, he was the son of a French immigrant and a Mexican mother. Rolland pursued his university studies and early career under the dictatorship of General Porfirio Díaz before supporting the revolutionary leader Francisco I. Madero, whose coalition overthrew Díaz in 1911. At that time, Rolland had already gained recognition as a leader in construction with reinforced concrete. After Madero's overthrow and assassination in February 1913, Rolland served as a communications officer for the Constitutionalists, an alliance arrayed against General Victoriano Huerta's new dictatorship. In particular, he became a propagandist for the Constitutionalists in the United States and, after 1915, an important cog in the eventual government of President Venustiano Carranza. From the 1920s to the 1950s, Rolland assisted the government in numerous projects: agrarian reforms, infrastructure projects, and, most importantly, the development of ports, particularly in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. Among many other buildings, he designed Mexico City's Plaza de Toros, the world's largest bullfighting arena (built for 40,000 spectators), as well as the stadium in Xalapa, Veracruz. As Justin Castro argues, “Adapting ideas and technologies from around the world, especially the West, Rolland strove to create a more secure Mexican sovereignty and to increase Mexican unity through infrastructure, shared space, the adoption of foreign ideas, and the creation of nationalist sentiment” (p. 236).Castro's work seeks to rescue Rolland from historiographical oblivion by casting him as a representative of the Mexican manifestation of Progressivism. Thus, Rolland's life and career emerges in this book as an example of a transnational political movement that transformed first the United States and then Mexico, where Progressivism still flourished in the 1920s and 1930s after it had already ended in the United States. Progressivism focused primarily on material rather than political innovation: as Castro states, “Rolland often referred to himself as apolitical, and he does appear in some way to have disliked politics, but he was politically astute” (p. xviii). To Rolland—as to the Porfirian científicos—politics featured problems to be solved more than a discursive space. In Castro's mind, Progressivism distinguished the Mexican Revolution from the almost contemporaneous (and Marxist) Russian Revolution. Although it is fair to say that some Mexican engineers saw things differently: for example, the self-styled socialist Marte R. Gómez, a friend of Diego Rivera's and governor of Tamaulipas under President Lázaro Cárdenas.In Castro's words, “Recounting the story of the revolution without engineers and other mid-level planners makes for a very incomplete understanding of the revolution and the construction of modern Mexico” (p. xxii). It is difficult not to agree: there were, of course, other, more political ingenieros who played prominent roles in the revolutionary decades and who still await in-depth study. The most famous of these engineers was probably Alberto J. Pani, a fellow civil engineer who headed several federal ministries over the course of a decade, including the Ministry of Industry, Commerce, and Labor, the Ministry of Foreign Relations, and the Treasury. Another example was Luis L. León, a close friend and ally of presidents Álvaro Obregón and Plutarco Elías Calles and one of the founders of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, the precursor of today's Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Finally, the Carrancista presidential candidate Ignacio L. Bonillas was also an engineer—the one of his craft who came closest to the seat of power. But Rolland threw his support behind General Salvador Alvarado, one of three victorious generals who opposed Bonillas's candidacy and someone who shared Rolland's admiration of US Progressivism (p. 117).Castro's book is certainly an invitation to future studies of engineers and other highly educated (and mostly creole) professionals who played a significant role in the rebuilding of the Mexican state after the cataclysmic violence, hunger, and disease of the 1910s. Written in accessible prose and without jargon, it joins our growing corpus of biographical works on the Mexican Revolution, and its focus on an overlooked but important civil engineer adds a new dimension to our knowledge of the process of reconstruction.

Tensiones en la gestión de las caravanas migrantes por Guadalajara

In this chapter we will explore the multiple tensions that occur in the operations of the Caravans of 2018 and 2019 through the metropolis of Guadalajara. The movement exposed the capacities of governments, the media, of organized civil and religious society and of the local society to assume the arrival of so many different people: foreigners, poor, and/or evicted. We are interested in analyzing the different actions and reactions of some of the key actors. The municipal and state governments both with the former governor Aristotle Sandoval (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI), as with the current governor Enrique Alfaro (Citizen Movement) are ambiguous with simultaneous actions of humanitarianism and criminalization, of visibility and invisibility of the phenomenon. Finally, we reflect on the “disconcerting” behaviors and agency events of the Caravans members.

Year One of AMLO's Mexico

Year One of AMLO's Mexico Humberto Beck (bio), Carlos Bravo Regidor (bio), and Patrick Iber (bio) On a sunny morning last May on the grounds of Los Pinos, the old presidential residence now open to the public, Mexican citizens strolled past a line of cars, trucks, and armored vehicles. They gazed in the windows of a 1951 Volkswagen bug and posed for pictures in front of a Lamborghini Murciélago. The cars, which all belonged to the Mexican government (some were for official use, some had been seized from criminal organizations), were waiting for auction. "There can be no rich government and a poor people," Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) had repeated on the campaign trail. Now he was president, and this sale symbolized the new order. Proceeds were destined for some of the country's poorest municipalities. Even the government agency responsible for the auction would have a new name: the Instituto para Devolverle al Pueblo lo Robado (the Institute for Returning to the People What Was Stolen). As they waited to be sold, the vehicles picked up the dust and grime of Mexico City, which sits in a pollution-trapping valley at nearly 7,500 feet of elevation. Just the week prior, the city had virtually shut down for several days because of a pollution emergency, in which high temperatures, low rainfall, and ongoing fires added to the usual stew of exhaust and industrial effluent. In the grime on the window of a Corvette Stingray, someone scrawled a homophobic insult directed at the last president, Enrique Peña Nieto. A few days later, the vehicles were gone. The auction raised more than a million dollars in revenue. The sale was designed to demonstrate some of the new president's political ambitions. Few doubt AMLO's determination to transform his country. Even before taking office he had already envisioned his term in historic dimensions, labeling it the "Fourth Transformation" of Mexico, following independence from Spain, the liberal Reforma, and the Mexican Revolution. Though AMLO has never provided a precise definition of the Fourth Transformation, he invokes it to describe a revindication of national pride, a political project of aligning the presidency with the popular will, and the creation of a social movement that could to do away with the old party system, social inequality, and the economic status quo. [End Page 109] Click for larger view View full resolution AMLO boards a commerical flight in February 2019. (Alfredo Estrella/AFP via Getty Images) AMLO has moved quickly to make changes. Old offices and programs have been dismantled and new social policies put in place. Spending considered profligate has been scrapped and budgets redirected. New priorities have taken over the everyday work of government agencies. Elected with an absolute majority, his party, MORENA, is in firm control of Congress. And his popularity has remained reasonably high, even as criticism mounts: his approval rating has fallen from a post-election peak in the mid-eighties to somewhere in the high-sixties. AMLO is the fourth president—and the first from the left—elected since the end, in 2000, of seven decades of single-party control of the presidency by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). Approximately one year into his term in office, his approval rating does not differ significantly from those of his more conservative predecessors at the same point. All of those presidencies—of Vicente Fox, Felipe Calderón, and Enrique Peña Nieto—are considered failures. Indeed, their legacy of accumulated fiascos propelled AMLO to the presidency. Expectations have been high. But for his administration to succeed, AMLO will need to make life better for the majority of Mexicans. To do this, he'll need to reduce corruption, improve economic fairness, and provide safety and security. In each of these areas, however, there are reasons to be concerned about AMLO's ability to make significant progress. [End Page 110] ________ In his campaign for the presidency, AMLO took aim at the most emblematic infrastructure project of the previous administration, Mexico City's New International Airport. At the time, about 20 percent of the construction was already complete and 60 percent of the investment under contract. AMLO...

Mass Party Formation: Land, Civil Society, and Party in Postrevolutionary Mexico

AbstractWhat explains mass party formation? Prevailing approaches explain party formation as a process of reflection of preexisting social constituencies, or as the consequence of the rise of the bureaucratic state and in particular the advent of universal suffrage. These approaches fail to explain why Mexico’s Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) emerged as a mass party in some regions but not others despite attempts to do so and similarity in conditions that have been posited as central to party formation. I put forth a novel approach that posits that parties emerge as mass organization through a process of constitution of the very social base they claim to represent, but their constitutive powers are conditioned by fundamental economic structures. Relying on agrarian censuses and archival data, I show that the PRI emerged as a mass party in areas where land privatization had been more intensive. In these areas the party during its process of formation was able to build new, and absorb existing, peasant unions and organizations and carry out strong electoral mobilization. These findings suggest that mass party formation is dependent on the destruction of “pre”-capitalist agrarian structures.

El desmadre: counter-hegemonic fervour in Carlos Monsiváis’s 1986 World Cup chronicles

ABSTRACTThe 1986 Mexico World Cup is memorialized in terms of two iconic moments produced by Argentine legend Diego Maradona’s on-field magic in the game against England – the controversial ‘Hand-of-God’ goal and the dribbling masterpiece score, unarguably considered to be the ‘Goal of the Century’. However, the World Cup with these dramatic events came in the backdrop of a tragic earthquake that devastated Mexico City taking a heavy toll of lives only a year back. While Mexico’s ruling party was accused of corruption and mismanagement in relief work, the government went ahead with the organization of the tournament. Interestingly, popular protests and movements against the government centred around stadiums such as the Estadio Azteca – the site of Maradona’s famed goals, transforming the same into sites of contestation and solidarity for many Mexicans. Writing at the time, Carlos Monsiváis, Mexico’s most notable chronicler, in his famous ‘¡¡¡Goool!!! Somos el desmadre’ (1986), captured the subversive atmosphere of these sporting venues through fan behaviour amounting to their counter-hegemonic fervour, coined ‘el desmadre’ in the chronicle. This study offers a discursive literary analysis of Monsiváis’s text and argues that both Monsi’s chronicle and his protagonists’ ‘disorderly’ behaviour served as popular discursive forces that challenged the Partido Revolucionario Institucional’s historical dominance in Mexico’s political arena.

Mexico’s Dirty War on Drugs: Source Control and Dissidence in Drug Enforcement

This essay focuses on the local effects and unintended consequences of the US drug war in Mexico. Mexico’s internal divisions and political challenges go beyond its role in the regional drug traffic. US drug-control policies intersected with and exacerbated many of Mexico’s domestic problems, including what activists and scholars have begun calling la guerra sucia (Dirty War), a period from the late 1950s to the early 1980s during which Mexico’s ruling party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), violently put down dissidence. Whereas a rather clean and organized image of United States–Mexico narcotics diplomacy emerges at the upper echelons of policy making, a focus on drug enforcement actors in Mexico charged with executing drug control and carrying out the PRI’s concurrent policies of domestic repression during the 1960s and 1970s reveals a very different picture. Using materials from Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate (DFS), a PRI intelligence agency, this essay demonstrates how the PRI’s actions against leftist threats shaped the Mexican government’s response to US drug issues, especially in rural, drug-producing areas already prone to political instability. As drug enforcement collided with the PRI’s efforts at domestic repression, it empowered certain state actors at the expense of others and led to a number of violent abuses.

Alternancia política atípica en el municipio de Abasolo, Tamaulipas (1980-1983)

El entrelazamiento de las convicciones ideológicas de la juventud del Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST) en México y la experiencia victoriosa del reparto agrario con la fundación de los Nuevos Centros de Población Ejidal (NCPE), en el municipio de Abasolo, Tamaulipas, México, de los campesinos agrupados en Comités Ejecutivos Particulares Agrarios (CPEA), dieron lugar a la primera alternancia municipal de la historia contemporánea de Tamaulipas. El ayuntamiento fue reconocido constitucionalmente en 1983, siendo la única victoria electoral del PST en el estado. El objetivo de este trabajo fue documentar los antecedentes sobre la historia política y social del Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST) de 1980 a 1983. El procedimiento de esta investigación fue histórica, con base en la triangulación de fuentes primarias y secundarias, siguiendo la premisa de que la política es la continuación de la guerra por otros medios. La historia del rompimiento de la hegemonía del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), en Abasolo, fue recreada con archivos históricos y entrevistas orales de diferentes actores sociales de la época. El PST alcanzó el reconocimiento constitucional del ayuntamiento en 1983 por 21 días, por lo que se dio una alternancia municipal atípica. Esta alternancia, resultó ser atípica no sólo por el hecho de que un partido distinto y de reciente creación ganara las elecciones, sino por las condiciones en las que se eligió el candidato y se dio el proceso electoral municipal, así como el modo en que el presidente municipal concluyó el periodo constitucional. Dichos sucesos posibilitaron la lucha político-electoral entre el PST y el Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) en ese municipio.

In Mexico, a new dawn for independent unions?

In April 2019 the new government of President Andrés Manuel López Obrador began undoing 36 years of neoliberal economic reforms in Mexico. The Chamber of Deputies and then the Senate passed a labour law reform bill proposed by López Obrador’s party, the National Regeneration Movement (Movimiento Regeneración Nacional, MORENA). The reform follows Mexico’s ratification of the ILO Right to Organise and Collective Bargaining Convention, 1949 (No. 98) in 2018, after sustained pressure from national union centres and the international trade union movement over many years. (It will enter into force on 23 November 2019). The labour reform deals primarily with the rights of unions and their members. For more than half a century, a set of established, conservative ‘charro’ unions have been tied to the government and the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI), which ruled Mexico for most of that time. In return for political support, charro leaders held office sometimes for life, with no accountability to their members. Labour boards made up of representatives of conservative unions, employers, and a pro-employer government made it extremely difficult for workers to form independent organisations. In thousands of workplaces, charro unions and employers negotiated secret ‘protection’ contracts guaranteeing labour peace. Whenever workers would try to organise independently to win better wages and conditions, employers would usually claim a ‘protection’ union already represented them, posing an enormous legal obstacle to workers’ attempts to establish their own unions. Achievements and Limits of the New Labour Reform Under the MORENA labour law reform, union leaders must now be elected by direct, secret ballot, making them more accountable to members. Contracts must be public, and members must have the right to vote on them. Unions that don’t comply will lose their legal status. And labour tribunals – as part of the judicial system – will replace the old procompany labour boards. The law explicitly covers domestic workers, but not agricultural workers. The reform has been widely welcomed, explains Hector de la Cueva, director of the Independent Centre for Labour Investigation and Union Research (Centro de Investigación Laboral y Asesoría Sindical, CILAS): ‘the current reform will have a big impact. One effect will be the democratisation of charro unions, and independent unions are preparing to take advantage of the new situation. It will be good for independent and new unions. There will be a new wave of workers’ struggles - in fact it’s already happening’. The near-unanimous votes in both chambers in favour of the reform demonstrated just how badly the old unions had lost power in last July’s presidential election. Carlos Aceves del Olmo, the head of the largest charro union, the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (Confederation of Mexican Workers, CTM) called the law ‘impossible to implement’. The old charro unions are continuing their protests, and have gone to court to stop the implementation of the law entirely. For some however, the new law did not go far enough. For one, the MORENA law did not reverse a 2012 reform allowing companies to outsource jobs (which had previously been banned). The 2012 also law allows no-cause termination during workers’ first six months on a job, part-time and temporary work and hourly pay rather than day-long rates. At the time of its passage, Arturo Alcalde - one of Mexico’s most respected labour lawyers - called the 2012 reform ‘an open invitation to employers, and a road to a paradise of firings’. Subcontracting proliferated. In Mexico City alone, 22 percent of the labour force, or about 800,000 workers, are now subcontracted. Some unions would like to address additional issues. University workers, for instance, can’t organise a national union, so each of their unions is tied to a single institution. Furthermore, the new law gives a period of four years before the labour tribunals will replace the old labour boards. During that period a growing number of workers will undoubtedly demand elections for their leaders, and will petition for legal recognition of new unions. There is no budget yet for the new tribunals and setting them up and training their personnel will be very costly. Labour Secretary Luisa Alcalde has...

Carlos y Mí Ciudad / Charles Bowden and My Ciudad Juárez

Carlos y Mí Ciudad / Charles Bowden and My Ciudad Juárez Julián Cardona (bio) In a country where life is worth nothing, a photographic negative, which represents perhaps the smallest part of a life, is worth infinitely nothing. Charles Bowden arrived at the photographic archive of Diario de Juárez late on a spring day in 1993. He was looking for a photograph of a missing woman and the clerk called me to find it. It was our first meeting. Neither of us realized at the time that we would end up collaborating on three books: Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (1998); Exodus/Éxodo (2008); and Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy's New Killing Fields (2010). Part of my task was introducing Chuck to my city and the newspaper world in which I worked. "Archive" is a pretentious description of the narrow room where we photographers finished our work after an intense day during which some of us risked our lives. By routine, the man in charge, or his two subordinates, periodically destroyed original photos and negatives that were considered unnecessary, in order to make room for new material that, in time, would also go into the garbage. On the 10th anniversary of the 1986 international bridge-takings and blockades by the right-wing party protesting the electoral fraud, only one slide remained of what had been the biggest post-election challenge in the history of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). When I went looking for slides of a birth defect perhaps caused by a maquiladora worker's inhalation of toxins, I found that they had been discarded as "no longer good for anything." They also tossed slides of the April 1996 apprehension of Los Rebeldes, a gang of men accused of murdering several women. I had photographed tearful mothers of the murdered women confronting the state governor at the end of a public ceremony. As the only [End Page 123] photographer present, I had hesitated to submit the photos to the editors and had considered keeping them instead. No one would know. The possiblity of censure worried me less than the negligence with which the photographs would be handled. In the end, I turned them over and these images also were lost. I began photographing for El Fronterizo. The day I was hired, my boss made me sign a waiver. It was his custom. I became the last photographer of the smallest newspaper in the city, a stage dominated by the staffs of Diario de Juárez (known on the street simply as El Diario) and El Norte. Jaime Bailleres, Manuel Sáenz, Gabriel Cardona, Raúl Lodoza, Héctor Dayer, and Octavio Díliz worked for El Diario, while Miguel Perea, Juan Antonio Castillo, Gabriel Mercado, and Ernesto Rodríguez worked for El Norte. El Fronterizo and El Norte had allied themselves against El Diario. While Miguel Perea was the chief photographer at El Norte, Ernesto Rodríguez was acting for himself. He often showed up with his FM2 camera to share material with my boss. One afternoon I heard shouts of celebration in the newsroom: "We ousted Bailleres [as chief photographer of El Diario] and we screwed them." El Fronterizo and El Norte frequently took advantage of news that El Diario did not cover, both papers publishing photos of these events on their covers. We El Fronterizo photojournalists were the lowest ranked. Protesters blockading the international bridges had received us very well, until they found out that we weren't working for El Diario. On the other hand, working for less prestigious newspapers burdened us with fewer responsibilities. El Fronterizo's building was old; its darkroom looked abandoned and gloomy. We spent evenings listening in the dark to Jaime Murrieta's fantastic stories, while Jasso, the photo technician, rocked film from side to side in a tray of Dektol, then hung the extended rolls by their ends to dry before printing them on glossy photographic paper. The three El Fronterizo photographers—Jesús Aguilera, Jaime Murrieta, and me—looked forward to Friday to indulge. A part of our paltry pay allowed us to eat at the Tragadero, a traditional restaurant...

El día de la libertad de prensa en México como medio de control del gobierno sobre la prensa, 1951-1969

En siglo XX, el Gobierno de México y la prensa construyeron una relación de interdependencia basada en el Estado corporativo y las figuras del Presidente de la República, el Secretario de Gobernación y el Partido Revolucionario Institucional. El control sobre la prensa fue ejercido mediante mecanismos legales como la Constitución de 1917 (artículo 6 y 7), la Ley del timbre y el funcionamiento de la Empresa Productora e Importadora de Papel. Este artículo se pregunta, a través del método histórico-crítico, si hubo otros mecanismos de control, (como, por ejemplo, la celebración de El Día de la Libertad de Prensa el siete de junio de 1951) y en qué medida los periodistas lo asumieron como una oportunidad para aliarse con el Gobierno, que apenas les ofrecía una libertad limitada.

Composición de las dirigencias del Partido Acción Nacional, el Partido Revolucionario Institucional y el Partido de la Revolución Democrática después de la alternancia política (2002-2016)

Este estudio tiene el objetivo de determinar las características de las dirigencias nacionales del Partido Revolucionario Institucional, del Partido Acción Nacional y del Partido de la Revolución Democrática, así como la composición de estas. Se clasifica el tipo de liderazgode los presidentes nacionales de dichos partidos políticos, el tipo de experiencia de estos, así como el tipo de acceso a las posiciones en los Comités Ejecutivos Nacionales. Esta clasificación caracteriza las diferencias y similitudes de los presidentes nacionales de los Comités Ejecutivos Nacionales de los tres partidos, las cuales se organizan en cuadros y anexos. Por la delimitación del análisis de estos tres partidos, se hace necesario un examen de los demás partidospolíticos. En cuanto a las aportaciones del estudio, este identifica patrones de experiencia en la dirección y en los Comités Ejecutivos Nacionales de los partidos y logra precisar la correlación de fuerza entre hombres y mujeres. Asimismo, la propuesta utilizada es replicable para dar continuidad analítica de los Comités Ejecutivos Nacionales actuales en los tres partidos y, al mismo tiempo, incluir otros.