This book seeks to form a general portrait of the history of political opposition during the so-called century of the Mexican Revolution. According to the author, most of the literature on political opposition has examined it from the point of view of the post-revolutionary regime and its official party; thus, her aim is to present a counterpoint by outlining a narrative from the perspective of “the other side” (p. 9).Expanding the interpretative framework she developed in her study of the dissident movement of General Henríquez (Ruptura y oposición: El movimiento henriquista, 1945 – 1954, Cal y Arena, 2001) Elisa Servín defines opposition as an “organized political expression, almost always but not only around electoral goals, that is increasingly institutionalized in the form of a political party and that competes, questions, and confronts constituted power through political non-armed action, and whose oppositional path is variable” (p. 11). Her argument is that, notwithstanding the authoritarian character of twentieth-century Mexican politics, opposition mattered as a testimony of the country’s social diversity, as a limited but enduring channel for participation and protest, and as a force pushing for change long before the actual democratization process of the 1990s.The book is divided into six chronological sections spanning from the late Porfiriato to the defeat of the PRI in 2000. It encompasses a large and somewhat motley assortment of people, ideologies, parties, and episodes: among others, the Flores Magón brothers and the radical Partido Liberal Mexicano (1900s); the maderista anti-reelection movement (1910); the Partido Comunista Mexicano (1920s); the conservative Partido Acción Nacional founded by Gómez Morín (1939); Lombardo Toledano’s frustrated initiative to unify the left in a loyal opposition party (1940s); the defeat of the henriquista “revolutionary opposition” (1952); the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, a progressive coalition headed by former president Lázaro Cárdenas (1960s); the reconfiguration of the left following Reyes Heroles’s electoral reform (1977); the boom of protests against fraud and the gradual acknowledgement of opposition victories in local elections (1980s); Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas heading the Corriente Democrática’s split from the PRI, and its eventual consolidation with a myriad of left-wing groups in the Partido de la Revolución Democrática (1989); Zedillo’s pivotal electoral reform (1996); and the victory of the PAN’s pro-business presidential candidate, Vicente Fox (2000).Ironically, the only common thread between such dissimilar individuals, organizations, and developments in Servín’s analysis is none other than the very target of their opposition: the PRI government. Thus, instead of producing a truly different understanding, La oposición politica simply inverts the same old PRI-centered perspective without breaking away from it — as do works such as Barry Carr’s Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (University of Nebraska Press, 1992), Jeffrey Rubin’s Decentering the Regime (Duke University Press, 1997), or Soledad Loaeza’s El Partido Acción Nacional, la larga marcha, 1939 – 1994 (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1999).There are, in addition, some analytical gaffes in the narrative. The claim about the opposition’s relentless aspiration to “the democratic ideal” in its struggles against “the authoritarianism of the regime that emerged from the revolution” (pp. 13 – 14) fails to problematize the changing meanings of democracy from the 1920s to the 1950s or the 1980s, nor does it take into account the differences between the authoritarianisms of Cárdenas, Alemán, Díaz Ordaz, López Portillo, or Salinas de Gortari. The assessment that the electoral fraud leading to the defeat of the opposition in 1952 “delayed the political development of the country by 30 years” (p. 55) is oblivious to the fact that authoritarian modernization was, alas, a form of political development. The reading of the 2000 election as the culminating point of “the long history of struggles for the democratic exercise of power that unfolded in the course of the twentieth century” (p. 75) is blatantly teleological and takes at face value the debatable democratic credentials of some opposition movements.On a positive note, besides providing the reader with a first-rate bibliographical section, Servín succeeds in qualifying the notion that there was no politics beyond the PRI (an overstatement that priístas took advantage of for decades); in spelling out the stakes of the opposition’s dilemma of participation in undemocratic elections; and in arguing insightfully that a telling sign of the opposition’s influence is to be found not in its electoral performance per se but in the political establishment’s varying responsiveness to its discourse and demands.Due to the contemporary relevance of its subject and to its potential for casting new light on the apparently familiar but still quite unknown history of the Mexican political system, La oposición política puts forth a multitude of riddles historians will have to unravel in the years to come.
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