Mexico's "democratic transition" has created a competitive electoral system and a formally plural state. Besides, a peculiar wave of insurgency, started in 1994, has challenged the alleged moderating effect of democratic transition. This book argues that socioeconomic inequality is the main factor behind this combination of democratic and undemocratic trends.
Mexico's "democratic transition" has created a competitive electoral system and a formally plural state. Besides, a peculiar wave of insurgency, started in 1994, has challenged the alleged moderating effect of democratic transition. This book argues that socioeconomic inequality is the main factor behind this combination of democratic and undemocratic trends.
This book explores environmental policymaking in Mexico as a vehicle to understanding the broader changes in the policy process within a system undergoing a democratic transformation. It constitutes the first major analysis of environmental policymaking in Mexico at the national level, and examines the implementation of forestry policy in Mexico's largest rain forest, the Selva Lacandona of the state of Chiapas.
Based on over a decade of research, a powerful, moving work of narrative nonfiction that illuminates the little-known world of the anexos of Mexico City, the informal addiction treatment centers where mothers send their children to escape the violence of the drug war. The Way That Leads Among the Lost reveals a hidden place where care and violence are impossible to separate: the anexos of Mexico City. The prizewinning anthropologist Angela Garcia takes us deep into the world of these small rooms, informal treatment centers for alcoholism, addiction, and mental illness, spread across Mexico City’s tenements and reaching into the United States. Run and inhabited by Mexico’s most marginalized populations, they are controversial for their illegality and their use of coercion. Yet for many Mexican families desperate to keep their loved ones safe, these rooms offer something of a refuge from what lies beyond them—the intensifying violence surrounding the drug war. This is the first book ever written on the anexos. Garcia, who spent a decade conducting anthropological fieldwork in Mexico City, draws readers into their many dimensions, casting light on the mothers and their children who are entangled in this hidden world. Following the stories of its denizens, she asks what these places are, why they exist, and what they reflect about Mexico and the wider world. With extraordinary empathy and a sharp eye for detail, Garcia attends to the lives that the anexos both sustain and erode, wrestling with the question of why mothers turn to them as a site of refuge even as they reproduce violence. Woven into these portraits is Garcia’s own powerful story of family, childhood, homelessness, and drugs—a blend of ethnography and memoir converging on a set of fundamental questions about the many forms and meanings that violence, love, care, family, and hope may take. Infused with profound ethnographic richness and moral urgency, The Way That Leads Among the Lost is a stunning work of narrative nonfiction, a book that will leave a deep mark on readers.
Transitions from authoritarian to democratic governments can provide ripe scenarios for the emergence of new, insurgent political actors and causes. During peaceful transitions, such movements may become influential political players and gain representation for previously neglected interests and sectors of the population. But for this to happen, insurgent social movements need opportunities for mobilization, success, and survival. What happens to insurgent social movements that emerge during a democratic transition but fail to achieve their goals? How influential are they? Are they able to survive their initial mobilizing boom? To answer these questions, María Inclán looks at Mexico's Zapatista movement, whose emergence she argues was caught between "sliding doors" of opportunity. The Zapatistas were able to mobilize sympathy and support for the indigenous agenda inside and outside of the country, yet failed to achieve their goals vis-à-vis the Mexican state. Nevertheless, the movement has survived and sustained its autonomy despite lacking legal recognition. Inclán examines the vitality of the movement during various tests of the emergent democracy (during more competitive elections, under various political parties, and amid various repressive measures). She also looks at state responsiveness to movement demands and the role of transnational networks in the movement's survival. Framing the relative achievements and failures of the Zapatista movement within Mexico's democratization is essential to understand how social movements develop and survive and how responsive an electoral democracy really is. As such, this book offers a test to the quality of Mexico's democracy and to the resilience of the Zapatista movement, as it identifies the extent to which emerging political forces have failed to incorporate dissident and previously excluded political actors into the new polity.
When the PRI fell from power in the elections of 2000, scholars looked for an explanation. Some focused on international pressures, while others pointed to recent electoral reforms. In contrast, Dolores Trevizo argues that a more complete explanation takes much earlier democratizing changes in civil society into account. Her book explores how largely rural protest movements laid the groundwork for liberalization of the electoral arena and the consolidation of support for two opposition parties, the PAN on the right and the PRD on the left, that eventually mounted a serious challenge to the PRI. She shows how youth radicalized by the 1968 showdown between the state and students in Mexico City joined forces with peasant militants in nonviolent rural protest to help bring about needed reform in the political system. In response to this political effervescence in the countryside, agribusinessmen organized in peak associations that functioned like a radical social movement. Their countermovement formulated the ideology of neoliberalism, and they were ultimately successful in mobilizing support for the PAN. Together, social movements and the opposition parties nurtured by them contributed to Mexico’s transformation from a one-party state into a real electoral democracy nearly a hundred years after the Revolution.
A comprehensive view of the remarkable transformation of Mexico's political system to a democratic model. The contributors to this volume assess the most influential institutions, actors, policies and issues in the country's current evolution toward democratic consolidation.
Introduction : a new kind of threat -- Saudi Arabia : oil fields ablaze -- Pakistan : loose nukes -- Mexico : a flood of refugees -- China : collapse of a great power -- Conclusions : the coming storm.
