Structural Change and Neo-liberalism in Mexico

Abstract

Nowhere did the ‘silent revolution’ of neo-liberalism become more embraced and contested than in Latin America. Equally, it can be argued that the case of Mexico stands out in the region because of the state’s pivotal position in 1982 in announcing it could no longer service its debt obligations. The ensuing era of first generation neo-liberal reforms throughout the 1980s and 1990s also exceeded in many ways the transformations envisaged by the so-called Washington Consensus. Moreover, as Harry Browne (1994, p. 17) noted at the time, ‘the evolving free trade relationship between the United States and Mexico foreshadows the future of North-South relations in general’. This chapter therefore develops a critical analysis of these significant and pivotal processes in Mexico commonly understood under the rubric of globalization. Linking directly with the theoretical framework detailed throughout the book (see Chapters 2 and 9), it will do so by tracing the rise of certain social class forces, shaped by a restructuring of social relations of production within the form of state in Mexico, to suggest that a shift occurred in the 1970s, which began the move towards a neo-liberal strategy of capitalist accumulation. This shift not only heralded an end to the phase of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI) growth, or ‘desarollo estabilizador’, but also fundamentally altered and unravelled the social basis of the hegemony of the once-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI).