Mexico 1940-82: Higher Priority on Political Stability and Economic Growth than on Social Change

Mexico 1940-82: Higher Priority on Political Stability and Economic Growth than on Social Change

Mexico’s political and economic stability from 1940-1982 can be well understood by looking at one of Sergio’s televisions. In Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman introduces the reader to Sergio Espinoza, a businessman who once employed some 700 workers to produce televisions, stereos and sound systems. His televisions’ high production costs, low quality, high prices and inaccessibility to the poor sketch a rough microcosm of the period from 1940-1982 by laying bare the inefficiencies of import substitution industrialization and the vast inequalities in Mexico. From 1940-82, economic growth and stability came at the expense of social justice and political pluralism. In particular, the Mexican campesinos, the backbone of the revolutionary Zapatista uprising, suffered from the economic development model and from the PRI’s ability to muzzle dissent.

The basic model employed after Cardenas to promote growth in the Mexican economy was Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), whereby Mexico attempted to build domestic industry and a domestic market. The strategy quickly started paying dividends, and the “import-substitution policies of the Mexican state were successful in generating rapid and sustained economic growth” (Sharpe 28). ISI ushered in the “Mexican Miracle” of economic growth; the Mexican growth hovered around 6% annually for some thirty years (Hellman 1). The government created incentives for investment and lowered taxation to spur domestic investment. Despite the strong economic indicators, the spoils of growth were not shared by many.

Those groups who bled and died from 1910-1917 for a more just and equitable Mexico were subsequently denied the fruits of economic growth and transparent political representation. Efforts to accelerate growth since the mid 1930s “have tended to produce- or at least, to reinforce- a highly inequitable pattern of income distribution” (Hansen 71). According to Roger Hansen, the author of The Politics of Mexican Development, “no other Latin American political system has provided “more rewards for its new industrial and commercial agricultural elites” (87) since 1940 and “in no other major Latin American country has less been done directly by the government for the bottom quarter of society” (87). Mexico’s development created a middle class and brought a certain measure of industrialization but further disenfranchised the poor.

Mexico’s leaders implemented a development policy which violated the ideals of the revolution by shirking the responsibilities of a social democracy. In his essay “Guatemalan Politics: The Popular Struggle for Democracy,” Garry H.