Mexico

Its importance to the wider world is out of proportion to its size. Mexico was the first country in the Americas to write a social constitution — the charter of 1917, which put land, labour and subsoil rights into fundamental law before any European state did anything comparable. It took the foreign oil industry into state hands in 1938, eighteen months after Bolivia had done the same, and made the idea a Latin American orthodoxy. It kept one party in power for seventy-one years and then voted that party out peacefully, in 2000. Its border with the United States is the busiest in the world, and the relationship across it — labour, trade, migration, narcotics, water — is the most intimate and the most unequal in the hemisphere.

Mexican history since independence has been a search for a stable polity in a country of extreme physical and social geography. Three attempts were made. The first, a constitutional monarchy under a Creole general, lasted eighteen months. The second, a liberal federal republic, survived a civil war, a foreign invasion and a dictatorship, and collapsed in a revolution. The third, the party-state built by the victorious generals after 1920, delivered order and growth for half a century and then lost its legitimacy. What replaced it is a democracy that works electorally and has not yet proved able to monopolise force.

The map in this entry is drawn from 1868, the year after the republic was restored, and again from 1920. The years in between — the decade of fighting that began in 1910 — are not drawn as Mexican territory, because for much of that time no single government held the country. The site dates the entry from 1821/1867 for the same reason: 1821 is independence, but 1867 is the year the federal republic that still exists was restored.

At a glance

Why did independence in 1821 produce an empire rather than a republic?

The crisis began in Europe. Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1808 removed the king, and the viceroyalty of New Spain, like the rest of Spanish America, had to decide who now held authority. The answer of the Creole elite of Mexico City was to keep it for the king in his absence, which meant keeping it themselves. That is why the first great insurrection, led by the parish priest Miguel Hidalgo and begun with the Grito de Dolores on 16 September 1810, was as much a war against the Creole elite as against the Spanish. Hidalgo's army of perhaps 80,000 peasants and miners was destroyed in January 1811, and he was executed that summer; the leadership passed to another priest, José María Morelos, a better soldier and a clearer political thinker, who was shot in December 1815.

For five years after that the insurgency survived as a guerrilla movement in the hills of the south, under Vicente Guerrero, while the royalist army — increasingly officered by Mexicans rather than Spaniards — held the cities. What broke the deadlock was a revolution in Spain itself. The liberal pronunciamiento of 1820 forced Ferdinand VII to restore the constitution of Cádiz, which was anticlerical and centralising, and the Mexican elite that had been royalist for a decade suddenly had reason to fear the government it had been defending. The royalist commander Agustín de Iturbide, who had spent the war hunting insurgents, changed sides.

His programme, the Plan of Iguala of 24 February 1821, was a masterpiece of compromise dressed as a proclamation. It promised three things — religion, independence, union: the Catholic Church would keep its privileges, the country would be independent, and all Mexicans, whether born in Spain or America, would be equal before the law. There was to be a constitutional monarchy, with a European prince on the throne if one could be found. The last Spanish viceroy, Juan O'Donojú, signed the Treaty of Córdoba on 24 August 1821; Iturbide entered Mexico City on 27 September, and the Act of Independence was drawn up the next day.

The compromise then failed in the way compromises do, when one partner takes the whole. No European prince appeared, and in May 1822 a demonstration outside the congress — organised, it seems, by Iturbide's own supporters — called on him to take the throne. He was crowned Agustín I in July 1822. The empire lasted eight months. Antonio López de Santa Anna proclaimed a republic at Veracruz in December 1822, the army turned against the emperor under the Plan of Casa Mata in February 1823, and Iturbide abdicated in March. He went into exile, returned in 1824 without warning, was arrested, and was shot at Padilla on 19 July 1824. The First Mexican Empire also took Central America with it, since the provinces of the old captaincy-general of Guatemala had adhered to it in 1821–22; they left again in 1823 and formed the United Provinces of Central America.

None of this made Mexico monarchist. Independence was made by the people who had been fighting against it, in order to preserve a social order — church, army, property — that a liberal revolution from below would have destroyed. The insurgency of Hidalgo and Morelos had been a peasant war as well as a patriotic one, and the men who inherited the state in 1821 had no intention of continuing it.

What did the federal republic of 1824 get right, and why did it lose half the country?

The constitution of 4 October 1824 abolished the monarchy and created a federation. Its fourth article adopted "the form of a representative, popular, federal republic"; its fifth listed nineteen states, from Chiapas and Yucatán to Jalisco, Zacatecas and Coahuila and Texas, with four territories: the two Californias, Colima and Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Its third article made Catholicism the perpetual religion of the nation and forbade the exercise of any other.

The federation was a bargain rather than a philosophy. The provinces had resented rule from Mexico City since the eighteenth century, and the men who had fought for independence at the regional level — Guadalupe Victoria, Vicente Guerrero, Nicolás Bravo — had to be given something. Federalism gave the states legislatures, taxes and, crucially, militias. Victoria took office in October 1824 and served his four years without being overthrown, which in the circumstances was an achievement.

What the republic lacked was money and a way of deciding who would govern. The colonial state had lived on silver, tribute and the sale of offices; independent Mexico inherited the silver but not the fiscal machinery, and borrowed at ruinous rates. The army and the church were corporate bodies with their own courts and revenues, and every government needed one against the other. Politics became a contest between centralists and federalists, fought through Masonic lodges and decided, after the disputed election of 1828, by riot: Guerrero took the presidency, was overthrown by Anastasio Bustamante in 1830, and was shot in 1831.

In 1833 the radical liberal Valentín Gómez Farías, governing while Santa Anna was absent, tried to reform the church, the army and education. He provoked a coalition of bishops, officers and provincial notables that destroyed the reform and made Santa Anna its instrument. In 1835 the Zacatecas militia was crushed in a single afternoon and the regime turned centralist; the constitution was replaced in December 1836 by the Seven Laws, which abolished the states and created departments ruled from the capital. Centralist Mexico was born, and Texas — settled by Anglo-Americans admitted under the colonisation law of 1824 — rose in revolt when the centralist state revoked the federal compact.

The Texas campaign was a story of Mexican political failure as much as Texan heroism. Santa Anna marched north, took the Alamo on 6 March 1836, divided his army, and was captured at San Jacinto on 21 April. The treaties he signed at Velasco recognised Texan independence; the Mexican congress repudiated them, and Mexico spent nine years insisting that Texas was a province in rebellion. When the United States annexed it in 1845 and sent troops to the Rio Grande, the war that followed was one Mexico could not win. The Republic of Texas had been a buffer; the American army was not.

The war of 1846–48 was decided in the north within a year and ended with the occupation of Mexico City in September 1847. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, signed on 2 February 1848, ceded about 1.36 million square kilometres — roughly 55 per cent of Mexico's claimed territory, including the two Californias and everything north of the Rio Grande — for $15 million. In 1853 a further 77,000 square kilometres were sold in the Gadsden Purchase for $10 million, to provide a railway route in the south. Santa Anna, who had returned to power that year and styled himself Su Alteza Serenísima, sold that too, and was overthrown for it.

Why did the Reform split Mexico into two governments?

The generation that came to power after Santa Anna's fall in 1855 was liberal, provincial, and impatient. It had learned from the 1833 experiment that half-measures against the church and the army would be reversed; it intended to legislate them away. The Ley Juárez of November 1855 abolished the special courts — the fueros — that gave clergy and soldiers the right to be tried by their own tribunals. The Ley Lerdo of June 1856 required the church and the municipalities to sell their rural property, on the theory that land held in mortmain was dead capital and that its sale would create a class of small farmers.

That second law had consequences its authors had not fully intended. It applied to the communal lands of indigenous villages as much as to the estates of the church, because those lands were also held collectively, and its effect was to force the sale of village land to those who could pay for it — usually the local mestizo elite. The liberal programme was both anti-clerical and anti-communal: it wanted a nation of individual proprietors, and it regarded the corporate village as an obstacle on the same footing as the corporate church. The Reform broke the power of a church that owned perhaps half the real estate in the country, and it accelerated the concentration of land; both things are true.

The constitution of 5 February 1857 embodied the programme: a bill of individual rights, a single chamber, a weak presidency, and no religious privilege. It was promulgated in February and was to come into force in September; by December the country was at war. The conservatives, backed by the church and much of the army, proclaimed the Plan of Tacubaya, and the moderate president Ignacio Comonfort, who thought the constitution too radical, joined them briefly before fleeing. Benito Juárez, the chief justice, claimed the presidency under the constitution's succession clause, and for three years there were two governments: a liberal one that moved between Veracruz and the north, and a conservative one in Mexico City.

The war was fought with armies raised by caudillos and paid for by forced loans, and it was brutal. It ended at Calpulalpan on 22 December 1860, and Juárez entered Mexico City in January 1861. Before that, from Veracruz in July 1859, he had issued the Laws of Reform: the nationalisation of ecclesiastical property, civil marriage and civil registration, the secularisation of cemeteries, the suppression of monastic orders, and religious toleration. These were the settlement that the 1857 constitution had left implicit, and they were what the war had really been about.

The liberal victory was narrower than it looked. The state was bankrupt, the countryside armed, and the defeated conservatives had not gone away; they had simply lost the capital. And the government's first act of fiscal desperation — the suspension of foreign debt payments in July 1861 — handed them an opening.

How did a Habsburg archduke come to rule Mexico, and why did the republic survive?

The suspension of debt payments gave Britain, France and Spain a pretext. By the Convention of London of October 1861 they agreed to intervene to secure payment; Spanish troops occupied Veracruz in December, and French and British contingents joined them in January 1862. The British and Spanish withdrew in the spring, having concluded that Napoleon III intended something more than debt collection. The French stayed, and in April 1862 the first fighting began.

The French plan was to march on Mexico City, install a friendly government, and secure a Latin American ally for a France that was challenging the United States and Austria in Europe. The first attempt failed: on 5 May 1862, at Puebla, a Mexican force under Ignacio Zaragoza defeated a larger French army, a victory still commemorated as Cinco de Mayo — much more widely in the United States than in Mexico. The French took Puebla a year later, entered Mexico City in June 1863, and set up a regency of Mexican conservatives.

The throne was offered to Maximilian of Habsburg, the younger brother of the Austrian emperor, who had been viceroy of Lombardy-Venetia until Austria lost it. He was a liberal by conviction, believed in constitutional monarchy, and had been told by the French that the Mexican people wanted him. He accepted in April 1864, after the French agreed to pay his debts and guarantee his army, and arrived at Veracruz in May. The Mexican monarchists who had promoted the scheme — clergy, landowners, officers who had lost the Reform War — believed they had recovered the state. The Second Mexican Empire was recognised by several European powers, including Britain and Austria, and by Brazil and China, but never by the United States, which continued to recognise Juárez as the legitimate president.

Maximilian's government was not a simple puppet regime. It issued decrees on child labour and vagrancy, sponsored a land law that would have given the imperial state power over the haciendas, and tried to build a conservative-nationalist base of its own, alienating both the church and the French. It never controlled more than the corridor between the capital and the port. Juárez's government, moving between San Luis Potosí, Saltillo, Chihuahua and Paso del Norte, kept the republic's legal existence alive, and that mattered: in Mexican political theory the republic was the constitution, and the constitution had not been abolished.

The empire was destroyed by events outside Mexico. With the American Civil War over in 1865, the United States could put real pressure on France, and Napoleon III, facing war with Prussia, decided in January 1866 to withdraw. He told Maximilian to abdicate; Maximilian refused. The French evacuated during 1866 and early 1867, and the imperial army was left with the Mexican conservatives and a dwindling treasury. Juárez's generals closed in. Querétaro fell in May 1867, and Maximilian was court-martialled and shot on the Cerro de las Campanas on 19 June 1867, with the conservative generals Miguel Miramón and Tomás Mejía.

The execution was a decision, not an accident, and it was contested at the time: even some of Juárez's own ministers asked for clemency. Juárez refused on the ground that the lesson had to be permanent. Whether the lesson took is another matter, but the republic had survived an invasion and an empire, and that survival became its title deed.

What did the Restored Republic achieve, and why did it end in dictatorship?

Juárez returned to Mexico City in July 1867 and was elected president in his own right later that year. The country he governed had perhaps 8 million people, a wrecked treasury, no credit, and an army of victorious generals who expected to be paid. His answer was to govern with the extraordinary powers the constitution allowed in wartime, and to keep them. He was re-elected in 1871 in an election that his opponents called fraudulent, and the result was a rebellion: Porfirio Díaz, the hero of the war against the French, issued the Plan of La Noria and took up arms.

The crisis resolved itself brutally. Juárez died of a heart attack on 18 July 1872, and Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada, the president of the supreme court, succeeded him, was elected, and pushed through the incorporation of the Laws of Reform into the constitution. Lerdo was a competent moderniser: he completed the first railway from Veracruz to Mexico City in 1873 and began a programme of public works. But he also wanted to be re-elected, and in 1876 Díaz raised the Plan of Tuxtepec on the principle of no re-election — a principle he later abandoned with some thoroughness.

The Restored Republic is often described as a lost liberal golden age, and the description is generous. It was a period of real institutional construction: the civil register, the secular school, the telegraph, the first railway, the beginnings of a professional army. It was also a period in which a small group of lawyers and generals governed through a franchise restricted by literacy and property tests to a fraction of adult men, and in which the state could not collect enough tax to pay its own officials. The liberal project had won the war and did not know how to build the peace.

The dictatorship grew out of that vacuum. Díaz took power in November 1876, was elected in 1877, and — after a four-year interval in which his ally Manuel González governed — held the presidency from 1884 until 1911. He was not a caudillo in the old style: he was a professional soldier who understood that the country needed capitalists, foreign technology and a centralised administration, and he supplied all three. The cost was that he also supplied himself.

How did the Porfiriato change Mexico?

Between 1876 and 1911 Mexico was transformed, and the transformation was real. Railway track went from some 600 kilometres at the beginning of Díaz's first term to about 24,000 by 1910, most of it built by American, British and French companies under concessions that guaranteed them subsidies and exemption from taxes. The lines ran north to the American border and to the ports, which is where the export economy wanted them, and not east–west between provincial cities, which is where a domestic market would have wanted them. That single fact explains a great deal of the geography of modern Mexico.

Foreign capital came with the railways. Mining was modernised with American and British money — copper at Cananea and Nacozari, silver at Pachuca and Guanajuato — and by 1910 Mexico was one of the world's largest producers of silver, copper and lead. Oil began at Ébano in 1901 and boomed after the Dos Bocas well blew in 1908, with the Tampico field divided between Edward Doheny's Mexican Petroleum and Weetman Pearson's El Águila. Cotton, sugar, henequen and coffee were grown for export, and the textile mills of Puebla and Veracruz, the breweries of Monterrey and the cigarette factories were the beginnings of an industrial bourgeoisie.

The political system that managed this was a pyramid of personal networks. At the apex was Díaz, who balanced the científicos — the positivist technocrats around José Yves Limantour — against the generals and the state governors, and who used the federal army, the rural police and the principle of no re-election (for everyone except himself) to keep the pieces in place. State governors were chosen for loyalty and allowed to run their states as fiefdoms. The press was subsidised or bought; the opposition was co-opted, jailed or shot.

Growth did not mean development. Real wages stagnated for most of the period; the great estates swallowed village land, sometimes by purchase and sometimes by force, and by 1910 a large part of the rural population was landless and in debt. The share of land held by a small number of families is often quoted — one per cent of the population owning 85 or 97 per cent, depending on the source — but the figures cannot be traced to a reliable contemporary count. What can be said is that concentration was extreme, that it increased, and that it was the immediate grievance behind the revolution.

The regime's fatal error was constitutional rather than economic. In 1908 Díaz gave an interview to the American journalist James Creelman in which he said that Mexico was ready for democracy and that he would not stand again. He then changed his mind and stood again in 1910, at the age of eighty, against Francisco I. Madero, a wealthy Coahuilan landowner who had written a book about the coming election. Madero was arrested, released on bail, fled to Texas, and issued the Plan of San Luis Potosí, which declared the election void and called for a rising on 20 November 1910.

What did the revolution of 1910–20 actually change?

The revolution began as a demand for honest elections and became something much larger, because the political crisis released the agrarian and labour grievances that the Porfiriato had suppressed. Madero's call produced risings in the north under Pascual Orozco and Francisco Villa, and in the south under Emiliano Zapata, whose Plan of Ayala of November 1911 demanded the restitution of village land and the expropriation of the haciendas that had taken it. Díaz resigned in May 1911 and left for France; Madero was elected in the autumn and took office in November.

He lasted fifteen months. Madero was a democrat and a spiritualist, and he had no idea how to manage an army that had just discovered it could make governments. He kept the federal army intact, alienated Zapata by demanding that he disarm first, and was overthrown in February 1913 by a conspiracy between General Victoriano Huerta, the American ambassador and the Porfirian old guard. The coup's ten days of fighting in Mexico City — the Decena Trágica — ended with Madero and his vice-president murdered on 22 February 1913.

Huerta's regime united everyone against it. Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, raised the Constitutionalist army under the Plan of Guadalupe, and the American occupation of Veracruz in April 1914 cut his enemy's customs revenue; Huerta fled in July. The victors then fell out. At the Convention of Aguascalientes in October 1914 the revolutionary generals tried to agree on a government and failed; Carranza and Obregón withdrew to Veracruz, and Villa and Zapata occupied the capital.

The decisive campaign was in the Bajío. At Celaya in April 1915, Obregón's Constitutionalist army — entrenched, with barbed wire and machine guns — destroyed Villa's cavalry in the largest battle of the revolution, and Villa's movement never recovered. Carranza was recognised by the United States in October 1915 and controlled the country by the end of the year. Zapata was murdered at Chinameca in April 1919, on Carranza's orders; Villa was assassinated in 1923; Carranza himself was killed in May 1920 after the Sonoran generals rose against him under the Plan of Agua Prieta.

Out of that sequence came the constitution of 5 February 1917, drafted in Querétaro in three months by a congress in which the radical wing outnumbered Carranza's own supporters. Its article 3 ended church control of education; article 27 declared that land and subsoil belonged to the nation and that the state could expropriate for the public good; article 123 laid down an eight-hour day, a minimum wage, the right to strike and to compensation for dismissal. Carranza accepted the text because he had to, and then spent three years not enforcing it.

The human cost is the hardest thing to measure and the most disputed. The census of 1910 counted 15,160,369 people; the census of 1921 counted 14,334,780. That is a decline of more than 800,000 in eleven years, in a country growing at about 1.1 per cent a year; INEGI's own analysis notes that on the earlier trend Mexico should have had at least 17 million people in 1921. The shortfall of roughly 2.5 million is not a body count: it includes births that never happened, emigration to the United States, and the undercount of a census taken by a state that had lost control of much of its territory. Estimates of the dead range from about 500,000 to two million. What is not in dispute is that the revolution killed a larger share of the population than any other event in Mexican history since the conquest.

How did the revolution's generals turn into a party?

The men who won in 1920 had a problem that no constitution could solve: how to hand on power without a war. Álvaro Obregón, president from 1920 to 1924, began the reconstruction — land distribution, rural schools, the ministry of education under José Vasconcelos, the muralists, the first serious labour legislation. Plutarco Elías Calles, his successor, was harder and more systematic: he built the state's financial institutions, founded the Bank of Mexico in 1925, and enforced the anticlerical articles of the constitution with a rigour that produced the Cristero War.

That war, from August 1926 to June 1929, was the last great religious conflict in the Americas. The church suspended public worship; the cristeros of Jalisco, Michoacán, Guanajuato and Zacatecas fought a guerrilla campaign with the slogan ¡Viva Cristo Rey!; the federal army burned villages and shot prisoners. Some 70,000 to 90,000 people died, according to the usual estimates, and the settlement of 1929 was a compromise: the state agreed not to enforce the letter of the law, and the church returned to the churches. The conflict left the state formally secular and the countryside substantially Catholic, a division that still shapes politics.

The succession problem then produced the revolution's most durable invention. Obregón was re-elected on 1 July 1928 and assassinated sixteen days later by a Catholic militant. Calles, who could not succeed himself, solved the crisis by creating a party. The National Revolutionary Party, founded in March 1929, was not a party in the European sense: it was a federation of the revolutionary factions — generals, unions, peasant leagues, state bosses — with a single candidate chosen by the outgoing president. For the next six years Calles governed through puppet presidents, a period known as the Maximato, until Lázaro Cárdenas, elected in 1934, turned the machine against its inventor and sent him into exile.

Cárdenas gave the regime its popular base and its ideology. He distributed some 18 million hectares to ejidos — more than all his predecessors combined — organised the peasants and the workers into confederations attached to the party, and reorganised the party itself in 1938 on corporatist lines, with separate sectors for labour, peasants, the army and the "popular" middle class. In March of that year he expropriated the foreign oil companies, after a labour dispute that the companies had lost in the courts and refused to settle; PEMEX was created in June, and the state took over the industry. The Spanish precedent for state ownership of the subsoil was not accidental: the legal argument was article 27, and the political argument was that oil was the nation's.

The 1938 expropriation was the moment the post-revolutionary state became legitimate in its own terms. Mexicans queued to donate jewellery and chickens to pay the compensation; the United States, pursuing the Good Neighbor Policy, did not intervene on the companies' side; and after the war the dispute was settled for about $24 million, a fraction of what the companies had claimed. Cárdenas also did something no Mexican president had done since Juárez: he finished his term, handed power to a chosen successor, and retired.

Was the Mexican Miracle a miracle?

The forty years after 1940 were the longest period of sustained growth in Mexican history. GDP grew at around 6 per cent a year from the 1940s to the late 1960s, faster than the population, which more than doubled between 1940 and 1970. The model was import-substituting industrialisation: tariffs and licences protected domestic manufacturers, the state built the roads, dams, railways and electricity that they needed, and the countryside supplied cheap food and cheap labour. Manufacturing went from about 15 per cent of output in 1940 to over 20 per cent by 1970, and Mexico City grew from about 1.7 million people to more than 8 million.

The social bargain behind the boom was political. The party — renamed the Party of the Mexican Revolution in 1938 and the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, in 1946 — delivered order, and the state delivered growth; in exchange, the unions accepted wage restraint and the peasants accepted the slowing of land reform. When the peasant and labour movements pressed too hard, the state used force: the railwaymen's strike of 1959 was broken by the army, and the doctors' movement of 1964–65 was crushed. The army was kept small and used mainly for internal security.

The boom had costs that were visible by the 1960s. Agriculture stagnated after the land reform ran out of land, and Mexico became a food importer in 1965. Income distribution barely improved: the share of national income going to the poorest half of the population was no higher in 1970 than in 1950. The state's spending on education and health rose, but so did its deficits, and the private sector depended on protection that made it uncompetitive. The political system's capacity to absorb dissent depended on there being something to distribute.

Then it broke, symbolically, in one night. In the summer of 1968 a student movement, provoked by a police riot in July, occupied the campus of the National Autonomous University and the National Polytechnic, and demanded the release of prisoners and a dialogue with the government. President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz decided that the movement was a conspiracy and that the Olympics, due to open in October, could not be allowed to be disrupted. On 2 October 1968, army units and a plain-clothes battalion surrounded the Plaza de las Tres Culturas at Tlatelolco and opened fire on a crowd of about 10,000 people. The government's official figures were a few dozen dead; independent estimates run between 300 and 500, and the documents released since 2001 indicate that snipers from the presidential guard fired first.

Tlatelolco did not bring down the regime. The Olympics went ahead, and Díaz Ordaz's successor, Luis Echeverría, jailed some of the students and then co-opted the rest with a rhetoric of revolutionary nationalism and a spending programme that his successors could not sustain. But the massacre destroyed the regime's claim to be the heir of the revolution, and the legitimacy it lost was never fully recovered.

What broke in 1982, and what did the market turn deliver?

Echeverría's answer to 1968 was to spend. Public investment and social programmes grew, the money supply grew faster, and by 1976 inflation and a balance-of-payments crisis forced a devaluation of the peso. The discovery of the Cantarell field in 1976 and the other offshore finds of that decade gave his successor, José López Portillo, a reason to borrow against the future: with oil at $35 a barrel, Mexico's reserves seemed inexhaustible, and the state borrowed tens of billions of dollars on the strength of them.

The arithmetic collapsed in 1982. Oil prices fell, interest rates in the United States rose, and Mexico's debt service reached more than the country could earn. In August the government suspended payments; in September López Portillo nationalised the private banks and imposed exchange controls, in a speech that blamed a "plague" of bankers for the crisis. The peso lost most of its value, inflation reached three digits, and the 1980s became the década perdida — the lost decade — in which real wages fell below their 1970 level and Mexico's per capita income did not recover until the 1990s.

The response was a reordering of the economy that went far beyond stabilisation. Miguel de la Madrid began the sale of state enterprises and joined GATT in 1986; Carlos Salinas de Gortari, whose election in 1988 was surrounded by the collapse of the vote-counting system and mass protest, accelerated the process: privatisation of the banks, the telephone company and the mines, the reform of article 27 in 1992 that ended the legal basis for land distribution, and the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement.

NAFTA came into force on 1 January 1994 and was the hinge of the new model: Mexico would export manufactures to the United States and import capital and technology, and the maquiladora belt along the border would be the engine. The results are large and uneven. Exports of goods and services rose from $61.5 billion in 1993 to $682 billion in 2024; manufacturing's share of output stayed at about 20 per cent, but its geography moved north, and the border states grew while the south did not. Two-way trade with the United States reached $871.6 billion in goods in 2025, making Mexico the largest American trading partner.

The same year brought the other face of the transition. On the day NAFTA took effect, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation seized several towns in Chiapas and declared war on the Mexican state, in the name of the indigenous communities that the new model had left behind. The uprising was militarily hopeless and politically decisive: it forced the government to negotiate, put indigenous rights on the agenda, and made the Zapatistas the most visible expression of the argument that the market turn had a price.

The political transition was slower and, in the end, cleaner. The 1994 election was the first in which the opposition had a real chance, and it was overshadowed by the assassination of the PRI candidate, Luis Donaldo Colosio, in March, and of the party's secretary-general, José Francisco Ruiz Massieu, in September. Ernesto Zedillo won, and then did what no PRI president had done: he accepted the loss of the party's congressional majority in 1997 and the loss of the presidency in 2000, when Vicente Fox of the National Action Party won with 42.5 per cent of the vote.

How did Mexico become a democracy, and why did it become so violent?

The alternation of 2000 was the most important single event in modern Mexican politics, and the least dramatic. The PRI's candidate conceded; the army stayed in barracks; the electoral institute, created in 1990 and made autonomous in 1996, did its job. The country discovered that its authoritarianism had been institutional rather than personal, and that the institutions could be handed over. Fox's government was competent and disappointing: it opened the archives of the dirty war, improved transparency, and failed to reform the tax system or the police.

The violence came with the next government. Felipe Calderón, who won the election of 2006 by 0.58 of a percentage point over Andrés Manuel López Obrador and took office amid a congressional sit-in, sent the army into Michoacán in December 2006 to confront the drug cartels. The decision was partly a response to a real surge in cartel violence, partly a way of establishing authority after a disputed election. It militarised a problem that had been handled, corruptly but quietly, by the police.

The results were catastrophic in the way that such campaigns usually are. The killing of cartel leaders fragmented the organisations into smaller, more violent groups; the army's presence in the streets produced human-rights complaints and, in many places, a transfer of local power to whichever criminal group could buy or kill the police. The intentional homicide rate, 9.7 per 100,000 in 2006, reached 29.4 in 2018; on the population of those years, the published rates imply something over 400,000 killings between 2006 and 2023. More than 100,000 people are officially recorded as disappeared.

Enrique Peña Nieto, who returned the PRI to power in 2012, built a reform programme — energy, telecommunications, education, fiscal — that was technocratically impressive and politically expensive; the disappearance of 43 students at Ayotzinapa in September 2014 destroyed his government's credibility, and the corruption scandals that followed confirmed the suspicion that the transition had changed who governed without changing how.

The deeper problem was the state itself. Mexico's tax take is the lowest in the OECD; its police forces are municipal and small; its judiciary is slow and, in much of the country, penetrable. Democracy gave Mexicans the power to throw out governments. It did not give them a state capable of protecting them, and the gap between the two is where the violence lives.

What has the Fourth Transformation changed?

Andrés Manuel López Obrador won the election of 2018 with 53 per cent of the vote, the largest share for any candidate since the transition began, and his coalition won majorities in both chambers. He called his programme the Fourth Transformation, after independence, the Reform and the revolution, and it was a genuine change of direction: austerity in the state's own spending, cash transfers to the young, the old and the poor, a huge public-works programme in the south — the Maya Train, the Dos Bocas refinery, the Interoceanic Corridor — and a rhetorical return to the revolutionary nationalism of Cárdenas.

His security policy was the most consequential and the most contested. "Hugs, not bullets" meant an end to the open war on the cartels and a turn to the newly created National Guard, amnesties, and the argument that violence was a symptom of inequality. Homicides fell from their peak but remained at historically high levels; the cartels consolidated their control of entire states; and the policy's defenders point out that the previous strategy had failed at greater cost. His opponents point out that the state's authority in Michoacán, Guerrero or Tamaulipas is now largely nominal.

On the economy the record is mixed and disputed. The economy grew by barely 1 per cent a year in his first two years and then contracted by more than 8 per cent in 2020; poverty fell, according to the World Bank's measure, from 35 per cent in 2018 to 21 per cent in 2024, and the minimum wage rose faster than inflation. Remittances reached $67.9 billion in 2024, more than foreign direct investment, and constitute the largest single source of foreign exchange after manufacturing. The energy policy — building refineries and buying the Spanish-owned power assets — was expensive and, in the judgement of most economists, a net loss.

The political change is clearer than the economic one. López Obrador dismantled the independent institutions the transition had built — the electoral institute was restructured, the transparency institute abolished, the autonomous regulators merged into ministries — and concentrated power in the presidency to a degree not seen since the 1980s. His party, Morena, won the presidency again in 2024, when Claudia Sheinbaum took 59.76 per cent of the vote and carried 31 of the 32 states, and it has since used its congressional supermajority to rewrite the constitution.

Sheinbaum, a physicist and former mayor of Mexico City, took office on 1 October 2024 and inherited a country with a strong currency, a large fiscal deficit, a security crisis and a new American administration threatening tariffs. Her first year was dominated by three things: the implementation of the judicial reform that makes judges elected rather than appointed, with the first elections held in June 2025; the negotiation of tariffs and migration with Washington; and the continuation of her predecessor's security policy with a somewhat harder edge. Whether the Fourth Transformation becomes a durable regime or a faction that outlived its founder is the open question of Mexican politics.

Common myths about Mexico

Timeline of Mexico

What the map shows next

At 1868 on the map the republic has just been restored: the French are gone, Maximilian is dead, and the map shows a country of some 8 million people whose government controls the cities and the railways but not the sierra. At 1910 on the map the Porfirian state is at its height, with 24,000 kilometres of track, a modern capital and a countryside on the edge of revolt; two years later the map stops drawing Mexico at all.

By 1940 the post-revolutionary state was consolidating, the oil industry was Mexican, and the population had reached 19.7 million. At 1994 on the map the border is a manufacturing belt, the Zapatistas have just declared war in Chiapas, and NAFTA has been in force for a day. At 2024 on the map the country is urban, ageing, connected to the United States by the busiest trade corridor in the world, and governed for the second time by Morena.