During the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas in the 1930s,
the Mexican government returned to some of the original
revolutionary goals by distributing 44 million acres of
land to landless Mexican peasants, thereby appealing to
the rural poor.
In the 1950s and 1960s, Mexico’s ruling party, the
Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), focused on a
balanced industrial program. Fifteen years of steady economic
growth combined with low inflation and real gains
in wages for more and more people made those years appear
to be a golden age in Mexico’s economic development.
But at the end of the 1960s, one implication of
Mexico’s domination by one party became apparent with
the rise of the student protest movement. On October 2,
1968, a demonstration by university students in Tlaltelolco
Square in Mexico City was met by police, who
opened fire and killed hundreds of students. Leaders of
the PRI became concerned about the need to change the
system.
The next two presidents, Luis Echeverría (b. 1922)
and José López Portillo (b. 1920), introduced political reforms.
The government eased rules for the registration of
political parties and allowed greater freedom of debate in
the press and universities. But economic problems continued
to trouble Mexico.
In the late 1970s, vast new reserves of oil were discovered
in Mexico. As the sale of oil abroad rose dramatically,
the government became increasingly dependent on
oil revenues. When world oil prices dropped in the mid-
1980s, Mexico was no longer able to make payments on
its foreign debt, which had reached $80 billion in 1982.
The government was forced to adopt new economic policies,
including the sale of publicly owned companies to
private parties.
The debt crisis and rising unemployment increased
dissatisfaction with the government. In the 1988 elections,
the PRI’s choice for president, Carlos Salina, who
had been expected to win in a landslide, won by only a
50.3 percent majority. The new president continued the
economic liberalization of his predecessors and went even
further by negotiating the North American Free Trade
Agreement (NAFTA) with the United States and Canada.
Although NAFTA was highly controversial in the
United States because of the fear that U.S. firms would
move factories to Mexico, where labor costs are cheaper
and environmental standards less stringent, some observers
asserted that the impact of NAFTA has been
more beneficial to the U.S. economy than to its southern
neighbor. Reflecting Mexico’s continuing economic
problems was rising popular unrest in southern parts of
the country, where unhappy farmers, many of whom are
native Amerindians, have grown increasingly vocal in
protesting endemic poverty and widespread neglect of
the needs of the indigenous peoples, who comprise about
10 percent of the total population of 100 million people.
In the summer of 2000, a national election suddenly
swept the ruling PRI from power. The new president, Vicente
Fox (b. 1942), promised to address the many problems
affecting the country, including political corruption,
widespread poverty, environmental concerns, and a growing
population. But he faces vocal challenges from the
PRI, which still controls many state legislatures and a
plurality in Congress, as well as from the protest movement
in rural areas in the south. Calling themselves
Zapatistas in honor of the revolutionary leader Emiliano
Zapata (see Chapter 5), the rebels demand passage of legislation
to protect the rights of the indigenous Indian
population and increasing autonomy for regions such as
the southern state of Chiapas, where Amerindians make
up a substantial percentage of the population. President
Fox has expressed his support for legislative action to
bring about reforms, but the movement has aroused such
a groundswell of support from around the country that he
will be under considerable pressure to deal with generations
of neglect in solving the problems of Mexico.
World History
