Thread by @arctotherium42

Excerpts from TR Fehrenbach's "Fire and Blood: A History of Mexico" (1995). The PRI had massively expanded higher education. These universities were entirely 'free'/self-governing and became locuses of left-wing organizing.

In 1968, security forces fired upon a massive student demonstration/riot against the Olympic Games.

By 1970 Mexico had made enormous progress; the national income increased sixfold while the death rate dropped by half. But Mexico was still struggling with foreign-exchange; the govt pursued import-substitution to improve balance-of-payments.

Mexico was kept solvent by the tourist industry, which provided the foreign exchange needed for the imports desired by Mexican consumers.

The combination of new oil discoveries and the 1973 oil shock led to a huge oil boom in Mexico; the money was spent on consumption, expansion of the bureaucracy, food subsidies, and make-work jobs.

When oil prices fell, the Mexican state could not reduce expenses, and much of the money had been stolen. Lopez Portillo responded by seizing all private banks, leading to capital flight.

Lopez Portillo's successor, De La Madrid, however, was able to pull off the market reforms that the contemporaneous USSR failed to, and salvaged the situation, in part thanks to the PRI's political monopoly and the President's extraordinary power.

Still, these austerity measures triggered the creation of a left opposition, the PRD. (BTW: even under PRI rule, Mexico's maximum era of peace and stability, hundreds of dissidents and journalists were killed yearly)

In 1988, Carlos Salinas assumed the presidency, in an election generally assumed to be fraudulent. He wanted to further democratize and liberalize Mexico, to make it more like the richer nations of the world, joining NAFTA and breaking the PRI's political monopoly.

Salinas' policies partly worked; debt halved as a % of GDP and the real income of Mexicans rose from 62% of the 1980 level to 73% by 1993. But it was very slow; Salinas gambled that given hope, the masses would be willing to endure.

In 1994, another Zapatista uprising began in Chiapas under "Subcomandante Marcos," a media sensation. The chosen PRI candidate, popular and competent, was assassinated, but his replacement, Zedillo, won (legitimately, even).

In 1994, Mexico remained the most stable Hispanic country, but after generations of exterminating dissidents and rebels it was forced to negotiate with them by international pressure.

There are still today three Mexicos: the indios and agrarian mestizos, the mestizo/Mexican urbanoids of most of the country, and the small ruling group of professionals, bureaucrats, and businessmen in a handful of great cities and businesses.