The Problems of Mexico: An Analysis of a Sociological Discourse

Neoliberalism has been implemented in Latin America for about three decades. This article reviews Mexico’s neoliberal trajectory to illustrate the political, economic, and social alterations that have resulted from this process. It finds that representative democracy has been perverted through fear, putting central political decisions in the hands of power groups with special interests. The border between the state of law and the state of exception is blurred. Economic structural adjustment with liberalization and privatization has provoked recurrent crisis, but has been maintained, leading to the destruction of the national productive structure in favor of supranational corporations, particularly financial capital. The association between criminal economy and economic criminality is also discussed. The privatization of social benefits and services requires state subsidies and allows the privatization of profits and the socialization of losses. The social impact of this process has been devastating, with a polarized income distribution, falling wages, increased precarious jobs, rising inequality, and extreme violence. Health conditions have also deteriorated and disorders associated with violence, chronic stress, and a changing nutritional culture have become dominating. However, in Latin America, massive, organized political and social mobilization has broken the vicious neoliberal circle and elected progressive governments that are struggling to reverse social and economic devastation.

The Americas, 2014

Latin American Research Review

As a preeminent enduring regime in the world today, Mexico provides a compelling case study regarding the nature and locus of power. Since the 1970s, accounts of politics in postrevolutionary Mexico have assumed that ongoing domination has resulted from centralized, relatively homogeneous power transmitted outward through corporatist mechanisms. The process of transmission replicated the dynamics of the center through a combination of skillful management and efficient coercion. Even now, as researchers are emphasizing the breakdown of corporatism and the complexity and nuance of current Mexican politics, they continue to codify the past according to the terms of the 1970s analysis and view the present through this lens. But while social scientists in the 1970s were right to characterize the postrevolutionary Mexican regime as authoritarian and hegemonic, they were wrong about the nature of hegemony. In constructing a state-centered and center-centered understanding of politics, soci...

Revista Mexicana de Sociología, 1986

El autor realiza un análisis de los problemas que se pueden suscitar en los procesos de elaboración constitucional llevados a cabo por las nuevas democracias emergentes. En un recorrido que nos lleva desde Budapest hasta Filadelfia, pata terminar en Sudáfrica, se discuten los aspectos relacionados con la legitimidad de estos procesos: el aprendizaje, los regla mentos de enmienda, los procedimientos a seguir, la publicidad, el consenso, la pluralidad y la "reflectividad", es decir, la capacidad de autocontrol y automodificación de una cons titución. Se examina el caso de Sudáfrica, al que toma como modelo político con objeto de sortear con éxito los obstáculos que se le presentan al legislador moderno cuando aspira a elaborar una constitución a la altura de las circunstancias y necesidades actuales y futuras de una nación democrática.

Global Labour Journal, 2011

Workers and Welfare is the most comprehensive account and analysis we have of Mexico's social welfare system, its historical evolution and its structures and functions. Her book supersedes earlier studies bringing the story of the interaction between labor unions, social welfare institutions, political parties and the state right up to the presidency of today's chief of state, Felipe Calderón. Organized around a simple, powerful thesis-the key role of labor in political cross-class coalition-the author provides a coherent and compelling argument that both drives the historical account and illuminates the structural analysis. Dion argues that the most important factor in accounting for the origin, development, and subsequent complex articulation of the social welfare system in Mexico has been the strength-or weakness-of the labor movement and its role in the cross-class coalitions that form the basis for Mexican political parties. Simply put, where labor has been well organized and powerful and had an important insertion in the dominant political party and government, the social welfare system expanded and tended to become more universal. When labor was weak, poorly organized, or less significant in the dominant party and in government, the growth and the tendency toward universal coverage was less significant. Wisely, Dion's own account is never so simply put. Dion recognizes the complexity of the system that results from many other factors that intervene in the historical process. While the role of labor in the political coalition may be at the center, other factors such as institutional momentum or inertia, changes in the political system from authoritarianism to multi-party democracy, and the transformation of the national and international economic model from Keynesianism to neoliberalism have also had a significant impact on the evolution of social welfare and its complex structuring. Attempts by labor unions or the state to reform the system, whether to make it more universal or to make it more restrictive, always confront the inertia of the institutions themselves. Consequently, reformers have tended to leave old systems in place while layering new ones in, over and around the others, leading to what Dion calls the 'patchwork' of today's Mexican social welfare system. The book opens with the question: what accounts for the creation of modern social welfare systems in nations like Mexico? Dion explains that social scientists have attributed their appearance to economic development, the expansion of the state's capacity, the international diffusion of social policy, and the power of the labor movement. Each of these explanations finds proponents in the disciplines of economics, political science, and sociology, and the intellectual debate between and among them leads to methods that emphasize the role of history, the significance of social structures

Este libro es resultado de una clase que impartí en el otoño del 2013 en la Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez en la Maestría en Ciencias Sociales, denominada: Sociedad y Desarrollo, donde tuve la oportunidad de conocer y trabajar con tres estupendos profesionales que pusieron todo su empeño y ánimo para fortalecer su formación. Al finalizar el semestre debía evaluarlos con un ensayo académico y fue ahí cuando nació la idea de presentar dichos trabajos en la forma de un libro para poner su esfuerzo a disposición de un público amplio y no quedar en el olvido. El resultado fue un trabajo sobre la importancia del sector agropecuario para el estado de Chihuahua, México; un análisis de la migración vista desde Ciudad Juárez y una extraordinaria discusión sobre la relevancia de la sustentabilidad para el desarrollo. A estas narrativas analíticas se agregó posteriormente un ensayo sobre la calidad y la producción de los investigadores en las instituciones de educación superior mexicanas...

2011

Abstract: The Zapatista rebellion which broke out on January 1, 1994, on the very day that the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was implemented, can be considered a local response to the global policy shift of the Mexican government under President Salinas de Gortari (1988-1994). This thesis includes a detailed discursive analysis of the annual speeches of the president, and the annual declarations of the EZLN (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional). One of the basic assumptions of the thesis is that these political narratives played a strategic role in a struggle to gain hegemonic acceptance amongst the Mexican populace for the respective national projects which each side envisioned. The initial chapters present a description of the socio-historical context in Mexico and of the EZLN as a social movement. Chapters III and IV describe the theoretical-methodological framework of the thesis, which integrates a Gramscian approach to hegemony with discourse theory and two main directions in critical discourse analysis (CDA): discourse and social change and the discourse-historical approach. Categories of discourse theory have been connected to categories in CDA, thus creating a framework which allows for the analysis of data in the light of a hegemonic struggle. The analysis helps to clarify concepts in discourse theory, especially ‘empty signifiers’, ‘nodal points’, ‘myth’ and ‘imaginary’. The integration of discourse theory and CDA makes possible an analysis of the discourse of the Mexican government and the EZLN in terms of processes of rearticulation. Thus, Salinas de Gortari rearticulates the national future of Mexico in terms of civic nationalism and liberal democracy; and the EZLN in terms of ethnic nationalism and a radical democracy. The final chapters discuss the stakes in this conflict and consider it in terms of the struggle, on the part of the EZLN, for the right to be different. In abstract terms, this involves an increased tension between the universal and particular – both relevant issues in a contemporary world which is characterized by multiple groups struggling to affirm their identity.

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Civil Society and Political Representation in Latin America (2010-2015), 2017

Since the mid-2000s, Latin America has been the stage for a multitude of social protests of different types, based around both 'classic' (targeted public policies, support for/rejection of a government) and 'post-materialist' social demands (Inglehart 1997). The latter includes topics such as gay marriage, abortion and the protection of the environment. These phenomena are the most visible symptom of the establishment of the processes of democratic consolidation, stabilization and routinization initiated since the 1980s, occurring almost concurrently with a decline in the frequency of episodes of democratic instability (Alcántara 2004; Alcantara and Tagina 2013; Mainwaring and Pérez Liñán 2015, amongst others). Furthermore, the occurrence and sheer scale of these movements, protests and pickets empirically contradict the literature in vogue in the 1990s which, based on the observation of generalized disenchantment in the region, diagnosed the emergence of a state of political apathy or depoliticization in

2001

In this thesis I examine the most important ideological issue of the six-year administration or sexenio of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in Mexico from 1988 to 1994: the tension between nationalism and economic or "neo" liberalism. That government undertook accelerated economic reform to substitute a statist political economy justified by the "revolutionary nationalism" that was hitherto the dominant political doctrine in Mexico with one based on market principles and free trade informed by neoliberal economic ideas. This chapter identifies the main questions which such a focus generatesconcerning the relationships between nationalism and modernity, and between political economy and ideological changeand positions those questions in a theoretical and historical context while outlining the specific objectives of the thesis and the structure it will take. The nationalism predominant in post-revolutionary political culture had a social character deriving from the popular dimensions of the constitutional settlement following Mexico's 1910-17 Revolution, whereas the economic liberalism which provided Salinas with the theoretical justification to conduct reform restated aspects of classical liberal political economy premised upon individualistic, free-market values hostile to the social state. The Salinas reform process, therefore, exposed a tension between the liberal vision of a market economy regulated by a minimalist state and partaking in free trade and an official nationalism traditionally defined by a strong state's sovereign power to attenuate social division by circumscribing market forces in order to foster the unity required, in theory, for the existence of nationhood. ' Kathy Powell has dwelt upon this issue, arguing that Salinas' effort to redefine national consciousness in order to assert his legitimacy had little success because of