In Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968 – 2000, Dolores Trevizo focuses on a paradox in late twentieth- century Mexico: while peasant groups constituted the base of electoral support for the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), their uprisings in the 1970s and 1980s were pivotal to the demise of the regime. The author posits that by focusing on understudied nonrevolutionary social movements we can better understand how these peasant movements transformed Mexico’s political system. In particular, Trevizo argues that corporatism ultimately estranged peasants from the regime and that what began as protests by peasants over land evolved into an oppositional social movement led by agrarian capitalists. While Mexico’s implementation of International Monetary Fund – mandated austerity programs in the 1980s disproportionately affected workers and peasants, the roots of these groups’ discontent reached further back. In fact, the PRI began to lose its legitimacy among these groups...

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