Mexico remains vital to the security and well-being of the United States in terms of political stability in our borderlands and as a major trading partner. Since 1982 Mexico has been suffering the worst economic conditions since its institutionalized revolution exploded in 1910. Its economy has not grown, and the purchasing power of workers has declined 50 percent. External debt pressures interest rates, and the government must struggle with widespread pollution. Yet President Carlos Salinas has managed to enhance the private sector through privatization. His predecessor, Miguel de la Madrid, did not make the necessary reforms, and the dominant party barely maintained its control of the presidency in the 1988 election.
All this becomes a perspective on the degree of democracy in Mexico in a volume edited by George W. Grayson, with thirteen co-authors. A political scientist at William and Mary College, Grayson focuses on the labor movement’s corruption and the love-hate relationship Mexico has with the United States. He also skillfully integrates chapters by Roderic Camp on the role of the party and the presidency, and on the military. John Purcell describes the challenge of Mexico’s huge foreign and domestic debts. Rogelio Ramírez gives a private-sector perspective on the Mexican crisis, and José Luis Bernal gives the government view of that crisis. David Simcox tackles demography and migration. Sidney Weintraub charts the Mexican economy’s decline, which has not ended. He finds inflation has been reduced but not controlled.
Camp observes that the official party, the PRI, is directly responsible to the president and that the health of the party depends heavily on the success of the presidency. John Bailey explains that the bureaucracy is highly static and centralized. It lacks a career service except for the finance and foreign relations ministries, and reliance on cliques or camarillas reinforces insecurity. Salinas’s closer integration of the Mexican economy with the world trading system may reform the overblown bureaucracy somewhat. M. Delal Baer explains that the electoral process was formerly peripheral to political life, but the corruption of President López Portillo during 1976-82 altered that condition, and the economic pragmatism of De la Madrid during 1982-88 brought a decline in the dominance of the PRI.
This volume will be invaluable to students of Mexican government and political history, with helpful statistical tables and data summaries that make it an example of successful applied scholarship.
