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Agenda for Mobilization: The Agrarian Question and Popular Mobilization in Contemporary Mexico

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 October 2022

Michael W. Foley
Michael W. Foley*
Affiliation:
The Catholic University of America
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Mexican politics has long been regarded as a closed system, with policy-making dominated by the reigning president and his circle and presidential succession (with all its possibilities for change of course) managed by an only slightly larger “Revolutionary Family” of top figures in the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI). So intertwined are the Mexican state and the dominant party that scholars and opposition leaders alike have begun to speak of the “PRI state.” E. E. Schattschneider observed that in the U.S. system, 90 percent of the population never has access to the “pressure system” that directs policy choice. The percentage of the excluded is undoubtedly even larger in Mexico because the system is more decidedly “closed.” Yet in both countries, policy innovation is not uncommon. Marked changes of course have occurred at times, and opposition forces external to the system have occasionally managed to block presidential decisions and force reevaluation and sometimes painful adjustments. This article will examine the “agrarian question” in Mexico and will argue that its persistence and the ways in which it has been framed have constrained policymakers while encouraging and sustaining the development of an independent peasant movement during the 1970s and 1980s.

Type
Research Article
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , 1991 , pp. 39 - 74
Copyright
Copyright © 1991 by the University of Texas Press

Footnotes

*

I would like to thank Jonathan Fox, LAR Editor Gilbert Merkx, and the anonymous readers for their very helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.

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