Mexico

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Rebellion and Recession

In 1994 an uprising in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas by a group of Native Americans known as the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (known by its Spanish acronym EZLN) stunned the country and shook international confidence in the Mexican government. The group, also known simply as the Zapatistas, was named for Emiliano Zapata, an early-20th-century Mexican revolutionary leader and agrarian reformer. The Zapatistas sought to bring attention to the plight of indigenous peoples in Mexico and demanded economic and political reforms.

In 1994 the PRI presidential candidate, Ernesto Zedillo Ponce de León, won the presidential election. Shortly after he took office, the government devalued Mexico’s currency. The devaluation, coupled with the Zapatista uprising, caused foreign investors to withdraw millions of dollars they had invested in the Mexican economy. The result was the near collapse of the economy. Mexico was able to prop up its economy through a multi-billion-dollar loan from the United States and prompt action by the International Monetary Fund. In return, Mexico had to pledge some of its future oil revenues.

The Zedillo administration faced a broad array of economic problems throughout 1995 and into 1996, including soaring inflation, labor unrest, a decline in investor confidence, and a prolonged recession. Zedillo worked to implement the economic austerity measures that had been a condition of the U.S. financial bailout and continued efforts to privatize state-owned petroleum and transportation enterprises. Plans to sell part of the enormous state-owned oil monopoly, Pemex, prompted thousands of protesters to blockade oil wells in the southern Gulf state of Tabasco in early 1996.

Despite these economic problems, President Zedillo pressed ahead with political reforms. In 1995 he replaced the country’s entire Supreme Court—which then began to rule against government agencies on a regular basis—and picked a member of the main opposition party to be his attorney general. He also began transferring some power from the office of the president to Mexico’s national legislature and 31 states. Zedillo oversaw a major overhaul of the country’s social security and health-care systems in 1995.

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Zedillo also managed to bring the Zapatistas to the negotiating table to seek a political compromise. In 1996 Zapatista representatives and the Mexican government signed peace accords that aimed to address the issues highlighted by the Zapatista rebellion, such as the need for increased political participation and local political autonomy for indigenous peoples. However, the Zapatistas later broke off negotiations with the government.

By the end of 1996 President Zedillo was struggling with continuing economic and political problems. Drastic economic measures, including steep cuts in social services, had helped to stabilize the economy. But these cuts came at great expense to the majority of the Mexican people, who suffered from reduced government spending on education, health care, and price subsidies for basic food items. The austerity programs also raised interest rates and kept the value of the peso low, which resulted in many Mexicans losing their jobs or businesses. These actions enabled Mexico to refinance its foreign debt on more favorable repayment terms. In 1997 Mexico made the last payment on its emergency loan to the United States, three years ahead of schedule.

In 1997 voters dealt a major setback to the PRI, which lost its majority in the Chamber of Deputies for the first time in its history. The PRI also lost gubernatorial races in several states and lost the first election for mayor of Mexico City since 1928 to opposition candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). (Previous mayors had been appointed by Mexico's president.) However, the PRI remained the dominant political force in Mexico, largely because political differences between the left-wing PRD and the right-wing PAN left them unable to form a working coalition.

The political environment of Mexico had changed by the beginning of the 21st century. In addition to the PRI losing its majority in the lower house of Congress, international public opinion, particularly in the United States and Europe, increasingly played a role in Mexican domestic politics. Pressure to move toward a functioning democratic political system resulted in the election of an effective political opposition in the Mexican congress and the consequent curtailment of presidential powers. Unilateral executive action was no longer possible. Unaccustomed to a functioning political process, Mexico’s political parties tried to define the balance of powers between the legislative and executive branches of government.

In 1999, in an attempt to make the PRI more democratic and thus revive the party’s political fortunes, President Zedillo relinquished his right to pick the next PRI candidate for president. In November the PRI held the first presidential primary election in Mexico’s history. In the election, open to all registered voters in Mexico, Francisco Labastida Ochoa overwhelmingly defeated three other candidates to win the party’s nomination for the July 2000 presidential election. However, Labastida was defeated in the election by Vicente Fox of the PAN. It was the first time the PRI had not won the presidency since the party’s founding in 1929. During the 2000 elections the PAN also became the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies, and the PRI lost its majority in the Senate.

Despite its losses in the presidential and congressional elections in 2000, the PRI continued to play a pivotal role in national politics. It effectively blocked Fox’s efforts in the congress to reform the tax code, the labor code, and national energy policies during the first half of Fox’s term. In midterm legislative elections in the summer of 2003, the PRI scored significant gains. In the Chamber of Deputies, it secured the largest number of seats of any party by a wide margin, 224 out of 500, placing it in a dominant position in the chamber. As a result the legislative initiatives Fox promoted in late 2004 were not expected to do well. Local and state elections across much of Mexico in the late summer of 2004 also testified to the PRI’s ability to remain a strong political force.

The presidential elections in 2006 were closely contested between Felipe Calderón, a former energy secretary and the candidate of the conservative PAN, and Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a former Mexico City mayor and the candidate of the leftist PRD. In early July the Federal Electoral Tribunal declared Calderón the winner by a narrow margin of about 243,000 votes out of 41 million votes cast. However, López Obrador challenged the results, charging fraud and irregularities, and he demanded a recount. The Federal Electoral Tribunal subsequently certified Calderón’s election. It was the closest presidential election in Mexico’s history.

The History section of this article was contributed by Colin MacLachlan. The remainder of the article was contributed by Roderic Ai Camp.

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