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Who governed? Grassroots politics in Mexico under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, 1958-1970
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Smith, Benjamin T. (2014) Who governed? Grassroots politics in Mexico under the Partido Revolucionario Institucional, 1958-1970. Past & Present, 225 (1). pp. 227-271. doi:10.1093/pastj/gtu034
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Official URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/pastj/gtu034
Abstract
For seventy-one years the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) not only dominated Mexico’s presidential and congressional votes but also won the vast majority of local elections. 1 Revolutionaries had fought for the right to choose local representatives, and the principle of municipal governance was enshrined in the 1917 Constitution. 2 As a result, opponents of Mexico’s hegemonic system often focused their critiques on municipal presidents or mayors. In the 1960s opposition politicians asserted that the PRI imposed ‘rogues and violent men’, and claimed that only eight of the country’s municipalities had experienced free votes. 3 Left-leaning commentators often concurred, arguing that local officials constituted a ‘mafia’. 4 Even discontented PRI functionaries declared that ‘municipal representatives … were selected directly from the federal capital’ and were ‘obscure and ill-qualified for the job’. 5 By the end of the decade, the cartoonist Rius’s Don Perpetuo, the corpulent, drunken mayor of San Garabato, had become a symbol of the PRI regime. Fantastically wealthy, inveterately corrupt and imposed from above without any popular support, there was, as one columnist remarked, ‘a Don Perpetuo in every village’. 6 (See Map .)
| Item Type: | Journal Article | ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Divisions: | Faculty of Arts > History | ||||||||
| Journal or Publication Title: | Past & Present | ||||||||
| Publisher: | Oxford University Press | ||||||||
| ISSN: | 0031-2746 | ||||||||
| Official Date: | 1 November 2014 | ||||||||
| Dates: |
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| Volume: | 225 | ||||||||
| Number: | 1 | ||||||||
| Page Range: | pp. 227-271 | ||||||||
| DOI: | 10.1093/pastj/gtu034 | ||||||||
| Status: | Peer Reviewed | ||||||||
| Publication Status: | Published | ||||||||
| Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access |
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