Mexico Under Siege: Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism

Mexico Under Seige is a readable and well-informed political history covering the period from the ruling PRI‘s lurch to the right in 1940 through to its eventual expulsion from office in the elections of 2000. Based on two decades of interview material and new documentary sources, this book is the first to consider the full panorama of popular resistance to the alliance between the Mexican state bureaucracy, the president and the business class. This resistance embraced emerging urban labour protest, new peasant movements, revolutionary strikes on the railways and in schools, student opposition, and the re-emergence of guerrilla struggle culminating in the celebrated indigenous peoples‘ resistance in Chiapas.

Mexico Under Siege analyses the core parties of the resistance, including the suprisingly central role of the Mexican Communist Party, and explains why resistance achieved no more than ending the PRI‘s system of presidential despotism. Hodge and Gandy conclude with some provocative ideas about who now constitutes the common people‘s primary opponent and examine the prospects for genuine struggle in an electoral arena where neo-liberal economic ideology and the Mexican economy‘s closer integration with the United States dominate the political scene.