Before Mexico descended into the mayhem of the Drug War, it experienced a strange form of authoritarianism- what the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called...

A Perfect Dictatorship? State and Society in Mexico, 1940-1982 (Dissertation) (HIST0618)

Before Mexico descended into the mayhem of the Drug War, it experienced a strange form of authoritarianism- what the novelist Mario Vargas Llosa called 'the perfect dictatorship'. With civilian leaders, nationalist rhetoric, regular (and fraudulent) elections, and apparently broad popular support, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) governed Mexico for decades; it bucked Latin American trends for coups and civil war, prefigured regimes of ‘electoral authoritarianism’ around the world, and left a profound legacy in Mexico.

This course has three main objectives. First, we will explore how and why the PRI dominated Mexico for so long, and who really wielded power in this peculiar system. Was rule violent or consensual, inclusive or exclusive? Was this regime either revolutionary or institutional? Second, we will use Mexico as a historical laboratory to explore critical twentieth-century themes: the global impact of WWII; the Cold War and US hegemony; ideas of national ‘development’; the New Left and the counterculture; spiralling urbanization and accelerating ecological crisis; violence and rise of the human rights; the remaking of race and gender hierarchies; the origins of neoliberalism. In doing so, we will challenge the idea that Mexico has been backward or marginal, and consider how it has been at the forefront of major global processes. Finally, we will trace how this history continues to shape contemporary conflicts over drugs, migration, and historical memory. The course introduces students to a lively and growing historiographical field, and draws on diverse primary sources: diplomatic dispatches, spy reports, memoirs, interviews, film, photography, and cartoons. More broadly, we will consider the opportunities and difficulties of researching the recent history of a place where access to archives is fitful, tens of thousands of people have recently been ‘disappeared’, and journalists are murdered at world-leading rates.