Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968-2000

Contents

List of Figures and Tables

Preface and Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction The Rural Roots of Mexico’s Nascent Democracy: The Role of Peasants and Agrarian Capitalists in Opposition Politics

1. Social Movements and Democratization

2. The “Banner of 1968”: The Student Movement’s Democratizing Effects

3. State Repression and the Dispersal of Radicals into Mexico’s Countryside, 1970–1975

4. Capitalists on the Road to Political Power in Mexico: Class Struggle, Neopanismo, and the Birth of Democracy

5. The Rural Sources of the PRD’s Electoral Resiliency

Conclusion The Post-1968 Struggle for Democracy in Rural Mexico

Appendixes

References

Index

“In a sweeping and ambitious work, part historiography, part social movement ethnography, and part quantitative assessment of human rights and democratization, Dolores Trevizo has convincingly called several aspects of [the stylized story of Mexico’s transition to democracy] into question in her opus Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico. This smart and enterprising book offers an important critique of the conventional wisdom, and, even more important, lays the groundwork for a more nuanced formulation of Mexico’s dramatic transition. . . .

“. . . The implications of this important book will be with us for some time as we use her wisdom to consider how social movements can take on authoritarians and win, staging their battles from the countryside as well as from the cities. Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico is necessary reading for all students of democracy, human rights, social movements, and political opportunity structures, from the Suez Canal to Tierra del Fuego.”

—Todd Eisenstadt, American Journal of Sociology