This week I have used my columns to tell you a bit about what I found while writing Conspiraciones. México a través de seis siglos. I have abused this space —and your patience— because I believe the findings are worth it. It is not a book devoted to hunting down historical myths and exposing them, although that happens along the way. It is not a history book, although it covers the past and offers dates and names in abundance. I’ve been told it is an essay.
Almost twenty years ago I stated that the Mexican Revolution never existed. There was a series of civil wars with no purpose beyond seizing power, and later that sequence was given some supposed meaning to legitimize those who ultimately reached power. For fifteen years the Sonorans governed, and they did so in a fashion similar to what Juárez and Díaz had done earlier—that is, through a coalition of regional strongmen and a national monarch who sought to consolidate a modern state: an efficient bureaucracy, a professional army, and a set of rules applicable to all. However, the Sonorans destroyed themselves in internal conflicts, and power ended up in the hands of a Michoacán native with a very different vision: Lázaro Cárdenas.
Cárdenas intuited Mexico’s traditional social structure: made up of clans and families, organized in corporations dating back to the seventeenth century, centered on Guadalupe. Like many in his era, he admired new forms of government emerging in Europe—Fascism and Communism. He thus created a new, neocorporate social structure: Agrarian Reform to eliminate the “Indian towns” and replace them with ejidos; the creation of unions and popular groups in the cities to break the old corporations; and the incorporation of these new structures into power through a corporatist party, the true predecessor of the PRI, the Party of the Mexican Revolution.
Since then, Mexico has lived in constant friction between those two structures: the traditional one and the “revolutionary” one. For the next quarter century, the friction was controlled thanks to economic growth, which made redistribution possible. By 1965, that was exhausted. The attempt to keep redistributing what no longer existed led to the great crisis of 1982, after which Mexico remained split.
That is where what is now called “the rupture of the social fabric” comes from. It is not a product of capitalism or neoliberalism, but of an unviable political construction legitimized by the fiction of the Revolution. In a new attempt to build a modern state—betting that we already had enough citizenship—we transitioned to democracy. During that period we managed to build an efficient bureaucracy (at least at the federal level) and achieved the best moment in rule enforcement, but we forgot —or underestimated— the need for a professional army, and its civilian equivalent.
With half the population in informality (that is, under the rules and logic of the seventeenth century), with organized crime expanding, the disaster was not caused by a priest nor an agronomist this time, but by a professional charlatan. And just as ninety years ago the spirit of the times led Cárdenas to build a corporatist state, today that spirit points toward illiberal states, toward the concentration of power in a single individual. That is where we stand.
Conspiraciones. México a través de seis siglos compresses this country’s history —and its global context— into a little more than three hundred pages. It is a guide, not a detailed voyage. I wanted to understand why it is so difficult for us to transition into a modern state, which is the foundation of democracy, economic growth, and justice. I hope you find it worth reading, and you can tell me whether the effort was worthwhile.