Abstract:
January 1 should have been a day of triumph for Mexico’s ruling party (PRI or the Party of the Institutionalized Revolution) and the North American boosters of globalization and free trade. For on New Year’s Day Mexico, Canada and the United States were to inaugurate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), long heralded as an unambiguous marker of Mexico’s exit from the camp of Third World Nations. Signing NAFTA, Mexicans had been told, meant that Mexico’s status as an unproblematically ‘modern’ society was now beyond question. More than fifteen years of rigorously enforced structural adjustment programmes consisting of a frenzy of measures to privatize public enterprises, deregulate the economy, demolish populist traditions and roll back the ‘strong state’ were finally bearing fruit.
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