Perpetuating Power

by Castaneda, Jorge G.

• ISBN13: 9781565847088
• ISBN10: 1565847083
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2001-11-01
• Publisher: New Pr

Summary

The widely acclaimed explication of Mexican politics from "one of the most insightful Mexican intellectuals" (The New York Times Book Review). Jorge Castaneda, recently named Mexico's foreign minister, has been both an insider and an outsider in Mexico's political system. In Perpetuating Power, he lays bare the often mystifying workings of power in Mexico, offering readers what the New York Times Book Review called "an unusually revealing explication of the inner workings of three decades of presidential succession." To outside observers, Mexico stood out for its odd mixture of democratic pretension with autocratic inevitability: there were always elections, but everyone knew the next president would be the candidate of the aptly named Party of the Institutional Revolution, which governed Mexico throughout most of the last century. In six penetrating essays combined with interviews by Castaneda with each of the living Mexican ex-presidents, Perpetuating Power provides a remarkably candid account of the political machinery behind Mexican presidential politics and a view, startling to political outsiders, of how power really operates.

Table of Contents

Introduction	ix
The Successions
Diaz Ordaz--Echeverria (1970)	3	(22)
Echeverria--Lopez Portillo (1976)	25	(20)
Lopez Portillo--De la Madrid (1982)	45	(18)
De la Madrid--Salinas (1988)	63	(26)
Salinas--Colosio (1994)	89	(26)
Salinas--Zedillo (1994)	115	(18)
The Ex-presidents
Luis Echeverria	133	(22)
Jose Lopez Portillo	155	(22)
Miguel de la Madrid	177	(28)
Carlos Salinas	205	(26)
Epilogue: July 6, 1988	231	(10)
Index	241