Fue el Estado: Social Movements and Neoliberal Development in Mexico

• In Event: 2180 - Section on Sociology of Development Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 03. Bureaucracy and Institutions II

Abstract

Over the past few decades, neoliberal development, democratic opening, and the war on drugs have thoroughly transformed Mexico, creating the conditions in which Ayotzinapa—as well as the state’s reaction to it, and social movement responses, in turn—must be understood. In 1980, Mexico was a single party state, under the rule of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which oversaw both a state-directed developmentalist economic strategy, as well as a relatively stable clientelist structure for managing illicit activity like drug trafficking, known as the plaza system. In recent years, however, statist development has given way to neoliberalism, single-party rule has given way to political competition (and later collusion), and the plaza system has disintegrated into bloody competition and militarized drug war. This paper provides a historical analysis of the conditions of possibility for not only the Ayotzinapa attack, but for the ways in which social movements have organized in response. It argues that the various social movement histories that combined to produce the explosive mobilizations post-Ayotzinapa represented not a rejection of the state, but a recognition of the historical of the particular model of development and form of state power—and an attempt to fight back.

Author

• Christy Thornton, Johns Hopkins University