Mexico under siege : popular resistance to presidential despotism

This book considers the full panorama of popular resistance to the alliance between the Mexican state bureaucracy, the president and the business class, in the period 1940 to 2000.

This resistance embraced emerging urban labour protest, new peasant movements, revolutionary strikes on the railways and in schools, student opposition and the re-emergence of guerrilla struggle culminating in the celebrated indigenous people's resistance in Chiapas.

It analyzes the core parties of the resistance, including the surprisingly central role of the Mexican Communist Party, and explains why resistance achieved no more than ending the PRI's system of presidential despotism.

The authors present some provocative ideas about who now constitutes the common people's primary opponent and examine the prospects for genuine struggle in an electoral arena dominated by neo-liberal economic ideology and the Mexican economy's closer integration with the United States.