Book Review

Caribbean and Latin America

In this book, which has many positive as well as problematic aspects, Stephen R. Niblo purports to trace corruption in Mexico to the ten-year period beginning in December 1940, when capitalist-oriented presidents ended the honest government supposedly instituted in the period 1934–1940 by socialist-oriented President Lázaro Cárdenas. By omission, Niblo claims implicitly that Mexico did not suffer from massive corruption until the 1940s, when he sees the country's first real push for industrialization take place. Niblo thus condemns industrialization as bringing with it the themes of his subtitle: "modernity, politics, and corruption." The author ignores the many historical roots of corruption in Mexico going back centuries.	1
Niblo states that this book is intended to complement his earlier War, Diplomacy, and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938–1954 (1995), which examines diplomatic, military, economic, and business relations. In considering the two books as the first and second volumes in a closely related series, we find that Niblo belies his promise in the first volume (p. xiv) to explore in this second volume the domestic political activities that "brought an end to the economic nationalism" of President Cárdenas. Rather, in both volumes Niblo focuses on Mexico's industrial push as if it came only from the United States. Neither book studies major aspects of Mexico's internally generated economic development. Indeed, Niblo seems generally unaware of Cárdenas's pre-1940 role in laying the basis for Mexico's industrial policy of the 1940s and 1950s.	2
Economic interpretations by U.S. academics are almost absent from Niblo's two books, and no scholarly Mexican economists (such as Enrique Cárdenas, Víctor L. Urquidi, or Leopoldo Solís) are even mentioned in the bibliography of the book under review, let alone discussed in the text. These are important omissions, because Niblo writes about political economy but tries to reveal complexity only from "political" and "social" perspectives and not domestic economic perspective. Niblo's Mexico of the 1940s is one without the positive influence of braceros (laborers) moving between Mexico and the United States and where the dramatic rise of the middle class goes unnoticed.	3
How did Niblo "tap the memories" of the 1940s? He neither tells us with whom he spoke at the end of the 1950s, nor does he reveal whether or not he recorded his conversations, which became so vivid for him that he felt that he had experienced first-hand living in the 1940s. Given his stated concern about oral evidence, Niblo does not seem to understand how historians can record testimony in order to pit the life justifications, selective memory, and vantage point of one person against those of another in order to aid our understanding of the complexity of events. The idea that "corruption" is complex and involves different dimensions and levels is not highlighted by Niblo, who quotes selectively from Ramón Beteta (ideologue for both Cárdenas and Miguel Alemán) and misses Beteta's important distinction between the unethical and the illegal.	. . .