A Conversation with Lorenzo Meyer about Mexico's Political Transition:
From Authoritarianism to What?

Lorenzo Meyer was interviewed in his office at El Colegio de México in April 1998. I edited a transcript of the interview and invited him to make changes and corrections in September 1998. He returned a lightly edited text in January 1999.	1
DAVID THELEN
LORENZO MEYER:My view of Mexican history is that we are living at the end of a long historical period that started at the beginning of the century with the Mexican Revolution, and this is the end. It's a long cycle that has taken the whole twentieth century. We have been living "in the shadow of the Mexican Revolution." That's the title of a book that Hector Aguilar Camin and I wrote.1 And now we are coming out of that shadow. In looking back at the nineteenth century, we can see that the turning points of that past century were independence, the establishment of a liberal political system, and the Mexican Revolution. These three moments of change developed through very traumatic struggles. It was a catastrophic way of changing. Perhaps this time, the fourth time, Mexico, as a whole, will change without experiencing the suffering, the destruction, of the other three periods that I have just mentioned.	2
I think that we have now a good chance of going from authoritarianism to something that I hope is going to be democracy without the traumatic experience of the past—without repeating ourselves.	3
Of course, we already have had violence and economic disasters, which have again produced suffering and destruction, but not at the level of the Mexican Revolution, the civil war of the nineteenth century, or the war of independence. So that's my first reaction to the question: Where are we at this moment in looking back at history? It's the end of our regime. That's the basic nature of this moment. We are changing the political system as well as the economic one. In the case of economics, we were forced by the outside to change the way in which the Mexican economy had been functioning for about forty years of systematic growth; we reached a quite dramatic moment in which the whole model based on the internal market and on protectionism, on industrialization based only on domestic consumption, was obviously unable to carry Mexico to the twenty-first century. That model had a very weak economic basis.	4
And then, almost from one day to the next, the decision was taken at the highest level—that means the presidency—to reshape Mexico, and it produced a lot of hardship in Mexican society, but globalization was finally overtaking Mexico. The way in which this happened was through the use to the fullest of the authoritarian instruments at the disposal of the president, Carlos Salinas. He used the most traditional instruments of Mexican politics to modernize Mexican economics. He used an array of authoritarian instruments to introduce liberalism, neoliberalism, market economics, to Mexico. But then the system had to pay a price. At some point the Mexican president said to the outside as well as to the Mexican public, we are not going to repeat the experience of the Soviet Union. He was not going to be Mikhail Gorbachev, not going to have a political opening and an economic disaster. Implicit in this view was the opposite: I'm going to keep the traditional system and produce almost a miracle in economic terms. And for a brief, shining moment, Mexico was viewed as a success story, a miracle; an underdeveloped, marginal country introduced an economic revolution and came out of it successful and proud. And at the end, that was not the case.	. . .