Opening Mexico

The Making of a Democracy

Julia Preston, Samuel Dillon

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780374226688
• eBook ISBN: 9781466822542
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Mexican History
• Index: History

Two Pulitzer Prize–winning reporters deliver "a gripping and insightful history of Mexico's democratic transition" (Daniel Kurtz Phelan, The Washington Post ).

Opening Mexico is a narrative history of the citizens' movement which dismantled the kleptocratic one-party state that dominated Mexico in the twentieth century, and replaced it with a lively democracy. Told through the stories of Mexicans who helped make the transformation, the book gives new and gripping behind-the-scenes accounts of major episodes in Mexico's recent politics.
Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party, led by presidents who ruled like Mesoamerican monarchs, came to be called "the perfect dictatorship." But a 1968 massacre of student protesters by government snipers ignited the desire for democratic change in a generation of Mexicans.  Opening Mexico recounts the democratic revolution that unfolded over the following three decades. It portrays clean-vote crusaders, labor organizers, human rights monitors, investigative journalists, Indian guerrillas, and dissident political leaders, such as President Ernesto Zedillo—Mexico's Gorbachev. It traces the rise of Vicente Fox, who toppled the authoritarian system in a peaceful election in July 2000.
Opening Mexico dramatizes how Mexican politics works in smoke-filled rooms, and profiles many leaders of the country's elite. It is the best book to date about the modern history of the United States' southern neighbor—and is a tale rich in implications for the spread of democracy worldwide.

"Preston and Dillon have filled in the spaces with the raw, vibrant details of the lives of contemporary Mexicans . . . with their classic, nuanced storytelling." —Michelle Wucker, The New York Times Book Review

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface: Making Mexican Democracy
• 1 - The Day of the Change
• 2 - From Disorder to Despotism
• 3 - Tlatelolco, 1968
• 4 - Earthquake, 1985
• 5 - Chihuahua, 1986
• 6 - 1988
• 7 - The Carlos Salinas Show
• 8 - 1994
• 9 - Ernesto Zedillo, the Outsider
• 10 - Raúl
• 11 - The General and the Drug Lord
• 12 - Testing Change, 1997
• 13 - The Earcutter
• 14 - Opening Minds
• 15 - Chiapas
• 16 - Democracy at Work
• 17 - Campaign for Change
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• Photo Credits
• Copyright Page