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Between Zapata and Che: A Comparison of Social Movement Success and Failure in Mexico Recent theories of how social movements succeed in influencing public policy emphasize the political opportunity structure (POS) of the polity rather than movement characteristics. The POS perspective is the dominant explanation of social movement emergence and outcomes in both democracies and non-democracies.[i] This perspective suffers, however, from multiple and sometimes contradictory definitions of political opportunities and the way they operate (Meyer 2004; Almeida and Stearns 1998). Political “openings,” for example, can either encourage or discourage mobilization. Rather than engage the divergent conceptualizations of political opportunity, this research explores those structuralist versions focusing on the degree of democracy, the centralization of power, repressive capacity, electoral dynamics, and the structured relationship between political parties and their bases (Rummel 1995; Kriesi et al. 1995, Amenta et al. 1992; Brockett 1991; and Kitschelt 1986). While structuralist versions of POS theory are fruitful for cross-national comparisons, they fail to account for the full variation of social movement outcomes in any one country, whether democratic or authoritarian. Not only have democratic countries with great military capacity, such as the United States, repressed social movements, but repression also varies considerably in kind, by target, and over time even in authoritarian states (Almeida 2003:376). It follows that social movement success and failure depend on more factors than the concentration of state power, the degree of democracy, political competition, associational parties, and military capacity. This research explains the variation of social movements outcomes in one protest cycle in Mexico, a country whose national state was until recently semi-authoritarian.[ii] The movements, a 1968 student movement and subsequent peasant revolts (1970-75), are comparable in their highly disruptive tactics, in the considerable overlap in the cast of leading characters at the level of government (Luis Echeverría), and at the level of movement leaders (students and left ex-students). Significantly, while each movement faced instances of either repression or concessions, their ultimate outcomes varied sharply, and in counterintuitive ways. The students’ pro-democracy movement ended in tragedy when soldiers and police massacred upwards of 300 youth, jailed several thousand others, and tortured many among the incarcerated. Officials acted in this way because of their tendency to authoritarianism, because the state was not structurally dependent on students for political support, and finally because the students’ frames mis-communicated revolutionary, or “displacement” goals. In contrast, the peasant movement that followed succeeded in restructuring property relations despite direct and illegal tactics, radical leaders, and despite the president’s alternative agenda for the countryside. Peasants got what they wanted from a government, which initially tried low-level repression, because the state was dependent on peasants for political support, and because the peasants’ radical leaders obscured their various communist affiliations, employing instead salient frames of meaning aligned with the official ideology. This research contributes to theories of social movements and policy outcomes first by showing that social movements in nondemocratic societies need not be devoid of political clout. In such societies, political clout may be determined by client status. Thus, while social movements have greater opportunity for political influence in democratic states, even officials from nondemocracies enact concessionary policy. This means that however frequently they rely on violence to quell political unrest, they too must work at manufacturing consent. Second, I show that a social movement’s political clout interacts with its level of organizational resources, as well as with such strategic decisions as the disruptiveness of its tactics and the salience of its frames. While the literature has established the importance of organizational resources and level of disruption (Andrews 2001; Almeida and Stearns 1998; Banaszak 1996), it has neglected the role of frames in social movement outcomes. Whereas numerous empirical studies in the last 15 years have focused on how framing strategies affect mobilization, only two address how frames influence government responses (Benford and Snow 2000; Noonan 1995). My research thus broadens the scholarship on framing by looking at the concrete circumstances of concessionary policy by officials of a semi-authoritarian state. Sequential and comparative analyses reveal how activists’ signifying work changed with time and across movements, as activists interpreted and reinterpreted government responses. Similarly, at the apex of a semi-authoritarian state, government officials also interpreted activist frames in the context of each movement’s level of political disruption. This type of dialogical analysis, which focuses on communication between political players, helps avoid the tautology that the successful frame was resonant while the unsuccessful frame was not by showing how government officials altered their responses to changes in a single movement’s frame, or changing frames across movements. This approach is consistent with the “process-oriented” and “dynamic” analyses favored by Meyer (2004) and Boudreau (1996) by emphasizing the contingent outcomes of changing political strategies by both state officials and movement activists in the context of their structured political relationships. Theorizing How Social Movements Influence Public Policy Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis proposes that social movements insert themselves into the political process via disruption, and that legislators respond with reforms aimed at restoring social order, especially in election years (Piven and Cloward 1977; Banaszak 1996). William Gamson’s and Charles Tilly’s versions of this thesis emphasize the variation of movement characteristics. Gamson, for example, argues that the most disruptive movements attain more of their demands than the least disruptive movements so long they are well organized, provide selective incentives to their bases, focus on a single issue, and do not have “displacement goals” (1990 [1975]: 42). Tilly differs from Gamson only to the extent that he argues that large, politically disruptive “performances” by worthy movements matter at least as much as the degree of organizational resources. Specifically, he argues that movement strength derives from the interaction of: “worthiness X unity X numbers X commitment” (or WUNC) (1999:261). While the last three variables are commensurate with Gamson’s theory (commitment refers to the willingness of activists to take on collective risk with disruption), Tilly adds a cultural dimension with the idea of worthiness. According to him, worthy movements are those claiming cultural legitimacy by their “sobriety, propriety of dress, endorsement of moral authorities, and evidence of previous undeserved suffering” (1999: 261). Some scholars reject the idea that policy reforms function as palliatives (Andrews 2001; Burstein 1999). As mentioned, the now dominant perspective holds that political opportunity structures (POS), rather than the magnitude of protest, determine movement success in much the same way as they determine political mobilization. A state’s POS may include some, or all, of the following: the extent to which the institutionalized political system is open or closed to inputs from non-elites; the degree to which elite alignments produce political stability or instability; the extent to which social movements have elite allies, especially in the state; the state’s capacity and propensity for repression (Brockett 1991). The most structuralist versions of POS theory hold that political movements are more likely to succeed in democracies with less centralized power structures (i.e., with real legislatures), and with competitive political parties based on association rather than patronage (Amenta et al.1992; Rummel 1995; Kriesi et al., 1995, Brockett 1991, and Kitschelt 1986). It follows that movements will tend to fail in societies with highly centralized power structures, and/or with fraudulent electoral dynamics (Brockett 1991), or with patronage political parties. Patronage parties, according to Amenta et al., structurally block “programmatic spending policies because discretionary and individualistic policies are the lifeblood of these parties” (1992:313-314; 335-336). Finally, this structuralist approach also predicts that states with less differentiated governing institutions and with a propensity for repression are more likely to repress social movements. Cress and Snow offer a distinct approach, noting that the ways social movements “frame” their grievances and demands contribute to the degree of their success with state officials. Specifically, how movements assign culpability (“diagnostic” frame) and propose solutions (“prognostic” frame) contributes to whether they are successful (2000). Benford and Snow specify that a proffered frame’s resonance is a function of its credibility and salience. While credibility depends partly on the frame’s disseminators, as well as the logical-empirical quality of the frame itself, “salience” refers to the cultural characteristics of the audiences “out there.” Frames are salient if they are consistent with, rather than merely parroting of, the values and beliefs of non-activists, are “commensurate” with the lived experiences of their audiences, and are congruent with the cultural narratives, myths, and ideologies of their society (that is, they have, “narrative fidelity”) (Benford & Snow 2000: 619-620; Snow & Benford 1988). According to Noonan (1995), frame salience is especially important in societies with authoritarian states because social movements may avoid repression by using the same discourse and frame as government officials. My research adds that salient frames help activists forge direct or indirect alliances with public officials of such states. Activists thus have the potential to create political opportunities for their movement by strategically framing their grievances and demands in ways that resonate with officials of non-democratic states. Mexico is a good case with which to disentangle the effects of disruption from democratic electoral dynamics and favorable political opportunity structures because, until recently, the country had few political opportunities. As mentioned, Mexico’s post-revolutionary state has been characterized as semi-authoritarian at best both because an official Party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (henceforth PRI), monopolized political power for over 70 years, and because decision-making authority was centralized in the presidency. In this “presidentialist system,” the chief executive was responsible for all policy, and the national legislature ratified all of his initiatives (until 1997) (Cornelius 1996). Local legislatures and courts followed the presidential line, and intra-elite conflicts were “managed” by, and contained within (until 1987), the ruling party.[iii] Further, the PRI’s longest-standing monopoly on power was not usually based on either fraud or force, but on the successful way in which it patronized the masses. The government provided collective benefits as well as selective incentives to clients through its official -or corporatist—associations, parastatals, and direct aid (Levy and Székely 1987; Middlebrook 1995; Rubin 1997; Otero 2000; Mitchell 2001). Mexico’s corporatist associations were compulsory, noncompetitive, representative monopolies created by the state and incorporated into the ruling party in “exchange for observing certain controls on their election of leaders and articulation of demands and supports” (Schmitter 1974:93). While those groups and classes which resisted the state’s colonization faced repression, patronage tended to generate sufficient legitimacy to help bring about the extraordinary political stability the country experienced during those 71 years of PRI rule. Thus, if social movements can exact policy reforms only from states with open political opportunity structures, as maintained by some versions of POS theory, it follows that social movements will have been unsuccessful in Mexico when an official party monopolized political power via patronage and semi-competitive electoral politics; such movements would be especially ineffective if poorly organized or decentralized. But if, as Tilly argues, WUNC matters, and as Gamson notes, the movement does not have “displacement goals,’ then it follows that highly disruptive social movements should exact favorable policy concessions even from nondemocratic states. Finally, if Snow and Cress are right that social movement frames also contribute to policy outcomes, then politically salient frames, especially those expressing a high degree of narrative fidelity, will tend to exact policy that confers new advantages to their bases. Methods and Data Sources: I explore these theories with multiple data sources and a mix of quantitative and qualitative methods. The analysis of the student movement draws on published testimonials, recently declassified CIA documents, and secondary sources. The analysis of the peasant movement includes an examination of the quantitative relationship between protest and land reform. Data on the latter derive from the Diario Oficial for the period 1971-1975. The Diario Oficial is the federal government’s official organ for information about land requests, as well as presidential resolutions about land expropriation and land redistribution. Because presidential resolutions are not legally actionable unless decreed in the Diario Oficial, every legal case of expropriation, whether of private or communal land, is published there (see also Sanderson 1984). Data on the key independent variable—a random sample of peasant protests--derive from the newspaper Excelsior. Sample selection bias in newspaper coverage is a function of the editors’ political perspective, mundane editorial concerns such as space, deadlines, journalistic norms, as well as the characteristics of the issues and events and themselves (Earl et al. 2004; Oliver and Maney 2000). Despite many examples to the contrary, it is possible for a newspaper’s editor to see “news value” in anti-government protest. Excelsior is an example and, indeed, the paper marketed itself in the first half of the 1970s as Mexico’s only independent newspaper covering political discontent nationally. Excelsior’s editor, Scherer García, so successfully challenged Mexico’s tradition of government-financed reporting, that Echeverría organized a violent occupation of the newspaper’s offices on July 8, 1976.[iv] According to Alan Riding, “the ousting of Mr. Scherer and [200 of] his liberal associates is equivalent to the silencing of independent opinion in Mexico since Excelsior offered the only forum for serious analysis of the country’s problems and for criticism of the Government’s performance” (New York Times, July 10, 1976). This example of counter-hegemonic investigative journalism illustrates why the political bias of newspapers should be contextualized, rather than dismissed (Earl et al., 2004; Oliver and Maney 2000). In the developing world, selection bias may also result from limited financial resources and communications networks. Consequently, even national newspapers may not have access to all locations and events. In Mexico, however, the very centralized structure of corporatist political representation connected both peasants and agrarian capitalists at the municipal level to authorities in Mexico City, where their national confederations were headquartered. It is reasonable to assume that journalists learned about local peasant protests from some of the many sources reporting such events to the corporatist leaders of the National Peasants Confederation, or either of the two confederations organizing agrarian capitalists (the CNPP and the CNG).[v] <Figure 1 about Here> Figure 1 indicates that Excelsior reported on protest events in nearly every state of Mexico. It follows that a random sample of newspaper reports covering protest events should be reasonably representative of the actual levels of underlying social movement activity. To insure the representation of different days of the week, I sampled every third day from January 1970 to December 1975, visually scanning all relevant sections of the newspaper.[vi] This method yielded a probability sample of 221 cases of peasant protests. Since Excelsior’s coverage of peasant insurgency was limited to “hard news” items (the who, what, when, which state), the opportunity for gross description biases was also limited. Finally, because Excelsior is the only primary source of information on peasant protests nationally, triangulation of media sources is impossible. But given the newspaper’s political independence, counter-hegemonic biases, the institutional links between local and national politics, the random selection of days, and hard news reporting, the data set is reasonably reliable and valid. Earl et al., who offer a comprehensive review of the literature on the utility of newspaper sources, recently concluded “newspaper data does not deviate markedly from accepted standards of quality” (2004:77). The Party of the Revolution, its Nationalist Myths and Unequal Patron-Client Relations A major social revolution between 1910-1920 significantly restructured the way in which Mexico’s state would relate to certain actors in civil society through the 20th century. According to both Knight and Katz, the mobilization of tens of thousands of peasants, landless peons, villagers, sharecroppers, and dispossessed serranos (i.e., mountain dwellers) not only toppled the ancien régime, but made it “a rural revolution, and in many instances an agrarian revolution” (Knight 1986, V.1: 170; see also Katz 1998; Knight 1986 V.2). The middle-class members of the Constituent Congress who signed the 1917 Constitution understood that peace would endure to the extent that they attended to grievances of these rural masses. Thus, despite the will of those liberals who simply sought “bourgeois” reforms of the state, the Constitution of 1917 also reflected some of the peasants’ agrarista (agrarian) demands. For example, it not only promised “land to the tiller,” but even to the landless. The 1917 Constitution also stipulates that Mexico’s land and water belong to the nation; consequently, national interests pertaining to conservation as well as the equitable (re-)distribution of wealth take priority over private property. Indeed, the Constitution created the legal mechanisms to restructure property relations in the countryside as well as prevent the re-emergence of the latifundio (massive concentrations of land), the grossly unequal pattern of landholding that provoked peasants in the first place. It did so by capping the size of rural property and by defining communal farms (such as ejidos and comunidades) as inalienable (i.e., they could not be rented or sold). These laws determined that private agrarian property was not absolute and compromised agrarian capitalist development in the 20th century Mexico (Trevizo 2003). In the 1930s, President Lázaro Cárdenas defeated political conservatives by encouraging militant workers and peasants to form unions, which he then incorporated into the party structure in 1938 (Hansen 1971). By the 1940s, the official National Peasant Confederation (CNC) as well as the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) would be the two most important bases of support for the ruling party, organized as they were by the PRI as corporatist associations. The third corporatist association was the National Confederation of Popular Organizations (CNOP) that organized industrialists, teachers, women, professionals, government bureaucrats, and small merchants. As corporatist associations, the CNOP and especially the CNC and CTM were the official “clients” of a ‘patron’ state. Their primary function was to exchange votes and other legitimacy signs for favors (Mitchell 2001). In exchange, public officials tended to couch policy in agrarista, labor populist, and protectionist terms; these were the “revolutionary” platitudes of official nationalist discourse. With 100 percent membership of the country’s over two million actual peasants, and nearly a million more would-be peasants, the CNC was still the largest and politically most important base of support for the ruling party from the 1970s through the 1980s. Indeed, R. Bartra argues that rural areas constituted Mexico’s “electoral fraud belt” because they registered high rates of electoral support for the official party, excluding both the opposition and any significant electoral oversight (2002 [1987/1988]: 115-18). But while landed peasants exchanged PRI votes for favors, the landless and near landless (minifundistas) were increasingly dissatisfied with the CNC’s ability to resolve decades-old land reform presidential decrees. Consequently, they began to mobilize for land independently of their official representative beginning in the 1960s, and then in record numbers in the 1970s (A. Bartra 1977; Canabal Cristiani 1984; Paré Ouellet 1992; Trevizo 2002). Clearly, the growing political alienation of a strategically important population challenged public officials to respond in ways that would not further erode their base of support. University students did not have the political clout of the peasantry, however. Their relative political unimportance was determined at the individual, collective, institutional, and even cultural levels. Individually, students were important to the state as human capital rather than as citizens. Their public university training qualified them for work in public ministries (Babb 2001), but they could not vote until they turned 21 (until 1969). Neither were students important to the political process collectively. Despite organizing various groups on the campuses since 1939, the official party never gained hegemony among students. To the contrary, pro-PRI organizations operated on many campuses clandestinely (Zermeño 1978:59). The large number of leftist and rightist political parties competing for student support at the National Autonomy University (henceforth, UNAM) made it “one of the chief oppositionist centers to the national government” (Mabry 1982:ix; see also Babb 2001: 66). Since students did not form a significant part of the corporatist bases of the state, their collective legitimizing functions were structurally limited (see also Zermeño 1978:91). At an institutional level, moreover, UNAM and its affiliated preparatory schools claimed autonomy since 1929. These claims were made through frequent struggles in which students militantly struck against the encroachment of the state on UNAM’s academic and administrative jurisdiction. According to Mabry, because of these struggles, UNAM became “one of the few [publicly funded] national institutions to escape the tutelage of the state” (Mabry 1982: ix; see also Stevens 1974:188; Levy 1980:77; Babb 2001:66). The students’ history of demanding financial support without governmental control succeeded in reducing the state’s role in UNAM to finances (Mabry 1982). This compromise was acceptable to the nation’s political leaders who, for their part, “did not want to contend with university affairs while they were coping with [the] more serious problems” of national governance (Mabry 1983:195). At a cultural level, the National Autonomous University’s hard-won autonomy was a crucial part of the students’ political identity. UNAM students cherished the autonomy of their university. Students from the more working-class, vocationally-oriented, and state-controlled Polytechnic Institute (IPN) envied it.[vii] According to Mabry, for much of the 20th century, the very “independence of the university and its self definition that … brought it into conflict with the state” (1982: 14). This was especially the case in the 1960s and early 1970s. Thus, when soldiers entered university campuses in 1968, student claims to university autonomy became one of their most important organizing principles. In sum, because students did not play a crucial role in the Revolution of 1910 they were politically irrelevant to the post-revolutionary state, which neither represented them in a meaningful way, nor included them in the official nationalist iconography and ideology of the “good Mexican.” In contrast, because peasants were decisive in toppling the ancien regime, the post-revolutionary state formally organized and represented them, and revolutionary peasant heroes, such as Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata, became officially identified with the essence of Mexicanismo. Over the course of the 20th century, these nationalist myths persisted despite state-sponsored capitalist development and modernization because the PRI exchanged agrarista favors for rural votes. The 1968 Student Movement Local instances of police abuse gave birth to the largest pro-democracy movement ever seen by the post-revolutionary state. A student movement mushroomed in Mexico City during the summer of 1968 when the Mayor of the Federal District, General Alfonso Corona del Rosal, deployed granaderos, or riot police, to manage extramural student conflict and leftist student demonstrations. Then when, on 29 July, students barricaded themselves in their high school to protest police abuse, infantry troops used a bazooka to blast through the 18th century baroque doors, and then proceeded to beat and ultimately arrest 1,000 students (Riding 1986:84). Student grievances quickly expanded from police abuse and the violation of university autonomy, to demands about political prisoners, state repression, and authoritarianism in general. While adopting the counter-cultural symbolism of 1968 student movements internationally, and especially the leftist “master frame” of revolutionary movements, Mexico’s students articulated a Mexico-specific critique of the country’s political system. They zeroed in on the extreme centralization of decision-making powers, the country’s lack of civil liberties, the PRI monopoly of power, as well as the backroom negotiations typical of corporatism (Stevens 1974; Guevara Niebla 1988; Gilabert 1993). Hundreds of thousands of middle-class mothers, office workers, and lower-level public officials participated in student demonstrations. According to Gilberto Guevara Niebla, a 1968 student leader, the massiveness of these challenges constituted an “unprecedented political crisis” (1988:39-41). There is, however, little to indicate that there was a real “political crisis” of the state. The Constitution of 1917 was not questioned, nor did students or elites challenge the incumbency of those in power. As Zermeño argues, in the absence of a coherent utopia, the students’ pro-democracy movement amounted to a small number of reformist demands around administrative concerns that were to be negotiated publicly with the existing government (1978:51). Finally, while the student movement was massive, it was limited to Mexico’ City’s middle-class (Imaz Bayona 1975) and university students in the provinces. Consequently, President Díaz Ordaz understood that his hold on power was not at stake, and believed public opinion to be unsympathetic to students given their riots (CIA “Weekly Review” of August 23, 1968). The state’s conciliatory gestures came at the very moment that the movement got political support from faculty and UNAM’s rector. Consequently, the movement’s political opportunities at the end of July seemed golden indeed. By early August, students organized a democratic, multi-university coalition called the National Student Strike Committee (Consejo Nacional de Huelga, henceforth CNH). A small leadership quickly centralized decision-making authority over 250 CNH members who, in turn, represented over 100,000 students nationwide (Guevara Niebla 1988:47). In addition to such vast human resources, the CNH had a highly effective division of labor with specialized functions in external relations, propaganda, finances, information, and juridical matters (Zermeño 1978:109). The financial commission coordinated “people-to-people brigades,” 150 in all, to circulate in the streets informing the citizenry about, and asking for financial donations for, the movement. This degree of organization, in turn, was replicated in each department and school on each of the various campuses. In addition to this internal organizational coherence, the CNH had external support from various faculty coalitions (Zermeño 1978: 110). The CNH’s organizational, human, and financial resources facilitated massive demonstrations at the National Autonomous University, at the National Polytechnic, and in the square, or Zócalo, in front of the National Palace traditionally used for official ceremony. Students dramatized the lack of democracy by appropriating the Zócalo for performances of “people’s power” and ingeniously drew audiences by insisting that negotiations with government officials be broadcast on television or radio. These highly disciplined and creative demonstrations were extremely disruptive by virtue of their size, their symbolism, their demands for public accountability, and, as we shall see, for their revolutionary frames and symbols. Despite its organizational coherence and substantial resources, the CNH never represented a single political vision (Zermeño 1978) nor did it control all activists. The movement represented students from multiple political orientations, ranging from hard-left Trotskyists, Maoists, Guevarists, and members of the Communist Party, to a soft “new” left of counter-cultural students. Put differently, to the right of the Mexican Communist Party was the mass of ideologically less dogmatic radical youth who, despite appearances, were neither communists nor socialists (Poniatowska 1977: 68-9; Zermeño 1978; Guevara Niebla 1988:46). Nevertheless, the evidence is also clear that members of the Mexican Communist Party and especially its youth wing wielded great political influence inside the CNH. According to CNH leader González de Alba, “after the top CNH leaders were captured, and other delegates retreated, the CNH’s direction came to be almost completely in the hands of the PCM’s Juventud Comunista” (quoted in Gilabert 1993:194). González de Alba explains that the PCM led the movement in these circumstances “not because they had the most delegates, but because they happened to be the best known and with the most political influence” (Ibid; see also Zermeño 1978:151). The PCM’s influence is also evident in the six demands around which all students agreed. These included: liberty for political prisoners; the dismissal of two chiefs of police as well as the riot police chief; the dissolution of the granaderos; the derogation of the “Crime of Social Dissolution,” the anti-subversion laws of the 1940s stipulating the political crimes codified in the Federal Penal Codes Articles 145 and 145b; compensation for the families of those students injured or killed; and the identification of those police, granaderos and soldiers responsible for excessive force (Guevara Niebla 1988:39, 49). The Mexican Communist Party had demanded liberty for political prisoners as well as the elimination of anti-subversion laws since 1958. Moreover, no student had been, or would be, arrested under anti-subversion provisions (Zermeño 1978:31; Mabry 1982: 243). Not only did communist youth help articulate the demands listed above, but they influenced the students’ street performances. Demonstration banners and flyers decrying “the climate of oppression,” of “political prisoners,” were as omnipresent as those with Che Guevara’s likeness. In their efforts to build alliances with peasants and especially workers, far-left students multiplied the issues with banners against the state’s “charro” unions, the “sold-out press,” and pro-government student organizations (El Día 8/6/68; Zermeño 1978; Babb 2001). Some created so-called ‘factory brigades,’ while others indeed hoped to “provoke a revolutionary crisis” as the “only way for bringing about a socialist future” (Zermeño 1978:46). According to one of the most important CNH student leaders, Raúl Álaverez Garín, Trotskyists and other far-leftists initiated interminable debates about “whether or not the movement was revolutionary” (quoted in Poniatowska 1977:68-9; Gilabert 1993:188). While the CNH made the important logistical decisions about demonstrations, rallies, dates, and times, it could not stop some students from discrediting the movement with frequent and destructive riots, the estimated property damage of which totaled $8 million U.S. dollars in 1968 terms (Defense Dept. Intelligence Information Report, 10/18/68). Thus, while the vast majority of students were ideologically moderate, the radical flank’s “revolutionary” frames and symbols eclipsed the more reformist goals of the student movement. Moderate “new” left students embraced the symbols of the “old” left not because they were communists, but because they identified them as the symbols of 1968’s youth movements internationally. Student activist Claudia Cortés González explains the students’ sentiments as follows: I never really thought of Zapata as a student symbol, an emblem. Zapata has become part of the bourgeois ideology; the PRI has appropriated him. Maybe that’s why we chose Che as our symbol at demonstrations from the very beginning. Che was our link with student movements all over the world! We never considered Pancho Villa. His name never even crossed our minds! (Poniatowska 1977:40, Gilabert 1993:201) In borrowing the symbolism of 1968 radical youth movements internationally, students unwittingly communicated displacement goals and, as such, called out repression. In a video-taped interview thirty years later, 1968 student leader “Tita” suggests that the radicalism of the speeches and actions at an evening rally on 27 August constituted a turning point for the government (See also Zermeño 1978:125-7; Mabry 1982: 259; Gilabert 1993:191,205; Guevara Niebla 1988:42). By 1:00 am, soldiers cleared out a ‘permanent guard’ brigade of 3,000-5,000 students who intended to occupy the Zócalo until the government conceded to public negotiations. The government readopted repression even though the largest demonstration in Mexican history had ended without incident the previous day. According to participants, the government did so because squatters that evening made “incendiary” speeches at the ceremonial site of power (Zócalo) while crowds cried “We Don’t Want Olympics! We Want a Revolution!”. After a botched pro-government counter-rally (the “mitin del desagravio”) on the 28th, Díaz Ordaz moved to contain the radical flank. According to CIA intelligence, from late August through September, Díaz Ordaz had three gunboats and two minesweepers patrolling the Yucatán. He did so, according to a skeptical CIA report, on possibly fabricated Mexican intelligence that the Cuban government planned to infiltrate arms into Mexico (CIA Intelligence Information Cable 81569 distributed 8/30/1968; CIA Intelligence Information Cable 87410). Whether or not the Mexican government fabricated information about Cuban and Soviet involvement, officials had been engaged in a Cold War against Mexico’s communists since Cuba’s revolution. For example, the Mexican government used army troops against striking students in Mérida (1955), both Puebla and Oaxaca (1959), and even stationed police on the IPN campus for two years after a “communist inspired” 1956 student strike (Mabry 1982: 209). They incarcerated Communist Party organizers of the 1958 militant railroad workers’ strike for over a decade, and deployed soldiers to the University of Morelia in 1966, and then to the University of Sonora in 1967 to stamp out the “left-wing” students with “foreign ideas.” In February 1968, approximately six months before the eruption of the student movement, the government began to jail the leadership of the Mexican Communist Party. So when the student movement erupted, government officials were genuinely concerned, in the words of Congressmen Octavio Hernánadez, that “extremists” operating within the movement “threatened” the nation (Zermeño 1978:144; Stevens 1974:198-99; Mabry 1982; see also July 30, 1968 telegram sent by the American Embassy in Mexico to the U.S.’s Secretary of State). This was so because they believed that the radical flank was increasingly influential, as hundreds of thousands of people marched through the streets denouncing repression, demanding things unrelated to campus issues, and sometimes even triumphantly calling for revolution. It was thus that the government’s cry of subversion became “hysterical” (Mabry 1982; Gilabert 1993; Stevens 1974). The communists’ supposed threat to national security ultimately became the basis for the government’s legal cases against students. The hysteria leading up to it is illustrated by the following editorial published on August 14, 1968 in El Heraldo, whose pro-government reporters were on the government’s payroll: The images of ‘Che’ Guevara and banners openly glorifying Cuba’s Communist regime and other doctrines foreign to our people were the flags of the demonstrators ¼ Shouting with impunity insults against the authorities, offensive phrases aimed at the armed forces and police ¼Large posters with provocative messages brought about the proliferating disorder (quoted in Gilabert 1993: 219). In response to the criticism of the movement’s iconoclasm, CNH leaders instructed their base to refrain from insulting chants and violence. They added, “Do not take red flags [to the demonstration]. Do not take Che banners! Do not take Mao banners! Take banners with images of Hidalgo, Morelos, Zapata so that they can say ‘Those are our Heroes! Viva Zapata. Viva!” (Poniatowska 1977:48; see also Gilabert 1993:307). This nationalist re-framing occurred too late, however. Just days after the most iconoclastic rally had sparked repression, President Díaz Ordaz announced a military strategy for restoring domestic order in his 1 September address to the nation. He argued that “pseudo-students” with “foreign” ideas had manipulated authentic students to riot in a conspiracy against the Olympiad, and Mexico. Strategically, he stated that it was his “solemn obligation to heed the will of the people” and would, if congressional hearings mandated it, repeal the laws pertaining to political prisoners. Nevertheless, he also threatened violence against the “small” but intransigent group of “un-Mexican” subversives, warning the “use all of the legal means at our disposal to maintain domestic order and tranquility so that nationals and foreigners have the necessary guarantees” during the Olympic games (IV Presidential Speech). Díaz Ordaz explicitly justified military force on the grounds that Mexico was indignant over student demonstrations, riots, the destruction of property, and the disruption of the Olympiad (IV Presidential Speech). Within days of his speech, the Mexican Senate empowered Díaz Ordaz to use the army, navy, and air force for either national or international “security” (Stevens 1974:228). Díaz Ordaz probably refrained from repressing the 13 September “silent” demonstration because 300,000 students participated. But on 18 September, he ordered 10,000 soldiers onto UNAM, and thousands more to other universities, including those in other states. Soldiers occupied UNAM for two weeks, where they arrested roughly 500 students. A few days later, an army unit shot its way into the Casco de Santo Tomás campus of the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN) after students held granaderos at bay for several hours with Molotov cocktails and a small arsenal of fire arms (CIA Weekly Review, 9/27/68; Department of Defense Intelligence Report, 10/18/68). Four students were killed and an additional 300 students were arrested (Riding 1986:85; Department of Defense Intelligence Information Report, 10/18/68). With hundreds of students behind bars, and with riots growing increasingly violent, the massive demonstrations of August were replaced by significantly smaller rallies and riots between mid September and October 2nd, 1968. As public support for students waned with the increasing number of riots (Poniatowska 1977; Gilabert 1993:248-249), Díaz Ordaz undoubtedly believed that he had succeeded in isolating the radical flank purportedly threatening the country’s national security and upcoming Olympic games. It was thus that he approved the use of massive force at the October 2nd, 1968, rally in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the District of Tlatelolco (henceforth Tlatelolco). There, a dramatically smaller crowd of an estimated 5,000-10,000 was met by at least 360 snipers from multiple, and uncoordinated, units of the armed forces (Los Angeles Times 10/2/03). Soldiers, cavalry troops, police units, federal security and intelligence officers, members of the army’s Olympic Battalion, as well as the Falcons, a secret police battalion, infiltrated a student rally, some in plain clothes. Upon an official signal, they fired high-caliber machine-guns and other automatic weapons from short range--and indiscriminately into the crowd--from rooftops and residential windows, and did so for over an hour. Testimonials support the theory that rank-and-file soldiers accepted the government’s frame that students were revolutionary. For example, student Ignacio Galván recalled the following about the night of the massacre when he and other students were being transported to the Campo Militar Numero 1: “The Sergeant [on the vehicle transporting the students] was furious…He gave us a long speech; [stating] that we were idiots for thinking that we could overthrow the government because they [armed forces] also had machine-guns” (Poniatowska 1977:228). Similarly, a group of CNH students reported that when a plain-clothes social control agent detained them that same evening, he ordered them to “Up against the wall, you sons of bitches, we’re about to give you your revolution!” (Poniatowska 1977:238). Other testimonials indicate that those who were branded Communists were treated more severely than non-communists. In his memoir, one of the CNH’s most important leaders, Guevara Niebla, recounted that as soon as a soldier (perhaps wrongly) singled him out as a Communist, [A]n official and three soldiers separated me from my [student] companions [also detained at Campo Militar Número 1]. Then they beat me again . . .I believed they were going to kill me . . . If you don’t tell us where you’ve hidden the firearms you’re fucked [te va a cargar la chingada]. You will not leave here alive¼ After they faked my execution, they took me back to my cell (1993:38). Similarly, another student recalled the following exchange he had with a solider while the latter interrogated him by torture. The following came about when the student—whose head was hooded—either could not or would not answer his interrogator: Soldier: “Either you talk or we’ll kill you¼You traitor, son of a whore. What do you bastards want? What are you trying to accomplish? ¼ Student: “He [his torturer] then called over another who was very likely a Sergeant because he said, ‘Sergeant, refresh the memory of this son of a bitch traitor who wants to turn us into to Communists. I’ll send for the death squad.’[p. 106] ¼The torture continued, but it was more brutal, it lasted longer ¼When the torture ended the soldier said to me: ‘Do not give yourself any illusions! Communist pigs! If you won’t talk, we have gringos nearby’ (Luís Tomás Cervantes Cabeza de Vaca, quoted in Poniatowska 1977: 106; 115). Peasant Movements 1970-1975: 1968 both haunted Mexico and marked the beginning of a “dirty war” in which governments, through the military, murdered and disappeared many of the country’s leftists. The new president, Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970-1976), had been Minister of the Interior during Díaz Ordaz’ administration, and is still widely believed to have pressed for a military end to the student movement (Castañeda 2000:14; L.A. Times 10/2/03). Echeverría assumed power during an unprecedented legitimacy crisis for the state, and consequently faced even greater political turbulence than in 1968. For while the repression at Tlatelolco ended the student movement, it radicalized its survivors as well as many bystanders. Subsequently, a significant number of youth from the 1968 period immersed themselves in urban and rural social movements; the most radical among them joined urban and rural guerrillas. My second comparative case comprises unarmed peasant movements in the early 1970s in which peasants invaded the lands of large landowners in local, semi-autonomous, yet regionally widespread movements. They were local movements in the sense that there was no national organization deciding strategy or coordinating them. However, the movements were not fully independent of each other. Instead, informal networks of communists and other leftists bridged the work of local peasant movements, even as the latter did not follow any centralized leadership at the national level (Trevizo 2002). Peasants, thus, lacked both the supra-local coordinating capacity and organizational resources of 1968 students. Additionally, my sample suggests that peasants had fewer human resources than controlled by 1968 students, with roughly 60,000 rural folk involved in over 600 protests for land between 1970 and 1975. Nevertheless, by 1975 practically all states of the country had had some degree of land invasions, marches, rallies, or hunger strikes (see Figure 1). In addition to their regional diffusion, 50 percent of all peasant protests were land invasions (land squatting), the most disruptive, high-risk tactic. Because peasants illegally squatted on the land held by others, this tactic frequently engendered violence from landowners, their gunmen, local police, or sometimes even army units. Finally, the peasants’ local protests disrupted the national economy because they threatened the interests of agrarian capitalists, the country’s leading exporters (Trevizo 2003). Peasants mobilized in the face of a widespread subsistence crisis caused by rapid demographic growth, the penetration of capitalist markets in the countryside, and political negligence on the part of state elites. State-led rural development since World War II had created a class of agrarian capitalists, many of whom were neo-latifundistas who circumvented land caps laws by titling phony subdivisions of their property under the names of their children or dead relatives. State elites not only closed their eyes to this illegal concentration of land. They also allowed decades-old land reform presidential decrees to bog down in complicated appeals processes. By the 1970s, Mexico faced mounting social inequalities in the countryside that took the form of landlessness and near landlessness in the face of an illegal concentration of land by private proprietors. Smallholders and landless rural dwellers responded by invading the lands of neo-latifundistas. Peasants anchored their claims on constitutional grounds: “land to the tiller” they had been promised, frequently by presidential decree, was a basic civil right. Given that land invasions are illegal, frequently violent, that they seek the expropriation of private property, and given that then President Luis Echeverría initially rejected land reform, why were they successful? Why was a president known for his initiation of the “dirty war” and linked to two student massacres “forced to cede large tracts of irrigated land ¼in the heart of some of Mexico’s most fertile irrigated districts” (Fox and Gordillo 1989:141)? Most scholars contend that Luís Echeverría engaged in substantive land reform to win back for the state some of the legitimacy lost in Tlatelolco in 1968 (Canabal Cristiani 1984:249; Fox and Gordillo 1989:140-141; Schryer 1990:194; Foley 1991:66; Paré Ouellet 1992:127). To do so he promised major changes, adopted a populist stance, released students from prison, redistributed massive quantities of fertile land and significantly increased public expenditures, especially for rural programs. But the argument that Luis Echeverría expropriated land from agrarian capitalists in a strategy to restore legitimacy neglects that he had rejected land reform as viable for the countryside when he took power. Instead, within a few months of taking office, in April 1971, he passed an essentially pro-capitalist Agrarian Reform Law (Ley Federal de Reforma Agraria), which sought to increase agricultural production and rural employment by creating “confidence” in the existing patterns of land tenancy, primarily the sanctity of private property (Excelsior 11/21/71; Excelsior, 1/8/70). Despite some contradictory provisions in the new law, the evidence is clear that the “agraristas” who favored land reform initially lost out to those officials who opposed it (Excelsior 10/30/72, 6/23/73).[viii] For while the former made it illegal for minors to hold title to rural property and created the Commission to Investigate Latifundios in May 1971 (Excelsior, 5/25/71), they failed to abolish the amparo agrario, the legal stay granted by the Supreme Court to protect rural properties from presidential expropriation decrees. In 1974, officials estimated that such amparos protected about five million hectares (over 12 million acres of land) held by latifundistas (Excelsior 3/8/74). Because of the amount of land at stake, Gómez Villanueva, an agrarista government official, had advocated abolishing the amparo agrario when he led the National Peasants’ Confederation (1967-1970). He rightly held that the amparo agrario prevented known latifundios from actual expropriation despite presidential orders to that effect (Excelsior 6/6/74). In addition to preserving the amparo agrario, the dominant “modernizing” faction of Luis Echeverría’s government insured that a greater number of commercial properties would be exempt from expropriation by distributing an unprecedented number “certificados de inafectabilidad” (expropriation exemptions) (Excelsior, 12/17/73). Additionally, his government stripped over 160,000 ejidatarios and comuneros (communal and indigenous farmers) of their usufruct rights (Excelsior, 8/31/75). In his own words, Echeverría sought to “protect and stimulate, within the terms of the Constitution and the law, forms of tenancy and organization that have achieved high productivity” (1972 speech, quoted in Foley 1991:46). Increasing agricultural production was a political priority because the country was in the midst of a food production crisis, one that created a mounting balance-of-payments deficit. Land reform was antithetical to this goal and officials saw it as logistically inefficient and politically volatile (Grindle 1986:153; Excelsior, 12/3/75). The political risk lay in the fact that many proprietors who could be expropriated were precisely those agro-exporters whose international trade dividends financed the country’s industrial development (Sanderson 1986:42). Since the modernizers of Echeverría’s government believed that the peasants’ low productivity was due to their lack of technology and credit, they resolved to provide such resources to communal farmers (ejidatarios) and small peasant proprietors as an explicit alternative to land reform (IV Informe Presidencial; Excelsior 10/16/75). Echeverría, therefore, executed land reform decrees of prior presidents during his first year in office in the hopes of permanently ending land reform (Excelsior 1/8/70; Excelsior 2/11/72; Excelsior 10/3/75). By 1973, he launched the Investment Program for Integrated Rural Development (PIDER), which began to distribute green revolution technologies, services, credit, and increased price supports for basic staples. The government built transportation infrastructure to link markets, marketed peasant produce directly, and sought to unify ejido plots. Such programs cost 18.5 percent of all public expenditures between 1974-1975. But rural folk, especially the landless, had an alternative agenda for the countryside. They wanted land, and invaded the properties of large landowners to obtain it. By 1973, land protests were not only greater in number, but had occurred in most northern-border states and many southern states. Echeverría initially sent out army troops against squatters on the grounds that the government had to “maintain the peace and tranquility necessary for the country’s agricultural development” (Ministry of National Defense Excelsior 10/28/71; Excelsior, 6/23/73). Later he fully militarized the state of Guerrero in an effort to crush Lucio Cabañas’ armed guerilla movement, where he permitted covert and illegal operations that resulted in the murder of hundreds of peasants in that state, and the disappearances of dozens of others (Excelsior, 8/14/74). Significantly, unarmed peasants did not face the same level of violence as armed guerrillas because the young radicals who led them had learned from 1968 (and 1971), about the dangers of revolutionary slogans and practices. For example, PCM members in Michoacán organized and led a supposedly apolitical peasant front called the Comité de Defensa del Valle de Zamora (Oposición 7/10/74). In addition to “fronts” such as this one, communists and other leftists immersed themselves in peasant struggles without advertising their communist political affiliations (Trevizo 2002). Unlike the 1968 student leaders, the leaders of the peasant movements not only denied their various communist affiliations, but they explicitly referenced the revolutionary hero Emiliano Zapata when highlighting the contradiction between the state’s ‘agrarista revolutionary’ ideology and its actual anti-agrarian practices (Trevizo 2002). While disruptive enough to bring out the army, their framing strategy sometimes stopped repression by making it difficult to justify to Mexico’s bystander audiences. The skill was in demanding the redistribution of private property not on communist but on Constitutional grounds. This illustrates that with the appropriate framing, even communists may, as Foley put it “successfully employ the ideological resources of the system against the state” (Foley 1991:40; see also Noonan 1995:106). <Figure 2 about Here> Further, the peasants’ employment of official discourse both strengthened the hand of the traditional agraristas inside Echeverría’s administration and weakened the modernizing faction that opposed land reform. Figure 2 shows a dramatic shift in Echeverría’s management of peasant protest, suggesting a change in the power dynamics among distinct factions of the state. As the Figure illustrates, starting in 1973, officials began to pull back from repressing peasant squatters, at least in some locations, while they slowly readopted land reform. That year Echeverría created “The National Commission for Investigating Fictitious Subdivisions of Land,” and in January of 1974 announced that his government promoted both peace in the countryside and agricultural productivity (Excelsior 1/2/74). By early 1975, Echeverría went so far as to promote the government bureaucracy responsible for land reform to its current ministerial status even as other officials tried to convince the public that “there is definitely no more land to redistribute to the 1,500,000 landless peasants” (Excelsior 7/11/75). It was not, however, until his final year in office that Echeverría most dramatically changed his land reform policy. While his government had scaled back on repression, soldiers continued to evict peasant squatters from select properties. In late October 1975, Excelsior journalists reported that soldiers killed six peasants while ejecting over 400 unarmed land invaders from a ranch in Guaymas, Sonora. The media’s attention on the army’s repression of unarmed peasants at a time when political succession was upon the nation embarrassed government officials (Trevizo 2003). These circumstances explain why Echeverría both forced Sonora’s governor to resign from power, and then delivered on a promise to uncover and expropriate disguised latifundios (Excelsior 11/1/75). Massive land expropriations of some of the country’s wealthiest and most productive proprietors followed in Echeverría’s final year in office. <Table 1 about Here> Table 1 shows the percentage distribution of the number of hectares the government expropriated from agrarian proprietors per state between 1971-1975 by peasant protests for land. It demonstrates that the states in the top quartile of peasant insurgency were much more likely to have undergone an above average amount of land reform than states without any peasant insurgency. The statistically significant Pearson chi-square value of 9.26 with 3 degrees of freedom indicates that land redistribution during Echeverría’s presidency was not random, and suggests a concerted effort to quell peasant unrest. Unlike the students of 1968, peasants were successful in exacting their demands from an initially unwilling and authoritarian president even while many of their radical leaders were jailed because their movements framed their demands in ways that established the worthiness of their claims. While Luís Echeverría undoubtedly sought to rebuild legitimacy for the state in the countryside, he did so by introducing integrated rural development policies as an alternative to land reform. Rather than instigate them, Echeverría capitulated to peasant protests when low-intensity warfare failed to stop them. Only when the independent media exposed the army’s repression of the Revolution’s chosen children during a presidential election year did he go so far as to expropriate some of the country’s most prominent agrarian capitalists. The tragedy at Tlatelolco, in contrast, is partly explained by the fact that an authoritarian Díaz Ordaz could define the supposedly revolutionary wing of the student movement as a threat to the nation. The students’ own frames made this interpretation plausible, and thus precluded the possibility of creating alliances with any public officials. While it is clear that students mis-framed a movement that essentially sought moderate democratic reforms, it is equally clear that Díaz Ordaz and the hawks of his administration exploited the students’ rhetoric and symbols to justify massive violence. It is reasonable to assume that in a more democratic society, a comparable student movement would not have paid so dearly for such tactical errors. Conclusion: A facile interpretation of the sharply contrasting outcomes of these movements would focus on the students’ structured political irrelevance and the peasants’ political decisiveness to the PRI regime. This interpretation is unsatisfactory because if it were true, then we would have seen only repression of ungovernable students, and only concessions to the state’s official peasant-clients. But state responses were more complicated than this. Díaz Ordaz conceded to students and even temporarily sustained their civil liberties by restraining repression in August of 1968. Similarly, Luis Echeverría engaged in low-intensity warfare against unarmed peasants until independent journalists exposed this repression. That both Díaz Ordaz and Luis Echeverría, two presidents with well-known authoritarian tendencies, managed political disruption with both repression and concession complicates political opportunity theory. The cases suggest that democracy, while helpful, is not a necessary determinant of a social movement’s capacity to influence public policy. The disturbing evidence from Mexico’s 1968 student movement shows that in the absence of political checks and balances and genuinely competitive elections, nondemocratic states are freer to use violence, even to violate human rights. But while highly centralized states with patronage political parties rely on violence more than democratic states with competitive associational parties, they too enact policy reforms to restore social order. This suggests that neither the openness of a political system, nor the associational fact of competitive political parties, are sufficient conditions for social movement effectiveness in the policy arena. This is so because, while free of electoral constraints, even semi-authoritarian states work at the manufacture of consent. They simply use non-electoral mechanisms to appeal to public opinion and garner political support. The sequence of events supports Charles Tilly’s view that disruptive tactics by numerous and committed activists matter at least as much as the degree of centralized organization and financial resources. Despite the students’ superior coordinating capacity and financial resources, the semi-autonomous peasant movements were more effective in reorganizing the policy agendas of previously unsympathetic public officials. This is not to say that political opportunity and resource mobilization theories are wrong. Rather, the evidence from both movements strongly supports synthesizing the models in such a way as to treat the variables as interacting. Specifically, the evidence suggests that while Mexico’s version of authoritarianism increased the odds of repression, the movements’ levels of organization, disruption, and modes of political contestation determined the forms and extent of violence. For example, the students’ well organized, centralized, disciplined, and massive events checked the state from repressing activists in August, during the movement’s heyday. The peasants’ decentralization, in contrast, made them more likely to face low levels of repression early on, repression that continued until exposed by the media. More importantly, these case histories indicate that political disruption has qualitative dimensions beyond such quantitative measures as the numbers of activists, level of resources, and frequency of action. Qualitative dimensions include the content of the activists’ demands as well as the frames and symbols they use for advancing them. Movement frames are important because they more or less succeed, perhaps even fail, at convincing their targets and bystander audiences that their demands are just, and that the activists are worthy beneficiaries. Salient frames are especially important in nondemocratic countries where officials are more likely to resort to repression to manage political disruption (Noonan 1995). In such countries, frames that ignore the cultural narratives, national myths, and political ideologies of their society may be defined as promulgated by “foreigners” with non-national political agendas. Therefore, in such countries movements reduce the odds of repression by strategically framing their claims so they align with the myths and ideologies of their society. This means, ipso facto, that they do not communicate what William Gamson long ago called displacement goals, real or symbolic (Noonan 1995). This research further adds that movements in nondemocratic countries may get what they want from state elites by advancing their demands for social change with salient frames. In nondemocratic Mexico, the peasants’ salient frames strengthened an initially weak agrarista faction in Echeverría’s regime and ultimately succeeded in favorable policy reform despite the President’s alternative political agenda, and despite their highly disruptive and illegal tactics. The peasants exploited both their privileged client status as well as their honored position in the Mexican nationalist iconography by highlighting the contradictions of official agrarista discourse with the state’s actual pro-capitalist policies. If salient frames can decrease the odds of repression and/or increase the odds of political alliances with state elites, then it follows that political opportunities are more dynamic and dialogically emergent than previously theorized. Treating political opportunity more dynamically could be accomplished by incorporating political opportunity variables into Charles Tilly’s parsimonious model of social movement outcomes. In such a model, social movement outcomes could be seen as a function of a social movement’s ‘worthiness X unity X numbers X commitment X Political Oppportunity’. PO would include indicators of state structures facilitating or impeding democratic input, while salient frames help to establish a movement’s “worthiness.”
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* p < .05 (one-tailed test) Notes: 1. Data on the extent of the government’s expropriation of private landed proprietors per state between 1971-1975 were obtained from the Diario Oficial. 2. I derived a probability sample of 221 cases of peasant protests by sampling every third day of Excelsior (Mexico City) for the period 1970-1975. To preserve variably, I allow the per state distribution of land protests to vary by (approximate) quartiles.
Figure 1 States affected by peasant protests in 1970-1975. Protest data from
Excelsior. Original map adapted from Pick, Butler, and Lanzer
(1989). Figure 2 Shift in Echeverría’s Responses to Peasant Protest * Hundreds of thousands of hectares were expropriated in Mexico per year. I rescaled the variable to the level of peasant insurgency by dividing the raw values by 10,000. Similarly, the number of army/ police units deployed to a protest event per year was rescaled to the level of peasant insurgency by multiplying the raw values by 10.
Data Sources for Author’s Figure: Excelsior and the Diario Oficial
[i] For non-democracies, see Schock (1999), Krain (1997), Boudreau (1996), Brockett (1991). [ii] While ideologically flexible, the state’s history of human rights violations, centralization and PRI monopoly of power, make it semi-authoritarian (Middlebrook 1995; Loaeza 1993; Levy and Székely 1987). [iii] Presidents also handpicked governors, some local mayors, and until 2000, their successor. [iv] Most newspapers were still on the government’s payroll during the 1970s. [v] The National Confederation of Small Proprietors’ (CNPP) organized agriculturalists and the National Cattlemen’s Confederation (CNG) organized capitalist ranchers. [vi] Data collection did not extend into Echeverría’s final year because Excelsior became an unreliable source when pro-government forces occupied it in July of 1976. The labor intensive method of visually scanning the newspaper made it inefficient to further explore Echeverría’s agrarian policy in 1976, especially since it delivered more of the same as it had in 1975, if at an accelerated pace. [vii] The government ended student protest by shutting down the IPN and its affiliated high schools in 1956 (Guevara Niebla 1988). When it reopened the campus two years later, the government organized students into the Federación Nacional de Estudiantes Técnicos (Stevens 1974:194). [viii] Gómez Villanueva, head of the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonización, and Alfredo Bonfil, Secretary General of the CNC, led the agraristas (Excelsior 5/12/172; 5/18/72; 10/16/72).
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