The Mexico we here about in travel guides, drunken college stories, and beautiful brochures is not the Mexico that is today. Of course it still has all of those well renowned scenic spots but there have been many crisis in Mexico that we have yet to really see.
Since 1983, Mexico has undergone a rapid and thorough economic restructuring program. Using extensive field research, including interviews with top political and business leaders, this study analyses the process by which the state has reformed its public enterprise sector. Under a process of institutional change and ongoing redefinition of state-society relations, the cornerstones and rules of the game of the country's postwar political order are being slowly but surely altered. The political events of 1994 were signs of a longstanding system in transition. The fundamental question is the direction these profound changes are taking Mexico. What type of new political system is being constructed to take the place of the old? .
The Chiapas uprising raised the possibility, of a social revolution on the horizon. First, while electronic communications extended the voice of the zapatistas across Mexico and the world, Mexican security forces successfully contained the guerrilla presence to a small, confined area of the state of Chiapas. Moreover, while solidarity marches and demonstrations for the zapatistas occurred with some frequency in Mexico City, their appeal did not resonate much beyond the limited membership of existing progressive interest groups in the country, despite the new depths of the economic crisis. A national plebiscite organized by them during the summer of 1995 to define their future direction yielded a disappointing turn-out of roughly one million citizens in a country of over ninety million. Second, the zapatistas recently announced their decision to convert themselves into a political movement. To symbolize the change in strategy, the Zapatista National Liberation Army has been renamed the Zapatista National Liberation Front.
