Opening Mexico: The Making of a Democracy

Though you get a good and brief Mexican history lesson at the get-go, the majority of this well-written and deeply researched book by two Pulitzer Prize winners from the New York Times is devoted to the past half-century or so. It's a thriller, a real-life cliff-hanger that includes bald-headed generalissimos in bed with drug-dealers, backroom dealings, sex, brutality, murder, kidnappings, ear-slicings, corruption up the kazoo, "revolutionary" baloney, all of which was brought to us by the PRI, the ham-fisted political party that ruled Mexico craftily for seven decades until the whole game came unglued in the late 1990s, landing opposition leader Vicente Fox in the president's chair in 2000. The PRI overdid it, and got their comeuppance, at last. This book is available in both English and Spanish. I find it odd that the chapter entitled "From Disorder to Despotism" is missing from the Spanish version, published in, you guessed it, Mexico. Plus, the Spanish version has no photos! I like to see what my goons look like. This book is a must-read for anybody interested in this messy land. I live in Mexico, and could hardly put the dang thing down.

Julie Preston and Samuel Dillon have written a wonderfully researched and thorough look at Mexico's politics that anyone could read, understand, and learn from. They have used the stories of real people to bring to life the complex problems of the country and at the same time described the sweeping changes that the country has undergone. I read this book as preparation for moving to Merida in the Yucatan peninsula. I feel that I can appreciate the current political discussions and events much better thanks to the background that the book provided.

Having lived in Mexico for 38 years, I would say that this THE definitive work. Another reviewer insists on looking at only the negative side of what happens in Mexico, as do so many Mexicans themselves. However, there is a positive side - a very positive side. Things are happening, and Mexico is, indeed, opening to a whole new way of life. No, it is not happening in a single day, but what does? I arrived in 1966. I have witnessed all the changes that Preston and Dillon depict in their book. It is a true picture of those events - and a pretty gutsy one at that. I once heard Julia Preston speak at the school where I am working. I was impressed at her intelligence and how knowlegeable she was. She was one of the most open-minded and objective Americans I had ever heard on the subject of this country. And that is exactly what I saw in her book. I don't wear a hat, but, if I did, it would certainly be off to these journalists who have done such a fine job.

Hats off to the team of Dillon and Preston who give us a bird's eye view of one of the most interesting times in modern history, not only in Mexican or Latin American history. The authors do a tremendous job of communicating the unprecedented and complicated events leading up to the election of Vicente Fox. But the added value is in their appreciation of the historical and cultural context in which many of the otherwise well-known facts occurred. I was working in Mexico also during this period. Given the limited coverage in both Mexico and the US of so much of what happened - in the former due to the one-sided view of the media and in the latter due to the wrongheaded disregard in the US for events that occur in our not so distant neighbor - I was reading many of the details for the first time."Opening Mexico" will stand as a more than worthy attempt to introduce a larger audience to the importance of these events to both the US and to Mexico, and to frame discourse on critical political changes to come in both countries over the next few years.

This is the first and only account of the amazing revolution in Mexican politics that took place when Vicente Fox was elected. For more then 70 years Mexico was dominated by the PRI(Institutional revolutionary Party) which made Mexico basically a one-party state. But beginning in the 1990s this book tells the fascinating story of the surprise election results that almost brought the PRD socialists to power. Then subsequent chapters detail the Colosio assassination and the Salinas/Zedillo presidencies, culminating in the Fox campaign and the rise of the PAN party. Although this book will appeal mostly to those with some knowledge of Latin American politics and Mexican affairs it is also of interest to any American who seeks more knowledge of our southern naeighboor. This is a much needed contribution to the dirth of scholarship on modern Mexican politics.Seth J. Frantzman