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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF
TRANSNATIONAL POWER AND

PRODUCTION
How and why Mexico’s socioeconomic structure was transformed through pluto-
cratic preferences, US corporate strategies, and ideology—all powering transna-
tional processes of neoliberalization—are issues examined in this comprehensive,
carefully documented publication covering four crucial decades of metamorphosis.
The causes and consequences of the creation of a new, regional power bloc—the
North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)—are extensively examined.
Readers will benefit from the many important demystifications presented here,
chronicling the asymmetric Mexico-US production system. The impacts of the
new transnational structure for labor on both sides of the border are matters of
centrality. Specialists and general readers alike will find an explicit and accessible
account of the powerful forces opening access to and profiting from millions of
low-wage workers enabling Mexico to become a strategic source of US imports.
Portrayed by mainstream economists and major policymakers as a “win-win” tri-
umph of “free trade” theory, this book documents the opposing reality imposed
by NAFTA and the US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement on both the US
and Mexican working classes. US economists foretold a dramatic narrowing of the
income gap—the US would benefit; Mexico would benefit even more. But instead,
the yawning gap increased for three decades, bringing devastation for workers while
debilitating Mexico’s national industrial base.
James M. Cypher is Emeritus Research Professor at the Universidad Autónoma

de Zacatecas, Mexico, and Emeritus Professor of Economics at California State
University, Fresno, USA.
Mateo Crossa is Research Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José

María Luis Mora, Mexico City, Mexico.
THE POLITICAL
ECONOMY OF
TRANSNATIONAL
POWER AND
PRODUCTION
Mexico’s Metamorphosis
1982–2022
James M. Cypher and Mateo Crossa

Designed cover image: © DALL.E 2 (openai.com/dall-e-2) and Chris Sturr
First published 2024
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© 2024 James M. Cypher and Mateo Crossa
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-032-30917-0 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-032-30918-7 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-003-30726-6 (ebk)
DOI: 10.4324/9781003307266
Typeset in Bembo
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CONTENTS
List of Figures vii

List of Tables viii
List of Focus Boxes ix
Acknowledgments x
Acronyms xii
Preface xiv
1 The Remaking of Mexico: The State, Economic Elite, and

US Capital 1982–92 1
2 From NAFTA to the PAN’s Implosion: Mexico Remade

for US TNCs 1992–2012 31
3 Stagnation and Income Dispersion Sink New PRI and

Fracture US Labor: 2012–8 68
4 López Obrador in Power, 2018–22: A Transformational or

Conformational Moment? 95
5 Export-Led Accumulation: Paradoxes of the Leading Auto Sector 128
6 Petroleum: A Strategic Resource for Houston’s TNCs or Mexico? 170

vi Contents
7 Mining and Agriculture: Supporting Pillars of the

Transnational Structure 199
8 Some Final Reflections on Dependence and Asymmetry 226
References 236
Index 260
FIGURES
5.1 Number of Workers in the Automotive Industry in

Mexico (Thousands) 139
5.2 US-Canadian Content in Cars Assembled in Mexico 141
5.3 Total Researchers in R&D Areas per Thousand Employees 152
5.4 Latin American Capital Goods Imports (Billions of Dollars) 153
5.5 Number of Employees by Auto Sub-branch in Mexico
and the US (2019) 161
5.6 Workers and Value-Added per Worker in the US
Assembly Industry and in Mexico’s Electrical and
Electronic Parts Production (2018) 161
5.7 Number of Workers and Monthly Wages by Auto
Sub-branches in Mexico (Monthly Wages in Mexican
Pesos 2018) 162
7.1 Direct Jobs in Metallic and Nonmetallic Minerals Mining
(Thousands) 211
7.2 Mexico’s Agricultural and Agro-industry Trade Balance
(Billions USD) 220
TABLES
2.1 Failure of the US/Mexico Income Convergence Hypothesis 58

3.1 Formal and Informal Sector “Subordinated Employees” 2013–18
(Millions or Percent) 71
4.1 Net New Foreign Investment and New Investment as % of
Nonfinancial Capital Inflows (Billions of Current US Dollars) 106
5.1 Mexico: Production by Auto TNCs 140
5.2 Total Vehicle Production and Auto-Related Private
R&D Investment (Millions of Vehicle or Billions of USD, 2018) 155
5.3 Main Vehicle Components Exported from Mexico to
the US (2021: in Percent) 160
FOCUS BOXES
1.1 Creation of the Maquila Regime 6

1.2 Abandonment of Mexico’s Sectorial Industrial Policies 20
1.3 The Mexican-Austrian Origins of Neoliberalism 25
2.1 The Unique Role of Monterrey Capital 33
2.2 A Champion of “Free Trade” Harbors Second Thoughts? 38
2.3 Emerging Fragmentation of National Capital’s Power 46
2.4 Waning Presidencialismo under Transnationalized Capital 51
2.5 Remittances: A Necessary Consideration 56
2.6 Growth Accounting: “Astounding” Numbers 60
3.1 Minimizing Labor’s Share 73
3.2 US Labor Force Displacement Due to NAFTA 80
4.1 De-fetishizing FDI 105
4.2 Build US-Buy US: Auto Sector IP in 2022 113
5.1 Industrial Fragmentations: A Brief Summary of Export
Manufacturing135
5.2 Absent “National Champion” Firms, Mexico Sites R&D Abroad 156
5.3 Labor Becomes Its Own, Best, Protagonist 164
6.1 Mexico’s Oil Nationalization in Context 171
6.2 Oil and Industrial Policy 176
6.3 Building National Innovation Capacity at the National
Petroleum Institute 182
6.4 The Petroleum Workers’ Union: Encrusted Power,
Zero Accountability 188
7.1 Technological Sophistication: The Basis of Mega-Mining 205
7.2 Emergence of Lithium? 212
7.3 From Ejido to TNC Agribusiness 214
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We are grateful for the assistance received in researching and writing this book.
In particular, we thank the following individuals: Arnulfo Arteaga, Dean Baker,
Guillermo Foladori, Arthur MacEwan, Josefina Morales, Juan Carlos Moreno Brid,
Gabriel Ondetti, Gerardo Otero, Oscar Pérez Veyna, Richard Roman, Chris Sturr,
Darcy Tetreault, and Chris Tilly.
For facilitating our field research in Detroit, we thank Kristin Dziczek. In the
border region, we thank numerous maquila auto parts workers who must remain
anonymous. They graciously gave of their precious time to increase our understand-
ing of labor processes and working conditions and their struggles to outmaneuver
an entrenched union hierarchy devoted to keeping them in their place.
María Eugenia Correa Vásquez (1954–2021) was an unremitting supporter of
our past research efforts, some appearing in her journal Ola Financiera. Her cosmo-
politan scholarly acumen, her joie de vivre, and her guidance were sorely missed as
we toiled to give shape to this manuscript.
We are also grateful to two extremely supportive anonymous reviewers tapped
by our publisher, Routledge, to evaluate early drafts of selected chapters.
At the Instituto Mora in Mexico City, we thank Mónica Toussaint for resolutions
regarding administrative matters.
We further acknowledge the adroit investigative skills of California State
University Research Librarian Sarah McDaniel and her colleague Chris Langer
confirming M. Thatcher’s arrival in Mexico—coinciding with the calamity of pres-
ident-to-be Luis Donaldo Colosio’s murder on March 23, 1994. We cite her, prob-
ably undelivered, speech transcript planned for March 25 in Chapter 8. As well,
librarians Carol Doyle and David Drexler speedily provided needed manuscripts.
As has been the case with previous efforts, Routledge publishers know how
to support authors while offering sound advice on all aspects of publishing. In
Acknowledgments xi
particular, we thank Senior Economics Editor Kristina Abbotts and Economics

Editorial Assistant Christina Mandizha for suggestions and solutions large and small,
and, most especially, for providing needed flexibility.
Special thanks are due to Chris Sturr, the creative and diligent editor of the
US economics magazine Dollars & Sense, for designing the striking digital artwork
appearing on the cover, evoking the industrial mural art of the great Diego Rivera.
ACRONYMS
AMLO Andrés Manuel López Obrador

BIP Border Industrial Program
CCE Business Coordinating Council
CFE Federal Electricity Commission
COECE Coordinator of Foreign Trade Business Organizations
CTM Confederation of Mexican Workers
EOM Export-Oriented Manufacturing
EV Electric Vehicle
FDI Foreign Direct Investment
FTZ Free Trade Zone
GATT General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade
GHG Greenhouse Gas Emissions
GVC Global Value Chain
IDB Inter-American Development Bank
ILO International Labor Organization
IMF International Monetary Fund
IMMEX Export Program of Manufacturing, Maquiladora and Service Industries
IMSS Mexican Social Security Institute
I-O Input-Output
IP Industrial Policy
LNG Liquefied Natural Gas
MBD Millions of Barrels per Day
NAFTA North American Free Trade Agreement
NPI National Petroleum Institute
OECD Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development
OPEC Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries
Acronyms xiii
PAN National Action Party

PECE Economic Growth and Stability Pact
PEMEX Petróleos Mexicanos (Mexico’s National Oil Company)
PRD Party of the Democratic Revolutionary
PRI Institutional Revolutionary Party
PSE Economic Solidarity Pact (the Pacto)
R&D Research and Development
SAPS Structural Adjustment Programs
S&T Science and Technology
STPS Mexico’s Labor Secretariat
TAA Trade Adjustment Assistance
TNC Transnational Corporation
UAW United Auto Workers
USA*NAFTA US TNC lobby to promote NAFTA
USMCA US-Mexico-Canada Free Trade Agreement
USTR Office of the United States Trade Representative
WTO World Trade Organization
WB World Bank
PREFACE
“Blessed Mexico, so close to God, and no so far from the United States”
Andres Manuel López Obrador, President of Mexico
(August 2, 2022)
Within the span of a little over 200 years, Mexico’s always fraught relationship
with the US appears to have swung 180 degrees. At least, this would be the first
impression one might gather from the above quote. One thing that stands out with
regard to Mexico’s economic integration and subordination to the US between
that of the late 19th century and that of President López Obrador (2018–24) is the
structure that now defines Mexico in many respects—the North American Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and its 2020 sequel known as the US-Mexico-Canada
Free Trade Agreement (USMCA)—that has bound Mexico’s fate since late 1993.
As we will maintain, this treaty had nearly nothing to do with so-called free trade
and everything to do with building a US-led, restrictive, largely neoliberal, eco-
nomic power bloc designed to promote US investment in Mexico and hinder all
economic rivals in creating a new transnational production zone. López Obrador
(AMLO) built his popular presidential campaign on the disparagement of neoliberal
socioeconomic policies. Now, his startling volte face (as noted in the epigram) sum-
marizes his assessment of how Mexico has fared under the USMCA and NAFTA.
How Mexico has actually fared, how the US has performed, and in what way a new
transnational system of power and production has been constituted between these
so dissimilar nations since the late 1980s is the subject of this book. We focus on
the political economy impacts affecting the majority of Mexicans and the millions
in the US working class. The focus of this book is both “worker-centric” and
“production-centric”.
It may be useful to attempt to define the scope and intent of the book through
a statement of what it is not:
Preface xv
First, it is not a “country study” of Mexico. Yes, the focus is to a considerable

degree, on Mexico: We have attempted to explicate the domain of transnational
production and its socioeconomic effects as experienced in both Mexico and the
US. Thus, we have consciously broken from a format that has dominated three
related fields of analysis: (1) Latin American Studies, (2) Mexican Studies, and (3)
U.S. Political Economy, to present a study based in International Political Economy.
Second, we have not sought to limit our analysis to what academicians define as
“primary sources” or “secondary sources”. Rather, to the degree that such consid-
erations have been warranted, we have conducted sufficient original field research,
in particular in Ciudad Juárez and Michigan, but also throughout a relevant swath
of Mexico—most particularly the Central-North states. In addition, we have been
actively researching the larger NAFTA themes since 1990, beginning with pro bono
research for the US Congress on what were at the time termed “twin plants” oper-
ations strung along the US-Mexico border, linking high wage processing in the
North with low-wage maquiladora operations in the South.
Third, this is not a book restricted to or centered on AMLO’s thus-far popular
administration: As with several preceding administrations examined here, we have
sought to convey the ideas and political economy initiatives of his (sometimes nation-
alist) regime. Conveyance of its essence is no simple proposition since opaque policy
positions shift, introducing a vexing element of elusiveness: For example, AMLO’s
frequent early references to the hegemony of “the mafia of power”, was reversed in
the fourth Presidential Informe (September 1, 2022) with the declaration that “the
oligarchy is no longer dominant”. But, the available evidence, some presented in this
book, suggests that the oligarch-producing processes of income, wealth, and power
concentration in Mexico (and in the US) have proceeded unabated.
Over the past 40-plus years, research that has informed our writing has occurred
in a variety of settings—including extensive field research via structured inter-
views, particularly with a substantial number of maquila managers and via in-plant
research—including, discussions and interviews conducted with operatives, local
functionaries and local TNC managers (particularly in industrial parks but also at
giant, stand-alone plants such as Nissan in Morelos and Aguascalientes). In addition,
we have conducted extensive interviews with government functionaries assigned
to implement state-level industrial development programs in several key industri-
alizing Mexican states (including Aguascalientes, Coahuila, Guanajuato, and San
Luis Potosí). We have engaged in discussions with representatives of the maquila
association, as well as exchanges with researchers (particularly those involved with
research and development (R&D) and innovation). We have met with labor leaders
and dissident workers (particularly in troubled Ciudad Juárez). We have participated
in and presented research at numerous national and international conferences. All
this research has culminated in numerous publications. As always, research sup-
porting the ideas, critiques, and conclusions presented in this book rests on moun-
tains of published official data, newspaper and other press accounts (which we have
carefully followed), academic journals, popular sources, published (often official)
reports, nonacademic sources, and books.
xvi Preface
We are confident that, in spite of our efforts, there are some materials we have
not accessed. This is due to the fact that a large body of difficult-to-access unre-
ferenced materials, often of limited circulation, particularly in Mexico, has intro-
duced tangible limits constraining our intended “comprehensive” research efforts.
Nevertheless, within these bounds, we have made every possible effort to find,
read, and digest the extant written materials, only some of which are cited in the
long bibliography. Many excellent studies have not been referenced—their absence
being a result of our decision to write a text of manageable length. We have sought
to compress a very important and very complex transnational metamorphosis that has
fundamentally restructured Mexico while extensively transforming the US—which
yet remains a process of further consolidation.
In the present era of the transnationalization of production, we prioritize the
emergence and consolidation of the cross-border system of power defining and
delimiting Mexico’s socioeconomic development. The striking epigram cited at
the outset denotes the vast gulf between the weary “realist” perspective—national
“interests are eternal and perpetual” and will be pursued, as famously stated by
Lord Palmerston in 1848—and AMLO’s “ahistorical-naïve” perspective regarding
Mexico’s interface with the US. Mexico’s socioeconomic subordination in the late
19th century during the “primary-export” regime built to extract resources needed
as the US consolidated its industrial dominance in a new age of monopoly capital
constituted an early system of limited, resource-based transnational production. In
this book, we explore the degree to which another famous epigram “plus ça change,
plus c’est la même chose” should resonate today in Mexico under the newly consoli-
dated export-led, manufacturing regime of dissonant, cross-border, asymmetrically,
integrated accumulation.
1
THE REMAKING OF MEXICO
The State, Economic Elite, and US Capital
1982–92
The Framework: A Prefatory Synopsis

How Mexico’s 1982–92 transformation occurred is difficult to summarize: Suffice
it to say that what had been a successful state-led process of rapid (if uneven) eco-
nomic development was confronted with a forking path in the 1970s—one path led
to continuation, the other promised new opportunity. The opportunity consisted of
a vast expansion in a far-from-new industry, oil. The 1970s, especially viewed from
the US, were convulsive: Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)
seized the moment (after decades of patiently and quietly providing an ever-larger
mass of exports to the advanced industrial nations) to exercise c onsiderable con-
trol over global supply, sending prices skyrocketing at various moments as supplies
swung about. A decade or so before, the US had plenty of oil, but then its oilfields
reached what were considered the doldrums of “peak oil”.
In the midst of what was a very messy situation provoking recession tenden-
cies and stop-go processes of economic growth, Mexico’s then proud national oil
company, Pemex (the state’s crown jewel) hit some very big new discoveries. With
prices seemingly ever on the rise, and big-league oil exports looming around the
corner, Mexico refocused on quick gains—adopting a “something-for-nothing”
rentier strategy. But, in doing so, Mexico required considerable new investments in
drilling platforms, pipelines, oil tankers, and refinery capacity: Some high-quality
steel and some ship-building could be provided nationally, much of the rest required
importation.
This need to pay for imported equipment and technologies coincided with the
emergence of so-called petro-dollars money flowing out of the Middle East into
European banks. Idle funds are a bankers’ curse: Mexico became a great place to
move Europe’s money surplus—oil being the ideal collateral for massive injections
of foreign loans. Lenders from around the world began calling Mexico, begging
DOI: 10.4324/9781003307266-1
2 The Remaking of Mexico
Pemex to take yet another loan. But, alas and predictably, all raw materials booms
simply presage busts. When the bust came at the end of the 1970s, getting worse
by 1981, oil prices plunged, loans stopped, and then things got worse: In inflation-
adjusted terms, from 1980–7, oil prices fell by 27.4 percent and continued to drop–
down by 72 percent in 1988—further collapsing to 84 percent below the record
high 1980 price in 1998 (McMahan 2021). But, repayment schedules remained,
and the noose tightened.
This crucial juncture had a great deal to do with US policymaking and with the
odd monetarist ideas of Milton Friedman: In 1979, the US was experiencing, for
the second time in the 1970s, a relatively high rate of inflation (roughly 11 percent
at its peak, about the same as 1974–5). Unlike 1974–5, however, Friedman’s idea
that inflation could be contained by controlling the supply of money became influ-
ential among those setting monetary policy. This context, and the naïve nature of
President Jimmy Carter’s economic management, enabled Friedman devotee Paul
Volcker’s appointment to run the US Federal Reserve. Then, and now, global credit
markets generally follow the lead of the Fed as it sets basic lending rates. In October
1979, Volcker imposed dramatic new measures in attempting to restrict the money
supply. By December, the interest rate on intermediate bonds had soared to 10 per-
cent, then 12 percent by February 1980. Short-term interbank rates set by the Fed
shot to 19 percent by April; one-year loans financed at 7 percent in 1978 leaped to
17 percent in 1981 (Goodfriend and King 2005: 983, 985, 995–8).
In the US, recession ensued. International bank lending to Mexico slowed
moderately but then reaccelerated in 1981, reversing course subsequently and fall-
ing by about 20 percent in the following year. In 1981, the World Bank (WB)
made its largest loan ever to Mexico, apparently chiefly at the behest of Mexico’s
powerful Ministry of Budgeting and Programming, headed by future president
Miguel de la Madrid (1982–8) along with his top aide, economic and social pol-
icy director, another future president Carlos Salinas (1988–94), who convinced
most WB economists involved that Mexico’s problems were transitory—although
by then overall foreign debt had jumped by 119 percent from 1978–80 (Toussaint
2020). Only months before Mexico subsequently defaulted on its foreign debt
in August 1982—sending shock waves abroad—the head of the International
Monetary Fund (IMF) wrote to then President López Portillo (1976–82) that “the
recent setback for the Mexican economy is bound to be transient” after meeting
with his top aides, including, most likely, Carlos Salinas (Kapur, Lewis, and Webb
1997: 603).
Mexico flailed, but by late 1982, the gig was up. Mexico’s business elite was
watching events, having as always the inside track on information. They knew. And
so, starting probably sometime in 1981, wildly accelerating in 1982, they performed
the “sacadolares” dance: They grabbed up almost all the dollars that had been circu-
lating freely in Mexico’s banking system and engaged in massive capital flight, most
probably taking out, in a period of 18 months, about all of what had flowed into
Mexico via foreign loans since the mid-1970s. Massive capital flight, 1981–2, likely
reached 5 percent of gross domestic product (GDP) (Buffie and Krause 1989: 152).
The Remaking of Mexico 3
Capital flight along with the threat to withhold investment (or its converse, the
conditioned willingness to invest) are two crucial measures of capital’s structural
power—policy decisions are made on its behalf “without need for concerted polit-
ical action” when systemic forces result in a “correcting” procedure, or a reversal
or a marginalization of any initiative that might impinge upon capital’s prerogatives
(Fairfield 2015: 414–25). Instrumental power can be calibrated by taking into account
the crucial role of peak business associations, particularly in Mexico, in achieving
specific short-run objectives through “concerted political action” in terms of the
return on capital as the state acts as the instrument of capital. This chapter is con-
cerned with events, and responses to events, that shifted the underlying relations
of state and capital, reducing rapidly the autonomy of the former. In the US, if
less dramatically, a largely similar role regarding capital’s enhanced scope and sway
has been both theoretically detailed and empirically documented (Gilens and Page
2014; Romm 2021).
Mexico’s then president (López Portillo)—who had only pronounced a short
time before that Mexico’s problems had been reduced to “managing abundance”—
said he had a list of the “sacadolares” mafia—but he never released any data despite
his promise to do so. Instead, expressing justified pique, he nationalized the banks.
And, to everyone’s surprise, including conservative small business owners who were
aghast at what they considered to be the sudden arrival of “socialism”, for the
first time, the banks became responsive to everyday Mexicans as efficiency leaped
upward. But that did not last long—the banks were “privatized” in 1991—gifting
the public banks to the new elite of financiers in a process replete with favoritism.
The Crisis of 1982–3 and the Rise of Structural Adjustment

1982 was quite a year, and 1983 was not measurably better. The long period of
“stabilized growth” had given way to wild inflation, and the canceling of dol-
lar accounts at the bank with depositors eventually paid off in devalued pesos.
Necessities, like milk, suddenly could only be found on the black market, or not
at all. Wages collapsed; dignified professionals plunged straight down into penury.
The middle class felt abandoned, and they were. Engineers started driving cabs;
they never found a way back to professional employment. Mexico needed help; it
could not help itself.
Help came, at a price, from the US government and the IMF. The IMF wanted
“austerity”—cut government spending on necessary services, went the old refrain,
and “loosen” the labor market by inducing unemployment. Then, by some sort
of magic only found in the imagination of neoclassical economists, the economy
would recover. It did not. Following the IMF recipe by shrinking public sector
spending while forcing down wages, Mexico’s economy shrunk, as one would
expect. According to what are known as “Ricardian Equivalencies”, if economic
activity shrinks in one area (always assuming full employment of labor and all other
“resources”), it has to rise in another—namely, investment. When none of this pro-
grammed fantasy occurred (how could it?), when the “medicine” of the “money
doctors” failed, the answer was…a larger portion of medicine. As the 1980s ground
on, the WB brought to Mexico the greatest ideas Washington had to offer—
Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs). These programs were a leap into the
unknown, as never before. Structural adjustment essentially meant that the recipient
nation had to abandon its conventional sovereign practices, and the IMF (through
“cross-conditionality”) also participated in the WB-led program to remake Mexico
as the exemplar export-led economy.
Transforming the Production System: De-territorialization/

Re-territorialization
The crisis of 1982–3 was somewhat stanched by a $3.5 billion 90-day loan on
the part of the US, which, as it reached its limits in December 1982, was then
supplemented by a $3.8 billion loan from the IMF. This was coupled with a two-
year moratorium on $23 billion in public debt repayments with a large number
of US-owned commercial banks. Other exercises in financial re-engineering fol-
lowed, most particularly the “Baker Plan”, but overall, these resulted in failure:
In 1981, external debt was a manageable 36 percent of GDP, but a year later, it
had shot to 49 percent, while—even after the IMF intervened again in 1986 with
a $1.4 billion loan—external debt rose to 78 percent of GDP. But, in 1989, the
“Brady Plan” resulted in a restructuring of $50 billion in external debt either
by (1) waiving 35 percent of Mexico’s debts or (2) considerably reducing inter-
est payments, or (3) offering new loans on these debts over the period 1989–92
(Brinke 2013).
The Brady Plan allowed the Mexican government to reclaim usage of a signifi-
cant part of its budget, given that in early 1989, 60 percent had been diverted to pay
foreign creditors: Total foreign, and internal, debt dropped from 1988 to 1994, fall-
ing from 63 percent of GDP to 22 percent. But, the impacts of the devastating crisis
went far beyond debt reshuffling agreements: The IMF, the WB, and the US gov-
ernment (which effectively controls the IMF and the WB) initiated a broad range
of fundamental changes, particularly with regard to how Mexico could exercise its
own sovereignty. Under the state-led developmentalist policies that reigned from
1940–82, Mexico had promoted a vast array of industrial activities (Cypher 1990:
127–53), using a variety of measures to do so, including subsidies, quotas, and tariffs
to limit the importation of competing products (along with creating state-owned
enterprises to promote national industrialization and deal with “market failures”).
As dictated by the SAPs, of the 1,155 state-owned companies in 1982, only 259
remained in 1991(Ángeles 1992: 164). The Mexican state reduced its participation
in national production from 25 percent of GDP in 1983 to less than 16 percent in
1992, while state employment decreased almost 10 percent, with respect to total
occupation.
But then, either autonomously or through joint-determination with the IMF
and WB, Mexico joined the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT),
with President de la Madrid (1982–8) authorizing Mexico’s entry petition in late
1985. Having entered GATT in 1986, the US arranged for Mexico to sign the
“US-Mexico Bilateral Framework Agreement on Trade and Investment” in 1987
(Erb and Greenwald 1989: 125). This was the initial step down the road that led to
NAFTA’s approval in 1993. The 1987 Agreement had been preceded by an outline
bilateral agreement at the behest of “interested business leaders” in late 1984 (Erb
and Greenwald 1989: 125). Thus, the “decision” to enter GATT, locking in Mexico
to policies that presaged the abandonment of the state-led industrialization project,
was one that originated, directly or indirectly from the US in 1984/5. By 1989,
restrictions on foreign ownership in many areas, excluding so-called strategic ones,
were greatly relaxed. By 1991, tariffs had been drastically reduced, quotas affected
only 20 percent of imports, and a massive sell-off of state firms was underway. The
US was particularly interested in setting up nonreversible arrangements with regard
to all transnational investments, actual and potential. The exercises in transnational
power intensified: By October 1989, Mexico had signed three trade and investment
accords with the US, one an “understanding on trade and investment facilitation”,
another designating specific sectors to be prioritized, and a third designed to “pro-
mote” transnational business opportunities” (Erb and Greenwald 1989: 127).
In large measure, this drive to impose transnational production structures on
Mexico came from large US corporations and their representative organizations,
particularly the Business Roundtable and the US Chamber of Commerce.1 But
also, especially in the crucial period 1983–91, many very powerful Monterrey-based
industrial firms—sometimes known as the Monterrey Group, which was formed
in the late 19th century from no more than 20 merchant, banking, and industrial
family-dominated enterprises (Gauss 2010: 207–20). Never loyal to the state-led
model (even as they grew and prospered as a result of it), they also advocated for a
transnationalized production and trade structure: As the ’80s crisis ground on, they
increasingly visualized a solution for their excess capacity through both large-scale
exports and establishing subsidiaries in the US.
Three decades later, of the 142 nationally controlled firms listed on the Mexican
stock exchange, 51 had become transnational corporations (TNCs) by 2019, but
only 10 were in manufacturing or resource-based heavy industry (Salas-Porras and
Medina-Hernández 2021: 5; 12–3; 16). In the fragile circumstances of the ’80s, the
Monterrey-based impresarios knew how to apply their economic power within the
political labyrinth in Mexico City. They, and a significant number of other business
leaders, to an unprecedented degree, broke with the underlying socio-political con-
sensus that had reigned for decades, by politically aligning with the right-wing PAN
(Partido Acción Nacional) party, created in 1939. Thus for presidents de la Madrid and
then Salinas, the rush to bend to the demands of transnational power were primarily
driven by pull factors emanating from the US, but also by push factors emanating
from AmCham de México members (then selling the output of their US-owned
branch plants into the shrinking internal market). Meanwhile, a powerful cluster of
national capital—the Monterrey Group in particular—also promoted the new turn.
Nonetheless, the largest units of capital, including bank capital, while alarmed by
López Portillo’s decision to nationalize the banks and critical of his petroleum-first
strategy, sought conciliation with the traditional power base as operated by the mas-
sive, generally inclusive, and sophisticated Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI)
ruling continually from 1929 to 2000 (and then from 2012–18). Yet, the insurgency
of northern capital in the ’80s signaled an important rupture providing a new,
strong, and versatile national power base, which over time, eventually was ready and
able to capture emerging possibilities as they opened in the 1990s: There were two
merging vectors, one coming from large capital clustered in and around Monterrey,
where the powerful ultra-conservative employers association Coparmex (formed in
1929) held sway; the other—also in the north—arose from footloose capital migrat-
ing south from the US to take advantage of the Border Industrial Program (BIP) by
setting up maquila plants (see Focus 1.1).
FOCUS 1.1: CREATION OF THE MAQUILA REGIME
The BIP (or maquila program) began in 1965, shortly after the US ended a
temporary cross-border bracero labor program in order to induce some com-
pensating employment in the northern border region; it did not gain momen-
tum until 1983 when Mexico’s Secofi (the Trade Ministry) issued a Decree for
the Promotion and Operation of Maquiladoras (Hernández Laos 2000: 313).
Significantly, this was also the moment when the CNIMME (National Council
of Maquiladora and Export Manufacturers) formed—a generally little-noticed
emergence reflecting the ongoing structural and geographic shifting of the
accumulation process. Until 1985, the border maquila assembly plants enjoyed
singular status whereby neither their component imports nor manufactured
exports were taxed. In 1985, a program known as PITEX (Hernández Laos
2000: 317–8) allowed export-based firms heavily dependent on processing
imported components not located on the border to have virtually the same
privileges as did the official maquilas (i.e., exemption from import/export tariffs
and value-added taxes on components, fuels, machinery, and parts used in
production testing and research equipment, etc.)—an important step deep-
ening and broadening what was once the largely marginal BIP into “a new
Mexican industrial project” (Arregui Velasco 1993: 165). In 1987, ALTEX—
reserved for large exporters (more than $2 million in exports)—granted both
direct and “indirect” exporters (suppliers to export operations) special, rapid,
treatment with regard to border transactions and repayment of value-added
taxes. By 1995, the PITEX firms exceeded in number the maquila firms, while
their exports were valued at 75 percent of the maquilas’. In 2006, PITEX was
essentially generalized, permitting all direct and “indirect” export firms (sup-
plier firms) exemption from tariffs and trade regulations throughout all of
Mexico under the IMMEX (Export Program of Manufacturing, Maquiladora
and Service Industries) program (Gambrill 2008).
We refer to the entire period from 1965 onward as “the maquila regime”
rather than limiting such usage only for 1965–85. PITEX transformed the BIP
program: What had once been an offhand concession to the long-neglected
border region—being initially a gap-filling measure to somewhat compensate
for the lost “bracero program” (1942–64)—partially addressed an endemic
labor surplus problem by attracting simple assembly plants to a narrow “Free
Trade Zone” just south of the long border. The pace of the setup of these
plants was initially very slow; five years after the program began, there were
only 120 plants employing 20,000 workers. But by 1974, employment had
increased 273 percent, now spread across 455 plants. Growth was periodically
interrupted by recessions in the US, but by 1985, when the PITEX program
commenced, there were 760 plants employing 212,000 low-wage workers. As
the crisis of the ’80s drug on, as Mexican workers’ real wages went down until
1984 (rising moderately thereafter until 1994, but only recovering their 1984
level in 2002) the maquila siting process boomed: By 1988, the plant count
reached 1,400, with employment registering 370,000 (Carrillo Huerta 1990:
32). From 1994 to 2002, maquila employment nearly doubled, reaching one
million (Cypher 2004: 362–3), while from 2004 to 2019, IMMEX workers rose
from 1.4 to 3 million. The exponential growth of maquilas in the northern bor-
der occurred parallel to the industrial decline of central regions in the country,
which had been pivotal in supplying the domestic market during the “import
substitution” (or state-led) period. This process was driven by the US’s counter-
ing of a surge of Japanese production capacity into its South.
The massive subsidies to the border plants and the PITEX firms, along with
low wages, actually constituted an atypical industrial policy: Instead of certain
sectors selected and promoted by the state, Mexico’s policy centered on guar-
anteeing low wages with an unlimited labor supply, in addition to offering any
temporary import-export firm (TIEF) an array of other incentives. Standing at
27 percent in 1980, by 1993, nearly 70 percent of all exports were processed
through the TIEFs either as maquilas or increasingly as PITEX operators, rising
to nearly 80 percent by 2002 (Puyana 2010: 8). Rarely mentioned were many
other TIEF subsidies in addition to those cited earlier: (1) usually comparatively
cheap water, gas and electricity; (2) low land rent and construction costs; (3)
possible exemptions, under one pretext or another, from corporate taxes; (4)
state-subsidized business financing; and (5) access to government-financed
labor training programs.
Resentment, arising from their relative exclusion from this large-firm/state-cap-

ital nexus centered in and near Mexico City, was strongest among medium-sized
firms, particularly in the north (Mizrahi 1992: 793). By 1975, medium-size indus-
trial firms had experienced stronger growth than the rest but remained a subor-
dinated faction—even as they held 35 percent of all industrial capital (Mizrahi
1992: 753). As the crisis commencing in 1981 drug on, sometimes deepening,
northern capital—which was, relatively, not so beholden to the national gov-
ernment—was more willing to break with the state-led economic policies engi-
neered through the PRI/large capital alliance. Configuring this break effectively
meant embracing neoliberalism and one of its major tenets—an export-led
accumulation strategy. As the consensus between state and capital fractured due
to divisions among the owners of capital, the initiative for constructing a new
configuration arose from the provinces under the influence of Coparmex (very
much in alliance with US capital)—a process that increased throughout the 1980s
(Mizrahi 1992: 757). In 1970, Coparmex had only 7,000 members: It operated
in the shadows cast by the hegemonic alliance between the state and the large
industrial-financial conglomerates as instituted in the paradigm-setting Cárdenas
era, 1934–40 (Gauss 2010; Hamilton 1982). As the neoliberal turn gained
traction—this being the construction of a new nexus between state and capital to
build out an emerging transnational productive structure—Mexico’s national
project was not to shrink the state, or sideline it with regard to the economic
structure, but to redirect it. As this process gained traction, by 1990, employers
associated with Coparmex jumped to 36,000 (Mizrahi 1992: 757): State pol-
icy was coalescing on Coparmex’s anti-labor stance. As the ’80s commenced,
or shortly before, US firms dominating the Mexican auto industry from their
Mexico City region plants, but now facing union pressures and Japan’s more
efficient plants, relocated to the north to nonunionized, often nonindustrial
areas: This shift expressed and augmented the regional power of Coparmex and
the Monterrey Group.
Export Promotion
The shift to maquilization in the north as the new epicenter of capital accumulation
was noted early (Arregui Velasco 1993). With economic dynamics centering on
the north (Cypher 2004: 362–3; Félix and Dávila 2008), Mexico experienced a
structural shift as the external market became the macroeconomic driver—exports
leaped from an insignificant 4.8 percent of GDP in 1956–70 to 9.1 percent during
the oil boom 1978–81. Then they grew at an annual rate of 5.8 percent per year
from 1982 to 1993 and then (before the US economy began to swoon in 2007) by
a truly remarkable 11.1 percent per year from 1993 to 2006 (Moreno-Brid and Ros
2009: 101, 127, 181).
Foreign trade, measured as exports plus imports, rose from 27 percent of GDP
(1982–4, when the internal market shrunk) to 62.6 percent (2004–6)—most strik-
ing was the rapid rise in intra-industry cross-border movements—an indicator not
of trade but of integrated transnational production: Accounting for only 7 percent of
foreign trade in 1982, these interdependent intra-industry (often intra-firm) trans-
actions rose to 17 percent in 1987 as the new structure consolidated, quickly reach-
ing 30 percent by 1990 (Thacker 2000: 166).
Instead of “international trade” based on highly differentiated products—here-

tofore the essence of cross-border trade—a new era of transnational production was
well underway, arising from, particularly, a dramatic drop in international transpor-
tation and communications costs—but also, importantly, from a new international
institution structure facilitating cross-border integrated production systems: This is
the complimentary double-movement undergirding a new era of accumulation—
the internationalization of capital. As part of the institutional structure that enabled
capital to shift across borders while denying labor any new options, it facilitated
“labor arbitrage” tactics to (1) make technologically complex portions of a final
product in advanced industrial nations, (2) ship the product to a nation in the
Global South (or Eastern Europe) where labor-intensive components were made
or assembled, and then (3) ship a finalized product across the border to a high-in-
come nation for final sale (Cypher 2021: 612–23). In fact, completing the process
of transnational production by producing a final consumer or capital good could
involve multiple border crossings, sometimes between two nations. (In the NAFTA,
now USMCA region, auto parts and components can cross borders eight times
before final assembly.)
From 1983 onward, as outlined in the 1983–9 National Development Plan (and
at a quickening pace through 1988), the Mexican government in its own right (and
increasingly in concert with the WB and IMF) orchestrated a number of changes
to realize the new turn based in export promotion. Many policy and program changes
were small, some more notable; all provided a cumulative effect (Cypher 1991:
87–93). As a result, the extremely influential neoliberal head of the Secretariat
for Trade and Industrial Promotion (Secofi), Héctor Hernández Cervantes (1988:
531), declared that Mexico had taken momentous steps to consolidate the most
important political economy shift in 70 years—which he termed a new growth model.
More accurately, Eduardo Gitli (1990: 161) declared this complex package of poli-
cies and initiatives as the “consolidation of an exportation model directed by trans-
national corporations”.
What has generally been lost in the ample documentation of this new turn
is the extent to which it was not consistent with the “commandments” of the
Washington Consensus or with neoliberalism, narrowly understood—it was not
a market-driven or “entrepreneurial” process. Instead, it was the result of massive
national and transnational government interventions, one element of which stands
out above all: the nationally owned export bank, Bancomext, showered subsidized
credits on private-sector export firms at a rate difficult to imagine: In 1990, the
credits extended amounted to the equivalent value of 7 percent of GDP, an aston-
ishing figure. Between 1982 and 1989—the crucial period in terms of policy for-
mation and implementation—Bancomext lent $56 billion to export firms, a sum
equal to 78 percent of the total value of all private-sector exports (Cypher 1991:
91, 105). Despite such obvious transgressions in terms of the market-driven “free
trade” policies that the WB and IMF proclaimed to be the only way to achieve
growth, these multilaterals (along with Bancomext) made the incredible claim that
Mexico had followed a process of neutrality (Cypher 1991: 100)—thereby ignoring
completely these, and other massive state subsidies directed at export firms.
According to the government, the program was a horizontal industrial policy—
something the WB and IMF were willing to tolerate. But, it was actually a sub
rosa, vertical, large-firm, industrial policy, promoting especially only two key
industries that were of interest to the TNCs, electronics and auto vehicle and
parts production. Here are some of the export promotion measures taken from
1983 through 1989/90 (Cypher 1991: 98–9):
• The key government development bank, Nacional Financiera (Nafinsa), was

restructured to both finance export production and to engage its very exten-
sive cadre of economic specialists to advise and facilitate a transformation of
Mexico’s industrial base to enhance export-oriented manufacturing (EOM).
At that time, Nafinsa was renowned for its “state capacity”—highest of all gov-
ernment entities. This effort was seconded by Bancomext, which channeled
massive sums to support EOM. As well, Secofi supported and implemented the
procedures developed by Nafina and Bancomext.
• The government developed two financing programs, FICORCA and DIMEX,
to quickly make available to importers and exports subsidized hard currencies
(usually the hard-to-get US dollar (USD)), as well as providing for foreign-ex-
change risks when currencies fluctuated while allowing the large national con-
glomerate firms, or “national power groups” extensive access to subsidized hard
currencies in order to pay-down their non-peso denominated foreign debts.
• Certain exemptions from profit taxes due by importer/exporter firms were
provided, as well as relocation subsidies, as companies moved to the north,
while also allowing them accelerated depreciation write-offs on the purchase
of capital goods. In parallel, the state constructed freeways, railways, ports, and
communication systems to facilitate EOM.
• Mexico-based US TNCs—relative to their US-based expenditures—could
count on a 33 percent reduction in electricity costs, a 65 percent drop in nat-
ural gas prices, a 33–50 percent drop in the price of construction, a 60 percent
decline in the price of water, and land and installations rents of 20 percent to
50 percent below equivalent facilities in the US (Shaiken 1990: 92).
• FDI (foreign direct investment) activities at 100 percent ownership levels com-
menced on a “case by case basis” if firms agreed to a given export production
quota—a step that greatly facilitated the doubling of such investment, 1982–8.
The state streamlined/accelerated its heretofore clogged permissions processes
for EOM activities (a matter of major consideration in Mexico).
A New Growth Pole: A Theoretical Formulation of Mexico’s

Transnational Turn
Originally—as pioneered by François Perroux (1903–87)—the elusively abstract
growth pole concept combined geographic specificity with economic dynamics
rooted in production, not exchange; his analysis focused on (1) power (a matter elided in
neoclassical economics) as an “inalienable component of economic activity” and (2)

the potential developmental effects of accelerating investment in industrial activi-
ties in specific geographic areas or regions: These were termed “growth poles” (de
Bernis 1994: 154; Hansen 1989). Perroux and others maintained that, through
agglomeration, complementarity, and synergy effects created when new plants and
equipment are supported by infrastructure investments, a specific industrial branch,
in a specific geographical area, could grow rapidly. Such growth would generate
dynamic “spread effects” into other geographic regions of the affected nation.
However, Mexico’s experience is one of cross-border reterritorialization/deter-
ritorialization; Perroux—so focused on power—would have understood the US
incursion as what he termed “the dominant economy” into a “marginal” area
(Mexico’s convulsed/impoverished border region). This fostered a new growth
pole—a case of what Perroux noted as “intentional dominance” (Guillén 2007–8:
16). In such an instance, what Perroux termed “the influence of the structure”—this
being the interdependent totally of socioeconomic relations—“is the dominance
exercised, in the medium and long term, of one structure over another. This can
be exercised between firms, industries, regions and nations” (Guillén, 2007–8: 16).
The question to be analyzed in an export-oriented economy (such as Mexico) is
the “optimal level of openness” to be achieved, wherein national control is sufficient
to overcome tendencies toward dominance and disarticulation that arise from “an
imprudent opening”: thus, either a nation can find the means to implement its
capacities and ambitions for change or it will fall onto a path of external subordina-
tion to a dominant nation, resulting in national disorganization/deterritorialization
wherein FDI both shapes the region and also leaves it bereft of nationally propagat-
ing production processes and innovation capabilities (Guillén, 2007–8: 20). As such, if
a nation succumbs to conditions of “intentional dominance”, the “influence of
the structure” results in the consolidation of an inauthentic transnational production
structure. In Perroux’s analysis, authentic growth included those processes driving
economic growth that result in (1) an increase in national wealth, and (2) improve-
ment in the well-being of all citizens, accompanied by (3) a rise in productivity
through the incorporation of new technologies (Guillén, 2007–8: 15).
Yet, after 40 years wherein this transnational region grew rapidly, the asymmet-
ric benefits produced via transnational production meant that Mexico failed on all
three counts: Most stark was the data provided by Mexico’s top poverty researcher,
Julio Boltvinik (2022a: 20) revealing the devastating scope of national poverty; only
27 percent of the population in 2020 (34.4 million) were not living below the pov-
erty level.3 Of the rural populace (29.3 million), only 11.7 percent were not living in
poverty (Boltvinik 2022a: 20). But, and this is extremely important with regard to
the idea of a “growth pole”, excluding Mexico City, the ten states with the highest
incidence of nonpoor (ranging from 36 percent to 44 percent of the population)
were all in the north, including all border states—indicating the lack of “spread”,
“externality” and “spill-over” effects (Boltvinik 2022b: 22).
For Perroux, development ultimately meant that the “costs of man” were ade-
quately met through the functioning and reproduction of the socioeconomic
system: That is, all the citizenry are able to live their lives under conditions wherein
their life expectancy, their health, and their access to knowledge would be com-
mensurate with the existing state of science and productive capacities of any given
historical moment. Using this metric, the data provided by Boltvinik are an excel-
lent proximate measure of how drastically and pathetically inadequate has been
Mexico’s prolonged engagement with a transnational system of production under
conditions of “intentional dominance”.
Partially Resolving the US Dilemma

By the late 1970s, the US had become long-accustomed to being “the first among
equals”, the exceptional nation that—from the early 1940s onward as the “American
Century” unfolded—was the unquestioned, self-confident, global hegemonic power.
This perspective, however, increasingly failed to conform in the 1970s with an
emerging new configuration of production and power wherein the once largely uni-
polar structure of production was rapidly becoming tripolar—Europe reconfigured
and expanded, while Japan’s successful regional role in Asia gave rise to widespread
US perceptions of Japan as Number One—the title of Ezra Vogel’s influential 1979
book. Japan, by 1977, had set up (or was establishing) so-called Free Trade Zones
(FTZs) in Korea (Masan), Taiwan, the Philippines (Bataan, Mindanao), Singapore,
Indonesia (Asahan), and Malaysia (Penang), strategically using its FDI (foreign direct
investment), which had surged dramatically from 1972. By 1976, Japan’s ascendant
corporations were enjoying a combination of tariff and tax privileges, subsidies, and,
especially, cheap labor in more than 335 Asian FTZs (PARC 1977: 41).
The US, by then, had lost its edge in manufacturing. Neoclassical economists
argued that this did not matter, that the US would now specialize in higher val-
ue-added activities, and that “market forces” would direct formerly well-paid,
unionized, industrial workers to new, better, jobs in the service sector and/or into
new emerging high-tech activities. But, such bland assurances contrasted with the
known facts—the US industrial areas, particularly those dominated by heavy indus-
try, were sinking as plants closed and nothing new arose. As a series of penetrating
studies demonstrated (Zysman and Tyson 1983), the US had lost its lead in the steel
industry, color television production, and semiconductors, along with a range of
formerly viable labor-intensive industries—footwear, textiles, and apparel. Most
critical of all was the very symbol of US industrial prowess—the auto industry,
where Japan’s production efficiencies were so great that their costs were at least 20
percent below Europe’s. The US trade deficit with Japan in technology-intensive
products jumped from $2 billion in 1970 to $13.5 billion in 1979, roughly $53
billion in 2022 USD (Zysman and Tyson 1983: 33).
The Paradigmatic Case of RCA

Where once US-based electronics firms dominated at home and in the global mar-
ket, Japan, using export promotion policies as early as the mid-1960s, began to
encroach on this lucrative market. The preeminent global firm was then RCA
(formed as a subsidiary of the US giant General Electric in 1919). In 1965, its sales
were greater than all other US electronics corporations combined, but by 1975, while its
sales had increased 95 percent, the sales of the three top Japanese electronics cor-
porations leaped ahead by 459 percent (PARC 1977: 42): Their combined sales in
1975 were 19 percent larger than RCA’s, even while this company maintained its
edge over all other US electronics firms. Even though RCA’s sales had nearly dou-
bled, between 1965 and 1975, profits had fallen by roughly 10 percent.
Mainstream international economic theory, until recently, presumed that capital
was nationally based: Finished goods and raw materials, according to classical/
neoclassical formulations, crossed borders but capital did not (nor did parts and
components). Capital stayed “at home” according to David Ricardo’s famous the-
ory of comparative advantage because capitalists were habituated to their native
social formations—its customs, laws, conventional business practices, and so on.
And, until the dawning of the new era of transnational production (blossoming fully
in the course of the 1980s), Ricardo’s perceptions on this matter were generally
accepted (even as some manufacturers set up branch plant operations in Europe,
and especially in Latin America, from the 1950s to step-over national industrial
promotion policies that constrained US-based exports).
RCA fought-off Japanese competition by first moving its capital to the non-
union US South as early as 1965. But, (1) the opening up of the Mexican border
region, (2) the attempts to unionize RCA’s massive plant in the US South, and (3)
the resistance by its southern labor force to tactics intended to intensify (speed up)
the labor process led, in December 1970, to the closure of this US plant (Cowie
1999: 92). Instead, RCA focused on Mexico, with full knowledge of the special
competitive advantage that a move to Ciudad Juárez would produce. RCA sought
mostly young female workers with a rural nonindustrial background. A double
labor arbitrage operation was brought into existence since, first, workers were avail-
able at roughly one-tenth of the US wage, while, second, female workers could be
paid even less. For RCA (and other US companies to follow), this functioned to
combat the noxious combination of rising foreign competition, stagnate (or falling)
exports, and US labor resistance by reversing the decline in profit margins. Mexico
was available to source RCA’s labor-intensive operations, while others—the more
capital-intensive and technical aspects of its vast production web—were offshored
to Taiwan or remained in the US. It was the first “Fortune 500” company to enter
the BIP. Production on a limited scale began in 1968 when RCA was the 15th
largest corporation in the US.
In Mexico, RCA expanded slowly, employing enhanced methods of social con-
trol over a labor force unavailable north of the border—including by specifically
recruiting young women, 75 percent of its workers: To its great liking, RCA had
free access to a growing labor pool, as 38 popular colonias (poor peoples’ squat-
ter-shack communities) mushroomed around Ciudad Juárez. Here a majority of
workers lived in tiny hovels shared by at least five residents. Necessary expenses for
workers’ subsistence were cut, vis-à-vis the US because workers lived in miserable,
self-built shanties on low-value land that had been, often, seized by the squatters
or relinquished by a governmental entity (without conceding land titles). US con-
sultants who worked with leaders in Juárez were convinced that the massive labor
surplus along the border and in the northern states was so great that whatever
capital the BIP might attract would never be large enough to push wages upward
(Cowie 1999: 112).
The BIP was initiated after Mexico’s secretary of trade and industrial promo-
tion (Secofi) had visited FTZs in Asia—seeing there a model to be followed. By
1973, there were 168 US electronics plants along the border—more than in either
Hong Kong or Taiwan. This was only the beginning. When RCA moved some of
its operations to Mexico in 1968, it secured a cheap labor force paid US$20 for a
48-hour workweek (42 cents per hour).
In 1970, Ciudad Juárez had an estimated 30,000 to 60,000 unemployed labor-
ers—meaning that the maquilas had their choice of pliant workers under conditions
of constant wages, but this combined with a productivity rate higher than US plants
in some instances (Cowie 1999: 117–8; Crossa 2022a: 7). Although generally over-
looked, and hard to document, such high productivity clashed directly with con-
ventional neoclassical economic perceptions: Mexico’s meager wages were no more
than a reflection of low labor productivity went their constant, comforting refrain.
But, beyond the disorienting ether of high economic theory, executives at
Whirlpool Corporation (until 1965 known as RCA Whirlpool) made a startling
announcement in 2005: At the company’s plant in Germany, production workers
were paid US$32 per hour vs. $23 in the US and $3 in Mexico (including bene-
fits). Their engineers determined that if Whirlpool’s Monterrey plant installed the
same advanced production technologies used in the German plant, there was no
question that Mexican workers would match the productivity of German workers
(Uchitelle 2005: 4): Thus, one Mexican worker, paid 9 percent of one German worker’s
wage, could produce the same amount of output per hour as his/her German counterpart;
Mexican workers, then, were, effectively, far more productive than US workers.
Comparatively low wages had nothing to do with low productivity and everything
to do with transnational corporate economic power. This has been the pull factor
bringing capital, especially from the US, to Mexico.
Capital Mobility and US Deindustrialization

The push factor was very strong, as well: US unions, particularly in electronics
manufacturing, from 1964 through 1978 were increasingly willing to strike, with
1964–9 being the years of strongest activity. However, by the late 1970s, the new
options available in Mexico, or Asia, served to undermine labor power, and strikes
collapsed (dropping from 200 per year in 1978 to almost zero from 1982 on) as cap-
ital moved, or threatened to move. As television production soared at the border—
largely at the world’s largest, most technologically advanced plant RCA built in
Ciudad Juárez—US workers in the industry declined from nearly 90,000 in 1968,
to slightly over 20,000 by 1986 (Cowie 1999: 130). All this was part of a process of
“silent integration”—long before the US Senate set the stage for NAFTA’s approval
in 1991, the entire US electronics industry was folding and moving, mostly to
Mexico.
The RCA-Juárez dynamic was only a small part of a larger process wherein
the US rapidly entered a stage of deindustrialization in the 1970s and early 1980s.
While neoclassical economists were generally blasé in the face of these changes,
a very few sounded the alarm to no avail: Most outspoken were Stephen Cohen
and John Zysman who encapsulated their argument in the title of their crucial
book Manufacturing Matters (1987). Correctly, they argued that if the US offshored
its manufacturing, this would generate adverse linkage effects: Without a solid core
of manufacturing firms, the US would lose its edge in technological development
since manufacturing demanded the production of capital goods (machines to make
machines), and a strong capital goods industrial base was the underlying source of
technical change. Switching to a service sector–oriented economy would actually
slow productivity growth across the economy because technological innovations
developed in the manufacturing sector spilled over to the service sector—they were
compliments, not substitutes, in the maintenance of a dynamic economy. As Cohen
and Zysman emphasized (1987: 8–9),
First…production is where the lion’s share of value-added is realized. It is

where the “rent on innovation” is captured. Second…unless R&D is tightly
tied to manufacturing of the product…R&D will fall behind the cutting edge
of incremental innovation. For example, by abandoning the production of
televisions, the US electronics industry quickly lost its know-how to design,
develop, refine and competitively produce the next generation of that prod-
uct, the VCR. As a result we make no VCRs in [the US] and we are likely to
lose whatever position we still maintain in [R&D] products that derive from
mastery of that product and production technology. High-tech gravitates to-
ward state-of-the-art producers.
Without a strong manufacturing base, import dependence would grow. Powerful

nations that maintained their manufacturing base—then Japan and Germany—
would keep a technological advantage because they would find ways to limit trans-
ferring their cutting-edge breakthroughs, at least for a crucial period of time. But
until plans were formulated to build NAFTA, US “free traders” were contemptuous
of the arguments put forward by Cohen and Zysman and others: They envisioned
a textbook world where classroom models of free trade and specialization would
define a new world order based on “efficient” market-driven international trade
(astonishingly, by definition their models excluded transnational investments—capital
could not move). Meanwhile, international rivalry, not neoclassical economic har-
mony, based in national power increasingly exercised through IP (Industrial Policy)
became the watchword: The US power elite slowly, and incompletely, began to rec-
ognize this, and the US commenced building its own defensive/offensive regional
bloc, i.e., NAFTA (Cypher 1992).
The lament and warning presented by Cohen and Zysman with regard to the
electronics industry were but one part of a much larger problem sweeping across a
broad range of industries, most particularly the industrial paradigm-setting US auto
industry: In 1970, the Big Three automakers (General Motors (GM), Ford, and
Chrysler—now Stellantis) were ranked in the Fortune 500 corporate listings as nos.
1, 3, 6. By 1980, a dramatic change had occurred, as reflected in the new rankings,
2, 4, 17. But, unlike their abandonment of the consumer electronics industry, US
policymakers were determined to save the dominant manufacturing industry by
imposing restraints on Japan’s market penetration: Its share of the US auto market
jumped from 18 percent to 27 percent from 1978 to 1980, as US auto output fell
from 9.3 million to 6.6 million (Destler 1991: 259). Threatening quotas, the US
imposed a “voluntary export restraint” agreement in 1981, which lasted through
the 1980s, holding the number of Japanese auto imports to 7.7 percent below the
1980 level.
With their exports to the US effectively contained by this quota, the Japanese
built auto plants in the US: Honda began in 1982, Nissan in 1983, and Toyota
in 1984. By 1989, they had nine fully operating plants, several in the nonun-
ion South, as part of a new “transplant corridor”, all well away from heavily
unionized centers (Dicken 2003: 392). Candace Howes’ extensive research on
these new plants revealed that they were actually no more than branch assembly
operations, with approximately 50 percent of all parts used sourced from captive
suppliers in Japan. Remaining parts were produced either directly in-plant or,
mostly, from nonunion US-based Japanese-owned suppliers, paying US workers
44 percent of the rate paid by parts companies that supplied the “Big Three”
(Howes 1993: 36, 44).
It could not have been a mere coincidence that at the precise moment Japan was
stealing a march on the US’s flagship industry, Mexico’s auto sector policies rotated
180 degrees. Part of this transformation involved turning Mexico into a low-
wage export platform guaranteeing the competitiveness of US auto firms as they
responded to the heightened tensions generated by the massive entry of Japanese
production into the US automotive market (Crossa 2022b: 534).
When the crisis of 1981/2 hit Mexico, policy positions in some areas shifted
rapidly and dramatically. The Mexican state imposed wage ceilings based on low
expected inflation and not past inflation, which in the 1980s shattered real wages
(inflation reached 159 percent in 1987). With wages falling, aggregate demand
was undercut, meaning that further private-sector investment was unwarranted.
The reduction in the public sector also resulted in a strong decline in government
capital formation. The results as measured from 1982 through 1988 were star-
tling, and contrary to what the IMF/WB anticipated, the economy grew annually
at the imperceptible rate of 0.07 percent while gross capital formation fell at the
annual rate of 5.2 percent—a cumulative drop of 43 percent (de María y Campos
1992: 21).
As always, the IMF demanded that an economy undergoing one of its “stabiliza-
tion” programs (SAPs) should increase its exports—which rose from 11 percent of
GDP to 18 over the 1982–8 period (de María y Campos 1992: 22). Manufacturing
exports rose from 14 to 56 percent of total exports, led by metal products, machin-
ery, and equipment, most produced by a small number of TNCs (de María y
Campos 1992: 44). This shift to a cheap labor export platform was also mandated
by the WB—the structure had to be changed via a rapid, permanent rise in industrial
sector exports: Yet, by international standards, exports (at 13 percent of GDP in
1986) remained low. The impetus of rapidly rising internal demand that had dom-
inated (1940–80) was now displaced onto external demand growth—the economic
structure was turned upside down. But this shift—at the same time that real mini-
mum urban wages fell by 45 percent and real per capita income by 11 percent—was
insufficient to create overall conditions of economic growth: The shrinking of the
domestic economy and the surge in the size of the informal sector (of street ven-
dors, servants, car washers, lottery ticket sellers, etc.) inducing a rise in the level of
income inequality, had a negative impact, overwhelming any boost from the rise in
exports (de María y Campos 1992: 22).
A major role was accorded to the auto sector in the drive to expand exports.
The 1983 “Decree to Rationalize the Automobile Industry” forced transnational
auto firms to reduce the number of models produced to a maximum of five in
order to achieve economies of scale. While it promoted exports, the Decree was
also designed to eliminate the importation of most parts and components: Auto
firms had to have sufficient foreign currency earnings to pay for all parts, com-
ponents, royalty payments, technology transfers, and interest payments on foreign
loans. As is typical of a sectorial IP, domestic content requirements remained but
were reduced on exported autos (Moreno-Brid 1988: 15–7). These new policies
basically demonstrated a revision and continuation of industrial promotion strategies,
but not for long.
Mexico’s entry into the GATT in 1986 was one of the clearest indicators that a
new era had arrived. Joining this organization, long resisted by advocates of state-
led development policies, meant a dramatic drop in tariffs, barriers, quotas, import
licenses, and so on that had been designed to promote industrialization through the
consolidation of national firms (private and public) in an earlier era. As recorded in
the IMF’s official history, as Mexico was inching once again toward default on its
international loans, it desperately needed to conform to the IMF’s preference that
it join GATT. The IMF began to “press the initiative” in late 1983, along with the
WB, and thereafter “continued to make the case” until Mexico applied for mem-
bership in 1985 (Boughton 2001: 361). Quickly, tariffs fell to a low average of 11
percent by 1989; only 20 percent of imports were subject to licenses. Mexico’s rapid
opening to imports created unprecedented problems in manufacturing because,
beyond a few giant firms, producers had little access to credit and were slow to
adjust: “The massive supply of imported products resulted in the disarticulation
of some production chains and provoked the closing of thousands of principally
medium and small manufacturing firms” (Máttar and Peres 1997: 222). In addition,
the state was slow and inept in addressing unfair trade practices (including those of
the US) that sometimes explained rising imports.
Resisting the Juggernaut

Renowned development economist Alice Amsden stressed that neither GATT nor
its 1995 successor, the World Trade Organization (WTO), constituted a deter-
ministic straitjackets for nations of the Global South (Amsden and Hikino 2000).
Unfortunately, for Mexico, this perspective was hardly ever acknowledged and rarely
applied. Instead, the Mexican state and the Mexican business elite were essentially
passive and accommodating with regard to GATT—a stance that reflected the ide-
ological victory of the rapidly embraced neoliberal perspective. Nevertheless, as the
fundamental changes shifting Mexico toward an export platform economic structure
proceeded apace, the premier institution of policy analysis and development projects
formation, Nafinsa—the national development bank—dissented. It published a brief
statement noting that in many respects joining GATT did not mean that Mexico was
devoid of a phalanx of measures that could be used to continue—perhaps with revi-
sions and new applications—projects of national industrial promotion. Mexico was
not under any clear mandate to indiscriminately open its industrial sectors to pow-
erful transnational corporations—particularly since they pursued predatory practices
to dominate or completely capture sectors and branches of industry (Pérez Aceves
and Valenzuela 1988: 67–70). These authors stressed that powerful nations, especially
the US, did not passively follow GATT-created policies. The Nafinsa economists
emphasized that “GATT rather than being an organization wherein a nation would
strictly adjust its basic governing rules, is actually a forum were rules and regulations
regarding international trade are discussed and then established,…and such regulations
are not always in fundamental agreement with…the liberalization of international
trade” (Pérez Aceves and Valenzuela 1988: 68, italics added).
The idea that Mexico had to passively conform to external “rules” was unwar-
ranted: But, Mexico largely did conform. The idea that GATT was some sort of
rigorous taskmaster was viewed as a misperception by Nafinsa and also, surprisingly,
by the economists who orchestrated the shift from the “old” industrial policy to
the “new” industrial policy (Sánchez, Fernando, and Motta 1994: 52). The unre-
stricted, rapid opening to overwhelming international economic forces was based
in the neoclassic premise that foreign competition would force private national
industry (now greatly expanded due to massive privatizations) to rationalize pro-
duction by investing in new imported technologies and improve managerial prac-
tices (which usually reflected the lackluster of family-owned firms). At the same
time, these “free trader” theorists argued, newly arrived foreign firms would also
impose market disciplining price and quality competition resulting in a general
revitalization of the industrial base: All such changes would be gradual and only
a “slight bit traumatic” according to Sánchez Ugarte, Fernández, and Pérez. Still,
these authors, importantly, argued that there was one “sui generis” exception—the
auto industry: It would continue for some time to benefit from state-led industrial
promotion policies (Sánchez, Fernando, and Motta 1994: 52–3; 55): And, by the
mid-1990s “Mexico [had]…become the largest developing-country exporter in
[the auto] sector in the world” (Moran 1999: 56).
Capital’s Voice and Access: Structural and Instrumental Power

Top policymakers did recognize that Mexico had to maintain some policy space and,
at least in the auto sector, they understood the need for some continuity with the
Ancien Régime. Nonetheless, for the state, the powerful peak business associations
(discussed later in this chapter), and the TNCs (particularly after 1988), the impo-
sition of the new export regime consummated a structural power shift favoring
large TNCs and national corporate capital. At the same time this change subor-
dinated or eliminated the prior institutional structure that had upheld workers’
interests (Collier 1992; de la Garza 2006: 28–94). For a small number of very large
Monterrey-based firms, the new opening to foreign capital and exports facilitated a
reciprocal structural shift wherein—given the shrinkage and stagnation of the inter-
nal market—their capital moved abroad through cross-border mergers or stand-
alone FDI. They also realigned their nationally based production system toward
export markets. This entailed a new accommodation with the emerging forces of
transnationalized production. The large-firm Mexican business elite would now
deploy via a nonmutually exclusive array of options, including (1) the formation
of joint ventures with TNCs, (2) the brokering and/or supplier facilitation of
TNC activities in Mexico, (3) the empowerment of the Monterrey Group as they
adopted export-oriented policies. Small- and medium-sized firms faced annihi-
lation or marginalization. Significantly, a new agile, strata emerged consisting of
lawyers, accountants, service providers (sometimes providing “turnkey” manufac-
turing plants, or testing, cleaning, and packaging services in industrial parks), and
well-connected provincial operatives who coupled government and private-sector
interests: They functioned within the profitable niches in the new structure as rentier
facilitators of the export-led regime.
The new opening to cross-border investment and trade, by achieving economies
of scale, and by promoting foreign-owned production in low-wage manufacturing
(particularly in the maquila sector) appeared successful: Manufactured exports (as
a share of all US imports) doubled from 1985 to 1993 (Sánchez, Fernando, and
Motta 1994: 145). But this metric ignored a number of important facts, including
the collapse of the oil sector, stagnation in agriculture, the continued drop in wages
(discussed later in this chapter) the diminution of mining, and the toxic, domestic
market constricting impacts of the ongoing bouts of austerity measures urged by the
IMF and WB as willingly adopted by the neoliberal state apparatus.
Ruination of the National Industrial Base

Returning to Nafinsa’s dissenting position with regard to an unrestricted opening
of the economy, this powerful institution continued to advocate for a buildup of
the capital goods industry. Failure to do so would mean conceding defeat in the
quest for technological capacity because of the potential spin-offs, learning effects,
acquired innovation capacities, and positive externality effects they associated with
nations (such as Japan, Germany, and the US) that had promoted and consolidated
a machine-building industry. Without it a considerable portion of whatever Mexico

exported would effectively be canceled out by machine imports (see note 2) and
more importantly the technological autonomy and productivity-enhancing attrib-
utes embedded in capital goods/machine building would be forfeited (Pérez Aceves
and Valenzuela 1988: 68–75). Further, Nafinsa’s economists urged continued fol-
low-through on programs to promote the textile industry and the electronics indus-
try (see Focus 1.2 on computer electronics).
FOCUS 1.2: ABANDONMENT OF MEXICO’S SECTORIAL

INDUSTRIAL POLICIES
What are termed “horizontal” industrial policies (IPs) were employed to estab-
lish the transnational production structure (wherein without preference to a
particular sector or activity, all firms can, potentially, be beneficiaries, as was
the case with the maquila and PITEX programs): For example, Mexico in the
late 1980s and onward became committed, at least officially, to promoting a
higher level of national R&D spending, wherein (in theory) all producers might
benefit from an economy that promoted innovation. What stands out, how-
ever, is that, in general, Mexico ceased to support many sectors—called vertical
IPs—including capital goods, computers, and pharmaceuticals.2 Such policies
were proscribed “interventions” according to neoliberal ideology (Sánchez,
Fernando, Motta, 1994: 35).
Now forgotten, Mexico prioritized the creation of a national computer
industry in the 1970s. The goal was to provide a framework for industrial pro-
motion by containing foreign firms in the sector, including restricting them to
minority ownership in joint ventures and requiring them to invest a minimum
of 3 percent of sales in R&D and fund training programs and research centers.
Mexican firms in the sector received tax credits and below-market loans from
state-owned development banks (such as Nafinsa). Domestic producers were
given preferential access to government procurement. Domestic content in
PCs was set at 45 percent of value-added. By the mid-1980s, the IP to promote
the computer industry was considered a success—through the establishment
of wholly owned Mexican firms, or through joint ventures. In 1987, national
supply met 56 percent of domestic demand, while roughly 50 percent of total
production was exported—meaning that this promoted sector was interna-
tionally competitive and provided scarce foreign exchange (Gallagher and
Zarsky 2007: 122–4).
But, in 1985, the US-based IBM corporation successfully fought the gov-
ernment and set up a 100 percent foreign-owned operation—by 1987, others
had followed suit. By 1990, as Mexico consolidated its neoliberal stance, the
government moved to abandon all sectorial IPs because TNCs were anxious
to integrate their Mexican holdings into their new global supply chain pro-
duction strategies. This relegated Mexico, usually, to low value-added, labor-
intensive parts manufacturing. (In the run-up to signing NAFTA in late 1993,
Mexico eliminated all remaining remnants of the IP for computers, and after
2001, when China entered the World Trade Organization, most foreign com-
puter firms reorganized, shifting their Mexico-based operations to China.) The
demise of Mexico’s fledgling capital goods (see note 2) and pharmaceutical
industries generally followed the same state-transnational-induced path into
oblivion.
Meanwhile, in the 1980s, high-level economic policymakers—working within

the still-reigning developmentalist paradigm of state-led industrialization—
supported the promotion of a national pharmaceutical industry, as well as a deep-
ening of the petrochemical industry (Wionczek 1981: 975–80). The drive to make
Mexico a powerful producer of petrochemicals—an industry with an extremely
broad range of inter-industry linkage effects—came to a close at a point in time that
coincided with the IMF Stand-By loan in November 1986.
Such loans are months in preparation and come with specific conditions:
Given the IMF’s perception that public sector activities should either be reduced
to their lowest possible level or eliminated if possible, the fact that in October
1986 de la Madrid’s administration commenced a broad-based reclassification of
the petrochemical industry should clearly be understood not as happenstance but
rather part of IMF loan “conditionality” (Ángeles 1996: 41). Thirty-six “basic”
petrochemicals (those that could only be developed by the state-owned petro-
leum company, Pemex), became overnight “secondary” petrochemicals eligible
for private ownership: These state assets were then sold (essentially gifted) to
eager TNCs and well-connected Mexican firms. Such steps were complimented
by a new round of petrochemical privatizations as part of a 1989 IMF/WB loan
(under “cross-conditionality”), with the Fund’s share being $3.73 billion: This
was the third and final IMF loan of the 1980s, bringing the total to $8.54 billion,
constituting an exceptionally large 38 percent share of all IMF outstanding loans
in 1989. In this instance, President Salinas, in 1989, reclassified and privatized an
additional 16 petrochemicals, leaving state control over only 20 (Ángeles 1996:
42). In short, whether it was petrochemicals, pharmaceuticals—or any other
national industrial sector that had once been targeted as programas de rama (impor-
tant industrial branches selected to receive state promotion)—by 1989, if not
before, the new paradigm of export-orientation was restricted to being solely a
private-sector initiative, frequently subsidized through public-sector export pro-
motion programs, as mentioned earlier.
The Pacto de Solidaridad (1987): The Linchpin of Structural

Change
For a very long time, Mexican industrial workers’ wages had grown in step with
the general economy, with annual industrial workers’ inflation-adjusted (real) wages
rising by almost 5 percent per year from 1959 to 1969 and then by 5.9 percent from
1971 to 1976—with the lowest-wage worker also included, as the minimum wage
rose 59 percent from 1970–6 (Cypher 1990: 62, 90). Anxious to ease deep tensions
between the state and capital that had emerged in the previous presidential term,
President López Portillo permitted rising inflation as the government largely ceased
to dissuade large private-sector firms from pushing up prices—minimum wages fell
in real terms by about 10 percent, while median wages fell 20 percent (1976–82)
during his term (Cypher 1990: 115; Moreno-Brid et al. 2019: 53).
Then, from 1982 to 1987, real wages drastically fell: The median wage dropped
by 55 percent (1980 = 100), while the minimum wage fell by 45 percent (Moreno-
Brid et al. 2019: 53). The then-powerful leader of the national labor confederation
(Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM)) began to circulate a call for a general
strike. This was an unheard-of initiative since (until the 1980s) the labor confed-
erations considered themselves to be “partners” in a social pact designed to raise
living standards, at least in pace with the growth of the national economy (Cypher
1990: 195–6). Dissent and debate (which began in the early 1970s over demands for
union democratization during the so-called union insurgency) gave rise to a funda-
mental restructuring of the relationship between state, capital, and labor, emerging
as the “Solidarity Pact” (PSE) in November 1987. To be renewed annually through
early 1990, this “Pacto” called for three new conditions:
• First, government was to maintain prices on all state-controlled products

(including a large number of “basic” goods such as grains, meats, and dairy
products);
• Second, labor was to accept only periodic “adjustments” in wage levels, includ-
ing the minimum wage; and
• Third, private-sector firms were free to raise prices as they deemed fit, always
charging “all the traffic will bear”.
The effects of the Pacto were threefold:
• The inflation rate dramatically declined in 1988 and for several years thereafter;
• Wages were held to a 23 percent increase in the first year of the Pacto (while
prices rose by 52 percent, meaning that real wages fell by 31 percent); and
• The exchange rate was stabilized, putting an end to the massive devaluations of
previous years, and “import inflation”.
The overall macroeconomic effect reduced the wage share in national income
which, with a rising population already pushed to the margin of subsistence, was
a brutal blow. The counterpart was to raise capital’s already extraordinary share of
national income. Generating these effects, the Pacto clearly played a critical role in
the defeat of the PRI’s presidential candidate in the summer of 1988, but then the
count was “adjusted” with the PRI’s candidate, neoliberal advocate Carlos Salinas,
given, via a well-documented process of electoral fraud, a free hand to rule, thereby
burying the possibility for a democratic option.
With Salinas in power, 1989 was a threshold year for labor as the social pact (con-
solidated under President Cárdenas in the 1930s) was definitively destroyed. First
under attack was the most powerful union—the oil workers’: Salinas imprisoned
the leader and commenced new programs of piecemeal privatization of Pemex.
Similarly, a threatened strike by 4,000 mining workers at the government-owned
copper mine Cananea brought about its privatization and the dismissal of all work-
ers. The state-labor collaboration had ended.
With the objective of increasing the profit margin for the private sector, the
Pacto became institutionalized in late 1989 (Ortega Riquelme 2006: 243–4). The
commission for the follow-through and evaluation of the Pact (CSEP) was cre-
ated with strong corporate representation from the peak business association CCE
(the Business Coordinating Council representing the largest firms).4 The manu-
facturers association (Canacintra), the Monterrey Groups’ employer confederation
(Coparmex), and the largest unions were then synchronized by the secretary of
labor within the 1989 follow-on framework of the PECE (Economic Growth and
Stability Pact), which remained in effect into 1994. The goal was to “obstruct the
future opposition of the participants”, meaning in practice the labor participants.
The objective of removing the power to set wage rates and labor conditions (which
had substantially rested with the unions) was achieved: Now such matters were left
to the powerful, captured Labor Secretariat (STPS), which generally pursued the
preferences of the CCE and Coparmex.
The results deepened the devastation for the working class: Because the Salinas
administration sought social support for NAFTA, a fictitiously financed expansion
occurred with real median wages rising slightly until 1994 (when another deep
crisis occurred). But such wages reached, at their highest moment, only approxi-
mately 75 percent of their 1980 level, while the real minimum wage fell to 40 of
1980 purchasing power (Moreno-Brid et al. 2019: 53). Thus, the real minimum
wage, then directly affecting an estimated 28 percent of the formal labor force fell
an additional 27 percent during President Salinas’ term.
The 1987 Pacto was, according to Valdés Ugalde (1996: 141), “the embryo of a
new relationship between economic and political elites—clearly a sin qua non for
a successful neoliberal reform of the state”. In the run-up to the final passage of
NAFTA in late 1993, the wage share of national income rose slightly as the state
endeavored to build the illusion of a successful remaking of Mexico’s economy
under the export-led program. For a brief moment, for some in Mexico, it appeared
that Salinas’ ambition to transform Mexico to become part of the “First World not
the Third World” was near realization. But, by early 1994, the data revealed that
Mexico’s economy was an unsustainable illusion, although most Mexicans looked
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THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF

TRANSNATIONAL POWER AND

James M. Cypher is Emeritus Research Professor at the Universidad Autónoma

Mateo Crossa is Research Professor at the Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José

James M. Cypher and Mateo Crossa

List of Figures vii

1 The Remaking of Mexico: The State, Economic Elite, and

2 From NAFTA to the PAN’s Implosion: Mexico Remade

3 Stagnation and Income Dispersion Sink New PRI and

4 López Obrador in Power, 2018–22: A Transformational or

5 Export-Led Accumulation: Paradoxes of the Leading Auto Sector 128

6 Petroleum: A Strategic Resource for Houston’s TNCs or Mexico? 170

7 Mining and Agriculture: Supporting Pillars of the

8 Some Final Reflections on Dependence and Asymmetry 226

5.1 Number of Workers in the Automotive Industry in

2.1 Failure of the US/Mexico Income Convergence Hypothesis 58

1.1 Creation of the Maquila Regime 6

particular, we thank Senior Economics Editor Kristina Abbotts and Economics

AMLO Andrés Manuel López Obrador

PAN National Action Party

First, it is not a “country study” of Mexico. Yes, the focus is to a considerable

The Framework: A Prefatory Synopsis

The Crisis of 1982–3 and the Rise of Structural Adjustment

Transforming the Production System: De-territorialization/

FOCUS 1.1: CREATION OF THE MAQUILA REGIME

Resentment, arising from their relative exclusion from this large-firm/state-cap-

Instead of “international trade” based on highly differentiated products—here-

• The key government development bank, Nacional Financiera (Nafinsa), was

A New Growth Pole: A Theoretical Formulation of Mexico’s

neoclassical economics) as an “inalienable component of economic activity” and (2)

Partially Resolving the US Dilemma

The Paradigmatic Case of RCA

Capital Mobility and US Deindustrialization

First…production is where the lion’s share of value-added is realized. It is

Without a strong manufacturing base, import dependence would grow. Powerful

Resisting the Juggernaut

Capital’s Voice and Access: Structural and Instrumental Power

Ruination of the National Industrial Base

a machine-building industry. Without it a considerable portion of whatever Mexico

FOCUS 1.2: ABANDONMENT OF MEXICO’S SECTORIAL

Meanwhile, in the 1980s, high-level economic policymakers—working within

The Pacto de Solidaridad (1987): The Linchpin of Structural

• First, government was to maintain prices on all state-controlled products

The effects of the Pacto were threefold:

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2.1 Failure of the US/Mexico Income Convergence Hypothesis 58

1.1 Creation of the Maquila Regime 6

FOCUS 1.1: CREATION OF THE MAQUILA REGIME