ABSTRACT
Mexico gained independence from Spain in 1810 but lost more than half its territory to Texan independence in 1836 (Texas joined the US in 1845) and war with the US a decade later. After the 1910 overthrow of dictatorship in the Mexican Revolution, Mexico became a one-party state under the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The foreign debt crisis of the 1980s (74) and recession following devaluation of the peso in 1994 gave way to rapid economic growth after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) came into effect in 1994. Multiparty democracy arrived in the late 1990s.
