ABSTRACT
Mexico is a society of intense class conflict. Indeed, the level of class war in Mexico is probably unparalleled anywhere else in the world. This chapter reviews the most important dimensions of the class struggle in various conjunctures of a system in crisis and an economy on the threshold of epoch-defining social change. Salinas de Gortaris and Ernesto Zedillo's neo-liberal policy agenda, implemented over the course of two sexenios, was extended by subsequent governing regimes to other strategic sectors such as oil production and the generation of electrical power, and labour reform. By the Zapatistas' own account, their resort to arms was dictated by circumstances and a correlation of forces under particularly adverse conditions. The Mexican labour movement has undergone a profound transformation over the last 20 years, the result of several decades of neo-liberal economic policies and the transformation of the Mexican one-party state into a system comparable to the two-party class dictatorship of the US and Canada.
