ABSTRACT
In the last two decades Mexico has lived through two fundamental transformations of its social and economic life. First, it adopted as its central strategy for economic growth a program of economic liberalization, and opened its markets to global international trade. Second, its decades-long transformation towards democracy finally overcame seventy years of uninterrupted rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) that emerged from the Mexican Revolution. Each of these sets of deep changes had promised to bring with it long-sought solutions to the problems of poverty, inequality and a deficient state of rights and rule of law. Instead, the country has experienced low rates of economic growth, continued poverty and unemployment, and twelve years of deadlock in Congress, and now faces a painful and costly war on drugs.
