Mexico's authoritarian political system

Many recent analyses of Mexican politics stress the authoritarian features of the political system and the way in which the stability of the regime rests, at least in part, on the control and co-optation of organized labour. According to Lawrence Whitehead,

This orthodox vision of the Mexican polity clearly implies that insurgent movements within the ranks of organized labour are likely to be ephemeral or irrelevant. If they pose any threat to the status quo such movements will be either repressed or brought into the official system of control. As was noted in chapter 1, such arguments are frequently made for other Latin American countries as well.

The argument, elaborated by Guillermo O'Donnell and others, may be summarized briefly as follows: the exigencies of capital accumulation in certain types of peripheral regimes require a strong and autonomous state which will, inter alia, exert control over unions in order to prevent wages from rising too fast (i.e. to the detriment of capital accumulation) and will keep strike activity to a low and manageable level so as not to scare off potential investors.