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Mexico's History: Modern Times
By 1920, the three main leaders of the revolution: Madero, Carranza, and Zapata, were dead. In 1929, the party that would later become the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, was formed as a way of consolidating the reforms that were included in the 1917 Constitution, and which had begun to be implemented during the 1920s.
A series of presidents under the PRI embarked on a course of fervent nationalism in the following decades, which included the nationalization in 1937 of the railways and in 1938 of the oil industry from British and U.S. firms. The PRI, backed by pro-government labor unions and peasant organizations, kept a tight control on power.
Government was typically paternalistic, looked on to solve problems of farmers, workers, peasants and even private business. The 1950s and 1960s saw a period of industrialization promoted by the state, coupled with stringent protectionism that lasted throughout most of the 1970s and part of the 1980s.
In the late 1970s, Mexico's oil industry underwent a boom that left the economy highly dependent on oil, a situation that had serious consequences during the 1986 oil price collapse. While the country now relies less heavily on oil as a percentage of exports and GDP, it is still the source of a third of government income via taxes and royalties charged to the state oil monopoly Pemex.
Despite the existence of opposition parties most of them token opposition the PRI was not seriously challenged in an election until 1988, when an alleged computer glitch at the time of vote counting led to widespread charges of fraud.
In 1994, Mexico joined the U.S. and Canada in the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA. Later that year, it was admitted into the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development.
The PRI lost its first presidential election in 2000 to Vicente Fox of the conservative National Action Party. By that time, however, the PRI had already moved far away from its socialist roots, reversing most of the nationalizations during the previous 15 years or so, and courting foreign investors like no one had since Porfirio Diaz.