Paul Gillingham on Why Mexico Stays Together

Paul Gillingham — historian of Mexico at Northwestern University — joins Tyler Cowen on the publication of Mexico: A 500-Year History to explain why Mexico held together while the rest of post-colonial Latin America fragmented, how a revolution that killed one in ten Mexicans produced a durable one-party state, and what makes Mexican politics genuinely idiosyncratic. Episode 273, recorded February 2026.

Key ideas

1. Federalism and hands-off government are what kept Mexico intact. Where Gran Colombia and the United Provinces of the Río de la Plata shattered within a decade of independence, Mexico survived by building deep federalism into its structure. Mountains made central rule difficult, so savvy governments — and governments with no choice — stayed hands-off, letting regions govern themselves. The paradox is that weakness at the centre produced territorial unity.
2. Mexico avoided military coups and civil war after 1929 through an unlikely combination of rigged elections, subsidised urban life, and war weariness. One in ten Mexicans died in the Revolution — a trauma that made pragmatic restraint a governing reflex for decades. The one-party state softened radical inequality with cheap cinema, subsidised housing, and good healthcare relative to income, while local elections gave organised communities a real, if unconventional, route to representation.
3. The ejido (communal land) system delivered political stability more than economic efficiency. Land redistribution under Cárdenas answered the Revolution’s central demand, even when collective farming suppressed peasant autonomy. Urbanisation continued regardless — food prices were kept artificially low to cheapen industrial labour — but the ejido carried symbolic weight and delivered rural healthcare at a nuts-and-bolts level that no other country in the Americas matched.
4. Drug violence follows geography, transit routes, and market structure more than culture. Yucatán is safe because its tourist economy makes killing foreigners bad business and because it lost its role as a transshipment corridor. Michoacán is violent because it sits on a Pacific port, produces poppy and methamphetamine in mountain terrain hostile to the army, and has never had a single cartel’s dominance — the condition that paradoxically produces stability elsewhere.
5. Mexico’s judicial reforms are a disastrous experiment. Electing judges in a country where drug-trading organisations have strong local reach gives criminal groups a cheaper path to sympathetic courts than threats. A 13 per cent turnout in the first judicial elections condemns the project on its own terms.

Content

Why Mexico did not fragment after independence

Post-colonial super-states were the norm in the early 19th century and failed quickly. Gran Colombia — roughly modern Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru — dissolved within a decade. Mexico, which had formally absorbed Central America, lost that region but kept the rest. Gillingham’s explanation is structural: Mexico’s mountain terrain made centralised rule impractical, so governments, willingly or not, governed lightly. That enforced federalism became a constitutional habit and a cultural identity. In contrast, Central America lacked an alternative capital of sufficient weight to anchor its own independence movement and drifted away without triggering Mexican collapse.

The Yucatán case sharpens the point. The peninsula fought the Caste Wars of the 1840s with genuine separatist energy — Mexico and Texas briefly formed an alliance to prevent Yucatán seceding. What held? Gillingham argues it was the racial structure of Yucatán society: a small white plantocracy centred in Mérida had no interest in leading an independence movement that would put the Maya in political control, and the Maya, though formidable as a state-building force, could not at that moment sustain a fully joined-up independence movement across all races and regions. The absence of a credible alternative capital did the rest.

Quintana Roo — now the tourism corridor of Cancún and the Riviera Maya — was carved out of the Yucatán peninsula as an administrative measure to corral the most unstable, least governable eastern strip. Gillingham calls the idea that you can manage instability by drawing a line on a map ‘profoundly optimistic,’ and notes that the territory only took off because of deliberate state investment in mass tourism infrastructure from the late 1960s.

Infrastructure, Porfirio Díaz, and the long road to stability

Before Porfirio Díaz’s Porfiriato (1876–1911), Mexico lacked the fiscal base for infrastructure. The reason was that independence in 1821 was not real independence: the Spanish held the fortress at Veracruz until 1829, then came a failed French invasion and eventually American invasions. True stabilisation began only in 1867, when Mexican forces executed the European-imposed emperor Maximilian — an act without precedent in 19th-century international politics, and one that ended foreign powers’ appetite for intervention. Díaz then rode a global commodity boom to attract industrial investment and build the railways and ports the country had lacked. The Porfiriato became the template of a successful ‘developing nation’ of its era — at the cost of massive land concentration that eventually triggered the Revolution.

The unusual concentration of great 19th-century politicians from Oaxaca — Benito Juárez, Díaz himself, and at one stage roughly two-thirds of congress — Gillingham traces to the state’s long tradition of fierce local autonomy, itself rooted in the Spanish conquest flowing around its mountain population rather than through it. After independence, every village in Oaxaca constituted itself a county with competitive elections — ‘almost like Swiss cantons,’ in Gillingham’s phrase. That training in competitive local politics produced a disproportionate number of nationally effective politicians.

The Revolution’s aftermath: peace without justice

Mexico’s post-1929 stability is, Gillingham says, a central paradox that political scientists have struggled with for decades. The country had one of the great revolutions, whose radical prescriptions for equality were then administered by one of the most unequal economies in the Americas. It had a one-party state whose elections were rigged at the national level — but not reliably at the local level, where organised communities willing to riot could force their candidate in. And it had, after JFK, RFK, and MLK in the United States, not a single political assassination of a major figure.

His explanation assembles several parts. First, war weariness: a revolution that kills one in ten people makes pragmatic restraint a governing imperative, not just a preference. Second, material concessions: the urban working class received subsidised housing, cheap cinema, and healthcare that was very good for Mexico’s income bracket — making Gini coefficients a misleading picture of what Mexicans actually received from the post-revolutionary state. Third, the mechanism of rigged-but-not-completely-rigged elections: a population that could at least sometimes get its people in through a combination of electoral pressure and riot had a steam valve for grievance. Fourth, a military institutionally excluded from politics — kept out by the same governing coalition that bought popular consent through the other mechanisms.

The ejido, land, and urbanisation

The Cárdenas land reform of the late 1930s distributed communal plots — ejidos — to millions of peasant families who had fought the Revolution over precisely this demand. Gillingham is clear-eyed about the economic results: the ejido was not autonomous smallholding. Peasants were directed to grow specific cash crops, sometimes on behalf of foreign agribusinesses using the Mexican state as a front — the US firm Anderson Clayton being the clearest example. The peasant had land but not the freedom to grow what he chose.

What the ejido delivered was something harder to measure: psychological dignity, decent rural healthcare (every communal farm had a medical office), and enough stability to prevent a countryside stripped of resources from revolting. The urbanisation that followed — food prices were capped to keep industrial wages low, pushing people to cities — was in many ways a deliberate transfer from the countryside to industry. Gillingham argues this happened regardless of the ejido; the ejido simply made it politically tolerable.

Mexico’s total fertility rate now lies below that of the United States, a fact Gillingham attributes to two unusual features: a uniquely aggressive, noncoercive contraception campaign in the 1970s and 1980s, and a degree of church-state separation that insulated family planning from Catholic opposition. Women’s primary education was the micro-level mechanism — in a deeply studied village in Jalisco, women with even a few years of schooling chose contraception regardless of male or clerical pressure. By the late 1960s, 73 per cent of women were completing three years of primary school, a rate ‘far better than most middle-income comparatives’ including India, Kenya, and Egypt.

Guerrero, Michoacán, and the logic of drug violence

Guerrero, Gillingham’s doctoral research territory, has been Mexico’s most consistently violent state across two centuries of independence. He identifies geography (mountains that reward guerrilla tactics and punish armies), proximity to Mexico City (which makes instability threatening and invites cycles of repression), and a large, politically assertive Afro-Mexican coastal population. The state also has the port of Acapulco — dynamic, multiethnic, historically attractive to both domestic and foreign capital — and a long tradition of resistance to central authority. The combination produces what Gillingham calls ‘a reinforcing cycle of repression, opposition, repression.’

Michoacán’s more recent violence he explains differently: a large Pacific port (Lázaro Cárdenas, built as a prestige project and poorly connected to the national economy) that became ideal for importing precursor chemicals; highland terrain suited to poppy, marijuana, and methamphetamine production; the avocado and lime industries as premium extortion targets; and, crucially, no single organisation with dominant control. Dominant-cartel control, counterintuitively, produces relative safety — Sinaloa was calm while the Sinaloa cartel was united; it became violent when the cartel fractured.

Monterrey he expects to remain relatively safe: nothing to grow, little to transship, an economy wealthy enough that extorting middle-income businesses is the marginal criminal activity, not drug production. Colima, by contrast, swung from tranquil to most-violent-state in a short span — a reminder that Mexico’s security landscape shifts faster than outside observers expect.

Judicial reform as institutional damage

The decision to elect judges, rather than appoint and tenure them, Gillingham calls ‘a disastrous reform.’ His reasoning is structural rather than ideological: in a country with strong criminal organisations at the local level, elections are cheaper and less risky than intimidation as a route to a sympathetic judiciary. Threatening a judge is a high-profile act that attracts state attention; funding a popular campaign is quiet, cheap, and legal. A 13 per cent turnout in the first judicial elections is, in his reading, the electorate rendering its own verdict on the project’s legitimacy.

He attributes the reform to a combination of Morena’s organisational interest in embedding its people in regional power and a philosophical populism inherited from the AMLO government. The honest version of the critique is not that Mexican judges were previously independent — they were not, reliably — but that the new mechanism gives organised crime a structurally superior route to influence.

Related

• Paul Gillingham — speaker; historian of Mexico at Northwestern University
• Tyler Cowen — host
• What Makes a Great Investor — theme; Gillingham’s structural analysis of Mexican stability has parallels with Cowen’s recurring interest in political economy and long-run institutional development