Mexico's history: a country that keeps rewriting its own rules

What was here before Europeans arrived

Human presence in Mexico goes back at least to 11,500 BC, and dates as early as 28,000 BC have been proposed for less securely dated sites.

Mesoamerica is one of the cradles of civilisation. The earliest complex society was the Olmec culture, flourishing on the Gulf Coast from around 1500 BC, whose traits diffused into the formative cultures of Chiapas, Oaxaca and the Valley of Mexico. In the classic period Teotihuacán built a military and commercial empire from a city of more than 150,000 people with some of the largest pyramidal structures anywhere.

The name comes from that world rather than from Europe. Mēxihko is the Nahuatl term for the heartland of the Aztec Empire, the Valley of Mexico and the territories around it.

How three hundred years of colonial rule worked

Spain learned of Mexico during the Grijalva expedition of 1518. The conquest of the Aztec Empire began in 1519 when Hernán Cortés founded Veracruz, and the capture of Tenochtitlan in 1521, followed by the founding of Mexico City on its ruins, opened three centuries of colonial rule.

Two things made the territory the most valuable possession in the Spanish empire, and the first is more important than the second: large, hierarchically organised Mesoamerican populations that rendered tribute and performed obligatory labour, and silver deposits in the north. The wealth of New Spain was built on an administrative structure the Spanish did not have to invent, because it was already there.

The machinery was assembled quickly. The papacy granted the Spanish monarchy sweeping powers over its overseas empire in 1493, conditional on spreading Christianity. Charles I created the Council of the Indies in 1524; a high court, the Real Audiencia, sat in Mexico City; the first Viceroy of New Spain was appointed in 1535; the Diocese of Mexico, created in 1530, became an archdiocese in the 1540s. State and Church were the two pillars and both answered to the crown.

Trade was deliberately narrow. To guard against English, French and Dutch privateers and to protect the crown's revenue monopoly, only two ports were open to foreign trade: Veracruz on the Atlantic for Spain, and Acapulco on the Pacific for the Philippines.

Rebellion was frequent and mostly small: the Chichimeca War of 1576 to 1606, the Tepehuán Revolt of 1616 to 1620, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The urban poor were a different problem: a riot in Mexico City in 1692 over the price of maize escalated into an attack on the viceregal palace and the archbishop's residence.

Why independence took eleven years

On 16 September 1810 the secular priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla declared against bad government at Dolores in Guanajuato. The date is Mexico's independence day and the declaration is remembered as the Cry of Dolores.

Independence itself came in 1821, and the interval is the point: a rising that began as a provincial protest took over a decade to become a state, and the state it became had to decide what it was. The declaration signed on 6 November 1813 by the Congress of Anáhuac called the territory América Septentrional, Northern America. The country's official name has changed with its form of government more than once since.

What the first century cost

The half-century after independence is the sequence the opening of this article describes, and it is worth setting out in order.

The 1835 centralisation produced civil war and three secessions: the Republic of Texas, the Republic of the Rio Grande and the Republic of Yucatán. The larger blow followed. The United States invaded in 1846, and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 sealed the loss of much of the north.

La Reforma then attempted to modernise along liberal lines. The Constitution of 1857 separated Church and State, stripped the Church and the military of their legal privileges, mandated the sale of Church-owned property and of indigenous community lands, and secularised education. Conservatives revolted, and the Reform War ran from 1858 to 1861.

The liberals won on the battlefield and the conservatives went abroad for a rematch. They asked Napoleon III to install a European monarch, the French army defeated the Mexicans, and Maximilian of Habsburg was placed on a newly created throne. The liberal republic under Benito Juárez governed in internal exile until the end of the American Civil War in 1865 brought United States support; the French withdrew, Maximilian stayed, and republican forces executed him.

The consequence outlasted the episode. Conservatism was discredited by collaboration with a foreign army, and liberalism became synonymous with patriotism. The old Mexican Army, descended from the colonial royalist forces, was destroyed by the Reform War and the French intervention, which cleared the way for a new generation of commanders. One of them was Porfirio Díaz.

What the silver paid for

The colonial economy deserves one more paragraph, because its shape outlasted the empire that built it.

Silver from the northern deposits was the reason New Spain mattered in Madrid, and the arrangement around it was extractive by design: two ports, a crown monopoly on revenue, a standing military built after Britain seized Havana and Manila in 1762, coastal fortifications, and presidios and missions pushed north into Alta California to hold the frontier.

An economy organised to move one commodity to one destination through two harbours is an economy with a particular geography, and independent Mexico inherited it: a productive north, a governing centre, and ports that faced outward rather than towards each other. The territory that the United States took in 1848 was the far end of that same frontier expansion.

What the Porfiriato was

After the turmoil of 1810 to 1876, Díaz ruled for thirty-five years, from 1876 to 1911, in a period described at the time as one of order and progress.

It delivered economic stability and modernisation, and it did so by settling the question that had wrecked every government since 1824: who holds power, and for how long. Díaz answered it by not leaving, which is a stable answer until the man giving it ages. It also produced the conditions for what followed, and the mechanism was the same one that had destabilised every previous settlement: a president who did not leave. Díaz had first entered politics by challenging Juárez over re-election in 1867.

What the revolution actually did

The Mexican Revolution ran from 1910 to 1920 and it was a decade of successive betrayals rather than a single uprising.

It began with risings after the fraudulent election of 1910, Díaz's resignation in May 1911, and the democratic election of Madero that autumn. In February 1913 a military coup overthrew Madero, who was murdered by agents of General Victoriano Huerta. The coup had the support of the United States administration then in office; when a new president was inaugurated in March 1913 he refused to recognise Huerta and allowed arms sales to his opponents.

The revolutionaries beat Huerta and then fought each other. Pancho Villa broke with Carranza and allied with Zapata; Carranza's general Obregón defeated Villa at the Battle of Celaya in 1915 and Villa's forces dissolved. Villa's subsequent raid on Columbus, New Mexico, brought 10,000 United States troops into Mexico in a failed pursuit. Carranza became president, gained the support of the peasantry, and then did little to institute the land reform that had motivated most of the fighting, returning some confiscated land to its original owners. He had Zapata assassinated in 1919.

The human cost is the figure to hold onto: 900,000 dead out of a population of 15 million, which is one person in sixteen.

What came out of it was written by the winners at a constitutional convention in 1916 and ratified in February 1917. The Constitution of 1917 empowered the government to expropriate resources including land, gave rights to labour, and strengthened anticlerical provisions. It remains the governing document of Mexico.

What that constitution was written against

The document is unusually explicit about what it was written against, and reading it that way explains its shape.

It empowered the government to expropriate resources including land, because the grievance that had put most of the fighters in the field was land held by very few people. It gave rights to labour, because the Porfiriato's modernisation had been built on labour with none. It strengthened anticlerical provisions, continuing a fight the liberals had begun in 1857 with the sale of Church property and the secularisation of education.

Each clause is a response to a specific defeat, which is why the text is long and why it has survived. A constitution written as a settlement between factions that have just stopped shooting is a different object from one written as a statement of principle, and it is harder to discard, because discarding it means reopening the settlement.

The gap between the document and its execution opened immediately. Carranza had the constitutional power to redistribute land and returned some confiscated land to its original owners instead. The mechanism was in place and the will was not, which is a description of Mexican land policy for decades afterwards.

How one party held power for seventy-one years

The post-revolutionary period from 1920 to 1946 was run by revolutionary generals serving as presidents, among them Obregón, Calles, Cárdenas and Ávila Camacho, and their project was to end military intervention in politics by institutionalising it.

It worked. The party that emerged governed continuously, and the first cracks appeared only in the 1980s, when an opposition candidate won a governorship in Baja California and a split inside the ruling party produced a serious challenger. The 1968 Olympics had already exposed the cost. The government poured resources into new facilities to showcase a country growing quickly, and what the world saw instead was weeks of student demonstrations in Mexico City before the opening, and a government response that is still a live subject.

Economic reorientation came in the same decade as the political cracks. A programme of liberalisation fixed the exchange rate, controlled inflation, opened the country to foreign investment and led to the North American Free Trade Agreement on 1 January 1994.

After 71 years, the governing party lost the presidential election of 2000. The 2006 election was decided by a margin of 0.6%.

A country that changed its constitution five times in a century then kept one for more than a hundred years, and changed its governing party once in seventy-one. Both halves of that sentence describe the same state, and which half is the anomaly is a live question in Mexican politics. One reading is that the 1917 settlement finally worked and the party was its instrument. The other is that the constitution survived because a single party governed under it and had no reason to challenge a document it controlled. The catalogue records the dates and leaves the reading open.