Institute for the Study of the Americas

Throughout the period covered by the materials held here Mexico was governed by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) although the relatively small number of party political documents in the collection may be seen as testimony to the limited party political challenges to its hegemony. However, increasing concern with the maintenance of internal order in the 1960s was both cause and consequence of the rise in opposition by other organisations to de facto one-party rule, as evinced in these materials by the publications of revolutionary movements, human rights organisations and groups expressing solidarity with the students massacred at Tlatelolco in 1968. Subsequently, the economic crisis which gradually enveloped Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s (as a consequence of high government expenditure and an increasing reliance on falling oil revenues) is reflected in the workers and peasants' movements represented here which prefigure the Zapatista uprising of 1994.