The Mexican Transition

This book is a collection of essays on the Mexican transition to democracy that offers reflections on different aspects of civic culture, the political process, electoral struggles, and critical junctures. They were written at different points in time and even though they have been corrected and adapted, they have kept the tension and fervour with which they were originally created. They provide the reader with a vision of what goes on behind those horrifying images that depict Mexico as a country plagued by narcotrafficking groups and subjected to unbridled homicidal violence. These images hide the complex political reality of the country and the accidents and shocks democracy has suffered.

Roger Bartra is one of Mexico's most important radical (and heterodox) intellectual figures. He has produced major works analysing the country's agrarian and political structures, as well as an extraordinarily original history of the European 'savage' and, more recently, an anthropological approach to the study of the human brain. In 'The Mexican Transition', his latest collection of essays, Bartra redeploys many of the key ideas developed in these works to produce an invaluable analysis of Mexico's contemporary political sphere as it emerges from decades of post-Revolutionary authoritarian rule. 'The Mexican Transition' is not only an original historical account of the emergence of new political agencies and democratic forms in a context beset by narco-violence and corruption, but also a trenchant critique of the various brands of neo-populism that inhibit true radical democratic reform in Mexico, as well as throughout Latin America as a whole. Professor John Kraniauskas, Birkbeck, University of London