Perpetuating Power

How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen

Jorge G. Castañeda

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Jorge Castañeda, recently named Mexico’s foreign minister, has been both an insider and an outsider in Mexico’s political system. In Perpetuating Power, he lays bare the often mystifying workings of power in Mexico, offering readers what the New York Times Book Review called “an unusually revealing explication of the inner workings of three decades of presidential succession.”

To outside observers, Mexico stood out for its odd mixture of democratic pretension with autocratic inevitability: there were always elections, but everyone knew the next president would be the candidate of the aptly named Party of the Institutional Revolution, which governed Mexico throughout most of the last century.

In six penetrating essays combined with interviews by Castañeda with each of the living Mexican ex-presidents, Perpetuating Power provides a remarkably candid account of the political machinery behind Mexican presidential politics and a view, startling to political outsiders, of how power really operates.

Jorge G. Castañeda, Mexican foreign minister, is the author of many books on Mexican and Latin American politics, including The Mexican Shock (The New Press) and Utopia Unarmed. He has been a professor of political science at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, in Mexico City, and at New York University. Padraic Arthur Smithies lives in Mexico City.