Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen
(Paperback)
Available Formats
Publishing Details
Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen
By (Author) Jorge G. Castaneda
Translated by Padraic Arthur Smithies
The New Press
The New Press
7th February 2002
United States
Classifications
General
Non Fiction
Elections and referenda / suffrage
324.63
Physical Properties
Paperback
272
Width 154mm, Height 233mm
382g
Description
Jorge Castaeda, who served as Mexico's foreign minister from 2000 to 2003, 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 Castaeda 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.
Reviews
"Castaeda strikes a blow for a more open and democratic Mexico in the future." The Washington Post Book World
"An unusually revealing explication of the inner workings of three decades of presidential succession." The New York Times Book Review
Author Bio
Jorge G. Castaeda is a Mexican politician and academic who served as Mexicos secretary of foreign affairs from 2000 to 2003. He worked as a professor at several universities, including the National Autonomous University of Mexico; the University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University; New York University; and the University of Cambridge. He has authored more than a dozen books, including Ex Mex: From Migrants to Immigrants, The Mexican Shock: Its Meaning for the United States, and Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen, all published by The New Press. Castaeda regularly contributes to newspapers such as Reforma (Mexico), El Pas (Spain), the Los Angeles Times, and Newsweek.
