Excepciones y privilegios. Modernización tributaria y centralización en México, 1922-1972 (review)

Few dispute the decisive role of fiscal reform in influencing the shape of emerging states in nineteenth-century Latin America. This is reflected in the bounty of fiscal histories addressing that period. However, perhaps due to an assumption that the fiscal foundations of these states were already laid, historians have not paid similar attention to twentieth-century fiscal policy, including in Mexico. But, as argued by Luis Aboites Aguilar, Mexico's revolutionary victors were keenly aware that fiscal constraints on the public treasury limited the authority of the postrevolutionary state. They therefore viewed fiscal modernization as fundamental to consolidating their authority, especially due to its potential to curb the historic sovereignty of regional interests. Moreover, they promoted fiscal modernization as necessary for the construction of a modern nation-state released from the bonds of inequality and anarchy that had stymied economic development and moral and social revindication during the Porfiriato.

Conceiving of modernization as centralization, post-revolutionary federal governments struggled to suppress municipal and state-level rights to taxation in favor of uniform, progressive, direct federal levies. As convincingly argued by Aboites, the apex of innovation occurred between the 1920s and 1940s, a period bookended by a 1922 federal circular about oil that unsuccessfully sought to transform the rights of state and municipal governments to participate in federal taxation and the federal government's triumphant elevation of control over beer taxation to the national level in 1949. Aboites draws subtle distinctions between continuity and change in fiscal policy during this period. He dates attempts to use fiscal modernization to overcome regional 'anarchy' back to liberal plans beginning in the mid-nineteenth century. But he also demonstrates the revolutionary character of these changes, most notably their progressive facets. By pressing for uniform, direct taxation, such as an income tax, revolutionary victors prioritized equity by shifting the tax burden from consumers and producers to individuals. They therefore sought to use direct federal taxes both to achieve revolutionary redistribution, as well as to efface the role of state-level and municipal administrators, whom revolutionary victors saw as relics of Porfirian-style politics, as mediators between state and nation.

Suppression of state and municipal taxation did not come easily, however, and instead reflected the pendular impact on fiscal policy of enduring tensions between regions and the federal government over state centralization. States and municipalities regularly circumvented federal efforts to centralize taxation; not until 1971 did the federal government finally declare the end of alcabalas. Aboites astutely observes that these local responses did not signify reactionary opposition to modernization. Indeed, many local authorities were often equally interested in ending fiscal anarchy and facilitating economic growth, including via uniform taxation. What they opposed was the notion that fiscal modernization necessitated centralization that would come at great cost to municipal and state-level treasuries and sovereignty. In turn, Aboites shows that this regional reluctance sometimes compelled federal officials to modify their aims, as when they recrafted the 1949 federal fiscal monopoly over the production and consumption of beer to assuage opposition.

One of Aboites's most novel arguments broaches how the federal government used tax exceptions and privileges to manage its relationship with popular groups. In practice, this meant extending privileges to business people and exceptions to agrarian interests. This seems to counter efforts to use fiscal modernization to promote capitalist expansion. Yet, Aboites makes a compelling case that fiscal protections for Mexico's agrarian class actually fostered growth by creating consumers and low-cost labor. Moreover, by redefining land, as well as other resources such as oil and water, as national, rather than local patrimony, fiscal modernization further eroded municipal resources and authority in relation to the federal government. This elasticity in fiscal policy, according to Aboites, helps to answer one of his central questions, which is why fiscal revenue is so relatively low in Mexico. What...