Made in Mexico: Regions, Nation, and the State in the Rise of Mexican Industrialism, 1920s–1940s

Chapter 5: The Politics of Nationalist Development in Postwar Mexico City

5 the politics of nationalist development in postwar mexico city Though President Alemán took office with a pledge to promote industry through a combination of tax exemptions and tariff modifications, within seven months he had abandoned that pledge in favor of trade controls.1 This decision was controversial, since tariffs merely deterred imports and exports, while trade quotas prohibited them. President Alemán turned to these controls in part to redress the mounting postwar trade deficit and diminishing monetary reserves. Yet, a range of political and social factors was also critical in his decision to adopt trade controls. This included a surge of economic nationalism in the wake of U.S. efforts to dominate postwar trade and loan agreements and the ruling party’s ongoing struggles to secure its relationship with labor and business. In this light, a favorable domestic political climate coupled with an apparently new, more predatory stage in U.S. imperialism —committed to postwar reconstruction and Cold War objectives— jointly encouraged the maturation of protectionism into a comprehensive program that culminated in midcentury ISI. After World War II, the United States redoubled pressure on Mexico to commit to free trade and raw material production. This heightened concerns among many industrialists, technocrats, and politicians about continued dependence. It also fostered resentments due to Mexico’s recent sacrifices in support of the war effort. U.S. pressure therefore provoked a sharp nationalist response that entailed treaty, tariff, and loan conflicts between the two countries from 1944 to 1948. As Mexican discontent took on new nationalist overtones directed at the United States, it fed popular support for protected industrialization. 1. Conferencias de Mesa Redonda, xxvii. 170 兩 made in mexico Amid this rising nationalist tide, the CTM and CANACINTRA became more vocal in campaigning for protectionist policies. They did so presumably to defend the jobs and factories on which their constituents’ economic security rested. For CANACINTRA, collaboration with the state became a strategy to gain the financing, subsidies, and protection enjoyed by many large-scale industrialists, some of whom had leveraged their political influence and personal connections to obtain concessions in the 1940s.2 Yet, by uniting around statist development, each also hoped that an alliance with the ruling party would ensure their long-term national authority. In doing so, they shed their earlier ambivalence about state economic intervention, including concerns about its potential to contribute to corruption, inefficiency , and rent seeking. Ultimately, though projected as national, this alliance encouraged the concentration of industry and political power in Mexico City. Remarkably, the postwar deterioration of trade terms also prompted CONCAMIN and COPARMEX to back limited, temporary protection. Each saw tariffs and even some trade controls as a stopgap to slow the loss of postwar reserves. Industrialist consensus around protectionism did not translate into unity behind state economic intervention, however. Rather, it set off a new round of clashes among industrialists over the rights of private enterprise in the face of the growing authority of the state. Amid these battles, both CANACINTRA and its more conservative counterparts tied economic nationalism to the unfolding Cold War, yet each drew on distinct definitions of class struggle to propose different resolutions to dependency . CANACINTRA linked nationalism to class collaboration and cooperation with the state, around statist industrialism. COPARMEX and CONCAMIN, by contrast, continued to espouse freer trade and the rights of private enterprise. They defended themselves with arguments about the advantages of stronger global trade ties in countering dependency and fostering economic growth. Significantly, this postwar debate between CANACINTRA and industrialists in COPARMEX and CONCAMIN reveals the contingent nature of the mid-twentieth-century association between economic nationalism and protected industrialization. It also reveals how the Cold War milieu and the prominence of protectionist policies in ECLApromoted structuralist programs secured that correlation.3 Despite opposition to state economic intervention that persisted through Mexico’s midcentury economic ‘‘miracle,’’ wider acceptance of tariffs was 2. Shadlen, Democratization Without Representation, 32. 3. For more, see Gauss, ‘‘Politics of Economic Nationalism.’’ politics of nationalist development 兩 171 an important step in enabling the consolidation of ISI into an enduring project underpinning the state and ruling-party authority. That acceptance became the foundation for an alliance between the CTM, CANACINTRA , and the PRI that augmented the state’s capacity to resolve postwar labor discord and industrialist discontent.4 By successfully tying nationalism to class collaboration and cooperation with the...