DEE WILSON CONSULTING
Book Review:
Excellent - and lengthy - history of Mexico
Mexico: A 500-Year History
Paul Gillingham (2025)
​​
For persons who want to know more about Mexico and its history, I highly recommend Paul Gillingham's "Mexico: A 500-Year History." (2025) This is a lengthy book, more than 600 pages, that begins with the Spanish Conquest and ends with the Mexican drug wars ( mid-1980's to the present). Some chapters retell familar stories, e.g., the overthrow of the Mexica (usually referred to as Aztec in other histories) empire by a few hundred Spanish conquistadors and their thousands of indigenous allies in the 1520s. Others reveal dimensions of Spanish colonialism in Mexico, e.g., the complex system of racial classification that utilized 16 categories of race/ ethnicity, with which I was unfamilar before reading Gillingham's history. I was also surprised to learn that Mexico experienced a revolution from 1910-20 that led to 1.4 million deaths, and another decade of violence from 1920-30 involving assassinations of multiple political leaders.
Gillingham's chapters on political governance in Mexico from 1930-2000 are difficult to follow without some basic understanding of Mexican history, and also because there is no simplified narrative that does justice to the combination of democracy and autocracy, of rebellion and extreme repression during these decades. Mexico during much of the twentieth century was ruled by liberal autocrats and, for about forty years, by a single party, the PRI. Gillingham's book provides the most insightful discussion I've encountered of drug cartels, more accurately described as Drug Trading Organizations (DTO's), and of the costs to Mexican society of periodic efforts to eliminate the DTO's. The relationship of Mexico with its predatory neighbor, the U.S., is a recurrent theme of Mexican history. Mexico ceded more than half of its territory to the U.S. after being defeated in the Mexican- American War of 1848-50.
In Gillingham's Epilogue, he asserts:
"Mexican history could could be told as a single story of a series of empires, from Mexica to Americans, .... Rather more often, though, Mexican history is characterized by many and distinct stories of lives lived in the face of empire, of people succeding in being left alone despite great disparities of power. Spain only succeded in imposing more than the most tenuous control over New Spain, which it never had the temerity to call a colony. "
"Mexican history could be written as a tragedy of race: the slavery of West Africans, the forced migrations and ethnocides of the North, the complex wars of the Southeast simplified into caste wars of brown against white, the systematic impoverishnment of the Maya peoples in modern Chipas ... None of that would be wrong. ... Such a history of Mexico would register the difference of a country (from the U.S.) where Blacks were acknowledged to be fully human, their abuse punished, their lynching unknown, and where Indians were full citizens, whose protective courts worked, who often kept language and lands, several hundreds of villages staying in the same place with the same political boundaries from the fifteenth century to the present ... "
"Another supposed constant of Mexican history is intense volence, whether during Independence, the revolution or the War on Drugs. Yet Mexican violence is comparatively unremarkable when set alongside the long homicidal sweep of American or European history." "Neither is there a death penalty on the books in Mexico. There are no school shootings in Mexico, whose gun control regieme since the revolution has been among the world's most restrictive," Gillingham states.
And yet (according to Gillingham), Mexico is one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists. "Between 2006 and 2020 more than one hundred were murdered. ... Between 2006 and 2020, the War on Drugs killed more than two hundred thousand Mexicans. About one hundred thousand more disappeared or were disappeared. Another two hundred thousand became refugees, according to the UN ... " and: "The majority of the dead.. have been civilians.... paramilitary criminals in the 2010's broadened their portfolios, expanding into robbery, kidnapping, extortion, human trafficking, forced sex work and illegal logging and mining."
Cartels, in league with the military, have committed massacres of students and community vigilante groups. "In extremis, cartels took over entire cities... The most dangerous regions were those without a single dominant cartel,"Gillingham states. "Some of the soldiers that narcos fought became predatory empire builders themselves.. another return to revolutionary days." Generals have been linked to specific cartels and occasionally prosecuted. The head of the armed forces, General Salvador Cienfuegos, was arrested in 2020 by U.S. law enforcement. He was subsequently released and left alone after the Mexican government threatened to withdraw all security cooperation with the U.S.,Gillingham states.
Gillingham acknowledges that "Drugs, not elections, were thus the main determinants of the new democratic Mexico. This was ironic, because drug consumption has never been a public health problem inside Mexico." Gillingham has a caustic analysis of the failure of killing or imprisoning drug kingpins to make a dent in the supply of drugs available to U.S. consumers. This is because, Gillingam asserts, DTO's are not integrated corporations with a CEO who imposes centralized control over all aspects of corporate activity. They are more like franchises that operate with a fair amount of autonomy. Killing or imprisoning heads of cartels does not effect either supply or demand, Gillingham asserts. The main beneficiaries of this strategy has been the DEA and other law enforment entities that have grown into huge enterprises with assured long-term employment for thousands of bureaucrats and agents, Gillingham asserts. He also maintains that governmental attacks on cartels have increased the level of community violence in Mexico, rather than vice versa. Felix Calderon's all-out attack on cartels in the early 2000s "left more Mexicans dead or displaced than Cristiada, the war against France, the war against the United States, and the last colonial smallpox epidemic, a devout conservatives's morally bankrupt, reckless choice of an unwinnable war," Gillingham maintains. In a perverse sense, the drug trade is, for Mexico, "too big to fail" as long as U.S. consumers have a huge appetite for its products.
Gillingham's history of Mexico is full of surprises: The Mexica initially believed that Spanish cannons and cavalry were "sentient and intrinsically hostile." Cortes' slave mistress, Malintzin, had enormous influence because of her fluency in languages, including Spanish and Nahuatl, which gave her enormous power to determine what was communicated between and among hostile parties. The Spanish Crown, in response to the petitions of influential Catholic priests, made periodic efforts to ban the enslavement of indigenous peoples beginning in 1542. The efforts of The Cathlic Church and Spanish Crown to ban intermarriage between Spaniards and Indians completely failed, due in part to the lack of Spanish women in Mexico, leaving the country with a much higher rate of racial intermarriage than in the U.S..
Gillingham refers to the expulsion of all Jesuits from all Spanish territories in 1767 as "the greatest blunder in Spanish imperial history." The Jesuits had a major role in the settlement of California and other northern outposts. "They provided social security to the poor," including in response to deadly epidemics which endangered their lives. "They were the also, more than any other order, the colony's educators and bankers," the founders of colleges. "Yet they fell victim to their own success. The Crown and its modernizers resented their allegiance to papal over royal authority, seeing them as wealthy, intriguing and overmighty rivals for power," Gillingham asserts. An entire book could be written about the Catholic Church's role in Mexican history. It would not be a simple story of oppression vs. enlightenment
​
​
-- Dee Wilson
​
​