#216 Economic Adjustment and Ethnic Conflict in Bolivia, Peru, and Mexico
By Alison Brysk and Carol Wise
From the Introduction
On January 1, 1994, a band of about two thousand armed Indian peasants attacked four towns in the southeastern Mexican state of Chiapas. The attack was motivated largely by failures of both economic and political liberalization: the social costs of economic adjustment for Mexico's depressed rural sector--heightened by the prospect of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), along with the government's refusal to loosen the authoritarian reins of the ruling party's (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, or PRI) regional bosses in Chiapas. The Chiapas uprising served as a dramatic reminder of the disruptive potential of groups marginalized by adjustment and the growing incidence of ethnic conflict in Latin America, despite the "end of history" axiom which declared such struggles resolved with the end of the Cold War.
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