Mexico

Enrique Krauze's Mexico traces the country's history from 1810 to 1996. His central argument is that the concentration of power in the caudillo, or leader, is as basic to Mexican culture and politics as the legacy of the Aztec emperors, Cortez, the Spanish Crown, the Mother Church and the mixing of Spanish and Indian peoples into a mestizo culture. Krauze, a Mexican historian, tells the story largely through the lives of the people who held power, so that history becomes biography. He follows the century of caudillos from the insurgent priests of 1810 to Porfirio Diaz and the Revolution of 1910. The Revolutionary era, which ended in 1940, was dominated by seven presidents: Madero, Zapata, Villa, Carranza, Obregon, Calles and Cardenas. After 1940 the presidency kept its dominant power through years of boom, bust and crisis. The book closes in the era of President Zedillo with a question about the modern state. Can that power be decentralized, and the cycle in which Mexican history reads as a biography of power be ended?