The power and wealth were also shared with PRI-affiliated labor leaders, whose unions won higher wages and benefits for workers in good times and held wage demands in check in bad, securing millions of votes for the PRI every six years and stifling dissent with ruthless efficiency. "We came to power by the force of arms," the country's most powerful union leader once said of the PRI, "and nobody is going to get us out of here at the point of a speech."

At its apex, Preston and Dillon write, the system was "an electoral democracy with no fair elections; a federation in which all power was centralized in the presidency; and a revolutionary state where the workers were dominated and demobilized." For several decades, it functioned smoothly, delivering stability, economic growth and basic services to much of Mexican society. But over time, the PRI's authoritarian populism lost its populist bent and increasingly began to display the sort of gap between rhetoric and performance that is characteristic of regimes that claim popular mandates they could never win in fair elections.

Two cataclysmic events would expose that gap for what it was, reshaping the country's political landscape and eroding the foundations of PRI legitimacy. The first came in 1968, when student activists began pressing for the release of political prisoners and the repeal of laws used to jail dissenters. Their efforts tapped into deep currents of public disaffection with PRI rule, and they were soon drawing hundreds of thousands of people to street demonstrations. Like its counterparts around the world, this movement was part political protest and part cultural revolution, with students flouting authority in ways that were, in the moral universe of the PRI, entirely beyond the pale--such as gathering in front of the National Palace and shouting at the president inside: "Come on out, Monkey Big-Snout!"

The president at the time, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, did indeed have a sizable snout, a short temper and--when it came to curbing dissent--a heavy hand. Where his predecessors had calibrated their use of coercive force with a certain degree of subtlety, Díaz Ordaz unleashed his security forces on the protesters, detaining and beating students, and imposing a virtual state of siege in Mexico City. The confrontations culminated with a showdown in a public plaza in the Tlatelolco district of the city, when army troops opened fire on the protesters, killing or wounding hundreds. The exact number was never disclosed, as the government trucked away the corpses, cleaned up the streets, prohibited the press from reporting what had taken place and began a cover-up that has lasted three decades.

The second transformative cataclysm was an earthquake in 1985, which brought down hundreds of buildings in Mexico City and buried an untold number of Mexicans--untold, again, because the government suppressed the figures (Preston and Dillon estimate 20,000 dead). The government was slow to respond and reluctant to recognize the scale of the disaster. As offers for help poured in from around the world, President Miguel de la Madrid announced that Mexicans were "ready to return to normal life" and didn't need foreign help.

Only after a second quake hit and the staggering loss of life could no longer be denied did the government react in a more serious fashion. But, as in 1968, the PRI authorities showed more concern with restoring order than with saving lives. It placed the ruins off-limits to the public, claiming they were unsafe. And, instead of digging, many troops devoted their energy to blocking the neighbors, relatives and thousands of students who turned out to assist in rescue efforts. The official rescue attempt was lackluster, and the authorities, seeing the buried bodies as potential sources of disease rather than potential survivors, sent in heavy equipment to clear the rubble.

Again it was the university students who stood up to the government, clashing with troops who sought to prevent them from digging in the ruins and lying down in front of bulldozers sent to clear the rubble. At the site of a collapsed hospital, students managed to stop the bulldozers long enough for rescuers to tunnel through to a maternity ward and rescue eight babies.

In addition to saving lives, these spontaneous rescue brigades, and the nongovernmental relief efforts that followed, generated a new conviction among many participants that, by banding together, they could address the needs of Mexican society better than the PRI regime was willing or able to. "We had a sense of the possibility of action and a conviction that we had to act collectively," one student leader recalls in the book. And this conviction would help to fuel the political movement that led to Cárdenas's strong showing in the 1988 election and the subsequent formation of his new political party, the Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).

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