Perpetuating Power: How Mexican Presidents Were Chosen

A remarkably candid account of Mexican presidential politics, "destined to become the most important political book of the decade" (Foreign Policy). In Perpetuating Power, Jorge Castaneda lays bare the often mystifying workings of power in Mexico, offering readers a guided tour through the maze that leads to the Mexican presidential palace. Since the 1920s, Mexico has conducted presidential elections every six years, electing each time the handpicked successor to the sitting president. To outside observers, especially Americans accustomed to a fractious and relatively unpredictable political process, what stands out about the Mexican system is its odd mixture of democratic pretensions and inevitability: there are always elections, but everyone knows the next president will be the candidate of the appropriately named Party of the Institutional Revolution, which has governed Mexico throughout most of the last century and remains in power today. In six penetrating essays combined with interviews with each of the living Mexican ex-presidents, Castaneda provides a remarkably candid account of the political machinery of Mexican presidential politics--and a view, startling to political outsiders, of how power really operates.