Mexico 1940-82: a higher priority to political stability and economic growth than to social change The political and economic stability of Mexico from 1940 to 1982 can be well understood by watching one of Sergio's televisions. In Mexican Lives, Judith Adler Hellman introduces the reader to Sergio Espinoza, a businessman who once employed some 700 workers to produce televisions, stereos, and sound systems. High production costs, poor quality, high prices and the inaccessibility of the poor to its televisions draw a rough microcosm of the period 1940-1982 by exposing the inefficiencies of import substitution industrialization and vast inequalities in Mexico. From 1940 to 1982, economic growth and stability came at the expense of social justice and political pluralism. In particular, Mexican peasants, the backbone of the Zapatista revolutionary uprising, suffered from the model of economic development and the PRI's ability to muzzle dissent. The basic model used after Cardenas to promote the growth of the Mexican economy was import substitution industrialization (ISI). , through which Mexico attempted to build a national industry and a domestic market. The strategy quickly began to bear fruit, and "the Mexican state's import substitution policies were successful in generating rapid and sustained economic growth" (Sharpe 28). The ISI ushered in the “Mexican miracle” of economic growth; Mexican growth oscillated around 6% per year for around thirty years (Hellman 1). The government created investment incentives and reduced taxes to stimulate domestic investment. Despite strong economic indicators, the fruits of growth have not been shared by many. The groups that bled and died from 1910 to 1917 for a more just and equitable Mexico were then denied the fruits of economic growth and transparent political representation. Efforts to accelerate growth since the mid-1930s “have tended to produce – or at least reinforce – a highly inequitable pattern of income distribution” (Hansen 71). According to Roger Hansen, author of The Politics of Mexican Development, "no other Latin American political system has offered "so many rewards to its new industrial and commercial agricultural elites" (87) since 1940 and "in no other major country of 'Latin America's government has done less directly for the poorest quarter of society' (87). Mexico's development created a middle class and brought some industrialization, but further disenfranchised the poor. Mexican leaders implemented a development policy that violated the ideals of the revolution by evading the responsibilities of a social democracy. In his essay “Guatemalan Politics: The People's Struggle for Democracy,” Garry H...