Mexico, the United States, and the 1981 North–South Summit in Cancún

Drawing on the NSC files in the Ronald Reagan Library in Simi Valley, CA and documents in the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores in Mexico City, this co-authored paper examines the U.S. and Mexican approaches toward the only North-South economic summit ever held, in Cancún in October 1981. By that time, the Reagan administration—unlike its predecessor, which focused on geopolitical issues elsewhere in the world—made Mexico the linchpin of a new policy of containment of what they saw as “communism” in Latin America. It aimed to undermine a growing Global South consensus on the New International Economic Order (NIEO), which the government of Mexico–as Christy Thornton has related–helped promote in the United Nations in the 1970s. On the other hand, Mexican President José López Portillo wished not only to promote the NIEO, but also to showcase the rapid economic growth of an economy buoyed by new petrodollars–as evidenced by the construction of Cancún itself, described in great detail in Carlos Hernández’s Yale dissertation. The failure of the summit to achieve any concrete goals–a failure the Reagan administration actively promoted-mirrored the failure of Mexico’s ruling PRI then approaching the twilight of its rule. After the financial crises of the 1980s and the triumph of the so-called “Washington Consensus,” it also led Global South governments to embrace South-South collaboration rather than further efforts to negotiate a new economic order with the Global North.