Anticorruption, Austerity, and the Capital Order in 1950s Mexico

This paper traces the emergence of austerity in 1950s Mexico through a typology of fiscal, monetary, and industrial discipline. Mexico's postwar political economy under Miguel Alemán expanded state-led industrialization and public works while entrenching clientelist corruption.

Upon assuming office, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines framed his administration's approach as an anti-corruption campaign to discipline elite excess and restore equilibrium, promising to cleanse the state and secure macroeconomic order. To achieve this, his administration pursued fiscal austerity through deficit reduction; monetary austerity through the 1954 devaluation; and industrial austerity through wage suppression.

Historians have documented the intensification of state-sanctioned repression during these years, yet have paid less attention to how economic austerity operated alongside it. Because the public sector had grown throughout the postwar period, economic adjustment fell not only on corrupt officials but heavily on public sector workers who had become a significant portion of the country's working class. By reconstructing austerity across these three modalities, this paper argues that 1950s stabilization clarified the class character of Mexico's postrevolutionary regime in the 1950s: a project claiming moral renewal while redistributing the costs of order onto the popular sectors, thereby transforming the postrevolutionary state itself into the principal object of class conflict.