Mexico: Country Profile

Mexico is a country in the Northern region of the Americas. To the North, it shares one of the longest borders in the world with the United States (US) and shares borders with Guatemala and Belize to the South. Its economy is the 15th largest in the world, driven by manufacturing, oil production and tourism.

Its formal structure is based on a federal system with 32 sovereign states governed by a federal Constitution and a presidential representative democratic republic with three branches of government. Each state has its own Constitution, governor and legislative assembly with the power to create laws within their jurisdiction. The federal government retains control over foreign affairs, national security, natural resources and immigration, while states have autonomy in areas such as education, health, public safety and public works. However, constitutional limits exist on state autonomy, including the requirement to comply with federal human rights standards. The Supreme Court of Justice of the Nation carries out a system of Constitutional review that allows it to strike down laws and regulations that conflict with the federal Constitution, including those created by the states.

Mexico is the world’s 11th most populous country. Its multi-ethnic, multiracial population stands at a total of 126,014,000, with a current growth rate of 1.2 percent. Some 6.1 percent (7,364,645) of Mexicans speak an Indigenous language, and 2 percent (2,578,213) self-identify as Afro-Mexican or Afro-descendant. However, linguistic proficiency in an Indigenous language is not the only marker of Indigenous identity; many other cultural traits of Indigeneity exist but are hidden by people to avoid discrimination. In response to criticism of the governmental methods used in the previous census to count the Indigenous population, the National Institute of Statistics and Geographic Information (Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía, INEGI) adopted a criterion of self-ascription. In the 2020 Census, 23.5 million people self-identified as Indigenous and 2.5 million as Afro-Mexican.

Prior to the European conquest, Mexico was the seat of great Indigenous civilizations that made up a very diverse racial, cultural, linguistic and civilizational mosaic. The legacy of that pre-Columbian linguistic, cultural and ethno-racial diversity continues to shape contemporary Mexico. According to official sources, 68 Indigenous languages are spoken by Mexicans, in addition to the de facto official language of Spanish. The great majority of these are in danger of extinction because of structural and cultural discrimination against their speakers. The school system plays a crucial role in the cultural and linguistic assimilation of Indigenous students by defining Spanish as the national lingua franca. Spanish colonialism determined ethno-racial and cultural hierarchies that subjected both the native Indigenous populations and Afro-descendants who were brought to the Americas as slaves to labour exploitation. The legacies of the colonial social order are reflected in social stratification in contemporary Mexico, which shapes the unequal distribution of wealth, social services, educational opportunities, security, a healthy environment and stable employment.

Mexico’s geographical proximity to the US and Central America influences regional processes of economic integration and migratory flows (predominantly South to North). According to the United Nations (UN) Commission on Population and Development, 26 percent of the world’s international migrant population is in the Americas, and most aim to reach the US as their ultimate destination, legally or illegally. Mexican citizens have migrated to California and other agricultural production areas as legally contracted labour since the 1940s and currently arrive under a special work permit known H-2A. However, this is just a small part of overall migration. Undocumented migration to the North is a continuing trend. Most migrants entering the US by land through Mexico are from Central America (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua), the Caribbean (Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic), South America (Venezuela) and Africa.

Mexico generates a considerable flow of undocumented migrants to the US and has become a bottleneck for foreign migrants from further South. Mexican authorities work to slow down and deter the migratory flow at the Southern border with Guatemala and at the points of entry to the North. To block migration, Mexico implements different strategies to contain the transit of migrants, either by offering them the possibility of legally remaining in the country or by returning them to their places of origin. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) reported that by 2021, 125,257 migrants were returned to Central America, with 73 percent sent back from Mexico and 27 percent sent back from the US. However, significant numbers of migrants remain in the country, where they are highly vulnerable to exploitation and violence by organized crime and suffer xenophobia, mistreatment and cruelty from local and federal migration officers.

Crossing the border between Mexico and the US entails many risks. The US-Mexico border extends for 3,145 km and traverses challenging terrains ranging from urban areas to impenetrable deserts. Approximately 1,045 km of the border is guarded by a physical barrier, commonly known as the “border wall,” which separates both countries. Migrants crossing into the US try to avoid detection (and deportation) by the US Border Patrol at the border itself, as well as within the “100-mile zone” that extends North into the US and where there are also checkpoints. Nearly 3,000 people lost their lives during migration across this border between 2014 and 2020, the largest number recorded by the IOM’s Missing Migrants Project at any land border worldwide. A more recent source points out that 2021 was the deadliest year at the US-Mexico border since 2014: A total of 728 migrant deaths and disappearances were recorded, 53 percent more than in 2020.

Migrants not only face dangers at the border but also during their transit through Mexican territory where they are exposed to exploitation, violence, extortion, human trafficking, sexual violence, kidnapping and forced recruitment into organized criminal groups. People in search of refugee status in the US face difficulties and delays and must confront US policy for asylum seekers to remain in Mexican territory while their applications are processed. There have been some advances in terms of legal norms and public policies to meet international human rights obligations toward the migrant population. However, largely because of the 2011 Constitutional reform that strengthened human rights justiciability, Mexican state policy remains focussed on national security. This means an emphasis on the control and administration of migrant flows rather than policies centred on the protection of migrants’ human rights.

Mexico is currently experiencing a severe human rights crisis due to the long-term effects of a failed anti-drug policy. By mid-2022, the number of disappeared persons was 105,189, according to Mexico’s National Search Commission and the Secretariat of the Interior (August 2022). Femicides number 10 per day according to ONU Mujeres, and the numbers of internally displaced persons and homicides have not decreased under the current administration of Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants are disproportionately affected by the multiple forms of violence afflicting Mexicans, including organized crime and militarization. Mexico is currently the country in Latin America with the highest number of murders of territorial and environmental defenders, most of them Indigenous activists. The link between organized crime and extractive industries, together with near total impunity for grave violations of human rights, drives these assassinations.

 

An important structural underpinning of these rates of violence is inequality and poverty, which affects 43.9 percent of the Mexican population. The administration of López Obrador promotes a reformist vision called the Fourth Transformation (4T) that aims to address socio–economic inequalities through the redistribution of income. The 4T includes a drastic reduction of state spending on what are deemed non-essential items, together with the fight against tax evasion and a strategic investment in state energy industries, such as the Dos Bocas oil refinery. The money saved through austerity policies has been allocated to social services programs, scholarships and state investment in local welfare programs. The federal government has implemented alternative mechanisms to allocate financial resources for development initiatives in Indigenous territories (e.g., roads, health clinics and economic support to agricultural projects). Critics of the regime allege that the 4T’s policies are not leading to national economic growth nor are they addressing the social, political and economic complexities underpinning the multiple and intersecting forms of violence affecting so much of the population. López Obrador inherits the effects of the neo-liberal development policies that preceded him, which accelerated the dispossession of Indigenous and peasant populations, as well as a progressive decapitalization of subsistence and small-scale agriculture. The militarization of Indigenous territories has continued under the 4T, coupled with an increasing securitization of borders, and has markedly contributed to further criminalizing the poor and racializing the migrant population.

The political-ideological project of Mexico since independence in the early nineteenth century has rested on republicanism and liberalism as foundational frameworks of the state. Developmentalism and capitalist modernization have been the driving forces of national growth, and the Indigenous population—in all its linguistic and political diversity—has been considered an obstacle to economic progress and “modernity.” Much state action has aimed to assimilate, make invisible, displace and/or acculturate the country’s Indigenous and Afro-descendant populations. A nation-building ideology of socio–cultural integration and racial miscegenation (mestizaje) is in direct opposition to pluralism because it aims to fuse all Mexicans into a Spanish-speaking and mestizo-centric national identity, implying the disappearance of different cultural and linguistic traits. Whitening is constructed as a condition of social acceptance and class ascension.

The contemporary struggle of Indigenous peoples in Mexico for political recognition as collective subjects of rights dates to the Zapatista uprising in 1994. The Indigenous movement challenges the hegemonic model of nationhood by pointing to the multicultural and multilingual nature of the country’s population, demanding respect for the self-determination of Indigenous peoples. Mexico’s Constitution was reformed in 2001 to recognize the country as pluricultural, obligating the state to protect the languages, customs, resources and social organization of Indigenous peoples. However, in contrast to multicultural constitutional reforms in other Latin American countries, the Mexican reform did not explicitly recognize Indigenous territories or jurisdictions.

The struggle of Zapatista peoples has inspired other social actors, including Indigenous women, feminists and Afro-descendant communities, to organize and mobilize to demand recognition in their diversity; to exercise their rights to participate as collective subjects of decision-making at the national, provincial and local levels; and to defend their territories.

Afro-descendant organizing is more recent, but the politicization of Afro-Mexican identity has gained traction over the last decade. Under the Lopez Obrador administration, there are initiatives aimed to recognize their collective identity and specific contributions to national and regional histories, and to begin to address the intersecting inequalities and exclusions that affect them.

In this report, the three social typologies we will focus on are Indigenous, Afro-descendants and migrants, as we believe they represent important experiences of diversity and resistance in a context of acute and intersecting inequalities.