This idea compels the authors, at least, to take a quick look, with limitations by the length of the text, to some of the manifestations of the crisis situation prevailing in the country during the period of imposition of the neoliberal pattern of capital accumulation and to the essential features and the contradictions that it has printed to the great metropolis and national capital. From this outline, in the central part of this work, they analyze the specific characteristics of the social movements and the actions that they have developed in the metropolis, between 2011 and 2018, registered in the Laboratory of Urban Conflicts of the Autonomous Metropolitan University, Unit Xochimilco.
TopMexico: Economic And Social Crisis
Mexican society is immersed in a structural, economic and social crisis, which has been shaping for more than four decades, particularly since the great world recession of 1982 and the imposition made by economic and political powers —United States and Great Britain —, and the multinational financial organizations —IMF, WB — of the neoliberal pattern of capital accumulation. Its main feature has been low economic growth, interspersed with recurring recessions (Guillén, 1997).
Unlike the period of industrialization by import substitution under the previous state intervention pattern of capital accumulation, between 1933 and 1981 (48 years), in which the Gross Domestic Product grew at an annual average of 6.40%, without suffering any recession, between 1982 and 2018 (36 years), it has only grown at an annual average of 2.27%, with 5 recessions: 1981-1982, 1986, 1995, 2001-, 2002, 2009, and in 2019 the rating agencies and the International Monetary Fund predict that the GDP growth will be between 0.2% and 0.4% maximum, confirming the slow growth of the Mexican economy in the long term (see Figure 1). This trend was not modified even by the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), with the United States and Canada that entered into operation in 1994, with which the Mexican rulers hoped to “enter the first world”.
Figure 1. Mexico. Average annual growth rates of gross domestic product 1933-2018
The real minimum wage, which perceives a still significant part of the economically active population, but whose legal variations have great influence on the rest of the workers' income, has followed similar trends to those of GDP. In 1951, the Current Equivalent1 Salary amounted to $ 52.28 Mexican pesos, in 1976 it had increased to $ 342.34, to begin since then a steady fall due to the application of neoliberal2 “salary caps” to reach $ 78.18 in 2008, a loss of 76.72%, and recover up to $ 88.36 at the end of 2018 (see Figure 2).
Figure 2. Mexico. Evolution of real minimum wage 1933-2018