Road to the Third World

In the 1970s, after decades of alignment with the United States, Mexico underwent a dramatic shift in its foreign policy. President Luis Echeverría Álvarez’s administration began to embrace Third World politics as a new cornerstone of Mexican internationalism. While historians have traditionally interpreted this shift as little more than an attempt to cover up domestic repression, Vanni Pettinà proposes that Echeverría’s turn to the Third World was an attempt to address Mexico’s ailing economic development process. Uncovering the material dynamics that drove Mexico and other developing countries to coalesce into the Third World, Road to the Third World illustrates how their alliance contested the entrenched structures of the global economy and the possibilities it presented for international economic reform.

Drawing on multilingual research conducted internationally, including in Mexico, Chile, Brazil, the US, the UK, and former Yugoslavia, Pettinà reveals how domestic political and economic crisis, Nixon’s 1971 New Economic Policy, and the Oil Revolution of the 1970s prompted Mexico’s new international stance. Mexico thus became a key player in the rise and fall of the Third World’s attempts to defy and reshape the global economic order. Ultimately, that project failed and neoliberal globalization took root, paving the way for today’s increasingly unbalanced world.