Abstract

This article revisits public debates in Mexico around two distinctive causes that found an undeniable impulse in the 1970s: the international demands to rebalance the financial and commercial agreements towards enhancing economic growth in the least developed countries and the global human rights agenda. The article traces the Mexican government’s interpretation of these causes and their intertwinement back to the 1917 Constitution that resulted from the Mexican Revolution and argues that this root created a common sense among a variety of unexpected actors which, in part, allowed it to outlive the twilight of the Cold War and the transition to neoliberalism in Mexico. Employing an array of primary sources—spanning the United Nations and the Organization of American States documents, Mexican and US records, press articles, NGO statements, and civil society perspectives—the paper scrutinizes both the Mexican government’s developmentalist human rights discourse and the later challenges it faced by NGOs and opposition parties in the context of the North American Free Trade Agreement. By focusing on the Mexican case study, the article hopes to show the specific shapes that expectations of post-war multilateralism took in less powerful countries, how these impacted questions around sovereignty, and the ways such variables changed in the last quarter of the 20th century. At the same time, for what is indeed the unique history of the Mexican post-revolutionary regime, focusing on human rights sheds light on some of the less studied ideological aspects of the regime, the policies these informed, and how shared the governmental particular understanding of human rights turned out to be, even among critics of the regime.