Performative Nationalism: Mexico’s Echeverría Regime between Popular Protest and Tercermundismo, 1970–76

Coming to power as the supposed architect of the infamous 1968 Tlatelolco Massacre, President Luis Echeverría (1922-2022) tried to show he was a man of the people, a populist leader in the mold of Lázaro Cárdenas, president from 1934-1940 and by most accounts, Mexico's most popular president of the twentieth century. He cranked up Mexico's dormant land redistribution program, poured money into social programs and public universities, and provided asylum to leftist dissidents from countries then falling under military rule such as Argentina and Chile—all while suppressing leftist dissent in Mexico at the cost of hundreds of lives. Under Echeverría, just as many dissidents died as did in Brazil's dictatorship during those same years. Based on recently classified papers available in Mexico's Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores and the Richard Nixon Library in California, this paper traces Echeverría's activist foreign policy, which he labeled Tercermundismo, or Third Worldism. Echeverría openly challenged the United States in the United Nations and elsewhere, proudly giving away guayabera shirts at photo ops with PLO leader Yasser Arafat. He also cultivated relations with Fidel Castro and Nicolae Ceausescu, although Echeverría remained careful not to antagonize the United States via too friendly relations with the Soviet bloc. At a time when the U.S. State Department collaborated in an attempt to undermine, and then topple, the socialist government of Chile's Salvador Allende, the U.S. government displayed surprising flexibility with regard to Echeverría's policy, in large part because they understood it as acts of performative nationalism that did not substantively challenge Mexico's place in the global capitalist economy. This paper first traces this performative nationalism and then briefly places it into the context of Porfirio Díaz's challenge to U.S. hegemony in Central America and Plutarco Elías Calles's attempt to install a government friendly to the Mexican Revolution in Nicaragua.