From the early 1970s through the early 1980s, Mexico was awash on a sea of optimism regarding its future oil prospects. Since the days of expropriation in the 1930s, oil had enjoyed a special symbolic standing as the culmination, in a sense, of the Mexican revolution. With expropriation, Mexico had at long last asserted control over its patrimony. Mexico's natural wealth was now owned by Mexico, not by foreign interests.
The oil boom of the 1970s underlined and reinforced this symbolic significance of Mexican oil. In 1974, after a brief period in which Mexico became a net importer as demand outstripped domestic production, Mexico regained exporter status at virtually the same moment as the world price increased fourfold. Soon it was proclaimed, and widely believed, that oil would solve Mexico's long standing problems of development. Mexico would become the Saudi Arabia of the western hemisphere, using the flow of oil wealth to modernize its industries and achieve at long last the good life its people had been so often promised, and had never (outside of the small elite) achieved.
Then, in the 1980s, the dream evaporated. World oil prices sagged, then collapsed. Mexico was left only with a mountain of debt a substantial portion of it incurred precisely due to the frantic effort to expand oil production during the heady 1970s. The demoralization could only be increased by the discovery, which became public early in the de la Madrid sexenio, that the oil boom had been accompanied by a vast wave of corruption corruption that extended to the highest levels of PEMEX, the long respected national oil company, and was linked as well to the office and family of the former President of Mexico.
In some respects, the cycle of boom and bust that afflicted Mexico in the 1970s and 1980s could be compared in its impact to the cycle that seems to have inflicted the United States a decade later. In the Un...