Mexico

The territory of present-day Mexico hosted some of the most sophisticated civilisations of the pre-Columbian Americas. From roughly 1500 BCE the Olmec on the Gulf coast established the cultural template later inherited by successor societies, including monumental sculpture, calendrical systems, and ritual ballgames. In the central highlands the city of Teotihuacan rose to dominance between the first and seventh centuries CE, while the Maya of the southeast built city-states such as Palenque, Tikal, and Chichen Itza that flourished during the Classic period. After the collapse of these centres, Toltec influence radiated from Tula, and by the fifteenth century the Mexica, popularly known as the Aztecs, governed a tributary empire from their island capital of Tenochtitlan, where Mexico City now stands.

Spanish contact in 1519 under Hernan Cortes, aided by indigenous allies hostile to Mexica rule and by epidemic disease, led to the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521 and the establishment of the Viceroyalty of New Spain. For three centuries the colony was administered from Mexico City as the wealthiest possession of the Spanish crown, with silver mining, hacienda agriculture, and the Catholic Church shaping a deeply stratified society organised around a casta system. The Bourbon Reforms of the eighteenth century tightened imperial control but also generated grievances among creole elites that would feed the independence movement.

The struggle for independence began with the priest Miguel Hidalgo's call to arms at Dolores in September 1810 and was completed under Agustin de Iturbide in 1821. After a brief monarchy, Mexico became a federal republic in 1824, but the early national period was marked by chronic instability, the loss of Texas in 1836, and the catastrophic war with the United States of 1846 to 1848, which ceded roughly half of national territory under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. The liberal Reforma of Benito Juarez and the French Intervention that installed Maximilian of Habsburg as emperor from 1864 to 1867 deepened these tensions. The long Porfiriato of Porfirio Diaz, lasting from 1876 to 1911, brought economic modernisation alongside authoritarian rule and rural dispossession.

The Mexican Revolution of 1910 to 1920, fought among factions led by figures including Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata, Pancho Villa, and Venustiano Carranza, produced the Constitution of 1917, a landmark document on labour rights, land reform, and state ownership of subsoil resources. The political settlement that followed coalesced in 1929 around what became the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which governed without interruption for the rest of the century. Lazaro Cardenas nationalised the oil industry in 1938, and successive administrations pursued import-substitution industrialisation until debt and currency crises in the 1980s prompted a turn toward liberalisation, culminating in the North American Free Trade Agreement of 1994.

Democratic transition matured with the 2000 election of Vicente Fox of the National Action Party, ending seventy-one years of single-party rule. Subsequent administrations contended with sustained drug-related violence following the militarised security strategy launched in 2006, while alternation between major parties became routine. Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of the Morena movement won the presidency in 2018, and Claudia Sheinbaum, also of Morena, took office in October 2024 as the country's first elected woman president. Mexico today is a federal presidential republic of thirty-two states, governed under the 1917 Constitution, with a bicameral Congress comprising the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate.