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Every six years, Mexico goes through an extended period of political paroxysm called presidential elections. Campaigns hijack the routines of normal public life, the media are monothematic, political propaganda litters the streets of large cities and remote villages.

In a nation whose history has been marked by caudillos and defined by seventy-one years of one-party rule, presidential elections determine the political future. I've witnessed and written on five of them so far. In 1988, when the vote count showed a clear tendency toward victory for center-left candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the computer system "crashed," interrupting the vote count and enabling the political system to install yet another candidate of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). While in office, the neoliberal reformer Carlos Salinas de Gortari faced two contradictory events that convulsed the nation on the same day—the country's entry into NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, and the launching of an indigenous armed uprising.

In 2012, the results were in many ways worse for the majority -- eighteen years after NAFTA, Mexico is ranked second in inequality by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, there are millions more people living in poverty, workers' buying power has decreased, and the nation faces severe environmental problems. The PAN, whose candidate -- Josefina Vazquez Mota -- received only 26 percent of the vote, paid the price for the poor economic situation, party divisions, and the disaster of the Calderon-led war on drugs. Since Calderon launched the war in December of 2006, at least sixty thousand people have been murdered in drug-war-related homicides. Adapted from the source document.

Las movilizaciones de las costureras en la Ciudad de Mexico despues de los terremotos del 19 y 20 de septiembre de 1985, y el subsecuente registro del sindicato "19 de Septiembre", conmociono al mundo entero al poner en evidencia las dificiles condiciones de trabajo en las que vivian las costureras. Grupos de feministas, sindicalistas, religiosos y organizaciones no-gubernamentales de muchos paises encontraron en la sorprendente lucha de las costureras mexicanas un ejemplo estelar de la capacidad de las trabajadoras para organizarse en la defensa de sus derechos

Throughout Latin America, the nature and location of power have shifted rapidly, in large part due to the emergence of new "shadow powers." These power groups act beyond institutional and legal frameworks and yet also interact with them. They operate clandestinely and yet openly control and rule in large swaths of national territory. Our capacity to adequately define them and their realms of activity is limited, and yet their effects on daily life can be huge. The model of the state fighting to eliminate the challenge posed by these powers is inadequate, as we see increasing alliances between elements of the state and shadow powers. Applying a feminist analysis of power, this article explores these contradictions in the case of Mexico, where a volatile mix of organized crime, government corruption, and legal and illegal economic interests have changed the map of power and led to conflicts. It focuses on the new dynamics of power and citizen responses to resist the imposition of illegitimate power and eliminate all forms of violence, with an emphasis on violence against women, which rises considerably in the context of shadow powers.