Mexico

• 1. Introduction

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  Mexico domesticated maize, the tomato, and beans, three plants that would feed much of the world. Human presence on this land reaches back at least to 8,000 BC, and the earliest stone tool chips found in the Valley of Mexico date to roughly 10,000 years ago. The country covers 1,972,550 square kilometers, the thirteenth-largest land area on Earth, and holds a population exceeding 134 million as of 2026. It is home to the largest number of native Spanish speakers anywhere. Officially it is the United Mexican States, a federal republic that borders the United States to the north and Guatemala and Belize to the southeast. How did a place that cradled the Olmecs, the Maya, and the Aztecs become a colony, lose half its territory, and then build the fifteenth-largest economy in the world? What forces shaped a nation that ranks fifth in natural biodiversity yet has buried more than 120,000 people in a war against drug syndicates? Those questions run through everything that follows.

• 2. Cradle Of Civilization

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  Around 5000 BC, an agricultural surplus from maize, tomato, and beans allowed paleo-Indian hunter-gatherers to settle into sedentary villages. Mesoamerica is counted among the six independent cradles of civilization, and from these Mexican cultures spread a vigesimal numeric system based on twenty, along with religious traditions and architectural complexes. The Olmec culture, the earliest complex civilization, flourished on the Gulf Coast from around 1500 BC, its cultural traits diffusing into Chiapas, Oaxaca, and the Valley of Mexico. The first true Mesoamerican writing systems emerged in the Epi-Olmec and Zapotec cultures, reaching their height in the Classic Maya Hieroglyphic script. Teotihuacan, with a population above 150,000, built some of the largest pyramidal structures in the pre-Columbian Americas before its collapse around 600 AD. Toward the end of the post-Classic period, the Aztecs established an empire based in Tenochtitlan, modern Mexico City, extending from central Mexico to Guatemala. Their language, Nahuatl, gave the country its name: Mexihko described the heartland of the Aztec Empire, and its people were the Mexica.

• 3. Three Centuries Of New Spain

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  The Spanish Empire first learned of Mexico during the Juan de Grijalva expedition of 1518. The conquest of the Aztec Empire began in 1519 when Hernan Cortes founded Veracruz, and the 1521 capture of Tenochtitlan opened a 300-year colonial era under the name Nueva Espana. Two things made the territory a jewel of the empire: large, hierarchically organized Mesoamerican populations that rendered tribute and labor, and the discovery of silver deposits in the north. The crown ruled through two pillars, State and Church. In 1535 it created the Viceroyalty of New Spain, while the Diocese of Mexico, founded in 1530, was elevated to an archdiocese in 1546. Only two ports were open to foreign trade: Veracruz on the Atlantic, connecting to Spain, and Acapulco on the Pacific, connecting to the Philippines. Pirates from England, France, and the Netherlands threatened both, with the Sack of Campeche in 1663 and an attack on Veracruz in 1683. After Britain seized Havana and Manila in 1762 during the Seven Years' War, the crown built a standing military and expanded northern presidios and missions into Alta California. The volatility of the urban poor surfaced in the 1692 riot over the price of maize, when crowds attacked the viceregal palace and the archbishop's residence.

• 4. Forging A Nation

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  On the 16th of September each year, Mexico marks the Cry of Dolores, when in 1810 the secular priest Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla declared against bad government in Dolores, Guanajuato. Hidalgo and some of his soldiers were executed by firing squad in 1811. The first 35 years of independence brought military coups, foreign invasions, and conflict between Conservatives and Liberals. Agustin de Iturbide, a former Royal Army general, was declared Emperor Agustin I when no European royal would take the throne, but army officers overthrew him in the Plan of Casa Mata. The First Mexican Republic was established in 1824, and former insurgent general Guadalupe Victoria became its first president. Vicente Guerrero, an Afro-Mexican who signed the Plan of Iguala, became president in 1829 and abolished slavery during his term, before being judicially murdered after a coup by his Conservative vice president Anastasio Bustamante. General Antonio Lopez de Santa Anna rose as a national hero and dominated politics for the next 25 years. When he suspended the 1824 constitution in 1835 and promulgated the Seven Laws, civil war spread and three regions declared independence: the Republic of Texas, the Republic of the Rio Grande, and the Republic of Yucatan. The largest blow came with the United States invasion of 1846 in the Mexican-American War, sealed by the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which stripped away much of the northern territory.

• 5. Reform And Empire

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  La Reforma, led by liberals after Santa Anna's overthrow, produced the Constitution of 1857. It separated Church and State, stripped the Church and military of their fueros, and mandated the sale of Church-owned property and indigenous community lands. Conservatives revolted, touching off the Reform War between 1858 and 1861. Defeated on the battlefield, Conservatives asked Emperor Napoleon III to install a European monarch, and the French Army placed Maximilian Habsburg on a newly established throne. The Liberal Republic under Benito Juarez survived as a government in internal exile until the end of the American Civil War in 1865, when the United States began aiding it. The French withdrew their support, and Republican forces executed Maximilian. Juarez returned as president of the Restored Republic and died in office in 1872. His successor Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada was driven into exile when Porfirio Diaz, a hero of the Cinco de Mayo, rebelled under the Plan of Tuxtepec. Diaz then ruled for 35 years, from 1876 to 1911, a period of order and progress marked by foreign investment, an expanded rail network, and a circle of advisors known as the cientificos, the scientists, who favored positivism and scientific method over theology. His government forcibly relocated the Yaqui to Yucatan and Oaxaca. In an interview, Diaz said he would not run in the 1910 election, when he would be 80, setting off a frenzy of activity that lifted the unlikely candidacy of Francisco I. Madero.

• 6. The Wind That Swept Mexico

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  The Mexican Revolution has been called the wind that swept Mexico, a decade-long conflict that began with uprisings after the fraudulent 1910 election. Diaz resigned in May 1911, and Madero was democratically elected that fall. In February 1913 a military coup overthrew Madero with United States support, and agents of Federal Army General Victoriano Huerta murdered him. When Woodrow Wilson was inaugurated in March 1913, he refused to recognize Huerta and allowed arms sales to the Constitutionalists, later ordering troops to occupy Veracruz in 1914. The Constitutional Army under Venustiano Carranza, governor of Coahuila, and a southern peasant army under Emiliano Zapata defeated the Federal Army in 1914. The victorious coalition then splintered. Carranza's best general, Alvaro Obregon, defeated Pancho Villa at the Battle of Celaya in 1915. After Villa raided Columbus, New Mexico, the United States sent 10,000 troops in a failed attempt to capture him. Germany sent a coded telegram in 1917 to incite war between the United States and Mexico, promising the return of lost territory, but Mexico stayed neutral. The revolutionary war killed 900,000 out of a population of 15 million. Carranza had Zapata assassinated in 1919, then was himself overthrown under the Plan of Agua Prieta. The Constitution of 1917, which empowered the government to expropriate resources and strengthened anticlerical provisions, remains the governing document of Mexico.

• 7. The Perfect Dictatorship

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  Plutarco Elias Calles, unable to become president again after the 1928 assassination of president-elect Obregon, founded the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1929 to manage succession. Workers, peasants, office workers, and briefly even the army were folded in as sectors of the single party that would dominate the rest of the century. Calles remained the key politician during the Maximato, from 1929 to 1934, until Lazaro Cardenas expelled him and carried out the Mexican oil expropriation of 1938, which nationalized a foreign oil company and created the state-owned Pemex. From 1946, under the first civilian president Miguel Aleman, came the Mexican miracle of industrialization and urbanization, and the Green Revolution itself began in the Yaqui Valley. When Mexico hosted the 1968 Summer Olympics, student unrest culminated in the Tlatelolco Massacre, which killed between 300 and 800 protesters. The novelist Mario Vargas Llosa in 1990 called the PRI the perfect dictatorship. President Carlos Salinas de Gortari, who took office after the disputed 1988 election, pursued neoliberal reforms ending with the North American Free Trade Agreement on the 1st of January 1994. That same day, the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose in armed rebellion in Chiapas. After 71 years of rule, the PRI finally lost the 2000 presidential election to Vicente Fox of the National Action Party.

• 8. A Land Of Many Climates

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  Mexico is one of 17 megadiverse countries, home to 10 to 12 percent of the world's biodiversity with over 200,000 species. It ranks first in reptile diversity with 707 known species and second in mammals with 438. The Tropic of Cancer divides the country into temperate and tropical zones, giving it one of the world's most diverse weather systems. Northern cities like Monterrey, Hermosillo, and Mexicali reach 40 degrees Celsius in summer, while the Sonoran Desert climbs past 50. The Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt holds the highest peaks, including Pico de Orizaba at 5,700 meters and Popocatepetl at 5,462 meters. On the Yucatan peninsula lies the Chicxulub crater, whose impactor scientific consensus links to the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event. Today these landscapes face climate change, with rising temperatures and altered rainfall threatening crops including maize and coffee. The native culinary inheritance of the land, maize and tomato and beans and chocolate and vanilla and a great variety of chiles like the habanero and jalapeno, is one Mexico still gives the world, a thread that runs straight back to the villages that first planted these seeds around 5000 BC.