Spain and England colonized the Americas in very different ways. That led to different cultural values, which led to different constitutions. Mexico has had to update and rewrite the Constitution several times since the first one in 1824, because that one was a disaster. So let’s talk about how that constitution came to life.  

Napoleon invaded Spain in 1808, and sent the nation into a crisis. In September of that year King Ferdinand was captured, and he abdicated the throne. In response to this, several Spanish administrators declared themselves the new government, basically a government in resistance to the French. They formed a parliament that produced the Cadiz Constitution in 1812, which called for equality under the law, and a more democratic legal system.

Now the rulers of Latin America had to decide how to respond to this. They had been loyal to the Spanish Crown, which had put them in the positions they were in. But now Spain was preoccupied with the invasion, and so the Latin American rulers were given a little more space to make their own rules.

Independence and The Constitution

But Spain wasn’t totally distracted. A wave of independence spread over Latin America. The first movement was in La Paz, Bolivia in 1809. Spain sent troops from Peru to crush that one.

The Mexican response to the Spanish crisis was complicated by a movement in 1810 led by a priest called Miguel Hidalgo. Hidalgo and his men sacked the city of Guanajuato and then started killing every white person they could find. The line between class warfare and ethnic cleansing totally disappeared. Mexico’s elite at that time was largely white, and as they watched that little example of popular participation in local politics, they remembered the Cadiz Constitution, which called for even more popular participation. They could never embrace that kind of document.

So Mexico’s elite stayed loyal to the Spanish Crown. In 1815 Napoleon’s empire collapsed and King Ferdinand took the throne again. But he now faced mutinies and was forced to recognize the Cadiz Constitution as well as the parliament that had written it. The parliament was now becoming more radical and was calling for the abolition of slavery.

The Mexican elites watched this as well. They no longer had an ally in the Spanish Crown, so they decided independence was a better fate than adopting the Cadiz Constitution.

Those elites wanted Mexico to become its own independent constitutional monarchy. The man who led their independence movement decided that he should be the emperor. And he wasted no time giving himself dictatorial powers. He didn’t last long, but the cycle of dictatorship, coup, dictatorship, coup haunted Mexico for about a hundred years.

During those hundred years Mexico endured the disastrous misrule of Antonio Lopez de Santa Ana, the guy who attacked The Alamo and lost the Mexican-American War.

The extreme political instability in Mexico during the 1800s was, obviously, disastrous. Mexico lost about half of its territory during this period, including basically all of the American southwest.

Since the arrival of the Spanish, the Mexican elite had structured their society entirely around slave labor and monopolies, AKA extractive economic institutions.

So after hundreds of years of those extractive policies, by the time the Industrial Revolution rolled around, Mexico was in no place to take advantage of it.

In the United States in the early 1900s, people from most walks of life could get a patent to develop products. Once you had a patent, you could get a loan from a bank to start a business. By 1914 there were almost 28,000 banks in the U.S., and the competition was fierce. In Mexico at that same time, there were about 40 banks, and no competition among them, meaning there was no incentive for a bank to provide a better service than the bank down the street. Since there was no competition, t