Institutional Revolutionary Party

The Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), known in Spanish as Partido Revolucionario Institucional, held corrupt political control over Mexico until the reforms of 2000. Its long dominance is invoked to explain why Nogales, Sonora, despite sharing a border, landscape, and much of its population’s cultural background with Nogales, Arizona, had markedly poorer public services, greater insecurity, and fewer economic opportunities. The party’s role in the book is therefore not simply as a name in Mexico’s political history: it anchors a comparison of how political arrangements become visible in ordinary life.

Rule and political change

Until the political reforms of 2000, Nogales, Sonora, like the rest of Mexico, was under the Institutional Revolutionary Party’s corrupt control. The contrast with its northern neighbor was not presented as a consequence of geography or of fundamentally different people. The two cities occupy the same area, and their inhabitants share ancestors, food, and music. Rather, their divergent conditions are tied to different political and institutional histories.

The reform date marks a transition from the PRI’s established control, though the account does not describe the reforms’ specific provisions or their immediate effects. It situates the party’s rule as the political background against which democracy in Nogales, Sonora, was still a recent experience.

The party’s significance in Nogales

South of the border, the average household income in Nogales, Sonora, was about one-third of that in Nogales, Arizona. Many adults lacked a high-school degree, many teenagers were out of school, and mothers faced high infant mortality. Poor sanitation and inadequate health care—not a different disease environment—helped account for shorter lives. Roads and public amenities were also poorer, while crime and the difficulty of obtaining permissions made opening a business risky.

The account connects these circumstances to political corruption and ineptitude that residents encountered in daily life. Its comparison makes the party’s dominance consequential at street level: the political difference between two closely neighboring communities corresponded to differences in health, public infrastructure, education, safety, and the practical ability to establish a business. The evidence does not attribute each hardship to a particular party decision, but places PRI rule within the institutional contrast used to explain them.

Institutional context and limits of the account

The book’s wider framework distinguishes inclusive political institutions, in which power is sufficiently pluralistic and centralized to support law and public services, from extractive arrangements that concentrate power and restrict opportunity. It argues that institutional differences can accumulate gradually and that critical junctures may redirect societies’ paths. The Mexican reforms of 2000 are identified as a political change, but the discussion of the PRI does not by itself establish the reforms’ later results or specify how the party’s internal organization operated.

The comparison also clarifies what the account rules out: the border did not separate different climates, geographies, disease patterns, or wholly distinct populations. Instead, it directs attention to political institutions as a major source of divergent outcomes between the two Nogaleses. The PRI thus functions as a concrete reference point in an argument about the persistence of political arrangements and the consequences of changing them.