The new middle class should, theory, have spent its money to furnish the demand on which indigenous Mexican industry would spring up. But would Lne capital come to finance the new industry? And would the access to markets come trom?
The PRI used the time-honoured Western bankers' prescription:
use attract grants and cheaper labour.
•ocasallls 'agribusiness': LOWLIN cash-crop there swollen slums furnished endless cheap labour for gigantic Volkswagen and Renault plants.
claim cents in every dollar of oil salco Sixty per of foreign trade goes to serVICE these leeches. Paradoxically, the very thing which attracted the new industries to Mexico cheap labour - meant that the demand for goods within Mexico could sustain the new expansion.
Slump While the middle classes darted around the city's eight lane highways their second-hand Volkswagons, the workers, shantydwellers and agricultural workers were lucky to find their next meal. The economy was based on foreign de mand for consumer products made cheap labour by foreign multinationals. Mexico failed to escape the iron grip of AN ARTITIO IMF conditions for renewed credit. Nor, indeed, do the bankers really fear that What terrifies them the prospect imposing auster measures, at the behest of the USA's rhetoric about 'national independence'.
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Mexico will not pay up. Rhetoric