Light and Power: The Political Economy of Electricity in Mexico (c. 1943-c. 1965)

This dissertation analyzes the political, economic, and financial transformations of Mexico’s power industry during the height of the Mexican miracle, arguing that electricity was both a condition and a vehicle of mid‑century industrialization and state‑building. Centering firms -private and public- as primary actors, it reframes postwar Mexican politics through the lens of state-capital relations, and situates Mexico’s electrification within global circuits of capital, technology, and multilateral development.

The study advances five linked claims. First, electricity became a general condition of industrial production: cheap, reliable power underwrote the rapid expansion of modern manufacturing between the 1940s and early 1960s. Second, Mexico’s early engagement with Bretton Woods institutions -especially World Bank lending to the power sector -constituted a formative moment in the global invention of “development.” Mexico functioned as a laboratory where Bank practices and priorities were first attempted. Third, interventions by International Financial Institutions (IFIs) sought not only to finance physical infrastructure but to legally and institutionally insulate private utilities to attract foreign capital. In Mexico, the first part of the agenda was successful, but the second was not, with electricity remaining painfully intertwined with politics. Fourth, an internal antagonism within the Bretton Woods agenda -between infrastructure buildout (development) and finance, understood as the suitability of said infrastructure to attract private investment making projects attractive to private finance- structured policy debates and outcomes in Mexico’s power sector. Fifth, Mexico’s developmental project was underpinned by two exhaust conduits: debt (private, sovereign, and para‑statal borrowing to finance infrastructural expansion) and nature (the construction of ever-larger dams and the burning of lead-heavy fuel oils), externalizing ecological and fiscal costs into the future.

Structured in five substantive chapters, the dissertation traces: (1) Mexico’s attempt to secure a developmental mandate at Bretton Woods, leading to the reorientation of its development strategy to pursue a bold industrial policy centered on electrification under Miguel Alemán’s presidency (1943-1949). Chapters 2 and 3 trace Mexico’s most important private-owned company, the Belgian-owned Mexican Light and Power. The World Bank’s first power loans (1948–1954), their technical designs, conditionalities, and the labor and political tensions these created are discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 examines the origins of “stabilizing development” and a budding financialization from the vantage point of the power industry. Companies attempted to tap foreign and domestic public capital markets between 1954 and 1960, while remaining dependent on government tax subsidies and soft credit for their profitability. In Chapter 4 the formation of an “industrial contract” whereby cheap, reliable electricity was supplied to large industry through preferential pricing and state supports is examined, providing in passing the first thorough examination of Mexico’s postwar industrial world. Chapter 5 analyzes the 1960 nationalization of the power industry. Taking the story forward to 1965, it examines the partial failure to resolve the sector’s structural fiscal problems under government ownership.

Empirically grounded in extensive archival research across some twenty‑five archives in four countries, the dissertation brings corporate records (Sofina, Mexlight), Mexican governmental files, and sources from IFIs into conversation. Methodologically it offers a business‑centered political economy of infrastructure, showing how corporate strategies, state fiscal choices, international finance, unions, and industrial consumers produced Mexico’s electrification and its contradictions. Energetically pursued by government officials and business leaders, cheap electricity was at the heart of a modern, industrial Mexico. Its broader fiscal and environmental costs, however, were never dealt with.