Social Movements in the Mexico City Airport Controversy: Globalization, Democracy, and the Power of Distance

How did a relatively small group of uneducated peasants organize a movement to halt a huge national project to build a showcase airport outside Mexico City? This article applies the power of distance model, an analytic perspective for understanding social movement origins and successes based on an understanding of state-society relations, to the mobilization by indigenous peasants against the proposed Texcoco airport. The power of distance perspective focuses on relative distance or closeness of relations between the state and its citizens. Our findings indicate that, despite democratization in Mexico, the distance between local peasants and the newly elected Fox administration was widened by its neoliberal, globalizing focus, which partly explains the escalation of the anti-airport mobilization. On another dimension, peasants were able to bridge the distance between them and global human-rights networks using an indigenous rights frame and global communications media to bring new resources to bear and eventually force the Fox administration to withdraw the airport proposal.