Searching for Mexican Sovereignty in the Age of Globalization: A Discourse Analysis of Mexico's 2006 Presidential Election.

Abstract: The 2006 presidential election in Mexico came down to a battle between Harvard-educated technocrat Felipe Calderón and populist indigenous rights activist Andrés Manuel López Obrador. Through discourse analysis of news articles and interviews with journalists as well as a straightforward quantitative analysis of Mexican newspaper coverage of the election, Mexican media were found to acquiesce to globalization and U.S. hegemony. Pressures against Mexican sovereignty from other nations and from within Mexico were examined. Several key sovereignty issues were identified where they emerged through an analysis of the election agenda in several nationally distributed newspapers. A textual analysis of news stories describes threats to Mexican sovereignty on economic and political fronts, but those stories were relatively rare. In-depth interviews revealed Mexico's media elites largely accept globalization as a given, and nationalism is not a driving factor in Mexican politics today. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]