Mexico

Mexico, the United Mexican States, has been North America's southern republic since 1821, when the Plan of Iguala ended three centuries of Spanish rule. Agustín de Iturbide's First Mexican Empire lasted barely a year before collapsing into a republic that spent its first decades losing ground: Texas broke away in 1836, and defeat in the Mexican-American War of 1846–48 stripped away half the national territory, from California to New Mexico. Benito Juárez's Liberals then wrote the Reform laws, survived the French Intervention and Maximilian's imported empire of 1864–67, and restored the republic. Porfirio Díaz imposed order from 1876 to 1911 — railways, mines, foreign capital — until revolution exploded: Madero, Zapata, Villa and Carranza tore the old regime down between 1910 and 1920, and the Constitution of 1917 promised land, labor and oil to the nation. The PRI ruled on that inheritance for 71 years, through the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre and the 1985 earthquake, signing NAFTA in 1994. The opposition finally won the presidency in 2000; since then democracy has endured alongside a grinding drug war that has killed hundreds of thousands.