Not If but How

This chapter explains early and extreme over-compliance in Mexico. In the 1980s, even while transforming much of the country’s economic strategy, the Executive remained cautious with regard to pharmaceutical patenting. Yet by the end of the decade, external pressures and the promise of a bilateral trade agreement with the United States transformed the Executive’s preferences. The analysis reveals how economic liberalization in the late 1980s and the process of negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement weakened the national pharmaceutical sector both economically and politically, and how Mexico’s export profile and the opportunities presented by a new trade agreement with the United States helped the transnational sector widen the coalition for over-compliance. Examination of the legislative process by which Mexico adopted pharmaceutical patents in 1991 illustrates these stark coalitional asymmetries; we observe a defensive coalition stripped of the will to fight and an expansive and energized coalition for over-compliance.