Mexico was not a dictatorship, but it was a non-democratic one-party state until the late 20th century.

Ironically you just loosely described a dictatorship, a democratically “elected” single party government.

https://www.britannica.com/topic/dictatorship

> Dictatorship, form of government in which one person or a small group possesses absolute power without effective constitutional limitations.

No, this isn't what I was describing, and isn't the same thing as a one-party state. There were important limitations on central power that were respected throughout the entire period of PRI rule; notably the restriction that a president couldn't serve for more than one term, which since the Mexican Revolution has never been broken.

"Dictatorship" to "liberal democracy" is a spectrum, and Mexico for most of the 20th century was not at either of the endpoints.

> Critical to this essay is Joseph and Buchenau’s interpretation of the post-1940 period vis-à-vis the other works under review. Using a term coined by Mario Vargas Llosa in 1990, they describe a “perfect dictatorship” between 1940 and 1968: a one-party system with the appearance of democracy that sustained regular elections and avoided military coups and social upheavals. In the reorganization that became the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) in 1946, the party removed the army from formal political power. The state/party emphasized securing dominance with loyalty, order, and representation of PRI sectors in local elections. The latter required central government reliance on local strongmen and their minions, effective political and cultural brokers. [0]

> The public split encouraged voices from the right and left. Add to this political contention the increasingly visible contradictions: uneven benefits of economic growth, population explosion creating pressure on the land and migration to cities, growing unemployment and inflation. For Buchenau and Joseph, the students rebelling in Mexico City in 1968 represent a coming-together of these critical contradictions: they demanded the rule of law, freedom from repression, and social justice. [0]

I’m definitely not an expert in Mexican history. But that to me sounds an awful lot like a typical dictatorship, and a bad one at that. Otherwise, people wouldn’t push back.

[0] https://larrlasa.org/articles/10.25222/larr.294/