Organizations, Geopolitics, and Transnational Capital: The Creation of the Bahía De Banderas Trust (FIBBA) in Mexico

Considering the context of the global economic integration of world systems and the (inter)dependence of peripheral countries in relation to the accelerated productive processes of central economies, we analyze the role of the Bahía de Banderas Trust (FIBBA) as an organizational and legal mechanism driving a major socioeconomic change in Mexico between 1970 and 1990, from agriculture to tourism. A trialectic morphogenetic analysis was employed, using organizational sociology, geopolitics, and transnational capital, to argue that FIBBA was an organizational mechanism deliberately created by the State, acting in a geopolitical level, through the facilitation of sale of communal lands to private companies—initially domestic, but later foreign—as a means of promoting economic and productive “modernization”, resulting in a transnational economic field.

New Institutionalism perspective, particularly focused on the institutional work, allied to the Critical Realist Evaluation, were used to demonstrate how the creation of the trust catalyzed institutional change by the State, enabling the privatization of communal lands, thus fostering the country’s integration into the global economy. Methodologically, the research adopts a historical-documentary approach, combining the analysis of historical, legal, statistical and qualitative data (interviews and direct observation) from both the municipality and FIBBA, to assess its impact on urbanization and land control.

The findings indicate that FIBBA significantly transformed Bahía de Banderas by shifting economic activity from agriculture to tourism, which attracted foreign capital and established tourism as a key economic driver. In conclusion, while FIBBA played a strategic role in modernizing the region and attracting investment, successfully integrating Mexico into the global economic system, through the tourism sector, it did so in a subordinate role, at the expense of increasing dependence on transnational capital and people disempowerment. This transformation also resulted in the dispossession of ejidatarios and disproportionately benefited large international corporations.

[Acknowledgments to CNPq for grants 403114/2022-5 and 422153/2021-4]