1. Lázaro Cárdenas and his Legacy
Modern Mexico
Monday 22 February 2010

2. Early 1930s: the end of the Revolution ?
Late 1920s until the mid 1930s, with general stalling of social reform, US “pilgrims” commentaries upon Mexico became much more critical and pessimistic.
Helen Delpar (in The Enormous Vogue) shows how US interest in Mexico shifted from social policies of the Revolution, to the cultural area - murals, music, film, etc.., where creativity was still evident.
Eyler Simpson (in The Ejido, Mexico’s Way Out ) observes how the stalling of reform coincided with the renewal of close relations with the US after the arrival of Dwight Morrow in September 1927.
In 1934, following Cardenas’s election to the Presidency as Calles’s preferred candidate, these perceptions swiftly changed

3. Eyler Simpson, The Ejido, Mexico’s Way Out 1937
“…coincident with Morrow’s presence in Mexico the life went out of the revolution…maybe the revolutionary movement had already run its course. On the other hand it may be that the kindly, sympathetic, well-intentioned, subtly flattering, former Morgan (Bank) partner, by trying to help Mexico put her house in order and to settle everything up in a ship-shape, businesslike fashion, succeeded in putting the breaks on the only real reform movement in the history of the country. It is difficult to conduct a revolution on book-keeping principles… ‘God save us from the friendship of the United States’…contains a deal of wisdom…”.

4. General Cardenas, during the Escobar rebellion, 1929

5. Lazaro Cardenas del Rio (1895-1970)
- From a small town (Jiquilpan, Michoacán) lower middle class class background, left school at eleven, set upon becoming a school teacher until joining the revolution Huerta Coup in Became a General.
- loyalty of Calles was rewarded with state governorship of Michoacán : showed agrarian and socialist sympathies, admired for keeping much of state out of the Cristero War and curtailing repression following the arreglos.
- chosen as PNR presidential candidate by Calles who expected to retain overall control, as he had done over three predecessors during the “Maximato”...
- but Mexico was about to enter a six year crisis characterised by class polarisation: Cardenas responded by applying the labour and agrarian policies of the Revolution and transforming the personalist/caudillist PNR into the corporatist PRM
- the Mexico of 1940 differed markedly from Mexico of 1934

6. The Depression and popular expectations
Mexico’s foreign trade fell by 2/3 between
Gross Domestic Product declined by 16%
300,000 returnee migrants from the United States had to be re-accommodated in Mexico’s towns and villages
between million Mexican entered the US to work in agriculture, mining, the railroads and heavy industry (particularly steel).
see Paul Taylor, A Spanish Mexican Peasant Community Arandas in Jalisco, Mexico (1933),for first hand accounts of the experience of Mexican “Cristero” migrants in the US

7. Early 1930s: political drift
Although Calles nominally in charge, Maximato regimes were rent by internal factionalism and disagreement on how to respond to the Depression
CROM losing influence to more radical labour organisations: workers turned to CGOCM (General Confederation of Mexican Peasants and Workers) organised by Lombardo Toledano and to CSUM (Confederacion Sindical Unitaria de Mexico) by the Communist Party
PNR was intended to mediate conflicts between ruling class and popular sectors, yet had little control in most areas of the country

8. The Depression: Government Response
In spite of stalled reforms, legislation proceeded during the early 1930s:
1931 labour Article 123 was finally enacted and Boards of Conciliation and Arbitration set up.
1932, formerly excluded hacienda peons entitled to bid for ejidos through Article 27
1933, Socialist Education launched to encourage collectivist principles and combat religious fanaticism. (Strand’s “Redes” formed part of this crusade)
1933 Five Year Plan launched .

9. The Cacique, Abelardo Rodriguez Market, 1934

11. Cardenismo
-Cardenas still commands great affection among Mexicans of all classes.....
-his regime cited as proof that the Revolution once lived, even if later it died ....
- meaning of the Revolution is harder to fathom, accounting for “volcano”, “windstorm”, “ball”, analogies,..
- Cardenismo, by contrast, evokes a potent combination of radical educational reform, indigenismo, labour and agrarian reforms, in a context of heightened nationalism associated with the expropriation of the foreign owned oil companies, the railways, electrical utilities and telecommunications.....

12. Cardenas regime: periodisation
Oil expropriation in 1938, however, was a watershed
Dec 1934-April 1936 consolidation of progressive forces and defeat of Callistas....
April 1936-December 1937, highpoint of radical reform
, growth opposition and resurgence of Conservatives within PRM

13. 1938 Oil expropriation

14. 1938 Oil expropriation

15. Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy ?”*
Knight asks:
How radical ? A real break with Sonoran tradition of top down reform ?
How strong was the regime ? Was it up to achieving its goals and facing resistance ?
What were its achievements and legacy ?
*Journal of Latin American Studies 26, 1, 1994,

16. Cardenismo: Marxists/Revisionists
Revisionist views:
Marxists:
- however radical in intent, Cardenas’s reforms laid the foundation for the “institutionalised revolution” (the PRI) which became after 1940 an engine for capitalist development and accumulation.
- under Cardenas popular movements were co-opted and subordinated to the state.
- the redistribution of wealth resulting from agrarian reform and labour gains deepened the market for the benefit of capital accumulation.
See example of Marxist approach in Mexico Reader:
Arturo Anguiano “Cardenas and the Masses”,

17. Arturo Anguiano “Cardenas and the Masses”, 457-460
“The new governing forces headed by Lázaro Cardenas knew that the class struggle was bound to worsen. They therefore considered it necessary to guide the mass movement of workers and peasants by winning their support and orienting their struggles so as to strengthen the state, giving it power that it could use to foment the country’s industrial development...”

18. Cardenismo: statists Statists:
- see as Mexico’s entry into mass politics (política de masas)
- agree that masses were subordinated to the state but there is debate over the relative autonomy of the state (ie autonomy from “capitalism”)
- most credit Cardenas with an ingenious feat of durable state building, after the personalism, caudillismo, bossism and corruption of the Calles period.
Arnaldo Cordoba, La política de masas del cardenismo. (1974) :
“El Pueblo se organizaba y, a su vez, organizaba al Estado” “The People became organized and, at the same time, organised the state”
Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton, 1982)
also favours a view of relative autonomy

19. Cardenismo: statists
Balancing top-down, bottom-up factors, Warwick PhD, David (Dawn) Raby, sees Cardenismo as period of corporatism with selective mobilisation rather than mass mobilisation of itself.
Cardenas encouraged the population to take the initiative, leaving him to decide, on pragmatic grounds (depending on the balance of local, regional, national and international forces) who merited support
at first Cardenismo was an open-ended process....after 1938 foreign and domestic pressures cause radical policies to be reigned back..
Liisa North & David Raby, The Dynamics of Revolution and Counter-Revolution: Mexico under Cradenas, ”, Latin America Research Units Studies Vol.2, 1977

20. Cardenismo: statists
Raby sees Cardenas as “real author of Mexican presidentialism”.
Change from PNR to PRM in 1938 was not of form but substance
Cardenas responsible for the creation of “essentially totalitarian concept of government based on he identity of four concepts: nation, revolution, party and government”
“a mature corporate state, albeit a relatively mild one which avails itself of a populist and democratic ideology in order to legitimise its procedures”
- system cannot be understood in Liberal terms
David Raby, “Mexican political and Social development since 1920” Canadian Journal of Latin American Studies I, 1975, 24-45

21. Statists and other views
Cardenas seen as “a fox in a Franciscan habit” (“un zorro con sayal franciscano”)
others stress his autocratic role as the “amo y señor de Mexico” (the “ruler and lord of Mexico”), with the state becoming a “burgeoning leviathan”, “a juggernaut driven by a determined driver”...
Others stress Cardenismo’s radical content and transforming goals.....the negation of Callismo....
Adoldo Gilly, La Revolución Interumpida (1972), written in jail after the repression of 1968, sees Cardenismo as a genuinely radical second wave of Revolution.
This belief inspired “neo-cardenimso”, radical opposition to the PRI led by Lazaro Cardenas’s son Cuautemoc, head of the PRD from the late 1980s....

22. Knight’s view
Knight argues that Cardenas presided over “a genuinely radical movement promising substantial change” commanding “substantial popular support”.
But because of this radicalism, Cardenismo faced severe resistance from diverse sectors of Mexican society curtailing its freedom of manoevre and limiting its practical accomplishments
- concludes that Cardenismo was “less powerful, speedy, capable of following proposed route than supposed...more a jalopy than a juggernaut”

23. Agrarian Reform
Cardenas’s agrarian reform was “dramatic, large scale and contentious” (Knight)
particularly the expropriation of large scale commercial estates in La Laguna, Yucatan, Baja California, Sonora, Chiapas and Michoacan.
See Mexico Reader : Fernando Benitez “The Agrarian Reform in La Laguna” ,

24. Agrarian Reform
20,136,936 hectares between , 10.2% of land area, 379,680 has month, benefitting 776,000 ejidatarios in 11,000 communities
Ejidos comprised in
Un-irrigated land 13.4 % 47.4%
Irrigated land % 57.3 %
Total value of land 10.2 % 35.9 %

25. Agrarian Reform Ejidos Agricultural Production:
11% in % in 1940
Capital Investment
3.7 % in % in 1940

26. CNC rally in Irapuato (Guanajuato, 1936

27. Critique of Land Reform
Yet, Knight concludes, much of the agrarian reform, such as collectivisation of the henequen plantations of Yucatan and the cotton plantations of La Laguna, amounted to the “socialisation of losses”, much like the nationalisation of the “played out railway system” in 1937
See Fernando Benitez, “The Agrarian Reform in La Laguna”, in Mexico Reader
“On November 6, 1936, Cardenas arrived with a group on engineers and began to distribute lands. The landowners’ arrogance disappeared as if by a magic spell. The President made them see that if they used any violence, the government would arm the campesinos, and the landowners, fearful of losing everything, folded their cards and resigned themselves to the inevitable...”

28. Cardenista rally, La Laguna Coahuila, 1934

29. Critique of Land Reform
8 years later (1944) the condition of cotton workers had not improved, although no-one wanted to return to the old days. Benitez blamed corruption and managerial ineptitude:
“...Mexico’s problem is not the campesinos. They deeply felt themselves to be men and not the beasts of burden driven by the whims of Mr Purcell or the Tlahualillo Company. The problem, the great and tragic problem of the country, is that it was and still is set up by the educated people, the engineers, the bureaucrats, the rectors of national life. With their colonialist education, who hate the people and can only conceive of them as peons or servants”
Fernando Benitez, “The Agrarian Reform in La Laguna” (1987) , in Mexico Reader

30. Critique of Land Reform
In 1940 Cardenista bureaucrats were lampooned by the greatest novelist of the Revolution, Mariano Azuela, in Avanzada :
“They travel in Pullmans when there are no planes to transport them. Never did our old hacendados eat, dress, or live in such a princely manner as they....the masses have merely changed rulers”
Technocrats also much criticised by Eyler Simpson in The Ejido, Mexico Way Out (1937)

31. Limits of land reform, 1940
1940
60 % of peasants were still landless (See Mexico Reader: Juan Rulfo, “They Gave us Land”, )
600,000 expectant ejidatarios still awaiting land and credit
3493 ejidal credit societies benefitted ejidatarios, leaving 978,804 ejidatarios are still without credit
Credit bank officials were seen as the “nuevos amos” (“new bosses”) by Luis Cabrera who had drafted Article 27 of the 1917 Constitution
Collective ejidos in Yucatan and Torreon oversupplied with credit yet bankrupt
Decline of grain production , dependence upon imports of maize and wheat......

32. Small property fight back
Law allowed landowners to retain 150 hectares of best land (more if the spread it around family)
In 1938, the “Office of Small Property” was established...
certificates of exemption from expropriation began to be granted to landowners who could prove strategic use: land returned to 150 complainants by 1940
small-holders (rancheros) increased from to 143,587 in 1935 to 191,587 in 1940 forming the “Sindicato de Pequeños Agricultores”: Mexico’s future agricultural prosperity lay with this sector......

33. Repression of peasant unions after 1940: the case of Ruben Jaramillo
See account of the struggle for social justice of former Zapatista, Rubén Jaramillo, worker’s leader at Zacatepec sugar mill cooperative inaugurated by Cardenas in 1938
Jaramillo describes the constant intimidation of workers’ leaders in the mill complex after 1940.
May 1962 Jaramillo and family are killed by judicial police backed by army
Murder denounced by writer Carlos Fuentes, one of “several high profile episodes that darkened the reputation of the PRI in the post-war era”
“Struggles of a Campesino Leader”, in Mexico Reader

34. Industrial Workers
Collapse of CROM’s working class support by 1934: strikes had virtually disappeared between 1924 and 1933, general rank and file disillusion
: “sindical explosion” upon Cardenas taking office: 60 strikes within first month, strikes in 1935 not including wildcat strikes
- workers flock to join CTM (f.1935) under Vicente Lombardo Toledano and CNC (f.1936).
close alliance between Toledano and Cardenas until the Oil Expropriation in

35. Industrial Workers
growth of influence of CTM worries bosses and foreign interests
also the army, suspicious of Toledano idea of a workers’ militia. 100,000 armed milicianos in 1938 marched in Mexico City in 1939 in solidarity with Spanish Republicans

36. Vicente Lombardo Toledano (1894-1968)
CTM leader 1938
PPS leader 1966

37. Cardenas’s pragmatism : Oil expropriation & Social Security deferment
Faced with such labour mobilisation under Lombardo Toledano, Cardenas’s labour policy was pragmatic rather than doctrinaire...Oil workers struck in 1937, foreign companies were intransigent, Cardenas resolved to apply the law....
For short clip on expropriation:
Michel Dion, “The Political Origins of Social Security in Mexico during the Cardenas and Avila Camacho Administrations”, Mexican Studies, 21, 2005, 59-95, offers an interesting political explanation for why the launching of Mexico’s first system of Social Security came under the conservative Avila Camacho and not the radical Cardenas.

38. Cardenas & Labour: Case Study
Michael Snodgrass explores struggle of Monterrey steel workers taking on Nuevo Leon’s “Regiomontano” Industrialists’ cartel and their close allies in the state government
Workers’ struggled to be allowed to organise their own union and to affiliate to the CTM
Cardenas supported steel workers, revolutionary state thus gains a foothold in a powerful, conservative, industrialising northern state
*Michael Snodgrass, “‘We are all Mexicans here’: Workers, Patriotism and Union Struggles in Monterrey” in Vaughan and Lewis, eds., The Eagle and the Virgin pp

39. Capitalists fight back
business groups and Right fight back….form Confederacion de Camaras Nacionales de Comercio e Industria whose influential Carta Semanal (Weekly Letter) denounced:
the economic harm caused by the land reform,
unfair taxes (complained of tax exemption for workers’ cooperatives and not private companies),
excessive state intervention and price controls
1939 plan to tax excess profits,

40. Capitalists fight back
lack of capital for new enterprise when demand was growing rapidly (funds Nacional Financiera f. in 1932 went to inefficient and corrupt state enterprises)
Foreign capital flight (Oil expropriation caused foreign credit famine)
Pro-labour bias of Junta de Conciliacion y Arbitraje, strikes lasted too long
Petitions for guarantees to farmers, reduction in taxes, investment in roads and infrastructure but less meddling in production and distribution...
“it isn’t possible to redistribute wealth before creating it”

41. Capitalists fight back
Carta Semanal’s diagnosis becomes blueprint for Government policy after 1940 under Presidents Maximino Avila Camacho ( ) and Miguel Alaman ( )
In 1941 Toledano was removed from leading CTM, handed to Fidel Velázquez associated with corruption and conservatism until death in

42. Daniel Cosio Villegas “Mexico’s Crisis” (1947) in Mexico Reader
Stinging critique of demoralising effects on labour and capital of government’s pro-labour policies, leading after 1940 to systemic “charrismo” (labour bossism) and violence..
“The Mexican labor movement has come to depend so completely on protection and support from official sources that it has been transformed into a mere appendage to the government, whose every step it follows: good, doubtful and frankly censurable” 42

43. Cardenismo in the provinces: Sierra Juarez, Oaxaca
Benjamin Smith, “ ‘Defending our Beautiful Freedom’: State Formation and Local Autonomy in Oaxaca, ”, Mexican Studies, 23, 1, 2007,
Explores Cardenas’s positive response to local initiative: federal support enables progressive young village Democrats – school teachers - in the Sierra Juarez of Oaxaca to form their own regional confederation, hitherto blocked by conservative village elders…..

44. Cardenismo in the provinces: Chiapas Central Highlands
Stephen Lewis, “A Window into the Recent Past in Chiapas: Federal Education and Indigenismo in the Highlands, ” The Journal of Latin American Anthropology Vol.6, No.1, 2001, 59-83,
Explores Cardenas’s support for similar initiatives in the Ttzotzil Highlands of Chiapas to establish a network of Indian schools, free of mestizo control….some progress made until 1940 when the programme is rolled back.

45. Community School, El Paso del Coyote, 1934

46. Federal Rural School, 1942

47. Cardenismo in the provinces: Yaquis of Sonora and Nahuas of the Sierra de Puebla
Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants and Schools in Mexico,
documents similar Cardenista responsiveness to local popular pressures from the Yaquis pueblos in Sonora, for return of their land and requests for the removal of non-Yaqui outsiders acting as school teachers.
In the Sierra de Puebla, Cardenismo builds on 19th C tradition of popular Liberalism, Xochiapulco become a regional centre for indigenous education…..

48. Cardenismo in retreat 1938-40
Economic crisis: drop in foreign investment, increased strikes,
Railways in a state of collapse, handed over to workers (70,000) in 1938, 12 April 1939 Guadalajara-Laredo trains collided, 50 deaths....
Oil industry: old machinery, shortage of parts from vengeful oil companies, increased wages and falling production
Investment in mining also frozen by fear of nationalisation and labour demands

49. Cardenismo in retreat 1938-40
: Inflation increased 50 % and real wages dropped 21 %
Inflation 26 % in 1936 and 8-9 % pa until 1939
Underlying problem was Cardenas’s decision to fund social reforms through financial deficits….
Growth of middle class opposition offended by Socialist Education and inflation….
Proto-Fascist Sinarquista movement attracts 100,000 into street violence in ….

50. The Last Caudillo: Saturnino Cedillo
April 1938, rebellion of Saturnino Cedillo, Cardenas’s Minister of Agriculture, since 1925 agrarista chieftain of San Luis Potosi since (who had help Calles suppres the Cristero uprising)
Cedillo suspected of receiving fiancial backing from foreign oil companies
Suppressed by Air Force (See Graham Greene, The Lawless Roads)
Mexico’s last Caudillo rebellion

51. Saturnino Cedillo rebellion, 1938

52. Cedillo rebellion

53. Lazaro Cardenas’s visit to San Luis Potosi, 1938

54. Election of 1940
Business and Church support General Juan Andreu Almazan, former Zapatista, road-building millionaire (Catalan father and mother claimed descent from Moctezuma I) from Guerrero
Left support Francisco Mujica, agrarian radical from Michoacan
Cardenas selects Conservative General, Manuel Avila Camacho, from Puebla

55. 1940 Election
Cardenas explained why he chose not to support Francisco Mujica candidacy, a radical agrarian from his own state:
“El señor general Múgica, mi muy querido amigo, era un radical ampliamente conocido. Habíamos sorteado una guerra civil y soportábamos, a consecuencia de la expropiación petrolera, una presión internacional terrible. ¿Para qué un radical?”

56. Manuel Avila Camacho, 1940-46 Two key points in his acceptance speech:
“Soy creyente” (“I am a believer”) : music for Catholic after 30 yrs of oficial anticleriaclism
“No hay que matar la gallina de los huevos de oro” (“You shouldn’t kill the goose that lays golden eggs”): Mexican capitalism should be nurtured not punished.
Mexico entered a different phase…….