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Judith Adler Hellman
THE REVOLUTION from "México in Crisis"

THE REVOLUTION from "México in Crisis"

. . . If for the ardour of an easy triumph, if for wanting to abbreviate the struggle, we cut out of our program the radicalism which makes it in- compatible with the program of the specifically bourgeois and conservative parties, then we will have done the work of bandits and assassins, be- cause the blood spilled will only serve to give greater strength to the bourgeoisie.... Ricardo Flores Magón
January 19, 1910
The Mexican Revolution was a brutally violent political and social upheaval that ravaged the Mexican countryside for more than a decade. The revolution still stands as the bloodiest conflict ever witnessed in the Western Hemisphere. Until the recent years of carnage in Cambodia, in terms of the proportion of population lost, this was the most violent revolutionary struggle ever. For in 1910 Mexico counted a population of only 14.5 million people. And during the struggle that followed the outbreak of fighting in October 1910, as many as one and a half million Mexicans lost their lives. The appalling death toll on the battlefield, the lack of medical care for the wounded, and the routine execution of captured soldiers decimated the revolutionary armies.
The civilian population suffered grievously. For nearly a million "noncombatants" the revolution brought death by starvation, disease, exposure, or execution. Villages wore burned or flooded by federal troops. Crops were destroyed and peasants were taken as hostages or summarily shot as "examples" to their fellow villagers. Thousands fled across the northern border into the United States never to return to their native land. By 1920, a total of 8,000 different villages had completely disappeared from the map as a direct result of the revolution.
The revolution was touched off by a group of landowners and intellectuals centered in the North of Mexico. These men sought to overthrow Porfirio Dìaz, the general who had seized power by military coup in 1876 and ruled Mexico as a dictator for more than thirty years. In his place they hoped to establish a liberal democracy in which presidential succession would be determined by the principle of "effective suffrage and no reelection." Led by Francisco I. Madero, a politically progressive landowner, the northern revolutionaries were a heterogeneous conglomeration of sectors of a number of different social classes, each with its own grievances against the Díaz regime and its own set of demands to press.
Both the style and substance of Diaz's politics had provoked deep seated resentment among substantial portions of the northern elite. These landowners, industrialists, mine owners, and merchants were prepared to take up arms in 1910 because their economic and political advancement had been thwarted by the Díaz dictatorship. The penetration of the Mexican economy by foreign capital had been pushed by Díaz to the degree that on the eve of the revolution more than two thirds of all investment came from foreign sources. The banks were 94 percent foreign owned, and electric power, most large mining enterprises, and the railroads were all under foreign control. Indeed, Diaz had invited foreign capital to finance the construction of Mexico's railroad system and had offered all kinds of monetary inducements to reduce the risk of investment. "In sweeping away the web of resistance which had inhibited foreign capital in the past and in enforcing the peace and security for such capital, Díaz assigned a role to foreigners in Mexico's internal economy which has very few parallels in the history of modern states. American ownership of land, railroads, mines, banks, and industries was particularly marked in the North of Mexico a situation that frustrated the economic ambitions of the northern Mexican bourgeoisie. And apart from Díaz's encouragement and generous concessions to foreigners, the president had reserved economic and political opportunity at the top for a small, favored elite made up of the men who had come to power with him in the 1870s and their descendants. Members of the northern bourgeoisie who wore shut out of this closed circle felt economically and politically excluded. As the dictatorship provided them no institutional means by which to effect a transfer of power to themselves, those men readily aligned themselves with the intellectuals who called the overthrow of the regime. Thus the revolutionary armies of the North included this elite component of men who were fighting to oust the narrow group of Mexican and foreign capitalists in whose hands economic and political power had concentrated.
The northern armies also incorporated members of the middle classes-clerks, teachers, professionals, small businessmen, small- and medium-sized farmers, estate overseers, and ranch foremen-a group whose advancement was also blocked by entrenched elites. Opportunities for employment for the educated middle class had not expanded during the Díaz years at a rate rapid enough to absorb those seeking white collar and professional jobs. And middle-class northerners resented their exclusion from the closed circle of government where all appointments were controlled by Díaz and his henchmen. Furthermore, the economic recession which began in 1905 and reached crisis proportions in 1909 heightened middle-class discontent as it caused further contraction of the already limited opportunities for social and economic mobility open to these people. Thus when the call to revolution came, a substantial proportion of this middle sector cast its lot with the revolutionary forces.
The mass base of the revolution in the North was formed by workers, miners, agricultural laborers, peasants, cowboys, shepherds, muleteers, and drifters. Before the revolution, this sector had been characterized by a pattern of horizontal mobility; according to the work available, men moved back and forth among various jobs on the estates, in the mines, in the factories, or across the border in the United States. But the years of recession and depression immediately prior to 1910 simultaneously eliminated most of these alternative work opportunities. And the northern working class and peasantry, whose economic condition was already precarious at best, found themselves squeezed even harder.
The goals articulated by the revolutionary leaders of the North were as diverse as the social classes participating in the struggle. The middle- and upper-class liberals were calling for political reforms to broaden the base of political participation, for anticlerical legislation to curb the power of the Catholic church, and for nationalistic legislation to impose state control over foreign investment and ownership. They were concerned with putting an end to some of the more glaring abuses of the Diaz regime: forced military conscription, suppression of the press, the total neglect of public education, and the maintenance of order through the use of the brutal rurales, a militia of mercenary soldiers.
While the call for "social justice" and "democracy" articulated by liberal politicians appealed to the mass base of revolutionary soldiers, the peasant and worker combatants had goals of their own. These goals corresponded to the workers' and peasants' needs and experiences and were not always well understood by their middle- and upper-class leaders. Workers were concerned with winning the right to organize, guarantees of decent working conditions, adequate pay and job security, the abolition of the company store, and other basic labor rights. Peasants had demands that varied according to the type of work they did and their relationship to the land. Agricultural laborers who worked for wages on commercial estates had grievances that closely resembled those of workers: demands for higher pay, better working conditions, and so forth. Sharecroppers and renters wanted land of their own. They wished to be free of the obligation to return to a landlord in cash or kind a large proportion of their produce. And those peasants who were tied to traditional estates sought relief from the burdens of debt peonage.
At the same time that we can identify separate sets of demands made by elite, middle, and mass sectors incorporated within the revolutionary movement of the North, we must also distinguish this ideologically heterogeneous northern movement from the clearly peasant revolution that developed in the south-central region of Mexico in the state of Morelos. The revolutionary front that emerged in Morelos was a unified, ideologically coherent movement of landless peasants fighting under the leadership of men and women of peasant origin.9 In this area of Mexico, peasant villages had held title to communal lands from the period of the Spanish conquest until well into the second half of the nineteenth century. The "Liberal Reforms" of the 1850s and 1860s were designed to transform these peasants into yeoman farmers working individual family farms. But the reforms had the effect of permitting large commercial landowners to gain control over the communal village holdings. Deprived of the basis of their livelihood, the peasants of Morelos and other central Mexican states wore forced to relinquish their status as independent small holders and attach themselves as peons or serfs to the large estates of the commercial landowners who had gained control of the village lands. This process of land alienation had greatly accelerated during the Díaz years. Thus, when word of the outbreak of revolution in the North reached Morelos, the peasants quickly rallied to the cause. The fight to overthrow the Díaz regime promised to provide the opportunity to reclaim land from the Díaz favorites who had progressively usurped the peasants' holdings. In this respect the goal of the southern revolutionary front was a radical one in that its implementation would have required the total transformation of the land tenure system that existed in 1910. Yet, at the same time, the southerners' demand was an archaic one: the peasants of Morelos were fighting for the restoration of village lands and the return to a traditional order of communal agricultural exploitation. Their vision of revolution had little to do with the demands of the northern elite or middle classes. It did not even comprehend the aspirations of industrial or agricultural workers who had never had any land of their own either to lose or have "restored." It was a limited vision of revolution but despite its narrow focus, it was a compelling vision for the tens of thousands of peasant men and woman who left their wretched homes to join the revolution in Morelos.
THE ARMIES OF THE REVOLUTION
The revolutionary armies that formed in the northern and south-control regions of Mexico are customarily identified by the names of their principal leaders. This convention reflects the degree to which personal charisma rather than ideological commitment was the element that drew and held together each of the revolutionary armies. Political adhesion to one army or another was linked to personal loyalties to the leader and his network of allies. It is particularly difficult to discuss the armies of the North without reference to the general who mustered and led the troops, because these movements were so heterogeneous in composition and ideology that, at times, the only common motivation shared by comrades-in-arms derived from personal attachment to their revolutionary chief. Even on the southern front where the revolution had a clear and coherent ideology, the movement was shaped by the charismatic qualities of its undisputed leader, Emiliano Zapata, whose name came to represent all that the southern peasants, or zapatistas, were fighting for.
Born in a peasant village in the state of Morelos, Zapata himself was a horse trainer and trader, rather than a peasant farmer, but his movement fully embodied the aspirations of the peasants of his home region. At the head of an army of 70,000 landless men and women organized in small, highly mobile guerrilla bands, Zapata used the mountains and forests of Morelos as his base of operations. From this tactically advantageous position, he led the fight for the restoration of village lands. As occurs in cases of successful guerilla warfare, Zapata's followers were not so much an army as a fully mobilized population. The peasant fighters struck swiftly at the federal forces sent into the region to suppress their rebellion, and then retired to their villages, buried their rifles beneath the mud floor of their huts, and resumed their everyday life in the fields. When the enemy penetrated Morelos in search of the "rebel army," they found only peaceful peasants humbly plowing the tiny parcels of land that were all that was left of their once extensive village holdings. Because Zapata's force was supplied directly from the small villages of Morelos, the entire state was devastated in the course of the revolution by federal armies using search-and-destroy techniques to flush out the peasant guerrillas.
The loyalty of Zapata's troops was unique in the history of the revolution. The guerrilla leader lived with a price on his head for ten years. But his followers regarded him with such esteem and affection that no one within his movement gave in to the temptation to betray his leader in return for the cash reward. The passionate loyalty Zapata commanded seemed to grow from his direct and earthy way of dealing with his supporters, and from the fact that he never asked nor accepted any material benefits for himself. As one peasant who fought for Zapata explained:
In my judgement, what zapata was fighting for was just. Porfirio`s government took everything away from us. Everything went to the rich, the hacendados, those with the power were the masters, and we had nothing. We were their servants because we could not plant or make use of any lands that did not belong to the hacienda. So they had us subjugated. We were completely enslaved by the hacendados. That is what Zapata fought to set right.... I liked Zapata´s plan and that´s why, when he came to my village, I went to him. I still hadn't joined but I went up in the hills with tortillas and water.... I went to see Zapata in his camp. He was in a little house but they wouldn't let me go in. They were suspicious. There were two guards right in front of the door. I stood at a distance, watching. He was sitting inside with his general staff. And he calls out to me, "What do you have there, friend?" "Nothing, señor. Just my tortillas." "Come in." "Let's see your tortillas: Take them out." And I gave them all to him. How he liked my tortillas! He and his staff finished them off. "And what do you have in your gourd? Pulque?" "No, señor, water." And he drank it.
While Zapata's leadership was charismatic, and the goals of his movement compelling to his peasant followers, the revolution of the South never succeeded in attracting any sizable degree of non peasant support. Throughout the years of struggle, Zapata was able to count upon the adhesion and collaboration of a group of urban and rural radical intellectuals. These men helped Zapata formulate his PIan de Ayala and other proclamations and programs calling for the breakup of the large estates and the restoration of lands to the peasant villages. But apart from these intellectuals, Zapata seemed unable to understand or reach urban Mexicans. Thus a serious limitation of zapatismo lay in the movement's inability to broaden its appeal or move beyond the land question to other issues that concerned industrial workers. Another limitation was that Zapata and his people constituted an effective fighting force only when they fought on their home ground, the mountains of Morelos. When they ventured beyond their own territory, the zapatistas were like fish out of water. This is what happened when they marched on Mexico City. Cut off from their supply base, the guerrillas could not hold the capital, and so they returned to their mountains to continue the struggle to defend the lands they had already won.
While the zapatista guerrillas held off federal troops in Morelos, on the northern front Díaz´s soldiers clashed with a large number of different ''revolutionary armies," each with its own charismatic leader who gave his movement a specific, social and political character. Among these armies, three in particular played determining roles in the course of the revolution.
The army led by Venustiano Carranza, a large landowner, was a conservative force among the revolutionaries. During the Diaz years, Carranza had served as a senator of the republic. But when the call to revolution came, Carranza armed the peons of his own hacienda, put together a small army, and joined the fight on the side of Madero. Carranza's force was called the Constitutionalist Army, and its leadership was provided almost entirely by middle-class liberals. These men fought for political reforms that would alter the worst aspects of the Diaz dictatorship, and would replace the despotism of Díaz with a narrowly based "constitutional democracy." But the carrancista leaders hated and feared the revolutionary groups that fought for radical social change just as much as they had resented the oppressions of the Diaz regime.
Fighting on the same side with Carranza were the troops of General Alvaro Obregón. Obregón was the son of a once wealthy rancher who had fallen on hard times. As a young man the general worked at a variety of trades-mechanic, salesman, sugar miller, and others- before returning to ranching. This background gave Obregón experience with people, places, and ideas somewhat outside his own social milieu, and helped him to identity with some of the more radical social goals of the revolution. In particular, his experiences enabled him to understand the grievances and aspirations of workers, and his ability to attract a working-class following would eventually alter the course of the revolution. "Obregón was by no means a socialist, but favored nationalist legislation and agrarian and labor reforms which would, at one and the same time, curtail United States encroachment, break the power of the great landed families, and widen the opportunities in the market for both labor and his kind of middle class."
In 1912, inspired by the ideas of Madero, the liberals, and the radical intellectuals, Obregón gathered a group of 300 fellow ranchers into a fighting force "that came to be known as the Rich Man's Battalion." Apart from the small- and middle-scale commercial farmers who joined this band, teachers, tradesmen, white-collar professionals, and a variety of other middle-class elements were attracted to Obregón's cause. The ranks of Obregon´s force, as elsewhere in the North, were filled out with miners, cowboys, industrial and agricultural workers, and peons from the huge haciendas of the northern states.
Undoubtedly the most able of all the northern generals, Obregón was a student of military strategy and in the course of the war proved himself a master tactician. He studied the progress of the Great War in Europe, and applied in battle what he had learned of modern trench warfare. Of all the northern generals, Obregón was perhaps the man best qualified for leadership. He was a flexible, well-disciplined person who was able to understand goals beyond his own self-interest.
The last of the most important revolutionary armies was the "Northern Division" led by the famous bandit-turned-revolutionary, General Pancho Villa. Villa's origins were as humble as Zapata's. He spent his youth laboring as a peon on a large hacienda; then, after a brief career as a mule driver, Villa lived for twenty-two years as a cattle rustler and bandit. By the time the revolution broke out, he already enjoyed a widespread reputation as a Robin Hood who stole from the rich landowner to give to the poor peon. Villa was not an ideologically sophisticated man. But in a good fight between the old dictator in Mexico City-supported by the rich landowners-and the new liberal leaders from the North, Pancho Villa cast his lot with Francisco Madero and the revolutionaries.
John Reed, the American journalist who traveled with Villa's army as a war correspondent, described the bandit this way:
His reckless and romantic bravery is the subject of countless poems. They tell, for example, how one of his band named Reza was captured by the rurales and bribed to betray Villa. Villa heard of it and sent word into the city of Chihuahua that he was coming for Reza. In broad daylight he entered the city on horse-back, took ice cream in the Plaza-the ballad is very explicit on this point-and rode up and down the streets until he found Reza strolling with his sweetheart in the Sunday crowd on the Paseo Bolivar, where he shot him and escaped. In time of famine he fed whole districts, and took care of entire villages evicted by the soldiers under Porfirio Diaz's outrageous land law. Everywhere he was known as The Friend of the Poor. He was the Mexican Robin Hood.
Villa recruited his forces from the cowboys, miners, small ranchers, bandits, gamblers, and drifters of Chihuahua State. In the other armies of the revolution, the women and children of soldiers normally traveled along with the troops, often because their homes had been destroyed, or their lives so totally uprooted that they had nowhere else to go. As a result, the movement of revolutionary forces often resembled the migrations of whole populations rather than an army on the march. But Villa often persuaded his troops to leave their women and children behind, and he instituted a technique of rapid, forced marches and surprise attacks that were the key to his military success. Most of Villa's troops were men who had lived half their lives in the saddle, and 40,000 strong, the Northern Division comprised a formidable cavalry. Indeed Villa's most impressive military victories were achieved with daring cavalry maneuvers, while his most disastrous defeats, toward the end of the revolution, came when he failed to understand the limitations of a cavalry attack used against an entrenched army protected by barbed wire and machine guns.
The social goal closest to Villa's heart was free public schooling. Unlike Zapata, who enjoyed the benefits of two years of primary education, Villa was illiterate until the age of forty-six when socialist intellectuals, imprisoned with him in the Mexico City penitentiary, taught the passionately eager general the rudiments of reading and writing. Villa never lost the illiterate's overwhelming faith in the power of education to erase injustice and social inequality. From the Villa camp John Reed wrote, "Often I have heard him say: 'When I passed such and such street this morning I saw a lot of kids. Let's put a school there.´" In this haphazard fashion Villa established more than fifty primary schools during his reign as military governor of Chihuahua State.
Apart from his commitment to education, Villa's concern with social reform was sporadic and ill-defined. His movement had no clear political ideology and his army was so amorphous that it provided a home for any opportunist who sought to penetrate its ranks.
More a force of nature than of politics, the villista party was commotion rampant. These northern drifters could give their populism no real point. Cowboys, muleskinners, bandits, railroad laborers, peddlers, refugee peons, the villistas had no definite class interests or local attachments. And to certain ambitious operators ... this disorder was an opportunity.... Villa was the very incarnation of irregularity, and his men took him as a model.
Although his movement was originally allied with the forces of Carranza and Obregón, distrust, rivalry, and, ultimately, betrayal by Carranza led Villa to break with the conservative and moderate northern generals and to identify himself with the radical demands of the zapatistas. Nevertheless, we cannot say that Villa's concept of revolution was as folly developed or as radical as Zapata's. For, even at the height of his military strength, Villa never attempted to seize landholdings and distribute them to the landless in a systematic fashion as Zapata had done in the South. Villa often gave away tracts of land in the same generous spirit that he distributed thousands of pesos of the currency he printed himself in the basement of the Governor's Palace in Chihuahua City. But neither Villa nor the generals who fought under him were much interested in establishing the legal bases or the mechanisms for a full-scale land reform program. For one thing, the arid expanses of the North did not lend themselves to parcelization and distribution in small lots. For another, given the low level of political consciousness that characterized Villa's officers and troops, the large estates that were re seized by the villistas tended to remain in the hands of Villa's generals. These men used the estates to create an upper-class way of life for themselves, becoming a landed elite in their own right with interests directly opposed to those who demanded land reform.
YEARS OF CONFLICT AND BLOODSHED
These were the principal forces that made the revolution against the old regime. Diaz´s institutional structure, sclerotic and decayed after so many years of rule, fell to pieces more quickly than any of the protagonists would have thought possible. And only a year after the fighting began, Francisco Madero, head of the liberals, took office as the revolution's first president.
The Revolution Comes to Power
Sadly, Madero proved incapable of controlling the forces he had unleashed. A weak-willed, inconsistent idealist, Madero was unable to provide firm leadership or to reconcile the contradictions between conservatives like Carranza and radicals like Zapata. In all fairness, it is difficult to imagine that the strongest and most able of politicians could have satisfied the demands of so many different forces fighting for so many different goals. Madero certainly was unable to play this role, although he struggled bravely. Unfortunately he never really understood the passions he had kindled with his call to revolution. He never understood the overpowering hunger for land that had filled the ranks of Zapata's army with desperate, landless men and women. Madero wanted to give full democratic rights to the people at a time when such niceties as votes and electoral contests were largely irrelevant. He expected that he could govern with mercy and humility at the moment that the reactionary forces were plotting his overthrow. Madero did not appreciate that he needed the armed support of the revolutionary forces to consolidate his control over the Mexican state. For Madero the struggle had successfully concluded when he took his seat in the presidential chair. Diaz's army, administration, and Senate were left intact while the new president attempted to delimit the content of the revolution and to contain the revolutionary forces that had emerged. Madero implored his allies to lay down their arms and accept the revolution that he would construct. But none of the principal generals had enough confidence in the new regime to disband his army without some concrete assurance that the new revolution would reflect his own concept of what a revolution ought to be.
Madero also faced strong opposition from the United States government. President William Howard Taft was initially sympathetic to Madero's government, but as soon as he realized that Madero had no intention of granting special concessions to American capital or taking measures to protect American property in Mexico, Taft withdrew his support. To make matters worse, the American ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, was closely linked to American financial interests, which were in direct competition with those of the Madero family. Accordingly, Wilson became "a fanatical enemy of the government to which he was accredited," and did everything in his power-which was considerable-to bring that government down.
Ambassador Wilson proceeded to create panic among American citizens in Mexico, sending thousands fleeing from the republic, and on the Ambassador's advice, 100,000 American troops were massed on the Mexican border. Wilson then brought to the embassy the leading counter-revolutionary conspirators, Felix Diaz, nephew of the deposed dictator, Bernardo Reyes, and Victoriano Huerta, and assisted them in formulating their plot against Madero. Four days later Madero and his closest associates were dead, the sinister Huerta had assumed the presidency, and Wilson gleefully dispatched the news to Washington that "a wicked despotism has fallen."
But the United States government was now headed by Woodrow Wilson. And the new American president was reluctant to recognize Huerta because it was clear even in Washington that Huerta's government was despotic. Ambassador Wilson was recalled and replaced, and a new type of U.S. intervention began. The new American policy in Mexico involved arms sales to favored revolutionary factions, arms embargoes against revolutionary forces unacceptable to U.S. business interests, and the seizure of the port of Veracruz at the cost of some two hundred Mexican lives.
With Madero gone, the fighting began anew. In March 1913, Carranza sent forth the call to rebellion to avenge the death of Madero and overthrow Huerta. The revolutionary armies united to crush the counterrevolution of Huerta, and their strength was such that Huerta's reign in Mexico City was relatively short-lived. He managed to control Mexico for eighteen months, from February 1913 to July 1914. Then Huerta was driven from power by General Carranza who had finally emerged as the dominant force among the armies of the revolution.
Political, Economic, and Social Dislocation
Another six years of bloodshed followed. Carranza´s appropriation of the revolution was challenged by Zapata and Villa and later by Obregón. The various armies of the North split and reunited along new lines. In the North, where the revolutionary troops had always lacked a clear political orientation, former comrades-in-arms now rode against one another in battle. Soldiers surrendered to an enemy force one day and, as a condition of their release, took up arms the next day to fight under a new general. Betrayal followed betrayal, and most of the principal revolutionary leaders died at the hands of assassins and traitors.
When the bloodletting came to an end in the early 1920s, the veterans returned to their villages and towns to find that there was not much left to come home to. The Mexican economy was in shambles and thousands of miles of roads, bridges, and railroad track had been blown up or torn out. The telegraph and telephone systems as well as public utilities were so seriously disrupted that they had to be completely reconstructed. Mining, the most important industry in Mexico before the revolution, was now in decline. Production of all staple crops, particularly loans and corn, was down to about half of the pre-revolutionary yield. In 1924, for example, less corn was harvested than in any other year during the previous two centuries. Cattle that had not been slaughtered on the spot to feed the troops of the revolutionary armies were often rounded up and driven across the U.S. border, where they were traded for arms and ammunition. Hacienda buildings, sugar and cotton mills, and crops had been burned to the ground, and where large estates were left more or less intact, landowners often refused to sow their fields for fear that revolutionary forces would reap the harvest. As a result of this severe dislocation in cattle raising and agriculture, food prices soared. Widespread starvation prompted food riots in cities throughout Mexico, and each day hundreds of peasants and urban poor who had survived the armed phase of the revolution now died of malnutrition.
After more than a decade of fighting that intimately touched the lives of millions of people, the old order of the Diaz regime had been overturned and a series of governments-some reactionary, some conservative, some moderately progressive-had followed in rapid succession. But the great mass of Mexicans were economically no better off than before the revolution. Workers still labored long hours for pitiful wages under miserable conditions. And those who had joined the revolutionary armies to fight for land had not witnessed the fulfillment of the promise that "the land would belong to the tiller." After so many years of hardship and destruction, a comprehensive land reform program was not to be initiated in earnest until the late 1930s. Although workers and particularly peasants constituted the bulk of all revolutionary combatants and casualties, the revolution did not bring them the economic, political, and social status for which they had fought.
The ''triumpll of the revolution" did not alter their low status because the politically conscious peasantry and working class were not sectors that emerged victorious from the revolution. On the contrary, the gains made by peasant armies, like those led by Zapata, were undermined or neutralized by the manipulations of politicians like Carranza who represented the aspirations of landowners, industrialists, and a highly mobile and ambitious middle class. While the workers and peasants were the principal actors in the revolutionary drama and it was mostly their blood that was shed, there was no point during a decade of conflict when peasant troops or workers' battalions, fighting under peasant or working-class leadership, were able to seize and hold national power. By 1920 Zapata had been treacherously assassinated. Pancho Villa had been defeated in battle, and his once powerful army of 40,000 reduced to an ineffectual force of a few thousand. In addition, as we have noted before, many of the villista generals (and even some of Zapata's men) who had begun the revolution as popular leaders, used the spoils of war to enrich themselves. As a result of this tendency, those peasant or working-class leaders who were not eliminated in the course of the revolution often acquired middle-class characteristics and middle-class interests and were quickly assimilated into the new ruling class.
THE NEW RULING CLASS
By the end of the revolution the leadership of Mexico had fallen into the hands of Carranza and the men closest to the old general, and a new ruling coalition had formed. Thc coalition was composed of (a) the new elite of recently landed revolutionary generals, (b) industrialists and businessmen who had prospered during and immediately after the revolution, and (c) members of the old land-owning oligarchy who had become aware that they could pursue their pre-revolutionary interests and preserve much of their pre-revolutionary status by declaring their adherence to the new regime.
Not every family that had enjoyed social prestige and economic and political power before the revolution was able to hold onto its former position. Some of the old landowners lost everything in the revolution. Some died in the course of the war, and many others chose to emigrate to Europe or the United States. But a remarkable number of these families survived with their property more or less intact, and some of the most economically powerful were able to further enrich themselves under the new order.
Old money was joined by new wealth amassed during the revolution and the period of physical reconstruction that followed. Reconstruction offered the growing community of capitalists a wide variety of opportunities for investment and profit. Friends and relatives of the successful revolutionary generals grew rich, sometimes overnight, on highly lucrative government contracts. In addition to the reconstruction of the communications network and the initiation of public works projects, a variety of industries introduced before the revolution developed rapidly in the 1920s and 1930s. Mining picked up and petroleum production soared. Iron, steel, cement, paper, textiles, shoes, beer, tobacco, soap, sugar refining, and flour milling were all expanded from their pre-revolutionary base, while new enterprises-among them metal goods, window glass, and foodstuffs-developed for the first time during this period of economic recovery.
The emergence of a new capitalist class, or "industrial bourgeoisie," and the consolidation of this group's political power has been described by Andre Gunder Frank.
The viable economic base of the more aristocratic upper class was destroyed by the Revolution. But many of its members and their wealth survived. Their money was invested in finance, commerce, industry and later again in agriculture; and the ex-aristocrats became the nucleus of the new bourgeoisie. Their ranks were soon supplemented by their erstwhile enemies, the individual beneficiaries of the same Revoulution, many politicians and generals among them. As their economic position became consolidated, so did their political power.




The interests of the new bourgeoisie differed, of course, from those of the old aristocracy. The new group possessed a modern capitalist orientation and looked to the commercialization of agriculture, industrialization, and a minimum level of government regulation in order to promote their modern financial, commercial, or industrial enterprises. It was hardly as if nothing had altered since the days when Mexico was controlled by Porfirio Díaz and his coterie. On the contrary, the social and economic changes wrought by the Mexican Revolution were extensive, and they laid the basis for a modern and industrialized Mexico. But it is important to understand that the changes that were produced by a decade of conflict were changes most appropriately summed up in the term "bourgeois revolution"-a transformation reflecting the interests of those people in a society who control capital and the means of production, and those people who share in the profits of capital. It was the Carranzas, the Obregons, and the other representatives of the rising Mexican burgeoisie who gave ideological character to the political order that emerged from the revolution. Although the Mexican Rcvolution was made by peasants and workers, it was in no way a "popular revolution" since neither the peasants nor the workers gained effective power, nor did their representatives come to control the state. As we have noted, for all their sacrifices the peasants and workers in fact derived very little immediate benefit from the revolution. The benefits they did receive came in the form of legislative guarantees.
The expressed goals of the popular forces that had participated in the revolutionary struggle were written into a new Constitution of 1917. This constitution became the one legacy provided by the revolution to the worker and peasant combatants.
THE WORKER'S LEGACY
It is one of the ironies of Mexican history that the great legislative breakthroughs for the Mexican working class were made during the period when the dominant politico in Mexico was General Venustiano Carranza-hardly a figure one would be tempted to describe as a great friend of the working man. The labor legislation that came out of the Mexican Revolution was, in its day, the most progressive body of labor guarantees on record anywhere in the world. Yet, ironically, the very fact that such laws were produced was due to the political and strategical needs of a conservative on his march to national power.
Although Carranza was a conservative within the revolutionary coalition of the North, the general made his first overtures to labor as early as 1914. At that point in the revolution, Carranza's forces (led by Obregón) had taken Mexico City, ousted the reactionary Huerta, and installed Carranza in the National Palace. But Carranza found himself in a very precarious military and political situation. In September 1914, Zapata had renounced Carranza because of the latter's lack of concern for land reform, while Pancho Villa, who had once figured among Carranza's outstanding divisional generals, had met secretly with Zapata and agreed with the guerrilla leader that Carranza could never be trusted with the leadership of the revolution.
Carranza countered by calling Villa and the other "Constitutionalist" leaders to Mexico City to discuss the program for the new carrancista regime. But Villa and his forces refused to meet in the territory controlled by Carranza, and so the proceedings ware moved to the northern city of Aguascalientes and the meeting became the Convention of Aguascallentes. This city rapidly filled up with Villa's troops and, against the express wishes of Carranza, the villistas brought Zapata's representatives into the convention hall. Among the zapatistas was one of the greatest orators of the period, Antonio Diaz Soto y Gama. Proclaming Zapata as the heir of Karl Marx, St. Francis of Assisi, and Jesus Christ rolled into one, Diaz Soto y Gama explained to the delegates the basic goals of Zapata´s movement. Speaking with great eloquence, he persuaded the convention to accept the principles of Zapata`s Plan de Ayala, a blueprint for radical agrarian reform that Zapata had already put into practice in the areas of Morelos State that he controlled.
Carranza chose to ignore the results of the convention, dismissing the meeting as an inconsequential pack of villistas swayed by a bunch of hot-headed agraristas. But Carranza was in serious political trouble. Only a month or so after his loss of face at the Convention of Aguascalientes, Zapata's forces, dressed in their loose, white peasant clothes, enormous sombreros, and heavily armed, marched on Mexico City. And when the Morelos peasants reached the capital, they were joined by Pancho Villa's Northern Division. This display of military strength forced Carranza to remove his troops to the port of Veracruz, on the Gulf of Mexico. Desperate for military support to counter the challenge of the zapatistas and villistas, Carranza turned to the working class for the military clout that he needed.
To recruit the support of workers, Carranza sent his ally, General Obregón, to negotiate an agreement with the labor unions of Mexico City. Obregón, always skillful in appealing to workers, persuaded the union leaders to send their members to the front in separate units called "red battalions." Carranza, in turn, gave union leaders his permission to proceed behind the lines, "to agitate and organize the workers in the districts reclaimed from the enemy."
In return for support on the battlefield, Carranza issued his Decree of December 12, 1914. In this document Carranza openly acknowledged the insufficiency of the narrow political goals which had been the rallying cry of the liberals who unleashed the revolution in 1910. Carranza had finally realized that the scope of the revolution had to be enlarged if it were to express the social and economic aspirations for which the peasants and workers were willing to fight. And, therefore, in the Decree of December 12, Carranza stated his intention "to establish a regime which will guarantee the equality of the Mexicans among themselves; . . . legislation to better the condition of the peasant, of the worker, of the miner, and in general of the working classes...." With the Decree of December 12, Carranza attempted to reassure organized labor that progressive labor legislation would have top priority for any government he might head. He promised that his administration would give attention to the "just claims of the workers in any conflict arising between them and employers." Although Carranza was anything but wholehearted in those gestures toward the working class, Alvaro Obregón, Carranza's divisional general, had in fact maintained close ties with organize labor and Obregón played a key role in winning labor support at this critical time . It was Obregon, for example, who expropriated the Mexico City Jockey Club and presented the building to the labor union as a headquarters for their central organization, the Casa del Obrero Mundial (House of the Workers of the World). The "Casa" had been established as a training, organizational, administrative, and propaganda center for the entire Mexican labor movement. When Obregón and the other carrancista agents first approached labor leaders to bargain for their support, there was great dissension among the membership. Once the decision to support Carranza was taken, many workers individually deserted their union battalions to join the struggle under the leadership of Villa or Zapata. But even with a substantial number of workers leaving the so-called red battalions to fight with the revolutionary forces of Villa or Zapata, Carranza's army, reinforced by the influx of workers, militarily overwhelmed both the villistas and the zapatistas.
Since the support they had given to Carranza proved important to his ultimate success, in 1916 organized labor looked to the general to make good his promise of progressive legislation for the working class. In November of that year, delegates from all over the country met in the central Mexican city of Queretaro to draft a new constitution. Once again, it was Carranza who called together the convention, and once again he tried to pack the meeting with his own people by excluding the representatives of his political enemies, Zapata and Villa. This time Carranza felt reasonably confident that his own people and his own political line would dominate the proceedings from start to finish. The delegates to the convention shared an ideological perspective that has been described as "corporate liberalism"'' They accepted private capitalist enterprise as the system that would prevail in Mexico, and they differed fundamentally only to the degree that they supported or rejected the principle that the state should play a strong regulatory role in the process of capitalist development. This disagreement became evident in the final months of 1916 as delegates quickly grouped themselves into two opposing factions: the moderate liberals or "reformists" who supported Carranza and rejected state intervention, and the radical liberals, or "Jacobins," who identified themselves with the more progressive General Alvaro Obregón and pushed for an active regulatory role for the Mexican state. Among these radical liberals were a group of revolutionary leaders who had fought with Carranza's armies, but whose deepest sympathies lay with the agrarian cause of Zapata. The agraristas at the convention were determined to see the principles of Zapata's Plan de Ayala incorporated into the constitution itself.
After several weeks of infighting and political intrigue, the radical liberal faction gradually gained the upper hand, and the more conservative carrancistas were forced to give way on the most crucial issues. Carranza presented to the convention his own proposals for the new constitution. Carranza's draft was a conservative document, emphasizing restraints on the power of government, and sticking closely to the precepts established sixty years earlier in the old Constitution of 1857. His proposal offered no program for land reform, specified no restraints on the power of the church, and offered few specific guarantees to labor.
But the Jacobins fought back, and while the final draft of the constitution adopted six weeks later included about three-fourths of the 132 articles originally proposed by Carranza, the document that emerged was far more radical in both spirit and letter than the proposals Carranza originally had in mind.50 The radical liberal members of the assembly were determined to extend all the existing guarantees to workers and to state them explicitly in a separate article dealing exclusively with labor. The result, Article 123 of the Mexican Constitution, was, as we have noted, the most progressive piece of labor legislation in any country of the world of 1917.
First, the article established the power of the government to intervene in labor relations in order to promote conditions favorable to the workers. It guaranteed the right to organize unions and the right to strike. These rights were to be enjoyed by workers in public service, as well as those employed by private enterprise. Article 123 established an eight-hour work day and carefully limited overtime. Well-defined limitations on child labor were set, and the principle of equal pay for equal work regardless of sex was laid down. A provision for maternity leave and limits on physical labor for pregnant women were included in the legislation. The authors of the article were careful to state explicitly that.
The minimum wage for workers shall be sufficient to satisfy the normal material, social and cultural needs of a head of family and provide for the compulsory education of the children. In every agricultural, commercial, manufacturing and mining enterprise, the workers have the right to share in the profits.... A social security law is considered of public utility, and shall include disability insurance, life insurance, insurance against unemployment, sickness, accidents and the like...."51
The constitution established employers' liability for work accidents, and it granted every worker at least one day of rest each week. Al1 wages were to be paid in legal currency rather than merchandise or credit at a company store, and three months' severance pay was due any worker laid off his job. In addition. "employers must furnish workmen with comfortable and sanitary dwelling places.... They shall also establish schools, clinics and other services necessary to the community when factories are not located in inhabited places...." Both state and national governments were required to enact specific labor legislation in conformity with the guidelines laid down in Article 123. Through those provisions and the requirement that all state labor codes conform to these constitutional principles, the radical liberal drafters meant to insure that the working class would receive the full share of the revolutionary legacy that belonged to them.
THE PEASANTS' LEGACY
The dominant radical group responsible for the progressive labor legislation was every bit as determined to provide both the constitutional principles and the mechanism through which the peasants could take possession of the land for which they had fought. Article 27 of the new constitution established the nation's ownership of all land and water resources, all forests, minerals, and other products of nature. In Article 27 the radical liberals were able to lay down the conditions for expropriations of private holdings by the state. The key passage is as follows:
The nation shall at all times have the right to establish regulations for private property which the public interest may dictate, such as those regulating the use of natural resources for conservation purposes or ensuring a more equitable distribution of public wealth. With this end in view, the necessary measures shall be taken to break up the large estates;
In addition to restricting land ownership on the part of the church and foreigners, Article 27 provided for the restoration of land to peasants who had been despoiled of their communally held properties before the revolution, and the distribution of land to "population centers that lack land and water, or do not have them in quantities sufficient for the needs of their people . . ." These grants were to be made from the expropriation and distribution of the land holdings of "adjacent large properties. ".
In summary, the constitution adopted in 1917 provided both the most progressive array of guarantees to labor known anywhere in the world at the time, plus the legislative basis for the widest scale land reform program in history The radical framers of the constitution left the hall in Querétaro deeply satisfied that, within the framework of a capitalist system. they had secured for both workers and peasants the legislative foundation for the economic and social justice they had sought in the revolution.

UNFEASIBLE AND UNENFORCABLE LEGISLATION
Unfortunately the more stroke of pen on parchment could not transform the aspirations of peasants and workers into reality. Two very basic problems stood in the way. The first was the nature of the legislation itself. The second problem was the conflict between the goals expressed in Articles 27 and 123 and the social, economic, and political interests of the men to whom the task of enforcing that legislation would fall.
With the best of good intentions, the radical liberals at the Constitutional Convention had drawn up a set of labor laws that unfortunately did not relate to the social and economic conditions of Mexico in 1917. Deeply influenced by the advanced proposals of European and North American labor movements, the authors of Article 123 adopted as their own some of the most progressive ideas that were current in capitalist countries at that time. But Mexico was far from comparable to countries like Britain and the United States in terms of her political and economic structure, industrial base, capital reserves, and the level of political consciousness and organization of her work force. Mexico had just emerged from a war that had divided the working class and peasantry and had devastated the economy. The men who wrote Article 123 made the mistake of trying to institute laws appropriate for societies in an advanced stage of development in a country that was recovering from war and had only just embarked on the road to capitalist development.
Thus, for example, it was unfeasible to place sanctions on child labor in an economy so backward that families relied for their survival on the pitiful wages received by children. Likewise, the establishment of minimum wage was equally unrealistic in a period when there were relatively few factories and millions eager to enter the industrial work force. Progressive labor legislation is a luxury that belongs to a fairly advanced stage of development. The problem for Mexicans was how to arrive at the point where progressive legislation could even be considered. And yet the labor code written into the constitution pre-supposed that this stage had already been reached. As always, when abstract principles clash with an unfortunate reality, it is the unworkable, if admirable, principles which fall by the wayside. Thus, it is no surprise that Article 123 was not taken very seriously either by the post-revolutionary political leaders, nor the industrialists and businessmen who were to build Mexico's industrial base. Had they attempled to apply these impressive humanitarian laws to the conditions that then existed in Mexico, the capitalist development that these powerful groups desired would have been impossible to achieve.
In contrast , the constitution's agrarian legislation did not conflict with the goal of capitalist development in Mexico. On the contrary, the long-term effects of land reform generally encouraged capitalist development. Land reform programs normally break down traditional structures, stimulate efficient utilization of land resources, move people from the backward agricultural sector into the cities where they provide a pool of cheap labor for the factories, and create internal markets for the goods of industry. The problem with Article 27 was not that it clashed with the long-run needs of capitalist development, but rather that it conflicted with the short-term, immediate interests of the men who came to power at the close of the revolution.
The radical liberals who dominated the Constitutional Convention were never in a position to enforce the legislation they had written. It would be General Carranza, a landowner and industrialist, who would assume the presidency in 1917, and to him fell the task of enforcing the constitution. Once Carranza was elected president, the fortunes of both peasants and workers took a turn for the worse. Carranza, who had actively sought the support of labor, now turned his back on the working class, which only three years earlier had turned the tide in his favor. The labor leaders he had once courted with promises of favorable legislation were now the victims of brutal goveroment repression. In 1923, Carleton Beals described Carranza's administration in this way:
". . . the revolutionary elements ware one by one eliminated and supplanted by politicians and unprincipled militarists. The enlightened constitutional provisions were ignored or malconstrued . . . land was not distributed except in certain states where it was forcibly torn away at the first opportunity, labor not only did not receive the protection accorded it by the constitutional code, but its organizations were openly persecuted."
OBSTACLES TO LAND REFORM
Carranza's relationship with the agrarian movement was one of the darker stains on his political career. At the point in the revolution when he feared the growing power of Zapata's forces in Morelos, Carranza attempted to undercut Zapata's appeal to peasants with generous overtures and concessions of his own. Thus in 1915, Carranza issued the Decree of January 6, a document that restated some of the main points of Zapata's Plan de Ayala. Ironically, it is Carranza's decree that is generally taken as the forma~ beginning of the great Mexican land reform. But, in fact, once Carranza felt secure in his power, he turned his back on the peasants, just as he did with the working class. He used workers' battalions to combat peasant armies, and in 1919, Carranza personally arranged for the assassination of Zapata and other radical peasant leaders Shortly before he was assassinated, Zapata himself denouncend Carranza's betrayal of the peasantry in an open letter published in March 1919.
"You have betrayed the agrarian reform and taken over the haciendas only to give the property and its proceeds to your favorite generals . . . a group of friends are helping you enjoy the spoils of war: wealth, honours, business deals, banquets, luxurious and licentious feasts, drunken carousing, orgies of ambition, of power and of blood. . . The hopes of the people have been turned to scorn…"
On the basis of his previous record, the agraristas felt nothing but despair when Carranza was installed in the Presidential Palace. Although progressive legislation was on the books, without the support of the federal government there was little hope that a politically weak and divided peasantry could successfully petition for land grants in accordance with the procedures stipulated in Article 27. And government support would not come as long as Carranza, a landowner himself, remained in power.
And so, despite official acceptance of agrarian reform as a main tenet of the revolution, sporadic land distribution took place on only a token scale over the next twenty years. Although militant agrarista organizations survived in some areas of Mexico, the armed opposition of landowners was usually sufficient to repress these peasant movements in their efforts to force the application of land reform legislation.
The landholders' opposition to the implementation of agrarian reform took a variety of forms. The most brutal was the use of private armies or police forces called "white guards." The white guards, conservative peasants in the pay of the landlords, specialized in the assassination of agrarista organizers and the destruction of crops and homes belonging to peasants bold enough to seek land grants under the agrarian law. Because the land reform law stipulated that only peasants living ill "population centers" of a certain size were qualified to petition for land grants, the white guards often scattered the population of whole villages by burning houses, diverting river waters to demolish adobe huts, or by killing off so many villagers that the number required for the petitioning process would not be reached. If these methods failed, landowners blacklisted those peasants who had enrolled their names on an agrarian petition, and these unlucky peasants would have to leave the region to find work.
In their fight against land reform, the landowning class found an ally in the Catholic church. In September 1922, a peasant league in the state of Durango filed the following report with the archbishop of the state:
Father Reyes of Gómez Palacio is so violently anti-agrarista that he refused to administer the last rites to Eulalio Martinez, merely because, in life, he had been an agrarista.
Father Santiago Zamora of Mapimí sustains on every occasion that taking possession of idle lands is theft, and the government that authorizes it, as well as the peasants and their families who benefit from it, are bandits.
The priest of Nazas, Manuel Gallego, is an avowed protector of the hacendados of that region, whom he serves unreservedly, attacking Article 27 of the Constitution within and outside of the church.
Father Margarito Barraza, formerly of the Hacienda of Dolores, now of El Rodeo, has preached incessantly against agrarianism, and has publicly declared that all members of the Agrarian Committee of El Kodeo shall be without benefit of clergy even in the hour of death.
Anastasio Arellano, curate of Peñon Blanco, threatened the Secretary of the Agrarian Committee, telling him that Upon all who touched the lands of Pablo Martínez del Río would fall the "curse of God." . . . Father Arellano is sold body and soul to the owners of the Hacienda de Catalina, which has resulted in his possession of an automobile and other properties which do not harmonize with the humility and poverty which Jesus preached.
The effect of the church's anti-agrarian position was powerful enough in a northern state like Durango, which lacked a strong Catholic tradition. Much greater was the effect of clerical opposition in various western and southern states of Mexico, where the influence of the church over the peasantry had always been a determining factor in the social and political life of the region. In 1926-27, Ernest Gruening studied the agrarian problem in Mexico. While traveling in the state of Guanajuato, he interviewed a priest who was attached to a large hacienda, and ministered to the community of peons who worked the hacienda lands. "Have these workers been offered their communal lands?" I asked one of them.
"They have not, they do not want them," replied the priest.
"Why do they not want them?" I asked. "It seems strange that anyone should not want something that is given for nothing."
"They would not know how to take care of the lands if they got them," said the priest.
"Why not, aren't they working the land now?" I inquired.
"They could work the land, but they wouldn't know anything about buying and selling, and they would lose the money they had put in for seed and tools if they could ever get enough together to buy those."
A few minutes later, Gruening approached one of the peasants laboring in the fields of the hacienda, and the following exchange took place.
"You people haven't received any ejidos in this region?"
'No, señor, we haven't.''
"Is it because you don't want them?''
"Yes, We want them, but-
"But what?"
"If we got them, we wouldn't be able to take care of them.''
"How is that? Aren't you working the land now? How would it be any different if you were working your own plot?"
"Oh, working the land would be the same, but we poor people wouldn't know anything about selling our product, and we would lose whatever we had paid for seed and tools.
"Who told you that?"
"The boss."
"Anyone else?"
"The padre."
As Gruening's account indicates, the alliance of the priest and the landlord would not have functioned so effectively to block land reform had it not been that a great many peons had accepted and internalized a concept of themselves as inherently inferior and destined by nature to live in servitude. Linked by personal and paternalistic bonds to a powerful landlord, many peasants were reluctant to cast off the ties that bound them to the patrón and his estate. In contrast with the agricultural worker who sold his labor for a cash wage, peons who were attached to the hacienda and given a hut or a subsistence plot in return for labor enjoyed a kind of security as their reward for loyalty to the landlord. The patrón might be a harsh and cruel father figure, but his paternalism was at least a familiar arrangement to the peasant, accustomed all his life to play the role of dependent.
In the minds of the labor force, the person of the hacienda owner-who mediates between them and the outside world-may also come to represent the hacienda itself: his well-being may seem a validation of their collective effort.... Once such a system becomes established, its functioning may become essential to the feeling of security of those who must live in terms of it. Disturbances of the system, whether due to changes in the position of the worker or of the owner, tend to be felt as threats to a way of life.
Given the security provided by the known, if oppressive, condition of dependent peon, we should not be surprised that many peasants did not push harder to obtain the ejidal lands to which they were entitled under agrarian law.
Yet another barrier to the implementation of land reform was the extensive foreign ownership of land in Mexico. At the outbreak of the revolution, more than 40 percent of Mexican agricultural land was owned directly and indirectly by American citizens. By 1923 the pattern of land ownership still heavily favored foreigners; approximately one-fifth of all private agricultural property belonged to foreigners. Americans owned the greatest amount (about 41 million acres), followed, by order, by Spanish, British, German, French, and a variety of other foreign landowners and landowning companies. Most foreign landowners enjoyed the full support of their own governments, which wore always ready to apply pressure to prevent any change in the land tenure pattern. Like domestic landowners, the foreign companies built their own police forces, maintained close ties with federal forces, and at times went in for sharp diplomatic arm-twisting to protect their property from expropriation.
All of these obstacles to land reform wore compounded by the lack of commitment or enforcement at the national level. Although the mandate for land distribution was clear, neither Carranza, nor Obregón, who followed him in the presidency (1920-1924), nor Plutarco Elias Calles, who followed Obregón (1924-1928), had any desire to carry the program forward. These men were or had become large landowners in the North of Mexico, and they were supported by large landowners from all parts of the republic. It was in their personal interest to leave the large landholdings intact. And these men ruled Mexico until 1934. Indeed, their hegemony over the Mexican political scene was so extended, and so complete, that they came to be known as the "northern clique" or, more solemnly, as the "northern dynasty."
THE NORTHERN DYNASTY
This group held power for nearly two decades. First came Carranza, who called himself the "First Chief of the Revolution" and exercised political power during four critical years. In May of 1920, Carranza tried to impose his own successor, but he was driven from office by a military junta led by Obregón and Plutarco Elias Calles, a carrancista general from the northern state of Sonora. Carranza fled from Mexico City with 50 million pesos of the national treasury, but was assassinated before he could reach asylum in the United States. The junta gave the job of "acting president" to another northerner who remained in the National Palace only six months, just long enough to stabilize the situation so that he could oversee the election of Obregón. Obregón, the general from Sonora who had labored so long in the shadow of Carranza, held office until November 1924. Then Obregón chose his friend Calles to succeed him and, in this way, the hegemony of the northern group was preserved. But when Calles's presidential term was up in 1928, Obregón's ambition led him to commiit a very serious political error. Through all the years of military struggle and political infighting, Obregón was the one figure whose power and influence in revolutionary circles had grown steadily. He had tremendous staying power, and he thought he could reassert this power by returning to the presidency. Accordingly, he initiated a constitutional reform that would permit his reelection as president. Notwithstanding considerable opposition, the constitution was amended to permit Obregón's reelection but before he could assume office, he was assassinated by a religious fanatic, enraged by the constraints that the northern leaders, Calles and Obregón, had imposed on the Catholic church. "It has been generally accepted that the attempt at reelection created a favorable climate for Obregón's murder."
Calles, whose political ambitions were no more modest than Obregón's, learned an important lesson from Obregón's fight for reelection and the support it cost him. Accordingly, Calles never attempted to take advantage of the constitutional amendment permitting reelection. He determined, instead, to direct Mexican politics from behind the scenes, placing in office a series of puppet presidents directly responsible to him. In addition, he created for himself the title of Lider Mámixo de la Revolución (Supreme Leader of the Revolution), and from this new position he succceeded in dominating and manipulating the incumbent presidents, while sustaining northern control over Mexican politics until 1934.
Throughout their seventeen years of political hegemony, the northern dynasty displayed considerable unity of purpose. These leaders were preoccupied with the material reconstruction of Mexico and her economic growth along capitalist lines. In the field of agriculture, they wore mainly concerned with the development of commercial agricultural exploitation based on large- and middle-sized properties. For one thing, they were determined to preserve their own large landholdings and those of their friends and associates. At the same time, they were interested in building an agricultural society based on the middle-sized family farm that had flourished in the United States. Neither of those interests was consistent with the mandates of the land reform legislation of 1917, which envisioned the division of large estates into small parcels and the provision of a plot for every peasant who wished to farm the land. The contradiction between the "goals of the revolution" as expressed in Article 27, and the goals of the strong-arm presidents who comprised the northern dynasty simply went unresolved during their period in power. And. of course, the land reform program itself was one of the principal casualties in the contusion over goals and priorities Even Obregón, who had fought at the constitutional convention for the inclusion of specific agrarian legislation was not energetic in implementing that policy once he came to power. The following is an excerpt from an interview with a peasant who headed an agrarian petitioning committee during the administration of Obregón. In this report he recounts a trip to Mexico City made by the committee in order to enlist Obregón's help in winning a land grant.
Obregón's offered to help us, the peasants of the Laguna. But when it came to the point, he sold out to the Chamber of Agriculture, which was made up of all the landowners around here.
We went to Mexico City with all the documents they asked of us as proof with which to confront the lawyers of the landlords. I, myself, carried the documents in twelve soapboxes, and guarded them in a room. In them were decisions favorable to us, handed down by the judges in Durango. On their side, the Chamber had all the big lawyers of Mexico City, as well as Joaquín Moreno, the owner of El Siglo de Torreón, the regional newspaper. We had three meetings with them and in the first it was obvious that the lawyers thought that because we were illiterate, we would not know how to defend ourselves, and they would beat us easily. They never imagined that we would present the proof we had from Durango....
We gave the documents to an intermediary who passed them on to the President, Alvaro Obregón. But the lawyers, seeing that they could do nothing legal to stop us, slipped some money to Obregón, and accordingly, he did not act in our favor.
In the last confrontation, by way of explanation, they offered us the pretext of a law book, but when they showed it to me, I said to General Obregón, "Don't bother showing me these books of yours because I don't know how to read. I see that they have red covers, but, as for what's inside, we have never bothered much with that."
Then the government offered to pay all the expenses of our stay in Mexico City and the trip back to the Laguna, whilst the lawyers continued slipping money to Obregon.
THE CONSOLIDATION OF NATIONAL POWER
It is difficult to know whether Obregón failed to act on the petition of the Durango peasant committee because he had accepted a bribe, as the peasants claimed, or because the large landlords of the region were too powerful a group to take on. In either case the un-official policy of indifference or "benign neglect" of agrarian reform continued under Obregón and his successors until 1934. The lack of official support to peasant petitions meant that fewer than 940,000 out of a rural population of almost 12 million received small land grants between 1917 and 1934.During that time Carranza, Obregón, and Calles had other matters on their minds. They were concerned principally with the consolidation of national power. 'They were preoccupied with the struggle to establish the preeminence of national over regional or local power i.e.the authority of the president over hundreds of local and regional strongmen who ruled whole sections of the republic like personal kingdoms. All over Mexico former "revolutionary generals" and their henchmen had established themselves as the political chiefs of various towns, states, or regions where their word became law. Many of those whose power and prestige originally derived from victories in battle now exchanged the title of "zone commander" for that of "state governor." The essentially military structure of power remained intact and the generals at the top, Carranza, Obregón, and Calles, had the job of maintaining control and discipline over the lesser military men, the local bosses. The autonomy exercised by the regional bosses, or caciques, threatened to build into a centrifugal force capable of pulling apart the frail unity and peace established after the revolution.
Thus, during the 1920s and early 1930s the energies of the northern dynasty were directed toward building a strong central government. In addition to dealing with local and regional politicians, this meant curbing the power of the Catholic church and checking the political force of nascent labor and peasant organizations. Above all, the presidents wished to prevent the renewal of armed conflict, an eventuality which was never far below the surface of Mexican politics during those years.
In the aftermath of Obregón's assassination, the need to stabilize the situation, legitimize their power, and extend and prolong the political hegemony of the northern clique was increasingly apparent to Calles. Accordingly, he gradually developed the idea of forming a political party that would provide an institutional framework for centralized rule and might solve the ever-troublesome question of presidential succession. Calles and his group could thus retain power and dictate the policy of the developing nation without running afoul of the "antireelection" principle. Calles himself introduced the idea of a new official party that would incorporate militant agraristas, labor leaders, military strongmen, regional bosses, industrialists, commercial landowners, merchants, and others-all the divergent groups currently vying for political power-within a single, all-inclusive party structure. In his September State of the Union address, Calles announced his proposal for the National Revolutionary Party (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, or PNR). The PNR was to be a loose coalition of already existing regional and special interest parties. In March 1929, delegates were sent once more to the central Mexican city of Querétaro to participate in the founding of the new party. The PNR was to have a structure flexible enough to permit the enthusiastic coexistence of the incredibly varied assortment of groups that collaborated in its formation. Differences among the interest groups were to be resolved through broad policy decisions and a heavy emphasis on unity and solidarity over decisive selfishness. Personal differences among leaders wore smoothed over with the signing of the Querétaro Pact of Union and Solidarity in which leaders pledged their willingness to accept the policies and candidates of the new party, submit to party discipline and eschew the use of armed force in the resolution of political conflicts.
With Calles's initiative in 1929, an institutionalized structure was established to resolve the problems of policy determination and presidential succession. It is often asserted that Calles's principal motivation in founding the PNR was to perpetuate himself in power; to provide a mechanism through which he could remain "Supreme Chief of the Revolution" while appearing to have relinquished power to a successor. Whatever the designs that motivated Calles's initiative, the result spelled irrevocable political change for Mexico. The new official party not only began the process of legitimizing the revolution, but it also provided the means through which a new "revolutionary" elite would continue in power up to the present time. The structure of that party and the way it maintains and exercises its political power are the subject of chapter 2.