The "revolution" which had unseated Díaz had found its
principal sponsors and beneficiaries among the upper and middle
classes, for although they had pressed the lower classes into the
fray to do the fighting and the dying, the latter had little to show
for their efforts when the Constitution of 1917 was drafted. Just as
in the struggle for independence, when it had been the
criollos that had wrested power from the peninsulares, in the "revolution"
it had been the mestizos and the Indians who had formed the bulk of
the fighting force but who had experienced the least improvement in
their lives. In neither instance had the fundamental problems of the
Mexican nation been addressed, but only those that most directly
impacted that minority of the population who saw the opportunity to
enhance their own economic, social, and political position. As in so
much of Latin America, the struggle for democracy, for equality, and
for human rights still had a long way to go in Mexico before some
semblance of victory would be achieved.
Few if any of the problems which had precipitated the conflict
had been resolved, for Mexico was seriously in debt, inflation was
rampant, wages were down and unemployment was widespread, the
railways had largely been destroyed, and food shortages were pushing
prices out of reach of the common people. Revenues from oil, most of
which was going to the United States, were still relatively stable
but when the Great War ended in Europe, the bottom fell out of the
henequen market and the Yucatán was plunged into
depression.
When Carranza took the reins of government, he continued to
rule Mexico in much the same mold as had Díaz, for as an
hacendado himself, he had no real intention of enacting any major
changes in land ownership. Indeed, Zapata's continuing struggle in
Morelos was a source of annoyance to him, and in July 1919, Carranza
engineered a plot to have him silenced. An army colonel was given the
assignment to pretend that he was secretly joining Zapata's movement
and, when he got within range of the charismatic leader, he murdered
him, in return for a promotion to a generalship. With Zapata out of
the way, Carranza next addressed his own future. Knowing that he
could not succeed himself in office when his term ended in 1920, he
attempted to install a flunky who he could manipulate, but
Obregón, who wanted the Presidency himself, had other ideas.
Acting swiftly, he forced Carranza to flee to the mountains of
Veracruz where his soldiers soon found and killed him. To fill
Carranza's un-expired term, he had a Sonoran friend from Guaymas,
Adolfo de la Huerta, named as president. However, when
Obregón's cousin, General Benjamin Hill, announced that he,
too, planned to run for president, this momentarily upset
Obregón's own plans, but not for long. General Hill abruptly
sickened and died, and only when autopsied could a cause of death be
firmly established: arsenic poisoning.
Obregón also acted quickly to remove Francisco Villa as
a potential source of irritation, offering him a pardon and a ranch
in Parral, Chihuahua in return for his promise to withdraw from
politics -- terms to which the now-aging fugitive readily agreed. So,
as Obregón moved into the presidency in 1920, he was already a
powerful hacendado but, being a pragmatist, he managed to greatly
enhance his fortunes while in office by avoiding any conflict of
interest with the all-powerful Yankee investors. Fundamental to this
cozy working relationship with the Americans was his support for the
so-called Bucareli Agreements of 1923, which essentially negated the
provisions of Article 27 of the Constitution that would have restored
mineral rights to the Mexican nation. As his own term of office
neared its end, however, Obregón resorted to the same tactic
used by Carranza before him, namely to choose a weak successor who
could be controlled from behind the scenes. When he announced his
choice of Plutarco Calles, another close friend from Guaymas, Sonora,
a number of military generals rose in revolt against him, several of
them likewise former associates from his home state. Secure in the
backing of the Yankees, Obregón proceeded to have every one of
the captured rebel leaders shot and even took the thoughtful
precaution of sending a "hit-man" to Pancho Villa's ranch to kill
him, lest the latter entertain any notion of joining the revolt
against him. Altogether, at least seven thousand persons are known to
have died in this abortive attempt to unseat Obregón.
Once Calles was suitably ensconced in the National Palace,
Obregón retired to his hacienda back in Cajeme, Sonora,
although it was clear to everyone that the country's center of power
had accompanied him. Unfortunately, Calles' term in office was not
only marked by a collapse in silver prices in 1926, but a decline in
oil revenues as well, so when his government reiterated Mexico's
claim to ownership of the sub-soil and restricted the concessions of
foreign oil producers to fifty years, the United States once more
threatened military intervention. Calles also made the "mistake" of
trying to enforce the anti-clerical provisions of the 1917
Constitution, causing a religious uprising to break out in the
solidly Catholic states of Jalisco, Colima, Michoacán, and
portions of adjacent Zacatecas and Nayarit. Beginning in January
1926, armed peasants, rallying to the cry of "Viva Cristo Rey" (Long
Live Christ the King) and subsequently known as the 'Cristeros',
attacked government troops and dynamited railroad trains, while the
army in turn shot priests, raped nuns, and pillaged churches. During
the three years that this bloody sectarian war raged, over eighty
thousand Mexicans were killed. By 1929, with drought ravaging much of
northern and central Mexico and depression spreading from Wall Street
throughout the world, both the impoverished Calles government and the
unemployed clergy called a truce in the fighting, leaving the
bewildered peasants in a state of limbo. As with so many contests of
strength in Mexico, the Cristero uprising, too, ended without a
clear-cut victory for either
side.
Nudged by his mentor back in the chickpea fields of Sonora,
Calles did manage to get the Congress to rewrite the Constitution to
permit the re-election of presidents and to extend their term by two
years, but otherwise he had such poor relations with the Senate that
he had to govern by executive decree. However, such tampering with
the Constitution did not sit well with politicians having aspirations
of their own for the Presidency, and when a couple of his Sonoran
military "buddies" ventured to announce their own plans for moving
into the National Palace, Obregón did not hesitate to order
them murdered. As a result, Obregón easily "won re-election"
in 1928, but, with the Cristero revolt at its peak at the time,
Obregón himself became the target of a pair of Catholic
partisans on the street in Mexico City. He luckily escaped unscathed
and his assailants were quickly put before a firing squad that
savagely riddled them with bullets. Shortly thereafter, however,
another Catholic fanatic gunned down Obregón at a banquet
honoring him in a posh restaurant. At this juncture, Calles, fearing
that he might be accused of having been a party to this scenario,
promptly dismissed one of his cabinet officers known to be hostile to
Obregón and proclaimed that he would step down at the end of
his term, never to seek the presidency again. He further announced
that, in the future, Mexico would be governed by "institutions"
rather than by "caudillos", and essentially abdicated the power of
the presidency to the Partido Nacional
Revolucionario (the National Revolutionary
Party).
The latter was a coalition of disparate political
constituencies that recognized more could be accomplished through
behind-the-scenes discussion and compromise than through half-hearted
military coups. To be sure, the coalition represented the existing
power structure of military men and regional chieftains whose grasp
on power was ensured by exercising careful oversight over what might
otherwise become unruly groups of industrial workers and land-hungry
peasants. Thus, it was an arrangement that promised something to
everyone -- protection to foreign capitalists as well as social
justice to the downtrodden masses. To succeed in its program, the
only prerequisite was to win elections, and with a network of
political control extending downward from the national committee in
Mexico City to the state and municipal delegations, this was a task
for which it was admirably equipped. By making membership in the PNR
a matter of personal choice, the Calles government also effectively
preempted the "need" for opposition parties, although anyone with
political ambitions certainly was quick to realize that they could
only be achieved through "playing ball" with the party in power.
With Obregón removed from the scene, Calles now became
the Jefe Máximo (the "Maximum Chief") of Mexican politics. In consultation
with the PNR, he gave the nod to Emilio Portes Gil, an agrarian
organizer from Tamaulipas, to serve as interim president until a new
election could be held. Calles and the PNR chose Pascual Ortiz Rubio,
an engineer from Michoacán as their candidate, but when
José Vasconcelos, the secretary of education under
Obregón, entered his name as an opposition candidate, it
suddenly became necessary for the PNR to harass voters and stuff the
ballot boxes to guarantee Ortiz Rubio's election.
On his inauguration day, an assailant with a rifle shot the
hapless Ortiz Rubio in the face, and, although he survived, he seldom
appeared in public following this attempt on his life. Calles
continued to direct the affairs of govenment, and, two years into his
job, when Ortiz Rubio sought to exercise his own authority, he was
quickly forced to resign. As his replacement, Calles chose another
old friend from Guaymas, Abelardo Rodríguez, on whom he could
count for complete subservience.
The first decade of Mexico's post-revolutionary history had
seen the country become the second largest oil-producer in the world
-- dwarfed only by the United States, to which most of its own
production went into export. President Wilson had warned Carranza not
to try to enforce the Constitution of 1917 because it was "an
anti-capitalist doctrine", and while there had been much muttering on
the part of the Mexicans, they had not dared to challenge their
powerful northern neighbor. Indeed, by 1930 Americans had more money
invested in Mexico than they did at the end of the Díaz era,
so the "revolution" had done nothing to reduce foreign influence in
the country. Similarly, land reform had gone essentially nowhere,
because the haciendas had been virtually untouched; nearly
five-sixths of the country's best farmland was still in the
possession of about two percent of the nation's landlords. Of the
country's three and a half million agricultural workers, over 70
percent had no land at all and another 15 percent tilled such minute
and scrubby parcels that they could scarcely support themselves and
their families. For their part, the industrial workers found wages
and working conditions only minimally improved, though by the end of
the "revolution" they could at least air their grievances through the
Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers (CROM), a
government-controlled union. However, the Great Depression all but
wiped out the small gains labor had made in the first
post-revolutionary decade as massive unemployment again spread
through the country. Even the modest advances made by the feminist
cause, especially in Yucatán during the progressive
administration of Governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto, came to an end in
1923 following his assassination. Sadly, Mexico's "revolution" had
not been a change with "a capital R": despite over a decade of
bloodshed and the loss of more than one million lives, most of the
country's most pressing problems still remained
un-addressed.
The collapse of the world economy in 1929 merely increased the
suffering of the Mexican
people. The bottom
dropped out of the market for all of the major export commodities --
oil, minerals, cotton, and henequen -- causing mines, factories, and
plantations to close, and thousands of farm workers were sent home
from the United States to further swell the masses of unemployed in
Mexico. Drought ravaged
much of the central and northern regions of the country, curtailing
the already meager harvests of corn and beans, and pushing food
prices out of reach of the impoverished
masses.
Clearly, in this dire hour of global distress, Mexico, like
most of the other countries of the world, looked to a "messiah", to a
"miracle worker" to lead it out of its deepening quagmire of misery.
Fortunately, the man of the hour was already being groomed for his
task in the heart of the western state of Michoacán. He was
Lázaro Cárdenas, born of chiefly Indian ancestry in the
village of Jiquilpán in 1895. His father was a field hand and
a weaver of shawls, but being able to read, had worked himself up to
becoming a small shopkeeper. Appreciating the value of education, he
made sure that his son Lázaro was enrolled in a private school
at the age of six. A couple of years later Lázaro transferred
to a public school whose teacher instilled in him a deep admiration
for Morelos and Juárez as well as a strong antipathy toward
the church and foreign intervention in Mexico's affairs.
Cárdenas also had ample opportunity to acquaint himself with
the plight of the Indian masses and to develop empathy for their
struggle for land reform. In his mid-teens he managed to obtain a
position in the local tax collector's office, a job that required him
to outfit himself in both a coat and a tie, and at 16 he became an
assistant to the secretary of the municipal mayor. As a youth of
eighteen he joined the army to fight in the Revolution against
Huerta, and by the end of the war he had advanced to the rank of
General. His rapid promotion was no doubt due, in part at least, to
the fact that he had come to attention of Plutarco Calles, who valued
the taciturn and laconic young man as one of his most faithful
lieutenants. In 1928, at the age of 33, he was elected governor of
the state of Michoacán, but the timing of his debut into
politics had to be one of the least auspicious that can be
imagined.
Facing the
united opposition of large landowners, clergy, and Cristeros,
Cárdenas immediately set about building his own power base
among the campesinos of Michoacán, because the state lacked a
significant industrial sector. Calling his movement the
Michoacán Regional Confederation of Labor (CRMDT),
Cárdenas drew together a following of agricultural workers,
public servants, university students and teachers whose numbers
swelled to more than 100,000, divided into something over 4,000 rural
cadres. Through his land reform
program, he organized a number of ejidos and saw to it that they were
likewise organized into well-armed rural defense units. He also was
the godfather of the Feminist Federation of Michoacán that
launched a campaign against both alcoholism and religious fanaticism
and trained the women to assist in the defense of their ejidos if
their husbands were incapacitated in any way. His political program
further called for agrarian reform, an 8-hour work-day, a minimum
wage, and close cooperation with the Mexican Regional Labor
Confederation (CROM) headquartered in Mexico
City.
An adroit politician, Cárdenas managed to keep all real
political power in his own hands by making sure that the hierarchy of
the CRMDT was systematically shuffled out of office as their elective
terms came to an end. Usually this meant that a federation member
'graduated' to some political office, such as becoming a state
legislator, a delegate to the National Congress, a municipal
presidency, or a judgeship. With allies in such strategic positions,
Cárdenas soon found himself climbing the national political
ladder, first becoming the head of the PRN, then Secretary of War,
and in 1932 being named to the inner sanctum of Calles' closest
advisors.
With the blessing of the national power structure,
Cárdenas relinquished the governorship of Michoacán to
a conservative who quickly set about trying to undo much of what he
had accomplished during his four years in office. Now, with national
political ambitions foremost in his mind, Cárdenas shifted his
support to a successor who represented the Confederation of Mexican
Workers (CTM), thereby dealing a deathblow to the CRMDT that had
outlived its usefulness as a stepping-stone to
power.
In 1934, when Calles and the PRN threw their support behind
Cárdenas rather than to one of the three generals also seeking
the 'nod', he was assured of election as Mexico's next president.
But, dissatisfied with the rubber-stamp approval of the party rather
than a vote of confidence from the populace at large, Cárdenas
immediately set off on a nation-wide "campaign tour", in which he
visited every state in the union to meet with the people, to listen
to their grievances and hear them express their hopes for the future.
Returning to Mexico City following the election, he ended his
acceptance speech with the words, "I have been elected President and
I intend to be President", a clear message to his patron and mentor,
Calles, that he had every intention of
being 'his own
man'.
When Cárdenas took office, the Mexican economy, like
that of most of the Western world, was in deep distress, so he and
his advisors devised a Six Year Plan for development, no doubt
patterned to some degree on similar programs which had been set in
motion in the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. It was a strongly
nationalistic document which called for agrarian reform, the
recognition of the ejido as a fundamental building block of
landownership in Mexico, the establishment of a bank to extend
credits to farmers, the expansion of irrigation systems in the arid
central and northern regions of the country, and the extension to
peasants living on large haciendas of the right to petition for small
plots of their own. The plan also called for compliance with Article
123 of the Constitution that granted workers the right to organize
and strike and also for enforcement of the Constitution's provisions
dealing with the ownership of the country's sub-soil resources of
petroleum and metallic minerals. In addition, rural education
was to be expanded through the construction of some 12,000 new
schools, and the curriculum itself was to emphasize scientific,
rational, and socialist goals, including sex education, while at the
same time banning all religious teaching. The uprising of the
Cristeros against Calles' earlier anti-clerical measures was, of
course, fresh in everyone's memory and one of the most notorious
opponents of the Church, the caudillo of Tabasco state who had won
the sobriquet of "executioner of priests", still occupied the post of
agricultural secretary in Cárdenas' cabinet. Naturally, the
Catholic devout of the country, concentrated largely in the central
states of Puebla, Morelos, Jalisco, Zacatecas, and Cárdenas'
home state of Michoacán, were infuriated by such ideas and
some 8000 middle-class urban dwellers took up arms to contest them.
So divisive an issue was the matter of sex education that this part
of the new school reform had to be shelved, at least temporarily.
Even so, anti-clerical feeling was running so high that by 1935 over
half of Mexico's states had no priests at all. When the governor of
Veracruz arbitrarily set a quota of one priest for every 1000
inhabitants in his state, it seemed a most generous "compromise",
because in the country as a whole their numbers totaled scarcely more
than 300 -- or less than 1 per 40,000
inhabitants.
Calles, now in retirement in Cuernavaca, still saw himself as
the "power behind the Presidency" and believed that Cárdenas
would have no chance of implementing his far-reaching plans for
reform without his support, which he had no intention of giving.
Indeed, by this time Calles was so thoroughly subservient to his
Yankee patrons that he founded himself championing the cause of
foreign capital and the sanctity of private property to garner their
continued favor. When the country was paralyzed by a wave of strikes
in 1935 and Cárdenas did not step in to crush them, Calles and
his coterie of businessmen were appalled by his inaction. For his
part, Cárdenas argued that the strikes were but a
manifestation of the unjust balance between profits and wages, and
turned the disputes over to his newly formed Department of Labor.
When the latter ruled repeatedly in favor of the striking workers,
Calles warned Cárdenas that he had better be careful lest he
be forced to "abdicate" as had his earlier "front-man", Rodriguez,
when he took too independent a line. However, by continuing to
support the cause of the workers, Cárdenas increasingly won
the backing of the labor movement, which, together with the solid
base he had already established amongst agricultural workers,
steadily strengthened his hand as the inevitable showdown between him
and Calles gradually came to a head.
Feeling himself bolstered by broad popular support,
Cárdenas proceeded to "dump" all but three of the country's
governors and military zone commanders -- all appointees of Calles --
as well as the cabinet that the latter had likewise bequeathed to
him. When a delegation of these unemployed bureaucrats arrived on
Calles' doorstep to complain to the Jefe
Máximo and demand reinstatement,
the head of the largest labor movement in Mexico, Lombardo Toledano,
threatened to call a general strike. Realizing that he was no longer
in control of the situation, Calles abruptly announced his
"retirement" from politics and departed for exile in the United
States. However, no doubt encouraged by his Yankee patrons, he was
back within six months trying to foment more trouble for the
Cárdenas regime, so Toledano brought out his workers -- 80,000
strong -- to march in the streets of the capital, while
Cárdenas arranged to have Calles and his cohorts "read out" of
the party and once more shipped off into exile in the United
States.
The next challenge to the reform government came from a strike
in the glass industry in Monterrey in February 1936. In response to a
directive from the Department of Labor, again favoring the workers,
the factory owners chose to lock out the workers instead, so
Cárdenas boarded a special train to confront the company
directors face to face. He candidly told them that if they were
"tired of the social struggle" implicit in such labor disputes, they
could either turn their factories over to the workers or to the
government! He assured them that either of these moves would be a far
more "patriotic" solution than a lockout. Once again Cárdenas
carried the day, and out of this confrontation developed an enlarged
labor movement that eventually crystallized into the Confederation of
Mexican Laborers (CTM) under Toledano's
leadership.
With Calles out of the picture and labor unrest temporarily
quieted, Cárdenas next turned his attention to mollifying the
Catholic church. He reaffirmed his belief in the freedom of religion
and promised that his government would not carry out any
anti-religious activities nor promote any "propaganda" or sex
education in the schools. Even so, fanatical Catholics felt that
these concessions did not go far enough, and in 1937 they organized
the Unión Nacional de Sinarquistas (UNS) to combat what they
considered to be the continued secularization of
Mexico.
Although often being accused of being a "socialist" or
"Marxist", Cárdenas was not an ideologue but a pragmatist.
Like the leader of many another country at this time of world
depression, he felt that the private sector of the economy has shown
neither its willingness nor its ability to cope with the magnitude of
the disaster and that only government could intervene to help put
things back on track once again. He had not disavowed "capitalism",
but he insisted on giving it a social conscience, and in this regard
he mirrored the policies adopted by FDR in the United States and by
many another government in the countries of Western
Europe.
One of the issues of top priority and closest to his heart was
agrarian reform. In the autumn of 1936, he took personal control of
the division and redistribution of lands held by the large haciendas
into ejidos, or communal farms. Geographically, the first area to be
targeted was the Laguna district of Coahuila state, the fertile
irrigated cotton lands that had been the home of Madero.
Cárdenas took deep pride in being able to expropriate the most
productive areas of these large commercial estates and turn them over
to the poorest of the landless peasants. The following year, he
targeted the large henequen plantations of the Yucatán for
subdivision among the small farmers, and then moved on to Sonora
where he made sure than much of the best irrigated land went back to
the Yaqui Indians. In Baja California the expropriated cotton
plantations surrounding Mexicali were turned into ejidos, and in
Tamaulipas he reallocated the sugar cane plantations among the field
hands. In Sinaloa, too, the premium-irrigated valleys were converted
into ejidos. The fact that most of these expropriations took place in
the more commercialized farming areas of the north simply reflected
the predominant presence of foreign investment in those regions. In
any event, within the six years that Cárdenas was in office,
he tripled the amount of land held by the country's small farmers,
having expropriated more than 45 million acres and distributed it
among a million peasants. By 1940, nearly 47% of the country's arable
land had been redistributed to about 42% of the agricultural
population. Nevertheless, well intentioned as such measures were,
there remained much left to do. Half of the country's large
landowners remained "unscathed" by the land reforms, yet more than
two million peasants still had no land of their own. Indeed, in many
parts of the country, the hacendados had largely defeated the
purposes of the land reform by sub-dividing their properties among
their heirs and relatives, so that no individual parcel would exceed
the 300 ha (750 acres) size-limit set for expropriation. Complicating
the situation further was the fact that the ejido investment bank had
run out of funds, many of the plots already distributed were of such
small size or of such poor quality that the farmers still could not
make a living, and insufficient rain in the late 1930's was causing
increasing hardship in many of the areas lacking irrigation.
Moreover, many of the farmers still could not get their products to
market because of inadequate or non-existent farm-to-market
roads.
In the haste to push through land reform, many administrative
blunders also occurred. Little thought was given to the geographic
distribution of the individual plots carved out of the large estates,
resulting in weird patterns of land ownership and problems of access.
Particularly in the Yucatán, where the principal cash crop was
henequen, some farmers obtained title to land about to be harvested
while others would have to wait for several years to realize any
return. Still others had no access to a desfibrador, or mill where the
plant was processed into cordage, so had no way to market their crop
whenever it was ready. Although for many ejidatarios, the old local
hacendado was gone, his new "landlord" was an impersonal bank located
somewhere in the capital city, but just as demanding in its schedule
of payments.
Ever mindful that the success of their reform programs
depended on an educated populace, the Cardenista planners also set
about expanding the construction of rural schools. Yet, if these were
to succeed in their mission, it was realized that they had to be
accompanied by programs for providing potable water, roads, medical
services, and electricity to the same remote areas of the country.
Moreover, technical assistance was required to build irrigation dams
and canals, to teach scientific methods of cultivation and animal
husbandry, and to establish producer and consumer cooperatives in
outlying areas that lacked a viable commercial infrastructure.
Cárdenas likewise re-established an activist Department of
Indian Affairs, realizing that a sizable proportion of the Mexican
population would forever remain outside the orbit of national life
without a material improvement in their economic and social
condition. So dedicated was he to the cause of the Indian that
Cárdenas personally attended each of the eight national
congresses held to discuss the concerns of the indigenous people, and
was instrumental in seeing to it that vocational schools were started
to help integrate them into the country's economy. Indeed, whether he
was aware of it or not, Cárdenas had instituted in many areas
of Mexico the same kind of comprehensive regional planning that was
being carried out at that time in the United States by the federal
government to assist in the economic and social development of one of
its most backward regions, the Tennessee Valley.
The Cardenista Six-Year Plan was not only a blueprint for
putting Mexico on a new course for economic and social development
but it was also a vigorous manifestation of a new political
independence as well. Washington, ever wary of its neighbor becoming
too independent in foreign affairs, was clearly upset when Mexico
offered political asylum to Leon Trotsky, the Soviet dissident. And,
when Mexico chastised the western democracies for their failure to
assist Republican Spain against Franco and the Fascists and began
sending supplies and munitions to their embattled "brothers", U.S.
pretensions of neutrality seemed strangely hollow indeed.
Domestically, Cárdenas bought out the foreign investors who
controlled Mexico's railway system and nationalized it. He also shut
down the gambling casinos and houses of prostitution located in the
northern border towns, despite the hue and cry raised by their
American owners and patrons. And when he expropriated the rich
farmlands surrounding Ciudad Obregón and returned them to the
Yaqui Indians, the Yankee cries of protest became even more
impassioned and bitter.
Cárdenas' boldest move was yet to
come: in March 1938,
only six days after Hitler's troops marched into Austria following
the Anschluss, he expropriated the properties of the foreign oil
companies and nationalized
them. Although President
Roosevelt had promised in his inaugural address in 1932 that the
United States would hereafter refrain from intervening in the
internal affairs of the Latin American countries, Cárdenas no
doubt had questioned for some time how seriously such a commitment
could be taken. With Europe moving inexorably toward another major
war as the result of German rearmament and expansionism, the U. S.
was now so much more clearly preoccupied with developments in that
sphere that he felt it would not likely respond to nationalization of
the Mexican oil industry in any belligerent manner. Nevertheless,
Cárdenas accompanied his move with a declaration that, if
Washington did dispatch any Marines to Mexico, he would not hesitate
to blow up the oil fields. Although the United States
was convinced that Communists were behind this hostile action, in
view of Cárdenas' threat, it decided against launching a
military incursion into Mexico.
Mexico's experience with the foreign oil companies had been
exploitive in the extreme.
Against an investment of some $100 million dollars made over
the course of thirty years, they had reaped profits that totaled in
the neighborhood of $5 billion dollars. Yet, wages for Mexican
workers had been kept minimal, and when strikes broke out seeking
higher pay, the oil companies argued that they could not afford to
meet more than one-fifth of demands the workers
submitted. A government
commission found that the workers' demands were valid and asked the
companies to at least double their
offer. When the
companies refused, the Mexican Supreme Court ruled against them, and
only after many threats and much vituperative rhetoric did the
companies begrudgingly "manage" to come up with the amount specified.
By then, however, Cárdenas' patience had run out. Despite his promise to pay
compensation within ten years, the companies rejected
Cárdenas’ offer, and the British and Dutch governments
immediately severed diplomatic relations with
Mexico.
The United States was every bit as hostile as were Britain and
the Netherlands, so it immediately set about trying to prevent the
sale of Mexican oil on the international market and also terminated
all purchases of silver from the
country. American
entrepreneurs were prevented from selling Mexican oil in Europe and
the inflow of all capital to Mexico was cut
off. Pemex (Petroleos
Mexicanos), the nationalized Mexican oil company, was unable to
purchase new machinery and replacement parts, and oil production
gradually fell to little more than half of what it had been when the
expropriation took place. Hostile anti-Mexican propaganda, financed
in part by American oil companies, sharply cut into the country's
tourist earnings, and an abortive coup against the Cárdenas
government also traced its financial backing to the same
sources. By 1942, these
economic pressures had succeeded in obliging Mexico to sell its oil
to Germany, Italy, and Japan -- so counter-productive a policy that
Washington finally decided to give up its embargo in that
year. Nevertheless, by
the outbreak of the war, the flight of capital out of Mexico as a
result of the expropriation of the oil industry had reduced foreign
investment in the country by two-thirds -- a clear indication to the
Cardenistas that their move toward independence was succeeding. Only in retrospect do we
realize how apropos the words of an unknown Mexican soldier following
the battle of the Alamo would have been to this situation: "Another
victory like this and we will surely lose the
war!" Perhaps the
greatest personal tragedy was that Lázaro Cárdenas
himself lived long enough to see most of his life's work expunged by
the actions of the lesser men that followed
him.
On the domestic political front, another major change was in
the offing. The PNR, or National
Revolutionary Party, believed that it had in effect accomplished what
it had set out to do. It
had given a voice to labor and land to the
peasants. Now, a new
agenda and a new format were needed to meet the challenges of a new
Mexico. Hence, a new
party -- the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano, or PRM -- came into
being, a fusion of workers and farmers that also reached out to
include the growing urban middle class, students, women, bureaucrats,
the military, and the professionals. For Mexico, 1938 not only
marked the high-water mark for economic and social reform but also
the charting of a new direction in the country's internal political
movement as well.
Of course, most of the Mexican elite was quite unhappy about
the nationalization of the oil industry. Industrialists, bankers, and
merchants all thought that Cárdenas had gone too far in trying
to stand up to the Yankees. Many of the military brass believed that
the move was Communist inspired, and technicians felt it had been too
precipitate a move because Mexico had neither the managerial
expertise nor the requisite fleet of tankers to operate the industry
efficiently. Of course,
the depressed state of the world economy only deepened their gloom,
causing markets for Mexican products to contract, oil revenues to
fall off, and inflation to set in as wages dropped and prices rose.
Small wonder, then that in the political arena the conservatives
rallied around a new coalition which called itself the Party of
National Action (PAN), among whose most ardent supporters were
Catholic activists and middle-class urban women. To be sure, Cárdenas
and his cohorts, including the once-mighty Toledano, saw the backlash
coming and realized that the reform movement had run its
course. When the PRM met to choose its candidate for
President, a reform candidate favored by Cárdenas was pushed
aside and the nod went instead to a conservative general by the name
of Manuel Ávila Camacho. Even so, when the ballots were
counted and Camacho was proclaimed the winner, it was generally
agreed that the ruling party had only managed to hold on to the
Presidency through fraud.
Violence on election day resulted in the death of some 47
Mexicans, the bulk of them in the
capital. Whether they
realized it or not, for most of Mexico's people, the era of hope and
promise was already drawing to a close and it was back to "business
as usual".