The Logic of Compromise in Mexico: How the Countryside Was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism

By Gladys I. McCormick

In this political history of twentieth-century Mexico, Gladys McCormick argues that the key to understanding the immense power of the long-ruling Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) is to be found in the countryside. Using newly available sources, including declassified secret police files and oral histories, McCormick looks at large-scale sugar cooperatives in Morelos and Puebla, two major agricultural regions that serve as microcosms of events across the nation. She argues that Mexico's rural peoples, despite shouldering much of the financial burden of modernization policies, formed the PRI regime's most fervent base of support.

McCormick demonstrates how the PRI exploited this support, using key parts of the countryside to test and refine instruments of control--including the regulation of protest, manipulation of collective memories of rural communities, and selective application of violence against critics--that it later employed in other areas, both rural and urban. With three peasant leaders, brothers named Ruben, Porfirio, and Antonio Jaramillo, at the heart of her story, McCormick draws a capacious picture of peasant activism, disillusion, and compromise in state formation, revealing the basis for an enduring political culture dominated by the PRI. On a broader level, McCormick demonstrates the connections among modern state building in Latin America, the consolidation of new forms of authoritarian rule, and the deployment of violence on all sides.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Feb 10, 2016
• ISBN: 9781469627755

Gladys I. McCormick

Gladys McCormick is assistant professor of history at Syracuse University.

Book preview

The Logic of Compromise in Mexico

The Logic of Compromise in Mexico

How the Countryside Was Key to the Emergence of Authoritarianism

GLADYS I. MCCORMICK

The University of North Carolina Press Chapel Hill

© 2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Arno by Westchester Publishing Services

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence

and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for

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The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the

Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover photograph: Tito Maldonado, Zacatepec, Morelos, 1944.

Courtesy of Félix Maldonado.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

McCormick, Gladys I., author.

   The logic of compromise in Mexico: how the countryside was key to the emergence of authoritarianism/Gladys I. McCormick.

         pages cm

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4696-2774-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-1-4696-2775-5 (ebook) 1. Partido Revolucionario Institucional—History. 2. Mexico—Politics and government—20th century. 3. Morelos (Mexico : State)—Politics and government—20th century. 4. Puebla (Mexico : State)—Politics and government—20th century. 5. Mexico—Rural conditions. 6. Morelos (Mexico : State)—Rural conditions. 7. Puebla (Mexico : State)—Rural conditions. 8. Jaramillo, Rubén M., 1900–1962. 9. Political corruption—Mexico. 10. State-sponsored terrorism—Mexico. I. Title.

JL1298.R4M35 2016

324.972′0842—dc23

2015026768

For Amelia and Lucia

Contents

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

The Promise of Cardenismo in Rural Morelos

CHAPTER TWO

The Limits of Cardenismo: The Emergence of Rubén Jaramillo

CHAPTER THREE

The Logic of Compromise: The Forgotten Tale of Antonio Jaramillo

CHAPTER FOUR

Undoing of Rural Autonomy: The Rise and Fall of Porfirio Jaramillo

CHAPTER FIVE

A Laboratory for State-Sponsored Violence, 1952–1958

CHAPTER SIX

Taking History Forward: The Institutionalization of Authoritarianism, 1958–1962

CHAPTER SEVEN

Searching for New Heroes, 1962 and Beyond

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

A map of Morelos and part of Puebla appears on page 7.

Acknowledgments

I would like to first extend my many thanks to the personnel of the Archivo General de la Nación in Mexico City. Roberto Beristáin, Armando Santiago Sánchez, Rocío Romero Hernández, and Ricardo Alday García helped make my stay at the AGN a productive and intellectually rich experience. I want to single out Vicente Capelo, at the time supervisor of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad documents, for a special acknowledgement. Aside from the AGN, I benefited from the assistance of many other archivists during my field research, including those at the Registro Agrario Nacional’s archive in Mexico City and its state-level branches in Morelos and Puebla, the Archivo General del Estado de Morelos, the Archivo General del Estado de Puebla, and Colegio de Postgraduados de Chapingo. Norma Edith Cervantes at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia provided invaluable insights into how to maneuver around the Archivo de la Palabra.

During my time in Mexico, I met many individuals who generously shared their insights and answered countless questions that helped guide my research. I am especially grateful to the faculty of the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social and Horacio Crespo of the Universidad Autónoma del Estado de Morelos. I thank Hugo Velazquez of the Universidad de Guadalajara for allowing me to join the comunidad de dos and helping me understand how to study the endemic violence of this period in Mexico’s history. I am beholden to two individuals from opposite sides of the political spectrum in Morelos. Emilio Plutarco García Jiménez not only opened his own personal archive on the Jaramillista movement but also introduced me to many of the surviving members of this movement and their families. I can only hope this book contributes to the historical record he so valiantly and methodically keeps from being forgotten. I also owe a debt of gratitude to Roberto Burnett. Like Emilio Plutarco, he opened up his personal archive, welcomed me into his family, and introduced me to many individuals in Morelos that shared with me a more complicated memory of the decades in question. I came to appreciate his generosity and his deep love for the many communities of southern Morelos, especially Jojutla. I also want to thank Félix Maldonado Cárdenas for his ongoing support and his permission to use his father’s photograph on the cover of this book.

The friendships I formed while in the field made the lonely and arduous process of research more satisfying. I would like to thank Stephanie Ballenger, Karen Melvin, Debbie Mondellini, Maggie Roberts, Halbert Jones, Paul Ross, Andrew Paxman, Eileen Ford, Nichole Sanders, Gillian McGillivray, James Cypher, Colby Ristow, Rob Alegre, and Ageeth Sluis. Several, including Halbert and Andrew, generously commented on parts of this book. My surrogate parents in Cuernavaca, Raymond Plankey and Gabriela Videla, always welcomed me back after trips to the campo and inspired me with their lifelong dedication to social justice.

Many individuals have helped guide my interests in state planning, political violence, and popular mobilizations. At the University of Wisconsin–Madison, Steve Stern, Francisco Scarano, and Florencia Mallon have created a dynamic, rigorous, and generous intellectual community of Latin American history scholars. I will always appreciate Franco’s encouragement to remember the material realities of people marginalized and frustrated in an unjust world. I am deeply grateful to Steve for his carefully interjected insights at key moments throughout the writing of this book. I learned from him the importance of remembering that scholarship has a real impact on people’s lives. Though the community of Latin Americanist historians coming out of UW-Madison is large, I want to single out Marc Hertzman, Andres Matías Ortíz, Tamara Feinstein, Carrie Larson, Julie Gibbings, Ana Schaposchnik, Anne Macpherson, Karin Rosemblatt, and Nancy Appelbaum for a special thank-you.

I am surrounded by a group of strong, beautiful, and intelligent women. First and foremost, I would like to thank Florencia Mallon. Years ago, I walked into her office with unformed ideas about economic development, Mexico’s political system, and Emiliano Zapata. And then she asked me what I knew about the 1940s and about Rubén Jaramillo. Little did I know she was setting me down a path that would consume my life for the next decade. I owe her my profound gratitude for being an excellent mentor and a source of unending inspiration. The next five women are my comadres. Jaymie Patricia Heilman, Brenna Wynne, Ariadna Rodenstein, Solsiree del Moral, and Ileana Rodríguez Silva gave me their unflagging encouragement and inspired me with their generosity, their brilliance, and their ability to laugh in the face of adversity. Jaymie, in particular, provided me with immeasurable support, and I am forever grateful to have her in my life.

Since arriving at Syracuse University, my intellectual community has expanded and left an indelible mark on the evolution of this book. Norman Kutcher, Carol Faulkner, Andrew Cohen, Dennis Romano, Michael Ebner, Laurie Marhoefer, Bridgette Werner, Phil Erenrich, and Matt Cleary were instrumental as I navigated the final stages of this process. In addition, I want to express my heartfelt appreciation to Elaine Maisner at the University of North Carolina Press for her enthusiastic support of this project. I am indebted to the two anonymous readers for their generous feedback and thorough engagement with the manuscript. I would also like to thank several institutions for providing financial and logistical support: the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Instituto Nacional de Estudios Históricos de las Revoluciones de México, and the American Historical Association, which awarded me an Albert J. Beveridge Grant for Research in the Western Hemisphere. Finally, I would like to thank the Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs at Syracuse University for its generous financial support as I concluded this project.

Growing up in Costa Rica, much of it in the countryside and during a time of enormous turmoil in Central America, left an indelible mark on how I approach history. I thank my parents, my brothers, Douglas, Nicholas, and Ian, my sister-in-law, Sarah Valatka, and my extended family for showing me the value of roots and for reminding me to come home. I also thank my parents, Harry and Annette, and my in-laws, Betty and Frank, for nurturing this project in so many ways, including being wonderful and always available grandparents. My brother, Nicholas, accompanied me on many trips to Morelos and Puebla. It was wonderful to see this region through his eyes, and I am deeply grateful for his companionship. Frank Couvares deserves a special mention. Not only did he read multiple drafts, but he was also always available to answer questions and probably knows more about Mexico than he ever thought he would. Amelia and Lucia were born as this project concluded, and I hope they will be proud of their mamá. I dedicate this work to these two beautiful beings and I want them to know how much they have inspired it.

Abbreviations

CCI Central Campesina Independiente (Independent Peasant Headquarters) CNC Confederación Nacional Campesina (National Peasant Confederation) CNPA Coordinación Nacional Plan de Ayala (Plan de Ayala National Coordination) CTM Confederación de Trabajadores Mexicanos (Confederation of Mexican Workers) DAAC Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonización (Department of Rural and Colonization Affairs) DFS Dirección Federal de Seguridad (Federal Security Directorate) DGI Dirección General de Industrias (General Industry Directorate) DGIPS Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (General Directorate of Political and Social Investigations) EZLN Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (Zapatista Army of National Liberation) FPPM Federación de Partidos del Pueblo Mexicano (Federation of the Mexican Peoples’ Political Parties) MLN Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Movement) PCM Partido Comunista Mexicano (Mexican Communist Party) PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Institutionalized Revolutionary Party) SA Secretaría de Agricultura (Ministry of Agriculture) SEDENA Secretaría de la Defensa Nacional (Ministry of National Defense) SIC Secretaría de Industria y Comercio (Ministry of Industry and Commerce) STIAM Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Azucarera (Sugar Industry Workers’ Union) UGOCM Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos Mexicanos (General Union of Mexican Workers and Peasants) UNPASA Unión Nacional de Productores de Azúcar (National Union of Sugar Producers) UPM Unión de Pueblos de Morelos (Union of the Peoples of Morelos)

The Logic of Compromise in Mexico

Introduction

In March 1962, Tito Maldonado sat down at his desk to write a history of the Cooperative Society of Peasants and Workers of the Emiliano Zapata Sugar Mill (Sociedad Cooperativa de Ejidatarios y Obreros del Ingenio Emiliano Zapata), located in the nearby town of Zacatepec. Not only was the cooperative one of Mexico’s largest sugar production enterprises, but it was also one of the top employers in the state of Morelos and had a budget larger than that of the state government.¹ As a dedicated member and a longtime worker of the cooperative, Maldonado discussed its beginnings during the administration of President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40), who in 1935 commissioned his brother-in-law, Antonio Solórzano, to find the best place in the state of Morelos to set up a sugar mill.² Maldonado speculated that Cárdenas wanted to benefit the citizens of Morelos—in his words, the cradle of agrarianism—because of their sacrifices during the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution, the first large-scale social revolution of the twentieth century. Morelos had also been home to Emiliano Zapata, the leader of the peasant revolutionary forces and one of the conflict’s emblematic figures. Maldonado remembered the inaugural ceremonies in February 1938, headed up by Cárdenas himself, and the widespread support of the area’s communities for the sugar-growing venture. A tone of nostalgia entered Maldonado’s writing as he recalled how everybody worked willingly, with enthusiasm during the first three zafras (sugarcane harvests).³

Maldonado went on to lament the abrupt end of the promise of prosperity in the following decade, when the cooperative fell victim to corrupt and incompetent general managers. Far from taking into account managers’ expertise in sugar production, the federal government used the post as a reward for political supporters. While in office, these managers exploited the cooperative to benefit themselves and the cadre of cronies they named to key positions. Maldonado blamed the cooperative’s downfall not only on corrupt managers but also on the division between its two main constituencies: sugarcane growers and sugar mill workers. He held the federal government liable for allowing the national government-affiliated labor union to enter the cooperative and represent workers in everyday affairs. Such representation ensured acrimony among members, worsened by the fact that peasants—those growing sugarcane and delivering it to the mill—had no commensurately effective political body to speak on their behalf. This failure on the part of government officials, according to Maldonado, doomed Cárdenas’s dreams for the area.

Maldonado’s account illustrates a sense of failure common in the Mexican countryside of the post-1940s, a sense of disjuncture between the promise and reality of Lázaro Cárdenas’s vision for Mexico. The political machine that engineered a large-scale patronage structure under a progressive leader could not guarantee that future leaders would follow a similarly progressive mandate. It was not surprising, then, to see the consolidation of one-party rule under the leadership of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI),⁴ a high degree of political centralization in the hands of the executive branch, an emphasis on urban growth and industrialization, and the rolling back of progressive gains of earlier social reforms. Even though it no longer adhered to the 1910 revolution’s ideals of social justice and economic redistribution, the governing regime continued to capitalize on its position as custodian of these promises. This political system thus allowed a small elite to manage far-reaching clientelistic relationships and monitor channels of political contestation and popular mobilization. It also allowed them to distribute the rewards of industrialization in their favor to such an extent that Mexico had one of the worst rates of income distribution in the region. Grassroots critics such as Maldonado argued that Cárdenas had a genuine progressive vision, but that vision was then co-opted by those presidents that followed him once he left office in 1940. All in all, Maldonado and others like him believed that Cárdenas built a modern welfare state that corrupt, less benevolent, and sometimes violent successors turned into what could be deemed one of the most successful instances of authoritarianism in twentieth-century Latin America.

The emergence of this authoritarianism, including its political and economic foundations, is the subject of this book. Tracking what happened to these foundations over the course of thirty years—1935–65—from the perspective of the increasingly marginalized countryside shows why this particular form of rule lasted almost eight decades and why, in contrast to what Maldonado proposes, it began before Cárdenas left office. One of this book’s central claims is that the shift in rural power relations in favor of industrialization that started in the 1930s, such as that witnessed at the cooperative in Zacatepec, was at the center of Mexico’s authoritarianism. Studying this shift shows how the political marginalization of peasants, which began after 1938 and gained traction in the 1940s, was a precursor to their repression in the 1950s. Increasingly, rural peoples sought to reconcile the contradiction between memories of a revolution celebrated for bringing social peace and economic prosperity to Mexico and the reality of a political system that resorted to co-optation and violence to suppress popular demands. Relying ultimately on a top-down, coercive, and clientelistic authority, this system of rule nonetheless also depended on the cooperation of a multitude of actors from many sectors of society, including those drawn from the countryside. Building and maintaining that system was a messy, incomplete, contradictory, and at times violent process that transformed the political and economic character of postrevolutionary Mexico.⁵ Such an analysis leads to the book’s main conclusion: Mexico’s particular form of authoritarianism first emerged in the governing regime’s strategies of containment and repression in rural areas, strategies that it later employed in urban centers.

The Shape of the State

To begin the story of the foundations of authoritarianism, we need to understand the origins of the governing regime as emerging out of the relationship between the ruling party and the federal government. The PRI was founded in 1929 to avert a constitutional crisis caused by the assassination in 1928 of the president-elect, Álvaro Obregón.⁶ The party’s founders determined to subordinate the congress to the executive branch and rein in chaotic elections at the regional level that threatened to undo much of what political elites achieved throughout the 1920s. The party’s power grew during the Depression of the 1930s as it promised to bring order and centralize authority in the hands of an enlightened political elite invested in fulfilling the promises of the 1910 revolution. Not only did the ruling party’s nomination of individuals to key government posts, including the presidency, happen behind closed doors, but all of its presidential nominees had previously held a post in their predecessor’s cabinet.⁷ This meant that, with the exception of the period between 1928 and 1934, when former president Plutarco Elías Calles dominated politics, the ruling party controlled the executive branch, and every action happened at the behest of the president.⁸ The PRI thus commanded the presidency and all federal senatorial seats during much of the twentieth century, and its candidates polled approximately 80 to 90 percent of all votes cast in presidential elections. Between the 1930s and 1960s, PRI supporters also held all state governorships and state legislature seats and almost all mayorships and municipal council seats.⁹ As Roger Hansen writes, office holders owe[d] their selection not to interest groups which support them with their votes, but to those few within the political elite who have co-opted them into the political hierarchy.¹⁰

Such prolonged dominance of one-party rule requires that we see it as much more than electoral manipulation or as the product of some mix of patronage and coercion or as uniform and intractable across such a diverse country. Rather, the success of the governing regime’s project of social control relied on the willingness of regional and local leaders, as well as teachers, bureaucrats, agrarian officials, and trade union leaders, to act on its behalf and staff state institutions. In the post-1960s period, these leaders allowed the governing regime to eventually capitalize on what anthropologist Monique Nuitjen calls the individual’s feeling of awe and powerlessness … towards a bureaucratic machine characterized by opaque politics.¹¹ Local and regional state agents effectively became arbiters of the opaque politics driving the postrevolutionary national project, which allowed them to mediate cultural knowledge and access to resources. To question their power meant challenging the roots of patriotism. The opaqueness of politics was especially crucial in concealing the frailties, flaws, and personal agendas of state agents, which might challenge the governing regime’s carefully hewn image as the guarantor of social order.¹² In reality, teachers revised official curricula, governors disobeyed orders from their political superiors, bureaucrats gave preferential treatment to close allies, and local leaders interpreted state directives to benefit themselves or the communities they represented. At any given moment, they might collaborate with, ignore, or resist official influence, depending on the rewards and penalties attendant on their choices.

Domination from the center was real, but it looked much more contentious and negotiated from a regional perspective.¹³ Precisely because the social order was prone to instability, it required the governing regime to periodically apply corrective measures to ensure state control. Over the course of the 1940s and 1950s, regime officials learned how to manage patron-client networks, divide and conquer popular groups, strategically deploy repression, and selectively use the contradictory rhetoric of revolutionary populism and economic modernization to enhance the governing regime’s power. Dramatic economic growth rates during these two decades helped ensure a semblance of social peace and covered up the contradictions within a political order that claimed to be revolutionary while eroding or blocking reforms designed to open the democratic process or redress income inequality.¹⁴ Repression aimed to resolve such contradictions, especially after an economic slowdown in the 1950s provoked political challenges to—and divisions within—the PRI. By the 1960s, the regime finally and very publicly revealed its authoritarian nature when it massacred hundreds of students and activists in the Tlatelolco Plaza in downtown Mexico City on the eve of the 1968 Olympics.

The PRI-led state’s predisposition to violence did not elicit surprise in the countryside. In the mid-twentieth century, catchphrases such as Golden Age and Pax Priísta, used to describe Mexico’s splendid moment as the cultural and economic engine of Latin America, retained some plausibility in urban centers, but little in the countryside.¹⁵ What seemed like social peace and the emergence of nonviolent authoritarianism in the city looked different from the vantage point of rural Mexico, which in 1940 was home to two-thirds of all Mexicans. State-sponsored violence, so shocking in Mexico City in 1968, had already become commonplace in rural areas.¹⁶ Since the 1940s, state officials had been readily deploying or sanctioning forms of repression against anyone who challenged the political status quo in the countryside. Given their control over the media and a bias toward seemingly more modern urban centers, officials felt confident that such violence would not generate public censure beyond the local area. The countryside thus served as a laboratory—sometimes intentional and sometimes not—to test and hone coercive strategies that officials later used against urban activists. By focusing on the countryside, this book shows that Mexico’s authoritarianism was more violent than previously assumed and began much earlier than the 1960s.

Nowhere does this story emerge more clearly than in Morelos and Puebla, states in south-central Mexico, a region that was the agrarian core of the 1910–20 Mexican Revolution, the home of Emiliano Zapata and thousands of veterans of the armed conflict, and the site of long-standing traditions of communal autonomy. Focusing on these two states raises the question of why rural people, so willing to take up arms to protect their way of life during the 1910 revolution, also disproportionately supported the PRI-led state in post-1940s’ Mexico despite the fact that it actively undermined them. In Morelos, rural peoples kept voting for the PRI and rallying behind its leaders not out of ignorance or because the PRI duped them into believing it looked out for their interests but because they witnessed over and over again what happened to those who did challenge the political order. This study thus tracks the emerging relationships between the PRI-led regime and the rural peoples who became its social base of support. It also shows that the countryside’s political complicity was in fact a story of ambivalent acceptance, enormous loss, and continual violence.

The fifty-six communities that made up the large-scale sugar production cooperative affiliated with the Emiliano Zapata Sugar Mill in Zacatepec, Morelos, and the nine communities surrounding the Atencingo Sugar Mill in Puebla were profoundly affected by the socioeconomic and demographic devastation that followed the 1910 revolution (see map). If left unchecked, that devastation threatened to have serious political and economic problems for the emerging political system. To address these problems, the regime created cooperatives that brought together peasants, workers, and bureaucrats in a project to industrialize the countryside and provide an accessible source of food energy for an emerging urban working class. Cooperatives promised to grant rural workers and peasants a direct say in governing their lives, while ensuring governmental oversight. The cooperatives studied in this book were among the largest and most important of the more than nine hundred cooperatives that Cárdenas created while in office. In spite of their size and importance as cornerstones of Cárdenas’s plans for rural modernization, cooperatives have attracted little scholarship.¹⁷

Comparing the two cooperatives and the surrounding areas provides a nuanced picture of the penetration of a PRI-controlled political order into previously marginalized rural areas. Morelos and Puebla have much in common: a long-standing history of continuous conflict over peasants’ access to land and peasant migration into sugar-producing zones. Both were home to significant peasant mobilizations that mounted concerted challenges to political authority in the two decades following the cooperatives’ formation. By the late 1950s, however, these mobilizations had waned, and, with few exceptions, rural peoples went on to support the PRI during electoral contests. Yet, there are also important differences between the two. In Puebla, Cárdenas abandoned his progressive principles and struck deals with powerful political bosses to consolidate his authority. In contrast, Cárdenas bypassed political elites in Morelos and managed a more direct relationship with rural communities, thanks in part to the near total destruction of the landed elite class at the hands of the Zapatistas. Because of Morelos’s proximity to Mexico City and its deeply symbolic place within the Mexican imaginary, the postrevolutionary governing regime targeted it for aggressive state intervention. The successes and failures of that intervention provided lessons that the regime applied subsequently to other locales. The case of Atencingo in Puebla more clearly reveals the PRI-led state’s violent underbelly—a violence tied to the particular power and land dynamics rooted in the 1910 revolution. Whereas the federal officials managed an arsenal of tactics, including clientelism, to consolidate a social base of support in Morelos, in Puebla they depended on repression carried out by regional leaders—often with the help of the military.¹⁸

Morelos and part of Puebla. Map prepared on the author’s behalf by Joseph Stoll, Department of Geography, Syracuse University.

Placing the two cases side by side reveals how authoritarianism emerged gradually over the course of two decades. While the governing regime asserted control almost immediately in Morelos, it could do so in Puebla only when resistant local and regional bosses died or were sidelined in the late 1950s. Until that happened, national leaders had to adapt to regional realities and sometimes strike bargains with such bosses. Instead of a top-down form of domination, the state built a social order through flexible negotiations with a cadre of regional and local leaders who parried threats from popular groups and exploited internal divisions within the governing regime. This study thus shows how Mexico’s particular form of authoritarianism functioned on the ground in everyday negotiations between different groups. It characterizes the political order as resilient but nevertheless requiring periodic adjustments and negotiations to ensure its longevity. While the outlines and timelines of the establishment of this political order varied from region to region, the case of Morelos and Puebla highlights some of the common trends that fostered a broader national political project wedded principally, if imperfectly, to the PRI.

To tell this story, the narrative arc of this book tracks the lives of three prominent brothers from the region: Antonio, Rubén, and Porfirio Jaramillo. They came of age in the 1940s and 1950s, married, had families, and died while the PRI was in power. Each one sought to be a political protagonist in dealing with the emerging political system. Over the course of their lives, all three straddled a line between supporting and opposing the regime; sometimes they accrued benefits, but at other times they paid a heavy cost. They also generated their own interpretations of political ideologies that drew on long-standing traditions of communal autonomy and new languages of progress that located peasants as pivotal figures in the making of modern Mexico. Their activism or lack thereof shaped how they would be remembered afterward and how they eventually died. The life trajectories of each of these three men—their choices, successes, failures, and compromises—showcase the experience of many rural peoples in south-central Mexico during this time.

Without a doubt, Rubén is the best known of the three brothers. Later generations of activists have invoked the heroic Rubén as inspiration for their own challenges to the PRI-led state. Scholars have also explored his life as part of longer traditions of peasant mobilizations in the region or as one of the few challenges to the apparent social peace of the 1940s and 1950s.¹⁹ Rubén positioned himself as spokesman for the area’s rural peoples and as heir to Emiliano Zapata. He led two peasant uprisings against the government and made a run for governor of the state of Morelos before being brutally assassinated by government agents in 1962. The activism of Porfirio Jaramillo, the youngest of the three brothers, pales in comparison to the exploits of his older brother, Rubén. Nevertheless, Porfirio negotiated with government officials on his own terms and staked out his own brand of activism. In Morelos and especially in Puebla, Porfirio refused entirely to accommodate the political order or compromise his ideals. It is thus not surprising that Porfirio was assassinated considerably earlier, in 1955, than was Rubén.

Antonio Jaramillo, the eldest brother, represents a more pragmatic response to the broader social and political changes afflicting this region. While it is tempting to qualify him as a political centrist, it is more accurate to say that he realized how few alternatives he and his neighbors had to the evolving political configuration of the time. Moreover, he had to take care of his brothers’ families when the military pursued and eventually killed them. The fourth and the youngest brother, Reyes Jaramillo, never led a popular movement or articulated his own political ideals. Yet, he was never far from them: He depended on Antonio to help care for his family, and he followed Rubén as he tacked between supporting the governing regime and taking up arms against it.

Tracing the brothers’ careers thus helps explain the routinization of protest that eventually defused radical challenges to the governing regime, demobilized the peasantry, and generated a political culture resigned to the PRI-led state’s authority. In light of the brothers’ experiences, we see how most individuals tried to find a place inside an emerging political system that allowed them limited tools and increasingly circumscribed channels within which to maneuver. Instead of highlighting only one narrative of activism, this study proposes that all three brothers, and the many for whom they stand, played a role in the making of modern Mexico. In doing so, it concludes that rural peoples most commonly chose accommodation and not, like Rubén, opposition to the regime. Peasant support for the regime came after two decades of constant disappointment and frustration with political channels, increasing dependence on patronage networks, and witnessing what happened to those who openly challenged the regime.

One of the more important recent contributions to the history of peasant activism in this region is Tanalís Padilla’s study of Rubén Jaramillo.²⁰ Not only does she analyze how Zapatismo politicized rural peoples as a direct result of the 1910 revolution, but she also shows how Jaramillo’s efforts melded with Lázaro Cárdenas’s populism to give rise to specific forms of peasant militancy seeking to fully enact the 1917 constitution. She addresses the sacrifices such militants endured for their activism. In her words, state violence and popular resistance emerge here in an escalating dialogue: each act of state repression was answered by popular organizing and militancy.²¹ I share with her a deep awareness of the political violence at play here. However, I build a different interpretation of state-society arrangements to propose that accommodation accompanied the aforementioned militancy and that Rubén Jaramillo’s activism was only one of several responses from rural peoples to the transformations that occurred across three decades. While Padilla portrays rural leaders as electing between consent and resistance to the PRI-led state, I show that the decision was much more fluid. Like Rubén, many rural leaders oscillated between confrontation and collaboration with the very regime that marginalized them. Thus, a study of Rubén Jaramillo’s career—alongside that of his two brothers—reveals the difficult and limited choices that peasant leaders faced.

Understanding Instruments of Control

Adopting a capacious view of peasant activism between 1935 and 1965, this study builds a nuanced tale of the growth of authoritarianism in the countryside and, specifically, the social base of support among communities that would go on to defend the PRI in subsequent decades. In creating this social base of support, the regime used the countryside to test and refine instruments of control that it later employed in other rural areas and eventually in urban centers. Such testing did not involve an explicitly defined plan; rather, it arose from a pattern of practices that emerged in the countryside. These practices included the institutionalization of preexisting corrupt practices to bolster clientelism, along with exclusionary economic development policies that exploited peasants while favoring workers. They involved the routinization of both protest and repression; manipulation of the collective memory of rural communities attempting to make sense of a changing world; and the selective and, at times, ad hoc deployment of violence against critics. The testing and refining of such instruments helped PRI officials figure out how to nurture wide rural support and add to its arsenal of tools for maintaining political control.

First, the regime learned that, even while rhetorically supporting peasants as key actors in postrevolutionary Mexico, it could methodically marginalize them.²² Beginning in the 1920s, leaders from both the regime and the emerging national labor movement established a strategic alliance that put into place a state-subsidized and heavily restricted labor movement.²³ This alliance ensured that industrial workers became the most important mass political force, thereby relegating peasants to a secondary and supportive role. In contrast to their view of workers, government officials viewed peasants as untrustworthy and undisciplined. Peasants represented different regions, ethnicities, educational backgrounds, and class statuses, making them less likely to conform to the demands of the political order and modern labor patterns. In response, regime officials marginalized the peasantry, strengthening the regime’s ties to workers, defusing peasant complaints, and discouraging collaboration between the two groups. Inside the sugar mills, repeated concessions to workers bolstered their image of themselves as a privileged class within the cooperative and the political order of modern Mexico. Through trial and error, the regime learned how far it could push