In this carefully researched monograph about the epizootic of foot-and-mouth disease (fiebre aftosa) in Mexico from the late 1940s to the mid-1950s, Thomas Rath offers a comprehensive approach that connects topics related to environmental history, the history of science, developmentalism, multilateralism, state-making, national security, and political violence in the context of postrevolutionary Mexico and the Cold War era. Rath also offers the most detailed depiction of the impact of the epizootic at the regional level, bringing up examples of communities from different Mexican states. Rath skillfully interweaves these local stories with the broader history of the US-Mexico relations during the period, characterized by a combination of negotiation and cooperation, the pursuit of hidden agendas on both sides, and resistance or selective compliance on the Mexican side.
According to Rath, the aftosa campaign was unprecedented in scale, as it absorbed over “half of US economic aid to Latin America between 1947 and 1951… involving thousands of veterinarians and ranchers from both countries, battalions of Mexican troops, and scientist from Europe and the Americas” (3). Even though one of the standard narratives about the aftosa campaign presents it as a US imposition to control the Mexican livestock industry in the context of the strengthening of the US hegemony after World War II, Rath shows the difficulties to reach agreements among different stakeholders, namely US and Mexican officials, state and local authorities, ranchers and livestock organizations, private foundations, veterinarians, and members of the scientific community. Rath emphasizes the contingent aspects of the epizootic crisis, and the way it “uncovered preexisting power structures, and was shaped by them” (4).
Rath shows that while the US government's solution to the crisis was the mass slaughter of infected and exposed livestock, an array of actors were active players in resisting and even reshaping US ambitions. At the end, the aftosa campaign succeeded because of the overlapping of the so-called “sanitary rifle,” multilateral negotiations, repression, corruption, and new virological knowledge and technology. Far from explaining this success as the triumph of the modernizing Mexican elites over a backward peasantry, Rath shows how a cross-class rural resistance to the campaign set limits to state power. This book also offers an important contribution to reflect on the parallelism between the animal-disease-control campaigns and the binational antidrug campaigns that also began in the 1940s and even the counterinsurgency campaigns from the 1960s onward.
Chapter 1 revolves around environmental history and the history of livestock production, tracing a long arch from the introduction of domestic animals to New Spain in the sixteenth century to the development of the modern livestock industry in postrevolutionary Mexico. Chapter 2 explores how the aftosa campaign was planned and waged by the US-Mexico Commission for the Eradication of Foot and Mouth Disease (CMAEFA). Rath shows that while the commission operated under the consensus of modernizing the countryside, there were tensions and conflicting perspectives amongst its Mexican and US members, for instance, about the adoption of a vaccination program instead of the massive slaughter of livestock. Rath also documents the persistent corruption related to the campaign. Chapter 3 details the opposition to the aftosa campaign in the countryside, revealing unknown episodes of civil disobedience, lynching of state agents, and popular riots. Chapter 4 focuses on the tactics employed by the CMAEFA to counteract local resistance, ranging from repression to propaganda campaigns and negotiations with local caciques and other powerbrokers. Chapter 5 demonstrates how the aftosa campaign in Mexico contributed to consolidating the perception of the livestock industry as a matter of national security and development, which translated into institutional building supported by private actors like the Rockefeller Foundation. Chapter 6 shows the global reverberations of the Mexican aftosa campaign—especially in Latin America—and reveals the obstacles that US officials faced to hegemonize the politics of animal disease control in the Western world.
Rath's project is original not only because of the way it intertwines different areas of study, but also because of the novelty of its sources, drawn from a wide variety of US, Mexican, and European archives. Rath's monograph is an important addition to the scholarship that is changing our understanding of mid-century Mexico.
