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The Crisis of Cardenismo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Albert L. Michaels
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Extract

By April 1938, Lázaro Cárdenas had altered the course of modern Mexican history. The hacienda system had virtually disappeared to be replaced by smallholdings and by collective and semi-collective ejidos. The church-state quarrel, cause of so much bloodshed in the 1920s, had largely subsided; the Catholic Church had supported the government against the foreign oil companies, even seeking to help the government collect money to pay for the nationalization. Both the nation's agrarian and urban workers had formed powerful, well-organized unions ready and able to defend their members' newly won gains. Most important to subsequent developments, however, was the government's expropriation of the foreign oil companies in March of 1938. The oil companies had defied every twentieth-century Mexican government; nationalization temporarily united Mexicans as never before in the nation's history. Although these accomplishments, especially the land reform and oil expropriation, established Cárdenas's credentials as the most radical of modern Mexican presidents, his subsequent behaviour has made many, especially on the extreme left, question his sincerity.

Type
Articles
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 2 , Issue 1 , May 1970 , pp. 51 - 79
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1970

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References

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16 In 1939 the United States government, seeking to pressure the Mexican government into paying ‘prompt and adequate compensation for the expropriated oil companies’, reduced the purchase of Mexican silver.

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56 For the relations between the CTM and the Cárdenas government, see Ashby, Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution under Lázaro Cárdenas, and Michaels, Albert L., ‘Nationalism and Internationalism, Organized Labor under Lázaro Cárdenas’, University of Buffalo Studies (08 1968).Google Scholar For an almost day-by-day account covering the period up to and during 1938, see the continuation of Salazar's, Rosendo earlier book, Historia de las luchas proletarias de México (México, D.F., 1956).Google Scholar

57 Cárdenas had not always given labour a free hand. In March 1936 he and PNR President, Emilio Portes Gil, had prevented the CTM from organizing the rural workers. The government then formed them into the Confederación Nacional Campesina. For the 1936 dispute, sec Michaels, ‘Nationalism and Internationalism’, pp. 71–2.

58 Bernstein, , The Mexican Mining Industry, p. 184.Google Scholar The Sonora copper strike of 1938 was characteristic of the government's problems. The government forced the union to accept a compromise solution, and the workers then tried to sabotage the mines which belonged to the Anaconda Copper Company; production fell 50 per cent. For details see New York Times, 20 Nov 1938.

59 The Mexico City press is filled with accounts of the inter-union and intra-union battles which occurred during these years. See for example Novedades, 6 Aug. 1939, El Universal, 12 Aug. 1939, and Novedades, 31 Oct. 1939.

60 Marín, Guadalupe Rivera, El Mercado de Trabajo (México, D.F. and Buenos Aires, 1955), p. 226Google Scholar, and Secretaría de Economía Nacional, Anuario Estadístico, 1940, p. 376.Google Scholar See also Wilkie, , The Mexican Revolution, p. 184.Google Scholar

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64 El Nacional, 25 July 1940.

65 Ibid., 29 July 1940.

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69 All these figures are taken from Whetten, Nathaniel C., ‘El surgimiento de una clase media en México’, in de Mendizábal, Miguel Othon (ed.), Las clases sociales en México (México, D.F., n.d.), pp. 53–60.Google Scholar

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73 A commission of Almazán supporters went to Cárdenas and asked him to reorganize their candidate whom they claimed had won the elections. Cárdenas, of course, turned them down, but during the interview they managed to articulate clearly many of the causes of the widespread discontent with Cardenismo. The text of this interesting confrontation was published in the journal Hoy, 7 Sept. 1940.

74 In ‘The Mexican Left’, in Maier, Joseph and Weatherhead, Richard W., Politics of Change in Latin America (New York, 1964), p. 136.Google ScholarGruening, Ernest in Mexico and Its Heritage (New York, 1928), p. 427Google Scholar, attacks Silvano Barba González and Augustin Arroyo Ch., later prominent Cardenistas, for their corrupt practices in the 1920s.

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78 Townsend, Lázaro Cárdenas, p. 335. Townsend quotes Cárdenas as saying ‘that any man who goes into public office poor and comes out rich is advertising his veniality’. Among those accused of corruption were Cárdenas's brother, Damaso and his close supporters, General Henríquez Gúzman and Ernesto Soto Reyes; thus, considerations of family and friendship might have limited the President's response.

79 Le Front des Pauvres (Montreal, 1954).

80 Ibid., pp. 239–41.

81 For an excellent description of the problem of political corruption in Mexico, see Sánchez, Manuel Moreno, ‘Un estudio norteamericano sobre Cárdenas’, Problemas agrícolas e industriales de Mexico (1955).Google Scholar Moreno blames traditional attitudes for much of the problem.

82 The text of the law was published in El Universal, 28 Dec. 1939.

83 ‘Es el momento de reconquistar plenamente nuestros derechos come padres de familias’, Hombre Libre, 1 jan. 1940.

84 See Wilkie, James W., Ideological Conflict in the Time of Lázaro Cárdenas (unpublished M.A. thesis, University of California at Berkeley, 1959).Google Scholar

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86 New York Times, 20 Jan. 1940.

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88 Excelsior, 1 March 1940.

89 El Universal, 10 March 1940.

90 El Universal, 7 jan. 1939. An opposition group protests the admission of Spanish republican militiamen whom it called mercenaries ‘who would disturb the country's peace’.

91 New York Times, 8 Aug. 1939. A group of railroad workers withdrew from the CTM in protest over the employment of Spanish refugees as drivers and firemen.

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95 See El Universal, 18 Jan. 1939, and New York Times, 12 Feb. 1939, for examples of the manifestos issued by Frente Democrático Constitutional Mexicano.

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97 Ibid., p. 209.

98 Halperin, Maurice, ‘Mexico Shifts Her Foreign Policy’, Foreign Affairs, 19 (10 1940), 220.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

99 Ibid., p. 225.

100 Novo, Salvador, La vida en México en el período presidencial de Lázaro Cárdenas (México, D.F., 1964), pp. 492–3.Google Scholar During his six-year term, Cárdenas had spent a total of 16 months out of the capital.

101 The entire text of this speech can be found in Mexicana, Partido de la Revolución, Cárdenas habla (México, D.F., 1940), pp. 248–56.Google Scholar

102 Ibid., p. 252.

103 Ibid.

104 Casasola, , Historia gráfica de la Revolución, v, 2365–6.Google Scholar