Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959–1965

Abstract

In this solidly researched and well-written monograph, Elizabeth Henson offers the first English-language work about the radical agrarian movement in Chihuahua's Sierra Tarahumara in the 1960s, an episode that produced the first socialist guerrilla movement in Mexican history. The originality of Henson's work lies in her primary sources. She consulted archives in Chihuahua state and was one of the first historians to explore the declassified archives of the Secretariat of the Interior at the General Archive of Mexico. Also, while oral history was not her focus because of bureaucratic constraints, Henson used published interviews, testimonies, and memoirs.Until the turn of the century, the scholarly production on Cold War Mexico had minimized the so-called socialist armed movement, describing it as a byproduct of the Cuban Revolution or the radical Left's overreaction after the 1968 Tlatelolco massacre. The assault on the military barracks in Madera on September 23, 1965, by the Popular Guerrilla Group (GPG), was not a part of collective memory beyond the town where it took place. However, Madera marked the beginning of the socialist armed struggle and also inaugurated the dirty war, a period of focalized state terror and human rights violations that the ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party concealed through psychological warfare and media censorship.In the late 1990s, the Mexican novelist Carlos Montemayor became the first public intellectual to write about the socialist armed movement, breaking a veil of silence about the Madera events. However, Montemayor's emphasis on the armed character of Chihuahua's popular insurgency downplayed the role of the radical agrarian movement and its alliance with the student movement. The first scholarly works on this topic (by Marco Bellingeri, Alberto López Limón, and Jesús Vargas Valdés) explained peasant unrest in teleological terms, assuming the preeminence of the guerrilla movement. Only Aleida García Aguirre's 2015 book considered the radical agrarianism and the guerrilla foco to be equally important. Henson provides a new approach to this historiography. She claims that her primary interest is the public, direct action aspect of the agrarian movement, which was more heterogenous, massive, and inclusive of women than the armed component (p. 5). Henson rejects the idea that direct action was less revolutionary than armed struggle, and she shows that both strategies entailed similar risks: prison, torture, assassination, and displacement.Henson demonstrates that political violence in postrevolutionary Chihuahua was a continuation of a long-standing tradition of elite violence followed by armed self-defense, from the nineteenth-century Tomochic rebellion to the 1910 revolution. Notwithstanding that the latter began in Chihuahua due to the extreme concentration of land in few latifundia, landowners who survived the upheaval, new caciques, and even thugs like the infamous José Ibarra encroached on land that was intended for ejidos or new population centers. The agrarian movement, which emerged as a response to landowners' violence and the government's corruption, resorted to radical means to enforce the constitution.Henson argues that unlike the primarily student-based armed vanguards that emerged across Latin America in the Cuban Revolution's aftermath without a social base, the GPG grew from this endemic agrarian movement. The GPG's leader, Arturo Gámiz, had previously led thousands of landless peasants who participated in the General Union of Workers and Peasants of Mexico. Henson's sources reveal that peasants failed to follow the GPG because they had grown weary of violence, which explains the paradox of the guerrillas' isolation despite their popularity.Henson departs from previous interpretations of the GPG by portraying it as a product of ideologization, voluntarism, and faith in Che Guevara's foquismo; she concludes that the formation of a revolutionary vanguard was a political mistake. However, Henson's analysis of the short-lived guerrilla movement's outcomes is ambiguous. On the one hand she claims that the GPG's activities thwarted the dynamics of the radical agrarian movement, but on the other hand she suggests that the federal government solved long-lasting agrarian petitions after the Madera assault as a way to curtail further violence. Although the guerrilla foco proved to be a failure, the GPG forced the government to change its strategy and set limits to elite power; therefore, it is problematic to imply that Gámiz's group should not have followed the armed path.While Henson focuses on the history of the eastern highlands of the Sierra Tarahumara—including detailed biographies and vignettes of every relevant actor and a tracing of the complex map of the Left—she also describes the context of Chihuahua and Mexico, underscoring the connections between the landed and industrial elites and the state and federal authorities as well as the broader impact and legacy of the agrarian revolt. In sum, this book provides both a useful introduction to Cold War Mexico for students and an in-depth case study of postrevolutionary violence for specialists in social and armed movements.