Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico

Abstract

This new volume of essays arrives at a propitious time, as Mexico grapples anew with the problem of broad military influence in public life that was seemingly laid low at mid-century. While the new administration in Mexico City must again deal with the competing demands of robust public security and effective civilian control of the armed forces, the essays presented in this volume edited by Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley look back to an earlier time when the military was perhaps the cardinal factor in Mexican political life. Fallaw and Rugeley have brought together a range of scholars to address a series of pressing questions about the essential nature of militias and the military in Mexico. Chief among these questions are two of the most basic but complicated ones: How did the armed forces, regular or irregular, affect daily life? And how did they affect long-term developments in the social, economic, political, and cultural spheres? The editors and contributors quite consciously utilize the methods of the new military history in answering these questions, concerning themselves not so much with top-tier leaders as with “the men who followed them, or . . . the women they left behind, or . . . the nature of life in the barracks” (p. 1). In this, they are engaged in a task of primary recognition, demonstrating that an institution with a pedigree as long as that of the Catholic Church in Mexico obviously had much to say about the relative quality of governance in the country.A central mode of analysis here is the close examination of “brass cacicazgos,” aptly defined as “patrimonial statelets” (p. 15). These political arrangements relied on several factors, including the personal prestige of the leader (personalism), that leader’s military rank and competence, and his political savvy in negotiating with the political center. These zones of influence are critical to most explanations about regional politics in the modern period, but many local authorities have received precious little study. One correction to this is Ben Fallaw’s precise and intriguing examination of the postrevolu-tionary career of Eulogio Ortiz, a second-tier general who nonetheless set the stage for Joaquín Amaro’s reform of the military and Plutarco Elías Calles’s dominance of the state (p. 136). Ortiz’s tasks were simple: enforce revolutionary ideology, weed out the opposition, and destroy the bases of Cristero support in the 1920s. Fallaw very convincingly demonstrates that men like Ortiz effectively used their military standing to deeply influence the daily life of anyone in their orbit, as classic (and important) an argument of the new military history as there is. Ben Smith and Paul Gillingham demonstrate the methods that regional caciques Heliodoro Charis Castro and Alejandro Mange Toyos contrived to acquire, enhance, defend, and, when necessary, use power. They relied on not only very old traditions of regionalism but also newer strategies that appropriated both revolutionary and bureaucratic discourses to legitimate their sometimes tenuous positions. Stephen Neufeld, in a very different approach, recovers the lived experience of the presidential guards surrounding Porfirio Díaz and explains how these volunteers became “a model for how Mexico was to enter modernity” (p. 82).The volume is greatly enriched by David Nugent’s very thorough concluding essay, which appraises the volume’s theoretical contributions. Nugent sees how fundamentally “violence was embedded in the social order, even as force was used variously to defend, undermine, or transform the status quo” (p. 241). He also directly discusses what each essay analyzes to a greater or lesser extent: the legitimation of power. This wide-ranging analysis, especially coming on the heels of such varied and provocative essays, is perhaps the most powerful segment of the collection. Among other conclusions, Nugent argues that there was an essential utility of the brass cacicazgos for the postrevolution-ary leadership in Mexico, which watched as “the organs of the central administration were systematically cannibalized by regionally based elites and locally oriented interests” (p. 249). Symbiosis as governance seems an appropriate way to understand the complex links between a centralized state lacking local dominance and the myriad regional caci-ques lacking legitimacy.The fascinating contributions within this volume and the space limitation of this review do not neatly mesh: there is much more to this book than can be remarked upon here. For scholars interested in state formation broadly conceived, both within Mexicanist circles and without, it will be of great use in thinking about what the state does, and does not, do.