Insurgency, Counter-insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929: Fighting Cristeros

Abstract

In Insurgency, Counter-insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926–1929, Mark Lawrence attempts to discern what led communities in Mexico to join the pro-Catholic uprising of the mid-1920s known as the Cristero Rebellion, to oppose it, or to remain neutral. The book focuses on greater Zacatecas—an area that, here, extends beyond the state into Durango and parts of Jalisco. Lawrence thus adds to the rich Cristero historiography, the scope of which has been necessarily regional because motivations varied widely across Mexico's so-called “Rosary Belt.” Lawrence's task is a difficult one, and the responses to the Cristero Rebellion do not lend themselves to neat classification. Lawrence disregards as “simplistic” Zacatecan Cristero veterans' own explanations for their participation in the insurgence: to defend Catholicism from government anticlericalism (p. 25). The statement is jarring, but his research in often-overlooked municipal and state archives clearly uncovered a plethora of causes.Some rebel regions were moved by a Catholic conservatism nurtured by a high concentration of priests; others resented government encroachment on political and cultural autonomy. Pro-government partisanship was strongest in areas with more federal schools and Protestants. Lawrence also uncovered innumerable intravillage conflicts that the Cristero Rebellion stoked into violent clashes. On both sides, political networks led by local power brokers shaped community responses. Beneath these myriad factors were several others, including landholding patterns, ethnic divisions, and topography. In fewer than 150 pages, Lawrence attempts to cover almost as much ground as Moisés González Navarro's Cristeros y agraristas en Jalisco (2000–2003) did in five thick volumes. The accumulation of factors comes with little analytical hierarchy and quickly overwhelms the reader and, perhaps, the author as well. Lawrence's thesis is that the conflict's “motives and interests” were “diverse” (p. 1). The war, he notes, hinged “less on ideology and more on long-standing local tensions, vertical rather than horizontal lines of allegiance, and on the autonomy of highland (serrano) culture hostile to central control” (pp. 1–2). Explanations of particular circumstances turn ad hoc without yielding broad patterns.The book's unwieldiness largely results from a mismatch between the book's objectives and its organization. Drawing on the new military history, the four main chapters are divided between government and Cristero “home fronts” and “battlefronts.” The division allows Lawrence to examine military tactics, logistics, and the “civil–military” tensions that provoked resentments almost everywhere. It also helps characterize “asymmetrical conflict environments” in which the “weak but strong” Cristero guerrillas often prevailed over federal forces (pp. 30, 63).New military history categories help explain the carnage. The book is strongest when it details the tragedies of war. Refreshingly free of the partisan whataboutism of many accounts, Lawrence describes the displacement of villages by government forces. Citing contemporaneous chronicles and poetry, he writes that “roads were clogged with exhausted peasants, struggling with chicken hutches, birdcages, piglets, and newborn babies” (p. 65). Pro-Cristero villagers under siege by federal soldiers faced imprisonment for wearing mourning attire (p. 70). Crop destruction inevitably led to hunger. Small wars like the Cristero Rebellion, Lawrence notes, were more “predisposed to atrocities because the stronger party . . . will seek to demoralize the weaker rebels by inflicting atrocities” (p. 63). Although the logic here lacked development (are big wars really less predisposed to atrocities?), the theory illuminates the nuance and structure of otherwise dispersed evidence.However, the new military history framework here was less helpful for discerning broad patterns in the historical factors that moved some communities to risk their lives and others to keep their heads down. Lawrence's accurate assertion that “most of the conflict . . . was marked as much by village versus village rivalries as ideology” undermines the logic behind the book's division into chapters addressing respective fronts (p. 59). If the Cristero Rebellion was more than a simple clash between pro-church rebels and federal forces, then it is unclear why this dichotomy organizes the book.Some of Lawrence's other assertions would have benefited from development in keeping with context and historiography. He suggests, for example, that Cristeros were romantically anachronistic—their rhetoric redolent of “‘Old Spain,’ of Santiago and Cervantes”—as if they were tilting at windmills instead of fighting to restore what they understood to be sacred rights (p. 23). Treatment of the federal government's motivations similarly approaches caricature, as when Lawrence states that President Plutarco Elías Calles's “hard line” against the Catholic Church was “an act of free will divorced from reality” (p. 32). Historians will long debate the effects and legacy of official anticlericalism, but Calles's policies were logically consistent with his political objectives. Although such statements are admittedly peripheral to the book's primary arguments, they are problematic precisely because they contribute not to any overarching goal but rather to the book's general unwieldiness.