Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960

Abstract

Without question, one of the most neglected topics in scholarship on the first half of the twentieth century in Mexico is the relationship between the armed forces and civilian political leadership. It is a crucial theme central to the evolution and success of the authoritarian Mexican model, setting the country apart from its peers in the region and elsewhere. Thomas Rath has made use of newly available archival materials in Mexico as well as existing material from US and European archives to examine this issue during four formative decades. He argues in this work that many factors played a role in the process of subordinating the military to civilian control, including “a range of forces within state and society,” and that this process was “markedly incomplete” (p. 2). He also suggests that demilitarization, defined as a decline in the importance of the military’s role in the political system, occurred after 1940.In his brief examination of the postrevolutionary era from 1920 to 1934, Rath explores a range of contradictory arguments and perceptions about revolutionary anti-militarism, noting similarities between arguments in this era and those raised in the nineteenth century. Further, he concludes that although official military policy sought to establish clear institutional separations between soldiers and civilians, the degree to which such a division was achieved is questionable. In his analysis of Lázaro Cárdenas’s impact on this issue, he introduces fresh insights based on archival materials. Most interesting is the revelation by a Mexican captain who reported after interviewing over 400 junior officers in 1937 that they were greatly upset by the president’s introduction of radical socialist ideas in the schools and that soldiers of all ranks pursued obstructionist strategies against such policies (p. 42). This example supports the author’s contention that Cárdenas pursued approaches different from those of his immediate predecessors regarding civil-military relations. Interestingly, Rath fails to explain that other influential groups, including the Catholic clergy and many intellectuals, were equally disturbed by the regime’s proactive, radical socialization efforts, thus making the military’s own attitudes all the more politically significant. At the same time, he makes no mention of the 1938 decision to nationalize the foreign-owned oil industry, which produced widespread support among many of the president’s former severe critics. The officer corps’s attitude toward nationalization is not revealed.Central to his broader argument is the evidence he provides of the lack of loyalty among numerous officers to the president, focusing largely on the administrations of Manuel Ávila Camacho and Miguel Alemán. Again, Rath offers much new and valuable material to support his claims for the less than smooth transition to civilian supremacy over the military as well as other aspects of military policy. There is no question that civil-military relations at the local level did not reflect the image the national leadership, both military and political, attempted to convey to the general public. However, several elements of this overall interpretation deserve greater attention. While Rath successfully conveys the attitudes and behaviors of many high-ranking officers, the reader is not exposed to an equally insightful picture of their civilian counterparts’ views or, for that matter, the extent of the military officers’ linkages to such civilians. The author needs to reveal the intense feeling shared by Alemán’s generation of civilian politicians and their support for Alemán as a representative of civilian, presidential leadership. Also, the author does not highlight the personal animosity Alemán had for the military, revealed in interviews and in his autobiography against the backdrop of his father’s experience as a revolutionary general who died in opposition to the reelection of General Álvaro Obregón. Moreover, Rath uses a thorough case study of local and state politics in Puebla to illustrate his larger theme of the government’s lack of control over local commanders. But Puebla, as Rath recognizes early on, may not be your typical state, having been the home state of the generals Manuel Ávila Camacho, his influential brother Maximino, and, to a lesser extent, Rafael, a third sibling. The early Partido Revolucionario Institucional system survived at the federal level by allowing extensive local autonomy in certain states as late as the 1950s, some of which were controlled by civilian caudillos and former presidents, others by postrevolutionary generals. This makes it difficult to argue that the army’s level of influence in Puebla was typical throughout Mexico. Indeed, after 1940 a number of states boasted of few or no governors who were generals, which is just one significant indicator of the military’s presence. Rath is to be commended for adding numerous valuable insights about the armed forces, including recruitment, veterans’ benefits, women and national service, and desertion. His conclusions, in spite of the above reservations, will be of great interest to historians and must be incorporated or addressed in future evaluations of the postrevolutionary evolution of Mexico’s political model.