The Secretary of War’s Historical Commission: Military Historians and the Cristeros

Abstract

The Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929), also known as La Cristiada, was a conflict between the Catholic Church and the Mexican government. The Catholics, especially from western states, rose up in arms against the anticlerical and pro-agrarian measures of President Plutarco Elías Calles’s government (1924–1928). General Joaquín Amaro, Minister of War, was charged with fighting the Cristeros in various regions of Mexico. Certain army generals, unable to conquer the Cristeros on the battlefields, triumphed when negotiating the road to peace with certain priests and Cristero leaders. In the higher echelons, two bishops, Pascual Díaz y Barreto and Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores, arranged, with President Emilio Portes Gil (1928–1930), an end to the conflict. The known “arrangements” between church and state were agreed upon, officially, on June 22, 1929. Once the conflict was formally over, General Amaro planned for the writing of an authorized version of the Cristero uprising. For this, he created the Historical Commission within the Ministry of War. The commission, according to Amaro’s orders, would produce, beginning with military documents, its own version of what had happened during the war. The soldiers turned “historians” would present their interpretation to their colleagues as well as to future generations. In spite of this, in the end the version that was disseminated was that of the former Cristeros. General Amaro failed a second time upon trying to pacify newer generations.