The war has brought peace to Mexico: World War II and the consolidation of the post-revolutionary state. By Halbert Jones

Abstract

The war has brought peace to Mexico: World War II and the consolidation of the post-revolutionary state. By Halbert Jones. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2014. 312pp. Index. £43.80. ISBN 978 0 8263 5130 2. The attention of historians who have written about Latin America's role in the Second World War has been drawn to the continent's overall function as a supplier of cheap raw materials to the Allies; to the reluctance of Argentina to abandon its neutrality in the face of considerable diplomatic pressure from the United States; and to Brazil's consequential decision to enter the war and send an expeditionary force to Italy. Mexico's decision to enter into a ‘state of war’ with the Axis Powers in mid-1942 after two of its vessels were sunk by German submarines and its ultimate dispatch of a largely symbolic air squadron to the Philippines in 1945 have been largely forgotten, even in Mexico, despite considerable nationalistic pride in this belated contribution to Allied victory at the time. Mexico's president during these years, Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–46), moreover, has also garnered little interest from historians, who have viewed his unspectacular sexenio either as an epilogue to the radical presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) or as a prologue to the consolidated, more conservative civilian regime of Miguel Alemán (1946–52), the keystone of the supposedly ‘perfect dictatorship’ of the reconfigured Partido Revolucionaro Institucional (PRI). Halbert Jones's book rectifies this double oversight by telling the story of Mexico's wartime experience and by positing the significance of these years for the country's subsequent political development.