Insurgency, Counter-insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926-1929

Fighting Cristeros

Mark Lawrence

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350095472
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military & Maritime History
• Index: History

Waged between 1926 and 1929, The Cristero War (also known as The Cristero Rebellion or La Cristiada ) resulted from a religious insurrectionary movement, which formed in protest of the Mexican Revolution's anticlerical constitution of 1917. It was arguably the most violent and divisive episode in Mexican history between the 1910 Revolution itself and the ongoing 'Narco Wars'. Filling in major gaps in our understanding of the conflict, Mark Lawrence explores both combatant and civilian experiences in the centre-west Mexican state of Zacatecas and its borderlands. Lawrence shows that, despite the centrality of this key region, it has received little scholarly attention compared with other states, such as Jalisco or Michoacán, which saw similar levels of conflict. In providing a greater understanding of Zacatecas during The Cristero War, Lawrence not only works to even out a major historiographical bias, but he also sheds greater light on the contours of religious conflict and political dissent in early 20th-century Mexican history. In particular, he illustrates how the dynamics of local politics had fundamentally affected the way that a broader movement was embraced (and rejected) at a sub-national level. As such, he offers all historians, irrespective of geographic or temporal specialization, a reminder not to make sweeping assumptions about the everyday nature of compliance and resistance at the local level.

1

Origins, context, historiography

The Cristero War (1926–9) was a popular convulsion made in protest against enactment of the Mexican Revolution’s anticlerical constitution of 1917. It was ultimately the most violent and divisive episode in Mexico between the 1910 revolution and the ongoing Narco Wars. The war has generated significant historiographical attention in recent years, especially in relation to the states of Michoacán and Jalisco, and is also increasingly the object of attention outside the academy. The breakthrough of regional studies in the 1970s and the loosening grip of Mexican revolutionary hegemony have improved our understanding of the 1926–9 Cristero revolt against Federal anticlericalism. Far from being a revolt of fanatics in cahoots with landowners, the Cristero rebellion had diverse motives and interests. Yet there are still gaps in our understanding. How, for example, was peaceful opposition to anticlericalism expressed in Mexico’s centre-west? What civil–military tensions existed in government-held areas, and how did these compare to those of the insurgent zone? In what ways did local power networks (cacicazgos) shape decisions to support or defy the government, and how were these informed by social, cultural and economic tensions? This new history, the first regional study of the Cristero War to be centred on the state of Zacatecas, answers these questions, adapting models applied in regional studies elsewhere and offering fresh perspectives in equal measure. Instead of studying the Cristeros in isolation, this book explains how the communities on both sides of the Cristero/Federal divide showed similar responses to the demands of militarization and displacement of population, and how the proximity of cruelty and killing produced similar spirals of violence. Fighting Cristeros shows how the war in Zacatecas and the centre-west 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.

This book aims to develop leads established by such historians as Lourdes Celina Vázquez Parada and the late Alicia Olivera, who placed regional and oral history firmly on the map of the Mexican historiography, as well as the classic trilogy of the Franco-Mexican historian Jean Meyer. Nonetheless, there are still opportunities for new research in several directions. Matthew Butler’s pioneering 2004 study of diverse and non-violent Cristero activism in Michoacán revised the dualist emphasis on overt militancy offered in Jean Meyer’s classic 1970s study and led to calls by experts, including by Meyer himself, for more studies of non-combatant responses to the Cristero War, including in regions untouched by fighting.

A regional history

Fighting Cristeros studies the Cristero War in Mexico’s centre-west, the state of Zacatecas and the adjoining bordering areas of Jalisco, Durango and Aguascalientes, parts of what is sometimes referred to as Mexico’s ‘Rosary Belt’. Zacatecas, a largely underpopulated state, has not been subject to a new military history study of its Cristero conflict. This is remarkable considering that the Federal war minister, humble-born Joaquín Amaro, and one of the leading Cristeros, Aurelio Acevedo, both came from the state. Jean Meyer’s classic trilogy included substantial material on the state, thanks to his privileged access to the papers of General Aurelio Acevedo of Valparaíso (Zacatecas). But this book does not claim to follow Meyer’s nationwide study. Rather, it considers Zacatecas and the adjoining centre-west states as an enclosed theatre of war and the Cristero rebellion waged within it as a kind of asymmetrical warfare. It explains how the geography, Catholic traditionalism and serrano culture of Zacatecas and the centre-west predisposed this region to suffering a very embittered insurgency in the Cristero War. It also explains how the recent revolutionary experience of the Mexican army led to both a brutal counter-insurgency and crises in civil–military relations. The persistence of the Cristero War in the Zacatecas region was determined not just by the clash between a ruralized militant traditionalism and an urban-based political and military counter-insurgency, important though these were. Rather, terrain, poor communications, economic dislocation, civil–military crises and defiant local power networks all combined to give the war its prolonged and asymmetrical features in this region.

It is hoped that detailed analysis of a broader phenomenon will necessarily lend weight to those calling for a more nuanced approach to Mexico’s national history. The book moves across genres and forms of history to offer a more complete picture of the everyday experiences of religious conflict in rural Mexico, explaining patterns of everyday resistance and negotiation as much as the better understood religious rebellion itself. Two sets of paired chapters explore the structuring and socializing of the insurgency and then of the counter-insurgency. After an introductory, contextualizing Chapter 1, Chapters 2 and 3 show how Cristero groups developed a guerrilla strategy in the centre-west by overriding local networks of power and utilizing them for insurgent ends, and then how the government ‘battlefront’ escalated its war effort. Chapters 4 and 5 switch focus to the experience of war on the ‘home fronts’ of the insurgent and government zones. Chapter 4 shows how Cristero control and collaboration was maintained and underpinned by local practices and policed by Cristero-appointed authorities; in mirror image, Chapter 5 details the militarization of the religious conflict at the hands of the Federal Army and the dislocation of government and administration under the impact of the revolt.

This book provides a first regionally specific study of Zacatecas and its borderlands and, in particular, applies a new military history methodology to its analysis. The new military history has not advanced much in the Mexican historiography, in part because historians have too readily accepted the state’s own claims that it demilitarized quickly after the 1910–20 revolution. The Mexican Defence Ministry archives for this period remain effectively off limits for historians, as only scant details on personnel files are forthcoming. This book tries to compensate by mining state and municipal archives (especially those of Zacatecas, Durango and Aguascalientes), along with further sources housed in London and Mexico City. A mysterious blaze devoured most of the relevant Zacatecas state archive in the 1990s, but this shortcoming is compensated elsewhere. This book also uses memoirs, local histories and selected oral history accounts in order to sustain a regionalized analysis, integrated throughout in the context of leading academic sources. My diverging source base offers local colour and detail ranging from cattle rustling to prostitution to the financial draining of local government, and these need to be explained as the consequences of civil–military relations and in the context of sociological and everyday aspects of the rebellion. The advantages of using diverse primary sources are clear. As Lourdes Vázquez has shown, the oral tradition for the Cristiada is of critical importance, largely because of the decades of silence imposed by embarrassed institutions in order to obliterate memory of the conflict and the fact that many (most?) veterans from both sides were illiterate.¹ Oral history also retains the distinct advantage of offering a personal version of history which, as a historian of Cristero women has remarked, ‘almost always diverge[s]; from the official version’.²

Conflict and Mexican history

Regional conflict has long characterized Mexican history. The independence struggle against Spain in the early nineteenth century was more regionalized in New Spain/Mexico than in other Spanish possessions. The regions have witnessed secession pressures from without (the Mexican–American War of the 1840s and filibusters) and within (the 1881 attempt to declare an independent Jalisco Republic³). Alongside nineteenth-century caste wars raged more complex revolts, such as the campaign waged by the mestizo Manuel Lozada (1828–1873), which was supported by several Huichol and Cora Indians as well as mestizos, and motivated by demands relgious and political autonomy as well as land reform. The Lozada revolt went down in official history as a ‘barbarous’ Indian revolt, although great savagery was in fact shown by both sides.⁴ The most dynamic internal conflicts have always fractured on the competing claims to legitimacy of religion and of the state. From the outset of independence neither conservatives nor liberals reconciled their politics with the powerful Catholic hierarchy,⁵ but liberals proved far more consistent than conservatives in attempts to impose state power over the Church. The first anticlerical attempts occurred under the 1833–4 Gómez Farías presidency (the only enduring feature of which was the abolition of the civil obligation to pay tithes).⁶ The greatest pre-revolutionary assault on Church power came with the religious secularizing articles added to the 1857 Constitution, implemented after the War of Reform. Studies of the nineteenth century have shown how the Reform War politicized society, cementing ‘popular liberalism’ via such institutions as the National Guard and imposing a strongly laic policy against the powerful Catholic Church.⁷ The 1872–6 radicalization of anti-Catholic measures was not unique to Mexico (cultural struggles also happened in Italy and in the German Empire). But the Catholic armed ‘religiosero’ revolt (a forerunner of the twentieth-century Cristeros) was peculiarly Hispanic, as only Spain witnessed a comparable phenomenon at the same time (the Third Carlist War), albeit for more complex reasons.

The doyen of new military history, Jeremy Black, has pleaded that civil wars should attract the sort of scholarly attention normally afforded to wars between states.⁸ Given Latin America’s absence from both the First and Second World War battlefields, historians of conflict have been more drawn to civil wars, insurgencies and counter-insurgencies. They have also been drawn to the particularly Hispanic phenomenon of armies making and breaking regimes, imposing their praetorianism usually under the pretext of a higher cause. As an expert on Latin American militarism put it,

Whenever the armed forces assumed political power, whatever their motivations, they maintained they were doing so only because the government had failed. Ostensibly they were motivated by only the purest of patriotic intentions. In their own eyes, grave national circumstances made intervention imperative. Indeed, ever since independence, the military had developed the firm conviction that it was their duty to step forward in times of internal crisis to save the nation from itself.⁹

Armies dominating politics either in presidential palaces or behind the scenes often faced domestic resistance to their policies. During the 1920s Mexico’s revolutionary regime steadily consolidated its power, successfully warding off army revolts, but the regime itself had come to power thanks to the army. Ultimately the regime relied on army power, especially when confronted with one of the most infamous challenges to its regime by the Cristeros. These rebels fought the Federal Army to a standstill by 1929, out of a complex array of religious, regional, socio-economic and power-political motives. They were dubbed ‘Cristeros’ by their enemies, but for much of the war official records referred to them as ‘revolutionaries’, as did several Cristeros themselves. One of the leading Cristeros, General Aurelio Acevedo, objected to the term ‘revolutionary’, citing how the Cristero movement aimed to restore a social and religious order vanquished by the chaos of real revolution underway in Mexico since 1910.¹⁰ But the Cristero rebellion was the last major armed conflagration of the era that opened up in 1910, so the term ‘revolutionary’ seemed uncontroversial to dispassionate contemporaries. For their part civilians caught in the path of contending government and Cristero armies tended to refer to the government side as the ‘Federation’ or as ‘callistas’, after President Calles, whose hard-line anticlericalism provoked the Cristeros to revolt.

The Cristero War of 1926–9 led to the deaths of somewhere between 70,000 and 85,000 people, with the government side sustaining casualties around twice or three times those of the Cristeros. The war exacted a toll almost half as great as the total claimed by the ‘armed phase’ of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20) and devastated large parts of Mexico’s centre-west.¹¹ The localized and intimate nature of killings make it hard for readers more accustomed to ‘regular’ conflict to understand the killers’ motives and states of mind.¹² Even regular forces engaged in sectarian violence. The policing and factio...