To understand the prevalence and appeal of antimilitarist rhetoric, why many saw it as empty and laughable, and why postrevolutionary leaders persisted in using it anyway, it is necessary to understand Mexico’s earlier history. After 1920, political and ideological conflicts about the army were often fierce and wide ranging. However, few people understood the issues to be entirely new. Postrevolutionary debates were shaped by earlier conflicts over the central or local organization of violence, who should serve in the army, the political and legal rights that military service should entail, and the circumstances under which the army could coerce the nation’s own citizens. This chapter provides an overview of these conflicts in Mexico after independence, and how they culminated in the revolution of 1910–20. It then explores how the Sonorans who controlled the postrevolutionary regime from 1920 to 1934 were influenced by this earlier history in their efforts to reform the army. The chapter ends with a sketch of Mexico’s army of the early 1930s that illustrates the limits of Sonoran reform and provides a baseline from which to plot subsequent changes.

For the first fifty years after independence, Mexico’s army both reflected and exacerbated the political instability of the period. In 1821, Mexico became independent after a faction of the colonial army switched loyalties and allied with the remnants of the popular insurgency they had spent most of the previous decade fighting. Mexico’s army was one of the largest national institutions, and its officers were ubiquitous figures in government offices and in frequent coups, rebellions, and pronunciamientos.⁷ Many historians have viewed military politics as being devoid of ideological meaning, led by individual caudillos who lacked the classical virtue to sustain republican institutions, or simply an expression of soldiers’ tendency to follow whoever promised to pay their wages.⁸ Others have taken the ideological debates of the time more seriously but have emphasized officers’ varied and complex alliances with civilian groups rather than the politics of the army as an institution, which they have seen as weak and fragmented.⁹ While there is much truth to each of these interpretations, the Mexican army (or at least its leadership) also displayed a “certain corporateness” and political identity.¹⁰ Shaped by the shared experience of fighting the insurgency of 1810, this outlook included a hierarchical conception of society, antagonism to widespread political participation, a marked reformism in military matters coupled with a defense of the ample legal privileges and autonomy inherited from the Bourbon reforms, and a pronounced hostility to local militias.¹¹

Recent research suggests that conservative officers were correct to be concerned about Mexico’s tradition of local militias and has confirmed that tradition’s strength and importance in the nineteenth century. The first attempts to group local militias into a National Guard began in the 1820s, but the National Guard only emerged as a key political institution between the 1840s and 1860s, as Mexico suffered invasion and territorial dismemberment during war with the United States (1847–48), civil war between liberals and conservatives (1857–61), and a further conservative-backed French invasion and occupation (1862–67).¹² Mexican liberals, like their political brethren elsewhere, generally defined militarism as the praetorianism of a privileged caste of officers and tried to create institutional separations between military and civilian spheres. Liberal proposals were accompanied by a moral discourse, perhaps unusually strong in Latin America, that emphasized the dissolute, vicious habits of military men—promiscuity, alcoholism, gambling, and cockfighting in particular—and the need to eliminate these behaviors through improved training, moralization, and limits on the scope of military justice. Many liberals also understood local and state militias as useful counterweights to the political power and authoritarian tendencies of the federal army, although moderates were often hesitant about opening up militia service to too many of the lower classes.¹³ Throughout the wars against conservatives and the French, liberals increasingly relied on the National Guard to recruit leaders and communities to the cause, allowing them to build political alliances among Mexico’s diverse provincial leaders and eventually emerge triumphant in 1867.

In some indigenous regions, service in the National Guard helped to spread notions of national identity and a popular, patriotic brand of liberalism that emphasized local autonomy.¹⁴ Whether soldiers hailed from Mexico City or a distant peasant community in the sierra, service in the National Guard was certainly more agreeable than serving as a draftee in the federal army; militia units could often elect their own officers and enjoyed some control over where and when they could be deployed.¹⁵ Likewise, some peasant communities in the north of Mexico, initially established as military colonies in territories dominated by nomadic indigenous groups, also came to associate local military mobilization with their rights to land, citizenship, and masculine honor.¹⁶

The rule of General Porfirio Díaz, president for all but four years between 1876 and 1910, transformed Mexican society and the army’s role in it in many ways. Since the 1820s, the federal army’s leadership had often tried to reform military training and education, recruitment, provisioning, and medical services. These plans were usually stymied by the instability and insolvency of the government.¹⁷ This was to change after the 1870s, as Mexico was transformed by twin processes of capitalist development and state building. Export-led economic growth boosted state revenues, which in turn enabled the state to enhance its capacities, both “cognitive” and coercive.¹⁸ The Porfirian state mapped territories, subsidized infrastructure, took censuses, recruited ex-bandits to a glamorous new provincial police force, and tried to update, centralize, and professionalize the armed forces.¹⁹ Of course, this meant curtailing the very National Guard in which Díaz had made his name as a patriot fighting the French, that had propelled him to national power in 1876, and that had formed the nucleus of federal army officers up to the 1880s. In the 1880s, federal officers increasingly hailed from new military academies, and Díaz decommissioned the National Guard. Like other governments at the time in Latin America dedicated to reaping the benefits of export-led growth, the Porfirian regime undertook a certain, selective demilitarization: the army’s share of the budget was reduced, its forces shrank by 25 percent between 1884 and 1910, and the number of officers in political posts declined across the Porfiriato.²⁰ However, the army remained deeply involved in enforcing the Porfirian order, its smaller size compensated in part by organizational improvements and increased mobility thanks to the new railways.²¹

International politics reinforced this domestic role. To the south, Guatemala was always too weak in geopolitical terms and poor in resources to play the role of a compelling military adversary. To the north, the United States presented far too formidable an enemy to be confronted with primarily military means. Although the United States did not enjoy the prestige of France and Germany as an organizer and outfitter of armies until the 1940s, its dominance over Mexico in military terms was evident to most observers since at least the 1840s. Throughout the wars of the nineteenth century and the Mexican Revolution, the United States was evidently an important source of arms and aid for rebels. Any government that intended to rule Mexico would have to use a part of its armed forces to secure key border points and ports. However, it was obvious that a purely military approach to deflecting U.S. influence made little sense. The army would continue to be influenced by foreign models of military reform and organization into the postrevolutionary period, but a basic domestic orientation would remain. The importance of domestic policing in turn ensured the dominance of Mexico’s army over its small navy and later its air force.²²

Despite this absence of international war, the Porfirian regime sought to use its newly reformed army to spread a particular (conservative, Europhile, racist) version of national identity and illustrate the “Order and Progress” that the government had brought to Mexico. The army paraded its new, European-style uniforms and drills before the public, projecting an image of modern discipline and hierarchy well suited to Porfirian conceptions of the wider social order; official commemorations of the National Guard faded away.²³ However, it was difficult to make the army a compelling symbol of Porfirian nationalism across class, regional, and ethnic boundaries. The army explicitly demanded lighter complexions of the recruits to Porfirio Díaz’s new elite presidential guard.²⁴ Nevertheless, a career in the federal army was never appealing for educated elites. Among the lower classes, the persistence of the press-gang and the harsh experience of military discipline belied the image of paternal patriotism.²⁵ Elite men suspected of belonging to the new category of criminals called homosexuals were packed off to the army as punishment; while this confirmed the deviancy of these men, it was less clear whether it implied the respectability of military service, or simply reinforced its penal associations.²⁶

Aside from the limited appeal of Porfirian nationalism, the project for the army faced other pressing problems. General Bernardo Reyes had cut his teeth in the National Guard, survived Porfirian professionalization, and became a prominent advocate of military reforms himself; he also became the head of a powerful political and military faction intent on propelling him to the presidency. In 1902, Reyes sought a partial revival of Mexico’s militia tradition by organizing the Second Reserve, a new volunteer, civilian, but socially exclusive military force that numbered 30,000 and included many middle-class supporters of Reyes. Díaz intervened to disband the reserve and removed Reyes from the Ministry of War. However, countering Reyes came at the cost of handing control of the army to a competing faction of newer professional officers led by General Manuel Mondragón, whose loyalty was conditional on their being allowed considerable leeway to graft. Such arrangements could be embarrassing when they were exposed in public scandal. They also weakened the army as an effective enforcer of the Porfirian status quo. Padded payrolls and empty arsenals, combined with the army’s continued reliance on demoralized soldiers rounded up by press-gangs, ensured that the army was ill prepared to combat popular insurgency.²⁷