Mexico
The hemispheric role of the US was also deeply
resented in Mexico. Yet no country was more
dependent on the US economically. Within the
Organisation of American States, Marxist Cuba
and Nicaragua had in Mexico their only sup-
porter. Mexico had made its own revolution
already in 1911. The country had good reason to
bear animosity toward her US neighbour having
lost half her territory to her in 1848. Mexico then
suffered a French occupation (1863–7) and only
gained some stability in 1876 when General
Porfirio Díaz seized power and ruled the country
for thirty-five years until 1911. There was spec-
tacular economic progress during these years; a
wealthy small Creole upper class modelled their
life-style on Europe. The less fortunate masses of
landless native American peasants worked on the
Haciendas of large landowners. Díaz could rely
for support on the Church and the bayonet.
Sweat-shops and textile mills employed labourers
at low wages.
A split among the ruling oligarchy ushered
in the Revolution. Díaz was overthrown in 1911,
and a liberal minded president was elected. But
the fall of Díaz started renewed conflict and civil
war. The hero of the Revolution was Emiliano
Zapata, who led a peasant army on his white
charger and became the romantic martyr. Civil
war raged against the new dictator General
Victoriano Huerta in the presidential palace, a
flamboyant former cattle rustler, Pancho Villa led
a small but well-trained force of mercenaries.
Then in 1914 Huerta faced a third foe. Woodrow
Wilson sent in the marines and Huerta fled. The
outcome of the Mexican Revolution remained in
doubt until 1923. By then both Villa and Zapata
had been killed by government forces.
Despite the socialist rhetoric of the Mexican
constitution, reform would be instituted from
above – peasants and workers were not to become
the arbiters of power. There were to be no revo-
lutionary social upheavals. The secularisation of
the state and the expropriation of Church wealth
were important outcomes of the revolution. An
alliance between the military, the wealthy and
the middle class consolidated the powers of the
presidents, and their followers were rewarded
by the spoils of office. But the difference between
Mexico and other Latin American countries is
that an effective party organisation, renamed sev-
eral times and since 1945 called the Partido
Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), controls the
country and embraces workers and peasants as
well as the rising middle-income groups. Lázaro
Cárdenas, president from 1934 to 1940, devel-
oped a corporate state in which each section of
the population, workers, peasants, the military,
the middle class, was placed under the party
umbrella as groups rather than as individuals.
Through large-scale land distribution Cárdenas
carried forward one of the principal aims of
the revolution, breaking up the haciendas and
granting the land as private plots or joint peas-
ant farms; another aim was to take control of
Mexico’s major resources, the most important
of which was oil. Cárdenas nationalised the largely
US-owned oil companies. Dissatisfied with the
compensation received, but even more disturbed
that other countries might follow Mexico’s
example, the international oil companies boy-
cotted her oil and inhibited development of
the state oil company until uncertainties in the
Middle East after the Second World War made
Mexican oil too valuable a Western resource not
to be utilised.
Westerners regarded Mexico as a truly revolu-
tionary country for a number of reasons: the
attack on the Church, the official government
espousal of atheism, nationalisation, reforms
which hurt the wealthy landowners, the propaga-
tion of the myth of a peasants’ and workers’
revolution and admiration for Marx and Lenin,
the assertion of a Mexican identity and pride in
her native American roots, immortalised by the
political–historical murals of Mexico’s most
famous artist, Diego Rivera, and the granting of
asylum to Leon Trotsky. In fact Mexico con-
formed far more closely to Latin American pat-
terns than to the Soviet model. In any case
the authoritarian state was not exclusive to the
Soviet Union but was common among the fascist
nations of Europe in the 1930s. Private property
in the early 1990s remained the source of great
wealth in Mexico for a minority, while poverty
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