Pistoleros and Popular Movements: The Politics of State Formation in Postrevolutionary Oaxaca

Conclusion

Conclusion uring the three decades following the Revolution, the Mexican government imposed an increasing degree of control on the country’s population. In Oaxaca this political process of state formation was complex, tortuous, and extremely disjointed. Although successive presidents appeared to direct the state’s reforms, the indigenous peasants, urban merchants, mestizo agricultural workers, regional caciques, obstreperous governors, and intransigent elites also ignored, bypassed, appropriated, modified, and opposed federal programs according to a series of local political, socioeconomic, and cultural histories. However, though the multiplicity of postrevolutionary experience can appear chaotic and incoherent, as Fernando Coronil argues, “fragmentation, ambiguity , and disjunctions are features of complex systems.”1 Patterns did emerge, and during the 1930s and 1940s this continual course of political flux not only fashioned contradictory and wavering narratives of state control but also formed an emerging map of regional acquiescence, resistance, adaptation, and reform. During the Maximato, Plutarco Elías Calles allowed Francisco López Cortés to dominate the government machinery of Oaxaca with little federal intrusion. Although López Cortés never attempted to test the limits of his relationship with the Jefe Máximo, by creating regional worker and peasant organizations and a state party and monopolizing the regulation of local caciques, he formed an 403 conclusion effective barrier against potential future interference. As a result it took almost three years for the radical project of President Cárdenas to lever the Chicolopista regime from power. After removing López Cortés from his role as regional caudillo, the president ensured that the state government did not fall into the hands of another aspiring strongman or any of the competing local camarillas . Central government now asserted control of the election of the state governor. For the next decade the presidents appointed former military men with little or no connection to the state’s political and economic elites. However, this process of administrative centralization did not lead to a broader course of governmental control. The federal bureaucracy, the peasant organizations, the unions, and the party made some advances in the Central Valleys and Tuxtepec, but most of the state remained dominated by individual caciques. These local leaders controlled the administrative machinery of the ex-districts and formed a useful balance to the ambitions of the state governor. Although they prevented the emergence of another regional caudillo and consequent instability at the heart of state government, at the midlevel of political interaction, in the cabeceras of the ex-districts, conflict was rife. Aggressive state governors such as Vicente González Fernández and Edmundo Sánchez Cano confronted independent local caciques such as Heliodoro Charis, Luis Rodríguez, and Genaro Ramos in elections and in armed clashes. This main narrative of divide and rule offers some corrections to traditional appreciations of the presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Manuel Avila Camacho and the historical formation of the Mexican state. Most important, it reveals how the political conflicts of the 1930s brought about a dual process of centralization and decentralization. As Alan Knight argues, the state 404 conclusion appeared to expand, but this was an “optical illusion.” While “the organs of the central government appear[ed] to grow, they [we]re in fact cannibalised by local elites and interests.”2 In fact, in areas of low federal influence the one necessitated the other. As President Cárdenas removed independent regional caudillos from the state governorships and replaced them with more compliant , marginal figures, he undoubtedly ushered in a process of increased state centralization. Similarly, at least at first, the progress of state ministries such as the Agrarian Department, the sep, and the daai drew Oaxaca’s peasant population toward the central government. Yet at the same time, as the federal state was weak and its corporatist organizations were often compromised or nonexistent, the president also had to insert a measure of decentralization into the system and allow the persistence of a group of independent local caciques. As Jeffrey Rubin argues, “the presence of the state and the implementation of those rules are far less complete, in terms of geography, as well as domains of social life, than the model of the all-encompassing or corporatist state asserts.”3 If the state that emerged from this process of administrative compromise resembled a pyramid, it was not the modern incarnation of Teotihuacán, with its clean lines and monumental poise. Rather it resembled Tikal...