Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico

1. An Unsatisfactory Picture of Civil Commotion: Unpopular Militias and Tepid Nationalism in the Mexican Southeast

23 chapter one An Unsatisfactory Picture of Civil Commotion Unpopular Militias and Tepid Nationalism in the Mexican Southeast Terry Rugeley Foreigners who came to Mexico in the years between independence and 1876 consistently remarked upon one feature: the pervasive and seemingly unhealthy role of military service in daily life. The German property owner Carl Sartorius referred to the “unsatisfactory picture of civil commotion ” that their presence created and, like many, pointed to what he considered unprincipled leaders, as well as their malleable followers, as the worst problem vexing the early nation.1 Similarly, in 1847 the Austrian botanist Karl Heller painted a dismal picture of Mexican officers and the apparent rabble they raised; as Heller put it, “The heroes of this land always appeared when the enemy had already gone, and availed themselves of what still remained by means of the most shameful and dishonorable scheming.”2 Mexicans themselves often shared these censorious views. National leaders of Liberal vintage saw the suppression of regional strongmen (caudillos ), together with what seemed to be their private armies, as a fundamental priority. Porfirio Díaz similarly feared armed men. He had come up through their ranks and had seen the way the institution bred ambition and instability, and after gaining power himself, he was determined to pull the ladder up after him by slashing military size and capability and diverting its officers through assigning plum diplomatic jobs, rotating appointments frequently, or simply allowing them to rot in their own inactivity.3 Finally, the revolutionary family from 1920 onward engaged in 24 • Terry Rugeley a single-minded campaign to curb military power, and to the degree that they created one of Latin America’s least praetorian and most professional armed services, they succeeded.4 The undesirable nature of the military institution, then, is a view that has proven both persuasive and long lasting. Professional history, oddly enough, has recently broken from this orthodoxy . The latest telling resurrects military service as reflecting a variety of popular sentiments, many of them folk versions of national ideologies more at home in Mexico’s salons and congressional debates than in, say, the cornfields of Milpa Alta. In place of Miguel Lerdo de Tejada’s doctrinaire laissez-faire capitalism, we have village rights to bear arms, 1830s anticipations of the Second Amendment to the US Constitution. Instead of a Juárez-style state-building, comes a popular nationalism in which peasants claim citizenship by reason of having picked off French mercenaries in mountain passes.5 Was service in the national army or local militia really the empowering force that it has recently been portrayed to be, and most important to this essay, how do we reconcile the divergent regional experiences of this hydra-headed institution? Why have some found in the community militia the basis of early national political concepts, while others— that is, myself, working in the southeast—have found so little of the same? A Pocket History of the Mexican Military By way of introduction, it is important to recognize that military service was of fairly recent vintage, at least as far as Mexican colonial institutions went. During most of the colonial period, Spaniards kept the peace by letting the Indians be Indians, allowing vast stretches of the latter’s social and cultural world to continue either above or just beneath the surface of a Europeanized facade. Systematic dismantling of regional indigenous authority, coupled with a surprising vitality of the same institution within the village, reinforced native culture and language but rendered intervillage unity difficult (a fact still true today).6 The eighteenth century, however , witnessed a heightened colonial competition that culminated in the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), in which Spain suffered various humiliations that convinced it that more systematic defense was in order. From the 1780s, the Bourbon administration began to construct militias throughout its colonies. In theory peninsular-led and excluding Indian peoples, the units gradually allowed ambitious creoles to work themselves into the officers ’ corps and permitted limited mobility for mixed race and even purely Indian peoples.7 Like so much else in Spain’s far-flung empire, policy The Mexican Southeast • 25 implementation remained inconsistent, and almost all later ambiguities of the institution—Spanish versus Mexican, elite versus popular, control versus mobility—germinated from seeds inadvertently sown at this early date. Adulterated from their original design, the militias became breeding grounds for Jacobinism and dreams of independence. For example, black...