The War Has Brought Peace to Mexico: World War II and the Consolidation of the Post-Revolutionary State

1. Ávila Camacho’s Difficult First Year: December 1940–December 1941

11 one Ávila Camacho’s Difficult First Year december 1940–december 1941 During the first year after his inauguration on December 1, 1940, President Manuel Ávila Camacho faced considerable challenges as he sought to establish his authority as the head of the Mexican state and as the leading figure in Mexican public life. Many of the conservative elements that had backed opposition candidate General Juan Andreu Almazán in the bitterly contested election of July 1940 continued to grumble that fraud and violence had deprived their man of victory , and they demanded revisions to the radical policies of the 1930s that they found most objectionable. At the same time, those who had most actively supported Ávila Camacho’s candidacy also looked upon the new president with suspicion. Though they pledged unstinting loyalty to him, labor unions, peasant groups, and other left-leaning organizations watched his every move, worrying that Lázaro Cárdenas’s chosen successor might prove to be insufficiently committed to his predecessor’s “revolutionary” project of redistribution and economic nationalism. In this polarized political environment, Ávila Camacho sought to steer a middle course. He endeavored to appease both radicals and reactionaries by pledging that his administration would focus on consolidating the gains of the Mexican Revolution rather than pushing ahead with new reforms, and he ensured that his cabinet represented a broad range of viewpoints. Though this approach was generally successful in preventing explosive confrontations between competing factions, it led some observers to conclude that the president was a weak, vacillating figure. 12 c h a p t e r o n e Confronted with these domestic political difficulties, Ávila Camacho took advantage of the international situation to augment his clout and to enhance his prestige. Though Mexicans were not eager to play an active part in the war that had raged in Europe since 1939, the global repercussions of the fighting there meant that the Mexican president’s preeminent role in the formation of foreign policy took on added significance . To be sure, moving too quickly toward a more active role in the war might have led to deepened dissatisfaction with the government, inasmuch as most Mexicans favored neutrality and had ambivalent feelings (at best) about the prospect of close cooperation with the United States in hemispheric defense efforts. But by gradually adopting a more stridently anti-Axis position and by emphasizing Mexico’s vulnerability to foreign infiltration and economic disruption during a period of worldwide crisis, the Ávila Camacho administration made more credible its insistence that national unity behind the president was necessary. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Ávila Camacho derived even greater political benefits from his efforts to lead Mexico toward a position of more open support for the anti-fascist cause. With much of the Mexican left suddenly enthusiastic about the Allied war effort, the president found it possible to move to the right in some domestic policy areas without losing the backing of the groups that had formed his electoral base. The left’s redoubled support for Ávila Camacho’s foreign policy gave the president some additional room for maneuver in other fields. At the same time, the assertion that spies and saboteurs posed a clear and present danger to the security of nonbelligerent countries allowed the Mexican regime to craft for itself new tools that would help it to stamp out what it saw as subversion and preserve its brand of order long after World War II came to an end. HHH When Ávila Camacho assumed the presidency, Mexico maintained a policy of neutrality with respect to the war in Europe. Fifteen months earlier, on September 4, 1939, President Cárdenas had responded to the German invasion of Poland and to the subsequent British and French declarations of war on the Third Reich by issuing a statement expressing his regret that a number of states had “resorted to armed struggle to seek the solution of their differences” and conveying his government’s á v i l a c a m a c h o ’ s d i f f i c u lt f i r s t y e a r 13 decision that Mexico would remain neutral in the conflict.1 Though the president’s statement was more a lamentation that war had broken out than a denunciation of the German violation of Polish sovereignty, the Mexican declaration of neutrality certainly did...