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81 CHAPTER FOUR Civilianism and Its Discontents Officers, Politics, and the PRI After he became president in 1946, the civilian Miguel Alemán received a peculiar anonymous letter from a group of army officers complaining about their new uniforms. During the Second World War, the army had designed unfussy, khaki uniforms to help express the idea of soldiering as a respectable but modest, practical profession.¹ The officers complained to Alemán that such inexpensive, deliberately drab uniforms eroded the profession’s prestige and “have taken away the posture and nobleness that have characterized military officers in another time.”² Such touchiness was understandable. Mexico’s large, factionalized, but powerful group of military officers stood at the center of conflicts over military reform, and their grievances went far beyond sartorial concerns. After 1946, Mexico would have a civilian president, and Alemán oversaw a decisive shift in political office holding toward a new generation of civilian bureaucrats and away from the army. The number of military officers in the cabinet (excluding the secretaries of defense and navy) declined from 12 percent in 1940–46 to 0 percent in 1946–52; the figure grew slightly to 2 percent in 1952–58, before returning to 0 percent in 1958–64.³ By the mid-1950s, military officers no longer seriously challenged the ruling party by contesting elections. In 1961, General Celestino Gasca led an abortive insurrection, recruiting campesinos who had supported the dissident presidential campaign of General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán in 1952. Gasca tapped into widespread peasant discontent, but precious little military support; the army suppressed the movement, although not without bloody engagements in Veracruz, Chiapas, Oaxaca, Puebla, México, Coahuila, and Guanajuato.⁴ The idea that, after 1946, Mexico had entered a new era of “civilianism” and consensual politics that distinguished it from the rest of Latin America became an important theme in government propaganda and was echoed by a docile national press. Zone commander General Miguel Molinar Simondy’s boast from 1949 was typical: “While officers in the countries of Central and South 82 Officers, Politics, and the PRI America stain their reputations with dishonorable acts, the Mexican Army shows itself before the eyes of Mexicans and foreigners . . . to be a bastion of loyalty and respect for the commander in chief.”⁵ This chapter argues that, despite these changes, officers retained the power to lobby, graft, politic, and resist policies of military institutionalization, particularly in the provinces, through a combination of informal pacts and bold assertions of power. As we have seen, in the late 1930s many military officers backed Manuel Ávila Camacho to restore the rhetoric of military neutrality against Cardenista radicalism. This chapter begins with an overview of Mexico’s officer corps in the early 1940s. Presidents Ávila Camacho and Alemán let zone commanders and their troops linger longer in garrisons than did Cárdenas, and officers challenged central political control, grafted, and sometimes embarrassed the government. I then tell the story of how the Alemán administration defeated key groups of dissident officers between 1948 and 1952 who sought to arrest the drift toward the civilian dominance of national politics. Finally, the chapter describes officers’ continued prerogatives that survived the turn to civilianism and argues that these were crucial to the pact that emerged between officers and the PRI; I illustrate these prerogatives by showing how a faction of officers helped to build the Avilacamachista political machine in the state of Puebla from the 1930s to the 1950s. Officers’ role in national politics is one of the few aspects of the army’s history to have received sustained scholarly attention. Studies have often seen the advent of civilianism as the culmination of long-term policies of institutionalization and military education begun by Amaro in the 1920s. More recently, studies by Elisa Servín and Aaron Navarro have made it clear that factions of military officers did not disappear from politics in the 1940s but continued to contest presidential elections until 1952.⁶ These valuable studies show how officers were still learning the rules of the political game in the 1940s and early 1950s, not simply from their military textbooks but from the broader political environment. However, they do not explore in detail the relationship between national and provincial military politics, or between officer politics and the army’s changing organization and institutional roles. Without these levels of analysis we cannot understand the ways that the PRI did affect the “removal of the military from politics” and, crucially , the...

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