The Calles Government and Catholic Dissidents: Mexico's Transnational Projects of Repression, 1926-1929

During the late 1920s, the Mexican government under President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) confronted multiple challenges to state consolidation. These included plots by political rivals, foreign relations crises, and several popular revolts. The longest-lasting and most destabilizing of these was the Cristero War, which persisted from 1926 until 1929, with sporadic uprisings into the early 1930s. Despite these challenges, Calles and his handpicked successors not only remained in power at the beginning of the 1930s, but also launched the single-party political system that would endure in Mexico until the end of the twentieth century.¹

While the outcome of state consolidation is well understood, there is still much discussion within the historiography about exactly how the Calles government ushered Mexico from political disorder to relative stability. Numerous scholars have explored the process of political consolidation and state formation under Calles and his successors. Many have investigated how revolutionary elites developed cultural programs, particularly education, to foment anticlericalism among the Mexican masses, whom they saw as backwards, superstitious, and overly influenced by the Catholic Church.² Other historical studies have focused on political forms of state consolidation, analyzing the ways that the Calles administration successfully negotiated between different regional leaders, political parties, and labor unions to overcome military challenges and forge a stronger and more centralized power base.³ Still others have recounted in detail the military strategies employed to conduct the Cristero War.⁴

The role of clandestine operations and political intelligence has attracted somewhat less scholarly attention, and fewer scholars still have studied the Calles government's use of deportation, blacklisting, and the surveillance of Mexican dissident exiles.⁵ Recently catalogued archival sources from both Mexico and the United States demonstrate how the Calles government, and particularly its Departamento Confidencial (Confidential Department)—the government agency in charge of intelligence-gathering and clandestine enforcement—used distinct and comprehensive methods of repression to quell incipient rebellions during the late 1920s.⁶ These repressive methods were transnational, extending Mexican sovereignty over its citizens beyond the country's territorial boundaries. Finally, these transnational projects were a significant component of state consolidation during the late 1920s; they proved to be an effective form of social control and ultimately helped to neutralize the seditious efforts of Catholic dissidents in the United States. For Mexico, the repressive efforts were necessary because anticlerical cultural projects were not in themselves effective at putting down dissident Catholic movements, or at weakening the religious beliefs and practices of the Mexican clergy, lay Catholic Mexican political figures, or even the broader Catholic lay population.⁷ This case study, then, offers a deeper understanding of Mexican state consolidation under Calles. Furthermore, it underscores a broader tendency for modern Mexican political conflicts to develop transnationally, and highlights the need for historians of these conflicts to examine archival material from both sides of the border.

The Mexican Intelligence Apparatus, 1900-1930

The Calles government administration, in expanding its intelligence operations and developing new repressive techniques aimed at political dissidents during the late 1920s, was building on a long historical precedent. In modern Mexico, just as in other modern nation-states, governments have used espionage and other clandestine methods to collect intelligence about their enemies and allies. Given Mexico's long history of mass migration to the United States, and the tendency for Mexico's political dissidents to use the United States as a haven and a place to regroup for new uprisings from north of the Rio Grande, all of Mexico's presidents since at least the mid-nineteenth century have monitored and surveilled Mexican emigrants in the United States.⁸ Indeed, in many ways, Mexican intelligence in the United States has served as an integral part of Mexico's domestic intelligence efforts. The Calles government, however, reformulated and expanded Mexican intelligence in the United States during the Cristero War years, especially in comparison to previous regimes.

Until about 1922, intelligence in modern Mexico was relatively unsystematic and inefficient. It also lacked institutional continuity, since intelligence operations were reshuffled every time a new...