In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Ethnohistory 49.4 (2002) 890-893



[Access article in PDF]
Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. By Ben Fallaw. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. x + 167 pp., notes, bibliography, index. $54.95 cloth, $18.95 paper.)

Ben Fallaw's Cárdenas Compromised offers one of the most thorough treatments of postrevolutionary Mexican politics currently available. A sad but entirely believable exploration of a state known for political skulduggery, the book documents how agrarian reform came to Yucatán, how reactionary opposition and political infighting crippled the project, and how something was ultimately gained despite the project's overall failure.

Cárdenas Compromised presents a tale of political machinations that would have flattered the Borgias. Early in his watershed presidency (1934–40), Lázaro Cárdenas initiated an agrarian reform program in Yucatán, a state with a richly deserved reputation for oligarchy and for a labor system resembling slavery. To that end he established the Agrarian Bank to fund the creation of ejidos, or collective farms, to win Maya peasants away from the henequen haciendas. This essentially reformist approach had to compete with the movement's own left wing, which advocated grassroots organization and a more forceful approach to agrarian redistribution. Meanwhile, hacendados, abetted by the reactionary newspaper Diario de Yucatán, managed to oppose both the Agrarian Bank and Left Cardenismo through a variety of duplicitous political fronts. They funded anarcho-syndicalist labor organizations that distrusted Cárdenas's statist political approach, and whose recurrent strikes forced the cardenista governor into open repression. Hacendados also encouraged Maya peasants to reject the ejido system on the grounds that they would be better off on the [End Page 890] henequen estates or on individually owned subsistence farms. Such grassroots anti-ejido campaigning proved effective in part because the underfunded Agrarian Bank paid 20 percent less than prevailing hacienda wages. Most successful of all, hacendados recruited Gualberto Carrillo Puerto, the younger brother of slain socialist governor Felipe Carrillo Puerto in order to co-opt the agrarian movement: the family name alone drew in substantial numbers of Maya peasants, while Gualberto himself was willing to stall reform while posing as its champion, provided that high political office was dangled in front of him as an incentive. Antireform obstructionist tactics generated so much mayhem that Cárdenas had to remove the governor who had been among his most loyal followers; walking right into the trap, the president allowed the imposition of an interim governor secretly opposed to agrarian reform. Thus was born the Official Camarrilla, a political group that eventually won the battle for state political control. Disgusted with Yucatecan scheming, Cárdenas himself came to the peninsula in August 1937 to promote agrarian reform, hoping that his immense personal charisma would tide over his preferred candidates in gubernatorial elections the following September. His tour began as a success: few Yucatecan villages had ever seen a national president, and his obvious concern for the welfare of rural Mexicans, a concern that shone through at every shade-tree pueblo reception, boosted his already legendary image. However, Cárdenas's lack of connection with an urban labor vote ultimately threw the election to an Official Camarrilla candidate. This group managed to win control over the agrarian reform process, thus guaranteeing cardenismo's subversion and failure.

As the author himself notes, Cárdenas Compromised maintains a largely political focus in order to reinstate process to historical accounts of Mexico's 1930s. But throughout this tale of Florentine chicanery, Fallaw shrewdly keeps one eye on underlying conditions and dynamics. He argues that three factors ultimately doomed Yucatán's agrarian reform. First came national budget priorities, which privileged Coahuila's Laguna cotton ejidos, the petroleum nationalization, and a much-needed but costly plan of infrastructure expansion. Second, Cárdenas yielded to corrupt state political actors in an effort to impose his own moderate successor as national president. Third, Yucatecan cardenismo always passed through the filter of a landowning class left largely intact throughout the preceding two decades of revolution. Like Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, reformers of southeast...

pdf

Share