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4. The Politics of Cardenismo, 1936–40
- University of Nebraska Press
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The Politics of Cardenismo, 1936–40 uring the period 1936 to 1940 President Cárdenas established his political program, building on the pnr structure and adding a series of modifications based on the socioeconomic reforms enacted by his own administration. Key to the development of Cardenista politics was his recreation of the pnr as a party of mass organizations. From 1936 to 1938 the president stressed the need for peasant and worker unification in the Confederación Nacional Campesina (cnc) and the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (ctm) respectively.1 At the same time he instigated an “open door” policy of electoral participation, encouraging both groups to contribute to party voting procedures.2 Finally, in May 1938 he announced the transformation of the pnr into the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (prm). The new party was intended to incorporate all four sectors of society, designated as the military, labor, agrarian, and popular. The new party had five times as many members as in 1936, including 2,500,000 campesinos and 1,250,000 workers.3 At the same time some opposition groups were co-opted into the party structure, while other more disruptive independent elements, such as Saturnino Cedillo, were forced to rebel and were subsequently crushed.4 Historians of the Cárdenas era have long debated the significance of the president’s political stratagems. For the early biographers of the Michoacán revolutionary, the open door electoral 108 the politics of cardenismo policy of 1936—the unification of peasants and workers and their admittance into the workings of party politics—indicated Cárdenas’s reverence for “democratic procedures and respect for the popular will” and that democracy was “instinctive to a man who had never severed his close ties with the common people.”5 However, post-1968 historians and political scientists started to charge Cárdenas with the creation of an authoritarian one-party state. Arnaldo Córdova denied Cárdenas’s democratic pretensions, arguing that his interest lay in the strengthening of the revolutionary state, that the open door policy was a “lie” and greater popular participation a “fiction.”6 Not only was the prm a “corporatist instrument that centralized and solidi fied the control of the state over the workers,” but it also served to concentrate power in the presidency.7 As a result the executive power came “to dominate local and regional politicoeconomic forces” as well as the “legislature, judiciary, military, peasantry and workers.”8 This chapter examines the tensions between centralization and decentralization, political control and local autonomy in Oaxaca during the Cárdenas era by focusing on the elections for state governor and the political arrangement in the ex-district of Ixtlán in the Sierra Juárez. At the state level, Cárdenas limited electoral participation and effectively imposed his own candidate in order to avoid the multiple claims of Oaxaca’s regional powerbrokers. However, outside Oaxaca City he was forced to allow a relative degree of political freedom, so long as stability was maintained. In Ixtlán the success of socialist education, the liberal heritage, and the generational divisions within villages compelled the president to allow free elections and wider political participation. [44.205.5.65] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 15:25 GMT) 109 the politics of cardenismo The Competition for Governor Although in December 1935 Governor García Toledo and his camarilla of Cardenistas had seen off the challenge of the Chicolopista candidate for the office of governor, Edmundo Sánchez Cano, the competition over the important post continued well into the following year. With the approval of President Cárdenas, García Toledo, Oaxaca’s Cardenistas, and the ccm had started to rally around Constantino Chapital as a candidate for the next governor in November 1935.9 At the time Chapital was a federal deputy , one of only two Oaxacan representatives who had formed part of the left wing of the congress.10 Not only was Chapital one of the first Oaxacans to back Cárdenas in June 1935—he also had an orthodox, healthy, and, in Oaxaca, rare revolutionary pedigree.11 During the Revolution Chapital had displayed a marked loyalty to the government of Venustiano Carranza, forming part of the “Fieles de Oaxaca” battalion in 1914 and holding a series of military posts throughout the country in the following years.12 In the 1920s Chapital continued his military career. Although he fought in few notable engagements, he was rewarded for...