Malcontents, Rebels, and Pronunciados: The Politics of Insurrection in Nineteenth-Century Mexico

12. A Socialist Pronunciamiento: Julio López Chávez’s Uprising of 1868

eduardo flores clair | Translated by Verónica Zárate Toscano Twelve. A Socialist Pronunciamiento: Julio López Chávez’s Uprising of 1868 O n 14 July 1866 Francisco Zarco sent a letter from New York to Benito Juárez. Among other things, he wrote: “It looks like it’s time to start thinking about the country’s reorganization .”1 In fact, the republican forces were getting stronger every day in their struggle against the French invading army. Zarco ’s concern lay with those dissidents who had to be incorporated into their political movement or had to be crushed. It was undeniable that the enemy army would eventually be defeated, but the dissidents were hidden among their allies. As far as we know, thanks to a large number of testimonies, between August 1867 and December 1868 the country did not obtain the peace it had desired for so long. On the contrary, many and significant political problems, large and small, followed one another at different moments and placed Mexico on the brink of a civil war. Without attempting to draft an exhaustive list, we can mention the uprisings in Sinaloa, Guerrero, and Tamaulipas, the inhuman repression of the Indians in Sonora, Yucatán, and Chiapas and, as far as this story is concerned, the multiple levantamientos (uprisings) that erupted in Mexico City. Such movements originated as a result of power disputes. More than one of the Reforma leaders thought he had the right to occupy the presidential chair; local powers also confronted each other because of fraud in 256 Flores Clair the electoral processes; but most of all, the Indian communities were forced to fight with everything they had to defend their lands from the liberal policies that were implemented once the Liberal Republic was restored in the summer of 1867.2 Against this backdrop of a country in constant upheaval, our objective is to focus on Julio López Chavez’s pronunciamiento, since it has been awarded great significance in Mexican historiography, especially because of the large volume of studies that have been dedicated to it. In broad terms, we can identify at least three different approaches to date: the first has concentrated on the agrarian politics of the nineteenth century and has been developed, in particular, in those studies dedicated to Mexican peasant movements . Second, there has been a body of research centering on the origins of the workers’ movement and its different ideologies, outlining how it merged into the peasant segment of society, developing its own brand of anarchism. More recently, these struggles have been identified with environmental history because of their defense of natural resources.3 In this chapter I analyze Julio López Chávez’s uprising of 1868, bearing in mind those elements associated with the nineteenthcentury Mexican pronunciamiento and understanding that such a practice took place when a group-led revolt abandoned the constitutional path in order to legitimate its act of insurrection, making a programmatic statement. As a matter of fact, the pronunciamiento was an instrument used to attack the establishment and entailed the all-important participation of the military, since this was one of the coercive forces that could defeat the opposition and lead to a power takeover. The participants knew their activity was illegal and, according to the law, it was a political crime that could lead to severe punishment.4 Without ignoring the agrarian A Socialist Pronunciamiento 257 essence of the Chalco movement that led to the uprising, I want to emphasize that it was a pronunciamiento, led by a group of officers in alliance with civilians who organized themselves into an armed force with the aim of defying the government and reclaiming their ancestral rights to the land. My approach to the subject is by studying the social background of the participants, the statements they issued, the state’s strategy to destroy the movement, and the judicial processes that were put in place. The aim is to try to answer the following questions: did the victory of the republican model lead to a context where the prospect of civil war was heightened? Did the state take hold of every source available, legal or not, in order to extinguish the opposition, and especially opposition that in trying to invert the social order represented a major threat—in other words, an anarchist alternative? Grievances and Changes Some time ago, when studying social movements, researchers had a tendency to...