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ChaPTeR 6 from the Caudillo to Tata lázaro The Maximato in Perspective, 1928–1934 Jürgen Buchenau On September 1, 1928, President Plutarco Elías Calles delivered to Mexico’s assembled congress his final informe, the annual state-of-the-nation address.The speech came with much anticipation. Only six weeks before, a Catholic assassin had killed Calles’s predecessor, General Álvaro Obregón, who had just been elected to a second term in office. As the Constitution of 1917 had abolished the office of vice president, the nation faced an acute succession crisis. Obregón had not been just any ordinary president-elect. Rather, Mexicans knew him as the “undefeated caudillo of the Mexican Revolution” and unquestionably the primary political leader of a nation that had only recently emerged from a destructive civil war. To top it off, Calles could not simply extend his own time in office, the likely solution in most other political contexts of early twentiethcentury Latin America. Obregón’s supporters blamed the president, as well as labor leader and presidential hopeful Luis N. Morones, for the murder of the caudillo, and they knew that the constitution, forged in the memory of General Porfirio Díaz’s long dictatorship, forbade Calles from serving a single additional day. As Calles scanned the assembled legislators, he knew that the caudillo’s death had created not only a political vacuum but also a menace to the fragile state that the winners of the revolution had built since Venustiano Carranza and Obregón led them to victory over Pancho Villa’s and Emiliano Zapata’s armies in 1915. However, a speech that could have thrust Mexico into renewed violence instead became the foundation of a new political order. Calles’s oration assuaged Obregón’s numerous supporters by delivering praise for the man who had served as his political mentor for much of the preceding fifteen years. But then, in a thinly veiled attack on Obregón, who was known far and wide as a 136 • jürgen buchenau caudillo, Calles referred to caudillismo as the source of his country’s ills.1 The reference to caudillismo placed Obregón’s career in the context of other caudillos such as Díaz and nineteenth-century strongman Antonio López de Santa Anna.2 Having thus linked Obregón’s leadership style to Díaz’s authoritarian tradition , Calles laid out his plans for the future. Addressing his opponents’ worst fears, he announced that he would not serve as president again under any circumstances and asked congress to appoint an interim president pending new elections. In his words, Mexico had entered the transition from a “country of one man” to a “nation of institutions and laws.” Calles also called for the creation of a national party in order to combine the hundreds of parties that claimed loyalty to the cause of the revolution, yet operated as the political machines of strongmen. Finally, he welcomed the formation of a Catholic opposition party, a gesture designed to direct his conflict with the church into legislative channels.3 This conflict had resulted from Calles’s anticlerical policies, as well as the Vatican’s opposition to the constitutional provisions that enshrined the complete separation of church and state. In July 1926, the clergy had suspended all religious ceremonies, and a few months later, the conflict had played a decisive role in setting off the devastating Civil Code. Calles’s speech disarmed his political opposition and assured for the president a continuing role behind the scenes. Indeed, Calles emerged as the symbolic pater familias of the revolution, or jefe máximo de la Revolución Mexicana (supreme chief of the Mexican Revolution ). The moniker jefe máximo was the creation of one of Calles’s opponents, Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, a former zapatista who had become one of Obreg ón’s most ardent allies following Zapata’s assassination. Suspecting the government’s involvement in Obregón’s slaying, Soto y Gama coined the term in order to criticize Calles’s repressive practices. The term jefe máximo thus imputed to Calles the very role he had publicly rejected: a leader just as authoritarian and dominant as Obregón. Calles never used this term to refer to himself in order to avoid its authoritarian connotations. Nonetheless, the label stuck, identifying Calles for better or for worse with the political system he had helped forge. As a result, one of Calles’s most prominent...

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