Populism in Twentieth-Century Mexico: The Presidencies of Lázaro Cárdenas and Luis Echeverría (review)

Some writers have dismissed Latin American populism as an overworked topic to which little new can be added. Yet the volume at hand presents some fresh approaches in the Mexican case, sandwiched between mature reflections by two eminent Mexicanists, Alan Knight and William Beezley. The resulting volume is lively and thought-provoking, even though it sometimes strays far from traditional populist analysis.

The genealogy of this book includes a graduate seminar conducted by Beezley, out of which I presume a majority of the present chapters emerged. Then, in 2006, the organizers held a conference in Tucson on Mexican revolutionary populism, which was attended by the former mayor of Mexico City Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, among others. The book's basic arguments are that only one classic populist existed in Mexico, President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940), and that while President Luis Echeverría (1970-1976) attempted to replicate and extend the earlier populist experiment he largely failed. (Recent presidential contender Andrés Manuel López Obrador is barely mentioned as a populist.) All of the authors follow the editors' definition of Mexican populism as a style of politics. One of the few discordant notes in the volume is Cárdenas's assertion that his father Lázaro was not a populist.

Alan Knight thoughtfully compares Cárdenas and Echeverría, setting the tone for most subsequent chapters. Whereas the populist style came naturally to the former and succeeded, it never quite worked with the latter, whose motivations were clouded by his role in the Tlatelolco massacre of 1968. Echeverría lacked the charisma of his predecessor, and times had changed since the heady leftist consensus of the 1930s.

Surprises abound in this book. Jürgen Buchenau valiantly makes a case for Cárdenas's predecessor and mentor, Plutarco Elías Calles, as the source of much of his successor's policies and successes. He looks especially at Calles's earlier career, which helped to chart the course of the Revolution. Guillermo Palacios, on the other hand, examines the rise of academic social sciences, especially history and anthropology, and their interaction with politics. Although the practitioners were inspired by U.S. academics, they also found support and eventually institutional homes in public institutes and universities, especially UNAM. Emily Wakild looks at the rise of environmental policies under the leadership of Cárdenas, which she calls 'resource populism' or state control over natural resources. She studies the creation of the Forestry Department and its propagation of reforestation and parks, which "put Mexico in the forefront of environmental management in the late 1930s" (p. 77). Also in the area of plant biology, Gabriela Soto Laveaga shifts to Echeverría's sponsorship of barbasco cultivation in Oaxaca, in order to augment campesinos' income from medicinal hormones extracted from this wild yam. While the president certainly exploited the program for his own benefit, in the end it died due to bureaucratization and the development of synthetics.

Echeverrías's Dirty War against leftists and guerrillas in Guerrero, a decidedly unflattering side of the president, occupies Alexander Aviña's chapter. The government instituted a carrot-and-stick policy to wean insurgents from resistance by offering good prices for coffee and copra through state-run cooperatives. Those who demurred faced stern treatment from the army and police: "By 1982, at least 537 guerrerenses remained unaccounted for, or 'disappeared'" (p. 119). Diane E. Davis complements this analysis with a detailed history of political uses of police authority under both regimes, part of her larger study. By the 1970s few of Cárdenas's programs for Indians remained, but Echeverría attempted to invigorate native spirits with the 1975 First National Congress of Indigenous Peoples. María L. O. Muñoz traces the place of this "participatory...