2003 Christopher Zehnder

We Die for God

The Mexican Revolution and La Cristiada
Last in the Series
By Christopher Zehnder

The Uprising Rekindled

he Cristero rebellion would have died in the summer of 1927 but for one man --- the guerrilla leader, Victoriano Ramirez. El Catorce (The Fourteen) men called him for a legendary feat --- that after breaking out of jail, he singlehandedly killed fourteen membrs of a posse sent out to arrest him. With the fame of this legend and his keen grasp of guerilla war tactics, Ramirez rekindled the rebellion in the Los Altos region of Jalisco. There he found ready followers; for, not El Catorce only had Los Altos all along been been the center of the rebellion, but its people had suffered harsh repression by the government. Federal troops had forced the native population to leave their homes and go into concentration camps. In this way the government thought it could keep the peasants from supplying the Cristeros and, moreover, confiscate their food and livestock. With the rebellion again in full swing, the Liga Defensora decided that the scattered Cristero forces needed coordination and military discipline. They turned thus to a retired general, Enrique Gorostieta Velarde, to take on overall command of the rebellion. Gorostieta however did not embrace the aims of the Cristeros. The mercenary general (he demanded twice the salary of a federal general) was a Liberal and a Freemason and mocked the religion for which the Cristeros died. But Gorostieta opposed Calles. His dream, it seems was to establish a truly Liberal republic that enforced separation of Church and state but did not interfere with religious belief or practice. Believer or not, Gorostieta was an able commander. He turned the ragged bands of Cristeros into a disciplined army. The rebellion that had seemed dead now took on new life. Cristero forces grew to between 40,000 and 50,000 men and, throughout 1928, defeated federal forces Enrique Gorostieta time and again on the field of battle --- and this, despite the fact that the United States was supplying the federals with arms. President Calles thus had no choice but to see the Cristeros for what they were: a true challenge to his government.

Who Were the Cristeros?

Gorostieta was not the only unbeliever to enter the ranks of the Cristeros; other leaders joined the insurgents to

further their own aims. Even some of its true adherents had mixed motives, for, other considerations (such as frustration over the slow pace of agrarian reform or, even, and hankering for adventure) influenced a would-be insurgent. Still, considering the movement as a whole, it was the religious motive that was paramount. Too, as we have seen, middle class, professional men (such as Capistran Garza and Anacleto Gonzlez Flores) were central to the rebellion; nevertheless the rank and file of the Cristero insurgent army (which included women and children as well as adult men) were drawn mostly from the peasant classes --- the same sort of men who had followed Emiliano Zapata. Calling the Cristeros peasants should not invoke disdain. For, though roughly 60 percent of them had never attended any school, like other peasant societies, they had a rich and evocative oral culture. Their dialect of Spanish, which would have been hard for a city-dwelling Mexican of the period to understand, was not, on that account, an inferior avenue of expression. The Spanish Cristeros from Nayarit spoken by many of the Cristeros was essentially the Castillian dialect of the 15th-16th centuries, the period of some of Spain's greatest literary achievements. It had a large vocabulary drawn in part from the gospels and the literary works of the Middle Ages. Yet, though their culture was oral, the Cristeros were not uninterested in literary works. Indeed, many of them taught themselves to read and indulged themselves, not only in devotional books, but textbooks on law and even astronomy. Moreover, it was not unusual for those who were literate to read to their companions in camp or while they were engaged in work. Even the illiterate insurgent had an intellectual curiosity. Some among the peasant Cristero leaders --- when circumstances called them to it --- discovered an aptitude for political organization. To maintain order in the liberated regions of Jalisco, Colima, Zacatecas, and Michoacn, Cristero leaders had to establish governments, which, though led by military men, were nevertheless democratic in character. Religion inspired these civil governments to crackdown not only on typical immoral behavior but on speculation in trade. For instance, General Manuel Michel, who was both military and civil leader in south Jalisco, did not allow drunkeness, gambling, and prostitution among his troops, and insisted that they say a daily rosary. If wealthy hacendados refused to supply his army, he seized from them whatever he needed. He punished severely dealiers in maize and other foodstuffs who tried to make money over and above a just return for their product and services. Those who are making money, said one Cristero leader, are our enemies, the maize dealers, and that is not what we want, it is not the time to be making money and sucking the blood of the people who are sacrificing themselves for the Cause of God.

Sacrificing themselves for the Cause of God --- this phrase aptly sums up how the Cristeros saw themselves. Still, it would be mistaken to think of all Cristeros as holy or as strict followers of Catholic moral precepts. The fact that General Michel had to forbid gambling, drinking, and prostutution among his men demonstrates that they were not strangers to these vices. And though in many regions, such as Jalisco, the peasants had benefited from sound catechesis and a vibrant sacramental life, in others (where priests had been few or even nonexistent) the Catholic Faith was confused with Indian pagan beliefs and practices. Still, the Cristeros were men committed to their Catholic religion, which they encapsulated in the phrase, Kingship of Christ. They did not rise up against the government because of any natural proclivity for revolution, for these peasants had a deep regard for constituted authority and were deeply patriotic (they continued to carry the Mexican tricolor flag in battle, emblazoned with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupet). They rose because the Cristero officer, Captain Alcanta civil authority had dared to assert itself against Cristo Rey. It had threatened to starve their souls by removing their priests, who alone could effect the sacramental bread that feeds men with God. Calles, they thought, was the servant of Freemasonry, Protestantism, and the United States --- the great northern nation that had stolen vast amounts of territory from Mexico, that (as some Cristeros themselves had experienced) mistreated Mexican workers within its borders, and was now allied with those who would kill Mexico's very soul. And though most of their bishops opposed their uprising, the Cristeros saw themselves as the defenders of the Church, joined in the epic battle that had first pitted the Archangel Michael against the enemy of mankind. ...All history is the history of this war, said the Cristero, Ezequiel Mendoza: Woe to the tyrants who persecute Christ the King! They are the beasts in human shape of whom the Apocalypse speaks! Now the Calleses are pressing us, they say it is because we are bad, because we are stubborn in wanting to defend the honor and glory of Him who died naked on the highest Cross between two thieves, because He was the worst of all humans because he did not wish to submit to the supreme lord of the earth. Like Cristo Rey, the Cristeros refused to submit to the lord of the earth or his minion, Plutarco Calles.

I Have Opened the Churches of Mexico

The year 1928 was an election year and, as every election year, it witnessed military insurrections against the government. When Calles had crushed these, he proposed that Alvaro Obregn succeed him in the presidency; their plan, it seems, was to take turns holding the office. Obregn easily won the election in the summer of 1928 but never took office. While in a restaurant on July 17, Obregn agreed to have his portrait drawn. While sketching the president-elect's portrait, the artist, Jos de Len Toral, took out a gun and shot him in the face. Toral was a Catholic, but many blamed Calles for Obregn's assassination. (Toral was unconnected to any Catholic group; he was a freelance assassin. Besides his own execution, only one other Catholic was

arrested and imprisoned for complicity in the murder: an abbess called La Madre Conchita.) Calles faced the crisis by summoning state governors and military leaders to the capital where he pledged that, from thenceforth, Mexico would not be ruled by personalities but by laws. Calles pledged to steer Mexico toward true democracy. Calles, of course, could not constitutionally succeed himself as president, so Congress appointed Emilio Portes Gil, the former governor of Tamaulipas, as provisional president of the republic. Calles, though, remained at the center of power - self-dubbed the jefe maximo (supreme leader) of the revolution. Thus, after Portes Gil took office in December, it was Calles who wielded power. Over the years, Calles had fallen more and more under the spell of U.S. ambassador Dwight Morrow. Morrow, who envisioned an American-style capitalist future for Mexico, had been urging Calles to abandon the revolutions agrarian policies and institute instead the direct sale of land for cash - a policy that would benefit the wealthy. Morrow also saw that the Cristero uprising was not good for business and urged Calles and President Portes Gil to come to an understanding with the Church. Father John J. Burke, the legal advisor to the United States bishops, supported Morrow's reconciliation effort. In 1929, Morrow and Burke arranged a secret meeting between themselves, along with the pope's delegate, exiled Bishop Leopoldo Ruiz y Flores of Michoacn, and Portes Gil. Most of the Mexican bishops had never backed the Cristero rebellion. In part this was because of a reticence to ally themselves with any political movement that they feared could compromise them. Too, it was far from clear that the Cristero uprising could succeed --- if for no other reason than that the U.S. government was backing Calles with money and arms. If the Cristeros were victorious, would the U.S. tolerate a Catholic government in Mexico, if such a regime came to be? And if they did not succeed, the prospect of a guerilla war without any foreseeable end could jeopardize the interests of the Church, not help them. Thus, with Morrow as facilitator and the warm support of Pope Pius XI, the government and the Mexican Church at last came to an agreement --- los arreglos, the arrangements. If the rebellion ended, the government said it would grant amnesty to all Cristeros who laid down arms; it pledged to restore their residences to priests and bishops, require civil registry of only some of the clergy, and allow religious instruction in churches (though not in schools). The arreglos were announced on June 27, 1929. The next day, church bells were ringing once again throughout Mexico, and Dwight Morrow crowed (to his wife): Betty, do you hear that? I have opened the churches of Mexico. The Cristeros, in the meanwhile, had suffered further setbacks. El Catorce, accused of writing treasonable letters to a federal commander (his accuser, some think, was a federal spy), was courtmartialed and executed. In March 1929, Cristero forces failed to take Guadalajara; and though on April 19 they beat the federals at Tepatitln in Los Altos, Padre Vega took a bullet in the head, and died. On June 2, Gorostieta, who had been vying for complete control of the rebellion, was shot down in an ambush. Still, the Cristeros were far from beaten and only in obedience to their bishops and the pope did they lay down their arms in the summer of 1929.

Martyrs for Christ the King

Miguel Pro had learned to love the poor from the example of his mother, who had always put herself at their service. Because his father was a mining engineer, Miguel felt a sense of solidarity with the working class. So it was that when he entered the Jesuit novitiate at the age of twenty, he was destined to disprove the old Liberal canard --- that priests are moneygrubbers who ally themselves with the rich. Because he belonged to the Jesuit order, Miguel Pro was forced to leave Mexico. He studied in the United States, Spain, Nicaragua, and Belgium; but, because of stomach disorders, he returned to Mexico in 1925 -- a year after his priestly ordination. Living with his family, he carried on an underground ministry in Mexico City during the interdict, saying Mass, hearing confessions, and administering the other sacraments. Padre Pros brothers were active members of the Liga

Defensora. On November 13, 1926, a car belonging to

them was used in an assassination attempt on Calles; and though the Pro brothers had not been involved, they, along with Miguel Pro, were arrested and imprisoned. Though no evidence convicted them of complicity in the assassination attempt, all were sentenced to death. Standing before the firing squad, Padre Pro prayed that God might forgive his executioners; then, with his arms outstretched in token of the cross, he cried, Viva Cristo

Rey!
Miguel Pro was not the first, or the last, priest to die under the revolution. Falsely accused of promoting the

Blessed Miguel Pro shortly before his execution

Cristero

revolt,

Padre

Cristbal

Magallanes

Jara

was

condemned to Miguel Pros fate. Before he was shot, Magallanes distributed his scanty possessions among his executioners. After giving them absolution, he said, I am innocent and I die innocent. I forgive with all my heart those responsible for my death, and I ask God that the shedding of my blood serves toward the peace of our divided Mexico. In April 1927, a parish priest of Totolan in Jalisco, Padre Sabas Reyes, suffered patiently while his hands and feet were burned, his bones were broken, and his skull fractured. Finally, he was taken to the town cemetery to be shot. Four times the rifles fired, and at each report Reyes cried out, Viva Cristo Rey! Not only priests but laymen suffered for their religion. David Roldan, Salvador Lara, and Manuel Morales, all laymen, were arrested with Padre Luis Batiz on August 15, 1926 at a town in Zacatecas. Even when offered their freedom, all refused to recognize the legitimacy of Calles anti-clerical laws. Because Morales had children, Padre Batiz asked the soldiers to free him. Morales, however, preferred death. I am dying for God, he said, and God will care for my children. These are but a few examples of the many who in Mexico died for their faith in the late 20s and early '30s. Some were soldiers who at the last minute refused to carry out the executions of Catholics and were themselves executed. All displayed the spirit of the priest of Union de Tula in Jalisco who, when asked Who lives? answered not with the words that would save his life, Long live the supreme government, but with the cry, Christ the King and Our Lady of Guadalupe! Three times he was asked the same question, and thrice he gave the same reply. For his courage, the priest died by hanging.

Thus ended Mexicos last major peasant rebellion. The cause of religion had been vindicated, or so it seemed. Events proved, however, that the Churchs woes in Mexico were far from over. No sooner had the arreglos been issued than the government broke them by ordering the execution, on July 3, 1929, of the Cristero leader, Padre Aristeo Pedroza. And the betrayal continued. By the end of 1929, the government had executed all but two of the Cristero leaders in Guanajuato and Zacatecas. Between 1929 and 1935, 5,000 Cristeros, officers and men, suffered execution. Many of those who survived fled into the desert, tried to lose themselves in large cities, found refuge in states with governors sympathetic to their plight, or crossed the border into the United States.

The Revolution Becomes Institutional

Interim president Portes Gil at least appeared more revolutionary than his boss, Plutarco Elas Calles. During his short term in office, Gil accelerated the pace of agrarian reform and cut off government funding from the corrupt, but powerful, CROM. But if Gil lent his support to independent unions -- even those with a Communist bent -- this was merely a political maneuver to crush CROM and Luis Morones. After rendering CROM toothless, the government (that is, Calles) proceeded to smash the independent unions. Communist unions suffered the most in this assault. In the election of 1929, obregonistas and President Portes Gil (center) after casting his ballot in the election callistas joined forces in a new party, the between rtiz Rubio and Jos Vasconcelos Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR). The PNR was not to be a political party in the usual sense --- it was not to be one party among many; it was to be the sole party of Mexico. Government employees had to pay a fixed proportion of their salaries to support the party. It would run presidential candidates who would be mere fronts for the real ruling power of the republic --- Plutarco Calles. Given the corruption in Mexican politics, a National Revolutinary Party would be certain to win every election. This was the case in 1929. An anti-reelectionist candidate, the education reformer Jos Vasconcelos, opposed the PNR candidate, a non-entity named Pascual rtiz Rubio. Like Madero, Vasconcelos toured the country, giving public addresses to thousands. He seemed a relatively popular candidate. But election results, announced in November, gave Vasconcelos a mere 20,000 votes as opposed to over a million for rtiz Rubio. Like Madero, Vasconcelos fled into the United States and called for revolution. No one answered his call, however, and he remained an exiled writer living north of the border. The jefe maximo, Plutarco Calles remained the sole power in Mexico. In Cuernevaca, surrounded by wealthy obregonistas and callistas, in league with foreign capitalists, Calles dictated government policy by daily telephone calls to the presidential palace in Mexico City. Calles had now fully succumbed to Ambassador Morrows influence. After returning from a trip to Paris in June 1930, the jefe maximo declared that the revolutions agrarian policy had been a failure --- giving land to peasants, he said, was bad economics. This meant, of course, that President rtiz Rubio halted all further land distribution to Indian villages and peasant

proprietors. The president, however, soon overstepped his bounds by attempting to remove officials who were Calles friends. In September 1932, after receiving word from Cuernevaca, rtiz Rubio resigned from the presidency to be succeeded by a man more agreeable to the jefe maximo --- Abelardo Rodrguez, a banker and gambling house owner. While rtiz Rubio was still president, the government (that is, Calles) again enacted a new wave of anticlerical legislation. States had already been violating the arreglos with the Church, but in 1931, the federal government undertook to limit the number of priests in Mexico. The Holy See opposed the archbishop of Mexico City's intended response, to suspend public worship; but Pope Pius XI did issue the encyclical, Acerba animi, condeming the violation of the arreglos while calling on the faithful to submit to the government. But the government's anti-clerical campaign had dire effects. Riots and priest shootings increased. State governors closed churches. By 1935, only 305 authorized priests remained to minister to the millions of Catholics throughout the entire Republic of Mexico. The assault on the priesthood was not Calles' last strike against the Church. In 1934, he issued his Pope Pius XI Grito de Guadalajara, in which he declared, we must now proceed to the psychological revolution; we must penetrate into, and take possession of, the consciences of children and the young people, because they belong and should belong to the revolution... The government must enforce, said Calles, socialist education. This latest assault on the traditions of Catholic Mexico inspired a new revolt among about 7,500 former Cristeros in six regions of Mexico. This revolt --- the Second they called it (but not the Second Cristiada) --they waged not just against the state, but the Church, for many Cristeros felt their bishops had betrayed them in 1929 by signing on to the arreglos. Fought in the savage sierras of Nayarit, Oaxaca, the Sierra Gorda, and the Sierra de Puebla, the Second, unlike the Cristiada of 1926-29, was both a terrorist and guerilla struggle. Among its victims were school teachers, the agents of Calles' socialist education policy. By 1937, insurgents had killed 100 teachers and wounded and mutilated 200 others. Forces, though, were at work which would shake and finally topple Calles power. Younger men who had grown up during the revolution were not content to see the struggle end in a triumph for capitalism, native or foreign. Beginning in 1933, these men, who were heavily influenced by Communist theories, grew more influential in the PNR. This new power structure in the party saw to it that agrarian reform was reactivated and transferred from the the states to the authority of the federal government. Calles saw he had to appease the young leftists in the PNR, so he lent his support to the candidacy of Lzaro Crdenas in the election of 1934. Calles, perhaps, did not realize what the election of Crdenas presaged for his power as the unofficial dictator of Mexico.

The Crdenas Years

Lzaro Crdenas presidency began as an all-out war against the callistas. The new president pushed agrarian reform, sympathized with strikes, and closed illegal gambling houses owned by Calles' friends. Crdenas

dismissed Calles hand-picked cabinet members, and by forming coalitions with various anti-Calles groups, gradually isolated the jefe maximo in the PNR. Crdenas final victory came in April 1936 when he deported Calles and Luis Morones to Texas. Once firmly established as head of the PNR, President Crdenas sought to consolidate his power. He organized peasant militias. He admitted into the PNR delegates of unions and the peasants and then reorganized the party entirely, changing its name to Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) the Institutional Revolutionary Party. The new party was to represent peasants, the workers, and the army. No other Mexican president advanced agrarian reform like Crdenas. By 1933, only 19 million acres had been distributed to peasants; between 1935 and 1940, Crdenas government distributed 45 million acres of land to 750,000 peasant families and to 12,000 villages. Mexican agriculture was still dominated by haciendas but, because of Crdenas policies, 17.5 million acres went to ejidos and 19.5 million to private owners. In 1910, 95 percent of the land had been held by hacendados; by 1940, that percentage had shrunk to 60 percent. The increase of peasant and ejido ownership of the land created its own problems. Since the agricultural methods applied by many ejideros were inefficient and only a small proportion of Mexico is arable (and of that much had been lost to erosion), food production could not keep up with the dramatic increase in population five million in twenty years. Thus, Mexico had to import food. Lzaro Crdenas Crdenas countered this problem by encouraging better agricultural methods and by the establishment of cooperatives to boost efficiency; but progress was slow. In 1936, representatives of Mexico, the United States, and other Latin American countries met at a conference in Buenos Aires, Argentina. At this conference, the United States agreed that no American state should intervene in the internal affairs of another American state. This, albeit temporary, agreement served Crdenas purposes, for foreign capitalists with property in Mexico opposed his economic policies. To these men, the president was nothing but a Communist. Crdenas, indeed, allowed the Russian Communist revolutionary Leon Trotsky refuge in Mexico after he had fallen out with Josif Stalin, and the Mexican government openly supported the Communist-dominated Republican side in the Spanish Civil War. Still, Crdenas did not call for state ownership of all industries; he seemed to favor employee ownership of businesses - not a Communist notion but nevertheless one all too radical for capitalist sensibilities. Crdenas found occasion to test the Buenos Aires non-intervention agreement in 1937. Workers in foreign-owned petroleum companies had gone on strike, and Crdenas supported their demands. The government ordered the companies both to raise the workers wages and begin appointing Mexicans to managerial positions in their companies. This seemed fair enough, for these companies had profited off Mexican oil for many years, with little benefit to the ordinary Mexican. Still, the companies agreed to the wage increase but to no other demands. Crdenas answered their defiance in May 1938 by confiscating all foreign-owned oil properties in Mexico. The companies called on the United States to intervene, but President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, true to the Buenos Aires agreement, refused. Crdenas nationalized the oil properties into Mexican Petroleum. The state-owned oil-company suffered at first from inefficiency but also from a boycott when tankers refused to ship

Mexican oil overseas. Crdenas, though, found Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and imperialist Japan ready customers for his oil, and the powers set up a bartering arrangement in which oil was traded for the machinery Mexico needed to modernize her industries. Though himself a virulent anti-Catholic, Crdenas understood the utter failure of Calles' anti-clerical policies. In February 1936, he denounced those who placed the religious problem above all the problems of the national program [A]nti-religious campaigns, he said, will only provoke a prolonged resistance and will definitely retard economic growth. Several days after Crdenas gave this speech, seven governors commanded the reopening of churches in their states. Over the next several months, churches reopened in Mexico City, Veracruz, Nayarit, and Jalisco. Though anti-clerical laws remained on the books under Crdenas, most were not enforced. Indeed, relations between the government and the Church improved in the late 30s, with the Church coming out in favor of many government policies. Luis Maria Martinez, who became archbishop of Mexico City in 1937, publicly urged support for the government in its fight with the oil companies. The government of Mexico, however, remained officially anti-Catholic, and it remained a crime for priests and religious to appear in public in clerical attire. Government anti-clericalism inspired a new movement among former Cristeros and other Catholics --Sinarquismo. The Sinarquistas insisted that Mexico should acknowledge the Catholic religion and the countrys vila Camacho (seated right) with U.S. President Roosevelt Spanish heritage. They favored hierarchical government rather than democracy (which admittedly did not exist in Mexico) and called for the establishment of industrial organizations that included both workers and owners. In the matter if industrial organization, they followed Pope Pius XI, who, in his encyclical Quadragesimo Anno, proposed that in such organizations workers and employers could peacefully arbitrate their differences without the rancor that leads to and results from strikes. (Such organizations will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 25.) The Sinarquistas and other groups formed a political party, the Partido Accin Nacional (National Action Party; pan in Spanish means bread). But since the PRI controlled national and state elections, the PAN served for little more than an avenue for dissent --- dissent that was often put down by violence.

End of the Revolution

Except for riots on election day, the year 1940 saw the first peaceful transition of power in Mexico in many years. The new president, vila Camacho, had been a PRI candidate but was a centrist in comparison to Crdenas. Camacho, for one thing, favored industrial growth according to capitalist principles; and, what was

more extraordinary, the new president publicly proclaimed himself a Catholic. Still, Camachos regime did not change the essentially anti-clerical character of Mexican government. If the anti-Catholic laws were not stringently enforced under Camacho, they, nevertheless, remained on the books. With the advent of vila Camacho and his more conservative policies, the Mexican revolution effectively ended. The party of the revolution, the PRI, became revolutionary in name only. In reality, it was a despotism that imposed its candidates and policies on the Mexican people. Mexico, as the PAN declared, was a sham democracy, a one-party government whose legitimacy rested on the pretence of popular suffrage. The struggle for the poor and downtrodden masses had ended only in setting up new oppressors. Thus the political fruits of the revolution. The cultural and economic effects of the revolution however were significant. The revolution did allow more of the poor to own land. By the 1940s, over one-half of Mexicos arable land was held by ejidos and by small farmers. The revolution however did little to change the traditional condition of the Mexican people. About two-thirds of the people remained agricultural workers. Despite the governments education program, most Mexicans over the age of ten were still illiterate. Indeed, many Indian tribes still spoke their tribal tongues; some knew no Spanish and lived in the conditions that had prevailed among their peoples for centuries. Because of the revolution, though, Mexicans, most of whom were at least part Indian, began to identify themselves with their Indian heritage. Both liberals and conservatives of the nineteenth century had embraced European models as their guiding lights; the liberals looked to Anglo-Saxon liberal traditions, while the conservatives looked to Spain. The revolution made many Mexicans take pride in their Indian heritage. And, despite itself, the revolution made many Mexicans more Catholic. As in ancient Rome, so in Mexico: the blood of martyrs was the seed of the Church. It has been said that Mexicans were more Catholic in 1925 than they were in 1910. The revolution had forced many to embrace the religion in which they had been born. Still, the revolution had shackled the Church. With dramatically fewer priests, many Mexicans, though devout, remained poorly catechized. Yet, the Faith remained strong in Mexico and, in the years to come, inspired new calls for social justice against a repressive regime.

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