Lázaro Cárdenas

President of Mexico (1934-1940)

• Born: May 21, 1895
• Birthplace: Jiquilpan, Mexico
• Died: October 19, 1970
• Place of death: Mexico City, Mexico

As a controversial president of Mexico, Cárdenas carried out bold policies intended to benefit peasants and workers. In 1938, he posed a major challenge to the United States and the United Kingdom by his nationalization of their Mexican oil properties. His assertion of the authority of the Mexican government left an indelible imprint on his times and provided precedents for other developing nations after World War II.

Early Life

A humble son of provincial Mexico, Lázaro Cárdenas (LAHS-ahr-oh KAHR-day-nahs) had few of the characteristics associated with success in Mexican politics. The eldest boy among eight children, he grew up in the household of a struggling merchant in the town of Jiquilpan in the state of Michoacán. He was a solemn youth who took his six years of schooling seriously and developed strict views on moral issues, particularly gambling and the use of alcohol. After the completion of grammar school, Cárdenas worked as an assistant to the local tax collector.

As the thirty-four-year-old dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz collapsed in 1911, sixteen-year-old Cárdenas was drawn to the excitement and idealism of the revolutionary movement led by Francisco Madero. Although the overthrow of Madero’s presidency in 1913 greatly disappointed him, he joined the forces of Venustiano Carranza, who carried on in the deposed president’s name. A courageous and at times impetuous field commander, Cárdenas rose to the rank of brigadier general by 1920. During these years of combat, he developed an awareness of social and economic issues. The Indian part of his ancestry (he was a mestizo, or a person of mixed Indian and European descent) gave him a special sensitivity to the needs of the rural poor.

Although increasingly involved in politics, Cárdenas decided to remain in the army as zone commander of the units stationed in Tamaulipas from 1925 to 1927. The young general quickly learned that United States and British oil companies expected him to accept expensive gifts in exchange for special favors, a common practice among zone commanders in the oil region. Cárdenas also saw that Mexican laborers received a fraction of the pay of their foreign counterparts for doing the same work. Oil company managers and engineers lived in the comfort of segregated compounds while Mexican workers endured in makeshift housing in the hot, humid coastal environment. Cárdenas rejected the bribe offers but retained a vivid memory of the difficulties faced by his fellow Mexicans.

Life’s Work

In 1928, Cárdenas left active military service to become governor of Michoacán. After fifteen years on the battlefields of the revolution and in the command centers of the army, he ventured into the arena of politics with a combination of idealism and determination that was unusual in Mexico of the late 1920’s. He pursued a vigorous policy of distributing farmland to the peasants while improving public education throughout the state. He led in the mobilization of peasants and workers in a statewide political party with a broad platform that included prohibition and women’s rights. Although these efforts did not always bring the results he wanted, Cárdenas built an impressive image as governor and began to gain national attention.

One of the effects of the worldwide economic depression in Mexico was to make an already uncertain political situation even more unstable. Cárdenas emerged in this environment as a competent state governor who had a brief tenure as head of the recently formed Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR, or National Revolutionary Party). In 1933, Plutarco Elías Calles, Mexico’s dominant politician, approved of Cárdenas as the PNR’s presidential candidate for the election of 1934. This nomination virtually ensured victory, but Cárdenas chose to conduct a strenuous campaign anyway. In the process, many residents of isolated villages saw a presidential candidate for the first time. The man they saw was, at a glance, hardly an imposing personality. He was not a fiery public speaker, and the receding chin beneath his fleshy cheeks, along with a quiet manner, created an impression of reserve. Cárdenas, nevertheless, managed to generate excitement. He relished his personal meetings with the common people, and his simple lifestyle with his new bride, Amalia Solórzano of Michoacán, won for him the admiration of peasants and workers. After easily winning the election, Cárdenas converted his popularity with the voters and his respect among generals and politicians into a major coup the peaceful expulsion of the nation’s political boss, Calles, not only from Mexican politics but also, in 1936, from Mexico itself.

In spite of his limited formal education, Cárdenas had an awareness of the importance of ideas in shaping a presidential administration. The PNR had adopted a six-year plan as a campaign platform. A conglomeration of Western liberalism and Soviet economic planning grafted onto Mexico’s constitution of 1917, the six-year plan was both a help and a hindrance to the new president. It established a central goal of massive social and economic change, a goal that Cárdenas readily accepted. It also contained vague Marxist slogans and made socialist theory the main doctrine in education. Such radicalism caused widespread protests from irate Roman Catholics. Although he was anticlerical, Cárdenas backed away from strict enforcement of socialist education and eventually moderated the government’s commitment to Marxist ideas.

By contrast, Cárdenas ventured far to the left in land reform. The heavy concentration of land in a few large estates, or haciendas, was the product of centuries-old traditions in Mexico. Since the early years of the revolution, leaders such as Emiliano Zapata had made clear the importance of the breakup of the haciendas for the benefit of the peasants. After twenty years of rhetorical promises, however, land reform had made little progress. An impatient Cárdenas quickly implemented controversial policies: government expropriation of haciendas, which were then converted into collective farms, or ejidos, for the peasants. Yet the young president realized that this transfer of property was only the first step. If the ejidos were to be successful, they needed credit to support their large-scale operations and technical skills to cultivate and market their products. Consequently, the Cárdenas government provided loans and technical training for the ejidos. In spite of this comprehensive approach, the farmers brought more enthusiasm than expertise to their work. Widely hailed as a political success by the peasant farmers and a daring innovation by leftist observers, the ejidos did not achieve sufficient levels of productivity.

The rise of Cárdenas to the presidency coincided with the appearance of a new labor organization known as the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM, or Mexican Confederation of Workers). Numerous spontaneous and disruptive strikes testified to the dynamism of the movement, but the Cárdenas administration established more orderly procedures through its close relationship with the CTM. Under the constant urging of the president, the CTM expanded to include many small unions and eventually reached a total membership of 600,000. In return for the allegiance of the CTM, Cárdenas transformed some benefits for the working class from theory into practice, particularly in technical education and government support in strike settlements.

The greatest challenge faced by Cárdenas came when the oil workers of the CTM struck for better wages and working conditions against United States and British petroleum corporations. The dispute went to the Mexican supreme court, which ruled in favor of the union. The corporations refused to comply and thereby openly defied not only the court but the entire Cárdenas government as well. Cárdenas responded with his own defiance: the nationalization of the oil corporations’ properties on March 18, 1938. Faced by aggressive fascism in Europe, the British wanted military seizure of the oil fields, but the United States was committed to its Good Neighbor Policy. PresidentsFranklin D. Roosevelt and Cárdenas initiated negotiations that resulted in a settlement for all parties in 1942. Cárdenas confronted the two foreign powers with the largest investments in Mexico and won a signal victory.

With these accomplishments in oil nationalization, labor organization, and land reform, Cárdenas obligated his government to expensive programs that weighed heavily on Mexico’s limited financial resources. The complex process of land reform reduced agricultural production, which combined with higher wages for workers to create inflation. United States and British oil companies refused to purchase Mexican oil, which cut into the government’s tax revenues. Plagued by this economic crisis, Cárdenas took a more moderate course after 1938.

Cárdenas left the presidency in 1941, but he continued to exercise influence in Mexican affairs until his death in 1970. He was especially active in regional economic development in Michoacán and in commentary on international affairs, in which he was a consistent opponent of imperialism. He and his son Cuauhtémoc came to symbolize the independent Left in twentieth century Mexico.

Significance

Cárdenas’s legacy contains the contradictions and disappointments of a political leader who attempted to change a nation’s entrenched hierarchical economic structure by peaceful methods. To deal with this structure, Cárdenas relied on a powerful government bureaucracy that, after he left the presidency, stressed stability and security over experimentation and change. The government and political party that Cárdenas helped to build for the benefit of the masses came to dominate them and eventually came to stifle local initiative.

Yet Cárdenas did make significant contributions to Mexican history in terms of the principles he espoused. He aroused Mexican peasants and workers in the name of peaceful social and economic change and, within limits, oversaw the early stages of land reform and labor organization for their benefit. He accumulated extraordinary personal power but willingly relinquished the presidency to his successor. He chose not to meddle in politics thereafter, thereby breaking with the authoritarian tradition of the imposition of continued influence by extraconstitutional means.

Caught between the world of his roots, the isolated mountain village, and the world of power politics, the intermeshed international economic system, Cárdenas used decisive if controversial methods to meet the challenges of modernization that have confronted most developing nations in the twentieth century. He committed Mexico to the adoption of modern technology and values in agriculture, industry, and education. He sought to redistribute wealth in his country through the nationalization of the property of foreign-owned corporations, a path that other nations would follow. In the process, he maintained a course independent of both communism and liberal capitalism. Operating in the context of the 1930’s, Cárdenas underwent experiences that anticipated struggles elsewhere in Latin American, Africa, and Asia later in the century.

Bibliography

Ankerson, Dudley. Agrarian Warlord: Saturnino Cedillo and the Mexican Revolution in San Luis Potosí. De Kalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1984. This book is a valuable account of the rise and fall of one of the Cárdenas administration’s main antagonists. Provides a careful explication of Cedillo’s point of view.

Ashby, Joe C. Organized Labor and the Mexican Revolution Under Lázaro Cárdenas. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1963. The author focuses on the expansion of organized labor and its participation in politics and the oil expropriation.

Carr, Barry. “Crisis in Mexican Communism: The Extraordinary Congress of the Mexican Communist Party.” Science and Society 50 (Winter, 1986): 391-414; and 51 (Spring, 1987): 43-67. Penetrating analysis of the internal and external problems of the Mexican Communist Party during the last years of the Cárdenas presidency.

Daniels, Josephus. Shirt Sleeve Diplomat. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1947. Daniels was United States ambassador to Mexico from 1933 to 1942. His sympathies for Cárdenas were evident in the resolution of the oil expropriation controversy and also in this account of his years in the United States embassy in Mexico City.

Fallow, Ben. Cárdenas Compromised: The Failure of Reform in Postrevolutionary Yucatán. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. A political analysis of the Mexican state of Yucatán during Cárdenas’s administration.

Gonzales, Michael J. The Mexican Revolution, 1910-1940. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002. A chronicle of Mexican history and politics from the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz through the Cárdenas presidency.

Hamilton, Nora. The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-Revolutionary Mexico. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. Hamilton explains the origins and weaknesses of Cárdenas’s political alliance and the limits of its power within the context of national and international economic structures.

Michaels, Albert L. “The Crisis of Cardenismo.” Journal of Latin American Studies 2 (May, 1970): 51-79. While this article concentrates on the crisis after the oil expropriation, it also provides an evaluation of the entire six-year presidency.

Prewett, Virginia. Reportage on Mexico. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1941. Prewett, a conservative journalist, was generally skeptical and at times critical of the Cárdenas administration in contrast to Daniels’s Shirt Sleeve Diplomat.

Townsend, William Cameron. Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexican Democrat. 2d ed. Waxhaw, N.C.: International Friendship, 1979. A highly laudatory biographical study of Cárdenas. Useful because of the author’s long-term personal relationship with Cárdenas.