Historian Frank Tannenbaum described the process by which dedicated revolutionaries became opponents of social change:
Their difficulty lay in the fact that they had come to power suddenly and without preparation, either morally, psychologically, politically, or even administratively. They were taken from their villages as barefooted youngsters who had slept on the floor and could barely read, and after a few years spent on the battlefields found themselves tossed into high office and great responsibility. This new world was filled with a thousand temptations they had not dreamed of: gold, women, houses, carpets, diamonds, champagne. . . Here, at no price at all, just for a nod, all their hearts desired was offered them in return for a favor, a signature, a gesture, a word.166
Historian Ernest Gruening noted that Nuevo Leon had
[the] distinction of having had probably the most dishonest governor in all the twenty-eight states, General Porfirio Gonzalez, who, not content to confine his thieving to state taxes collected in advance, defrauded the federal treasury by organizing wholesale smuggling from the United States.
The flagrant enrichment of officials did not escape popular notice. The street in Cuernavaca where Calles and his cronies built their lavish mansions was known as the street of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.”167
Those holding political power manipulated state policy to facilitate their own enrichment. Revolutionary officers so thoroughly converted the Agricultural Credit Bank into their private treasury that its founder (and later PAN leader) Manuel Gomez Morin resigned in disgust, declaring that it “had become a whorehouse.” The unchecked enrichment of revolutionaries created such a problem that Obregon lamented that it was becoming difficult for Mexico to “liberate itself from its liberators.”168
Even though the economic elite was never incorporated into the official political party, it was always active, well organized, and influential. The government sought the cooperation of businessmen to rebuild the economy, the radical tone of the constitution notwithstanding. In 1917, to encourage this cooperation, the Carranza administration invited businessmen to create the National Federation of Chambers of Commerce (CONCANACO) and the National Federation of Industrial Chambers (CONCAMIN). These groups were followed by the Businessmen’s Federation of the Mexican Republic (COPARMEX), organized in 1929 to oppose the proposed federal labor law. Representatives of these groups became the spokesmen for business. During the Cardenas administration, COPARMEX representatives lobbied against diverting capital away from investment to promote social justice, claiming that such a diversion would deplete capital and lower production.169
Profirian office holders and cientificos vanished from power early on. The hacendado class was much more tenacious. Except in Morelos and Chihuahua, most hacendados survived into the 1930s with their economic positions relatively intact. Even in Chihuahua, families such as the Terrazas maintained enormous wealth and power through kinship ties and diversified holdings. In 1922, when Obregon finally expropriated all their holdings not under cultivation, the Terrazas received
13.5 millions pesos compensation for their land.170
The old hacendado class was anything but fatalistic in accepting its displacement. Some sold their land to Mexicans in small parcels before the agents of land reform arrived and moved their capital into industry and urban commerce. Others sold land to foreigners whose nationality made authorities reluctant to question the sale. In other instances, they bribed local land reform officials to exempt their properties. In some cases, landowners would rent land to military officers to deter agrarian takeover. Hacendados repeatedly resorted to the courts, using shrewd lawyers and their financial resources to outlast the financially strapped peasants. By forming alliances with local military leaders, the elite could use troops to block land reform. They also engaged in subterfuge, dividing their estates into many small units among family and friends. If government forces were unavailable or unwilling to do their dirty work, landowners hired private armies variously called militias, rurales, guardias blancas, and guardias municipales, which murdered agrarian leaders and terrorized rural populations.171
Though vastly diminished in power, even after Cardenas’s massive land reform many members of the agrarian elite remained wealthy. Those who had been unable to convert their land to cash and invest elsewhere were allowed to retain 370 acres of irrigated land or its equivalent in dry land. Often they controlled milling, credit, agricultural inputs, and marketing outlets and, through these channels, profited from dealings with the direct beneficiaries of land reform.172
At the end of Cardenas’s presidency, the industrial elite was in an advantageous position. Cardenas’s support for labor had its greatest impact on foreign capitalists, not Mexican ones. The state had financed infrastructure with internal and external debt, not higher taxes. The oil nationalization held the promise of an inexpensive fuel supply. With the government having vastly enlarged the domestic market with land reform, rosy days lay ahead for businessmen, especially during the Second World War-induced boom.173
World History
