If a history of an animal disease campaign does not conjure images of assassinations, lynchings, torture, peasant riots, parachuting ice, cowboys drinking cattle vaccines at gunpoint, and archival incinerations, Thomas Rath's history of the Mexico–United States Commission for the Prevention of Foot and Mouth Disease (CMAEFA) is here to correct the record. Between 1947 and 1954, CMAEFA inspected more animals than any other animal disease campaign in history, boasted a budget greater than that of the early Marshall Plan, encountered hundreds of incidents of civil disobedience, and produced the most detailed maps of Mexico to date. The end result, according to Rath and the governments that led the effort, was a campaign “unequalled in the annals of animal-disease eradication,” shaping Mexican modernization efforts and the Cold War creation of international animal disease networks (3).
Stressing the impossibility of distilling a linear narrative of the campaign to address the “crisis” created...
