The political mechanism whereby former President Plutarco Elías Calles dominated Mexico is the subject of Tzvi Medin’s latest book, which explains, in a readable and usually convincing way, the intrigues within the political oligarchy, 1928-35. The author ably analyzes the reelection of Alvaro Obregón and the situation following Obregón’s assassination. As he observes, the authority of Calles reached a peak in 1929 with the defeat of the Escobar rebellion of unhappy Obregonistas.
In discussing the emergence of Pascual Ortiz Rubio’s presidential candidacy, Medin might have mentioned, first, the arrangement whereby all the nondiplomatic presidenciables, except for Aaron Sáenz, became ineligible, and second, the subsequent need to weaken the expected Escobar rebellion by dropping Sáenz—a need revealed in the anti-Sáenz sentiments expressed by Generals Juan Andreu Almazan and Fausto Topete. It is Medin’s contention that Calles feared Sáenz’s ability to unify the Obregonistas and even stimulated the rebellion in order to crush remaining traces of Obregonismo.
The author, whose sources include the files of Ortiz Rubio and Calles, seeks to provide new insights. Advocating a favorable view of Ortiz Rubio’s administration, he writes that Ortiz Rubio resigned not simply to avoid civil war but also because he feared that a possible victory over the Callistas would bring the presidency to Joaquim Amaro, whose mentality was too military. Equally striking is Medin’s finding that Ortiz Rubio’s peaceful resistance to Calles’s imposition smashed the maximato. This finding, technical in nature, is based on what Medin maintains was the breakdown of the mechanism, essential to the maximato, that had allowed the jefe to manipulate the president through the official party, Congress, and the cabinet. By defining the maximato as he does, Medin is able to write about the Jefe Máximo carrying on triumphantly following the maximato’s collapse in 1932.
These concepts will seem irrelevant to readers who feel that the important thing for the maximato was not a particular type of mechanism, but was the Jefe Máximo’s retention, despite Ortiz Rubio, of the instruments necessary for political domination. Readers who feel this way will have difficulty visualizing a Jefe Máximo without such instruments and therefore they may take less seriously than Medin the suggestions that a Jefe Máximo could have coexisted with a president who ran Mexico’s affairs and whose authority included the indispensable ingredient of tapadismo, the prerogative of indicating his successor.
In describing how Lázaro Cárdenas became such a president, Medin demonstrates that his successful struggle was as much against a conservative social ideology as against a resurrection of the mechanism of the maximato. And he adds that Cárdenas, late in his term, rejected a maximato Cardenista, bequeathing, instead, caudillismo without a caudillo: a political hegemony whose power comes from the presidency.
