Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax-Priísta, 1940–1962

289 Pages·2008·3.541 MB·English

by  Tanalís Padilla

acknowledgments
i would not have been able to complete this book without the help, sup-
port, and encouragement of numerous people. as such, it represents a col-
lective effort. i am especially grateful to Michael Monteón, my adviser at
the University of California, san diego, for guiding the dissertation upon
which this book is based and for the time he has continued to devote to me
after i finished at ucsd. i am deeply indebted to my other graduate school
professors, david Gutiérrez, Ramón Gutiérrez, Christine Hünefeldt, Ramón
E. Ruiz, Rosaura sánchez, and Eric Van Young, for their time and the intel-
lectual rigor they demanded.
Throughout the years that i have worked on this project, several insti-
tutions have provided generous funding. uc mexus and the Center for
U.s.-Mexican studies supported much of the research and writing for my
dissertation. a postdoctoral fellowship from the Ford Foundation enabled
me to spend a year at Yale University undertaking the first revisions to trans-
form my dissertation into a book manuscript. likewise, the dickey Center at
dartmouth College funded and organized a seminar that brought together
several of my dartmouth colleagues, as well as Jeffrey Gould and adrian
Bantjes. The seminar was exceptionally helpful, and i am grateful to lisa Bal-
dez, Judi Byfield, doug Haynes, annelise Orleck, Marysa navarro, Misagh
Parsa, John Watanabe, and Christianne Wohlforth for taking the time to
read my work and for the sparks of insight generated by their discussion.
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To Jeff and adrian i extend my heartfelt gratitude for making the trip the
Hanover and for their invaluable feedback. i thank dartmouth College for
consistently supporting my research.
Throughout my research and writing i have relied on numerous people
whose comments, guidance, and insight fueled my passion for this work.
Cindy Forster read and commented on numerous incarnations of this man-
uscript, offering meticulous feedback that has enriched its texture. Through
work, travel, and activism Cindy has been an inspiring historian, a wonder-
ful friend, and the clearest example of what it means to be a committed
scholar. To my other undergraduate professors, colleagues, and friends sid
lemelle, Victor silverman, and Miguel Tinker salas, i owe the desire to be
a historian, the good humor with which to confront difficult times, and the
comfort of knowing i can always turn to them. across the years i have been
blessed with other wonderful colleagues and mentors. From the beginning
Barry Carr enthusiastically encouraged me to pursue this topic at a time
when few ventured beyond the 1940s. My conversations with him and his
comments on portions of this manuscript have greatly enriched this work.
Gil Joseph, with his characteristic generosity, read and commented on the
entire manuscript. For this and his gracious mentoring while i was at Yale,
i am indebted. i thank Enrique Florescano whose lively discussions and en-
couragement will stay with me. avi Chomsky, John Hart, Christina Jiménez,
John lear, and louise Walker have also read and contributed invaluably
to this study. i am grateful to the staff at duke University Press, especially
Valerie Millholland, for taking an interest in this project and for her insight
and guidance through the publication process. i would also like to thank
duke’s anonymous readers for their extensive and constructive feedback,
and Kathryn litherland for her keen editing work.
My colleagues at dartmouth College have been a wonderful blessing. i
have been continuously amazed at how my fellow members of the History
department go out of their way to support my research and teaching. i
am especially grateful to Judi Byfield, Joseph Cullon, annelise Orleck, Celia
naylor, and Craig Wilder for their encouragement, affection, and extreme
generosity of spirit. Their smiles and good humor brought me much-needed
warmth during those long new Hampshire winters. i also thank Miguel
Valladares for seemingly performing miracles by locating and bringing key
sources for me to use in Hanover. Over my years of teaching i have had
viii acknowledgments
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several memorable students, but Claudia Rueda brought special joy to life
inside and outside the classroom. Her sensitivity and enthusiasm give me
hope.
Returning to Mexico has been one of the most wonderful aspects about
researching and writing this book. There i have found myself surrounded
by incredible scholars, amazing friends, and inspiring activists who show
an unwavering commitment to social justice. since the beginning of this
project my conversations with Javier Villanueva have nourished me in so
many ways. His comments on my work and his gentle, poetic voice always
filled me with a sense of possibility. luis Hernández navarro read and com-
mented on several portions of this work, bringing to it important insight.
several chapters bear the imprint of our discussions, in which he framed so
many issues with a passion that is contagious. i am grateful to Carlos Mon-
temayor, who years ago took an interest in my work and commented on sev-
eral chapters. His own work on guerrillas highlights their significance to the
current situation in Mexico. i thank armando Bartra, who gave me access to
valuable newspaper articles housed in the instituto Maya. i would also like
to extend my gratitude to the staff at the archivo General de la nación, who
were always so kind and helpful in locating the documentation i needed.
several people in Morelos played a crucial role in making this manuscript
a reality. i am especially indebted to Plutarco Emilio García for granting me
access to his personal collection of Jaramillista documents and interviews.
i am deeply grateful to him and hope that this work honors the trust he has
shown in me. Over the years Guillermo Peimbert has been a true friend,
always providing a place to stay, wonderful conversation, and much-needed
comic relief. aura Hernández shared key sources with me. i am ever grateful
for her generosity. i also thank Guadalupe García for providing important
documents on women Jaramillistas, and Florencia ibarra, who opened her
home to me in Cuernavaca and was always so warm and wonderfully sup-
portive. Victor Hugo sánchez Reséndiz shared with me his insight on Mo-
relos, taking me to some of its most beautiful towns. a state known for its
tourism, language schools, and water parks, the trails i explored with Victor
Hugo gave me a different view of the state, one far more wonderful. From
the villages that diligently celebrate their religious festivals, to bustling mar-
kets alive with vibrant smells and colors, to communities organized against
ever-encroaching neoliberal projects, Morelos continues to be a site of resis-
tance. it is in these places where Jaramillismo most came alive.
acknowledgments ix
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i am grateful to my family, especially my mother Eva, who has always
encouraged me to pursue my passions. during my numerous stays in Mex-
ico City, my aunt and uncle Hilda Moreno and arturo Padilla have opened
their home to me and provided support, company, and wonderful home-
cooked meals. Enrique dávalos has been an inspiring and compelling friend
whose good nature and work inside and outside the classroom is a source
of inspiration. it is difficult to do justice to the role Bobby has played in
this work. From the very first stages he has accompanied me in all aspects,
enduring my roughest of drafts and worst of moods. With his characteristic
sweetness, patience, and humor he helped me push through difficult times
and in the most crucial moments provided the much-needed voice outside
myself. His love and tenderness are a consistent source of strength.
Most of all, i am indebted to the Jaramillistas, the men and women and
their families who took me into their homes and shared their life stories with
me. it is difficult in these times to remain hopeful, but in those moments
when i feel pessimism’s cold edge i remember the words of campesino and
campesina Jaramillistas as they related the reasons for their struggle. This
work is dedicated to them with the hope that, in some way, it does justice
to their history.
x acknowledgments
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IntroductIon
In the early afternoon of May 23, 1962, two military trucks, two jeeps, and
a civilian car, together carrying about sixty soldiers and several armed civil-
ians, surrounded the home of Rubén Jaramillo, a prominent agrarian leader
in the south-central state of Morelos. Captain José Martínez, who led the
operation, shouted for Jaramillo to step out and accompany them, or else
they would machine-gun his home. Jaramillo emerged from his small adobe
home but refused to comply with the men’s orders to get in the car. When
Filemón, one of Jaramillo’s stepsons, displayed the official pardons given to
Jaramillo and his wife, Epifania Zúñiga, by President Adolfo López Mateos
(1958–64), Captain Martínez put them in his pocket and told Filemón not
to complicate matters. In the commotion, Raquel, Zúñiga’s oldest daughter,
slipped out of the house and went to seek the help of Tlaquiltenango’s mu-
nicipal president Inocente Torres. He told her everything was in order; the
soldiers and civilians had an arrest warrant issued by the attorney general’s
office. When Raquel returned, Rubén, her mother, and her three brothers,
Enrique, Filemón, and Ricardo, were all gone. A few hours later, the bullet-
riddled bodies of the five family members were found on the outskirts of the
Xochicalco ruins, an archeological site near Cuernavaca.1
As word of the quintuple murder spread, so too did the shock about this
crime committed by government officials. While government repression was
hardly new in rural Mexico, its manifestations were typically more subtle.
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The state had targeted agrarian leaders in the past but usually did not mur-
der entire families like this. What’s more, the military tended to reserve its
show of force for popular mobilizations, not for executing specific leaders.
Government officials delegated such jobs to hired gunmen or ordered them
carried out under the cover of darkness. The audacity of this act left the
“Xochicalco massacre” etched in public memory for decades to come, often
overshadowing the 24-year-long trajectory of the Jaramillista movement
itself.
The Jaramillista struggle began two and a half decades earlier in the south-
ern region of the state of Morelos, the homeland of Emiliano Zapata. During
the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), peasants from this small state fought
for land and community autonomy with such determination that even
though their political project was defeated, their right to land became en-
shrined in the constitution. When President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40)
carried out a massive agrarian reform in the 1930s, he was, in part, fulfilling
the land aspirations of the rural poor who had fought in the decade-long civil
war. Cárdenas’s successors, however, would come to honor agrarian reform
more in the breach and land hunger continued throughout the twentieth
century. The legacy of the Zapatista struggle, in turn, remained alive through
memory, legend, and myth and permeated rural consciousness throughout
Mexico. Zapata became both a symbol of campesino struggle and the moral
barometer by which to judge popular leadership. It is no surprise that when
Jaramillo began to speak out in the name of the poor, campesinos in Zapata’s
homeland simply referred to him as another Zapata.
Although Jaramillo and many of those close to him had fought under Za-
pata, he represented another generation of agrarian struggle. Rather than
fight for land and community autonomy, this generation sought the state
support necessary to make the campesino economy viable in a rapidly mod-
ernizing nation. The Jaramillistas demanded credit, technical assistance,
better prices on their products, and basic state services such as schools and
hospitals. Unlike the Zapatistas, whose locus of organization had primar-
ily been the peasant community, the Jaramillistas incorporated a broader
cross-section of the Morelos population. Drawing their strongest support
from the sugar- and rice-producing zones along the southern contours of
the state, their ranks included subsistence farmers, seasonal laborers, mi-
grants, sugar-mill workers, and even a few rural schoolteachers. Despite this
diversity, they identified themselves as campesinos, “a distinct social group
2 introduction
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united by a shared set of political and economic interests as well as by a col-
lective history of oppression.”2
As with most poor people’s movements, the Jaramillistas came to depend
heavily on their leader, who articulated, and in some respects embodied, the
complex dynamic of the Morelos countryside. Born in 1900, Jaramillo joined
the Zapatista forces at the age of 15. Himself a farmer, in the 1930s he be-
came an outspoken defender of rice and sugar cultivators. When attention
to the countryside began to dwindle after 1940, he mobilized campesinos
in southern Morelos to preserve the revolutionary gains. For this he earned
the wrath of caciques (local strongmen), politicians, and in time, the fed-
eral government, who sent the army in his pursuit. Undeterred, Jaramillo
relied on the Zapatista legacy of armed struggle and, together with other
revolutionary veterans, fled to the mountains in self-defense. From there
he continued mobilizing the local population, launching proclamations that
denounced the government’s betrayal of the constitution.
In many respects, Jaramillo represents a classic example of the Gramscian
organic intellectual. Having received no formal education (it is said that his
first wife, Epifania Ramírez, taught him how to read and write), he spent
hours studying the Mexican Constitution and especially agrarian law. Like
leaders who headed struggles in other countries under dramatically differ-
ent contexts, Jaramillo fashioned an eclectic ideological mix that ranged
from reformism, to communalism, to class struggle, to anti-imperialism. In
this respect, his unclassifiable political philosophy is reminiscent of Augusto
Sandino, who not long before had led a small band of rebels against the
United States’s occupation of Nicaragua.3 As did other less famous Cen-
tral American leaders who committed their lives to speaking out in defense
of the poor, Jaramillo both drew elements from the dominant ideology (in
Mexico’s case, revolutionary nationalism) and translated complex theoreti-
cal paradigms, including Marxist ones, into simple categories.4
Jaramillo led mobilizations in the late 1930s, but the group known as the
Jaramillistas emerged in 1942 at the Zacatepec sugar cooperative, where
workers and campesinos mounted a joint strike to assert their rights against
management’s abusive power. When the manager hired gunmen to target
strike leaders, a group of campesinos, led by Jaramillo, unearthed the rifles
they had preserved from the revolution and fled to the mountains. But they
remained underground for only a year, and in 1943 the federal government
issued them an official pardon. In 1946 the Jaramillistas mounted an electoral
introduction 3
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campaign backing Jaramillo for state governor. Despite the agrarian leader’s
popularity, he lost the elections to the official party candidate. In what would
become standard practice throughout the twentieth century, the Mexican
Revolutionary Party, later the pri (Institutional Revolutionary Party), han-
dled the Jaramillista electoral challenge through a combination of fraud and
repression, forcing Jaramillo into clandestine action and initiating the sec-
ond armed uprising of his group.5 In 1951, however, the Jaramillistas again
put down their weapons and—in alliance with a national party formed by
disenchanted members of the pri—participated in the following year’s elec-
tions. This campaign was much larger than the one six years earlier and
involved the far more visible participation of women. The government’s
fraudulent and repressive tactics grew accordingly, forcing the Jaramillistas
to once again turn to armed struggle. During the six years in which this third
uprising unfolded, the Jaramillistas became more radical, attempting to take
over some municipalities and issuing proclamations whose tone revealed
an increasing lack of faith in legal channels. But their militancy notwith-
standing, a small, localized rebel group was in no condition to take power
from a solidly entrenched ruling class. So in 1959, when the state once again
pardoned Jaramillo, campesinos under his leadership initiated a campaign
to settle some vacant land on the Michapa and Guarín plains in western Mo-
relos. Although the government initially decided to concede this land to the
Jaramillistas, the army soon came to remove the settlers. Shortly thereafter,
another army unit kidnapped and killed Jaramillo, his wife, and their three
sons, most likely under orders from the national government.
The Jaramillista movement—with its varying tactics and seeming contra-
diction between militancy and reformism—presents us with an intriguing set
of questions. What, for example, was the relationship between campesinos
who came together under Jaramillo’s leadership and the Zapatistas who a
few decades earlier fought in the revolution? How were these movements
different? To what extent can we attribute such differences to rural dwellers’
experience under Cárdenas? Why did the Jaramillistas go back and forth
between armed tactics and reformist strategies such as electoral politics?
Why did the government continue to pardon Jaramillo? Why did Jaramillo
continue to accept these pardons? What is the legacy of the Jaramillista
struggle? And what does it tell us about the current situation in Mexico?
The answers reveal important aspects about the Jaramillista movement in
particular, and about twentieth-century Mexico more generally. When the
4 introduction
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revolutionary war ended in 1920, the triumphant Constitutionalists, led by
northern bourgeois reformers, set about to consolidate their hold on power.
They could do this only by heeding the demands of those who during the
revolution had stubbornly fought for broader social reforms such as land
and labor rights. Indeed, these provisions had already been incorporated
into the constitution drafted in 1917 when various revolutionary factions
attempted to reach an agreement that might put an end to the fighting. But
the fighting continued for at least three more years and would ultimately
entail the murder of Zapata in 1919. Perpetrated by the Constitutionalists
at a meeting in which he was invited to parley, this betrayal has not been
forgotten by Morelos’s campesinos.
The agrarian leader’s assassination was a devastating blow to the Zap-
atistas, but the new government knew that the Morelenses could not be
pacified through force alone, and in the 1920s President Plutarco Elías Calles
(1924–28) implemented an extensive land reform in the state. Even so,
Zapata would not die easily, and his struggle began to acquire mythic pro-
portions, serving as a reminder that the new ruling group had not come to
power with the interests of the poor in mind. The state thus attempted to ap-
propriate Zapata’s image and, duly cleansed of his rebellious spirit, place him
in the pantheon of Mexico’s founding fathers. Once celebrated and spread
by the government, however, Zapata’s image was a double-edged sword.
“Far from enabling it to manipulate opinion, the state’s somewhat sudden
and clumsy embrace of Zapata merely helped it open lines of negotiation,”
notes Samuel Brunk.6 “After a decade of warfare in which most of Mexico’s
administrations had labeled the Zapatistas bandits, their leader was now
being acknowledged, in public ritual as well as national policy. . . . The state
was admitting that the Zapatistas had been right in their struggle all along.”7
This, in part, helps explain the official pardons issued to Jaramillo. Given the
government’s claim over Zapata, an armed campesino group operating in
his homeland and invoking the legacy of Zapata did not sit well with a state
party claiming itself to be revolutionary. The government may have had the
physical force, but the Jaramillistas possessed the moral legitimacy.
The legitimacy of campesino demands was further reinforced in the 1930s,
when President Cárdenas finally implemented the land, labor, and educational
reforms mandated by the 1917 constitution. Land redistribution consti-
tuted a centerpiece of his policies, and, throughout Mexico, campesinos
received ejidos (collective landholdings), credit, and technical support. In
introduction 5
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