Insurgent Guerrero: Genaro Vázquez, Lucio Cabañas and the guerrilla challenge to the postrevolutionary Mexican State, 1960-1996

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INSURGENT GUERRERO: GENARO VÁZQUEZ,
LUCIO CABAÑAS, AND THE GUERRILLA CHALLENGE
TO THE POSTREVOLUTIONARY MEXICAN STATE,
1960-1996
by
Alexander Aviña

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(HISTORY)

August 2009

Copyright 2009 Alexander Aviña

ii

Acknowlegements
I never expected the University of Southern California to become a home.
Over the course of seven years a number of amazing people helped transform the
university into an intellectual, emotional, political, and academic home. From the
first day I entered the History Department office La Verne Hughes, Lori Rogers, and
Brenda Johnson provided essential assistance with the details of graduate student life
and, more importantly, friendship. I could always expect friendly smiles, hilarious
conversations, and generous support from the three women that ensure the smooth
operation of the USC History Deparment. I will never forget La Verne’s efforts to
provide me with cookies (re: energy) during my written Ph.D. Qualifying exams nor
Brenda’s sublime dancing skills. Though Brenda left us to return home to
Mississippi, Sandra Hopwood entered the scene as we collectively supported one
another during the recent historic presidential campaign. Joseph Styles provided
guidance and always responded to the countless email queries I sent during my
graduate career at USC.
Beyond departmental office walls to hallways lined by professors’ offices, a
number of historians at USC taught me how to become a historian. The committee
that patiently and generously guided this dissertation collectively encouraged me, to
paraphrase Samuel Beckett, fail better and continously strive for a better project that
matched its driving passion. They always treated me as colleague and friend—a big
deal for graduate students usually plagued by moments of self-doubt and intellectual
insecurity. George Sánchez always provided a precise intellectual brilliance that
disrupted disciplinary barriers and stimulated new ideas and interpretations. Perhaps

iii

more importantly, George helped me navigate the labyrinthine processes inherent to
graduate studies and avoid potential pitfalls faced by historians and academics of
color. María Elena Martínez served as an inspirational academic role model for an
aspiring historian: an intellectual that produces brilliant (and prolific) work while
politically engaged with domestic and international issues. María Elena was also an
incisive and supportive mentor that always managed to infuse humor into any work-
related meetting. Priya Jaikumar passionately encouraged an incessant questioning
of my discipline’s methodological and epistemological presuppositions. In other
words, Priya encouraged me how to think un-historian-like in order to create an
original and innovative history dissertation. Marjorie Becker munificently spent
hundreds of hours reading chapter drafts, book reviews, and literature reviews (not to
mention countless meetings with me) patiently attempting to teach me the historian’s
craft. Despite my initial dogmatic and Manichean ways of thinking, Marjorie
labored to teach me a vision of history generally dismissed and denigrated by
traditional historiography: a vision that blurred the lines between historiography and
poetry, time and space, memory and history. I faced that vision of history hesitantly
until I reached Guerrero and encountered campesinos that possessed similar
historical visions. As a patient and demanding mentor, that vision was Marjorie’s
greatest gift to me, in addition to her friendship.
Graduate student camaraderie forged in classrooms, TA offices, intramural
soccer fields, basketball courts, and Memorial Coliseum also transformed USC into a
welcoming home. Phuong Nguyen, Jerry Gonzalez, and Gustavo Licon provided not
only friendship and academic support but, perhaps more importantly, laughter as

iv

well. Within a career susceptible to individualizing competition and rivalry, my
three friends personified community and selfless support. Indeed, we all entered
USC at the same time and left together with doctoral degrees in hand. Rebecca
Sheehan and Joop van de Wege, my comrades in countless discussions on
revolution, popular movements, and theory, provided stimulating intellectual
debates. Professors Lon Kurishage and Ricardo Ramírez displayed respectable
basketball skills and, in the midst of intense games, provided advice and guidance.
Gerardo Licon, Ana Rosas, Anabel Mota, and Claudia Martínez helped create and
sustain a supportive community at USC.
I would also like to thank InterLibrary Loan at Doheny Library for always
graciously fulfilling my requests for rare manuscripts and books—as did Barbara
Robinson as librarian of the Boeckmann Center for Iberian and Latin American
Studies. I would also like to acknowledge USC, the Haynes Foundation, and the
COMEXUS Fulbright Commission—particularly Tim Wright—for providing the
essential funding that enabled the completion of this dissertation.
I would also like to thank the Miño Magni family. They opened the doors of
their home when I first moved to Los Angeles and continued to provide extremely
affordable housing. Their dinner invitations allowed me to discover the delicious
nuances of Argentine cuisine. Above all, they lovingly treated me as a member of
their wonderful family.
While researching in Mexico, I encountered a group of academics, social
activists, and ex-guerrillas that enriched and, indeed made possible, this dissertation.
Gladys McCormick, Tanalís Padilla, Louise Walker, Thom Rath, María Olin Muñoz,

v

John Kinglemann and Brian Palmer-Rubin all contributed in determinant fashion to
the dissertation. Dra. Romana Falcón helped me get to Mexico with a Fulbright
García-Robles Grant while Dra. Veronica Oikión provided entrance into a
community of ex-guerrillas, Dirty War survivors, and academic colleagues. Aside
from her immense knowledge of Mexican guerrilla organizations and popular
movements, Adela Cedillo exemplifies a politically-engaged intellectual that
combines human rights activism with innovative scholarship. José Luis Moreno
Borbolla, José Luis Alonzo Vargas, Benjamin Pérez Aragón, Alejandra Avila Sosa,
Miguel Topete, Celia Sánchez, Maricela Balderas Silva, and Bertha Lilia Gutiérrez,
Consuelo Solís, Concepción Solís, and Macrina Cárdenas Montaño all shared their
valuable time, knowledge, and friendship. In Guerrero, Fernando Pineda, Tita
Radilla, Andrea Radilla, José Bracho, Santos Méndez, Ascención Rosas Mesino,
Alejandra Cárdenas, and Hilario Mesino graciously hosted me and allowed
interviews. Their stories drive this dissertation. In Mexico City, the Amaral family
essentially adopted me, facilitating my adjustment to life in the Mexican capital and
provided housing, friendship, and support.
During my undergraduate days at St. Mary’s College of California, Myrna
Santiago identified my love for history early on and gradually convinced me to
consider graduate studies. As a patient and dedicated mentor, Myrna effectively
prepared me for the rigor of graduate school while providing a model as a selfless
and passionate political activist, indefatigable researcher, and devoted teacher. She
also made possible my participation at the Institute for the Recruitment of Teachers
(IRT) in Andover, Massachusettes. The IRT, then led by Kelly Wise, provided

vi

valuable opportunities and opened the doors to graduate programs throughout the
United States. Alvaro Ramírez became a dedicated friend and mentor during my last
year at St. Mary’s and continued to provide advice and guidance during my graduate
years. Susan Weissman ensured that I left St. Mary’s well-versed in revolutionary
theory, Soviet history, and Latin American popular movements.
In great part, Ryanne Banks ensured the timely completion of this
dissertation. With her loving support, patience, and incisive commentary, Ryanne
helped defuse moments of anxiety and tension provoked by deadlines and self-doubt.
She selflessly read chapter drafts after long work days and provided perceptive
suggestions. During the last months of dissertation writing, her ironic humor
guaranteed that our home remain a place of levity. I could not have finished without
her love or support.
This dissertation is dedicated to my family. My extended family in the
Tierra Caliente region of Michoacán, particularly the Torres-Godinez family, offered
a familial sanctuary of respite during my research stays in Mexico City and
Guerrero. My brother Gilbert Aviña and sisters Laura Ciscomani Aviña and Itzari
Godinez kept me grounded throughout the writing of the dissertation with their
humor, irreverence, and neverending support. Above all, my parents Ana Godinez
and Gilberto Aviña made this project possible. In 1978 they risked everything as
young newlyweds and immigrated to the United States. For fifteen years they lived a
semi-clandestine life avoiding the attention of immigration officials, working
multiple jobs with ten-twelve hour days, and sending their children to the best public
schools. For they knew that education was key for the social mobility of their

vii

children. As they constantly reminded us, schooling would ensure that my brother,
sister, and I avoid backbreaking manual work devoid of healthcare benefits and labor
rights. They succeeded in their mission as today their children are all first-
generation university graduates. The love, sacrifice, and courage of Ana Godinez
and Gilberto Aviña enabled the fruition and completion of this dissertation. This is
for them.

viii

Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ii
Abbreviations ix
Abstract xi
Introduction: A Tradition of Rebellion 1
Chapter 1: Rural Politics, Durable Utopias, and Two 46
Centuries of Peasant Rebellions in Guerrero

Chapter 2: A Lesson in Civic Insurgency 126
Chapter 3: Re-treading Old Paths, Forging New Routes: 206
The Radicalization of Popular Movements, 1961-1968

Chapter 4: “There was no other way:” The National 275
Revolutionary Civic Association and the Struggle for
National Liberation

Chapter 5: A Poor People’s Utopia 346
Chapter 6: “We have returned to Porfirian times:” 401
Counterinsurgency and Dirty Wars in Rural Guerrero

Conclusion: “The bones will tell us what happened” 436
References by Source 449
Bibliography 485

ix

Abbreviations

ACG Asociación Cívica Guerrerense
ACNR Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria
AGN Archivo General de la Nación (México)
ALC Asociación Local de Cafeticultores de Atoyac
BCA Brigada Campesina de Ajusticiamiento
BOLA Brigada Obrera de Lucha Armada
CAP Consejo de Autodefensa del Pueblo
CCI Central Campesina Independiente
CNC Confederación Nacional Campesina
DFS Dirección Federal de Seguridad
DGIPS Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales
EPR Ejército Popular Guerrillero
EPRI Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo Insurgente
EZLN Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional
FAR Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias
FEP Frente Electoral del Pueblo
FLN Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional
GPG Grupo Popular Guerrillero
Liga Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre
INMECAFE Instituto Mexicano de Café
MAR Movimiento de Acción Revolucionaria
MLN Movimiento de Liberación Nacional

x

MRP Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo
OCSS Organización Campesina de la Sierra Sur
PAOM Partido Agrario Obrero Morelense
PARM Partido Auténtico de la Revolución Mexicana
PCM Partido Comunista Mexicano
PDLP Partido de los Pobres
POA Partido Obrero de Acapulco
POCM Partido Obrero-Campesino Mexicano
POT Partido Obrero de Tecpan
PPS Partido Popular Socialista
PRD Partido Revolucionario Democrático
PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional
PROCUP Partido Revolucionario Obrero Campesino Unión del Pueblo
PSG Partido Socialista de Guerrero
SDN Secretaría de Defensa Nacional
UGOCM Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos de México
UP Unión del Pueblo
URPC Unión Regional de Productores de Copra

xi

Abstract

This dissertation chronicles the intertwined histories of two significant
guerrilla movements that developed in the Mexican state of Guerrero during the late
1960s: Genaro Vázquez’s Asociación Cívica Nacional Revolucionaria (ACNR) and
Lucio Cabañas’ Partido de los Pobres (PDLP). Both leaders, as rural schoolteachers
with campesino backgrounds, led separate armed rural movements that sought to
overthrow the one-party state of the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) and
install a revolutionary democratic state ruled by the popular masses. In contrast to
social science literature that represents these postrevolutionary decades as a stable
“pax priísta,” underwritten by unprecedented economic growth known as the
“Mexican Miracle,” this dissertation proposes to explore an incongruent episode in
the traditional narration of post-1940 Mexican history; that is, the presence of
widespread popular protests and mobilizations in the state of Guerrero against the
PRI’s model of capitalist modernization and authoritarian rule.
Prior to taking up arms and setting up guerrilla camps in the sierras of
Guerrero, the majority of ACNR and PDLP members began their activism in the
political mobilizations of the Asociación Cívica Guerrerense (ACG) during the early
1960s. A heterogeneous, multi-class state-wide movement, the ACG sought to
democratize state politics, internally reform the PRI and rid Guerrero of local-
regional “cacique” strongmen that formed a nexus of political and socio-economic
power. Peaceful demonstrations intent on realizing the political rights guaranteed by
the Constitution of 1917 encountered a series of massacres perpetrated by an
increasingly rigid and inflexible one-party state. These massacres—Chilpancingo

xii

1960, Iguala 1962, Acapulco 1967, Atoyac de Alvarez 1967—delegitimized the
“revolution-turned-government” and convinced a number of campesinos, workers,
Catholic laypersons, rural schoolteachers, and university students of the necessity of
revolutionary change on a national scale. Drawing upon a diverse, historical array of
radical legacies and tactics—Zapatista armed agrarianism and Che Guevara-inspired
“foco” strategies to name two—the ACNR and the PDLP fought the Mexican
government throughout the late 1960s and early 70s. In the context of Latin
America’s post-1959 armed left, both the ACNR and the PDLP represent an
alternative political option when legal and constitutional routes appeared closed
down by the authoritarianism of a one-party state.
To reconstruct the history of the ACNR and the PDLP, I draw extensively
upon recently declassified and untapped Dirección Federal de Seguridad intelligence
and counter-insurgency documents; military records; manifestos, speeches, letters,
and communiqués produced by the guerrillas; newspaper articles; testimonial
literature; and oral histories. My study analyzes the creative amalgam of radical
traditions that constituted the revolutionary imaginaries of both groups and that
continue to shape the “hidden transcripts” of popular organizations and guerrillas in
present-day Guerrero.

1

Introduction:
Guerrero, Traditions and Legacies of Rebellion

“…history negotiates its terms and collects its dues from those who break its laws.
They heard its sickening thud. They smelled its smell and never forgot it."—
Arundathi Roy, The God of Small Things
1

They came to commemorate yet another massacre of campesinos
2
in the
southwestern Mexican state of Guerrero. Hundreds, including ex-presidential
candidate Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas and other opposition politicians, gathered in the
small town of Aguas Blancas on 28 June 1996 to remember the seventeen
campesinos ambushed and killed one year earlier by state police forces acting on the
orders of the state governor. Suddenly, one hundred men and women dressed in
military fatigues and wielding high-powered assault rifles descended upon the town
from the surrounding mountains. Wearing ski masks and sporting the initials EPR in
bright red on their uniformed shoulders, a detachment from the armed group
approached a makeshift podium.
3
Frightened witnesses calmed and listened to the
following words: “…the situation has not changed. Repression, persecution, jailing,

1
Arundathi Roy, The God of Small Things (New York: Random House, 1997), 54.

2
Following historian Christopher Boyer, I define campesinos as “distinct social group united by a
shared set of political and economic interests as well as by a collective history of oppression.” See
Christopher Boyer, Becoming Campesinos: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in
Postrevolutionary Michoacán, 1920-1935 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 3. I thank
Tanalís Padilla for bringing this definition to my attention.

3
Maribel Gutiérrez, “Irrumpe grupo armado en Aguas Blancas,” La Jornada, 29 June 1996; and,
Hilario Mesino, interview with the author, Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, 17 May 2008.

2

assassinations, massacres, tortures, and disappearances continue as tactics of
governance of the [Mexican] state, a situation similar to 1967 and 1968…we refuse
to remain passive and contemplative in the face of injustice.”
4
After presenting a
summary of the manifesto in Náhuatl, the armed group disappeared into the
mountains to plot guerrilla warfare leaving behind their name: the Popular
Revolutionary Army (EPR).
In Guerrero, history, or the sense of historical time, seems hostile to the linear
and positivist version of time described by Walter Benjamin as “homogenous and
empty.”
5
While the sudden emergence of the EPR astonished many of the
commemoration participants, the development of another guerrilla group sparked by
another campesino massacre surprised few observers of a Mexican region where
popular insurgencies tend to “reoccur.”
6
In referencing the years 1967 and 1968 in
their Aguas Blancas Manifesto, the EPR signaled a previous cycle of campesino
guerrilla insurgencies propelled by state terror and posited their contemporary
struggle as the legitimate continuation of those past (and failed) movements. They
intimately linked their revolutionary attempt to the historical legacies of Genaro
Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas: two activist schoolteachers who organized guerrilla
movements in 1967 and 1968, respectively, after various violently-suppressed

4
“El Manifesto de Aguas Blancas,” cedema.org/ver.php?id=1117.

5
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, eds.
Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2003), 395.

3

attempts to obtain political and socio-economic reforms through constitutional
means. In tracing the clandestine histories of these two men and the guerrilla
insurgencies they led, this dissertation demonstrates the importance of continuity in
the post-Independence history of guerrerense
7
and Mexican popular movements.
Within Mexico, Guerrero stands out as a historically insubordinate place.
The post-Independence history of the region—established as a state in 1849—can
read like a Rulfo-esque series of dramatic orgies of violence randomly scattered
throughout a generally mundane, banal movement of rural time. While such a
description could apply to most of rural Mexico, “Guerrero Bronco”
8
occupies a
unique place within Mexican popular and academic consciousness—an unruly place
with unruly people marked by extreme violence and death, massacres and
suffocating poverty. As Mexican scholar Armando Bartra once wrote, “If it’s true
that those who are killed do not rest then Guerrero is an immense congregation of
insomniac dead.”
9
Of course, this type of reading dangerously obscures the
historicity of such violence and its various, oft-different quotidian manifestations.
10

6
See Carlos Montemayor, La guerrilla recurrente (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad
Juárez, 1999.

7
Guerrerense is an adjective of or relating to Guerrero: its people, culture, etc.

8
Bronco roughly translates into unbreakable, untamed, and/or “wild.”

9
Armando Bartra, “Sur profundo,” in Crónicas del sur: utopias campesinas en Guerrero, ed.
Armando Bartra (Mexico D.F.: Editorial Era, 2000), 18.

10
Ranajit Guha, James C. Scott, and Gilbert Joseph collectively (and forcefully) reminded us that
rural violence—in its almost infinite forms—occurs within popular or subaltern political registers, fed
by popular politics and/or “hidden transcripts,” most often misunderstood by academics and
politicians alike. In contrast to scholars like Eric Hobsbawm (or current “high” political leaders
across the globe), these scholars did not view rural violence as symptomatic of rural folks’ “pre-

4

Moreover, the cultural formulation of Guerrero as “bronco” has historically led to the
implementation and justification of undemocratic forms of ruling by a variety of
Mexican governments. In other words, rebellious guerrerenses need not democracy
(indeed they are incapable of adopting democracy according to the official
narrative), but a firm fist.
11

Read in another manner, the so-called innate rebelliousness of these people
testifies to their historic resistance against authoritarian forms of rule, extreme
poverty, and their creative political attempts to assert some degree of control over
their everyday lives: over the products of their labor, over those that govern them,
over their homes, families, and communities, over their nation. Insurgent Guerrero
prominently participated in every struggle since Independence that sought to define
and determine the contours of the Mexican nation. This dissertation seeks to
chronicle one such episode. Starting in 1960, a series of popular multi-class civic
movements, independent unions, and peasant guerrilla movements revolted against

political” state, struggling to find and utilize modern discourses through which to express aspirations
and political beliefs. Thus, a Rulfo-esque reading of Guerrero’s history can feed the stereotype of an
innately violent rural people, always sporadically (and dramatically) reacting, in knee-jerk, Pavlovian
fashion. See Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants
and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 4;
Ranajit Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian
History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); James Scott,
Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1990); and, Gilbert Joseph, “On the Trail of Latin American Bandits: A Reexamination of Peasant
Resistance,” Latin American Research Review 25, no. 3 (1990), 7-53.
11
For instance, government agents reporting (in recently declassified reports) in 1960 on the recent
removal of the state governor by a widespread social movement diagnosed guerrerenses as possessing
a “peculiar psychological nature” that allowed only three governors in the state’s one-hundred year
history to finish out their terms. Archivo General de la Nación (AGN hereafter), Dirección Federal de
Seguridad (DFS hereafter) 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 120.

5

the increasingly institutionalized authoritarianism of the “institutionalized
revolution” and its accompanying program of capitalist modernization. At stake: the
direction and composition of a postrevolutionary state that abandoned the very
peasants and workers it had negotiated with to establish hegemonic rule some three
decades earlier.
12

Experimentation, creativity, and the exhaustion of legal channels
characterized guerrerense attempts to democratize their region in the aftermath of
World War II. An endless petitioning of the federal government for rural
infrastructural support was lost within bureaucracies that would have made Kafka
smile. Attempts to organize independent rural unions and oppositional political
parties faced targeted state co-optation and military repression. The emergence of
the guerrilla groups National Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR) and the Party
of the Poor (PDLP) in the late 1960s—the focus of this dissertation—occurred only
after laboriously working within the political parameters established by the 1917

12
The ensuing struggles—at times bloody and violent—often revolved around competing
interpretations of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. The civic protest that began in 1959-1960 in
Guerrero—not to mention the 1958 railway worker and teacher strikes on a national scale—revealed a
series of alternative and popular definitions concerning the 1910 Revolution, the postrevolutionary
state, and its future that fueled such movements. While post-1940 presidential administrations rolled
back hard-gained populist reforms of the Lázaro Cárdenas years and embarked upon a course of
capitalist modernization, popular protests grounded their arguments on their interpretation of the 1917
Constitution. As railway workers in 1958 called for a limit on the subsidies granted to foreign
corporations, guerrerenses petitioned the federal Senate (as stipulated by the Mexican Constitution)
for the removal of a violent and despotic state governor. Guerrerenses explicitly demanded the
removal of Governor Raúl Caballero Aburto as Mexican citizens with certain social and political
constitutional rights. See Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 211; and, Salvador Román Román, Revuelta cívica en
Guerrero, 1957-1960: la democracia imposible (Mexico, D.F.: Instituto Nacional de Estudios
Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 2003), 12-14; and, Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the
Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962 (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008), 6-8.

6

Constitution as citizens, and struggling for what they understood as the unredeemed
promises of the Mexican Revolution. Led by rural schoolteachers Genaro Vázquez
Rojas and Lucio Cabañas Barrientos respectively, the ACNR and the PDLP
represented the popular adoption of an alternative political path in the aftermath of
state-directed massacres and terror campaigns characterized by torture,
disappearances, and extra-judicial executions. Prior to the infamous Tlatelolco
student massacre of 1968, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its terrorist
tactics convinced vast segments of rural Guerrero that armed insurgency constituted
the only viable path to fundamental change.
Who were these so-called “innately” rebellious guerrerenses that participated
in guerrilla insurgencies in a variety of different ways? A heterogeneous group, they
included Afro-Mestizos from the Costa Chica region; women who maintained rural
societies afloat with their unpaid labor; peasant laborers, middling ejidatarios
13
, and
in-debt smallholders; young, revenge-minded campesinos; local political officials
and rural defense forces; Acapulco taxi-drivers and mothers of the disappeared;
“red” students from the Teacher Training school in Ayotzinapa and rural teachers
intimately aware of their students’ poverty; women who laboriously prepared
tortillas everyday in the coffee sierras or opened market stalls in Chilpancingo at
dawn to feed striking university students; veterans of the Mexican Revolution; the
Vázquez, Solís, Cabañas, Barrientos, and other families; young women escaping

13
Ejidatario refers to Mexican peasants who worked plots of land technically owned by the Mexican
government. Ejidatarios did not own the land (and thus could not sell it) but could pass it on to
usually to first-born male heirs.

7

patriarchal households; guerrillas dumped into the Pacific Ocean from military
airplanes off the coast of Acapulco; citizens who faced bayonets and bullets when
demanding their constitutional rights; dreamers with unfulfilled, dangerous counter-
longings.
14
They made the histories that this dissertation seeks to trace.
***
“If human feces had value, the poor would be born without asses.”—Brazilian Saying
15

“Woe for the poor if they do not make it into heaven: they are screwed here and they
are screwed in the afterlife.”—Doña Inés Godínez Sandoval
16

The political unrest in Guerrero during the 1960s and 70s formed part of a
larger history of popular protest and mobilization in Mexico after 1940; a history,
essentially, of competing utopias. If Mexico’s middle-class revolutionaries of the
1920s and 30s had finally learned to negotiate their longings for a behaviorally
transformed and “modern/secular” citizenry with local subaltern “understandings of
everyday life,” their successors after 1940 increasingly discarded the lessons of
pragmatic negotiation as they steered the revolution toward a new course. Inspired

14
I borrow the term “counter-longing” from Marjorie Becker, “’When I was a child, I danced as a
child, but now that I am old, I think about salvation: Concepción González and a past that would not
stay put,” in Experiments in Rethinking History, eds. Alan Muslow and Robert A. Rosenstone
(London: Routledge, 2004), 29. Longing and counter-longing refer to intense subaltern yearnings for
alternative existences; that is, yearning for the possibility of a different world or for something
different on a lesser scale but just as significant. Becker used these terms to highlight the subversive
longings of Mexican campesina women that went against their cultural training in “modesty, humility,
and silence by the [Catholic] Church itself;” and, the potential counter-longings these women
experienced simultaneously as they danced with their revolutionary boyfriends in a Church stripped of
its religious icons knowing the consequences of their brave act.

15
Cited in Eduardo Galeano, El fútbol a sol y sombra (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2004), 119.

16
This quote is an oft-repeated piece of knowledge from my maternal grandmother.

8

by regional and local agrarian radicalisms forged in revolutionary warfare and the
populist legacy of President Lázaro Cárdenas, campesinos came to expect much
from the “revolution turned government:” redistribution of land, infrastructural
support for and local control of their land, credit, municipal autonomy (i.e. local
democracy), and honest returns for their labor. Yet, for the vast majority of rural
people, this Revolution turned into Samuel Beckett’s patiently waiting Godot.
Workers, too, increasingly faced a regime less aligned with them—though soon in
firm control of their unions—and more intimately involved with national and
international capital.
17

Yet, the nation’s laboring classes would not quietly and compliantly retreat
offstage into the background. For the Revolution and Cardenismo had taught them
something about state formation, hegemony, and power: namely, that they possessed
the opportunity to confront and/or negotiate from positions of limited power with an
incomplete, uneven, and at times fissured presence of a postrevolutionary state.
State formation occurred and depended upon local and regional sites of negotiation
and alliance building during the presidential rule of Cárdenas. He learned that poor
people could as easily mobilize to protect their understandings of Catholicism or

17
Marjorie Becker, “Lázaro Cárdenas and the Mexican Counter-Revolution: The Struggle over
Culture in Michoacán, 1934-1940,” Ph.D. Dissertation (Yale University 1988), 3; Becker, Setting the
Virgin on Fire: Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants and the Redemption of the Mexican
Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 5-8; Bartra, “Sur profundo,” in Crónicas
del sur, 14-22; Mary Kay Vaughn and Stephen E. Lewis, “Introduction,” in The Eagle and the Virgin:
Nation and Cultural Revolution in Mexico, 1920-1940, eds. Mary Kay Vaughn and Stephen E. Lewis
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 9-12; and, Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the
Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910-1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74:3 (August
1994), 394-395.

9

municipal autonomy as they would to demand redistribution of land.
18
The
michoacano President, in sum, learned the importance of “political pragmatism” and
“ideological inconsistency” in the quest to capture allegiance from variegated, at
times rival or dissident, popular groups and movements.
19
These attempts
constituted a hegemonic project—as a fragile process characterized by struggle and
as a fragile, contingent endpoint reached by competing groups.
20

18
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 162; and, Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent, “Popular Culture
and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution
and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, eds. Gilberto Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1994), 3-23. Presenting a perspective that simultaneously exalts the political
creativity and heroism of campesinos michoacanos and the poignant limits—both internal and
external—they faced, Becker highlighted the “bittersweet” nature of the dealings between campesinos
and Cárdenas. By 1940, campesinos proved unable to dislodge the one-party system cemented by
Cárdenas or domestic and international capitalist domination of the Mexican economy.
19
Claudio Lomnitz, “Final Reflections: What was Mexico’s Cultural Revolution?” in The Eagle and
the Virgin, ed. Vaughn and Lewis, 336-337; Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 5; and Jeffrey Rubin,
Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán, Mexico (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1997), 12-15.

20
While hegemony was originally conceived by Antonio Gramsci to denote rule and domination as a
combination of coercion and consent, subsequent scholars have further elaborated on the concept,
conceptualizing hegemony as more than just the ingestion of dominant ideologies by subaltern
classes. My definition borrows heavily from Florencia Mallon and her insistence on differentiating
hegemony as both an end point reached by competing parties and as processes of struggle that
characterize political relations at all levels: from the local community to the nation-state. A close
reading of Gramsci himself, as William Roseberry reminded scholars, also reveals a similar dynamic
interpretation of hegemony. Roseberry argued that the Italian revolutionary understood consent and
coercion—as the pillars of hegemony—within a complex and dynamic unity characterized by struggle
and movement. Moreover, in his writings on the failure of the Piedmont bourgeoisie to forge an
Italian nation-state, Gramsci demonstrated an understanding of the fragility of hegemony, as it was
contingent on continual struggle. Roseberry concluded by suggesting that we utilize hegemony, as an
analytical concept, to understand struggle, not consent. See Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation:
The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 6-8;
and, William Roseberry, “Hegemonía y lenguaje contencioso,” in Aspectos cotidianos de la
formación del estado, eds. Gilbert Joseph and Daniel Nugent (Mexico: Era, 2002), 216-220.
My work is also heavily influenced by Marjorie Becker and her insistence on the fragility
(and often unrealized popular expectations) of hegemonic pacts and the existence of subaltern
political alternatives. See Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 162. Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto
Laclau valorized the political creativity of subaltern classes and their abilities to form cross-class
alliances. See Mouffe and Laclau, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic
Politics (London: Verso, 2001), esp. chapter 4. See also Antonio Gramsci, Selections From the
Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1999 [1971]), 238-277; Raymond Williams,

10

Far from forging an ideological consensus, Cardenista hegemony created “a
common material and meaningful framework for living through, talking about, and
acting upon social orders characterized by domination.”
21
Yet, the framework
became increasingly meaningless as Cárdenas’ presidential successors implemented
a capitalist modernization program based upon the unfettered exploitation of the
countryside. Urban workers received frozen wages and increased costs of living
while national and transnational corporations obtained state-funded infrastructural
projects and tax shelters. Challenges to the economic model or to the one-party rule
of the PRI after 1940 faced a tripartite state response, applied unevenly and often
incompletely: small concessions, the allure of co-optation, and repression. The
presidential use of the last option, in the form of military rifles and bayonets,
increased as the intensity of popular resistance and protest to the PRI program
amplified. Prior to the student massacre of 1968, a series of regional massacres and
state-directed repressive actions drained the regime of the political legitimacy and
popular allegiance gained during the 1930s. The Cardenista framework broke down
as the PRI political elite continually chose repression over renegotiation. Postwar

Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 108-135; and, William Roseberry,
“Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation, 355-366. For
a personally influential yet dissenting perspective on governance, states, and hegemony, see Philip
Corrigan, Harvie Ramsay, and Derek Sayer, “The State as a Relation of Production,” in Capitalism,
State Formation, and Marxist Theory, ed. Philip Corrigan (London: Quartet Books, 1980), 1-26.

21
Roseberry, “Hegemony and the Language of Contention,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation,
36.

11

PRI hegemony thus began unraveling at the edges, in the countryside and provincial
cities, as the regime reneged on its side of the hegemonic bargain.
22

Efforts to obtain the promised yet unfulfilled fruits of the Revolution from
within legal channels characterized the political imaginary of popular movements
that emerged during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Campesino
movements demanding land redistribution and just returns for their products, for
example, presented their demands as justified by, and stated in, the 1917
Constitution. By instituting more effective ways of providing machinery, credit, and
irrigation, Cárdenas had earlier strengthened rural demands by endowing them with
institutional legitimacy; and, seemingly evidencing that the postrevolutionary state
could fulfill revolutionary promises. Industrial workers, too, based their arguments
for better wages, union autonomy, and even the limiting of subsidies to foreign
corporations on the Constitution.
23
Yet the PRI regime largely neglected such
reformist demands. Worse yet, it responded to peaceful campesino and worker
mobilizations—who voiced their demands as rights-bearing citizens—with violence.
This cycle of popular legalistic protest and state violence tended to produce
radicalizing effects as entire regions of Mexico learned that the 1917 Constitution
was not worth the paper it was printed on. Civic leader-turned guerrilla fighter

22
“Introducción: El Milagro Mexicano,” in Cien años de lucha de clases en México (1876-1976),
Tomo II, eds. Ismael Colmenares, Miguel Angel Gallo, Franscisco González, and Luis Hernández
(Mexico: Quinto Sol, 1993), 189-191; and, Rubin, Decentering the Regime, ch. 1.

23
Tanalís Padilla, “’Por las buenas no se puede:’ La experiencia electoral de los jaramillistas,” in
Movimientos armados en México, siglo XX, eds. Verónica Oikión Solano and Martá Eugenia García

12

Vázquez succinctly described the cycle in a 1971 interview: “we exhausted all
possible and legal forms of protest…thousands of documents with grievances passed
through my hands without any of them being resolved in a favorable, just manner for
campesinos…and we got tired.”
24

Fatigue translated into civic insurgency in the state of Guerrero. From 1959-
1980, the state experienced a variety of insurgencies—civic, guerrilla, counter,
“neopopulist”—that turned the state into what Vázquez described as a “school of
progressive struggle,” and, alternately, into a theater of counterinsurgent terror.
What initially began in 1959 as an effort to oust a despotic governor, framed within a
nationalist discourse and backed by the Constitution, transformed into a challenge to
the legitimacy of PRI rule. For guerrerenses intimately learned that neglect and
massacres constituted primary PRI responses and that elections were decided before
they began. The broad, multi-class movement that organized to depose General Raúl
Caballero Aburto in 1959-1960 constituted an expression of civic discontent with
political authoritarianism and foreshadowed PRI responses to civic demands for
democratic governance.
25

Ugarte (Zamora, Mich.: Colegio de Michoacán/CIESAS, 2006), 278; and, Carr, Marxism and
Communism, 210-211.

24
Newspaper interview cited in Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 114.

25
Alba Teresa Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista: Crónica de un conflicto
(Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 2001), 107-108. Sergio Aguayo argued that in
planning the 1968 student massacre in Tlatelolco, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and his advisors
gleaned lessons from the state-directed massacres of protesting citizens in Chilpancingo, Guerrero
(1960) and San Luis Potosi (1961); in particular, the use of snipers to fire upon soldiers who in turn
respond by firing at the protesting masses. At the time of these massacres in Guerrero and San Luis
Potosi, Díaz Ordaz worked as the Minister of the Interior in the presidential administration of Adolfo

13

In effect, Guerrero comprised a prophetic microcosm of future crises of
governance on a national level as the regime proved incapable of responding to
popular, democratic challenges without violent repression. That incapacity produced
and provided the space for the emergence of guerrilla movements—some inspired by
the Cuban Revolution and other Third World movements—throughout Mexico.
Massacres and repression convinced schoolteachers Vázquez and Cabañas that
armed insurgency represented the only viable political path when confronting a
regime that massacred citizens that played (protested) by its rules. Both men arrived
at such a conclusion only after exhausting legal channels during their long careers as
schoolteachers, social activists, and defenders of the rural poor. State repression
radicalized not only political tactics but also their demands (and the scope of those
demands), as both guerrilla leaders concluded that the entire nation needed a
revolutionary socialist transformation. They learned, as Cabañas explained during a
rural assembly in 1973, that “the problem was not one restricted to Atoyac or even
Acapulco, but it’s a national problem, of a Mexico dominated by a rich, millionaire
class.”
26

Vázquez and Cabañas knew that dominated and impoverished Mexico well.
Years of immersion in social struggles within and outside of Guerrero, their
experiences working as schoolteachers, and brief stints of exile in poor areas of

López Mateos (1958-1964). See Sergio Aguayo, La charola: Una historia de los servicios de
inteligencia en México (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2001), 135-136.

26
Luis Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, el guerrillero sin esperanza (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1985), 114.

14

northern Mexico provided them with a profound cultural knowledge of the people
for whom they took up arms. This intimate knowledge of subaltern political cultures
in Guerrero, I argue, allowed both guerrillas to ground their revolutionary socialist
and Marxist ideologies in the everyday experiences of poor and middling rural
guerrerenses. Rather than speaking in Marxist tongues to campesinos about a future
proletarian utopia of egalitarianism (in evangelical style), both Vázquez and Cabañas
learned that unredeemed longings, aspirations, and vengeance potentially could—
and did—mobilize a widespread base of support for rebellion.
27
The accumulation
of past injustices (e.g. state-sponsored massacres) along with the unfulfilled promises
of the Mexican Revolution had contoured a “spirit of sacrifice” within a rural
population that did not take rebellion lightly and possessed a long memory.
28

27
This is not to say that differences did not exist between the guerrilla leaders and their respective
guerrilla supporters. My work will highlight the visible tensions that existed between leaders and
bases of popular support in order to elucidate the processes of negotiation and contestation at work
between the former and the latter; in other words, the ACNR and PDLP actively worked to gain
popular support, involving a pedagogical exercise for both sides. Popular support for the guerrilla
movements was not a given. Positing the tension at the forefront of my analysis also attempts to
avoid the tendency that runs through earlier studies on peasant insurgencies: that of transposing the
leaders’ political ideologies onto his or her base of support. Please see chapter 6.

28
Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History,” particularly Thesis 12, provides an interesting
insight on this type of tension between Marxist revolutionaries focused on an unrealized, future utopia
and subaltern rebels moved by the accumulation of past injustices. Criticizing European social-
democratic parties for uncritically adopting the positivist, linear conception of time of bourgeois-
capitalist modernity—which robbed the working classes of their “hate” and “spirit of sacrifice”—
Benjamin suggests that subaltern classes “nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not
the ideal of emancipated heirs.” For Guerrero, the notion of a revolution betrayed and the massacres
of citizens during the 1960s worked to create a collective “picture of enslaved forebears.” Benjamin,
“On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings: Volume 4, 1938-1940, eds. Howard Eiland and
Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 394.
For an excellent reading of Benjamin’s critiques of modernity and re-reading of Marx, see Bolívar
Echeverría, “Benjamin: mesianismo y utopia,” in Valor de Uso y Utopía (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1998),
119-152. See also Michael Lowy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s ‘On the Concept of
History,’ (London: Verso, 2005).

15

Tapping into that spirit and positing revolutionary demands intimately connected to
the historical longings of their rural base of support constituted an original aspect of
the PDLP and Cabañas, in particular. While Vázquez’s suspicious death in 1972
prematurely aborted the ACNR movement, the PDLP managed to forge a robust
support network of rural communities in the Costa Grande region of Guerrero and
launched the most dangerous guerrilla challenge to the Mexican state since the
Cristero Rebellion. It took a vast military counterinsurgency program similar to
those practiced in Chile or Argentina —marked by extrajudicial executions,
kidnappings, torture, strategic hamlets, and rape—to undermine popular support for
the PDLP and ensure the movement’s defeat by the beginning of 1975.
Moving back, the existence of two incipient guerrilla movements in
Guerrero by mid-1968 testified that something “was rotten in” Mexico.
29
Some
months later, hundreds of students lay massacred in Tlatelolco for demanding
democracy when the world’s attention was fixed on the nation as the Olympics
loomed in the background. The student massacre shocked scholars and observers
alike, leading some to question the pillars that had supported the myth of Mexico’s
“preferred revolution:”
30
political stability and economic growth. Influenced by the
unprecedented economic expansion that lasted roughly from 1940-1965, the so-
called “Mexican Miracle,” most scholars prior to 1968 contributed to the image-

29
Hamlet, 1.4.87-91.

30
Stanley Robert Ross, “Mexico: The Preferred Revolution,” in Politics of Change in Latin America,
ed. Joseph Maier and Richard W. Weatherhead (New York: Praeger, 1964), 140.

16

fashioning of a Pax Priísta. Subsequent scholarship, primarily produced by social
and political scientists and journalists, questioned the “official story” even as their
largely top-down analyses excluded important instances of popular protest. It is to
this “official story” of Pax Priísta, and the debates it spawned, that we now turn.

***

The dearth of historical scholarship for post-1940 Mexico could suggest that
history ended following the presidential departure of Cárdenas.
31
Some celebratory
works went further, suggesting that Mexico had nearly reached the Promised Land
(re: modernity) in the decades that followed the ruling tenure of the michoacano
president.
32
With few important exceptions, historians focused on the decades of

31
For a number of recent important exceptions see: Marco Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado a la
guerra de los pobres: Ensayos de guerrilla rural en el México contemporáneo, 1940-1974 (Mexico:
Ediciones Casa Juan Pablos/Secretaría de Cultura de la Ciudad de México, 2003); O’Neill Blacker-
Hanson, “’La Lucha Sigue! (The Struggle Continues!)’ Teacher Activism in Guerrero and the
Continuum of Democratic Struggle in Mexico,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Washington (2005);
Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2005); Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, Mexico Under Siege:
Popular Resistance to Presidential Despotism (London: Zed Books, 2002); Seth Fein, “Producing the
Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert Communications,” in In from the Cold: Latin
America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, eds. Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2008), 171-213; Tanalís Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The
Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press,
2008); Jeffrey Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitán,
Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997); Jaime Pensado, “Student Resistance, Political
Violence and Youth Culture in Mexico City, 1867-1965: A History of the Antecedents of Porrismo,”
Ph.D. Diss., University of Chicago (2008); Louise Walker, “The End of Miracles: Crisis and the
Middle Classes in Mexico City, 1971-1988,” Ph.D. Diss., Yale University (2008); and, Eric Zolov,
“¡Cuba sí, Yanquis no! The Sacking of the Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano in Morelia,
Michoacán, 1961,” in In from the Cold, eds. Joseph and Spenser, 214-252.

32
Charles Cumberland, Mexico, the Struggle for Modernity (New York: Oxford University Press,
1968), 323. While Mexico had not yet reached the Promised Land of modernity, Cumberland wrote,

17

insurgency, rebellion, and state formation that collectively constituted the Mexican
Revolution (1910-1940). Political and social scientists (and some journalists) first
took up the challenge to study the middle decades of the twentieth century. From
1940-1968, scholars produced studies that, in the face of six percent annual
economic growth, stressed unprecedented economic development and continued
political stability. While a number of Mexican academics soon expressed skepticism
and disillusionment with the “institutional Revolution,” American scholars proved
more resilient in their faith.
33
Convinced that the PRI regime constituted a preferred
alternative to contemporary anti-colonial and Marxist revolutions, they lauded the
Mexican “unique New World ‘Middle Way,’” presided over by a presidential
“liberal Machiavellian” who worked in tandem with “a socially responsible class of
Mexican entrepreneurs.”
34
Economic growth and the orderly transfer of presidential
power, they argued, ensured the continuation of a smooth democratic evolution.

“…at long last the leaders of the Mexican nation had come to realize that the greatest natural resource
available to any society is its people, who with proper training and stimuli can do wondrous things.”

33
As early as 1947, Daniel Cosío Villegas lamented the corruption of the Mexican Revolution. By
1965 Pablo González Casanova argued that the Revolution remained unfinished, while a year later
Moisés González Navarro pointed out that the economic growth known as the Mexican Miracle took
place on the backs of an exploited working class that did not enjoy its benefits. See Daniel Cosío
Villegas, “La crisis en México,” in Cuadernos Americanos 32 (March-April, 1947), 29-51; Pablo
González Casanova, La democracia en México (Mexico: Era, 1965); and, Moisés González Navarro,
México, el capitalismo nacionalista (Mexico: Costa-Amic, 1970). See also David C. Bailey,
“Revisionism and the Recent Historiography of the Mexican Revolution,” in The Hispanic American
Historical Review 58:1 (1978), 70-71.

34
Howard Cline, United States and Mexico (New York: Atheneum, 1963), 6; and, Frank
Brandenburg, The Making of Modern Mexico (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1964), 219, 165. See
also, Howard Cline, Mexico: Revolution to Evolution, 1940-1960 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1963); Cumberland, Mexico, the Struggle for Modernity; Ross, “Mexico: The Preferred
Revolution;” and, Robert Scott, Mexican Government in Transition (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1959).

18

This narrative, labeled by historian Arthur Schmidt as “Revolution to
evolution,” lost steam in the aftermath of the 1968 student massacre and the ensuing
economic slowdown. Earlier studies that emphasized the plural, representative
nature of the Mexican political system (despite its one-party structure) gave way to
critical works that characterized the PRI regime as authoritarian and corporatist; that
is, a focus on how the regime “co-opted, controlled, and repressed political pressures
of peasants and workers while promoting economic policies that favored a small
elite.”
35
Despite a marked departure from the “Revolution to evolution” narrative
with emphasis placed upon economic inequality and political repression, studies
produced by Roger Hansen, Pablo González Casanova, and Daniel Cosío Villegas
nonetheless continued to focus on regime-based decisions and decision makers. The
PRI was posited as a monolithic, all-encompassing, and centralized entity capable of
preventing change through co-optation and selective coercive methods.
Emphasizing the effectiveness of PRI corporatism, as Schmidt noted, and allotting
the regime sole possession of power excluded Mexican society “from any
explanatory processes.”
36
Moreover, this chilango-centric
37
vision of politics and

35
Arthur Schmidt, “Making it Real Compared to What? Reconceptualizing Mexican History Since
1940,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940, eds. Gilbert
Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 25; and, Jeffrey
Rubin, “Decentering the Regime: Cultural and Regional Politics in Mexico,” in Latin American
Research Review 31: 3 (1996), 91. Corporatism, as Rubin noted, was used as a concept to explain
how a “nonmilitary authoritarianism” successfully functioned.

36
Schmidt, “Making it Real Compared to What,” 29; Daniel Cosío Villegas, El sistema político
mexicano (Mexico: Joaquín Mortíz, 1975); González Casanova, La democracia en México; and,
Roger Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development (Baltimore: John Hopkins Press, 1971). See
also Arnaldo Córdova, La formación del poder político en México (Mexico: Era, 1972); and, Robert

19

power marginalized the importance of the regional and the local in effecting some
sort of political impact on a national level. In short, political power involved only
the postrevolutionary state, occurred exclusively in Mexico City, and remained out
of the grasp of the middle and lower classes. Such studies thus inadvertently
reinforced the image of a constant Pax Priísta characterized by a stability that lasted
until the 1968 student massacre and the ensuing turbulent presidential administration
of Luis Echeverría (1970-1976).
38

1968 and the subsequent economic turmoil, not to mention the breakdown of
understanding between President Echeverría and Mexico’s economic elites during
the mid-1970s, marked a dramatic watershed. Whereas scholars who utilized a

Scott, Mexican Government in Transition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1964). Hansen’s
study, in particular, operated on the premise that apathy and submission to authority characterized the
political culture of Mexico’s lower classes. Partly a result of these cultures’ “traditional” character (as
opposed to a “modern” citizenry), the ability of the PRI regime to effectively co-opt popular demands
also contributed to the formation of a citizenry which proved unable to mobilize and challenge the
government. For another study with a similar theoretical appreciation of Mexican subaltern political
cultures see, Wayne Cornelius, Politics and the Migrant Poor in Mexico City (Palo Alto: Stanford
University Press, 1975). For an insightful critique of these and other similar works, see Rubin,
“Decentering the Regime,” 91-94.

37
Chilango is a slang noun and/or adjective relating to or of Mexico City (e.g. a chilango is an
inhabitant of Mexico City).

38
In no way do I intend to demean or slight the historical importance of 1968. Rather, my intention is
to highlight the disproportionate scholarly attention the student movement and massacre have
amassed when posited as the beginning of a democratization movement in Mexico. Such a
perspective neglects a series of local and regional struggles that anticipated the ’68 movement in
mobilizing movements that demanded the democratization of political life. “Something was rotten
in” Mexico long before the democratic effervescence of 1968 exploded—motivated by young
people—onto the scene. For instance, Armando Bartra argues that the 1958-59 railroad worker strike
constituted his generation’s “1968.” See Armando Bartra, 1968, el mayo de la revolución (Mexico:
Editorial Itaca, 1999), 139. Mexican sociologist Ricardo Pozas argues that the 1964-65 strike
organized by young doctors and medical students in Mexico City, and the subsequent violent state
response, produced the first fracture in the previously comfortable relationship between the PRI
regime and the urban middle-class. See Ricardo Pozas Horcasitas, La democracia en blanco: el
movimiento médico en México, 1964-1965 (México: Siglo XXI, 1993).

20

corporatist framework to explain authoritarianism stressed the state’s ability to co-
opt and control popular demands prior to 1968, others influenced by the student
massacre began to write of the emergence of “new social movements.” Post-1968
mobilizations, they argued, embraced popular-democratic politics and moved beyond
class-based demands or forms of organization as “the birth of civil society [1968]”
initiated a decades-long struggle for democracy.
39
Both narratives nonetheless
possessed a shared insistence on the regime’s ability to contain such demands and
posited a dyadic conflict, unthreatening to overall regime stability, between an all-
powerful monolithic state and popular groups. In the end, as historian Jeffrey Rubin
wrote, “the fight was always the same and the state always won.”
40

Yet, the supposedly placid decades of the Pax Priísta contained repeated
episodes of popular protest that represented different types of fights, resulted in
alternating outcomes, and fashioned relations of domination at the local and regional

39
Joe Foweraker, “Introduction,” in Popular Movements and Political Change in Mexico, eds. Joe
Foweraker and Ann L. Craig (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publications, 1990), 5; Alan Knight,
“Historical Continuities in Social Movements,” in Popular Movements and Political Change in
Mexico, eds. Foweraker and Craig, 82; and, Tanalís Padilla, “From Agraristas to Guerrilleros: The
Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of the Pax Priísta,” Ph. D. Dissertation (University of
California, San Diego, 2001), 3-4. For examples of works that emphasize the “newness” of post-1968
popular movements, to the detriment of historical continuities present in such movements, see Sonia
E. Alvarez, Evelina Dagnino, and Arturo Escobar, eds., Cultures of Politics Politics of Cultures: Re-
Visioning Latin American Social Movements (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998).

40
Rubin, “Decentering the Regime,” 97. In a study that attempted to elucidate the continual
bargaining and negotiation that the PRI regime participated in with certain sectors of Mexican labor in
order to maintain political legitimacy after the 1930s, Ruth and David Collier nevertheless stressed the
regime’s overall ability to contain challenges. Limiting the focus of their study to the national level
and to “formal” labor organizations, they concluded that the PRI regime “remained stable and was
characterized primarily by continuity” from 1952-1980. See Ruth Berins Collier and David Collier,
Shaping the Political Arena: Critical Junctures, the Labor Movement, and Regime Dynamics in Latin
America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 574.

21

levels. As early as 1947 railway workers went on strike to demand higher wages and
syndical autonomy while political dissidence within in the PRI transformed into a
political opposition group, the Federation of Parties of Mexico (FPPM), in 1952.
Zapatista veteran and ardent Cardenista Rubén Jaramillo initiated a decades-long
struggle in the early 1940s defending the agrarian rights of campesinos using legal
and guerrilla tactics in the state of Morelos. Northern Mexico witnessed widespread
land invasions beginning in the late 1950s led by an autonomous rural union, while
San Luis Potosi and Guerrero experienced multi-class civic movements that
mobilized to overthrow despotic governors. These seemingly disconnected and
distanced regional movements collectively fought for what they interpreted as “the
true project of the Mexican Revolution” in the face of increasing political
authoritarianism and inequitable capitalist development.
41
Undermining scholarly
corporatist perspectives that posited the postrevolutionary regime’s exclusive ability
to “activate or exclude the masses,”
42
these movements demonstrated the existence
and potential of popular agency; thus, the “masses” constituted active historical
protagonists and not passive objects of state rule. Moreover, the struggle over the
definition (and direction) of the Mexican Revolution and the persistence of

41
Elisa Servín, Ruptura y oposición: El movimiento henriquista, 1945-1952 (Mexico: Cal y Arena,
2001), 16; Carr, Marxism and Communism, 211; Armando Bartra, “Movimientos obreros y populares
a fines de los 50s,” in Cien años de lucha de clases, 268; Gerrit Huizer, “Land Invasion as a Non-
Violent Form of Peasant Rebellion; Some Cases from Latin America,” in Journal of Peace Research
9:2 (1972), 126-129; Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 8-20, 55-84; and, Hodges and
Gandy, Mexico Under Siege, 70-81.

42
José Luis Reyna, “Redefining the Authoritarian Regime,” in Authoritarianism in Mexico, eds. José
Luis Reyna and Richard Weinert (Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, 1977), cited
in Rubin, “Decentering the Regime,” 97.

22

caciquismo as a local and regional form of undemocratic “boss” political rule further
highlighted the limitations of the postrevolutionary state. The fact that the civic
movements of Henriquismo, Navismo in San Luis Potosí, and civismo in Guerrero
ended in state-sponsored bloodbaths (prior to ’68) further exposed the fragility of
PRI hegemony at the local and regional levels.
Adopting a regional perspective that focuses on popular politics and
movements thus permits a dismantling of the Pax Priísta myth and moves scholars
toward a re-examination of the presupposition central to that myth: the positing of a
Leviathan corporatist state unilaterally wielding and radiating political power from
the center to peripheries. The instances of popular protest listed above demonstrate
that contestation and struggle characterized hegemony in post-1940 Mexico—not
consensus or incorporation. Such hegemonic contestation repeatedly occurred at the
regional and local levels where national designs had to confront and negotiate with
regionally-specific politics and histories, often resulting in new political forms that
exceeded state-sanctioned boundaries.
43
In contrast to the omnipresent “state” that
figured prominently in the corporatist-model literature, regional political
mobilizations that emerged from 1940-1965—each with its own political and
cultural histories—exposed the uneven presence of the PRI regime; and, the
limitations, indeed the fragility, of PRI hegemonic rule. Moreover, as Rubin
demonstrated in his innovative regional history of Juchitán, Oaxaca, these

43
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 108-119.

23

movements suggested the multi-directional operation of power, differing “across
geographic and cultural locations“ and embedded in “a network of [power]
relations.”
44
Understanding the fissures in PRI hegemonic rule and its variations
contingent on regional contexts emerges as a salient issue when trying to understand
the shift in popular mobilizations that occurred after 1958 with the beginning of
national labor mobilizations, the surfacing of Cuban-fired leftist insurgencies, and
variegated state responses to such challenges.
In a region where the violence of the Mexican Revolution did not fully arrive
until the limited application of agrarian reform during the 1920s and 30s pitted
violence-prone landed elites versus land-hungry campesinos,
45
and the post-1940 era
witnessed a series of peasant and civic mobilizations, Guerrero constitutes an ideal
case-study for the limitations of postrevolutionary PRI rule. Prior to 1968 and the
emergence of “new social movements,” this seemingly backwater state had already
experienced the democratic explosion of a multi-class, heterogeneous movement
organized around popular-democratic demands: first, the removal of a despotic
governor in 1960 that united the overwhelming majority of Guerrero’s civil society;

44
Rubin, Decentering the Regime, 262. The PRI regime also faced contestation from regional elites
and caciques, particularly when the rule of cacicazgos appeared threatened. As a regional form of
“boss” political rule and organization, caciquismo did not always form a complimentary pair with
corporatist state rule. In contrast to literature that envisioned caciquismo as a regional nodal point
through which the PRI regime exercised power on a local-regional level, they did not always share the
same interests; and, as Alan Knight deftly noted, “modernity” and democratization has not eliminated
caciquismo as a form of political rule. See Alan Knight, “Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico,”
in Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century Mexico, eds. Alan Knight and Wil Pansters (London: Institute
for the Study of the Americas, 2005), 7. For a series of excellent case-studies see the Roger Bartra-
edited volume, Caciquismo y poder político en el México rural (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1975).

45
Batra, Guerrero bronco, 42-43.

24

and, second, the electing of opposition political candidates to local and state posts in
a direct challenge to the PRI’s one-party structure. While the 1960 civic movement
operated on the premise that the PRI possessed the ability and willingness to reform
democratically from within, the 1962 oppositional electoral campaign led by Genaro
Vázquez and the Guerrerense Civic Association (ACG) demonstrated popular
inconformity with PRI authoritarianism and a demand for political change working
within the legal framework established by the 1917 Constitution. Expressed
differently by an ACG orator during their state congress in August 1962: “the ACG
was born from the heart of our community and will continue its struggle to save our
Mexican Revolution that has fallen into the hands of caciques and opportunists.”
46

Yet, saving the Mexican Revolution signified more than just the changing of political
party rule. Redeeming the progressive social facets of the 1917 Constitution
constituted a major theme throughout that August 1962 ACG congress.
As it did with the 1958-59 national railroad and dissident teachers strike, the
PRI responded to popular movements in Guerrero with violence. State-directed
massacres of protestors in Chilpancingo 1960 and Iguala 1962 joined the everyday
exercise of violence suffered by campesinos willing to defy local-regional caciques
or join oppositional organizations such as the ACG and independent rural unions.
Leaders like Vázquez and Cabañas, who participated in the ACG by leading the
Atoyac chapter and organizing another at the rural Teachers Training school in
Ayotzinapa, faced state persecution and trumped-up criminal charges for their social

46
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2 Legajo 1, 106-108.

25

activism. By 1964, guerrerenses determined to change their history under
circumstances not of their making realized that playing by constitutional rules proved
futile and dangerous. They needed new strategies, new ideas, or what Vázquez
termed “a new route” as he transformed the ACG from civic movement and
opposition political party into a revolutionary guerrilla force in the face of constant
state repression.
47
For thousands of social activists across Mexico experiencing state
persecution and disaffected by the collaborationist strategies propagated by leftist
political parties, the “new route” soon became, in the words of rural schoolteacher
Arturo Gámiz, “the only route.”
48
When the military barracks in Madera,
Chihuahua awoke on 23 September 1965 facing an attack by the Gámiz-led Popular
Guerrilla Group (GPG), the history of modern guerilla warfare began in Mexico.
The Madera attack, in directly emulating the Fidel Castro-led attempt at Moncada in
1953, evidenced the impact of the Cuban Revolution on certain sectors of the
Mexican Left. By 1965, both Cabañas and Vázquez had spent six years imbuing the
history of that Caribbean revolution. For them and other soon to be guerrillas
throughout Latin America, the small island represented the hope that another world,
one more just and equitable, was readily possible.

47
Francisco Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas hacia la guerrilla campesina,”
Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 88 (April-June, 1977), 111-114; and, Antonio
Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses (Mexico, 1979), 72-77.

48
Laura Castellanos, México Armado: 1943-1981 (Mexico: Era, 2007), 63-82.

26

Decades later after failed “mass utopias,”
49
the evolution of popular
revolutions into authoritarian one-party states, and the experiences of state terrorism,
some scholars fashioned a particular politico-historical teleology concerning the
political transformation of Latin America after 1959 and the failures of revolution.
Emulating the example set forth by revolutionary Cuba, and armed with the guerrilla
“foco” doctrines of Ernesto Guevara, this teleology posited an emergent Cuban-
inspired Left spreading throughout Latin America intent on violently seizing state
power. Constituted by a tiny number of utopian and romantic revolutionaries—often
out of touch with the impoverished masses due to their petit-bourgeois upbringing—
these hopeless “first wave” guerrillas provoked Latin American militaries into
unleashing widespread violent repression.
50
Such repression interrupted a
hemispheric social democratic evolution that had begun in the immediate aftermath
of World War II, thereby plunging Latin America into decades of military
dictatorship. With the emergence of democratic movements during the 1980s and
the end of the Cold War, the teleology concluded, Latin America could get back on
the social democratic track; and, perhaps assist “the Latin American Left and its
foreign supporters escape from the captivity of Guevarismo.”
51

49
Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
50
For example, see David Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans (Boulder:
Westview, 1999); and, David Stoll, Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1995).

51
Stoll, Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of all Poor Guatemalans, 282. For a critical view of this
teleology, one that greatly influenced my discussion, see Greg Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre:
Latin America in the Cold War (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 15-17. First-Wave
guerrillas refer to the conventional classification of Latin American guerrilla movements that occurred

27

Utopia Unarmed, written by Mexican public intellectual Jorge Castañeda in
1993, represented the most widely-read and urbane expression of this “place-all-the-
blame-on-Cuba” teleology of the post-1959 Latin American Left. While Castañeda
presented his argument from an empathic position intending to provide a “practical”
path for the Latin American Left to follow following the end of the Cold War, he
tended to slight the historical contexts from which “first-wave” guerrillas emerged.
52

Groups like the PDLP and ACNR in Mexico did not spontaneously emerge out of a
historical vacuum ready to wage a violent struggle labeled by Castañeda as “weak,
localized and doomed to defeat.”
53
Rather, such guerrillas formed part of a historical

during the Cold War. For instance, “first-wave” refers to Cuban-inspired movements of the 1950s
and 60s, while second-wave movements locate their inspiration in the Sandinista Revolution of 1979.
More controversial, third-wave tends to refer to movements that emerged after the end of the Cold
War. See Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America: A Comparative
Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992); and, Mark
T. Berger, “Romancing the Zapatistas: International Intellectuals and the Chiapas Rebellion,” Latin
American Perspectives 28:2 (March 2001), 149-170.

52
Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 427-475. Works that expressed similar arguments include Stoll,
Between Two Armies in the Ixil Towns of Guatemala; and, Paul Lewis, Guerrillas and Generals: The
“Dirty War” in Argentina (Westport: Praeger, 2001). Both works identified guerrillas as the culprit
in provoking the violent exercise of military repression on civilian populations. While Stoll took to
task the international Left for supporting Guatemalan guerrillas and neglecting peasants caught in-
between insurgents and the military, Lewis argued that the youthful, middle-class constituents of
Argentine guerrilla groups—afflicted by psycho-social angst and frustration—directly provoked the
military coup of the 1970s with their “terrorist acts.” Works that demonstrated partisanship toward
parliamentary forms of political mobilization in their evaluation of the Cuban-inspired Left, implicitly
rehashing the 1960s pro-Castro, pro-China, or pro-Soviet Union debates, include Marta Harnecker,
Haciendo lo imposible posible: la izquierda en el umbral del siglo XXI (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2005
[1999]), 20-25; and, Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, “Conclusion: The postwar juncture in Latin
America and its consequences,” in Latin America Between the Second World War and the Cold War,
1944-1948, eds. Leslie Bethell and Iax Roxborough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
327-334.

53
As Antonio Gramsci once wrote, “there is no room for pure spontaneity in history.” See Antonio
Gramsci, Selections from Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971), 196-200,
quoted in Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Durham: Duke
University Press, 1999 [1983]), 4-5. Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 87.

28

process of social struggle; a trajectory of protest guided by—in the case of
Guerrero—a persistent rural desire to redeem the democratic and economic justice
facets of the 1917 Constitution and shaped by repeated instances of violent state
responses. On a broader level, as historians Greg Grandin and Gilbert Joseph
demonstrated, the emergence of a “Cuban-fired” New Left armed radicalism
occurred within a continental atmosphere characterized by the suppression of short-
lived, nascent social democratic regimes initially established by Popular Front-type
alliances after WWII. Palpable frustration caused by the rolling back of hard-earned
democratic rights and increasing governmental authoritarianism supported by the
United States, in addition to events such as the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in
Guatemala and the Cuban Revolution, radicalized many leftists. The frustrated
efforts to consolidate social democracies after the Second World War, and the
closing down of pacific, legalistic political paths with state-sponsored violence,
radicalized people throughout the Americas. Contrary to Castañeda’s view, military-
state repression provoked thousands of Latin American youth to take up arms as a
political option of last resort, not the other way around.
54

Characterizing the men and women who fought as PDLP or ACNR guerrillas
as inflicted by “militarist deviations” participating in “hopeless guerrilla projects”

54
See Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 1-18; and, Gilbert Joseph, “Lo que sabemos y lo que
deberíamos saber: la nueva relevancia de América Latina en los estudios sobre la guerra fría,” in
Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico:
CIESAS/SRE/Porrua, 2004), 67-92. For Mexico, see Marco Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado; and,
Salvador Castañeda, La negación del número (La guerrilla en México, 1965-1996: una aproximación
crítica) (Mexico: CONACULTA, 2006).

29

not only minimizes the historical trajectory of social struggle of their region. As I
have written elsewhere, such an approach also leads “to a general neglect of human
emotions, perceptions, and perspectives produced by those involved in armed
struggle.”
55
Ignoring what James Scott calls the “long pre-history”
56
of rural
guerrilla movements, those other modes and strategies of resistance and mobilization
that preceded the use of violence, perpetuates the notion of an innately reflexive and
spontaneous peasantry capable of committing senseless orgies of violence, incapable
of formulating their own politics, and susceptible to “outside” (read: communist)
influences. Neglecting the role of human emotion, on the other hand, subsumes the
myriad of personal motivations that led ordinary, everyday campesinos to pick up a
rifle and wage war—motivations that potentially can humanize and provide nuance
to those structural factors usually cited by scholars to explain the origins of rural
rebellions and revolutions. Failing to elucidate the emotions and hopes that drive
peasants to rebel further strengthens that myth of rural people as one-dimensional
“bags of potatoes,” provincial-bound in worldview; and, minimizes the fact their
decision to take up arms or support a guerrilla movement comprised a dangerous and
difficult decision. The attempt to formulate what the PDLP called “a poor people’s

55
Harnecker, Haciendo lo imposible posible, 22; Luis Súarez, Lucio Cabañas, el guerrillero sin
esperanza (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1985 [1976]), 339; and, Alex Aviña, “¡Viva la revolución pobrista!
The ‘Perfect Dictatorship’ and Poor Peoples Revolution in Guerrero, Mexico, 1967-1974,” in
Undoing Leviathan, eds. Priya Jaikumar and Roopali Mukherjee (Forthcoming 2010).

56
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 212.

30

state” constituted a grave risk—a risk so grave that the campesino rebel “could
hardly afford to engage in such a project in a state of absent-mindedness.”
57

And they paid dearly. Actually, guerrerenses continue to do so. As Mexican
scholar Carlos Montemayor is quick to point out, Mexico has lived through a period
of almost uninterrupted internal warfare since that fateful day in 1965 when Gamíz
and his dozen guerrillas attacked the Madera military barracks and its 120 soldiers.
58

That infra-story, a deep undercurrent of post-1940 Mexican historical narratives that
emphasized political stability and economic miracles, and of more recent post-
revisionist works that tend to focus on urban popular culture, remains largely
untold.
59
In effect, this dissertation comprises a sort of archeological project that
strives to excavate beneath the edifices of certain myths that portrayed a decades-
long Pax Priísta and, on a continental level, a terroristic and guevarista guerrilla New
Left provoking military terrorism at every turn.

57
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, ch. 8; Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte (New York: Mondial, 2005); and, Guha, “Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 1. This is not to
say that Marx necessarily viewed peasants as “bags of potatoes”—an argument one can make only by
taking his comment out of context. I use the term in ironic fashion cognizant of Marx’s complex and
dynamic theorization of the peasantry. See August Nimtz, “The Eurocentric Marx and Engels and
other related myths,” in Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies, eds. Crystal Bartolovich and
Neil Lazarus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 65-80.

58
Montemayor, La guerrilla recurrente, 27.

59
Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds., Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of
Culture in Mexico Since 1940 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

31

Sources and Methodology

“The history of subaltern social groups is necessarily fragmented and
episodic…subaltern groups are always subject to the activity of ruling groups, even
when they rebel and rise up: only a “permanent” victory breaks their subordination.”
—Antonio Gramsci
60

Beyond a historical focus confined to the development and emergence of two
distinct peasant guerilla groups that fought and lost to the postrevolutionary Mexican
state, this dissertation chronicles older rural stories of defeated possibilities and
extinguished utopian counter-longings. In a sense, this project is an attempt to
provide visibility to the defeats experienced by a rural Mexican world that
continually contested the authoritarian and capitalist modernizing drives that
restricted it, simultaneously, as the folkloric repository of an “essential” Mexican
identity while subsidizing a state-directed program of rapid industrialization after the
late 1930s.
61
Notwithstanding important postcolonial critiques regarding the
authority of the investigating subject vis-à-vis the histories of subalterns he/she seeks
to recover, this dissertation comprises an attempt to give voice to rural peoples
whose dreams, hopes, aspirations, and experiences find no room in either nation-
centered historical narratives that posit the capitalist nation-state as the End of
History; or, within the very structure of historical narrative itself—a narrative
structure fundamentally based upon what happened, that moves causally in linear,

60
Antonio Gramsci, “Notes on Italian History,” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York:
International Publishers, 1972), 54-55.

61
Eric Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’: The Renarrativizing of
Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in Fragments of a Golden Age, 234-272.

32

progressive fashion to what happened next. Experience, particularly those forms
derived from poor people’s existence, finds no room within such narratives as history
becomes “the retelling of the ways, the wealthy, the powerful, the literate have
appropriated the world.”
62

Yet, as a wide assortment of scholars creatively and crucially remind us,
defeated or failed subaltern hopes persist and survive clandestinely as memories,
“hidden transcripts,” millenarian hopes, and fantasies of turning the world upside
down.
63
While both the ACNR and the PDLP engaged, and were influenced by, a
contemporary leftist context dominated by the Cuban Revolution, Third World anti-
colonial rebellions and the Sino-Soviet split, popular peasant support for these
guerrilla movements depended upon the embracing of local and regional legacies of
struggle. Postrevolutionary Guerrero possesses a rich history of popular
mobilization and armed protest after the violent phase of the Mexican Revolution
subsided in 1920. Taking seriously the radical tenets of the 1917 Constitution, a
series of guerrerense movements actively sought to redeem the promises of agrarian

62
Marjorie Becker, “When I was a child, I danced as a child,” 29. Or, third-world histories turn into
different, incomplete, and inadequate variations of a meta-narrative European/Western History that
obliterates and denigrates different forms of living, existing, and time to the status of pre-modern or
uncivilized. Dipesh Chakrabarty presented this argument, citing the use of themes such as “failure,”
“lack,” and “inadequacy” to describe third-world histories. See Dipesh Chakrabarty, “Postcoloniality
and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for ‘Indian’ Pasts,” Representations 37 (Winter 1992), 1-26.

63
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, esp. chapters 7 & 8; Gilly, Historia a contrapelo, 22-
30, 90-103; Gilly, La revolución interrumpida (Mexico: Era, 2005 [1971]), 262; Becker, “When I
was a child, I danced as a child,” 29. See also a number of newer studies on the Andean rebellions of
the late 18
th
century, including: Sergio Serulnikov, Subverting Colonial Authority: Challenges to
Spanish Rule in Eighteenth-Century Southern Andes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Ward
Stavig, The World of Tupac Amaru: Conflict, Community, and Identity in Colonial Peru (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and, Sinclair Thomson, We Alone Will Rule: Native Andean
Politics in the Age of Insurgency (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003).

33

reform, democracy, and workers rights. From the formation of the Worker’s Party of
Acapulco in the late 1920s led by Juan Escudero, to the various ensuing peasant
movements that took up arms to protect the constitutional redistribution of rural land
during the late 1920s and 30s, this thread of redemption was woven into the
democracy movements of the early 1960s. This popular history of independent
political party organizing, armed self-defense, cacique and elite violence in the face
of state inaction, and civil disobedience comprises, in essence, a “prehistory”
64
of the
ACNR and PDLP insurgencies full of cultural referents: memory, heroes, martyrs,
songs, and even jokes. Such a “prehistory” is not some simple teleological preamble
to the very rare instance of violent subaltern rebellion. Yet, it nourished the ACNR
and PDLP insurgencies with a complex revolutionary imaginary constituted by
diverse and multiple political and historical strands that included the radical
agrarianism of Zapatismo; the “red” agrarianism of local rebels such as Valente de la
Cruz and Amadeo Vidales; the socialist education of rural schoolteachers; popular
interpretations of Cardenismo; and, “foquismo” from the Cuban Revolution.
To analyze the “prehistory” of both the ACNR and PDLP, to chronicle their
guerrilla attempts to overthrow the PRI regime and form a revolutionary popular
state, this dissertation utilizes five principal types of sources: manifestos,
communiqués, pamphlets, and speeches fashioned by the guerrilla participants and
supporters; memos, reports, and evaluations produced by state intelligence agents
from the Ministry of the Interior and the Mexican Army to government officials;

64
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 212.

34

intra-military correspondence that detailed counter-insurgency efforts against the
peasant insurgents; newspaper articles; and, oral history. The manifestos, political
leaflets, and communiqués elaborated by the guerrilla organizations provide insight
into the movements’ motivations for armed rebellion and political orientation.
Speeches that recorded a series of popular assemblies organized by Cabañas and the
PDLP from 1972-1974 reveal not only the group’s heterogeneous political ideology,
but also the arduous manner through which the PDLP cultivated peasant support in
the small villages and hamlets of the Costa Grande. The very intonations,
metaphors, and vernacular speech used by Cabañas as he explained dialectical
materialism, in one instance, to the village of Santa Yerba in 1973 using the growth
cycle of maize highlights the PDLP’s almost Maoist strategy of “becoming and
being the people” in order to lead the “people” to revolution.
65
While taking into
account the PRI regime’s strict control over Mexican media, newspaper articles
facilitate the reconstruction of important events such as the 1960s civic movements
and confrontations between the Mexican army and the guerrilla organizations. More
importantly, newspaper articles from the nation’s major presses shed light on the
propagandistic aspect of the state’s counterinsurgency campaign against the ACNR
and PDLP in Guerrero. Unlike the cyber-savvy “guerrilla-poets” of the recent
EZLN, both the ACNR and PDLP proved largely unable to rupture the state-

65
Un Hombre llamado Lucio: Comandante: Lucio Cabañas Barrientos, Vol. I-II (Discos Pueblo
Rebelde); Gerardo Tort, Director, The Guerrilla and the Hope: Lucio Cabañas (La Rabia Films,
2005); and, Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 131-132.

35

pressured media besiegement that continually referred to guerrillas as bandits and
criminals—despite the existence of small, left-wing newspapers like ¿Por Que?.
66

Intelligence reports and evaluations produced by Ministry of the Interior
(Secretaría de Gobernación) and military intelligence agents constitute valuable
sources that enable an elaboration of what historian Ranajit Guha termed as the
“official mind” of the state; that is, state reductionist tendencies to view from a
“national security” standpoint, in this case peasant political action, as criminal and
illegal. Only declassified in 2002, documents from the Dirección General de
Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales (DGIPS, Department of Social and Political
Investigations) and Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS, Department of National
Security)—as part of the Ministry of the Interior—and the Secretaría de la Defensa
Nacional (SDN, Department of National Defense) allow for the re-creation of an
official version of events that stands in stark contrast to popular versions. Espionage
memos, evaluations, reports on public events, military campaign plans, and daily
military telegram correspondence collectively form an archive of counterinsurgency
that sought to catalogue, analyze, and exterminate peasant movements the PRI
regime identified as national security threats. While such documents tend to provide
extraordinarily deficient analysis of armed movements—even exaggerated in order
to procure increased state funds and for personal advancement as some scholars

66
For a valuable comparison of media coverage on 1970s Mexican guerrilla movements and the
EZLN, and guerrillas’ use of media and communication technology, see Jorge Mendoza García, “Los
medios de la información y el trato de la guerrilla: una mirada psicopolítica,” in Movimientos
armados en México, siglo XX (Zamora, Mich: El Colegio de Michoacán/CIESAS, 2006), 145-178.

36

accurately document
67
—they do offer the possibility of recovering patchy campesino
and insurgent voices since the reporting agents often reproduced speeches, political
pamphlets, and, on an infrequent basis, mentioned the failure of state
counterinsurgency measures. Internal military correspondence, in particular, often
provided a dose of veracity when top commanders admitted the overwhelming level
of popular support achieved by the PDLP and labeled the group as a “true” guerrilla
force. Reading such “prose of counterinsurgency” against the grain may not only
highlight the state’s refusal to view peasant insurgency “as a motivated and
conscious undertaking on the part of the rural masses,” but also provides fragmented
“’windows,’ however foggy and imperfect, on people’s lives.”
68

Such popular and state-derived sources offer tantalizing bits of evidence in
the attempt to discern why a peasantry, steeped in centuries of conservative
Catholicism and decades of PRI revolutionary nationalism, decided to take the
drastic action of supporting two separate guerrilla insurgencies in Guerrero. A third
type of source, oral history, provides a medium through which to hear the voices of
participants themselves. While not making the claim that the memories of
guerrerenses offer unmediated access to a past they continue to live out (indeed they
are, like written documents, constructed narratives) the orality of oral history reveals
cultural meanings and information—slang, jokes, intonation and rhythm of speech—

67
Aguayo, La charola, 100.

68
Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 46; and, Florencia Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma
of Subaltern Studies: Perspectives from Latin American History,” American Historical Review 99:5
(December 1994), 1506.

37

simply impossible to reproduce in written form and gives voice to a population that
suffers from rampant illiteracy. Like written sources, oral history can suffer from
contradictions, unverified facts, outright deceit, and exaggerations. Yet, as oral
historian Alessandro Portelli pointed out, oral history tells us more about meaning as
opposed to events; of what might have happened; what people wanted to do; what
others longed for yet failed to realize. Such meaning is crucial for a dissertation that
speaks to the eruption, defeat, and persistence of insurgent peasant yearnings.
69

Moreover, the re-constructed memories of ex-guerrillas, guerrilla
collaborators, and bystanders who suffered collective punishment at the hands of the
Mexican military provide narratives largely unrecorded in written form and
incongruous with the historical narratives used to describe post-1940 Mexico. Their
memories, their histories function and move along different registers of time—
registers determined by, for instance, the day their son or daughter disappeared at the
hands of army soldiers. For others like Don Ascención Rosas Mesino, a campesino
from the Costa Grande, time stopped in 1972 when his son left to join the ranks of
the PDLP, only to return some thirty years later, his bodily remains contained in two
small plastic boxes.
70
Still others believe, like those Zapatista campesinos in
Morelos, their leader Cabañas still rides in the mountains ready to return. The way

69
Alessandro Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different [1979],” in The Oral History Reader, eds.
Robert Perks and Alistair Thomson (London: Routledge, 2006 [1998]), 33-36. See also Alessandro
Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 1991).

70
Ascención Rosas Mesino (Don Chon), interview with this author, Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero,
May 17, 2007.

38

in which informants organize the plot of their stories, “the way in which the story
materials are arranged by the narrators in order to tell their story,” in other words,
forces a re-interpretation and re-arrangement of contemporary Mexican history.
71

Such memories speak not to broad topics usually tabbed to describe that period of
Mexican history (e.g. import substitution industrialization, neo-populism, economic
miracles), but to a clandestine Dirty War waged by the PRI regime over two decades
that resulted in the murder-disappearance of 500-1000 people and the transformation
of certain rebellious regions into theaters of war. Images of the post-1940 PRI
regime as “liberal Machiavellian” or Leviathan—underscored by the narratives of
Revolution-to-evolution and Revolution-to-demolition, respectively—in the face of
such memories appear untenable.

Chapter Layout

This dissertation is organized both chronologically and thematically. While
the first four chapters proceed in chronological fashion, chapters Five and Six move
to and from the 1960s and 1970s to describe the uneven process of radicalization
experienced within the PDLP guerrilla insurgency and the Mexican state’s various
attempts at counterinsurgency. Chapter One delineates the long history of popular
movements and revolutions in Guerrero beginning with the various struggles for
Mexican independence in the early nineteenth century to the populist presidency of

71
Portelli, “What Makes Oral History Different,” 36.

39

Lázaro Cárdenas during the 1930s. In exploring popular rural demands voiced
through the praxis of violent resistance and open rebellion, the chapter traces both
changes and continuities in the subaltern political cultures of Guerrero over decades
in order to historically ground the ACNR and PDLP insurgencies. A similar form
and mediums of expression (particularly in the formation of cross-class alliances to
more effectively have their protests heeded or guerrilla warfare as a method of
rebellion) speaks to the continuity and longevity of unredeemed campesino political
longings.
72
To avoid reductionist readings of the peasant rebellions led by Genaro
Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas in the 1970s, to envision such movements as complex
social and historical processes, an engaged and expanded look in the region’s
subaltern political history is required.
Chapter Two explores the 1960 civic movement that emerged in response to
the heavy handed gubernatorial rule of General Raúl Caballero Aburto. Appointed
governor of Guerrero in 1957, the general transformed the state into his personal
fiefdom rife with corruption, nepotism, authoritarian political rule, and the exercise
of violence against dissidents. Creating political enemies across social classes and
state regions, Caballero witnessed the organization of a multi-class social movement
intent on removing him from power and exercising citizenship rights guaranteed by
the Constitution of 1917. Over the course of one year, the civic movement utilized
civil disobedience, tax strikes, and the endless petitioning of the Mexican president

72
Becker, “When I was a Child I danced as a Child,” 28-29;” Adolfo Gilly, La revolución
interrumpida (Mexico: Era, 2004 [1971]), 262; and Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in

40

and Congress to ensure the removal of a governor they argued “betrayed” the
postulates of the Mexican Revolution. In the process of struggle, the movement led
by the Guerrerense Civic Association (ACG) and the Coalition of Popular
Organizations (COP) developed a radical, patriarchal vision of democracy that
stressed the active participation of citizens in the preservation and application of
constitutional rights. Within a national context characterized by similar democracy
movements in San Luis Potosí, land invasions in northern Mexico, and national labor
strikes, the PRI regime responded with violence and soldiers massacred several
ACG/COP activists in the capital city of Chilpancingo in December 1960. The
bloody resolution to the conflict, in which both Vázquez and Cabañas prominently
participated, constituted the first of a series of massacres perpetrated by the Mexican
state and initiated a process of political radicalization experienced by thousands of
Mexicans.
Chapter Three chronicles the radicalization of popular movements in
Guerrero in the aftermath of the 1960 Chilpancingo massacre. Tracing the
emergence of a “New Left” markedly influenced by the Cuban Revolution and the
increasing use of terror by the PRI regime, this chapter follows Vázquez and
Cabañas as they engaged a re-invigorated Mexican Left that sought a return to the
radical social legacies of the 1910 Mexican Revolution. While Vázquez traveled to
Mexico City to participate in that brief moment of leftist unity embodied by the

Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1983), 39.

41

short-lived and Cárdenas-led Movement for National Liberation (MLN), Cabañas
traveled a different national network organized and comprised by younger,
radicalized rural schoolteachers and students with experience in rural protest
movements. Both men returned to Guerrero in early 1962 to transform the ACG into
an opposition political party and participate in municipal and state elections. A
strong electoral performance by the ACG led to electoral fraud committed by the PRI
and the regime jailed prominent ACG leaders. A public protest in the city of Iguala
in December 1962 resulted in another state-sponsored massacre of peaceful ACG
protestors. The ACG’s three year attempt to democratize political life in the state of
Guerrero thus taught a number of their militants an important lesson: the
impossibility of democratizing the PRI’s authoritarian political structure from within
using legal, constitutional tactics. The cívicos’ various attempts demonstrated the
inutility (and the life danger) of electoral, “legal” paths. New routes appeared
necessary as state terror transformed social activists into rifle-toting guerrillas.
In recounting the politico-military histories of the ACNR and PDLP,
Chapters Four and Five (respectively) show how PRI repression radicalized forms of
protest and political demands. By the time Cabañas narrowly avoided an
assassination attempt during a police massacre of protestors in his home town of
Atoyac de Alvarez in May 1967 and Vázquez escaped from an Iguala prison in April
1968 both men preached the need for a “new” Revolution: popular in constitution,
democratic in function, and socialist in orientation. They also posited guerrilla
warfare, inspired both by regional-historical legacies of resistance and the Cuban

42

Revolution, as the means to achieve the overthrow of the PRI regime. Using
recently declassified government documents and oral histories, Chapters Four and
Five chronicle the operation of two ideologically and tactically distinct guerrilla
groups that failed largely to militarily threaten the Mexican state due to the latter’s
terroristic response. Yet, they posed a serious political threat. The legitimacy of
their demands and critiques of the PRI regime exposed the dark underbelly of a state
often hailed by American scholars as embodying the preferred model of political and
economic development for Third World nations.
In addition to delineating the politico-military history of the PDLP, Chapter
Five also interrupts the chronological narrative of the dissertation to explore the
various revolutionary traditions, campesino politics, utopias, longings, and
alternative definitions of political community that constituted the PDLP’s
revolutionary imaginary. Examining the two manifestoes published by the PDLP
reveals a diversity of influences ranging from Zapatista agrarianism, the “red”
agrarianism of campesino rebels that emerged in 1920s Guerrero and Cardenismo to
the more immediate impact of the Cuban Revolution. While acknowledging the
conceptual gap that existed between the politics of the PDLP leadership and the
politics of its campesino base of support, I argue that a radical definition of popular
social democracy that fused political and socio-economic demands represented a
crucial point of convergence between PDLP leaders and base. Historical experiences
and recent lessons in PRI violence also formed the contours of a common framework
through which the PDLP and its campesino base dialogued and understood one

43

another. Feelings of anger, indignation, and vengeance—provoked by decades of
elite and state-sponsored reactionary violence and impunity—worked to join PDLP
guerrillas and peasant base in a common armed struggle against the Mexican state.
Chapter Six contextualizes 1970s Guerrero within a broader Cold War Latin
American history of state terror and “dirty wars” by chronicling the various counter-
insurgency programs utilized by the PRI regime to suppress the ACNR and PDLP
guerrillas. While Mexico did not experience the levels of violence seen in the
southern cone nations, specific regions like Guerrero, Chihuahua, and Jalisco
experienced analogous forms of state terror. Certain techniques, such as the tossing
of human bodies into the Pacific Ocean from airplanes and helicopters, may have
been pioneered by Mexico’s repressive state apparatuses. Yet terror, particularly
under the presidency of Luis Echeverría (1970-76), was accompanied by increased
state participation in (and funding of) Guerrero’s rural economy. While state terror
exercised by military regimes in South America paved the way for neoliberal
structural re-adjustments along lines advocated by Milton Friedman and other
Chicago Boys, Mexico under Echeverría experienced a revival of populist economic
policies. Guerrero constituted a frontline for this dyadic or schizophrenic form of
governance.
My conclusion synthesizes and reiterates arguments presented in the previous
chapters and ponders the importance of the ACNR and PDLP within post-1940
Mexican history. Centering contemporary Mexican history on the time of the
Luciada and the Guachal—time markers used in parts of Guerrero to describe the

44

1970s—reveals “subaltern knowledge of the loss of state legitimacy” and the
disruption of the myths of national unity and Mexican-ness invoked by the PRI
regime from 1940-1980.
73
Unearthing the intertwined histories of the guerrilla
PDLP and ACNR—as movements historically formed by the experience of decades
of popular struggle, unredeemed longings, and failures—demonstrates that the PRI
“dictatorship” proved neither “perfect” or “bland.”
74
In exposing the extent of terror
and violence utilized by the postrevolutionary regime to quell armed dissidence in
Guerrero, this dissertation also forces a re-examination of the recent electoral defeat
of the PRI in 2000. Though “democracy” was the buzzword celebrated by most as
President Vicente Fox took office in late 2000, continuing state repression in
southern Mexico—including Guerrero—confirmed the partial survival of the
repressive apparatus built by the PRI over a course of seven decades. As impunity
reigns for the planners, directors, and executioners of the Dirty War, the history of
popular armed struggle in Guerrero remains unearthed, now buried underneath the
official proclamations of right-wing politicians who promise electoral democracy but

73
Luciada is a popular name used in the Costa Grande region to denote the time of the PDLP
rebellion, a term derived from Lucio. Guachal is slang for “a lot of soldiers” (Guacho is a derogatory
nickname used in many regions of rural Mexico to describe soldiers). Adela Cedillo, “El sepelio de
Lino y Esteban,” Emeequis (9 April 2007); and, Ascención Rosas Mesino (Don Chon), interview with
the author, Atoyac de Álvarez, 16 May 2007. For the quote, see Ileana Rodríguez, “Reading
Subalterns across Texts, Disciplines, and Theories: From Representation to Recognition,” in The
Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, 23.

74
I borrow the archeology metaphor from historians Florencia Mallon and Marjorie Becker.
Acclaimed Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa used the term “perfect dictatorship” to describe the
PRI’s ability to rule for seven decades. See Florencia Mallon, “Reflexiones sobre las ruinas: formas
cotidianas de formación de estado en el México decimonónico,” in Aspectos Cotidianos de La
Formación de Estado, eds. Joseph and Nugent, 105-142; Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 329; and,
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, xiv.

45

neoliberal exclusion and starvation for masses of poor Mexicans. Within a
contemporary context that may be witnessing the consolidation of a new blue-and-
white one-party dictatorship (or the revival of a tri-color one),
75
the telling of this
history of popular protest intends to humbly fan “the spark of hope in the past.”
76

Exploring the subversive longings, hopes, and politics embraced by the ACNR and
PLDP thus facilitates an understanding of how and why Mexican guerrilla groups
continue to emerge and embrace armed struggle.

75
Blue and white are the colors of the right-wing National Action Party (PAN). The tri-color refers to
the PRI.

76
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-
1940, 391. Benjamin’s Frankfurt School comrades Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer made a
similar point in Dialectic of the Enlightenment: “the task at hand is not the conservation of the past,
but the redemption of past hopes.” See Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of the Enlightenment (New
York: Continuum Publishing Co., 1997), XV. For a work that has profoundly shaped and guided my
reading of Benjamin, see Gilly, Historia a contrapelo, 39-48, 135-142.
As historians Greg Grandin and Tanalís Padilla pointed out, studying the histories of popular
movements during the 1960s and 70s, and the subsequent state terror, also sheds light on the
consolidation of neoliberal capitalism in Latin America in the aftermath of such movements. In
destroying a range of diverse popular movements, state terror, Grandin argued, fulfilled “the
prerequisite for the rapid economic restructuring that took place throughout the Americas beginning
full throttle in the 1980s—lowering tariffs, deregulating capital streams, reducing government social
spending, weakening labor protections.” Padilla noted that while Grandin excludes Mexico from his
argument, that nation actually experienced a similar though later structural conversion to neoliberal
capitalism—a process only recently coming to light with the help of declassified Mexican intelligence
and military archives and recent academic works. See Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 14;
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 1-25. The “classic” case of this form of neoliberal
conversion was Chile under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. See Marcos Taylor, From
Pinochet to the “Third Way:” Neoliberalism and Social Transformation in Chile (Pluto Press, 2006);
Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan
Books, 2007), esp. chapter 2; David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005), 5-38; and, Andre Gunder Frank, Economic Genocide in Chile: Monetarist
Policy versus Humanity: Two Open Letters to Arnold Harberger and Milton Friedman (Nottingham:
Spokesman Book, 1976).

46

Chapter 1:
Rural Politics, Durable Utopias, and Two Centuries of Peasant Rebellions in
Guerrero

“Long live the King, Death to the Bad Government!”—Battle Cry of 1810
Independence Insurgents
77

“…I find Southerners willing to sacrifice their families, homes, personal interests,
and lives, before succumbing to the tyrannical government of that ungrateful soldier
[López de Santa Anna], one day caudillo of the people and today the most obstinate
oppressor…we Southerners want that nation be represented by whichever Mexicans
as long as they are honest and noble patriots and who reject the pernicious influence
of those classes that call themselves privileged to exploit the people, nourishing
themselves with their blood…Southerners will always fight for blessed liberty.”—
Juan Álvarez, 1 October 1854
78

“The government has always been controlled by the rich; it has always been a
dictatorship against the poor. The only option left to us and to those who haven’t
already is to take up arms and fight…until we defeat the dictatorship throughout the
Republic and the poor govern all. Zapata is our guide and the people our support.
Long live the people! Death to the Bad Government!”—PDLP Communiqué, 4
April 1972
79

If the litmus test for the importance of studying the histories of lower-class
struggles and “freedom dreams” depends on whether such struggles impacted the
world in which we live in, as historian Peter Guardino suggests, then Guerrero’s

77
Peter Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State: Guerrero, 1800-
1857 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996), 59. This chapter would not be possible without
Guardino’s groundbreaking study and borrows much from his insights.

78
Daniel Muñoz y Perez, El General Don Juan Álvarez (Mexico: Editorial Academia Literaria,
1959), 49 [Unless otherwise noted all translations are my own].

79
Archivo General de la Nación (hereafter AGN), Dirección Federal de Seguridad (hereafter DFS)
80-21-72, legajo 1, 105-106.

47

campesinos
80
vividly emerge as historically significant.
81
Actively participating in
every major social upheaval of the nineteenth and twentieth century, rural
guerrerenses decisively influenced the course of those popular revolutions and the
contours of the Mexican state-in-formation. From sustaining the Independence
movement alive following the execution of rebel priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1811 to
supporting the 1988 oppositional presidential candidacy of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas in
1988 in the face of PRI violence, these campesinos not only participated in
determinant fashion, but also nourished such movements with their own creative
political visions. In expansive fashion, this chapter covers two centuries of peasant
resistance and rebellion in Guerrero in order to historically ground the peasant
guerrilla insurgencies led by Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas in the 1960s and
1970s. Contrary to counterinsurgent state-centered narratives, these Cold War

80
Unless otherwise noted, I will use peasant and campesino interchangeably throughout the chapter,
fully aware of the shortcomings—particularly when these historical agents tended to self-describe
differently during the nineteenth century (e.g. indigenous, community, etc). Campesino comprises a
broader definition including both rural/agrarian workers and peasants “who have the power to
determine the product of a relatively small parcel of land worked either individually or in common
through village consensus” without necessarily directly owning that land. See John M. Hart, “The
1840s Southwestern Mexico Peasants’ War: Conflict in a Transitional Society,” in Riot, Rebellion,
and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1988), 249. Christopher Boyer also provides a useful working definition for campesino used in
this chapter: “…a campesino can be thought of as a rural person who makes a modest living working
the land as his or her primary economic activity (whether as subsistence farmer, a tenant on another’s
land, or as a paid field hand), who tends to base economic strategies on a household rather than an
individual base, and who, I argue, recognizes some degree of political or economic affinity with other
impoverished or disempowered rural folk.” Boyer, Becoming Campesino, 250.

81
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 211; and, Robin
Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (New York: Beacon Press, 2003).

48

guerrilla rebellions emerged from and operated on deep, richly layered reservoirs of
peasant politics, longings, and grievances.
82

The broad scope of the chapter forces a series of limiting generalizations.
Peasant communities emerge as largely homogenous, glossing over the intensely
contested (and negotiated) fractures that assumed gendered, ethnic, class, and
generational forms. Such rural communities, to quote historian Florencia Mallon,
comprised “arenas of argumentation where power gets consolidated and contested,”
not examples of “rural Eden.”
83
Creative “everyday forms of peasant resistance”
(and the dynamism of peasant identity itself) are generally muted in favor of rarely
occurring revolutions and the limited revealing of utopias expressed through the
praxis of rebellion.
84
Yet, we could argue that such revolutions represented a
dramatic and condensed presentation of political demands forged in the arduous
course of everyday struggles.

82
Becker, “When I was a Child I danced as a Child,” 28-29;” Adolfo Gilly, La revolución
interrumpida (Mexico: Era, 2004 [1971]), 262; Gilly, “La historia: crítica o discurso del poder,” in
¿Historia para qué?, Carlos Pereyra et al. (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2000 [1980]), 214-215; and Guha,
“The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” in Subaltern Studies II: Writings on South Asian History and
Society, ed. Ranajit Guha (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 39.

83
Florencia Mallon, Peasant and Nation: The Making of Postcolonial Mexico and Peru (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995), 329.

84
Though, of course, those everyday forms of peasant resistance are intricately and intimately linked
to and nourishing of the rarer instances of violent rebellion. I disagree that only through violent
“outbursts” can we obtain perspective into the lives of the rural poor. To quote Marjorie Becker: “the
recurrent scholarly perception has been that most of the time peasants are mired in dull lives,
unworthy of comment. Only when they burn bridges, murder elites holed up in granaries, or mutilate
teachers do they merit analytical notice…on purely historical grounds, such thinking is suspect…what
Mexican peasant rebellions do reveal, on the other hand, is a heightened version of their political
demands.” Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 59. See also, James Scott, Weapons of the Weak:
Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 284-303, 322-
350.

49

Who imagined these utopian longings, or better yet who did not, elicits
another important gendered exclusion. Despite the large-scale presence of rural
women in Mexican Independence struggles in traditional care-taker roles and non-
traditional combatant tasks, we know little about their motivations and demands.
85

To cite another example: the cornerstones of popular federalism and liberalism
throughout the nineteenth century—“universal male suffrage, state and municipal
autonomy, low taxes, and a generally wide diffusion of government power among
local groups”
86
—represented patriarchal utopias that subsumed present campesina
counter-longings despite their active participation in struggle. Despite such
historiographical omissions, the fluid contexts of revolutionary struggles often
provided opportunities for gender role transgressions and their subversive re-
imagining. Yet, for large swaths of the nineteenth century we know little of such
imagination. What ontologically “unthinkable” utopias did rural women imagine?
87

85
For important exceptions that cover the decades before and after the 1810 Independence struggles,
see: Deborah Kanter, Hijos del Pueblo: Gender, Family, and Community in Rural Mexico, 1730-
1850 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009); Elizabeth Dore and Maxine Molyneux eds., Hidden
Histories of Gender and State Formation in Latin America (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000);
Steve Stern, The Secret History of Gender: Women, Men, and Power in Late Colonial Mexico
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Silvia Arrom, The Women of Mexico City,
1790-1857 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1985); and, Claire Brewster, “Women and the
Spanish-American Wars of Independence,” Feminist Review 79 (2005), 20-35. Eric Van Young
references large numbers of peasant women insurgents without exploring motivations or demands in
The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence, Ideology, and the Mexican Struggle for Independence (Palo
Alto: Stanford University Press, 2001). For female leaders of (25% of) communal village riots and
rebellions in late colonial Mexico, see William Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial
Mexican Villages (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1979), 116 & 155.

86
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 95-96, 210.

87
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (New York:
Beacon Press, 1995), 70-75. Scholarship on the long Mexican Revolution effectively and creatively
presents a range of utopias and longings imagined by historically protagonist rural and urban women.

50

Notwithstanding such faults, the sweeping overview structure of the chapter
provides an opportunity to historically demarcate the “elementary aspects”
88
of
gendered peasant utopias in Guerrero as expressed through and in rebellion. The
“residual” and “emergent” character of peasant demands for patriarchal local
democracy and land (to cite two examples) speaks to the longevity, adaptability, and
creativity of campesino longings; that is, as longings forged in the past but “still
active in the cultural process…as an effective element of the present,” and expressed
using “new” forms and “new” language.
89
Each subsequent peasant mobilization
worked from a long “prehistory” comprised of longings, failures, rebellions, songs,
rumors, martyrs, jokes and multiple layers of popular memory that worked to vitally
nourish such movements.
90
The guerrilla ACNR and PDLP proved no different
despite their adoption of socialist and Marxist discourse. Such “great traditions,” the

For a few examples see, Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire; Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in
Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Mary Kay Vaughn, The Cultural
Politics of Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930-1940 (Tucson: University
of Arizona Press, 1997); and, Gabriela Cano, “Unconcealable Realities of Desire: Amelio Robles’s
(Transgender) Masculinity in the Mexican Revolution,” in Sex in Revolution: Gender, Politics, and
Power in Modern Mexico, eds. Gabriela Cano, Mary Kay Vaughn, and Jocelyn Olcott (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2006), 35-56.

88
Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency, 1-17.

89
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 122. For
Williams’ entire discussion on the residual and emergent aspects of cultural formation see pages 121-
127.

90
James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 212; and, Steve Stern, “New Approaches to the
Study of Peasant Rebellion and Consciousness: Implications of the Andean Experience,” in
Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World: 18
th
to 20
th
Centuries, ed.
Steve Stern (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), 9-12.

51

anthropologist and political scientist James Scott would write, confronted and
necessarily negotiated with long-held peasant “little traditions.”
91

Contextualizing the ACNR and PLDP within this rich history of campesino
agency thus disrupts official and state narratives that posited the guerrillas as outside
communist agitators that duped hapless hungry peasants into suicidal rebellion.
92

Rather, we obtain a radically different perspective through historical interpretation
that reveals both guerrilla insurgencies as complex social and historical processes
with deep and profound roots. The guerrillas represented only the final cumulative
phase of a protracted social process marked by repeated historical injustices,
authoritarianism, economic exploitation, and state/elite-sponsored violence—factors
that tended to both radicalize popular peasant politics and drastically reduce political
options for redressing grievances. Persistent peasant dissidence, and repeated forms
of its expression (such as the formation of cross-class alliances to more effectively
have their protests heeded or guerrilla warfare as a method of rebellion), speaks not
to some innate campesino tenet for irrational and reactive violence, but to the

91
James Scott, “Protest and Profanation: Agrarian Revolt and the Little Tradition, Part I,” Theory and
Society 4:1 (Spring 1977), 1-38.

92
Such state or official narratives (as well as some guerrilla vanguardists) also tended to gender the
insurgent peasant masses as “spontaneous,” “unruly,” and/or “emotional.” For the gendered
representation of “the people” see, Lessie Joe Frazier and Deborah Cohen, “Defining the Space of
Mexico ’68: Heroic Masculinity in the Prison and ‘Women’ in the Streets,” Hispanic American
Historical Review 83:4 (2003), 618-622; Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination, 63-108;
and, Ileana Rodríguez, Women, Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 30-40, 62-76. For an emblematic example of a
state narrative published by a Mexican general see, Mario Arturo Acosta Chaparro, Movimiento
subversivo en México (n.p. 1990) [in possession of the author]. Acosta Chaparro is accused by human
rights groups in Guerrero of personally participating in 143 extrajudicial executions of suspected
guerrillas and collaborators during the 1970s. In 2000, he was jailed for nearly six years accused of
protecting the narco-trafficking cartel in Cuidad Juárez.

52

historical and chronic irresolution of rural problems.
93
Knowing well the potential
costs of rebellion, peasants resorted to that modality of resistance only as a political
option of last resort.
94

Before proceeding to that history of rebellion, we turn now to a physical
description of the variegated and mosaic guerrerense territory.

“I bring you a message from the Sierra of Guerrero…”
95

Mountains, forming part of the imposing Sierra Madre del Sur, pierce
through the state of Guerrero along a north-south axis. Long considered (rightfully
so) a seedbed and refuge of subversives, armed rebels, and fleeing criminals, these
mountains historically formed an obstinate obstacle to the productive designs of
peasants and the centralizing efforts of national governments as they occupy four-
fifths of the state’s surface. In the coastal north of Guerrero, the peaks vividly
separate seashores described by some as Edenic and known to most as the Costa

93
Such is the reason, as Mexcan scholar Carlos Montemayor insightfully noted, why rural Mexican
guerrilla movements tend to “reoccur” and re-emerge in places like Guerrero. Carlos Montemayor, La
guerrilla recurrente (México: Random House Mondadori, 2007), 12-14.

94
Stressing the continuity of campesino demands in Guerrero should not be read as a disregard of the
importance of historical context and its impact on subaltern politics. Obviously, campesino demands
for universal male suffrage and municipal autonomy proclaimed in the Costa Grande during the 1820s
differed in content to similar demands voiced by Costa Grande campesinos in 1960 as they organized
to remove a corrupt state governor. The same applies to “bad government” denunciations articulated
in 1810 in relation to an imploding colonial system versus the same charge expressed by socialist
peasant guerrillas during the 1970s. For a work that takes a long durée approach to the history of
popular indigenous resistance in Chiapas see, Antonio García de León: Resistencia y utopia:
Memorial de agravios y crónicas de revueltas y profecías acaecidas en la provincia de Chiapas
durante los últimos quinientos años de su historia (Mexico: Era, 2002 [1985]).

95
José de Molina, “De la Sierra de Guerrero,” Se Acabó [compact disc in possession of the autor].

53

Grande. Moving southward, continuing to separate a stunning, slim coastline from
hotter highlands, the mountains temporarily give way to the port and world-famous
beaches of Acapulco: a port city inserted into a developing world economy during
the sixteenth-century paradoxically surrounded by lands largely neglected (in
“modernizing terms”) until the 1960s. Continuing our trek south, the mountains
begin to intermingle with a range of volcanic peaks in the rugged Costa Chica, a
region bordering the state of Oaxaca primarily populated by indigenous and Afro-
Mexican communities. The mountain range, profoundly contributing to the image
and reality of Guerrero as a peripheral region within the Mexican nation despite its
relative proximity to the national capital, eventually ends in eastern Oaxaca.
96

Four more internal regions comprise the state that was founded in 1849 and
named after the Afro-mestizo Independence leader, and one-time president, Vicente
Guerrero. Yet moving from the coast inland, essentially traversing the Sierra Madre
del Sur, proves an arduous task. Traveling east on the highway that connects
Acapulco to Mexico City
97
, passing deep ravines now conquered by formidable

96
Ironically, these mountains historically protected the political autonomy and economic domination
of local-regional caciques and the very guerrillas (at different historical moments) cacique domination
tends to inspire. At the same time, this peripheral condition prevents what Alba Teresa Estrada
Castañón refers to as “the territorial integration of the region in order to impulse an integrated and
sustainable economic development within the national market;” thus, making Guerrero one of the
least economically developed states of Mexico and one of the most impoverished. Estrada Castañón,
Guerrero: sociedad, economía, política y cultura (Mexico: Universidad Autonóma de Mexico, 1994),
8-9, 11-12; Jaime Salazar Adame, “Periodo 1867-1910,” in Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana:
estado de Guerrero, 1867-1940 (Mexico: Gobierno del Estado de Guerrero/Universidad Autónoma
de Guerrero/CEHAM, 1987), 43-44; and, Norberto Valdez, Ethnicity, Class, and the Indigenous
Struggle for Land in Guerrero, Mexico (New York: Garland Publishing, 1998), 17-26.

97
A highway that connected Acapulco to Mexico City was only built in 1927. More recently, a
modernized highway was built in the early 1990s by the state government and later was refurbished
by the federal government—the famous “Highway of the Sun,” the most expensive highway (quota

54

bridges under the shadow of mountains, one reaches the Centro region and state’s
wind-swept capital city of Chilpancingo de los Bravos. The wind gives way to high
temperatures, aridity, and parched hills as we make our way to the border of
Guerrero and the state of Mexico, reaching the city of Iguala (birthplace of the
tricolored Mexican flag) and the silver mines of Taxco. Abundant and fertile
agricultural lands, nourished by the waters of the Rio Balsas, lay to the west in the
fittingly-named Tierra Caliente. A dramatic contrast occurs as we move southeast
toward the highlands bordering Puebla and Oaxaca. Home to three of the state’s four
indigenous groups (Tlapanecos, Nahuas, and Mixtecos), rampant poverty, lack of
industry or fertile agricultural lands, and high rates of malnutrition and child
mortality characterize La Montaña region.
98
La Montaña constitutes the most
neglected, impoverished region of a historically neglected and impoverished state.
Yet, towering mountains and powerful rivers bear not sole responsibility for
the chronic neglect, isolation, inequitable capitalist modernization (or
underdevelopment), and authoritarianism that characterizes much of Guerrero’s past.
With an abundant coastline, an important port city, fertile lands capable of sustaining
large-scale agricultural production, and a relative proximity to Mexico City,
Guerrero seemed an ideal and profitable bloc for the various—at times competing—

price) in Mexico, often beleaguered by rock slides. Carlos Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero
(Mexico: Colegio de México/Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2000), 100.

98
Estrada Castañón, Guerrero, 8-11; Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 93-100; Mario O. Martínez
Rescalvo and Jorge R. Obregón Téllez, La Montaña de Guerrero: Economía, historia y sociedad
(Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero and Instituto Nacional Indigenista, 1991), 170-

55

economic development programs enacted by the national government after 1849.
Yet, that ideal never fully materialized, however illogical it seemed to the peoples of
the state who believed their heroic participation in the most important of nineteenth-
century armed movements endowed them with certain privileges. For instance, an
editorial published during the Porfirian 1890s quipped about the lack of
transportation networks in the state at the height of national railway expansion:
“While other states, much more distant from the capital city [Mexico City] than ours,
already count on one or more railroads…while we lack even one railway.”
99

Conferred to a select elite few in the form of haciendas, economic
concessions, and political posts, such privileges remained largely out of reach for
Guerrero’s popular classes.
100
Demanding the sanctity of municipal autonomy and
low taxes, while articulating a sophisticated democratic vision that blended notions
of economic justice with achieved political rights, peasants confronted a plethora of
rulers throughout the nineteenth century that shared Santa Anna’s 1842 judgment of
the political incapacity of Mexico’s subaltern groups: “our pueblo, due to its lack of
education, still needs to be led by the hand like a child...the man who leads them

175; and, Rebecca Overmyer-Velázquez, “Indian, Nation and State in Guerrero, Mexico,” Ph.D.
Dissertation (University of California, Santa Barbara, 2003), 4-5.

99
El Avisador, 25 November 1891, cited in Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 99; Francisco
Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina en la Costa Grande de Guerrero (Mexico: Editorial
Posada, 1979), 83; and, Salazar Adame, “Periodo 1867-1910,” 43-44.

100
Hermenegildo Galeana, hero of the Independence struggles of the 1810s, received 16 haciendas for
his “service to the nation” located in the Costa Grande. Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina,
65-67.

56

needs to be of good intention, lover of his nation, and truly a Republican.”
101

Concomitant to child-like is irrationality. Such themes found full expression in the
indictments voiced by conservative Lucas Alamán in 1830 that described
contemporary guerrerense peasant rebellions as apolitical “barbarism” that attempted
to “ruin all property…[and] cause a desolation a hundred times more terrible than
that of the 1810s.”
102
The evaluations formulated by both Santa Anna and Alamán
harkened colonial-era social dichotomies of “people of reason” versus “people (re:
Indian/peasant) without reason. As we now turn to a cursory history of peasant
struggles from 1810-1940, a diametrically opposed vision of popular agency and
politics emerges. The political utopias of Guerrero’s campesinos expressed through
active political participation contributed to the formation, protection, and redefinition
of the Mexican nation-state throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century.

101
Letter from Santa Anna to Juan Álvarez, 16 April 1843, in Fernando Díaz y Díaz, Santa Anna y
Juan Álvarez frente a frente (Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1972), 150, cited in Armando
Bartra, Guerrero bronco: Campesinos, ciudadanos y guerrilleros en la Costa Grande (Mexico: Era,
2000 [1996]), 22.

102
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 132. Alamán served
as minister of the interior from 1830-1832 during the centralist/conservative presidency of Anastasio
Bustamante.

57

Durable Utopias I: Revolution of 1810
“What characterizes revolutionary classes at their moment of action is the awareness
that they are about to make the continuum of history explode.”—Walter Benjamin,
1940
103

Mexican peasants decisively entered the revolutionary fray in 1810
doubtfully knowing, or even moved by the notion, that their actions would shatter the
continuum of colonial history. As a contingent and processual social movement, the
1810 independence revolution arrived at an endpoint in 1821 starkly different from
those initial moments in September 1810 when Father Miguel Hidalgo organized his
peasant rebellion in modern-day Guanajuato state. While the revolution began as an
autonomist movement seeking greater political participation and influence within the
Spanish colonial system, the achievement of Independence in 1821 with the
negotiated Plan of Iguala reflected more than ten years of intense political
transformation and innovation among all of Mexico’s social classes, in cities and
throughout the countryside. Contrary to scholars who depicted the Plan de Iguala as
the founding document of a “conservative independence,” particularly with its
adaptation of a constitutional monarchy, the concessions granted by Agustín de
Iturbide to insurgents led by Vicente Guerrero demonstrated a negotiated end to the
long insurgency.
104
Such concessions, namely the expansion of citizenship to

103
Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4,
396.

104
Lucas Alamán, Historia de Méjico (Tomo 4), 666-668. For works that base their evaluation of a
“conservative Independence” on the small number of peasant insurgents in 1821 (or neglect the
effectiveness of such insurgents in preventing the re-establishment of colonial rule in the Mexican
countryside) see, Brian Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency: Mexican Regions, 1750-1824 (Cambridge:

58

include all men and keeping in place the recently revived 1812 Cadíz Constitution
(with special emphasis on the creation of municipalities), reveals both the military
power wielded by peasant insurgents who refused to accept defeat and two of the
pillars of insurgent peasant political cultures that developed in the course of
revolution: municipal autonomy and political egalitarianism for all adult males.
105

As themes that motivated peasant political action throughout the nineteenth century,
the 1810 Revolution represented their foundational moment.
For the formation of these types of popular peasant politics in Guerrero, 1808
constituted what Benjamin once referred to in his famous treatise on history as
Stillstellung, or the “zero-hour”
106
of their elaboration. As Guardino rightfully
argued, the year when Napoleon’s army traversed the northern border of Bourbon
Spain marked an important transition, or “zero-hour” of guerrerense subaltern
politics and their modes of expression:

Cambridge University Press, 1986), 58; Romeo Flores Caballero, Counterrevolution: The Role of
Spaniards in the Independence of Mexico (1804-1838) (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1974), 58; and, John Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico: The Social Bases of
Agrarian Violence, 1750-1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 11-12.

105
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 74-78.

106
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” www.marxists.org. Writing against a “historicism” that
simply fills up a “homogenous and empty time” with a mass of facts in Thesis 17, Benjamin offers his
interpretation of historical materialism as a non-linear form of writing history that traces the “zero-
hour” of events; in other words, zero-hour denoting a dramatic interruption of historicist narratives, “a
revolutionary chance in the struggle for the suppressed past.” Another translation refers to the
“messianic arrest of happening, or (to put it differently) a revolutionary chance in the fight for the
oppressed past.” See Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” Walter Benjamin, 396.

59

Before 1808, the primary forum for social and political disagreements
was the colonial court system; after 1808 it became rebellion and the
threat of rebellion. Before 1808 political action and peasant
resistance was atomized in lawsuits and riots that rarely extended
beyond a single village; after 1808 political actions in which peasants
from more than one village cooperated became common.
107

While the short-term implications of Napoleon’s southern expansionist drive
involved the creation of an imperial power vacuum in Spain’s American colonies, a
longer historical perspective reveals the end of a fragile yet effective colonial
hegemony that spanned across three centuries. As a crucial arena for widespread
insurgent activity from 1808-1821, the region that would become Guerrero in 1849
spawned a politics—popular republicanism—and a form—inter-village rural
coalitions able to forge alliances with local and regional elites—that shaped the
formation of Mexico as a national state throughout the nineteenth century.
108

***
What prompted Mexican campesinos to participate in the 1810 Independence
movement? Historians generally cite a host of structural and political factors, borne
from the Bourbon Reforms of the late eighteenth century, which in general terms

107
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 44.

108
Ibid, 79-80; and, Illades, Breve historia, 33-35. See also Jaime E. Rodríguez O., “Introduction:
The Origins of Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Mexico,” in The Divine Charter:
Constitutionalism and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century Mexico, ed. Jaime E. Rodríguez O. (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005), 10-13. By popular republicanism I am referring to the
political cultural switch that developed in rebel-controlled areas, including Guerrero, from “legitimist”
politics based on the rightful sovereignty of the captive King Ferdinand VII to republican ideas on
popular sovereignty and representative government. This will be discussed in more detail below.
Suffice to write here that one can trace a political continuity between popular republicanism to the
development of a popular federalism/liberalism that Guardino describes in his work by the mid-
nineteenth century.

60

increased economic exigencies on peasant villages through a more precise tax
collection system, and politically targeted the autonomy of peasant organizations.
Creole elites, too, faced a series of challenges that included limited access to high
political and economic offices, while the clergy lost some legal and financial
privileges (“fueros”).
109
Historians with an eye cast on agrarian matters stress the
introduction of capital and credit, through the figure of the merchant-investor, into
“pre-modern” societies of the Bajío region that resulted in the creation of a debt
peonage control system. In the Jalisco region, recently proletarianized Indians
returned to labor in the grain fields they once owned, annexed by neighboring
haciendas. An agrarian structural transformation that deprived Indian villagers of
their lands thus constituted a major motivation to enter the revolutionary fray of 1810
in some regions.
110
Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain and the 1808-1810 socio-

109
David Brading argues that the Bourbon expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 eroded the political
legitimacy of the Spanish crown and transformed parish priests, like Miguel Hidalgo and José María
Morelos, into revolutionaries—political legitimacy then fully undermined by the European events of
1808. David Brading, The First America: The Spanish monarchy, Creole patriots, and the Liberal
state, 1492-1867 (Cambridge, 1991). See also William Taylor, “Banditry and Insurrection: Rural
Unrest in Central Jalisco, 1790-1816,” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution: Rural Social Conflict in
Mexico, ed. Friedrich Katz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 205-246.

110
Hamnett, Roots of Insurgency, 34; and, Eric Van Young, Market and Hacienda in Eighteenth
Century Mexico: The Rural Economy of the Guadalajara Region, 1675-1820 (Maryland: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers, 2006 [1981]), chap. 14. Hamnett argued the localized social tensions that
revolved around the merchant-investor played a direct and indirect role in: the expansion of capital
and credit; pressures of indebtedness; land disputes in the Guadalajara region caused by annexation of
village lands; arguments of over labor conditions, wages, and water rights; and, the incorporation of
subaltern populations into the market economy through primitive methods of credit (which allowed
the use of debt as a form of social control). See also Friedrich Katz, “Rural Uprisings in Preconquest
and Colonial Mexico,” in Riot, Rebellion, and Revolution, ed. Katz, 94; and, John Coatsworth,
“Patterns of Rural Rebellion in Latin America: Mexico in Comparative Perspective,” in Riot,
Rebellion, and Revolution, ed. Katz, 54.

61

economic crises complement the long-term factors in explaining the unraveling of
what historian John Tutino described as the “colonial agrarian peace.”
111

Popular politics, or explanations that portray peasant insurgents as multi-
dimensional and heterogeneous political subjects, remained conspicuously absent in
these accounts.
112
In Guerrero, the existence of merchant monopolies over credit
that raised interest rates and drove down the prices received by indigenous and
mulatto peasants for their products effectively contributed to their rebelliousness by
1810—as did the rental of Indian village lands by “outsiders.” Mulatto
sharecroppers living in the coastal regions, subject to unstable swings experienced by
the cotton market in the late eighteenth century, bitterly resented the paying of
tribute stipulated by their caste position. Indigenous villagers firmly resisted
Bourbon policies that sought to tap into their cofradías funds, while both mulattos
and indigenous villagers continually protested the informal (and illegal) continuation

111
Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico, 12. The discussion on the explanatory factors
of the 1810 Independence movement, along with popular participation in the struggle, owes much to
conversations with Drs. Marjorie Becker and María Elena Martínez.

112
Even the recent work on the 1810 Revolution by Eric Van Young, while delving into the cultural
worlds of the peasant insurgents and forwarding some important insights on their political cultures,
arrives at a similar conclusion to that of Brading, Hamnett, and Tutino: a conclusion that stresses the
parochial, “un-modern,” and “backward-looking” characteristics of popular politics. Creole
“protonationalists” are contrasted with inward looking peasants solely concerned with the “primordial
ties” of community and family; thus, we get the classic autochthonous peasant incapable of imagining
national politics. Eric Van Young, The Other Rebellion: Popular Violence and Ideology in Mexico,
1810-1816 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Yet some scholars working on nineteenth
century Mexico and Latin America have demonstrated instances of peasants forming national
coalitions and developing national political registers that played an important role in state formation
processes. See Charles Walker, Smoldering Ashes: Cuzco and the Creation of Republican Peru,
1780-1840 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999); Brooke Larson, Trials of Nation Making:
Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004); and, Ariel de la Fuente, Children of Facundo: Caudill and Gaucho Insurgency during the
Argentine State-Formation Process (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

62

of the repartimiento system. Demographic trends tied to population growth and
demands for land (especially in the Tierra Caliente region) also played an important
role.
113
Yet such factors fail to fully explain the leap from “localized and dispersed
village riots” that characterized violent peasant protest during the colonial epoch to
the dramatically radical anti-colonial and republican revolution led by José María
Morelos that developed by 1813-1814.
114
How do we move beyond discussions, to
quote historian Ranajit Guha, in which peasant insurgency is “regarded as external to
the peasant’s consciousness and Cause is made to stand in as a phantom surrogate for
Reason?”
115

Examining rural perceptions of Napoleon’s 1808 invasion of Spain, of a
colonial hegemony in crisis, constitutes one such (if limited) way. The invasion
provoked a crisis of colonial legitimacy in New Spain as elites remained confused
and, crucially, divided on what course of action to take. A conservative coup in
1808 led by wealthy landowner Gabriel de Yermo that attempted to set up an
autonomous government to rule while the Spanish king remained captive further

113
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 39-43 & 53-57;
Illades, Breve historia, 32-35; Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 17-19; and, Jonathan Amith, The Mobius
Strip: A Spatial History of Colonial Society in Guerrero, Mexico (Stanford: Stanford University
Press, 2005), 537-541. In a theoretically innovative work that focuses on colonial central Guerrero,
Amith argues that by the late 1700s the realignment of the local economy, namely an alliance between
mining and merchants elites that kept maize prices on an open grain market low while political
officials manipulated public grain markets, posited the rural and urban poor in a shared structural
position; thus, suggesting one possible medium through which insurgent coalitions in this region were
formed along incipient class lines.

114
Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion in Colonial Mexican Villages (Stanford, 1979), 143-
146 & 151.

115
Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 47.

63

complicated an already tense and confused social context.
116
Divided elites, the
Yermo-led conservative suppression of the Mexico City municipal council, and the
arrest of the viceroy provided the immediate motivation for Miguel Hidalgo’s
famous cry of Dolores on 16 September 1810. The ensuing insurgency, a royalist-
tinged movement united by religion and monarchy that sought to end the “bad
government” of Yermo, sought to drive European Spaniards from Mexico in the
name of the captive King Ferdinand VII. For the first phase of the Independence
movement rural peoples across regions led by Creole elites fought under the banner
of “Long Live the King, Death to Bad Government” as they attempted to establish an
American kingdom still under the rule of the Spanish king.
117
Within a political
register that linked justice to the Spanish sovereign, the popularly perceived “illegal”
and seditious acts of local political functionaries and European merchants moved
peasants and some Creole elites to revolt in the name of the king against royalist
“bad government.” While “to kill a Spaniard” in the 1780s Andes signified the

116
For a classic and detailed account of the lead-up to the Yermo coup, see José María Luis Mora,
México y sus revoluciones, Tomo II (Mexico: Porrúa, 1965 [1836]), 295-313.

117
Stating that in the absence of the king the responsibility of sovereignty lay with the people,
Hispanic legal principles constituted one of the few, yet crucial, factors (along with religion) that
allotted the possibility of cross-class insurgent alliances. In violating this cornerstone of colonial
political legitimacy with the Yermo coup, Royalists in New Spain provided a legitimate argument for
insurgency for a national and diverse (in terms of race, caste, and occupation) movement. Rodríguez,
“Introduction,” 10-11; Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State,
59; Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 128-142; and, Carlos Herrejón Peredo, “La
justificación de la insurgencia,” Cuadernos Americanos 42 (1983), 162-180.

64

fulfillment of religious duty, to kill a Spaniard (or gachupín) in 1810 New Spain
protected the sovereignty and legitimacy of Ferdinand VII.
118

Shared notions of justice, rebellion, and “bad government,” along with anti-
gachupín thinking, thus facilitated the establishment of cross-class and inter-village
coalitions that collectively formed the 1810 insurgency. The latter element
manifested itself in different manners according to region and class, yet the actual
hate and disdain worked to create alliances between Creoles and peasant rebels.
119

Muleteers, an ethnically and socially diverse group that constituted one of two
important sources for insurgent leaders (priests being the other), resented well-
connected Iberian merchants who operated out of Mexico City and retained the help

118
Jan Szeminski, “Why Kill the Spaniard? New Perspectives on Andean Insurrectionary Ideology in
the 18
th
Century,” Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, ed. Steve
Stern, 190-191; Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 58-59;
Van Young, The Other Rebellion, chap. 17; and, Taylor, Drinking, Homicide, and Rebellion, 113-151.
In an October 1811 public decree that sought to avoid the outbreak of a “war of castes,” Morelos
asserted that the responsibility of rule, considering the captivity of Ferdinand VII by the French,
would fall upon Creoles, “who would best guard the rights of Ferdinand VII [and rule] without using
any of the colonial distinctions as all would be considered Americans, and all would see themselves as
brothers living in the sacred peace of the Redeemer.” Miguel Domínguez, La erección del estado de
Guerrero: Antecedentes históricos (Mexico: Secretaría de la Educación Pública, 1949), 75, cited in
Guerrero: textos de su historia vol. 1, ed. Carlos Illades (Mexico: Chilpancingo: Estado de
Guerrero/Instituto Mora, 1989), 183.

119
Of course, not all regions or indigenous and mulatto peasants joined the insurgency. Divisions
within peasant communities existed as well. Some indigenous communities, for instance, resented
and feared that the abolition of Indian identity (as a legal identity) as stipulated by the Cadíz
Constitution of 1812 and subsequent constitutions would strip them of the rights enjoyed under
colonial rule. In the Costa Chica region, mulatto participation in colonial militias that allowed them
to evade tribute demands, the limited participation of Spanish merchants in cotton production, and the
support of a militia commander/subdelegado in evading tribute demands apparently produced
unwavering loyalty to the Royalists—even when it came to supporting the Plan de Iguala in 1821.
See Manuel Ferrer Muñoz and María Bono López, “Las etnias indígenas y el nacimiento de un estado
nacional en México,” in La independencia de México y el proceso autonomista novohispano, 1808-
1824, ed. Virginia Guedea (México: UNAM/Instituto de Investigaciones Doctor José María Luis
Mora, 2001), 363-365; and, Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National
State, 53-54.

65

of political officials to prevent competition. In the cotton-producing Costa Grande,
where the volatile cycles of the world market, high interest rates for credit, and the
repartimiento system crystallized in the figure of the foreign merchant for mulatto
and Indian sharecroppers, anti-gachupín sentiment ran high. When María Morelos
arrived in the Costa Grande with twenty men in November 1810 he encountered little
difficulty in quickly recruiting 3,000 soldiers and rapidly conquering most of the
Costa Grande, leaving only Acapulco in the hands of merchants and royalist soldiers.
Similar sentiments led landowning families such as the Bravos from central Guerrero
and the Galeanas in the Costa Grande to actively participate as insurgent leaders.
120

Following the capture and execution of Hidalgo by royalist forces in 1811,
Morelos assumed the mantle of insurgent leadership and presided over a radical
political shift in the revolutionary imaginary of the rebel forces. Morelos himself
moved from describing the revolution as the protection of Ferdinand VII’s rule in
late 1811 to proclaiming at the aperture of the Chilpancingo Congress in September
1813 that:

120
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 55-57. For a classic
account of Morelos’ first journey to the Costa Grande, see Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, Obras
completas II: Obras históricas, ed. Moisés Ochoa Campos (Mexico: Secretaría de la Educación
Pública, 1986), 131-211. According to Guardino, the Bravo family entered the fray after royalist
officials attempted to arrest them for not cooperating in the effort to battle Morelos. As owners of
cotton-producing haciendas, the Galeanas were also subject to market volatility and to the cornering
of harvests and credit by merchants. The anti-gachupín ideology of Juan Álvarez, prominent
insurgent leader and future president, contained a personal dimension in addition to other political
motives. Having been orphaned in 1807 and left under the care of the Spanish “subdelegado” of
Acapulco, the latter treated Álvarez in despotic manner and even tried to deprive him of his
inheritance. Álvarez would go onto to join Morelos in 1810 at the age of 20. Muñoz y Pérez, El
General Don Juan Álvarez, 3.

66

…sovereignty resides essentially in the people…when [sovereignty
is] transmitted to Monarchs that are absent, dead, or captive, such
sovereignty flows back to the people…who are free to reform their
political institutions whenever it suits them…that no nation possesses
the right to oppress another if not preceded by an unjust aggression.
121

The radicalism (and novelty) of the switch from “royalist” to anti-colonial republican
politics resided in the practice of popular sovereignty legitimizing, indeed
encompassed within, a form of representative and independent government. Yet, the
switch constituted more of a blending of the new with the old, as evidenced in
Morelos’ words that demonstrated the influence of pre-absolutist Jesuit theologian
Francisco Suárez. As scholars noted, pre-absolutist political ideas that stated God
conferred sovereignty to the King only after passing through “the people [el pueblo]”
comprised a cornerstone in both elite and subaltern political cultures throughout the
Spanish empire.
122
Creole leaders in 1808 used that idea to justify self-rule during

121
Carlos María de Bustamante, Cuadro histórico de la Revolución Mexicana, Tomo 1 (Mexico:
Comisión Nacional para la Celebración del Sesquicentenario de la Proclamación de la Independencia,
1961), 620, in Guerrero: textos de su historia, ed. Illades, 193.

122
Specifically the work of theologian Francisco Suárez, who in his political writings stated that “the
power to rule other men politically was never bestowed by God upon a single man;” and, the decision
to depose a tyrannical or unfit king rests solely upon the “community” that received sovereignty from
God. See J.A. Fernández-Santamaría, Natural Law, Constitutionalism, Reason of State, and War:
Counter-Reformation Spanish Political Thought, Volume 1 (New York: Peter Lang, 2005), 188-223.
Guardino noted that such pre-absolutist thinking maintained a strong influence throughout the
colonial era. See Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 59.
For discussions on the place of the Spanish king within the revolutionary imaginaries of the 1810
insurgents and other colonial subjects in South America see Eric Van Young, “Quetzalcóatl, King
Ferdinand, and Ignacio Allende Go to the Seashore; or, Messianism and Mystical Kinship in Mexico,
1800-1821,” in The Independence of Mexico and the Creation of the New Nation, ed. Jaime
Rodríguez O. (Los Angeles: UCLA Latin American Center Publications, 1989), 112-114; Van
Young, The Other Rebellion, 492-493; Jaime Rodríguez O., “From Royal Subject to Republican
Citizen: The Role of the Autonomists in the Independence of Mexico,” in The Independence of
Mexico and the Creation of a New Nation, 8-10; and, John L. Phelan, The People and the King: The
Comunero Revolution in Colombia, 1781 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978).

67

the absence of Ferdinand VII, while Indian village riots carried out by “loyal
subjects” against “bad government” throughout the colonial era operated on similar
premises.
123
In addition to Morelos, Hidalgo also justified the 1810 movement on
the same political principles. Nonetheless, the question remains: what triggered the
gradual move toward notions of republican and representative government?
Guardino cited two immediate factors: an impression spread via rumor
throughout important parts of New Spain that Ferdinand VII had, in some way,
betrayed Spain and gone “Napoleonic;” and, the refusal of the Spanish Cortes to both
“recognize the insurgency and the independence of New Spain under the
sovereign.”
124
By the time Ferdinand returned to the throne in March 1814,
abolishing the Cortes and the 1812 Cadíz Constitution some two months later,
insurgents led by Morelos had already experienced the political effects unleashed
(and disseminated via rebel press) by the organizing of the Anáhuac Congress in
Chilpancingo in September 1813. At this central Guerrero town Morelos presented
his famous “Sentiments of the Nation,” a document in which the rebel leader stated

123
One can discern radical differences in the ways that both groups justified the immediate reversion
of sovereignty to them. For instance, in an 1809 decree Creoles from the Mexico City municipal
council argued that in the absence of the Spanish king, “creoles, as heirs to the rights that from the
conquest of this empire were handed down to our elders by the conquistadores.” See Alicia
Hernández Chávez, “From res publicae to Republic: The Evolution of Republicanism in Early
Mexico,” in The Divine Charter, ed. Jaime Rodríguez, 38. Yet, in their 1808 discussions, the Mexico
City municipal council “invited the Indian governor of the barrio of San Juan to their deliberations;”
thus, expanding the definition of “the people” to be included in popular sovereignty. Guardino,
Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 59. See also Jaime Rodríguez O.
“From Royal Subject to Republican Citizen;” 8-10; and, Rodríguez O. “Introduction,” in The Divine
Charter, 10-13.

124
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 67.

68

that sovereignty arose from the “people”—a gendered, caste-less definition of the
body politic based on the distinction between “americano” and “europeo”—who
willingly conferred such power to elected representatives; thus, radically and
irrevocably severing the idea of popular sovereignty from the figure of the formerly
captive King. The demand for independence, as the seemingly logical outcome of
this political argument and three years of insurgency, followed with a declaration
promulgated on 6 November 1813.
Just as crucial in the eyes of mulatto and indigenous campesino rebels,
Morelos and the Anáhuac Congress also declared the abolishment of slavery, the
termination of tribute demands, end of repartimiento and excise taxes, and the
confiscation of Spanish wealth for national interest. The insurgent priest thus
advocated, without overlooking the strategic aim of gaining popular allegiance, the
rectification of the very problems that formed the cornerstones of rebellious
campesino political cultures during the late colonial era.
125
Yet, the abrogation of
grievances provoked by Bourbon reforms proved far more radical. By eliminating
slavery and caste distinctions (and accompanying requirements of tribute and taxes),
Morelos essentially challenged the justifying premises of Spanish colonial hegemony
that, in the words of historian Sergio Serulnikov when evaluating the 1780 Andean
Revolutions, used “cultural difference as a signifier of racial inferiority and the use

125
The document also established Catholicism as the only religion of the land and limited the
admission of foreigners into Mexico to artisans willing to teach their crafts. Lucas Alamán, Historia
de Méjico, Tomo III (Mexico: Editorial Jus, 1968), 350-351, cited in Guerrero: textos de su historia,
Tomo I, 197-198; Rodríguez O., “Introduction,” 15-17; and, Ernesto Lemoine, Morelos y la
Revolución de 1810 (Morelia: Gobierno del Estado de Michoacán, 1984), 260-265.

69

of the notion of racial inferiority as a legitimate claim to rule.”
126
The praxis of the
Declaration of Independence thus required the demolishing of a colonial social order
based upon caste distinctions and corresponding rights, privileges, and duties.
127

If the Congress of Chilpancingo signaled a drastic political rupture between
metropole and colony, the elaboration of a constitution for the liberated insurgent
zone in the hotlands of Michoacán in late 1814 cemented the idea of popular
sovereignty/republican governance in the revolutionary imaginary of campesino
insurgents. More than simply “turning the world upside down,” the Apatzingán
Constitution of 22 October 1814 marked the elaboration of an alternative republican
polity, rooted in both Enlightenment principles and Spanish legal-politico traditions,
which essentially transformed colony into nation; colonial subjects into citizens-in-
formation.
128
While the constitution drew heavily from “Sentiments” and the work
of the Anáhuac Congress, the Magna Carta of the rebel state introduced a plural

126
Sergio Serulnikov, “Andean Political Imagination in the Late Eighteenth Century,” in Political
Cultures in the Andes, 1750-1950, eds. Nils Jacobsen and Cristóbal Aljovín de Losada (Durham:
Duke University Press, 2005), 271.

127
A social order fundamentally based upon, as María Elena Martínez argued, control over the
sexuality of Spanish/Creole/White women; or, rather, their wombs. The sistema de castas constituted
“a system [that] privileged whiteness and was accompanied by a whole sexual economy centered on
the inaccessibility of most Spanish women to all but a few Spanish men.” See María Elena
Martínez,” The Black Blood of New Spain: Limpieza de Sangre, Racial Violence, and Gendered
Power in Early Colonial Mexico,” The William and Mary Quarterly 61: 3 (July 2004), 483.

128
The Constitution, along with earlier pronouncements made by insurgent leaders, revealed a certain
cultural hybridity that melded pre-absolutist political theology, Enlightenment ideas (particularly
Montesquieu’s notion of the division of power between different governing branches), and principles
forwarded by Spanish Liberals within the 1812 Cadíz Constitution. That hybridity proved fluid and
contingent as events in Mexico and Spain throughout the 1810s shaped the changing definition of
popular sovereignty in both the insurgent-controlled Mexican areas and within the Liberal Spanish
Cortes. See Lemoine, Morelos y la Revolución de 1810, 289; Richard Herr, The Eighteenth Century

70

executive office and a powerful legislature in light of Morelos’ late 1813 military
disasters in Michoacán. Both documents and their widely publicized and distributed
ideals marked the culmination of a transformation of campesino political cultures
from royalist to republican in the insurgent zones. The trinity of God, “the people,”
and the King was permanently and fatally disrupted (at least in reference to foreign
monarchs) as the conferment of popular sovereignty would now involve a liberal
republican state. Liberal nationalism and popular sovereignty thus underscored the
transformation of colonial subjects formerly tagged by racial categories into
“American” republican citizens.
129

Campesinos concretely demonstrated such political cultural transformations
in their contact and participation with the liberated zones that collectively constituted
an “insurgent state.” Within most of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and swaths of Michoacán,
Veracruz, and Puebla, insurgents forged a state that in the course of five years (1810-
1815), and amidst violent royalist counterinsurgency efforts, organized elections,
formed a Congress, and created a functioning constitution. Villages comprised the
basic social unit of the rebel government, facilitating the collecting of taxes crucial to
the maintenance of the state and regular army. Yet, they also retained a varying
degree of autonomy that shaped the organization of elections
130
at the local level in

Revolution in Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958), 347-348; and, Guardino, Peasants,
Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 68.

129
Lemoine, Morelos y la Revolución de 1810, 264.

130
For a critical look at elections held in insurgent-controlled areas, see Virginia Guedea, “Los
procesos electorales insurgents,” Estudios de historia novohispana 11 (1991): 222-248.

71

ways that did not always follow the constitutionally-mandated precept of universal
male suffrage. Such a practical ceding of power by the state to the local ensured
continued popular support for the insurgency. Morelos’ organizing of a village-
based militia system to supplement his highly organized army further guaranteed that
sovereignty truly emanated from the (armed) “people” to the representative rebel
state;
131
and, proved quite useful in organizing guerrilla warfare campaigns during
the dark days of the revolution after the royalists captured the insurgent priest in
1815.
132

In contrast to scholars who minimize the importance of the Anáhauc
Congress and the Apatzingán Constitution,
133
or reduce peasant political horizons
during the struggle for Mexican Independence to “extending metaphorically only so

131
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 68-71; and Lemoine,
Morelos y la Revolución de 1810, 289-296.

132
The watershed defeat of Morelos during his Valladolid campaign in December 1813 and his
capture and execution by November 1815 marked the end of insurgent aspirations to defeat royalist
forces on a national level. Remaining leaders like Vicente Guerrero, Juan Álvarez, and Isidro Montes
de Oca turned to guerrilla warfare—and the support of rural villages that makes such a politico-
military strategy possible—as a way to prevent the total defeat of the independence movement first
started by Hidalgo in 1810. From 1814-1820, as the insurgent state all but withered away,
guerrerense villages in the Costa Grande, La Montaña, and Tierra Caliente sustained a guerrilla
movement that concentrated on harassing larger royalist troop detachments and disrupting the
everyday commercial operations of the royalist colonial state. See Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and
the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 70-80; Christon Archer, “La Causa Buena: The
Counterinsurgency Army of New Spain and the Ten Years War,” in The Independence of Mexico and
the Origins of the New Nation, ed. Rodríguez O., 102-108; and, Christon Archer, “The Militarization
of Politics or the Politicization of the Military? The Novohispano and Mexican Office Corps, 1810-
1830,” in The Divine Charter, ed. Rodríguez O., 209-218.

133
In arguing for the historical importance of the 1812 Cadíz Constitution for subsequent Mexican
constitutions that adopted many of its radically liberal precepts, Rodríguez minimizes the importance
of the Apatzingán Constitution since “it was never implemented and exercised no influence on
subsequent constitutional development in New Spain/Mexico.” Yet, such an argument can only be
made by neglecting the latter’s importance to the campesino insurgents that sustained the 1810
movement and focusing solely on “high” politics. Rodríguez, “Introduction,” 16-17.

72

far as the view from their church bell tower,”
134
Guerrero’s campesinos
demonstrated through revolutionary practice their anti-colonial, national, and
republican politics. The forging of cross-class and inter-village insurgent alliances
that facilitated the organizing of an anti-colonial American revolution revealed not
“dialogues of the deaf”
135
between peasants and Creole elites, but rather an ability to
communicate in a common language (however fragile and momentary) established
within a colonial context. Indigenous participation in, for example, the colonial
world economy and Spanish legal system from the Conquest onward prevented the
formation of strictly autochthonous rural villages. Taxes, religion, and legal disputes
thus tied such communities, internally fractious as they were, into a broader colonial
world their inhabitants “needed to engage…on some level to live their lives inside
their communities as best they could.”
136
Undoubtedly, campesino aspirations
differed on some level from those that moved their Creole military and political
leaders like Morelos, Hermenegildo Galeana, and Juan Álvarez. Yet, popular
support for the insurgents was not automatic as campesinos forced the rebel leaders
to negotiate their support. The 1810 insurgency thus demonstrated the possibility of

134
Van Young, The Other Rebellion, 483. For an incisive and perceptive rebuttal that greatly
influenced my own reading of this work, see Guardino, The Time of Liberty, 284-286.

135
Van Young, The Other Rebellion, 493.

136
Guardino, The Time of Liberty, 286. In positing a rigid separation between Creole “proto-
nationalism” and the “naïve monarchism” of indigenous communities whose politics were oriented
inward, Van Young seemed to rehash the notion of rural people as “pre-political,” incapable of
imagining polities beyond the communal level. Ironically, such an argument places the historian in
the company of the very scholars—and approaches to the 1810 Independence movement—he was
writing against.

73

momentarily overcoming “dialogues of the deaf” to create a heterogeneous
movement: a revolution in which villages and rural communities sustained an
insurgent state until at least 1815 and continued to support guerrilla groups led by
Vicente Guerrero in fluid “liberated zones” up to the 1821 proclamation of the Plan
of Iguala.
137

As a means of attaining specific political goals, coalition-building with other
villages and village outsiders would thus characterize guerrerense campesino
movements for the next half-century. In addition to innovative forms of protest and
resistance, peasant political visions also changed during the uneven process of
Mexican Independence. Comprising a creative amalgamation of political concepts
drawn from colonial political discourse and the appropriation of certain liberal
notions derived from the 1812 Cádiz Constitution, the peasant shift to republican
politics in 1813-1814 under the leadership of Morelos occurred through the praxis of
revolution; and, cemented by the actual application of liberal precepts stipulated by
the Cadíz document and insurgent proclamations.
138
Specifically, the Cadíz

137
Ibid, 284-286; and, Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State,
57-70. For a useful essay that argued the very structure of Spanish colonialism in the Andes
prevented the elaboration of village-centered politics and worldview, see Serulnikov, “Andean
Political Imagination in the Late Eighteenth Century,” 273-275.

138
As an eloquent, even visionary political document, the Apatzingán Constitution borrowed heavily
from the Cadíz Constitution while simultaneously Americanizing definitions of citizenship to include
all adult males born in, the words of José Marti, “nuestra America.” The impact of this notion of
citizenship can be seen in Guerrero’s acceptance of the Plan de Iguala only after it guaranteed the
right to vote (e.g. political participation) to all men. Mario de la Cueva, “La idea de la soberania,” in
Estudios sobre el decreto Constitucional de Apatzingán (Mexico: UNAM, 1964), 317. For an
assessment of the importance of the document expressed by a nineteenth century intellectual, see José
María Luis Mora, “Discurso sobre la Independencia del Imperio Mexicano,” in Obras Sueltas de José
María Luis Mora, cuidadano mexicano (Mexico: Porrúa, 1963), 469.

74

Constitution permitted the establishment of municipalities in villages that contained
1,000 or more “souls”—a requirement zealously followed in 1812 and again in 1820
when Spanish liberals forced Ferdinand to reinstate the Constitution. In Guerrero
alone 71 municipalities emerged in the eight months prior to the Plan de Iguala. In
time, the municipality became both “the symbolic center of rural political life”
139
and
the vehicle through which guerrerense (and Mexican) peasants engaged the Mexican
state-in-formation throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Defense of the
municipality would come to signify the vigilant protection of local autonomy and
citizenship rights against possible state encroachments—a possibility turned reality
in the decades that followed Independence.

Durable Utopias II: The Development of Popular Federalism, 1821-1860

Continuing the Independence struggle initiated by Hidalgo and led alternately
by José María Morelos and Vicente Guerrero, campesinos guerrerenses
140
fought in
1828 to bring Guerrero to the presidency; joined Juan Álvarez in his mid-century
struggles against Santa Anna to carry out the Revolution of Ayutla; and, took on both
Conservatives and French troops during the 1860s. This section focuses on rural

139
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 87; Alicia Hernández
Chavez, “From res publicae to Republic: The Evolution of Republicanism in early Mexico,” in The
Divine Charter, 54-55; and, Rodríguez O., “Introduction,” 12-14.

140
In the years after Independence, indigenous groups constituted 79% of Guerrero’s population.
Afro-Mexicans and mulattos made up 12%, other “castas” 6%, and Spaniards 3%. Eduardo Miranda,
“Los pueblos de indios en la formación del Estado de Guerrero,” Revista Altamirano 12 (1999), 121,
cited in Tomás Bustamante Álvarez, “Los campesinos en la reinvención de Guerrero,” in El sur en
movimiento: la reinvención de Guerrero del siglo XXI, eds. Tomás Álvarez and Sergio Sarmiento
Silva (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero/CIESAS, 2001), 159.

75

subaltern participation in the formation and defense of “la patria” (the nation) and
the continued elaboration of popular political cultures through such involvement.
Demands such as municipal (and state) autonomy, low taxes, a federalist diffusion of
state power, and universal male suffrage grounded the rural political imaginaries of
campesinos in everyday terrains of struggle and produced a “popular federalism”
141

by the time Álvarez led the Ayutla movement in 1854. In essence, this subaltern
political register articulated political visions (alternately liberatory and oppressive)
that looked beyond village church towers to continually expose the contradiction
between the “promise and practice of national-democratic discourse.”
142
They
articulated alternative definitions of citizenship, nationalism, and governance.
Yet, the campesino-regional elite alliance that fought for decades to create a
federal state that respected local autonomy and provided universal male suffrage
paralleled the gradual development of a regional cacique system that sought, and
succeeded in, creating a system of domination and exploitation founded on the fusion
of political and economic power.
143
Ironically, regional leaders like Álvarez

141
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 95-96, 210.

142
Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 9 & 12. As Mallon, Guardino and other scholars stressed, such
campesino political discourses themselves were the products of struggle and negotiation that took
place at the village level and along gender, generational, kinship, and ethnic lines. As Mallon
insightfully writes in explaining her notion of communal hegemony, “….the challenge for those of us
wanting to understand popular political culture and action is to develop approaches that make visible
both the hierarchy and the heroism, the solidarity and the surveillance [within peasant communities].”
For a similar argument see William Roseberry, Anthropologies and Histories: Essays in Culture,
History, and Political Economy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).

143
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 13; and, Adán Benítez Aguirre, Guerrero: economia campesina y
capitalismo, 1960-1987 (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 1995), 202-206.

76

managed to elaborate a regional cacicazgo social formation by the mid-1850s that
lasted for decades.
144
Thus, as campesinos expressed and fought for an intricate
political vision of what Mexico should be, the elites they supported at the local-
regional level created a cacique system of domination that shaped the forms of
popular struggles from the 1820s to 1880s.
145

Nonetheless, the historic struggle between campesinos and caciques in
Guerrero was not so evidently dyadic. While traditional historiography of nineteenth
century Mexican (and Latin American) state formation generally focused on the
enigmatic figure of the caudillo as the determinant form of political leadership,
capable of mobilizing popular support through (mechanical) patron-client relations,

144
I do not wish to imply that a lack of change characterized the political cacique structure in
Guerrero or popular political cultures. As this chapter will demonstrate, the complex relation between
historical continuity and historical change is a crucial one. Elite efforts to overhaul and impose new
hegemonic political cultures (e.g. Mexican Liberals during the 1850s and the victorious
Constitutionalists from 1917-1940) necessarily affect and influence popular politics. Moreover,
insurgent groups and ruling elites have appealed to the themes of continuity and change to legitimize,
respectively, rebellions and ruling authority. For instance, PDLD insurgents during the 1970s (and
ERPI guerrillas in 2008) claim that the lot of guerrerenses—subject to the whim of exploitative
authoritarian rulers—continued unabated for decades, thereby justifying their mode of resistance and
call for a new revolution. Liberals during La Reforma tended to portray the country as still colonial
during the 1850s, with independence having failed to produce “modern” citizens, as a way to justify
“a set of political interests and ideals that emphasized the need for dramatic reform.” Guardino, The
Time of Liberty, 278.

145
In an essay tracing the origins of political authoritarianism in Mexico, John Coatsworth noted that
democracy in nineteenth century Mexico existed only at the local, popular level, particularly in
indigenous communities and some mestizo villages. In tracing the continuity between the Porfiriato
and the preceding Reforma governments, Coatsworth argues that liberals and federalists generally
ignored such instances of local democracy, focusing on strengthening the links between state and
federal governments on the basis of agreements reached with regional caciques; thus, rendering
nineteenth century federalism as “ profoundly opportunistic and at the same time ineffective.” Local
definitions of (patriarchal) democracy, with Zapatismo constituting the classic case, underwrote the
campesino revolution of 1910. Joan Coatsworth, “Los orígenes sociales del autoritarismo en
México,” in Los orígenes del atraso: nueve ensayos de historia económica de México en los siglos
XVIII y XIX, ed. John Coatsworth (Mexico: Alianza Editorial Mexicana, 1990), 221-228.

77

recent works demonstrate a messier, more dialectical relation between leader and
base.
146
As in rural Argentina or Peru, campesinos in Guerrero constituted adroit
political subjects that demonstrated an ability to forge cross-class alliances with
regional elites and community outsiders and create inter-village pacts during times of
rebellion for strategic and political aims.
147
Far from comprising the apolitical
objects that responded to caudillo calls according to hungry stomachs, kinship ties,
or fear of punishment, peasants throughout Latin America generally negotiated their
participation under caudillo leadership with a focus on the possibility of fulfilling
their political aims: the revocation of taxes in 1840s Guerrero, resistance to military
recruitment in northwestern Argentina during the 1860s, and, to cite one last
example, the indigenous struggle against head taxes in 1830s Peru.
148
Such
processes of negotiation, similar to what Stuart Hall once referred to as a “dialectic
of cultural struggle,”
149
produced intimate and dynamic connections between popular
and caudillo/elite politics—connections necessary to understanding processes of
state formation and political (in)stability in nineteenth century Latin America. For

146
For example see, Hugh Hamill, ed., Caudillos: Dictators in Spanish America (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1992); and, John Lynch, Caudillos in Spanish America, 1800-1850
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

147
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 45. Such “outsiders”
included: parish priests, muleteers, and landowning families like the Bravos of the central region and
the Galeanas from the Costa Grande.

148
De la Fuente, Children of Facundo, 170-174; and, Walker, Smoldering Ashes, 225-226. See also
Mallon, Peasant and Nation; Larson, Trials of Nation Making, esp. chapter 1; and, Guy Thomson,
Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism in Nineteenth Century Mexico: Juan Francisco Lucas
and the Puebla Sierra (Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1999).
149
Stuart Hall, “Notes on Deconstructing ‘The Popular,’” in People’s History and Socialist Theory,
ed. Raphael Samuel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), 233.

78

Guerrero, these linkages help elucidate the formation of popular federalism by the
1850s, its modification into an oppositional popular liberalism most vibrant during
the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, and its expression as armed peasant insurgency
during the 1910 Mexican Revolution.

***
Conflict and ephemeral compromises characterized efforts to forge a new
nation in the forty years after Mexican Independence. Clashing political
perspectives in relation to the proper source of sovereignty—nation or states—soon
found expression among Mexican elites in what constituted a seemingly antonymic
political clash between federalists and centralists from the late 1820s to1840s. This
clash, in essence, involved competing definitions of the Mexican nation. Would
Mexico comprise a centralized national entity that restricted political access to social
elites, limited suffrage, and practically erased the political importance of
municipalities? Or would the former Spanish colony operate on the federalist
premises of mass male political participation, a powerful legislature and weak
executive, and generally spread political power to the state and local levels?
Following the abdication of Iturbide as constitutional monarch of Mexico in March
1823, and the ratifying of the “confederalist” 1824 Constitution by provincial and
Mexico City elites, such questions established the parameters of political debate and

79

political coalitions in the emerging nation.
150
Campesino participation within those
political coalitions-oft-turned-insurgencies, as voters
151
and/or guerrillas, proved
decisive in determining both military and political outcomes as they violently forced
their political visions, usually federalist, into the national halls of “formal”
politics.
152

Recalling the moment in which Guadalupe Victoria took office as Mexico’s
first president in 1824, Lucas Alamán wrote in his memoirs that the former insurgent
“found himself in the most prosperous of circumstances; the republic enjoyed calm;
the parties had been controlled; and there was an expectation of a happy future.”
153

In the Guerrero countryside, Alamán’s recollection proved largely accurate as most
insurgents had turned their attention to municipal politics. As stressed earlier, the

150
Rodríguez O., “Introduction,” 20-22; and, Rodríguez O., “The Struggle for the Nation: The First
Centralist-Federalist Conflict in Mexico,” The Americas 49:1 (July 1992), 2-10 & 20-21. By
“confederalist” Rodríguez refers to the compromise reached in the 1824 Constitution on the shared
nature of sovereignty between states and the nation—a compromise that established a federal republic
in 1824. For Iturbide’s 18-month rule see Timothy Anna, “The Iturbide Interregnum,” in The
Independence of Mexico, 185-199; and, Anna, “The Role of Agustín Iturbide: A Reappraisal,”
Journal of Latin American Studies 17 (1985), 79-110).

151
Richard Warren argued that the years of 1823-1830 witnessed a “boom” in popular political
participation, particularly through voting. See Richard Warren, “Elections and Popular Political
Participation in Mexico, 1808-1836,” in Liberals, Politics and Power: State Formation in
Nineteenth-Century Latin America, eds. Vincent C. Peloso and Barbara Tenenbaum (Athens:
University of Georgia Press, 1996), 42-44.

152
Leticia Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas en México, 1819-1906 (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1980), 85-
120. In contrast to Guardino, Reina contended that regional-local leaders like Juan Álvarez simply
manipulated peasants and their demands in order to guarantee their participation in his military and
political forays. In positing this mechanical and one-sided patron-client relationship, Reina neglects
the political capabilities of peasants and their political motivations for joining insurgent movements
(motivations that move beyond demands for land).

153
Alamán, Historia de Méjico Tomo V, 812; cited in Rodríguez O., “The Struggle for the Nation,”
22.

80

municipio became the local institution through which peasants engaged the national
state not only to voice demands but also for political participation in the form of
elections, tax payment and collection, and the local implementation of national laws.
Guardino’s research demonstrated that in areas such as the Costa Grande and Tierra
Caliente—bastions of the independence insurgency—the era of 1820-1835 proved
“favorable” for campesinos as mass suffrage laws stipulated by the 1824
Constitution allowed them to “control municipalities and defend their resources and
limited the power of appointed officials whose colonial counterparts had exploited
peasant resources.”
154
Such participation essentially constituted political battles over
the dimensions and substance of the nascent Mexican state as reproduced at the local
level. Questions over municipal control, who paid taxes, and who voted represented
national issues of sovereignty, political power, and citizenship manifested at the local
level. As the Centralists began their counterrevolution in the late 1820s, peasant
communities in Guerrero mobilized and turned to the forging of inter-village
coalitions, armed protest, and regional rebellion to protect their local definitions of
federalism based on autonomy and lower taxes.
Economic factors also contributed to popular unrest during the late 1820s.
Primarily, the opening of Mexico as a market for North Atlantic textile products
severely affected coastal Guerrero as campesinos’ raw cotton faced stiff competition

154
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 108. Indigenous
communities, Guardino noted, had extensive colonial experience with the process of voting in contrast
to non-Indian communities who spent much of the 1820s learning the process. Suffrage laws after
1824 stipulated that all men over the age of 25 had the right to vote. This time period also witnessed
lower personal taxes (in relation to pre-Independence colonial taxes).

81

from cheaper foreign imports for production in the textile plants of Puebla and
Mexico City. Mining remained underdeveloped and stalled in the Taxco region due
to the lack of capital. Popular ire soon found (or rather re-emerged to find)
scapegoats: the Spanish merchant, landholder and mine owner. The predominance
of Spanish merchants within the Mexican economy as a whole, not to mention the
political activities of certain Spaniards within the Centralist camp, permitted the
crystallization of anti-Spanish Mexican nationalism. Mulatto militias from the Costa
Grande assaulted and even killed several Spanish merchants in 1827 and 1828,
calling for the strict application of a December 1827 Federal Expulsion Law aimed at
Spaniards. The Tierra Caliente indigenous village of San Miguel Totolapan sparked
a region-wide rebellion in 1829 that sought to expel non-Indian residents they
identified as Spanish “chaquetas,” a term previously used during the 1810 revolution
to describe Spanish troops, according to contemporary federal law.
155
Rumors of
internal plots that sought to return Mexico to Spanish rule further intensified anti-
Spanish sentiment, Mexican nationalism, and popular mobilization. Following the
short-lived and defeated uprising of centralist Nicolas Bravo in 1827, former
insurgent Juan Álvarez re-appeared on the military scene promising to lead a
campesino force to Mexico City to preserve Mexican liberty and demand the
expulsion of Spaniards.
156

155
Ibid, 113-120.

156
Muñoz y Pérez, General Don Juan Álvarez, 10-11. According to Muñoz y Pérez, Álvarez initially
did not support legal and extralegal methods that sought to expel all Spaniards from Mexico. While
military commander of Acapulco, Álvarez led the counterinsurgency effort against the anti-Spanish

82

Anti-Spanish sentiment provided a rallying call that stressed independence
and national sovereignty for the supporters of Vicente Guerrero’s failed presidential
bid in 1828. Following Guerrero’s narrow loss to a former royalist military officer,
Antonio López de Santa Anna revolted in Veracruz accusing the presidential winner
as the beneficiary of a pro-Spanish and aristocratic conspiracy. From the Costa
Grande, Álvarez and Isidro Montes de Oca followed suit, leading a mulatto militia
force all the way to Cuernavaca while insurgent groups from the Tierra Caliente also
participated. A fleeting popular uprising in Mexico City, also motivated by demands
for the expulsion of Spaniards, displayed allegiance to the Guerrero-led revolt and,
according to contemporary observers, allowed the urban lower classes and armed
rebels to take over public space for more than a week.
157
By late 1828 this
Revolution of La Acordada proved successful, placing Guerrero in the presidential
chair and initiating a short-lived, yet radical presidential administration. Utilizing
the figure of the Spaniard to symbolize “absolutism” and foreign “tyranny” while
simultaneously evoking the Spanish connections of Mexico City elites, the
Revolution of La Acordada managed to coalesce regional coalitions between
provincial elites and indigenous, mestizo, and mulatto peasants for national designs.

forces of José María Gallardo, forces responsible for several killings of Spanish merchants in the
Costa Grande. Yet, by 1828 Álvarez joined forces with Montes de Oca to demand the legally
mandated expulsion of all Spaniards in order to prevent, in the words of one Friar Arenas, the return
of “sweet Spanish domination.”

157
Silvia Arrom, “Popular Politics in Mexico City: The Parian Riot, 1828,” Hispanic American
Research Review 68:2 (May 1988), 257-260; and, Will Fowler, “Dreams of Stability: Mexican
Political Thought during the ‘Forgotten Years:’ An Analysis of the Beliefs of Creole Intelligensia
(1821-1853),” Bulletin for Latin American Research 14:3 (September 1995), 292-295. See also Luis
Mora, México y sus revoluciones, Tomo I, 80-82.

83

Designs, as they believed, exercised in the defense of the nation. The radical, yet
conflicted, definition of grassroots democracy advocated by Vicente Guerrero and
the radical yorkinos
158
that supported him converged with local interpretations of
federalism espoused by the insurgents that carried the dark-skinned Independence
hero to power. The stage was set for more than two decades of federalist-centralist
strife.
159

Racialized class warfare formed the subtext of the strife, at least as
conceptualized and publicly presented by centralist politicians and intellectuals.
Guerrero’s “populist” presidency lasted less than a year in the face of Spanish
invasion, bankruptcy of the national treasury, and the loss of support from federalists
who disagreed with the president’s ruling by emergency decree. With Anastasio
Bustamante taking office in early 1830, Álvarez, Montes de Oca, and Guerrero
organized mulatto and Indian guerrilla forces predominantly in the region of

158
Yorkino refers to the Masonic lodge to which this coalition of insurgents belonged to, specifically
the York-rite lodges. Historians traditionally have explained the Revolution of La Acordada as a
political conflict between competing Masonic lodges, the Scottish-rite (escoseses) and the York-rite,
which more or less described an emerging division between centralist and federalist forces,
respectively. Both rites represented different groups and contained internal divisions as well.

159
Muñoz y Pérez, General Don Juan Álvarez,11-12; Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the
Formation of Mexico’s National State, 121-127; and, Timothy Anna, Santa Anna of Mexico (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 115-116. Guardino defined this “species” of grassroots
democracy that “included wide suffrage and rejection of the idea that politics were only a matter of
choosing the most qualified candidate for every office…the yorkinos asserted the right to form parties
and promote programs and championed the rise to political power of Mexico’s middle classes.” Some
members within this yorkino coalition even advocated a variant of agrarian reform. Also crucial
within this political register, and intimately connected with anti-Spanish sentiment, was the demand
for economic protectionism to aid Mexican artisans and cotton growers unable to compete with cheap
foreign imports.

84

Guerrero to launch the “War of the South.”
160
To dissuade other provincial elites
from joining the guerrilla insurgency, centralist intellectuals like Alamán evoked
memories of the protracted and violent Independence wars. Comparing the
guerrillas to the “barbarous peoples” that invaded the Roman Empire, Alamán
asserted that the “southern” guerrillas aimed to destroy private property and produce
“desolation a hundred times more terrible than that of the 1810s.”
161
In contrast,
Álvarez and other rebel leaders claimed that centralists sought to undermine national
sovereignty while they, as federalists, took up arms to defend Mexico’s
independence. Indeed, Álvarez adopted the title of “Division Protectorate of the
Sovereignty of States” for his insurgent forces, a title denoting the federalist and
patriotic identity of his peasant guerrillas in their self-proclaimed quest to rescue the
nation. This identity linked citizenship, albeit a gendered form that excluded
women, to the armed defense of Mexico, as Álvarez wrote in an 18 April 1830 letter
to centralist Nicolas Bravo: “of defending the ‘patria’ from its exterior enemies and
to support the sacred Constitution, sanctioned by the Congress as the only way to
live free.”
162

Lasting little more than a year, the “War of the South” ended in a military
stalemate that witnessed the capture and execution of Vicente Guerrero and the

160
Josefina Zoraida Vázquez and Caroline Fowler, “Political Plans and Collaboration between
Civilians and the Military, 1821-1846,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 15:1 (1996), 25-26.

161
Alamán, in Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 132.

162
Letter from Juan Álvarez to Nicolas Bravo, 18 April 1830, quoted in, Muñoz y Pérez, Don Juan
Álvarez, 14.

85

granting of pardons to all but one insurgent leader who refused the offer. The
conclusion of the struggle ensured the ascendancy of the Centralist
Counterrevolution that culminated in the 1836 adoption of centralism as the nation’s
constitutional system, though not without instances of peasant rebellion in the Costa
Grande led by Álvarez.
163
Under the “Seven Laws,” the newly centralist government
severely curtailed regional and local political autonomy by removing state governors
and state legislatures, replacing them with state-appointed departmental governors.
Most municipalities vanished as the centralists increased the population requirements
for their legal establishment while suffrage was limited to persons with an annual
income over 100 pesos and personal taxes dramatically increased. Economic and
political privilege defined an exclusionary political system that, according to some
historians, recalled the colonial political system and operated on elite apocalyptic
visions of race and caste war. This centralist system, wrote federalist José María
Luis Mora in March 1837, “monopolized political power, elections, property of all
types, education and economic development…based on keeping the masses in a state
of ignorance and degradation…they will not love it.”
164

163
Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 67-69; and, Muñoz y Pérez, Don Juan Álvarez, 31
& 161-162. In March 1835 Álvarez announced his “Plan de Texca,” in which he railed against Santa
Anna’s role in helping consolidate the centralist government and undermine the Constitution of 1835.
In essence, this plan called for the defense of federalism and the 1824 Constitution.

164
Barbara Tenenbaum, The Politics of Penury: Debts and Taxes in Mexico, 1821-1856
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1986), 46-56; Josefina Zoraida Vázquez, “Iglesia,
ejército y centralismo,” Historia Mexicana 39 (1989), 205-234; and, Guardino, Peasants, Politics,
and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 139-140, 144-146. Mora’s quote is from Mora, Obras
Sueltas, 168-169. By no means did centralists possess a monopoly on fears of racial caste war. Many
federalists, including Mora, tended to share a fear of the popular masses that expressed itself in calls
for the limiting of suffrage to certain “propertied” classes—calls solidified by popular mobilization

86

Mora’s prediction proved prophetic as the 1840s experienced a series of
indigenous peasant revolts in Guerrero and other parts of the Mexican nation.
Fueled primarily by land disputes, head taxes, and a wholesale exclusion from the
centralist political system, Indian peasants from the central region of Chilapa
initiated an armed rebellion in 1842 that soon included the participation of dozens of
villages from the Tierra Caliente region in the west, to the eastern Tlapa/La Montaña
region that bordered Oaxaca. While decades-long land disputes initially provoked
the Chilapa uprising, the application of a national income tax in 1841, and its
replacement with a head tax in 1842, provided a unitary cause for peasant villages
that joined the insurgency and increased its ranks to the thousands. In an area rich in
linguistic and ethnic diversity, the peasant insurgents managed to forge an inter-
village coalition that momentarily bridged potential ethnic divisions and also
included the participation of some small landholders from the Chilapa region.
165

Moreover, this movement originated from within peasant communities that decided
to take the initiative. Regional elites like Álvarez who previously organized similar
insurgencies found themselves collaborating, at least halfheartedly and with political

that occurred during the Revolution of La Acordada. See Warren, “Elections and Popular Political
Participation in Mexico,” 43-45; and, Arrom, “Popular Politics in Mexico City,” 248-249.

165
Peasant insurgents were from at least five main indigenous groups: tlapanecos, yopes, nahautlacas,
amusgos, and mixtecos. See Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas, 94-95; and, Hart, “The 1840s
Southwestern Mexico Peasants’ War: Conflict in a Transitional Society,” 250.

87

interests in mind, with the centralist government of Santa Anna to suppress a
rebellion that soon spread into parts of Morelos, Oaxaca, and Michoacán.
166

What did the peasant guerrillas want? In October 1843, the rebel leaders
issued a manifesto that called for the reorganization of local power structures,
demanding local autonomy and local power in deciding land and tax issues. Later
that year, the villages of Xonacatlán issued a revealing addendum to the initial
manifesto:

…due to the promises that were made in the year 10 [1810], we do
not want our earned right made in the form of coins but with the lands
that we presented and demanded to this date, and that all types of
taxes that oppress our communities be moderated…and that the
republic and not personal caprice rule. Death to the despotic general
Santa Anna and to his miserable slaves.
167

Through their proclamation the villagers of Xonacatlán attempted to present their
legitimate political demands to a broader public, in part an effort to respond to
Mexico City-based denigrations of the movement as barbaric and to entice potential
allies. The proclamation also revealed insight into the post-Independence peasant
definitions of local political power and the sort of national government they desired.
This vision of the state, falling largely along federalist lines, called for a form of

166
Guardino, “Barbarism or Republican Law? Guerrero’s Peasants and National Politics, 1820-
1846,” Hispanic American Historical Review 75:2 (May 1995), 194-203; Hart, “The 1840s
Southwestern Mexico Peasants’ War,” 256-266; Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas, 85-98; Jean
Meyer, Problemas campesinas y revueltas agrarias (1821-1910) (Mexico: SEP, 1973), 10; and,
Leticia Reina ed., Las luchas populares en México en el siglo XIX (Mexico: SEP/Cuadernos de la
Casa Chata, 1983), 49-53.

167
Quoted in Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas, 97. The town is located near the Guerrero-Oaxaca
border, south of the major city of Tlapa.

88

local patriarchal democracy enacted through municipal politics and universal male
suffrage. Insurgent peasants also wanted a state willing to heed and rectify their
complaints against encroaching large landholders (increasingly involved in
commercial agriculture) and just levels of taxation.
168
The Xonacatlán document, for
example, called for a reduction of tax rates that surpassed colonial levels, not their
complete abrogation—a demand with the potential to attract allies from other social
groups and communities.
Chilapa remained in armed upheaval throughout the decade. Scorched earth
counterinsurgency campaigns, offerings of amnesty, and the assassination of peasant
leaders failed the fully quell the rebellion. Elite divisions at the national level created
opportunities for peasants to engage and participate in national politics, particularly
after 1844 when Santa Anna reinstated the main culprit of the resistance in the first
place: the odious head tax that was temporarily suspended by local military
commanders in response to the violence. A force of 10,000 peasant insurgents led
by mestizo rancher Miguel Casarrubias soon emerged to combat government forces
and even endorsed the Plan de Jalisco proclaimed 26 November 1844 by enemies of
Santa Anna who sought his overthrow.
169
While the assassination of Casarrubias in
early November initiated a slow decline for his rebels, the movement demonstrated
features that proved crucial in the years to come when Álvarez organized the

168
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 150; and, Guardino,
“Barbarism or Republican Law, “211.

169
Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas, 107-109.

89

Revolution of Ayutla: the forging of a cross-class, inter-village movement intent on
participating in, and drastically shaping, national politics. Additionally, peasant
rebellions of the 1840s marked a shift in the demographic and regional constituency
of guerrerense insurgents from the coastal mulatto and mestizo sharecroppers to the
indigenous communities in La Montaña, Tierra Caliente, and central Guerrero.
Having participated in those regions since the 1830s as military pacifier, guerrilla
leaders, and/or government negotiator, such experience permitted Álvarez to shift his
base of popular support inland from the coast. The campesinos that took up arms to
combat centralist government during the 1840s contributed to the downfall of
centralist government in 1846 and would form the popular backbone of the 1853-
1855 Ayutla Revolution.
170

Durable Utopias III: Peasant nationalism and the Revolution of Ayutla, 1849-
1860

“…let us unite to make the tyrant eat dust, and the nation will be saved.”—Juan
Álvarez, 1 October 1854
171

This section will discuss two important processes. In 1849, Michoacán,
Puebla, and the state of Mexico ceded portions of their territory to form the new state
of Guerrero under popular and national pressure and aided by the relative stability
that followed the imperialist War of North American Aggression. Secondly,

170
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 158-162: Guardino,
“Barbarism or Republican Law,” 212-213; and, Peter Guardino and Charles Walker, “The State,
Society, and Politics in Peru and Mexico in the Late Colonial and Early Republican Periods,” Latin
American Perspectives 19:2 (Spring 1992), 35-37.

171
Álvarez, quoted in Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 152.

90

Álvarez’s proclamation of the Plan of Ayutla on 1 March 1854, and the permanent
removal of Santa Anna from the presidency in 1855, represented the national
emergence of popular federalism after decades of elaboration, struggle, and
experimentation in rural Guerrero and other states. Generally considered to mark the
beginning of La Reforma
172
, the Revolution of Ayutla displayed the content and
form of popular federalism, as described throughout the chapter, on a national level.
The alternative visions of citizenship, state, and nationalism expressed in popular
federalism formed crucial strands within a popular liberalism that later developed
during the tumultuous 1850s and 1860s marked by civil war and foreign invasion. A
subsequent decades-long Porfirio Díaz dictatorship (1876-1910) forced popular
liberalism underground. Calls for local autonomy, protection of land rights against
expanding haciendas, and lower taxes resonated throughout the Porfiriato, expressed
in litigation and at times through open, though localized, rebellion. It took decades
to find their echo in the form of Zapatismo.
***
Attempts to organize Guerrero as a federal state, or at least certain regions
within it, preceded the state’s official creation in 1849. In 1841 Álvarez and his
longtime centralist adversary from Chilpancingo, Nicolas Bravo, negotiated a
temporary alliance in order to formulate a proposal that called for the organization of

172
La Reforma refers to the period between 1855-1867 during which Mexican political culture shifted
from federalist-centralist coalitions to a civil strife involving Liberals and Conservatives. The
decisive defeat of Mexican conservatives, symbolized by the execution of Emperor Maximilian and
his Mexican allies, catapulted Mexican liberalism, albeit an authoritarian variant, into a political
hegemonic position within Mexican political culture.

91

the Department of Acapulco. Decades earlier as his guerrillas battled royalist forces
in the Costa Grande, Morelos decreed the creation of the Province of Tecpan in
September 1811. Including swaths of coastal and eastern Guerrero, Tecpan
encompassed a sort of liberated insurgent zone that experienced the implementation
of measures later codified in “Sentiments of the Nation” and the Apatzingán
Constitution: abolishment of slavery, caste distinctions, and accompanying tribute
demands; a reduction in alcabala rates; and, the return of usurped lands to certain
indigenous communities.
173
While Tecpan ceased to exist as a province due to
Morelos’ military defeat in 1815, the Álvarez-Bravo attempt remained limited to a
small number of local and provincial elites. In contrast, the creation of Guerrero as a
federal entity in 1849 involved, and was motivated by, the widespread peasant
mobilization that dominated the 1840s.
While some scholars argued that the formation of Guerrero only consolidated
the developing political and economic power of local and regional caciques, they
overlooked how it also legitimized and institutionalized some of the demands
articulated by peasant communities since the 1820s and especially during centralist
government rule.
174
Operating under a restored federalist system, the laws of the
new political entity reduced taxes to 1820s levels, cautiously increased the number of

173
José C. González Galindo, Benito Juárez, y Acapulco: Cartas, proclamas y documentos durante la
epóca de la Reforma (Acapulco: Ayuntamiento Constitucional, 1986), 15-24, quoted in Illades, ed.,
Guerrero: textos de su historia, Tomo I, 264-269; and, Miguel Domínguez, La erección del estado de
Guerrero, Antecedentes históricos (México: SEP, 1949), 73.

174
Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas, 118; and, Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 21-23.

92

new municipalities, installed universal male suffrage without prerequisites (e.g.
literacy tests), and expanded the definition of citizenship to include male jornalero
peasants within a legal identity that required “useful and honest profession.” In
addition to this “symbolic assertion of the [male] poor’s inclusion in the economic
and political body of the new [federalist] Mexico,” the state’s constitution also
sanctioned the right of the populace to take action against individuals deemed to
commit treason against the state or federal government.
175
In effect, this provision
both legalized the right to rebel against “treasonous” government officials (in the
name of the republic), and legitimized earlier instances of peasant rebellions that
discursively posited their acts as patriotic duties enacted against despotic
governors.
176
At first glance, and on a theoretical level, the new state and its
accompanying federalist constitution seemingly represented a popular victory after a
decade of peasant resistance to centralist rule.
Neither the disastrous culmination to the war against the United States, nor
the ascendancy of regional federalist leaders during the resistance to the Anglo-
American invaders managed to completely remove centralist figures from the
political scene. Or even Santa Anna for that matter. The post-1848 presidential
administrations of José Joaquín Herrera and Mariano Arista fell to Santa Anna and
his erstwhile centralist-turned-conservative allies. By 1852 Santa Anna had returned

175
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 175.

176
Ibid, 174-175; and, Ley orgánica provisional para el arreglo interior del estado de Guerrero
(Mexico: Imprenta de Ignacio Cumplido, 1850), 3-55, quoted in Illades, ed., Guerrero: textos de su
historia, Tomo I, 318-357.

93

from exile to rule the country and impose (or re-impose) a political order that
rejected the representative electoral system, sought to undermine the political power
at the local and state levels by removing elected town councils and municipal
governments. In other words, they called for a strong central government that
monopolized political power and fiscal collection for a privileged few. Reinstating
the hated head tax and strengthening state ties to the Catholic Church, the
conservative government of Santa Anna demonstrated quasi-monarchial
tendencies—as evidenced by the veracruzano’s adoption of the title “His Extremely
Serene Highness.” The very presence of Alamán as government minister evoked
memories of royalist traitors and the centralist clique that assassinated Vicente
Guerrero during the early 1830s.
177

Peasant insurgency, unsurprisingly by this point, began in Guerrero in March
1854 when Álvarez issued the famous Plan of Ayutla. A document that, as
Edmundo O’Gorman correctly stressed, called for the removal of a “despotic” ruler
and not for a radically new social order, the Plan of Ayutla nevertheless emphasized
themes that resonated with the politics of popular federalism; particularly, the
rejection of monarchical-inspired “Orders, treatments, and privileges openly opposed
to Republican equality” conceptually linked to exterior threats to “the independence
and liberty of the nation.”
178
In sum, the document sought to arouse popular support

177
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 180-190.

178
Edmundo O’Gorman, “Precedentes y sentido de la revolución de Ayutla,” in Plan de Ayutla:
conmemoración de su primer centenario (Mexico: UNAM/Facultad de Derecho, 1954), 176-178;

94

for the fight against Santa Anna and establish a provisional political framework in
the immediate aftermath of the insurgent victory over the conservative forces. The
ideological content that scholars decry as missing in the Plan emerges, as Guardino
noted, in the speeches that Álvarez gave throughout Guerrero and in Morelos, and in
other published documents.
179
Álvarez reminded his peasant guerrillas that Santa
Anna had joined “the party of parricide…that infamously bought the head of the
illustrious General [Vicente] Guerrero and whose despotic tendencies were
instinctual.” To the inhabitants of Cuernavaca in October 1854, the aging guerrilla
leader invoked the “imperfect” 1824 Constitution that proved unable to unite the
nation yet nonetheless displayed signs of improvement “when calmly discussed and
sanctioned by the legitimate representatives of the nation”—a process interrupted by
centralist intrigue. Accusing Santa and his “parricide faction” of “undermining…the
columns erected by patriotism in support of democratic institutions,” Álvarez listed
the violation of popular federalist principles: the debilitating of community and
municipal political power, the persecution of the judicial and legislative branches,
the attempt to enslave citizens under a monarchy, and the pillaging of public funds.

and, “El Plan de Ayutla Reformado en Acapulco [1854],” in Muñoz y Pérez, Don Juan Álvarez, 183-
186.

179
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 184-185. For a
description of the Ayutla movement as an alliance between campesinos and “petit-bourgeois” regional
leaders, see Reina, Las rebeliones campesinas, 17-20.

95

The fight against despotism, he concluded, constituted the patriotic duty of all
Mexican citizens.
180

That patriotic duty manifested itself militarily through guerrilla warfare that
lasted from March 1854 to August 1855. In fielding peasant guerrillas from dozens
of southern campesino communities led by allied local-regional elites, and using
guerrilla hit-and-run tactics to harass superior military forces, the Revolution of
Ayutla expressed a creative mode of peasant resistance that first surfaced during the
Independence wars and continued to develop in the subsequent decades.
Predictably, Santa Anna responded with violently counterinsurgency campaigns that
unleashed collective punishment on peasant communities suspected of supporting
Álvarez and his pintos (as his guerrillas were called). The extralegal executions of
rebels and suspected supporters were matched by a journalistic “prose of
counterinsurgency”
181
that emanated from Mexico City press. Official newspapers
cast the revolution as a race-caste war between the Indian peasant “hordes of
barbarism” represented by Álvarez and the civilized upholder of law and order (re:
private property) Santa Anna. Reminiscent of the images utilized during the 1830

180
Álvarez, “Don Juan Álvarez a sus soldados,” 14 March 1854; Álvarez, “El Manifiesto del general
Don Juan Álvarez lanzado en Cuernavaca el 2 de Octubre de 1855;” both quoted in Muñoz y Pérez,
Don Juan Álvarez, 187 & 195-200. For an innovative look at the dynamic cultural exchanges that
occurred between Morelense peasant political cultures and the Revolution of Ayutla, see Mallon,
Peasant and Nation, chap. 5.

181
See Guha, “Prose of Counterinsurgency.”

96

“War of the South,” Mexico City press would apply the same tropes to the Zapatista
movement some six decades later.
182

After initially starting in Guerrero, the Revolution of Ayutla spread to other
regions including parts of Michoacán, Morelos and the state of Mexico. The
inability of Santa Anna to wage an effective military campaign against the peasant
guerrillas led by Álvarez only encouraged uprisings in other regions. By May 1855 a
rebellion erupted in Nuevo Leon while a month later anti-Santa Anna campesino
forces emerged in Jalisco and Oaxaca to sound the death-knell on Santa Anna’s final
period of rule in August. The revolution, in the words of one historian, “was like
none other in Mexico…a truly popular uprising,” that demonstrated the popular
federalist political visions of campesinos in Guerrero and elsewhere. As one
revolutionary from Tamaulipas expressed, notwithstanding the hagiographic tone:

…we all wanted to be free and did not care how the colors on the
national flag were arranged; for us it sufficed to have the words
Liberty and Patria emblazoned on the flag, carried by the calloused
hands of the great Don Juan Álvarez , the last insurgent.
183

Campesino guerrillas carried Álvarez and his “calloused” hands to victory in August
1855. In their articulation of a political vision that included local and state
autonomy, universal male suffrage, and low taxes through revolution, perhaps

182
Guardino, Peasants, Politics, and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 186-187.

183
Enrique de Olavarría de Ferrari, quoted in Muñoz y Pérez, Don Juan Álvarez, 92-93; Clyde Gilbert
Bushnell, La carrera política y militar de Juan Álvarez (Mexico: Porrúa, 1988), 235-336; and,
Eduardo Miranda Arrieta, “La colaboración de los indios de Guerrero en las luchas por el poder
regional y nacional, 1849-1900,” in El sur en movimiento, 98-100.

97

Guerrero’s insurgent peasants lead us to a reformulation of Marx’s famous axiom
regarding states and fiddle-playing. Perhaps the fiddle playing at times, rarely and
momentarily, occurs at the bottom with those at the top of the state badly (or
hesitantly) dancing.
184

Porfirian Prelude

Throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, Guerrero’s campesinos
forged regional political cultures predicated on local patriarchal autonomy and the
practice of (male) universal citizenship. Everyday forms of state-making that
involved arduous intra-community conflict resolution and electoral participation,
along with the praxis of revolution organized along inter-village and cross-class
negotiated lines, culminated in the 1854 Ayutla Revolution; and thus violently ended
two decades of centralist rule. As such, popular politics contributed in setting
national the stage for the Liberal-Conservative and French wars that ensued shortly
after the promulgation of the 1857 Constitution. In a context characterized by
intense “high” political strife, civil war, and foreign invasion, popular federalism
became an integral component within an emergent popular liberalism that developed
as campesinos engaged laws and ideology pronounced by the Benito Juárez-led
Liberal faction. Lacking the unity its descriptive label suggests, popular liberalism
connotes multiple political meanings (inclusive and exclusive) discussed at the
communal level in places like coastal Guerrero, highland Puebla, and central

184
Karl Marx’s quote is: “When you play the fiddle at the top of the state, what else is to be expected
but that those down below dance?” Marx, “The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” in Karl
Marx: A Reader, ed. Jon Elster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 284.

98

Morelos—places with a strong popular federalist tradition, and, not coincidentally,
places that later led the campesino revolution of 1910.
185

In Guerrero, local political autonomy, as expressed through defense of the
municipality, and universal male citizenship regardless of ethnic and social origin
continued to form the bastions of peasant politics during the conflictive 1855-1876
period. Newly enacted Liberal land laws fused questions of local autonomy with
local definitions of communal land tenure, while peasant military participation
against insurgent Conservatives and French invaders facilitated the articulation of
alternative peasant visions of nation and citizenship. Such visions, as historians
Florencia Mallon and Guy Thomson demonstrated for Puebla and Morelos, tended to
link more inclusive definitions of citizenship based not on property ownership,
ethnic or social origin but on civic and patriotic duty. Defense of the nation in dire
times entitled peasants to political and economic rights—access to land and
municipal autonomy—within a democratic and patriarchal social order. While little
research exists for Guerrero in this time period, the region’s earlier protracted
engagement with popular federalism and the important military role played by
campesinos guerrerenses against the French invasion suggests a similar process.
186

Local and rural definitions of liberalism, conceptually welded with patriotism and

185
Not all peasant movements proved to be popular federalist in political cultural orientation. For an
example of a potentially “popular conservative” movement in modern-day Nayarit that lasted close to
three decades see, Jean Meyer, Esperando a Lozada (Mexico: CONACYT, 1984).

186
Leopoldo Carranco Cardoso, Acciones militares en el estado de Guerrero (Mexico: Sociedad
Mexicana de Geografía y Estadística, 1963), 45-75; Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 51-53; and,

99

underscored by “democratic patriarchy,” thus produced radical “alternative
nationalisms” that stood in stark contrast to the fractious political imaginary of elite
Liberal politicians and intellectuals.
187

Yet, in the midst of civil war, Liberals found themselves in a difficult
position vis-à-vis their most important military allies. For the “liberal
establishment”
188
proved unable and unwilling to incorporate even partially the
increasingly radical peasant interpretations of liberalism. Paralyzed by a colonialist
and caste vision of Mexico’s rural populace, one symptomatic of a broader
hemispheric vision that equated the rural world with barbarism and backwardness,
Liberals (with the exception of the Porfirio Díaz-led faction) moved away from their
peasant allies after the restoration of the republic in the late 1860s. Such a shift
represented, as historian John Coatsworth noted, a disavowal “of the only Mexican
institutions where democracy possessed a deep ideological, economic, and social
significance;” namely, indigenous and mestizo peasant communities.
189
In turning to

Alejandro Martínez Carbajal, Diego Álvarez y Vicente Jimenez: Panteras del Sur (Acapulco:
Comisión Editorial Municipal/Ayuntamiento de Acapulco, 1992), 8-22.

187
Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 312-316; Thomson, Patriotism, Politics, and Popular Liberalism, 73-
88; and, Guy Thomson, “Bulwarks of Patriotism: The National Guard, Philharmonic Corps and
Patriotic Juntas in Mexico, 1847-1888,” Journal of Latin American Studies 22:1 (February 1990), 34-
44.

188
The term is used by Charles Hale to describe the Liberal “intellectual and quasi-governmental
elite” of the latter-half of the nineteenth-century. Charles Hale, The Transformation of Liberalism in
Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), ix & 222-224.

189
Coatsworth, “Orígines sociales del autoritarismo,” 226. For a classic view of the rural-barbarism
dyad see, Domingo Sarmiento, Facundo: Civilization and Barbarism (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004 [1845]). For a broader perspective on Latin American elites’ perceptions of
their countries’ laboring masses see, E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in

100

regional caciques to help maintain order and enact unpopular Liberal land and
anticlerical laws at the local level, Liberal politicians ensured the failure of their
hegemonic ruling project by 1869—a year marked by the emergence of peasant
rebellions in seven states provoked by the alienation of communal land.
190
Porfirio
Díaz stepped into the breach in 1876 with his anti-reelection Plan de Tuxtepec and
promises of restoring local and state autonomy. Such promises soon proved
ephemeral as the Oaxacan general consolidated political power during the following
decade.
The return of Díaz to the presidency in 1884, thereby initiating three decades
of dictatorial rule, constituted the (momentary) defeat of local government and the
centralization of political power in the hands of a few within the federal government.
While the ensuing Porfiriato meant land dispossession, tax hikes, and the inexistence
of “legal” political space for campesinos, the ascendancy of Díaz also signaled the
demise of the cacique old guard. The Ayutla Revolution marked the meteoric
political rise of southern caudillos like Álvarez (who briefly served as president), his
son Diego, and a host of others in-training—including Vicente Jiménez and Canuto
Neri—yet the following decades witnessed their slow demise under the centralizing
efforts of Díaz; and, the rise of “modern” regional caciques in-waiting described by

the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); and, Larson, Trials of
Nation Making.

190
Mallon, Peasant and Nation, 314; and, Meyer, Problemas campesinos, 18-19.

101

historian Ian Jacobs as “ranchers.”
191
As one historian remarked, the physical
deterioration of Juan Álvarez paralleled the violent disintegration of the southern
caudillo alliance created during the strife of the 1850s and 1860s.
192
With the senior
Álvarez on his death bed in 1867, his successor Diego and Jiménez waged a
prolonged, bloody struggle that shook the state for months and recalled conflicts that
occurred between the elder Álvarez and Bravo some decades earlier. As they fought
to become the dominant political entity in the southern state throughout the 1870s
and 80s, the wily Díaz managed to play them off one another while bringing in
military outsiders to rule the state as governors and local political prefects. By the
late 1890s the second generation of caciques, forged in the centralist-federalist and
liberal-conservative wars, had died, and the triad of national oligarchs, foreign
capitalists, and Díaz himself emerged triumphant.
193

In contrast to the cacique old guard and their negotiated bases of peasant
support, political prefects obtained legitimacy from Díaz and his hand-picked state
governors.
194
Operating at the district and municipal levels, prefects and sub-

191
“Modern” in the sense that they emerged as a regional petit-bourgeoisie or middle class during
Díaz’s dictatorial tenure, in part helped by the liberal economic policies promulgated by the
oaxaqueño dictator. See Ian Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt: The Mexican Revolution in Guerrero (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1982), chapter 2.

192
Nicole Girón, “Ignacio Manuel Altamirano en la vida política del estado de Guerrero:
Correspondencia con Juan N. Álvarez y Vicente Jiménez,” in Ensayos para la historia del Estado de
Guerrero (Chilpancingo: Instituto Guerrerense de la Cultura, 1985), 95-106; and, Illades, Breve
historia de Guerrero, 52.

193
For a detailed summary of these conflicts see Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt, 8-14.

194
Political prefects formed part of a political institution termed jefaturas políticas initially created by
the 1812 Cadíz Constitution. Depending on state or region, they included department chiefs, political
prefects and sub-prefects, and political chiefs designed to act as, in the words of Romana Falcón,

102

prefects brought Porfirian despotism to the everyday lives of campesinos. In charge
of police duties, the “re-distribution” of land, the collection of taxes, and possessing
the legal right to suspend members of community (ayuntamiento) councils
195
,
prefects entered local political arenas fashioned by decades of rebellion (revolution
and everyday forms) generally provoked by “outside” infringements on local
autonomy; that is, on local understandings of democracy, land tenure, citizenship,
and the role of the national state. During the so-called Pax Porfiriana (1876-1910)
the state of Guerrero experienced repeated instances of civic protest and rural
violence directed at the figure of the prefect and the duties charged to him by federal
law. By 1890, the killings of four prefects and numerous assassination attempts
moved Díaz to repeatedly advise state governor Francisco Arce—a three term
governor from Jalisco—to exercise strict control over local officials and to remove
some of the most notorious. Díaz received numerous letters from peasant
communities that continually described prefects as feared and hated officials. One
such letter from Acatepec in La Montaña region dated April 1892 claimed that the
prefect Felipe León “maintained the community in a state of slavery with all the
services he demands…[and] forced to work without food.” Utilizing a discursive
strategy that appealed to Díaz as a paternal figure, the writer further justified the

“centralizing forces, anxious to extend the links of domination forged in the state or national capital.”
For an excellent essay that delineates how the corruption and abuses of jefaturas políticas committed
at the state level in Coahuila de-legitimized the Porfirian regime, see Roman Falcón, “Force and the
Search for Consent: The Role of Jefaturas Políticas of Coahuila in National State Formation,” in
Everyday Forms of State Formation, eds., Joseph and Nugent, 107-134.

195
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 26-27; and, Falcón, “Force and the Search for Consent,” 111-112.

103

legitimacy of their claim by citing past community leaders who “shed their blood for
the nation and for the paternal order.”
196
This town, as most others from the
indigenous La Montana, suffered similarly the arbitrary rule of corrupt prefects who
oversaw the dismantling of communal lands, privatization of “unused” public lands
by middling and large landowners, and the collection of high taxes.
The issue of land tenure, in addition to violations of local autonomy, also
provoked constant (localized) peasant unrest in Guerrero during the Porfiriato. Yet,
the rise of haciendas, aided by the 1857 Constitution and Lerdo Law, took a different
form in Guerrero in contrast to sugar-cane dominated Morelos or regions where
railroad construction dispossessed peasant communities of their lands. While the
state witnessed the doubling of haciendas from 51 to 100 in the course of thirty years
(1871-1901), a different form of land tenure proliferated during the same time period
almost three fold (328-901): the rancho.
197
Aided by Liberal land laws and
Porfirian economic policies, ranchos proliferated in the Tierra Caliente and Norte
regions of the state and their owners formed a newly emergent urban and rural
middle class that would play a crucial role in the 1910 Revolution. Haciendas
dominated the coastal regions. Prominent cattle grazers from five families remained

196
Jaime Adame Salazar, “Movimientos populares durante el Porfiriato en el Estado de Guerrero
(1885-1891),” in Porfirio Díaz frente al descontento popular regional (1891-1893), eds. Friedrich
Katz and Jane-Dale Lloyd (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana, 1986), 107-111, 123-124.

197
Jaime Salazar Adame, “Periodo 1867-1910,” 67; Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 68-69; and,
Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt, 29-39. See also Tutino, From Insurrection to Revolution in Mexico, ch. 8;
John Coatsworth, Growth Against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian
Mexico (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1981); and, Friedrich Katz, “Labor Conditions on
Haciendas in Porfirian Mexico: Some Trends and Tendencies,” Hispanic American Historical Review
54:1 (February 1974), 1-47.

104

continually in conflict with neighboring indigenous communities in the Costa Chica
while Acapulco-based Spanish merchants set up an expansive commercial monopoly
that controlled agriculture in the Costa Grande. In the decades prior to the
Revolution, both rancho and hacienda combined to create a system of rural
domination that produced not peones acasillados or expropriated peasants, but rather
sharecroppers forced to pay exorbitant land rents with their harvested goods.
198

Heavy-handed political prefects and large landowners provoked a small
number of violent campesino responses. In 1889 an illiterate rural worker named
Juan Galeana led an insurgent force of one hundred campesinos that killed the
political prefect of Ayutla (Costa Chica) and threatened local landowners. After a
short term in the Tierra Caliente region during which he sold off fertile land
communally owned by Coyuca de Catalán campesinos, prefect José Pandal arrived
in Ayutla in 1889. He soon took a liking to Galeana’s wife, making numerous
advances while also harassing Galeana. Pandal continued persecuting Galeana even
after the latter moved his family to the outskirts of Acapulco. Enraged and without
legal recourse (seemingly a constant feature in the history of Guerrero), Galeana
captured and executed the prefect in 1890. An earlier attempt to assassinate the main
cacique landowner of Tecoanapa (Costa Chica), historian Renato Ravelo argued,
signaled the vast popular discontent that existed in the region rapidly catalyzed by

198
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 28-29. Bartra describes three Spanish-owned merchant companies based
in Acapulco as the most important landowners in the Costa Grande. Two American companies also
owned extensive land: Roberto Silberber Sucesores with 40,000 hectares of forested land and the
Guerrero Land and Timber Company with 150,000 hectares that extended over the municipalities of
Tecpan, Coyuca de Benítez, and Atoyac.

105

Pandal’s authoritarian ways.
199
The rebellion soon after obtained peasant support
from beyond the region, extending into La Montaña, as an enlarged force of three
hundred combatants joined the revolutionary beckon of dissident general Cornelio
Álvarez y Cortés. Díaz quickly sent military detachments into Guerrero that
violently suppressed both the rebels and local communities by early 1891.
200

A different societal group, one largely created and fostered by the Porfiriato,
organized a foreshadowing rebellion at the turn of the century. A group of young
intellectuals, village merchants, lawyers, schoolteachers, small and middling
landowners (rancheros), and students attempted to overthrow a tyrannical governor
imposed by Díaz via electoral means in 1900.
201
After a hotly contested election and
much-disputed electoral result, incumbent governor Antonio Mercenario emerged
victorious over guerrerense politician and landowner Rafael del Castillo Calderón.
Popular discontent forced Mercenario’s resignation but Díaz appointed yet another
outsider, Agustín Mora (Puebla), as interim governor until the rescheduled elections
set for 1901. While Mora’s attempts to obtain support floundered, a re-energized

199
Ravelo Lecuona, “Periodo 1910-1920,” in Historia de la cuestión agraria, Salazar Adame et al.,
102-104.

200
Salazar Adame, “Periodo 1867-1910,” 54-55; and, Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 68-74. The
combination of despotic prefects and large landowners produced several uprisings (though not
matched in scale) before Galeana’s rebellion. In 1884, a self-proclaimed colonel Pascual Claudio led
an “army of the Pueblo” under the banner of “Land, Industry, and Arms.” He demanded that the
federal government provide household heads of family with livestock and land. Three years later in
La Montaña region, a popular “Reformist Army” led by Juan P. Reyes and L. León distributed a
manifesto that demanded the exemption of indigenous communities from tax and contribution fees.

201
Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt, 17; Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 60; Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 24-
25; and, Vicente de Paul Andrade, “Un viaje a Chilapa leído en la sesión del 22 de abril de 1911,” in
Boletín de Comité Nacional Mexicano de la Alianza Cientifíca Universal 1:10 (June 1911), 304-307,

106

and growing Castillo Calderón campaign began to face intensified harassment and
persecution carried out by regime officials. When the opposition candidate was
directly attacked, he and a group of supporters left Chilpancingo for the nearby town
of Mochitlán. Only days before the elections set for 21 April 1901, the anti-Mora
opposition drafted a “revolutionary manifesto” identified by historian Ian Jacobs as a
precursor to the Maderista rebellion that occurred less than a decade later. On 8
April, partisans in Atoyac distributed a manifesto that “demanded the right of the
people to vote freely in the coming elections;”
202
in other words, no re-election and a
definition of democracy strictly limited to voting rights.
Díaz sent a colonel by the name of Victoriano Huerta to suppress the
rebellion. Honing counterinsurgency skills that made the colonel infamous some
years later in Morelos (and Yucatán), Huerta brutally ended the disorganized and ill-
equipped uprising in Mochitlán. The colonel summarily executed a number of rebels
and deported others.
203
Yet, the military victory for the Díaz regime failed to resolve
the underlying factors that provoked the 1901 uprising. While the relatively “new”
rancher social group that supported Castillo Calderón continued to work for “free
elections” and “no re-election,” dispossessed campesino indigenous communities in
the Tierra Caliente envisioned the end of haciendas and the return of lands owned

in Carlos Illades, ed., Guerrero, textos de su historia tomo II (Chilpancingo: Gobierno del Estado de
Guerrero/Instituto de Investigaciones Dr. José María Luis Mora, 1989), 168-169.
202
Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt, 18.

203
Ibid; and, Illades, Breve historia de Guerrero, 59-61. For Huerta’s actions in Yucatán against the
Mayan rebels, see Nelson Reed, The Caste War of Yucatán (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press,

107

since “immemorial” colonial times. Mestizo and mulatto sharecroppers and landless
peasants in the Costa Grande harbored an intense nationalist hatred for their Spanish
overlords. As we shall see later on, many had not forgotten that the Plan of Iguala
granted citizenship rights to the former colonizers; or, that a law passed by the
Mexican Congress in December 1828 decreed the expulsion of Spaniards. In sum,
the state of Guerrero harbored a heterogeneous collection of political registers and
demands by the early 1900s. Like those Russian workers in 1905, guerrerenses and
Mexicans would preempt the Eurocentric “Age of Extremes” and usher in a
revolution.
204

A Flash of Old and New Utopias: The Long Revolution, 1910-1940

Guerrero experienced the emergence of a revolution driven primarily by the
despotism of political prefects and the recuperation of municipal autonomy. These
two general demands, in large part shared by the emergent Porfirian middle class
(rancheros) and campesinos, offered the possibility of forming multi-class
alliances—that long-honed tactic used by guerrerenses throughout the struggles of
the nineteenth century. Yet, as historian Armanda Bartra noted, other class-specific
demands lurked beneath the surface. Popular definitions of patriarchal municipal
democracy and national citizenship (foundations of popular liberalism) clashed with
the “hegemonic aspirations of a [new] regional cacicazgo” focused on “no re-

2001 [1964]), 302-303; and, Don Dummond, The Machete and the Cross: Campesino Rebellion in
Yucatán (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 397.

204
Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914-1991 (New York: Vintage,
1996).

108

election;”
205
campesino demands for the return of expropriated lands or the
redistribution of hacienda lands conflicted with the ranchero belief in the sanctity of
private property. As Emiliano Zapata reportedly commented to a fellow soldier,
“effective suffrage and no re-election is good and fine…but before thinking of
politics, we need to think of the tortilla for all Mexicans, not just for a bunch of
voracious wolves that have appropriated all the wealth.”
206
For Zapatista
campesinos in the Tierra Caliente, the recuperation of communal land signified
justice; for rancheros like Ambrosio Figueroa, such popular actions represented
criminality and banditry committed by “the ignorant class of the Pueblo.”
207
With
such dramatic differences, initial ephemeral alliances joined under the 1910 anti-
Díaz banner of Francisco Madero, or the momentary 1913 cause against the usurper
Victoriano Huerta, evaporated.
During the military cycle of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920), three
political currents thus defined the struggle in Guerrero. Largely divided along
regional lines, these included: the dominant rancheros from northern Guerrero led
by the Figueroa brothers and supporters of Francisco Madero and Venustiano
Carranza; a militarily weaker yet peasant-supported Zapatismo in the Tierra Caliente

205
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 27.

206
Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama, La revolución agraria del Sur y Emiliano Zapata, su caudillo
(México: Centro de Estudios Históricos del Agrarismo en México, 1983), 84, quoted in Daniel
Molina Álvarez, “Periodo 1920-1940,” in Historia de la cuestión agraria, Salazar Adame et al., 224.

207
Ambrosio Figueroa, Letter to Francisco Madero, 12 December 1911, in Guillermo Martínez
Martínez and Álvaro López Miramontes, Figueroismo versus Zapatismo (Chilpancingo: Universidad
Autónoma de Guerrero/Centro de Investigaciones Sociales, 1976), 15.

109

region captained by a small landowner named Jesús H. Salgado; and, in the Costa
Grande, a constantly side-changing and chameleonic current led by teacher-ranchero
Silvestre Mariscal. Exceptions existed in each region, such as the Zapatista Cabañas
brothers (direct ancestors of Lucio Cabañas) that operated in the Costa Grande, or
the small contingencies of Zapatistas in the ranchero-dominated north near the city
of Taxco. After the fall of Díaz and his successor Madero’s hesitancy to institute
land reform in November 1911, Zapata proclaimed the radically peasant Plan of
Ayala decrying the Maderista betrayal. Demands for the redistribution of lands and
(patriarchal) municipal autonomy based upon armed campesino militias soon found
echo in the Tierra Caliente.
208
For a few days prior to the announcement of the
Zapatista Plan, Salgado had proclaimed his own campesino program: “we went to
the battlefield to destroy an odious cacicazgo that trampled upon the law and insulted
the rights of citizens…[yet] the dispossessed have yet to officially retrieve their lands
even though it was promised in [Madero’s] Plan de San Luis.” The soon-to-become
Zapatista leader of Guerrero also condemned “odious taxes” and promised all
soldiers a parcel of land “the same as other classes; all of us in equality and true
fraternity.” The campesino revolution in the southern state had begun: “We go to the
conquest of our rights in full possession of our liberties, without asking anyone for

208
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 32-33; Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt, 98-101; Gilly, La revolución
interrumpida, 96-101; John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage,
1968), 400-404; and, Renato Ravelo Lecuona, La revolución Zapatista de Guerrero: De la
Insurreción a la Toma de Chilpancingo, 1910-1914 (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de
Guerrero, 1990), 202-205.

110

them…to forcibly overthrow enemies of the Pueblo now constituted as the bad
government.”
209

Peasant political action through the praxis of revolution revealed specific
grievances and utopian glimpses. Prior to the falling out with Madero in 1911,
Salgado’s forces executed a number of political prefects in the Tierra Caliente
region. As local representatives of the despotic Porfirian order endowed with broad-
ranging powers and impunity, prefects provoked popular rage and ire. When
entering the city of Coyuca de Catalán in April 1911 in search of an unpopular
prefect to kill, campesino guerrillas immediately entered the unguarded municipal
archives, “took out old papers [land tenure and tax documents] and burned them in
the middle of the street.”
210
By the time Maderista peasant insurgents captured the
cities of Iguala and Chilpancingo in 1911, campesinos had established a specific
political ritual grounded in recent history: the burning of archives, assaults on
merchant houses and principle businesses, the raiding of granaries, and the pillaging
of government offices for weapons and ammunition. The attacks on municipal
archives symbolized a complete disavowal of the Porfirian era, as historian Renato
Ravelo argued: “for the insurrectional masses, the burning of archives represented
the permanent historical erasure of fraudulent land litigation that dispossessed them
of lands, judicial proceedings enacted against debtors, military levy for dissenters,

209
Ravelo Lecuona, “Periodo 1910-1920,” 128-129; and, Ravelo Lecuona, La revolución Zapatista,
203.

210
Ravelo Lecuona, La revolución Zapatista, 87-88.

111

and the destruction of tax records.”
211
Peasant insurgents, whether adhered to
Zapatista or Maderista/Carrancista forces, practiced similar “rituals,” often beyond
the control of their leaders.
The utopian glimpses appeared in March 1914 when Zapatista forces led by
Salgado and Zapata captured the capital city of Chilpancingo. For a brief and
unprecedented period (1914-1915), a Zapatista occupied the governor’s chair and
attempted to radically reorganize guerrerense society along popular campesino lines.
Named provisional governor by the Zapatista revolutionary junta, Salgado and three
captains implemented a series of radical reforms throughout most of the state: the
suspension of land rent payments; the authorization for landless peasants to cultivate
unused federal lands and hacienda grazing properties; the expropriation of hacienda
lands from those opposed to the revolution; the abolition of political prefects; public
education for all children; and, the removal of mayors (alcaldes) appointed during
Huerta’s tenure.
212
The Zapatista governor also created a “Revolutionary Bank of
the South” that used only coins made with state metals to help “victims of the
Revolution” and foment agricultural industry. Calling for municipal elections to take
place in November 1914, Salgado decreed that locally and democratically (most
likely only males) elected municipal authorities possessed the power to choose

211
Ravelo Lecuona, “Periodo 1910-1920,” in Adame Salazar et al., Historia de la cuestión agraria,
120.

212
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 34; and, Marcelo González Bustos, El general Jesús H. Salgado y el
movimiento zapatista en Guerrero (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 1983), 67-80,
in Illades, ed., Guerrero, textos de su historia Tomo 2, 217-219.

112

commissaries, chiefs of police, and other officials as to prevent “the participation of
individuals who collaborated with past regimes…and could lead the people down the
path of tyranny and injustice.”
213
Such radical changes, some implemented with
others prevented by war, represented the popular demands and exigencies that
nourished the Zapatista movement in Guerrero with vitality and creativity. For a
brief fleeting moment, most of state experienced a sort of popular power:
214

potentially (though not explicitly) anti-capitalist, simultaneously nostalgic and
revolutionary, and definitely difficult to categorize within orthodox political
linearity. If the Carrancista counter-revolution in 1915 managed to overthrow the
Zapatista government, the eventual victors of the Mexican Revolution failed to erase
its subversive memory. Indeed, peasant intransigence and bellicosity forced the
victors to implement municipal autonomy and land reform in the 1917 Constitution.
Yet, visions and memories of popular power remained alive throughout the
countryside.
Such visions nourished a series of popular movements that attempted to
implement the potentially radical social clauses of the 1917 Constitution—municipal
democracy and agrarian reform—in the Costa Grande region during the 1920s.
While military Zapatismo largely failed to gain entrance into the region during the
1910s, Zapatista officers Pablo, Pedro, and Tiburcio Cabañas managed to introduce

213
González Bustos, El general Jesús H. Salgado, 69-75, in Illades, ed., Guerrero, textos de su
historia Tomo 2, 224-225.

214
Adofo Gilly, The Mexican Revolution (New York: The New Press, 2005), 330-332.

113

radical political ideals to the municipality of Atoyac. Yet, unlike the dispossessed
indigenous communities of the Tierra Caliente, campesinos in Atoyac tended to
conceptualize Zapatismo as “a [broader] struggle of all the poor.”
215
As an elderly
woman from Atoyac named Carmen Téllez recalled, “[General] Pablo Cabañas did
not mess with Madero, Carranza, or [Alvaro] Obregón…he only wanted that the
lands of the sierra not belong to the rich of Atoyac.”
216
South of Atoyac in
Acapulco, an exiled union organizer arrived in 1919 to enter the fight against the
wealthy Spaniards that controlled the Costa Grande. Eventually dubbed the “Lenin
of Guerrero,” Juan Escudero played a vital role in coastal attempts during the 1920s
to make manifest hard-fought constitutional rights in the everyday lives of peasants
and workers. The arena for such struggles, at least initially and in contrast to the
preceding decade, was a constitutional one. Intractable regional power-holders and
their privately financed “white guards” ensured that the arena turn violent.
The “Lenin of Guerrero” founded the Worker’s Party of Acapulco (POA) in
1919 with the idea of capturing municipal power through electoral means. Guided
by the anarcho-syndicalist ideas of Ricardo Flores Magón and marked by his
experiences with the “wobblies” in California and the House of the World Worker in
Mexico City, Escudero combined leftist radicalism with “reformist” (re:
constitutional) tactics. He organized agrarian committees, unions, and cooperatives

215
Andrea Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores: una historia de resistencia de los
cafeticultores: Atoyac, 1940-1974 (Chilpancingo: Imprenta Candy, 1998), 104.

216
Carmen Téllez, interviewed by Andrea Radilla Martínez, September 1988, in Radilla Martínez,
Poderes, saberes y sabores, 104.

114

along with the POA, decidedly refusing to conceptualize the political and the
economic as separate spheres of existence. The POA elaborated a working program
based on the 1917 Constitution that called for just wages for workers; the defense of
human rights; honest public servants; active electoral participation; the eight-hour
work day; public education; redistribution of land for campesinos; the organizing of
health campaigns; and, the construction of a Mexico City-Acapulco road.
217

Escudero sought to implement the program in 1920 after becoming elected city
mayor by a broad multi-class coalition of rural and urban workers, small merchants,
low-level government bureaucrats, public workers, and minor landholders.
218
Under
the banner of “good government and police,” the POA ruled for three years and
attempted to radically reorganize city life under constitutional auspices. POA
activists like Maria de la O helped organize working-class women, neighborhoods
and distributed the party newspaper, Regeneración. By 1922, the POA had spread
throughout the Costa Grande, organizing party “branches” and winning municipal
elections in Tecpan, Coyuca de Benítez, Atoyac, and La Unión (near the border with
Michoacán). POA agraristas like Valente de la Cruz and the Vidales brothers

217
The gubernatorial tenure of Rodolfo Neri, implicitly sympathetic and supportive of Escudero’s
efforts, also helped the explosive growth of the POA. Alejandro Martínez Carbajal, Juan Escudero y
Amadeo Vidales (Mexico: Editorial Revolución, 1961), 53-59; Mario Gill, “Los Escudero de
Acapulco,” Historia mexicana 3:4 (October-December 1953), 295-300; Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y
lucha campesina, 100-107; Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 45-48; and, Cayetano Reyes, “El jefe agrarista
costeño Valente de la Cruz,” in Ensayos para la historia del Estado de Guerrero (Chilpancingo:
Instituto Guerrerense de la Cultura, 1985), 145-150.

218
O’Neill Blacker-Hanson, “La Lucha Sigue! (The Struggle Continues!) Teacher Activism in
Guerrero and the Continuum of Democratic Struggle in Mexico,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of
Washington, 2005), 75. Forty years later in 1960, the ACG would organize a similar broad alliance
that included people from all parts of guerrerense civil society.

115

organized committees of landless peasants that petitioned the federal government for
land and encouraged the development of regional agricultural infrastructure (e.g.
irrigation). As municipal president of Tecpan, Amadeo Vidales permitted landless
campesinos to cultivate federal lands illegally used by large-scale livestock
owners.
219

Popular attempts to democratize regional politics and economic production
based on the constitution produced violent responses from regional oligarchs
(particularly the main Spanish merchant houses) allied with large landowners and
sympathetic military officers. Under the cover of civil war in December 1923 during
the de la Huerta revolt, soldiers executed Escudero and his two brothers.
220
POA
militants that militarily fought to suppress the revolt and defend President Álvaro
Obregón also faced assassination attempts at the hand of paramilitary “white
guards.” Months before in July 1923, POA municipal officials and peasant leaders
organized a “self-defense armed guerrilla” band of two hundred men in Atoyac after
police killed a popular peasant leader, Manuel Téllez. Famed local agraristas and
revolutionary veterans like Pedro Cabañas, Silvestre Castro, and Feliciano Radilla
joined the guerrilla movement as popular politics radicalized in the face of sustained

219
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 47; Reyes, “El jefe agrarista,” 155-159; and, Jacobs, Ranchero Revolt,
115-119.

220
In 1923, General Adolfo de la Huerta and half of the federal army rebelled against President
Álvaro Obregón when the latter attempted to install Plutarco Elías Calles as his presidential successor.
See Jennie Purnell, Popular Movements and State Formation in Revolutionary Mexico: The
Agraristas and Cristeros of Michoacán (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 197-202 ; Vicente
Fuentes Díaz, Historia de la Revolución en el estado de Guerrero (Mexico: Instituto Nacional de
Estudios Históricos de la Revolución Mexicana, 1983), 185-202. Escudero had already survived
several assassination attempts, including one in 1922 that left him paralyzed.

116

elite-sponsored violence.
221
White guards and national revolts taught Costa Grande
campesinos that only the rifle guaranteed constitutionally-mandated municipal
electoral results and agrarian reform.
That lesson contributed to another Costa Grande peasant guerrilla uprising in
1926 that lasted for three years. Facing an anti-agrarian reform state governor that
falsely charged POA politicians and local peasant leaders with treason (and
continued white guard violence), Amadeo Vidales organized the “Liberatory
Movement of Economic Re-integration for Mexico” in May 1926. The name of the
movement signaled its origin: the failure of progressive reform movements like the
POA to profoundly restructure political and socio-economic relations of domination
in the Costa Grande during the 1920s. As a small merchant and oppositional
politician, Vidales directly experienced the political and economic hegemony
exercised by Spanish and other foreign commercial interests in the region. Thus, his
Plan de Veladero manifesto exhibited anti-imperialist tones of national liberation,
calling for the expulsion of Spaniards from Mexico and the redistribution of their
“goods” to municipal governments for the financing of local industry. Far from
advocating a radical re-distribution of the means of production to the rural masses,
the Plan de Veladero mirrored some the economic protectionist stances present in the
developmental plan elaborated by President Plutarco Calles.
222
The radicalism of the

221
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 47-51.

222
Ibid, 53.

117

program is fully appreciated when considered in relation to the system of domination
that existed in the Costa Grande.
Proclaiming adherence to the 1917 Constitution, Vidales posited Spaniards as
the target of a regional insurgency that sought to complement Mexico’s political
independence with economic emancipation: “we have lifted our rebellious banner
with weapons in hand to protest the invalid Spanish dominion over what is ours.”
223

Attempts to forcibly expel Spaniards began with the failure of three hundred
vidalistas to capture Acapulco. Federal military units forced the insurgents to adopt
guerrilla warfare. With experienced guerrilla experts like Pedro and Pablo Cabañas
in their ranks and broad popular support throughout the region, the Vidales-led rebels
survived for three years. While the Mexico City press ridiculed the group as
“anachronistic” for articulating demands already expressed one hundred years
earlier, Costa Grande landless peasants and sharecropping campesinos knew that
local domination exhibited a Spaniard form. The ensuing military counterinsurgency
campaign—burning of villages, rape, extrajudicial assassinations, and torture—
turned the region into “scorched earth” for supporting the rebels. One particular
military officer, Colonel Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, left behind memories of one
brutal tactic: cutting off the hair braids of campesinas suspected of collaborating
with the guerrillas.
224
Yet, military violence failed to quell the rebellion or destroy

223
Martínez Carbajal, Juan R. Escudero y Amadeo S. Vidales, 153-167; and, Gómezjara,
Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 108-115.

224
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 55-56; and, Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 115.

118

subversive politics. As campesino leader Valente de la Cruz (slain in 1926) wrote in
1925:
…the rich misters of gold will finish off current agrarian leaders, just
like they did with previous ones…yet the seed of liberation has been
planted in the popular consciousness of contemporary youth that
refused to tolerate Porfirian despotism and did not fear the rigors of
war…spring season will bear the fruit of that seed with vigorous and
urgent action.
225

In other words, subversive notions stubbornly persisted. They re-emerged in the
“spring” of the 1930s during the populist presidential administration of Mexican
Revolution veteran Lázaro Cárdenas.
In Guerrero the idea of the “Revolution” demonstrated a forceful endurance.
For Cardenismo left a profound imprint in the political imaginary of the Costa
Grande campesinado. When President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940) promised
weapons to campesinos while on the campaign trail near Acapulco in 1934, he spoke
to an audience that lived through fourteen years of low-intensity warfare as they
struggled to redeem the agrarian and democratic postulates of the Mexican
revolution.
226
As described above, the region previously witnessed the flowering of
radical political parties and agrarian unions after 1920, their subsequent
radicalization when confronted by cacique violence, and the adoption of guerrilla

225
Molina Álvarez, “Periodo 1910-1920,” in Salazar Adame et al., Historia de la cuestión agraria,
271-272.

226
As Gerrit Huizer argued, one should not underestimate the “the psychological effect experienced
by campesinos provoked by the possession of weapons for the defense of their rights. This factor was
very important in allowing them to overcome their fear of large landowners and their allies and gave a
major motivating impulse to agrarian reform.” See Gerrit Huizer, La lucha campesina en México
(México: Centro de Investigaciones Agrarias, 1970), 71.

119

warfare as a self-defense tactic. By initiating an agrarian reform program (ejidos,
credit, irrigation, and infrastructure) that unfolded unevenly and hesitantly in the face
of violent cacique resistance, Cárdenas strengthened popular rural demands by
endowing them with institutional legitimacy. Moreover, the general legitimized
prior cycles of campesino struggles (1920-1934) by positing them as valid defenses
of the Mexican revolution. With the redistribution of land, Cárdenas seemed to
demonstrate that the post-revolutionary state could fulfill revolutionary promises.
227

As a cafeticultor from the Atoyac area reminisced, “no [politician] remembered the
agrarian law, no one could enforce respect for the Constitution, until the arrival of
Cárdenas, who with such facility distributed land…and fulfilled his campaign
promises (of 1934) to change the living conditions of the campesino class of
Atoyac.”
228
With all its limitations and undemocratic undercurrents, Cardenista
agrarian reform finally achieved what local peasant organizations fought for during

227
Despite his massive land redistribution campaign and the expropriation of Mexico’s natural
resources (not to mention his move away from anti-clericalism), some historians argue that Cárdenas
inadvertently set the corporativist foundations of the PRI during his left-leaning administration. His
attempt to posit the postrevolutionary state as an arbiter between capital and labor failed, initially
during his presidency, and disastrously (for the Mexican masses) during the subsequent six decades of
PRI rule. Thus, the PRI’s authoritarianism did not appear miraculously after 1940, nor did its reliance
on foreign capital. For Cárdenas’ failures, see Nora Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy: Post-
Revolutionary Mexico (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Becker, Setting the Virgin on
Fire, 155-162; and, A. Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 70-73. For a suggestive, almost prophetic analysis
of Cárdenas’ expropriation of Mexico’s national resources, see Trotsky, “Nationalized Industry and
Workers’ Management.” For a work that argued for the radical intentions of Cardenismo, which in
turn fostered intense resistance that prevented practical accomplishments (also due in part to the
fractious heterogeneity of Cardenismo), see Alan Knight, “Cardenismo: Juggernaut or Jalopy?”
Journal of Latin American Studies 26: 1 (February 1994), 73-107.

228
José Téllez Sánchez, interviewed in Andrea Radilla Martínez, Poderes, Saberes y Sabores: una
historia de resistencia de los cafeticultores: Atoyac, 1940-1974 (México, 1998), 132; and, Tanalis
Padilla, “’Por las buenas no se puede:’ La experiencia electoral de los jaramillistas,” in Movimientos

120

the 1920s: the economic and political displacement of Spanish and national
commercial and large landholding caciques.
Cárdenas and Cardenismo thus became key cultural referents in regional
campesino political cultures of the Costa Grande. Many campesinos embraced
agrarian reform based on the ejido (collective landholding) model and organized to
obtain those other promises articulated by Cárdenas: agricultural technology, credit,
infrastructural development, schools, and hospitals.
229
Coffee-producing peasants in
Atoyac like Rosendo Radilla
230
believed such promises indicated that, as Cárdenas
declared in 1934, “progress would be socialized [and] campesinos would constitute
the principal beneficiaries of economic development.”
231
The populist president’s
ruling tenure was subsequently remembered as a time when the postrevolutionary
state embodied the driving utopias and promises unleashed by the 1910 Mexican
Revolution because it collaborated with campesinos in their favor.
232
Ensuing

armados en México, siglo XX, eds. Verónica Oikión Solano and Martá Eugenia García Ugarte
(Zamora, Mich.: Colegio de Michoacán/CIESAS, 2006), 278.

229
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 5-7; and, Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y
sabores, 110-113.

230
Tita Radilla, interview with the author, Atoyac de Álvarez, Guerrero, 16 May 2007.

231
Lázaro Cárdenas, quoted in Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 110. For a general
overview of Cárdenas’ policies as president see, Saúl Escobar Toledo, “La ruptura cardenista,” in
Everardo Escárcega López and Saúl Escobar Toledo, eds., Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana
(Tomo 5): El cardenismo: un parteaguas histórico en el proceso agrario nacional 1934-1940
(Primera Parte) (México: Siglo XXI, 1990), 9-38.

232
This argument is specific to Guerrero. Peasants in places like Michoacán, Jalisco, Guanajuato, and
Zacatecas resisted in a myriad of ways the anticlerical and socialist education policies, and (at times)
the hierarchical application of agrarian reform forwarded by Cárdenas. For example, see Jean Meyer,
La cristiada: la guerra de los cristeros (Tomo I) (México: Siglo XXI, 1991 [1973]), Becker, Setting

121

presidential administrations would face popular evaluations and criticisms
fundamentally based on comparisons with the constantly re-imagined Cardenista
“utopia.” Despite rollback of populist policies like agrarian reform after 1940, “hope
remained alive in the countryside.”
233
For as sociologist Andrea Radilla Martínez
wrote in her study on Atoyac’s coffee-producing peasants, “Hope and the desire to
fight or resist largely emanated from [peasant] experiences with Cardenismo…there
are still some alive who met him or others know him from stories told in the furrows,
during the cleaning of coffee trees, in ejidal assemblies, over cups of coffee…his
picture adorns [humble rural dwellings] alongside Zapata.”
234
Alongside the national
portraits of Zapata and Cárdenas, local portraits of Salgado, Escudero, de la Cruz, de
la O, Vidales, and Radilla populated the memory walls of Guerrero’s peasantry.
Clandestine memories lingered.
Conclusion
“…neither silence nor historical deformation can erase what has remained in the
[popular] collective consciousness, acquired through revolutionary experience. Such
experience reappears when its bearers and heirs mobilize, because the popular
conquests of experience and consciousness can be concealed and exist clandestinely
for long periods of time, but they are never lost.”—Adolfo Gilly
235

the Virgin on Fire; and, Adrian Bantjes, As If Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the
Mexican Revolution (Wilmington: SR Books, 1998).

233
Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 115-116.

234
Ibid.

235
Gilly, La revolución interrumpida, 262.

122

Thinking back to the early days of the PDLP insurgency in the late 1960s,
Lucio Cabañas recalled a phase characterized by solitude, misunderstanding, and a
lack of peasant support. Attempts to enlist peasants enraged by continuous state
repression in a guerrilla war against the PRI regime initially failed in Babel-type
conversations. When Cabañas spoke of guerrilla warfare (with Cuban hues), they
responded with: “hey Profe [teacher], which General will come to our aid? What is
the date of the uprising? Just tell us when and we’ll be there.” Atoyac peasants, the
PDLP leader later realized, actively waited for a Zapata or Vidales to organize a
recruitment effort, proclaim one of the innumerable Plans that crowd Mexican
history, and proclaim a set date for revolution.
236
In traveling throughout the Atoyac
mountains visiting remote peasant communities and conversing with their
inhabitants, Cabañas realized (or remembered considering his own family history)
that he traversed a region with a rich political culture of rebellion and where peasants
had not forgotten their historical trajectory of resistance and struggle. As a sort of
guerrilla apostle seeking guerrilla converts, the schoolteacher-turned-PDLP leader
caught a glimpse of a different modality of violent peasant resistance, one that dated
back to the mid-nineteenth century exploits of Juan Álvarez, reinforced by the 1910
Revolution, and consolidated during the agrarian wars of the 1920s and 30s. In sum,
he learned that Atoyac’s peasants carried their rebellious histories with them.
237

236
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 59-61.

237
I paraphrase sociologist Timothy Wickham-Crowley’s incisive question: “Do people carry their
rebellious histories with them?” Timothy Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin

123

Those rebellious histories, or what historian Adolfo Gilly identifies as
popular “conquests of experience and consciousness” in the epigraph above,
constituted the subject of this chapter as an attempt to contextualize the 1970s ACNR
and PDLP insurgencies within a longue durée history of peasant and rural rebellions
in Guerrero. Both movements emerged not in a historical vacuum, but within
peasant political cultures saturated with memories of failed and successful rebellions,
unredeemed longings, suppressed female counter-longings, martyred revolutionaries,
and betrayals; in a word, utopias. In cursory fashion, this chapter documented the
profound political cultural transformations that the rural lower classes of Guerrero
experienced over decades and centuries, from the implementation of the Bourbon
Reforms in the late eighteenth century to the 1854 Ayutla Revolution; from the
Porfiriato to the class warfare unleashed by the agrarian reform efforts of the 1920s
and 1930s. While Independence constituted an important watershed that witnessed
the shift from “royalist” to “republican” popular politics, the struggles of 1810-1820
formed part of a longer process with roots in the late Bourbon period and flowering
during the Ayutla Revolution in the form of popular federalism. The gendered
demands articulated by campesinos that served as Álvarez’s soldiers in 1854—state
and local autonomy, universal male suffrage, and low taxes—proved incredibly
enduring.

America: A Comparative Study of Insurgents and Regimes since 1956 (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1992), 131.

124

The Porfiriato only managed to partially submerge the popular federalist
utopias unleashed on a national scale by the Ayutla Revolution and proved just as
incapable in handling the popular liberalism that developed during La Reforma and
French Intervention.
238
My argument for submergence should not be read
synonymously with a lack of peasant resistance during that era. The localized
instances of peasant mobilization in Guerrero and throughout Mexico formed a
crucial part of the pre-history of the 1910 Revolution: the violent and public
reemergence of some peasant utopias on a regional and national scale that stressed
unredeemed nineteenth century longings such as local patriarchal democracy and
land. In Guerrero, dozens perhaps hundreds of campesinos died fighting to enact the
labor and agrarian rights guaranteed to them by the 1917 Constitution during the
1920s and 1930s. The demands that violently erupted during the Revolution, and
their peasant bearers, helped shape the contours of a postrevolutionary state that
under Cárdenas in the 1930s seemingly fulfilled or redeemed peasant aspirations.
Campesinos remembered that he once promised to arm them in order to defend the
ejido and schools. Yet, the hegemonic arrangement soon proved bittersweet.
239

For guerrerense peasant participation in Mexican state formation from the
1850s onward was paralleled by the development of a regional cacicazgo social

238
Guardino posited popular liberalism as the successor of popular federalism (though not
synonymous) as peasant communities tended to associate liberalism with the defense of local
autonomy during the Reforma wars and the French Intervention. See Guardino, Peasants, Politics,
and the Formation of Mexico’s National State, 218-219. See also Mallon, Peasant and Nation, ch. 4,
esp. 130-132; Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 25-27; and, Bustamante, “Los campesinos en la reinvención
de Guerrero,” 163-165.
239
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 160-162.

125

formation that sought to monopolize political and economic power in the hands of a
few. While the 1910 Revolution and Cardenista land reform managed to uproot the
ancien régime of caciques fostered during the Porfiriato, the rancheros that first
supported Madero and later Carranza took their place in the postrevolutionary order.
The institutionalization of some peasant demands under the 1917 Constitution and
during Cárdenas’ sexenio failed to guarantee their fulfillment in practice and on the
ground in Guerrero. As the revolution froze in the 1940s and 1950s, to use the term
coined by slain Argentine documentary filmmaker Raymundo Glazer, residual and
emergent rural demands manifested themselves through a series of gremial and civic
struggles in Guerrero that subsequently questioned, undermined, and exposed the
“nakedness” of the post-revolutionary regime eight years before the infamous 1968
student massacre in Tlatelolco. As the next chapter demonstrates, the civic
insurgency of 1960 vividly tested the willingness, indeed the ability, of the
“revolution turned into government” to re-negotiate the postrevolutionary hegemonic
pact. Subsequent events would lead many to believe, as Genaro Vázquez remarked
in 1963, “the electoral path does not resolve problems and the secret and universal
vote is a bourgeois trick.”
240

240
Bartra, “Sur Profundo,” in Crónicas del sur: utopías campesinas en Guerrero, ed. Armando
Bartra (Mexico: Era, 2000), 56.

126

Chapter 2:
A Lesson in Civic Insurgency

“…democracy is not “given” or “granted.” It requires conflict, namely, courageous
challenges to authority, risk-taking, and reckless exemplary acts, ethical witnessing,
violent confrontations, and general crises in which the given sociopolitical order
breaks down. In Europe [and in Latin America I add], democracy did not result from
the natural evolution or economic prosperity. It certainly did not emerge as an
inevitable byproduct of individualism or the market. It developed because masses of
people organized collectively to demand it.”—Geoff Eley
241

“…Political democracy is not simply the normal superstructural product of capitalist
development. In large measure, it is a political and cultural conquest of popular
movements.”—Roger Bartra
242

In the midst of a post-war economic “miracle” and an intensifying global
cold war, tens of thousands of guerrerenses organized to topple an autocratic state
governor. A movement that began in 1959 with a single goal, involving a vast cross-
section of guerrerense civil society, developed in the praxis of civil disobedience a
radically, albeit patriarchal, democratic vision that promised a profound social
restructuring: a simultaneously heterogeneous and limited vision meant to displace a
cacique-dominated society while maintaining intimate household gender hierarchies
in place. Such a vision, one that expanded the parameters of citizenship to extend
democratic struggles beyond state-sanctioned political institutions (re: the vote) into

241
Geoff Eley, Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 4.

242
Roger Bartra, “Missing Democracy,” in Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the
Post-Mexican Condition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 73. For a similar argument within

127

economic, social, and cultural realms, took the social democratic promises of the
Mexican Constitution seriously. The bearers of that democratic vision doggedly
requested the actual application of constitutional rights. Some of the movement’s
demands, municipal/local autonomy and lower taxes for instance, proved historically
persistent and painfully unredeemed.
243
Organizational forms, too, resurrected
memories of the electoral battles waged by the Acapulco Workers Party (POA)
during the early 1920s or the tax strikes waged by Costa Grande communities in
1945. Thus the 1960 civic movement, and the ensuing electoral and gremial
struggles it inspired, formed part of a long trajectory of popular political participation
filled with “residual”
244
memories, utopias, failures, silences, and experiences.
The “emergent” quality of the movement resided in its creation of new
political and gendered subjectivities that widened the definition of terms like
“political,” “citizenship,” and, “democracy.” In the course of state-wide and creative
civil disobedience campaigns, participating guerrerenses determinedly demanded to
exercise some level of democratic control over their everyday lives: over their labor,
their municipal governments, taxes they paid, and the role of their federal

a different national context see, Lawrence Goodwyn, Democratic Promise: The Populist Moment in
America (New York: Oxford USA, 1976.

243
For a profound and deeply sensitive description of gender, in particular how the everyday lived
experiences of women—within a culture radically structured by gender inequality—maintained
impoverished rural communities afloat, see Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 27-38.

244
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 121-127.

128

government.
245
Within the fractious political imaginary of the cívicos (nickname of
movement participants), the active expression of dissidence—expressed within
constitutional and legal limits—constituted a civic duty in the face of a governor who
they believed betrayed the postulates of the Mexican Revolution. Cívicos took to
heart and acted on an implicit suggestion forwarded by President Adolfo López
Mateos (1958-1964): “caciques will remain in power as long as the community
tolerates them.”
246
Further influencing such civic effervescence, this activism
occurred at the historical juncture of a national context characterized by widespread
independent union mobilizations and peasant land invasions; and, a hemispheric
political climate stormed by the nascent Cuban Revolution whose radicalism both
cast doubt on the self-proclaimed “revolutionary” status of the PRI regime and
inspired a generation of young social activists.
Social heterogeneity marked the 1960 civic movement. Urban (provincial)
middle-class professionals, teachers, and low-ranking bureaucrats demanded access
to political channels restricted by a postrevolutionary state that promoted regional
boss politics. Peasants, those so-called “favored sons of the regime,”
247
viewed
political democratic participation as the gateway to inclusion in the PRI’s restrictive

245
As this chapter will demonstrate, both the praxis of “becoming” a citizen and the idea of an active
citizenry contained exclusions and limits; namely, that of women. Within the massive civil
disobedience campaign of 1960 the role of participating women as “logistical auxiliaries”—cooks,
child caretakers, etc.—remained largely unquestioned. A few women, particularly teachers like Julita
Escobar Adama did participate as key movement leaders.

246
Así, 19 March 1960, cited in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero: la democracia
imposible, 136.

247
Arturo Warman, Los campesinos, hijos predilectos del régimen (Mexico: Nuestro Tiempo, 1972).

129

economic modernization program that posited the countryside solely as exploited
subsidizer of urban and industrial development. Women sought to end their
treatment as “political metaphors”
248
that alternated between the abnegating soul of
the nation responsible for maintaining it afloat, and innately moral “political
housekeepers”
249
with limited civic rights. Facing a dual fight against structural
forces that pillaged the countryside and a “modernizing patriarchy”
250
within rural
households, campesina women assumed the “triple burden”
251
of organizing,
working, and familial care-giving to actively participate. In the course of struggle,
they and the rest of the participants in the civic movement acted to redeem their
constitutional rights and, in the process, became citizens.

248
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 100-101. A third metaphor, of the “irrational” woman
susceptible to “foreign” or radical influences, emerged when Mexican women transgressed traditional
and modernized gender roles. For women as metaphors of the nation within masculinist anti-colonial
nationalisms, see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments: Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 116-157.

249
In 1953, women obtained the right to vote in presidential contests. Olcott, Revolutionary Women,
234; and, Sarah A. Buck, “The Meaning of Women’s Vote in Mexico, 1917-1953,” in The Women’s
Revolution in Mexico, 1910-1953, eds. Stephanie Mitchell and Patience A. Schell (Lanham,
Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2007), 73-98.

250
Mary Kay Vaughan, “Modernizing Patriarchy: State Policies, Rural Households, and Women in
Mexico, 1930-1940,” in Hidden Histories of Gender, eds. Dore and Molyneux, 194-214. Vaughan
defined “modernizing patriarchy” as attempts by the postrevolutionary Mexican state to maintain in
place rural household gender hierarchies “in the interest of national development.” Domesticity was
“rationalized” as the state appropriated reproductive activities and educated mothers in “scientific,
hygienic household management and child raising in order to produce healthy, efficient, patriotic
citizen-workers” (196). Patriarchal familial household arrangements and “national development”
subsumed the rights and interests of women in postrevolutionary Mexico. And yet, women managed
to at times appropriate and redefine such government policies to demand specific rights (e.g.
suffrage).

251
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 161.

130

Such popular activism radically altered Guerrero’s political topography and
created new political forms that posed a reformist challenge to the ruling PRI regime.
How would the regime respond to the democratic challenge? Would it side with a
popular movement that originated autonomously from the PRI party structure or
continue to buttress the ferociously stubborn authoritarianism of local-regional boss
politics (caciquismo)? To answer such questions, this chapter combines historical
narrative and political analysis to delineate the sociopolitical history of the 1960
civic movement. What began as a challenge to gubernatorial despotism ended as a
broad popular critique of one-party PRI rule. Spearheaded by the Guerrerense Civic
Association (ACG) and its young leader, Genaro Vázquez, the civic movement
comprised one of several provincial democratization movements that prefigured
Mexico City 1968. Civic attempts to obtain democracy through popular action,
rather than state patronage, would provoke violent responses.

The End of Myths
“Myth is a language.”—Roland Barthes
252

Forged at the intersection of a revolution in rigor mortis and a not-so-cold
Cold War, the twenty years that preceded the1960 civic movement constituted its
dramatic prologue. Those twenty years (1940-1960) marked both the economic
“golden age” of the so-called Mexican Miracle and the zenith of the PRI regime’s

252
Roland Barthes, Mythologies (New York: The Noonday Press, 1993 [1957), 11.

131

post-war political stability as the revolution transformed (some would say
transmogrified) into government. Internationally, the “global cold war”
253
emerged
and intensified, structuring the world into neatly divided bipolar armed camps
headed by the United States and Soviet Union in a theoretical geo-political scenario
that fully existed only in the minds of U.S. and Soviet ruling elites (and
ideologues).
254
ACG activists and supporters worked on political and cultural
terrains intimately contoured for twenty years by both contexts: a national context
increasingly marked by nation-wide yet disparate popular protests against the PRI
model of capitalist modernization and political centralization; and, a hemispheric
milieu saturated with a “meta-language of subversion” that tagged all popular
dissidence as communist and “subversive” of national security. The U.S.-assisted
development of intelligence agencies during the late 1940s and proliferation of
counterinsurgency technology after the Cuban Revolution complemented discursive
efforts.
255
This section details the intersection of both histories: an intersection that

253
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

254
Reality failed to conform to such grand designs. As historian Seth Fein argued in a recent essay,
the United States’ greatest “global” fear during the 1950s and up until the Cuban Revolution was the
position of neutrality vis-à-vis the competing superpowers: “This fear produced the idea of the Third
World, as it was initially conceived in the decade’s opening years, to take hold—a world between
East and West.” Seth Fein, “Producing the Cold War in Mexico: The Public Limits of Covert
Communications,” in In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War, eds.
Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 172.

255
Daniela Spenser, “La nueva historia de la Guerra Fría y sus implicaciones para México,” in
Movimientos armados en México, 100 & 108-109. For example, the Dirección Federal de Seguridad
(DFS) was founded in 1947 as at type of political police that monitored and suppressed
internal/domestic dissidence. FBI agents helped train DFS agents in investigation techniques.
President Miguel Alemán (1946-1952) initially ordered the creation of the DFS. See Sergio Aguayo,
La charola: una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México (Mexico: Grijalbo, 2001), 61-71.

132

witnessed the decline of certain myths, the rise of new ones, and the silencing of
others.
Myth, Roland Barthes wrote, “deprives the object of which it speaks of all
History [;] In it, history evaporates.”
256
Or, as in the case of post-1940 Mexico,
History evaporated into, indeed embodied, the postrevolutionary state.
257
Then-
current scholarly evaluations of the 1910 Revolution and the so-called “Mexican
Miracle,” and contemporary (1940-1970) government pronouncements ran parallel
in the elaboration and fortification of the “myth of Pax Priísta”
258
after 1940.
259
The
myth goes something like this: stimulated by demand during World War II, from
1940-1970 the Mexican economy experienced a “miracle” in the form of
uninterrupted annual GDP growth that averaged nearly 6.5%. Buoyed by such
spectacular economic growth, underscored by Import Substitution policies, political
stability characterized the era as transfers of presidential power and elections took

256
Barthes, Mythologies, 151. For a similar approach to myth within a Mexican context, see Roger
Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía: identidad y metamorfosis del mexicano (México: Delbolsillo,
2005 [1987), 230-231.

257
As Roger Bartra argued in his landmark cultural study on Mexican identity: “…the same occurs to
the links that exist between the Mexican people and the national state; to paraphrase Auerbach , the
state finds itself in the people as if announced or promised, and the state fulfills (the technical term is
figuram implore) the people…in the nationalist imaginary both [people and nation] are linked
vertically. In that way history is dissolved.” Bartra, La jaula de la melancolía, 231. See also
Chatterjee, The Nation and its Fragments, 95-115.

258
I borrow the term from the title of Tanalís Padilla’s dissertation, “From Agraristas to Guerrilleros:
The Jaramillista Movement and the Myth of Pax Priísta,” Ph.D. diss., University of California, San
Diego (2001); and, Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata: The Jaramillista Movement and
the Myth of the Pax Priísta, 1940-1962 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

259
For a perceptive evaluation of such complementary efforts see, Schmidt, “Making it Real
Compared to What,” 23-33.

133

place in peaceful, orderly fashion. Industrialization, urbanization, and the rise of a
new middle-class seemingly heralded Mexico’s anticipated entrance into the “First
World.” Moreover, unlike most of Latin America the nation managed to avoid the
military coups and state terror that marked the region’s Cold War as it tread a careful
geo-political path of neutrality and self-determination. Covering almost four
decades, the Pax Priísta experienced several severe lapses, most notably the 1968
student massacre in Mexico City and economic slowdown during the early 1970s,
but partially recovered with the oil boom of the mid-1970s.
260

Few in Mexico experienced and lived the myth. For Guerrero and the
majority of the national rural sector, the “miracle” represented artificially suppressed
prices for agricultural products that enabled low prices and low wages for urban
workers. The de facto end of agrarian reform (despite momentary
revivals/concessions during the administrations of López Mateos and Luis
Echeverría) led to the re-concentration of land in places like the Costa Grande of
Guerrero and the Madera region of Chihuahua, and created a vast “industrial reserve

260
Carlos Pereyra, “México: los límites del reformismo,” Cuadernos Políticos 1 (1974), 53-54.
Definitions of the Mexican Revolution (e.g. as the “preferred revolution” in the words of Frank
Tannenbaum) and of the evolution of the postrevolutionary state—formed contrapuntally against
Soviet and Cuban backdrops depending on historical era—worked to further solidify the image of
Mexican exceptionalism. Foreign observers and domestic political and economic elites often
commented on the nature of the postrevolutionary regime as congruent with “Mexican nature.”
American scholars, such as Frank Tannenbaum and Frank Brandenburg, searching for alternatives to
Soviet Communism or Third-World liberation movements often posited PRI Mexico as a preferred
alternative to the former. For insightful discussion on Mexico’s place within the U.S. imaginary
during the 1960s, see Eric Zolov, “Discovering a Land ‘Mysterious and Obvious’: The
Renarrativizing of Postrevolutionary Mexico,” in Fragments of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture
in Mexico Since 1940, eds. Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2001), 248-250. For Mexico as the “preferred revolution” for United States
policymakers and designers of Alliance for Progress, see Olga Pellicer de Brody, México y la
revolución cubana (Mexico: El Colegio de Mexico, 1972), 76-78.

134

army” of workers who moved into burgeoning urban centers in search of work.
261

Agrarian state policy focused almost exclusively on the financing and the creation of
vast capitalist agricultural zones. Furnished by state-funded infrastructural projects
such as irrigation, such large-scale zones produced crops destined for export. In
regions where campesinos held onto their ejidos, they often faced the incursions of
state-owned and foreign corporations on communally-owned forest and water
resources. Rural women maintained rural societies alive, subsidizing the
developmental program with their unpaid yet expected household labor: cleaning,
caring for children (and sometimes family elders), and cooking. Adding to such
demands, campesinas also worked outside of the home to supplement household
income.
262
In sum, the countryside subsidized industrial development and fed
bourgeoning cities as economic inequality became the hallmark of the “miracle.”
263

261
Juan Felipe Leal and Mario Huacuja assert that from 1940-1960 some 13 million hectares of
generally marginal and unproductive land was redistributed by the government—compared to the 20
million distributed by Lázaro Cárdenas during his presidential tenure. See Juan Felipe Leal and
Mario Huacuja R., “Los problemas del campo mexicano,” Revista del Centro de Estudios Políticos 5
(January-March 1976), 17.

262
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 166; and, Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 28-
31.

263
Warman, We Come to Object: The Peasantry of Morelos and the National State (Baltimore: John
Hopkins University Press, 1980); Roger Bartra, Estructura agraria y clases sociales en México
(Mexico: Ediciones Era, 1974), 45-52; and, “Campesinado y poder político,” in Caciquismo y poder
politico en el México rural (Mexico: Sigloveintiuno Editores, 1975), 5-30; Niblo, War, Diplomacy,
and Development: The United States and Mexico, 1938-1954 (Wilmington, Scholarly Resources,
1995), 288-289; Donald Hodges and Ross Gandy, Mexico, the End of the Revolution (Westport, CT:
Praeger, 2002), 86-91; and, Steve Sanderson, The Transformation of Mexican Agriculture:
International Structure and the Politics of Rural Change (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1986), 40-48.

135

In many ways, Guerrero represented a hyperbolic metaphor of national rural
conditions. An overwhelmingly rural state in 1960, 74.3% of the population lived in
rural communities (the national average was 51%). It contained only one city,
Acapulco, which attracted any sort of substantial capital and infrastructural
investment.
264
More statistics from 1960 provide an idea, albeit incomplete, of living
conditions in what continues to be one of nation’s poorest states. 24 to 27% of the
population could not afford to eat meat, fish, eggs, and milk, or purchase footwear.
Only 20% counted on stable, year-long employment. Guerrero’s per capita of 1,400
pesos left it well below the national average of 3,800 pesos. In other words, this
impoverished, multi-ethnic, and agricultural state remained on the periphery of the
so-called Mexican Miracle (with the exception of tourist-drawing, economically
fragmented Acapulco)—peripheral yet necessarily constitutive of the PRI regime’s
post-1940 economic project.
265
In Guerrero, the functionality of this project partially
depended on various forms of violence; one, the everyday structural (objective)
violence of capitalist modernization that impoverished the countryside while GDP

264
The 1960 census counted 1,186,716 inhabitants. Palemón Díaz Ortiz,” Las finanzas públicas en
el estado de Guerrero,” Licenciatura Thesis, Escuela Nacional de Economía, México (1964), 19, cited
in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 30-31. For a detailed history of the development of
Acapulco, and the role played by national and international capital, see Gomezjara, Bonapartismo y
lucha campesina, 181-259.

265
Moisés Ochoa Campos, Guerrero, análisis de un Estado problema (México: Trillas, 1964), 33-34
& 187, cited in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 31. See also Juan Felipe Leal,
“Guerrero: economía y violencia, un análisis de las condiciones objetivas,” Punto Critico 10
(October 1972), 26; and, Martín Tavira Urióstegui, “Proceso Revolucionario y Democrático en
Guerrero,” in La transición democrática en Guerrero (Mexico: Diana, 1992), 156.

136

numbers proclaimed a “miracle;” and, two, the subjective violence wielded by those
caciques that refused to entertain any popular challenges to the status quo.
266

The constancy of rural violence in the history of Guerrero, as discussed in the
previous chapter, almost lends it the appearance of banality. Yet, after 1940 and in
large part due to the Mexican Revolution and Cardenismo, organized campesinos
expected the aid of the postrevolutionary state as they faced such violence.
Cárdenas’ enactment of agrarian reform fortified popular rural demands by
endowing them with institutional legitimacy.
267
With the redistribution of land (and
the technical and infrastructural means with which to work that land), the populist
president seemingly demonstrated that the postrevolutionary state could fulfill
revolutionary promises. And guerrerenses, such as the twenty-two Atoyac sierra
communities that received twenty-one ejidos in 1940, did not forget. With his deeds
and promises of an economic development that would primarily benefit campesinos,
Cardenás became a cultural icon in rural Guerrero: “the achievements of
Cardenismo in agrarian matters became firmly fixed in their [campesinos] minds; the
struggles against the old and new latifundismo; the vast modernizing process of the
countryside that translated into, in relative terms, better conditions of life for

266
For an illuminating differentiation in the types of objective and subjective violence, see Slavoj
Zizek, Violence (New York: Picador, 2008), 11-15.

267
See Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata; 55-60; Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire;
155-162; and, Hamilton, The Limits of State Autonomy, 236, 275-279. There was, of course, another
side to Cárdenas and Cardenismo; that is, the consolidation of one-party rule and the establishment of
a presidential office with vast undemocratic powers.

137

thousands of campesinos.”
268
As they experienced firsthand the “exclusionary”
modernization program of the PRI during the 1940s and 50s, campesinos recalled
past instances of struggle, organization, and achievement supported and spurred on
by the Cárdenas regime.
269
Rural schoolteachers, initially posited as Cardenista
missionaries responsible for the “spiritual liberation” of campesinos and workers,
would now play an increasingly important role as communal organic intellectuals
within popular movements that sought the redemption of the Mexican Revolution.
270

Why the perceived need for redemption? The administrations of Manuel
Avila Camacho and Miguel Alemán Valdés (1940-1952) enacted a sustained
rollback of key social reforms. Modifications to Article 27 of the Constitution that
practically ended land redistribution (1942-43), the end of socialist education, and
changes to the Federal labor law that restricted worker rights in 1943 in the name of
“national unity” undermined hard-earned popular rights gained in previous decades.
Alemán’s elevation of rapid industrialization into what historian Barry Carr referred
to as a “state religion” repositioned the place of the Mexican countryside (discussed

268
Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 109-110.

269
Perhaps some campesinos remembered Cárdenas’ speech in 1934 at the Ejido of Tres Palos,
Guerrero where he concluded by saying: “I will give campesinos the mauser rifles with which they
made the revolution so they can defend the revolution, so they can defend the ejido and the school.”
Palabras y documentos públicos de Lázaro Cárdenas: mensajes, discursos, declaraciones,
entrevistas y otros documentos vol. I (México: Siglo XXI, 1978), 128. Such expressions of support
and actions like the organizing of “defensas sociales” helped make Cardenismo and Cárdenas into
significant cultural referents. See also, Huizer, La lucha campesina en México, 71.

270
Palabras y documentos públicos de Lázaro Cárdenas, I: 169, cited in Becker, Setting the Virgin
on Fire, 62.

138

previously) as subsidizer of capitalist “modernization.”
271
This dramatic change in
course by the postrevolutionary state, as perceived by the workers and peasants,
provoked a series of disconnected, yet thematically related, popular movements from
1940-1952 that collectively worked within the legal arena and based their diverse
demands on the 1917 Constitution: land, schools, labor rights, credit, infrastructural
development, and municipal autonomy. This period, bookended by a 1941 massacre
of workers in front of the presidential residence and a massacre of protesting
Henriquista supporters in Mexico City during the summer of 1952, witnessed the to
what historian Elisa Servín termed the “real project of the Mexican Revolution” in
the post-1940 era.
272

Perhaps the most emblematic and important movement of the era, the various
peasant mobilizations led by ex-Zapatista Rubén Jaramillo in Morelos—alternating
between union organizing, guerrilla resistance, and the formation of an opposition
political party—symbolized the grievances and demands expressed by the
countryside. Not opposed to industrialization, Jaramillo and his supporters

271
Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico, 143.

272
Elisa Servín, Ruptura y oposición: el movimiento henriquista, 1945-1954 (Mexico: Cal y Arena,
2001), 16. For the 1941 massacre of workers, see Hodges and Gandy, Mexico Under Siege, 29-30.
Henriquistas refers to the followers of General Miguel Henríquez Guzmán, opposition presidential
candidate that ran in the elections of 1952 for the Federation of People’s Party (FPPM). Having
mobilized to protest what they considered as the fraudulent election of PRI candidate Adolfo Ruiz
Cortines in Mexico City on 7 July 1952, Henriquistas were attacked by mechanized units from the
Mexican military. While posterior official declarations posted a casualty list of 7 dead (and 500
detained), eyewitnesses put the number closer to 500. See “Sobre el henriquismo: el populismo de
derecha y la historia escamoteada,” La cultura en México/Suplemento de Siempre, 557, 11 October
1972, pp. iii-viii, quoted, in Tanalís Padilla, “’Por las buenas no se puede:’ la experiencia electoral de
los jaramillistas,” in Movimientos armados en México, 303-304.

139

elaborated a vision that “made the ejido, not the latifundio, the basic unit of
production, and campesinos, rather than capitalists, were to be in control of this
production.”
273
For Jaramillistas, the ejido demarcated the basic and fundamental
unit of national political-economic progress. After an initial self-defense guerrilla
campaign during the early 1940s, such demands propelled Jaramillo to enter the
political arena through the formation of an independent political party in 1945.
Influenced by Cardenismo, committed to a constitutional and legal framework, and
indicative of a “campesinado desirous of participating in the national political
project,” the party encountered repeated instances of electoral fraud.
274
Subsequent
persecution by state authorities (kidnappings, torture, and murder) further convinced
the ex-Zapatista that, in the words of one comrade: “…the conclusion that we came
to was that by the rules (por las buenas), the PRI will never accept a loss.”
275
State
violence and the erasure of legal political channels later spurred similar processes of
popular political radicalization in Chihuahua and, of course, in Guerrero.
World War II, and the beginning of Mexico’s capitalist modernization
project, produced significant changes in Guerrero, particularly in the Costa Grande
region. As the country joined Brazil and the United States to form the American
Allies “three caballeros,” wartime demands spurred coastal peasants to abandon

273
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 116.

274
Padilla, “Por las buenas no se puede,” 276.

275
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 136-137.

140

cotton and sesame cultivation in favor of copra
276
and coffee. Regional caciques too
changed “domains but not methods: usurer credit, the cornering of harvests, and the
monopolizing of agricultural industrialization that changed its focus from cotton and
sesame production to copra and coffee.”
277
Having lost land and political power
during the Cárdenas years, this reconstituted agrarian bourgeoisie emerged to
monopolize and control access to local and regional markets, credit, and
transportation networks. In the absence of meaningful federal support for small rural
producers, this group controlled the regional economy through a web of “coyote”
intermediaries that purchased crops, provided credit (at exorbitant rates) and formed
part of the local political class. By “purchasing, processing, and commercializing”
the products of copreros and cafeticultores
278
, Armando Bartra argued, this
reconfigured “commercial bourgeoisie” managed to monopolize the regional
economy without necessarily owning large swaths of land.
279
This structure of

276
Copra refers to the dried meat of coconuts from which coconut oil is extracted. Industrial uses for
copra include: industrial lubricants and oils, cosmetics, and soap.

277
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 75. By “agricultural industrialization,” Bartra was referring to the multi-
stage production processes that transformed copra into coconut oil, industrial lubricants, and/or soap;
and, harvested coffee cherries (wet and dry) into coffee beans. Both plants required small-level
industry for crop processing. Often, as was the case with coffee in Atoyac, the owners of coffee
processing plants had the power to set prices and were usually local-regional caciques.

278
Coprero refers to a rural producer of copra, while cafeticultor refers to a rural producer of coffee
beans.

279
In sum, the caciques adapted to postrevolutionary agrarian reform. Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 77,
84; Lorena Paz Paredes and Rosario Cabo, “Café caliente,” in Crónicas del sur: Utopías campesinas
en Guerrero, ed. Armando Bartra (Mexico: Era, 2000), 131. See also Armando Bartra, Los
herederos de Zapata: movimientos campesinos posrevolucionarios en México, 1920-1980 (Mexico:
Era, 1985), 79-89; Marco Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado a la guerra de los pobres: Ensayos de la
guerrilla rural en el México contemporáneo, 1940-1974 (Mexico: Casa San Juan Pablos, 2003), 111-
115; Andrea Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores: una historia de resistencia de los

141

domination, which included the systematic use of paramilitary white guards that
terrorized non-conforming ejidatarios, shaped the character and demands of
campesino movements that emerged during the early 1950s.
280

For the state’s powerful politico-economic caciques, the law represented, at
best, an inconvenience susceptible to facile undermining, manipulation, or simple
disregard. By contrast, peasant ejido holders and rural workers tended to
conceptualize the Constitution as a guarantor of their “progress,” and PRI-affiliated
institutions as the vehicles that ensured such progress. Following the Cardenista
land-redistribution, ejidos throughout the state created agrarian committees with the
assistance of local and state authorities that managed and organized ejido affairs.
Internally fractious organizations that experienced contentious negotiations and at
times involved inter-familial violence,
281
agrarian committees constituted the

cafeticultores: Atoyac, 1940-1970 (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 1998), 185-
190; José Félix Hoyo and Olga Cárdenas Trueba, “Desarrollo del capitalismo agrario y lucha de
clases en la costa y sierra de Guerrero,” Coyoacán 13 (July-September 1981), 84-87 & 91-95; Iván
Restrepo Fernández, Costa Grande de Guerrero: Estudio socio-económico (Mexico: Secretaría de
Recursos Hidráulicos, 1975), 91. Initial, starting credit is crucial to the production of copra and
coffee. While both crops require a transformation of arable land, both also necessitate patience in
obtaining the end product. For instance, it takes 8-10 years for coconut trees to reach a fully
productive phase and provide the coconuts from which copra is obtained. See Restrepo Fernández,
Costa Grande, 51-52, 105-106.

280
While not necessarily owning large swaths of land, caciques did own the most fertile properties
with superior access to irrigation. For instance, in 1971 only six out of 78 ejidos in the Costa Grande
owned land classified as “de riego [with irrigation].” Also, in a region that lacked passable roads (the
only important road in the region connected Acapulco to Mexico City), caciques also controlled the
means of transporting coffee beans and processed copra by air or sea. They also owned the
processing plants. Restrepo Fernández, Costa Grande, 89-90; and, Paz Paredes and Cabo, “Café
caliente,” 131-133. A road that connected Acapulco to Zihuatanejo along the state’s Pacific coastline
was not built till mid-1950s.

281
At times ejidos, such as the interfamilial conflict that occurred near the Michoacán-Guerrero
border between the Duarte and Torres families in March 1946, could experience internal violence as
warring sides vied for state support. The Duarte-Torres rivalry dated back, according to

142

mechanism through which campesinos interacted with state institutions.
282
While
some scholars
283
have tended to consider such organizations as one more example of
the PRI’s hegemonic corporativist structure, these agrarian committees and ejidos
often comprised loci of communal resistance throughout the 1940s and 50s during an
era characterized by Mexican sociologist Francisco Gomézjara as “a climate of
terror.”
284
Official appeals sent to state and federal authorities that denounced
violent local caciques were continually matched by the creation of popular
organizations or mobilizations that worked independently of the PRI.
For instance, townsfolk from the Costa Grade seaside community of San
Jeronimo organized in February 1946 a Committee for the Defense of the Mexican

newsmagazine Tiempo, to 1930s agrarian reform when local authorities considered one of the families
as “agrarista” (loyal to agrarian reform) when in reality they were “unconditional supporters” of local
hacienda owners. Members of this family subsequently ambushed and killed two from their rival
family (the newsmagazine fails to distinguish which family was which). See Gómezjara,
Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 145.

282
For a specific example see, Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 175-178; and, Tita
Radilla, interview with author, Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, 16 May 2007. Their father, Rosendo
Radilla, worked extensively within such committees and also participated in the organizing of
independent rural unions and later participated in the ACG and CAP under the leadership of Genaro
Vázquez. Rosenda Radilla was disappeared by members of the Mexican military in 1974 after
accusations that he belonged to the ACNR. See also, Andrea Radilla Martínez, Voces Acalladas
(vidas truncadas) (Mexico: Nueva Visión, 2007).

283
For example, see Pablo González Casanova, La democracia en México (Mexico: Era, 1975
[1965]), 46-52 & 144-160; José Luis Reyna, “Redefining the Authoritarian Regime,” in
Authoritarianism in Mexico, eds. José Luis Reyna and Richard S. Weinert (Philadelphia: Institute for
the Study of Human Issues, 1977), 160-162; Judith Hellman Adler, Mexico in Crisis (New York:
Holmes, 1983); and, Ruth Berins Collins and David Collier, Shaping the Political Arena (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991), 574. For Marxist-oriented Mexican works that conceptualized the
post-revolutionary state as “Caesarist” or “Bonapartist,” see Roger Bartra, Estructura agrarian y
clases sociales en México (Mexico: Era, 1993 [1974]), 156-162; Roger Bartra, ed. Caciquismo y
poder político en el México rural (Mexico: Era, 1999 [1975]), 24-27; and, Gómezjara, Bonapartismo
y lucha campesina, 20-24.

284
Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 143.

143

Revolution “to demand free elections and to stop certain urban projects that under
the pretext of modernization have destroyed numerous homes, leaving many
residents homeless.” Almost a year earlier, various Costa Grande towns, including
municipal capitals Tecpan de Galeana and Atoyac, agreed to organize a tax strike.
Demanding the expulsion of some “nefarious functionaries grown rich under the
shadow of public service and despotic toward the local population to boot,” these
citizens exposed corrupt civil judges and even the local leader of the CTM
(Confederation of Mexican Workers).
285
In Acapulco, the indefatigable socialist
María de la O helped formed the Committee for the Defense of the Port of Acapulco
during the early 1940s to defend peasant ejidal lands from expropriation (and
transformation into tourist zones). A member of the PCM and Fraternal Union of
Working Women with a long history of local radical activism, de la O also
participated in a series of peasant land invasions that occupied federal-owned
property in Acapulco.
286

Thus, campesino organizing conducted at the ejido level and often at the
behest of the postrevolutionary state provided the organizational framework and
terrain for the instances of independent rural union organizing that marked the 1950s

285
Ibid, 142-146. For all three examples, Gomézjara obtained direct quotes from the newsmagazine
Tiempo from the following dates, respectively: 8 March 1946; 10 June 1945; and, 17 May 1946.

286
The federally funded development of Acapulco into a world-class tourist destination—one that
included the construction of streets, sewage, privatization of beaches, and the expropriation of 16
million square meters of ejidal land—provoked the organizing of a Committee for the Defense of the
Port of Acapulco. Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 208-209. See also Nélida Flores
Arellano, Doña Maria de la O: una mujer ejemplar (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de
Guerrero, 1992).

144

in Guerrero. At mid-century, copreros and cafeticultores
287
from the coastal regions
organized cooperative union ventures that sought the circumvention of the region’s
cacique hegemony. Motivated by a vision of economic democracy sustained by the
1917 Constitution, the Regional Union of Copra Producers (URPC, founded 1951)
and the Local Assocation of Coffee Producers (ALC, founded 1952) sought a
collective take-over of the entire production process: collective control over credit
and production process (cultivation, harvest, processing, and commercialization of
crops).
288
They wanted to undermine an exploitative system that fused economic and
political power in the hands of a few caciques that proved more than willing to use
violence as a means of control and provided campesinos with unjust returns for their
labor and products.
289
In essence, they demanded the agrarian redemption of an

287
Coprero refers to a rural producer of copra, while cafeticultor refers to a rural producer of coffee
beans.

288
Paredes and Cabo, “Café caliente,” 143-145; and, Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 76. According to the
analysis of Gómezjara, international prices for copra descended during times of relative international
“peace” such as 1952, 1961-1962, and 1967-68, while ascending during the most bellicose years.
Ironically, relative international peace contrasted with regional violence directed against coprero
organizations by caciques. Francisco Gomezjara, “La experiencia cooperativa coprera de costa
grande, Guerrero,” Revista del México Agrario 9:4 (1976), 133.

289
That is not to say that the interests of local and regional caciques always mirrored those of national
officials working out of Mexico City. A region-versus-center tension constitutes a crucial aspect of
Guerrero’s history, as regional caciques at times worked against the interests of the federal
government and PRI elites. Particularly evident during the 1930s as these caciques worked against
(while some worked with) the implementation of Cardenista agrarian reform, this tension also
manifested itself during the governorship of General Raúl Caballero Aburto (1957-1960) who
continually clashed with local caciques allied to Donato Miranda Fonseca, personal secretary to
President Adolfo López Mateos. These types of tensions suggest, as historian Jeffrey Rubin argued in
his influential work on Oaxaca, that PRI rule was never as monolithic, hegemonic, or centralized as it
is usually conceptualized by most scholars. Furthermore, such qualities tended to reinforce the “myth
of Pax Priísta” and the “Mexican Miracle.” See Rubin, Decentering the Regime, chap. 2. For a useful
work that attempts to systematically define caciquismo as a multi-layered form of “boss politics,” see
Alan Knight, “Caciquismo in Twentieth-century Mexico,” in Caciquismo in Twentieth-Century

145

interrupted revolution and, simultaneously, signaled the exclusionary aspect of an
exploitative “modernization.” As the leader of the URPC proclaimed, both
organizations comprised a single “combative force that could destroy into pieces the
ancestral [exploitative] system of economic organization.”
290

In 1951 copreros suffered a double injury. The international price for copra
experienced a severe drop that led to the importation of sebo (oil, grease) as a
replacement lubrication derivative in lieu of copra—further damaging the copra
market and copreros. Making matters worse, the governor raised a pre-existing
copra tax from two to five cents per pound and charged ten pesos for every coconut
tree involved in copra production. By the time copreros organized to form the URPC
in late 1951, they no longer focused only on lowering taxes. In fact, their tactics and
demands had moved outside of institutional arenas. Organizing over 12,000
copreros, the UPRC initiated a forty-two day strike in 1952 that ceased the
harvesting and production of copra, and implemented road blockades in the Costa
Grande. A movement later described by their leader Florencio Ursúa Encarnación as
a “strike of fallen arms [huelga de brazos caídos],” the URPC openly stated its
independent status:

Mexico, eds. Alan Knight and Wil Pansters (London: Institute for the Study of the Americas, 2005),
1-48.

290
Francisco Ursúa, quoted in Paredes and Cabo, “Café caliente,” 145.

146

No representative or fraternal delegate from any other organization,
Whether friendly or hostile, from the secretariats of the states, or any
of the Republic’s governments possess the right to lead or tutor,
openly or secretly, the actions…of this Union, and when it is proven
that this stipulation has been violated we will demand the expulsion of
those involved.
291

The copra strike succeeded in fulfilling the demands of the URPC, including a
reduction of taxes and a credit line of 5 million pesos for the organization. Yet, in
larger terms the union represented a threat to the manner in which the PRI regime
conducted political and economic affairs and provided an organizational blueprint
for other societal sectors harboring neglected grievances. Despite the URPC’s
eventual co-optation into the PRI-controlled National Confederation of Campesinos
(CNC) in 1956, a vast majority of copreros would participate in another experiment
of independent popular agency in 1960: the ACG movement against General Raúl
Caballero Aburto.
292

In the Costa Grande throughout the 1950s, both the URPC and the ALC
293

forwarded reformist demands such as just prices for their products, machinery

291
Florencio Ursúa Encarnación, Las luchas de los copreros guerrerenses (México: Editora y
Distribuidora Nacional de Publicaciones, 1977), 69-72; and, Francisco Gómezjara, Aceites, jabones y
multinacionales (México: Nueva Sociología, 1978), 41, quoted in Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 79.

292
This episode demonstrates another of the “hegemonizing” tactics utilized by the PRI regime: co-
optation. Ursúa Encarnación, Las luchas de los copreros guerrerenses, 69-75; Bartra, Guerrero
bronco, 79-84; Andrés Rubio Zaldivár, Comandante Genaro Vázquez Rojas (San Luis Acatlán,
Guerrero, 2003), 7-9; Gómezjara, “La experiencia cooperativa coprera en la Costa Grande de
Guerrero,” 133-137; Hoyos and Cárdenas, “Desarrollo del capitalismo agrario,” 86-88; and, Alba
Teresa Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista: Guerrero, 1960, Crónica de un conflicto
(Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 2001), 38-40.

293
For the development of this independent coffee-producers union, see Paredes and Cabo, “Café
Caliente,” 143-148; and, Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 185-190.

147

needed for processing, credit, transportation networks, and the removal of high state
taxes. Such demands pointed to local-regional agrarian problems and reflected
broader, national rural deficiencies faced by a stratified campesinado.
294
Yet, an
obstinate PRI regime largely neglected such reformist demands and/or attempted to
co-opt movement leaders. Worse yet, its primary responses to the peaceful
mobilizations of campesinos (and workers) who voiced their demands as rights-
bearing citizens became increasingly violent. This cycle of popular legalistic protest
and state violence tended to produce radicalizing effects that steadily eroded any
semblance of ruling legitimacy the PRI regime possessed. In Guerrero, this process
began in 1960. Copreros and cafeticultores began linking their struggles for
economic justice with broader national issues involving political democracy,
culminating with their prominent participation in the popular democratic movement
that shook the state in 1960.
On the eve of the ACG campaign, a group of young, bearded revolutionaries
managed to depose a dictator so reviled that even the United States government
withdrew its earlier support. Even as the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution inspired
radical utopian imaginings throughout the Americas, the machinery of imperial
counterinsurgency was earnestly put into motion by military and political officials in

294
On a larger scale, URPC and the ALC fit within a national context of popular movements and
organizations that emerged prior to and throughout the 1950s. Collectively characterized by a
political strategy of working within legal channels through independent organizations outside of the
PRI corporatist structure, such movements sought to obtain what they considered the promised yet
unfulfilled goals of the Mexican revolution and based their demands on the Mexican Constitution.
Examples include: the 1952 Henriquista presidential campaign, the land invasions organized by the

148

Washington that sought to replicate their earlier success in 1954 Guatemala.
295
For
PRI officials in Mexico, the Cuban Revolution strengthened a form of Cold War
governance that justified the use of state violence against social dissidents tagged as
“communists” in the name of national security. Popular calls for fairer redistribution
of fertile lands, labor rights, or electoral democracy—demands cited as rights within
the Constitution—became unequivocally, in the official thinking of the state “exotic,
communist ideas” incompatible with, as President Alemán declared, mexicanidad;
and, worse yet, treasonous.
296
As such, historian Daniela Spenser argued, the Cold
War in Mexico both robustly reinforced the authoritarianism of the PRI regime and
directly led to the development of a “dirty war” a la Mexicana.
297
In Guerrero, that
dirty war began in 1960.
298

Union of Mexican Workers and Peasants (UGOCM) in northern Mexico during the late 1940s and 50,
and the national mobilization of railroad workers, electrical workers, and teachers in 1958-1959.

295
Such “machinery” included the elaboration of military counterinsurgency training manuals created
in the United States and distributed to Latin American militaries; the training of Latin American
military officers in the United States in the “arts” counterinsurgency supplemented by the French
experience in Algeria, and the British experience in Northern Ireland; and, technological innovations
in military surveillance and intelligence gathering. See Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 184-
195.

296
Jurgen Buchenau, “Por una guerra fría más templada: México entre el cambio revolucionario y la
reacción estadounidense en Guatemala y Cuba,” in Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América
Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico: CIEASA/Porrúa, 2004), 119-122; Eric Zolov,
“’¡Cuba sí, yanquis no!:’ el saqueo del Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano en Morelia,
Michoacán, 1961,” in Espejos de la guerra fría, 176-181; Enrique Condés Lara, Represión y rebelión
en México (1959-1985), Tomo I (Mexico: Universidad Autónoma de Puebla/Porrúa, 2007), 62-65;
and, Steven Bachelor, “Miracle on Ice: Industrial Workers and the Promise of Americanization in
Cold War Mexico,” in In from the Cold, eds. Joseph and Spenser, 253-256.

297
Spenser, “La nueva historia de la Guerra Fría,” 109.

298
For the people of Guerrero, 1960 marked the beginning of a process similar to a hemispheric one
described by historian Greg Grandin as a cycle of revolution-counterrevolution, “…a protracted
revolution, dispersed through time and space yet entailing a coherent and legible logic of insurgency,

149

There are many Cuban Revolutions. If for the Mexican state it represented
both a national security threat and an opportunity to strengthen its independent
radical posture within the international community, for some Mexicans it represented
something profoundly distinct. Former President Lázaro Cárdenas, for instance,
viewed the Cuban revolution through a domestic lens that revealed a frustrated and
interrupted revolution at home.
299
For a cafeticultor from Atoyac, Don José Téllez,
the radicalism of the Cuban Revolution represented a sort of utopian, yet practical
hope:
…the news of the Cuban Revolution reached us through short-wave
radio…Lucio Cabañas would speak of it during the protests launched
against Caballero Aburto, other orators too would discuss the social
achievements of Cuba, Imperio Rebolledo was one of them…it
seemed that there was a hope that things could change for us, we were
tired of so much exploitation at the hands of acaparadores
[middlemen] and the bank…tired of the abuses and assassinations
carried out by regimes such as Caballero Aburto’s…
300

Arturo Gámiz, a young rural schoolteacher from Chihuahua, captured the impact of
the Caribbean revolution felt by many other schoolteachers trained in the teacher
training schools sprinkled throughout rural Mexico: “nothing else has infused the

violence, and transformation.” Popular attempts to reform state authoritarianism through civic,
legalistic action during the early 1960s, and the recurrent instances of state violence they continually
encountered, radicalized and convinced many Guerrerenses of the necessity of armed revolution.
Counterrevolutionary terror, “inextricably tied to empire” as Grandin noted, unmade people’s worlds
and produced the very subjects the Mexican state purported to fight in the first place: radicalized
groups of students, workers, and peasants willing to take up arms and utilize violence to re-make
better worlds. See Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 188-189 & 196-197.
299
See Lázaro Cárdenas, Ideario Político (Mexico: Era, 1972), 281-292.

300
Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 201.

150

oppressed of Latin America with the hope and the confidence for a better future, and
in the certainty of revolutionary victory, like the Cuban Revolution.”
301

During these tumultuous times characterized by increasing state repression
and the proliferation of liberatory dreams, a group of young leaders emerged from
the National Teachers Training School in Mexico City and the rural Ayotzinapa
Teachers Training School—teachers who like Gámiz sought to create a more just
and democratic Mexico. Formed in radical, alternately Cardenista, liberal and
socialist, educational contexts, these teachers (often of campesino origin) embraced
the progressive legacies of the 1917 Constitution.
302
Yet, as subsequent teaching
assignments in impoverished rural and urban areas exposed the effects of the
regime’s rollback of social reforms, teachers often became “organizers of resistance
to [state power].”
303
Genaro Vázquez was one such teacher-organizer.

301
Gámiz and several other teachers, students, doctors, and campesinos formed the Grupo Popular
Guerrillero (GPG) in the mountain ranges of Chihuahua in 1963. 23 September 1965 marked the date
on which they attacked the Madera military barracks, a military action inspired by Fidel Castro’s own
Moncada barracks attack in 1953, and suffered a disastrous defeat. For the quote, see Laura
Castellanos, Mexico armado, 1943-1981 (Mexico: Era, 2007), 69.

302
Concepción Solís studied at the National Teacher’s Training School in Mexico City during the late
1950s. She remembered her teachers as “progressive people, those who Lázaro Cárdenas offered a
home to, to escape political persecution…many Spanish professors taught us and planted the seed of
restlessness in us.” Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, 25 May 2007. Solís later led the
Mexico City urban wing of the guerrilla ACNR.

303
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 10.

151

“…He thinks like Zapata, like Villa…”
In the attempt to convince her father to accept Genaro Vázquez as her choice
for husband, Consuelo Solís posited the latter’s radical politics as a bargaining chip.
“He thinks like Zapata, like Villa, like you,” she remembers telling her skeptical,
hard-working father from the state of Hidalgo. “Well I admire the cabrón and his
thinking,” he responded, “but not to be your husband!”
304
By the time he relented
and the marriage took place in 1959, Vázquez was already an experienced political
leader. Born to a poor campesino family in the Costa Chica town of San Luis
Acatlán on 10 June 1931,
305
Vázquez described himself as the son of a campesino
leader. As a child, he remembered attending ejidatario assemblies and meetings with
this father. With some help from state officials, he obtained primary and secondary
education in Mexico City at the internado Francisco I. Madero and Rafael Dondé,
respectively. After finishing preparatory studies at San Ildefonso, he entered the
National Teacher Training School, finishing in 1955 and obtaining his teaching
credential as an urban schoolteacher in 1956. At the Normal nacional, Vázquez
began a two decades-long career as a popular political activist and charismatic
leader. According to his wife Consuelo, he led a student movement within the
National Teacher Training School that demanded more scholarships, improved

304
Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007. Consuelo Solís is the
widow of Genaro Vázquez.

305
Other sources posit 1933 as Vázquez’s birth year. See Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez (Mexico: Diógenes,
1972), 73, 79; and, Hodges and Gandy, Mexico under Siege, 108.

152

dining facilities, and the removal of an unpopular school rector.
306
Obtaining the first
two demands after a meeting with then-Public Education official Luis Echeverría,
Vázquez and his wife participated in the 1958 strike and take-over of the Secretariat
of Public Education building led by the Revolutionary Teacher’s Movement
(MRM).
307
His work as a schoolteacher and involvement in Mexico City-centered
political movements did not prevent him from knowing the political situation in his
native state. As he recalled during an interview in 1970: “in the course of my
studies and during the exercise of my profession I never lost contact with
guerrerenses…they would come talk to me about their problems and they designated
me as their representative before the Agrarian Department.”
308

During the formative years of his political ideology, methodology, and
praxis, Vázquez continually (and would do so after the 1960 civic movement)
displayed remarkable political pragmatism and non-sectarian thinking. Within a
sectarian and dogmatic domestic Left that spent hours debating the proper road to
socialism, the benefits of an alliance with the so-called “national-democratic

306
Vázquez also briefly studied law at the National University (UNAM) after completing his teaching
credential. Ibid; José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, 9 March 2007; Orlando Ortíz,
Genaro Vázquez, 73-74; Francisco Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas hacia la
guerrilla campesina,” Revista Mexicana de Ciencias Políticas y Sociales 88 (April-June 1977), 88-89;
and, Juan Miguel de Mora, Las guerrillas en México y Jenaro Vázquez Rojas (su personalidad, su
vida y su muerte) (Mexico: Latino Americana, 1972), 26-27.

307
Vázquez served at the MRM’s secretary general of western Mexico City during the labor struggles
of the late 1950s. The Revolutionary Teacher’s Movement (MRM) was formed during the late 1950s
by Othón Salazar as an independent, autonomous teacher’s union that demanded better wages,
improved healthcare, cheaper medicine, and, union autonomy. See Castellanos, México armado, 112;
and, Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, 30 May 2007.

308
Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 74.

153

bourgeoisie,” or expelling “heretical” members—while often caught unprepared by
the autonomous and democratic demands of 1950s popular movements—the
schoolteacher’s independent political acumen stood out. He was “anti-party,”
309
a
critic of political parties like the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) for their inability
to truly represent and lead Mexican workers. He coincided with José Revueltas—
one such “heretical” Marxist—when the Marxist writer criticized the PCM for failing
to lead a “headless proletariat” during the massive worker mobilizations of the late
1950s.
310
Praxis, coalition building, and the sharing of common goals to struggle for
mattered more to Vázquez than party affiliation or ideological orthodoxy. Before the
emerging popularity of Antonio Gramsci’s writings in Latin America during the late
1960s and early 70s, the man who “thought like Zapata, like Villa” busily engaged in
a multi-fronted “war of position.” Vázquez helped forge an inter-class “hegemonic
bloc” that would challenge one particularly despotic state governor in 1960.
311

309
Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007; and, José Bracho, interview
with the author, Acapulco, 9 March 2007. Baloy Mayo claimed that Vázquez once belonged to the
PRI, as did ex-ACG member Blas Vergara. Both Solís and Bracho refuted that claim during their
interviews with the author. See Mayo, La guerrilla de Genaro y Lucio, 35-36; and, Román Román,
Revuelta cívica, 175.

310
José Revueltas, Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (México: Era, 1980 [1962]).

311
I discussed this phenomenon of “being Gramscian before it was fashionable” with former ACNR
guerrilla Antonio Mirada Ramírez. Antonio Miranda Ramírez, interview with the author,
Chilpancingo, Guerrero, 14 May 2007. For an interesting discussion of Gramsci and his theorization
on the “hegemonic bloc,” see Hughes Portelli, Gramsci y el bloque histórico (Mexico: Siglo
veintiuno, 2003 [1973]).

154

“…the cruel reality that reigns in the suffering state of Guerrero”
312

This particular part of the story could have many beginnings. Yet, one in
particular stands out partly because it demonstrated the character and thinking of
General Raúl Caballero Aburto. A longtime military man expert in giving orders,
fully expecting that such orders be strictly and uncritically followed, the general
proved somewhat less skilled in obeying them. And this military man, with no prior
political experience, was appointed governor of Guerrero in 1957.
A day after the July 1952 presidential elections in Mexico City, hundreds of
supporters of the recently defeated presidential candidate General Miguel Henríquez
Guzmán gathered to protest what they considered as the fraudulent election of PRI
candidate Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. Defying government proclamations not to organize
public protests, the defiant Henriquistas gathered at the Alameda Central. Stationed
nearby, a military mechanized battalion under the leadership of General Raúl
Caballero Aburto. Born in 1902 in the Costa Chica region of Guerrero and veteran
of the Mexican Revolution, General Caballero had recently completed a series of
military courses at Fort Knox and at the Panama Canal U.S. military zone. Facing
the peaceful congregation of civilian Henriquistas on 7 July 1952, the general
participated in their violently forcible removal from the Alameda Central. Hundreds
of protestors suffered severe beatings. According to some eye witnesses, the violent

312
Archivo General de la Nación (AGN hereafter), Dirección Federal de Seguridad (DFS hereafter)
48-54-1960, Legajo 1, 129.

155

actions left hundreds dead.
313
Five hundred Henriquistas languished in prisons,
formal and clandestine versions. As the repression against Henriquista supporters
spread from Mexico City to provincial regions (like Morelos), General Caballero
gained the sympathy and support from the newly-“elected” Ruiz Cortines. The
president would not forget the general’s endeavors—largely explaining why he
anointed Caballero as the governor of Guerrero for the term of 1957-1963.
314

Like his counterpart in Chihuahua, General Práxedes Giner Durán,
315
General
Caballero confused the state, in the words of one 1960 civic leader, “with the
barracks he previously commanded [in Veracruz and Puebla from 1952 to 1956] in
his attempts to dominate civil society with an iron fist, rather than heed, in timely
fashion, peaceful demands for justice and proposed solutions.”
316
Away from the
state some thirty years and possessing the support of only a few important Costa
Chica caciques, General Caballero became part of a volatile “official” political
culture: intricately defined by unwritten laws, patronage, compadrazgo and cacique

313
Castellanos, México armado, 47; and, Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 135. At
least 500 people were detained by state authorities.

314
José Bracho and Santos Méndez, interviews with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007 &
15 May 2007. For specifics on Caballero’s military career see, José Gutiérrez Galindo, Y el pueblo se
puso de pie (Mexico: Logos, 1961), 100; Roderic Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-
1993 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995 [1981]), 97; Estrada Castañón, El movimiento
anticaballerista, 49-50; Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 27-28; Arturo Miranda
Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos en el estado de Guerrero durante la guerra sucia:
una herida no restañada (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 2006), 100-102; and,
Marcial Rodríguez Saldaña, La desaparición de poderes en el Estado de Guerrero (Chilpancingo:
Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 1992), 134-135.

315
Giner Durán, a large landholder in Chihuahua, protected other cacique landholders and did not
hesitate to use violence as a principal form of ruling. See Castellanos, México armado, 65-67, 80-81.

316
Dr. Pablo Sandoval Cruz, quoted in Miranda Ramírez, La violación de derechos humanos, 99.

156

networks, familial ties, and it included an uneasy coexistence of competing wealthy
families. Assuming a fragile office (only three of his predecessors managed to
complete their gubernatorial terms in the prior forty years), the general perceived a
dual threat to his rule. First, the passed-over gubernatorial candidates that formed
part of Guerrero’s cacique power network—with foreign and national capitalists
centered in Acapulco—and were affiliated with political figures at the national level.
The most important federal player, Donato Miranda Fonseca, worked with President
Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964) as secretary of the cabinet. A native of Guerrero,
Miranda Fonseca previously served tenures as federal deputy and mayor of Acapulco
during which he forged links to important Acapulqueño socio-economic interests.
317

Second, the general inherited a state characterized by recent waves of independent
rural union activism that potentially threatened cacique interests in the Costa

317
AGN, DFS, 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 93. This internal DFS memorandum lists former state governors
General Baltazar R. Leyva (1945-1951), Alejandro Gómez Maganda (1951-1954), and Darío L.
Arrieta (1954-1957, interim) as having formed two separate political groups that challenged, possibly
even clandestinely worked against, the administration of Caballero Aburto. The general also faced
pressure from passed over candidates, a group that included: Ruffo Figueroa, elder member of the
Figueroa cacicazgo; Donato Miranda Fonseca; and, Fernando Lugo. See Rodríguez Saldaña, La
desaparición de poderes, 135; Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 52-55; Gutiérrez
Galindo, Y el pueblo se puso de pie, 103; Antonio Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia de la Asociación
Cívica Guerrerense: jefaturada por Genaro Vázquez Rojas (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma
de Guerrero, 1991), 34-35; and, Román Román, Revuelta Cívica en Guerrero, 26-29. For a short
biography of Miranda Fonseca, see Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 473.

157

Grande.
318
In this context, this military man who viewed Guerrero through the eyes
of a garrison commander took office on 1 April 1957.
319

The general wasted no time in making up for his lack of cacique or popular
bases of support. As way to ensure loyalty within his own administration—and to
maximize the profitability of his position as governor—Caballero packed the state
government with compadres, brothers, nephews, nieces, uncles, aunts, and distant
relatives. For instance, relatives occupied the positions of Attorney General,
Treasurer, Tax Collector, Customs Officer of Acapulco, and Chief of Acapulco’s
urban police.
320
Throughout his gubernatorial tenure, he managed to impose his
candidates for municipal presidencies around the state—in general, bad political
choices according to DFS agents.
321
For example, citizens from the Costa Grande
municipalities of San Jerónimo and Coyuca de Benítez sent telegrams to the ACG

318
Regime officials tended to view such instances of popular mobilization differently. A Federal
Directorate of Security (DFS) analysis produced in the aftermath of the 1960 civil disobedience
campaign blamed popular mobilization on guerrerenses’ innate “volatile” temperament; and, their
character as “climatologically conditioned” and their “predisposition for agitation caused by a lack of
communication networks and culture.” AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 90 & 92-93.
319
In the history of Guerrero, a general serving as governor was nothing new. From 1917-1993, ten
of 25 governors were military men (one, Adrían Castrejón, 1929-1933, represented an exception as an
agrarista, even Zapatista, governor). For the list of governors, see Estrada Castañón, Guerrero, 84.

320
On the eve of a visit to Guerrero by President Ruiz Cortines in June 1957, Caballero confided to a
local PRI leader from Iguala that “in order to fulfill the compromise that I have with the president of
the Republic I must govern with the people that I know and those are my relatives and my friends;
but, after some time passes I will change that.” Fernando Huicochea Núñez, interview with author
Salvador Román Román in Revuelta Cívica en Guerrero, 49-50.
A list sent by the ACG to the federal Senate in 1960 included 30 public positions occupied
by Caballero’s relatives—a list that contained the names of persons from the two Costa Chica
cacicazgos that most supported the general: the Flores and Añorve families. AGN, DFS 48-54-1960,
Legajo 1, 119-120.

321
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 90 & 93-94. To cite an example: Constantino Zapata López,
appointed tax collector in Atoyac, ended his term by leaving a deficit of 75,000 pesos. AGN, DFS
48-54-60, Legajo 1, 122.

158

Mexico City office in 31 December 1959 and 6 January 1960, respectively, citing the
unconstitutional imposition of caballerista supporters in their municipal
governments. In the case of Coyuca de Benítez, telegram writers accused the
caballerista municipal president of being a murderer who exhibited a willingness to
act violently: “in view of the ignorance displayed by the federal Congress and the
President of the Republic who continue to disregard [the] imposition of municipal
governments [ayuntamientos] throughout Guerrero, we [local ACG members] are
resolved in taking by force the government palace in Chilpancingo with 5-10,000
men.”
322
Such accusations voiced against the imposed Coyuca de Benítez municipal
government proved accurate as the local ACG leader, Dr. Galdino Guinto, later
survived an assassination attempt at the hands of Aurelio Avila Hernández, secretary
of the ayuntamiento who “received instructions directly from the state governor who
had ordered the destruction of that [ACG] committee.”
323

Nepotism and the constant violation of municipal autonomy—long a point of
struggle for guerrerenses dating back to the early nineteenth century—reflected the
broader programs of political centralization and fiscal modernization advocated by
General Caballero from the start of his gubernatorial term. In reorganizing and

322
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 1-3. According to the ACG, another imposition of Caballero yes-
men at the municipal level occurred in Tlacotepec on 19 January 1960. Two local deputies (one
related to Caballero) and two hired gunmen forced the municipal president Efrain Hurtado Romero to
resign in order to install Trinidad Valdez. Valdez, “a man with criminal precedents in the region” was
installed at the behest of a local forestry cacique that continually clashed with Hurtado Romero. See
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 17.

323
30 January 1960, AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 23. ACG and ACNR participant Antonio Sotelo
mentions in his history of the ACG that Dr. Guinto was later poisoned following the removal of
Caballero from the governorship. See Sotelo, Breve historia, 57.

159

“modernizing” the state’s tax-collecting apparatus under the Ministry of Treasury
and State economy, the general’s new tax policies specifically targeted the state’s
lower and middling classes while leaving untouched Acapulco-based transnational
corporations, forestry companies, or national capitalist interests. During May and
July, two new taxes emerged by decree: the first charged Acapulco residents from
specific neighborhoods with “urbanization” fees, and the second elevated existing
taxes on alcoholic beverages. Establishing a State Office of Alcohol, Caballero put
his nephew Armando Caballero in charge. The nephew and his father, Enrique
Caballero Aburto, subsequently established a monopoly on mezcal production.
Additional taxes on coffee, copra, real estate, grocery stores, urban services, goods
sold in small businesses, and foodstuffs (with the exception of maize and beans)
eroded the possibility of the governor developing any sort of legitimacy among the
state’s laboring and middling classes.
324

As an overwhelmingly rural state, the increased taxes burdened the already
precarious living standards of Guerrero’s poor and middling campesinos. Caballero,
at least rhetorically, took office promising to modernize the countryside with a re-
organized fiscal system that taxed agricultural products and, subsequently, deposited
such fiscal funds in bank accounts owned by campesino cooperatives and unions.

324
In contrast, corporations usually received preferential treatment. A decreed “Law of Protection of
Industry #29” reduced or removed taxes for a period of five to ten years for tourism-based businesses
deemed necessary by the governor. One particularly blatant example was the ten-year tax exemption
allotted to Cementos del Sur, S.A., a Caballero-owned company. AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1,
121-123; Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 57-59; and, Román Román, Revuelta
cívica en Guerrero, 58-59.

160

Such promises helped the governor attain the valuable support of the now-PRI
affiliated coprero URPC early in his tenure, as the copreros believed collected taxes
on copra production would infuse capital in their newly-created organization that
sought coprero control over the entire commercialization process: the Mercantile
Union of Coco Producers and its Derivatives (UMPC). For a brief period in 1957-
1958, the cafeticultor ALC viewed the increased taxes on their coffee products in a
similar light. With the help of URPC members and assessors, the ALC organized the
Mercantile Union of Coffee Producers in 1958 to obtain the vast majority of funds
gained from the coffee taxes. Designed to displace traditional agro-bourgeois
commercial networks, such “autonomous” campesino cooperatives seemed to
confirm the neo-Cardenista populist slogans pronounced on a national level by
newly-elected President Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964).
325

The “honeymoon” between Caballero and the countryside proved fleeting.
For closer contact and affiliation with the PRI and local politicians literally corrupted
the earlier autonomous and economic democratic impetus of the URPC and ALC.
By mid-to-late 1959, the divide between rank-and-file campesinos and union
leadership vividly and dramatically widened as the latter forged ties to the PRI and
even secured political positions at the state and municipal levels. Revenue obtained
from the copra and coffee taxes failed to reach union members, most likely
embezzled by the caballerista government or by union leaders themselves.

325
The Mercantile Union was to receive 75% of the copra taxes, while the URPC received the
remaining funds. The cafeticultores operated on a similar distribution model. See Bartra, Guerrero
bronco, 80-86; and, Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 60-61.

161

Caballero himself imposed ALC leader Raúl Galeana in 1959 as the municipal
president of Atoyac, while local caciques like Candelario Rios negotiated alliances
with URPC leadership. As rank-and-file campesinos experienced only increased
taxes levied by Caballero and potential benefits absorbed by corrupt leaders, the
Costa Grande joined the cities of Acapulco, Chilpancingo, and Iguala as the
cauldrons of discontent that would produce robust bastions of ACG support in
1960.
326

Dissidence, as the discontented realized from the beginning of the general’s
tenure, exacted a heavy, sometimes, fatal price. At times working one’s land or just
living day to day sufficed to provoke state-sponsored violence. One month in office,
Caballero announced a state-wide “depistolization” campaign, similar to one he led
some years earlier in Veracruz, for public safety and anti-crime purposes.
Implemented by a newly consolidated police apparatus that posited five police
bodies under the direct control of the governor, the “depistolization” program soon
turned into a campaign of extortion, repression, extrajudicial killings, and
suppression of public protest. By January 1959, according to a telegram sent by one
courageous newspaper director from Acapulco to then-minister of the interior
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, more than 1,000 guerrerenses had died at the hands of state

326
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 3, 113; DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 90-108; Gómezjara, “La
experiencia cooperativa coprera,” 135-138; Radilla, Poderes, saberes y sabores, 185-187; and, Sotelo,
Breve historia, 46-47.

162

police forces.
327
Geographic locales, such as the now-covered and fenced Pozo
Melendez on the Taxco-Iguala road or the “Trozadura”
328
near Atoyac, became
infamous as execution grounds and impromptu burial sites. Specific “officers” like
Francisco “La Guitarra” Bravo Delgado and Tibe Paco inspired tremendous fear
among the citizenry and their murderous legacy remained alive for various decades.
According to Dr. Pablo Sandoval, a leader in the 1960 movement, the consolidated
police forces constituted no more than “official” smokescreens for paid gunmen that
served at the behest of the governor and his nepotistic regime. An internal analysis
produced by the DFS soon after Caballero’s fall from power in early 1961 listed the
use of such “criminal groups” and their acts of “assassinations, theft, and plunder” as
a crucial factor in the “development of the Guerrero case.”
329

Repression facilitated, indeed ensured, the nepotism and illicit enrichment
that characterized the Caballero governorship. As that same DFS report explained,
the use of violent criminals masquerading as state and municipal police officers
allowed the general and his family to take over and maintain vital economic sectors.

327
Ignacio de la Hoya, director of La Verdad, cited in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero,
181.

328
The “Trozadura” refers to an area where the Atoyac road joined the Acapulco-Zihuatanejo
freeway. Former ACNR guerrilla Antonio Miranda Ramírez wrote that the trees of the Trozadura
often served as gallows for dissident campesinos who refused to cede their land, or men accused of
livestock theft. Miranda Ramírez, La violación de derechos humanos, 9-10 & 110.

329
Cruz Sandoval, El movimiento social de 1960, 76-78; and, AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 94.
During his guerrilla days of the early 1970s Lucio Cabañas recalled the infamous deeds of Tibe Paco:
“[he] entered the [Mounted Police] and went around killing people…[in the time of Caballero Aburto]
he gave himself the pleasure of killing poor people, leaving La Trozadura filled with the dead…and
no one punished him. We would be filled with rage in that time, witnessing so much injustice and we
could never respond.” Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 117.

163

Citing the governor’s brother Enrique Caballero Aburto, head of the Acapulco tax
collection office, the analysis argued that “in controlling all of the economic sectors
of the port [Acapulco] and the entire Costa Grande, an economically rich sector, [he]
used as a medium of repression and terrorism Francisco Bravo Delgado (a) ‘La
Guitarra’…always protected by Enrique through [the federal justice system].”
330

Campesinos that lived on the coastal outskirts of Acapulco experienced firsthand the
“mediums” of violent repression used by the governor’s brother. In 1957, a
campesino community living alongside the Acapulco-Puerto Marqués coastal road
was violently expelled from their land because a “brother of the governor wanted to
divide that zone’s land holdings.” They watched as gunmen burned down their small
cabins. The same occurred to a group of campesinos from Cumbres de Llanos
Largo, a hamlet located on the southern part of the Acapulco bay. Tucingo, a
neighboring community, suffered a more savage fate: some of their residents were
“machine-gunned.”
331
Why the attacks? These communities obstructed the
development of lucrative private beaches and wealthy residential zones to the south
of the Acapulco beaches.

330
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 94.

331
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 19. For the case of Tuncingo, this document fails to demonstrate
if community members died in the attack on their homes. Basing his account on a review of local
newspapers, the historian Salvador Román Román shows that in December 1959 state police officers
under the orders of Francisco Bravo “La Guitarra” arrived in Tuncingo and “machine-gunned”
various members of the Pino family—nephews of a veteran general of the Mexican Revolution and
father to a murdered cívico, Napoleon Lacunza. Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 146-
148.

164

Such instances of repression committed by state police forces occurred
throughout the state during Caballero’s tenure and affected most sectors of civil
society. Rural hamlets, such as those coffee-producing communities in the
mountains above Atoyac, suffered the assassinations of ejidatarios who refused to
cede their lands. Duly elected municipal presidents who refused to leave their
public posts to Caballero supporters faced torture, assassination attempts, and, at
times, death. Such was the case with Angel Betancourt, municipal president of
Cutzamala de Pinzón (located in the Tierra Caliente region near Michoacán): shot to
death on 19 January 1958 and posthumously hung from his genitals by his killers.
332

State university students who demanded qualified professors, professional courses,
adequate installations, increased state funding, and institutional autonomy clashed
with a Caballero-formed group of violent athletic thugs dubbed the “Pentathlon.”
People jailed for alleged crimes faced the possibility of police lynching, either
hanged at La Trozadura or thrown into the deep pit of the Pozo Meléndez.
Progressive activists and independent-minded PRI militants experienced vigilance,
harassment, and the specter of that famously un-democratic Article 145 of the
Mexican Constitution: the crime of social “dissolution” and sedition that, according
to ACG militant Antonio Sotelo, became “in vogue” during Caballero’s term.
333

332
Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 77; Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 46; and,
Castellanos, México armado, 105-106.

333
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 41. Article 145 of the Mexican Constitution, passed during World
War II, punished those that “propagate ideas, programs, or conduct that tend to produce rebellion,
sedition, riots, disorders, and the obstruction of the functioning of legal systems.” Marco Bellingeri,
“La imposibilad del odio: la guerrilla y el movimiento estudiantil en México, 1960-1974,” in

165

The general’s way of ruling “through the medium of terror,”
334
as a group of
Atoyac cafetaleros expressed it, helped forge the foundations for the popular
movement that would eventually end his violent reign. Repression, taxes, and the
openly flagrant use of public funds and property for personal enrichment produced
the beginnings of a shared social perception described by Armando Bartra as a “civic
eruption…whose function was to elucidate the consciousness of a citizenry and let
loose a popular insurgency.”
335
Expressed differently by a participant of the 1960
movement:
…the 1960 movement was a protest movement against a bad
government…yet above all, it was a movement that still believed in a
system of government borne out of a popular revolution. It was an
entire people that demanded a change in the system of government in
favor of another more democratic one; it was the hope for a new
dawn…
336

That “hope for a new dawn” would underscore and nourish the 1960 civic
movement. Like previous popular struggles in Guerrero, this one initially rallied
under the banner of “Death to Bad Government.” General Caballero had become the
dramatic personification of “bad government.”

AA.VV., La transición interrumpida, México, 1968-1988 (Mexico: Universidad Iberoamericana-
Nueva Imagen, 1993), 53; quoted in, Eric Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican
Counterculture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 122.

334
AGN, DFS 44-17-60, Legajo 1, 27-28.

335
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 90.

336
Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 65.

166

“Guachos, sons of whores, I am a Cívico!”
337
The Formation of the ACG
Popular discontent with the policies of General Caballero, as detailed earlier,
started almost immediately after he took office in mid-1957. The governor’s
nepotistic and violent ruling methods provided the opportunity for different sectors
within guerrerense civil society to coalesce into an effective oppositional movement
united by common goals. Into this turbulent political context ripe with opportunity
for social mobilization stepped the ACG. Working within an umbrella organization
dubbed the Coalition of Popular Forces (CFP), the ACG—or “cívicos”—directed a
state-wide, multi-class, democratic movement for two years that initially sought the
fulfillment of one demand: the removal of General Caballero from gubernatorial
power. Yet, in the process of democratic struggle, the ACG developed and posited
an alternative interpretation of the “Mexican Revolution;” or, rather, its radical
redemption.
The foundation date for the ACG remains unclear. Mexican political police
(DFS) trace the origins of the group to the city of Iguala in 1958 when townsfolk
organized the “Igualteco Civic Association” in order to demand more public funds
from the state government. By mid-1959, the DFS began producing frequent and
detailed reports on the ACG, providing information regarding meetings, plans, and
members; thus, suggesting that they identified the group as a potential threat early

337
Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007. She recalls that in 1960,
kids in the cities of Chilpancingo and Acapulco would line the streets as soldiers marched by and yell
at them.

167

on.
338
Former members tend to cite 1959 as the founding year of the organization.
Antonio Sotelo, a native of the Costa Grande community of San Luis San Pedro,
recalled that guerrerenses who lived and worked in Mexico City began to meet in
early 1959 to discuss their state’s problems. Another participant, Blas Vergara,
posited the formation of the ACG in 1959 as the continuation of the 1958 Mexico
City teachers strike led by Othon Salazar and the MRM (and involved the
participation of Vázquez and other future ACG members).
339
Whatever the original
founding date, it seems clear that by the end of 1959, the organization received on a
consistent basis multiple complaints and calls for help from several guerrerense
communities that faced the imposition of municipal authorities chosen by the
general. As several journalists began to publicize the dark side of the Caballero
governorship, the ACG initiated a series of organizational networks that brought
together campesino unions, local chambers of commerce, dissident municipal
governments, university students, small business groups, and urban labor unions
(taxi drivers, electricians, vendors, etc.).
340
Using his experience as representative of
campesinos before the national Agrarian Department, Vázquez cultivated the support
of four independent unions made up of copreros, cafeticultores, palm, and sesame

338
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 94; DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 47-48; and, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1,
1-3 & 5. A letter published in January 1961 by a group of expelled ACG members, including López
Carmona, signals 14 November 1959 as the organization’s founding date. See AGN, DFS 100-10-1,
Legajo 7, 29.

339
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 53; and, Román Román, Revuela cívica en Guerrero, 120-122.
Gómezjara posited 10 September 1959 as the ACG’s founding date. Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y
lucha campesina, 264.

340
For example, see AGN DFS 58-54-60, Legajo 1, 17.

168

campesinos. As president of the Confederation of Mexican Youth (CJM), Vergara
introduced the support of national student organizations, including the Federation of
Socialist Campesino Students of Mexico (FECSM)—integrated, and later led, by a
young Lucio Cabañas.
341

From its inception, social, class, and political heterogeneity characterized the
membership of the ACG. Disaffected Priístas, such as the ACG’s first president
professor Dario López Carmona, schoolteachers, housewives, doctors, lawyers, PCM
and PPS militants, Acapulco-based independent journalists, entire town and city
barrios, and small-scale ranchers joined the groups listed above. With López
Carmona and Vázquez elected as ACG president and vice-president, respectively, in
September 1959, the organization’s main political divides visibly emerged at the
forefront, in its leadership. A predominantly Tierra Caliente bloc led by López
Carmona largely opposed a direct action civic campaign directed against Caballero,
instead preferring the collection of inculpatory evidence and its presentation before
the federal senate and President López Mateos. Throughout the anti-Caballero
campaign of 1960, this group continually challenged the participation of non-PRI
activists as leaders within the ACG (particularly PPS members) in order to prevent
“outside manipulation…conducting habitual oppositional work.”
342
In contrast, a

341
Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 74; and, Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 122. From October
1961 to 1963, Cabañas worked as Secretary General of FECSM. See AGN, DFS 11-11, Legajo 2,
116-117; and, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 9, 38. FECSM is a student organization present in Mexico’s
rural teaching training schools.

342
AGN, DFS, 48-52-60, Legajo 1, 186; and, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 4, 161. PPS stands for the
Popular Socialist Party led by Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano.

169

Vázquez bloc made up of campesinos and urban poor advocated a more radical
posture that included notions of social justice and direct action; the mass
mobilization of campesinos (at times armed in self-defense), workers, and students;
the organizing of protests and strikes state-wide; and, in general, a frontal civic
challenge to the Caballero regime. Despite differences and internal conflicts—
including the constant accusation that Vázquez was a PPS infiltrator
343
—the goal of
removing the general from the governor’s palace worked to (at least initially)
provided cohesion and unity. Following the elections of López Carmona and
Vázquez, the ACG organized teams “to travel throughout Guerrero, form municipal
Cívico committees in charge of collecting evidence, grievances, and news in order to
present them before the people and the federal government.”
344

The ACG first targeted the Costa Grande for its proselytizing. In October
1959, Vázquez, Sotelo and the rest of the leadership council arrived in Acapulco and
forged a crucial working relationship with the PPS-led Acapulco Civic
Association—a political relationship that later in 1960 would bear fruit when
Caballero took on the progressive municipal president of Acapulco, Jorge Joseph
Piedra. Traveling north along the Pacific Coast, the cívicos arrived in Coyuca de
Benítez, a bastion of coprero activism that played an important role in the copra

343
Not clear is whether such rumors emanated from Vázquez’s rivals within the ACG or as a
disinformation campaign organized by Caballero’s police agents and/or the DFS—a common tactic of
the latter. For example, see AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 161-162 (dated 26 October 1960). Other
rumors, continually repeated within DFS circles, included one that identified Caballero as Vázquez’s
godfather. AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 124.
344
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 54; and, AGN DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 1 (report dated 6 January
1960).

170

strike of 1952. Upon the arrival of the ACG, the opinions voiced by locals at a town-
hall meeting revealed a restive impatience with PRI authoritarianism and cacique
domination
345
as they experienced it during the course of the URPC coprero
movement:
We don’t want the ACG to become part of the PRI in the manner of
the URPC, the ALC, or have anything to do with the CNC…we will
join the ACG if they can guarantee us that their struggle is truly
independent and autonomous from all of the organizations or political
parties that always play an embarrassing role as lackeys of the
government.

According to the testimony of Antonio Sotelo, local ACG militant Dr. Guinto spoke
to assuage their fears. A visibly moved and emotional Vázquez followed:
Our civic organization constituted on 10 September 1959 in Mexico
City has the obligatory mission of struggling shoulder-to-shoulder
with the popular masses of workers and campesinos in order to
reclaim our constitutional rights, infringed upon by the current
governor…we cívicos struggle independently of all organizations
manipulated by the bourgeoisie…we will not rest until achieving the
disappearance of gubernatorial power in Guerrero.
346

On 22 October 1952, Coyuca de Benítez formed the first municipal Cívico
Committee.
Continuing northward, the ACG formed more local committees in the
municipal capitals of Atoyac, San Jeronimo, and Tecpan de Galeana. Drawing on

345
The local cacique, Candelario Ríos, was a personal friend of former president Miguel Aleman and
commanded a paramilitary force that confiscated campesino lands and coprero products. Sotelo
Pérez, Breve historia, 55-56.

346
Ibid, 57; and, Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 138-139.

171

the rich history of campesino resistance in the Atoyac region, the ACG formed a
committee comprised exclusively of non-Priísta cafeticultor and coprero activists and
created sub-committees that reached out to the surrounding mountain hamlets and
communities. San Jerónimo, a region that witnessed the creation of the Union of
Authentic Copreros of Guerrero to combat the now-corrupt URPC, proved “to be one
of the most combative [ACG committees] during the most critical moments of the
anti-Caballero movement.”
347
By late 1959 and early 1960 similar committees
existed in Iguala and throughout the regions of the Costa Chica, Tierra Caliente, and
Norte. The Rural Teachers Training School in Ayotzinapa—a bastion of
communism and progressive politics in Guerrero since its inception during the
1930s—forged a working relation with the Cívico committee of Tixtla and brought
Lucio Cabañas into the struggle.
348
This movement, “this legal struggle with
democratic tints that radicalized as the problems went unresolved via legal
channels,” rapidly spread as Caballero continued to increase taxes on urban homes,
“lucrative professions,” alcoholic beverages, livestock slaughter and purchase, and
for “urban betterment.”
349
Despite an awareness of the tenuousness of his rule, as he
revealed during a newspaper interview as early as February 1959, the general also
continued the infamous “depistolization” campaign.
350
A notorious executor of that

347
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 59; and, AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 1.

348
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 23-24.

349
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 58; and, Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 64-65.

350
La Prensa, 3 February 1959, cited in Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 64.

172

campaign, Francisco Bravo “La Guitarra,” provided the ACG with the opportunity to
realize its first public act.
In February 1960, Bravo murdered Luis Lara in Zihuatanejo because Lara
refused to sell a small plot of land he worked in the town. Lara was not the first
ACG member to suffer a violent death. The cívico committee leader of Acapulco,
Napoleon Lacunza, died in early February 1960 when “unconditional supporters of
Caballero” ran his car off the road after weeks of death threats.
351
Yet, Lara’s
murder at the hands of the infamous “La Guitarra” brought the ACG onto the public
stage. A respected and humble young man, his murder produced popular outrage.
Local residents sent a flood of protests to public officials at all three government
levels. “La Guitarra” provided his own interpretation of events in an interview given
to an Acapulco newspaper five days after the murder on 22 February 1960: “I killed
Luis Lara in self-defense…I attempted to fulfill an order of arrest signed by the
governor…in order to resolve the invasion of land plots belonging to Jorge Olvera
Toro.”
352
At the time working in Mexico City, the leadership council of the ACG set
out to the port city upon the invitation of local sympathizers. A massive number of
citizens met the ACG leaders in front of a home owned by Lara’s family and
proceeded to organize a demonstration denouncing the level of impunity—aided by

351
AGN, DFS 44-17-60, Legajo 1, 27; DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 31; and, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 46.
The first report states that prior to the automobile attack, armed persons arrived at Lacunza’s small
ranch and peppered it with submachine gun fire. Lacunza was the son of General Albino Lacunza
Pino, veteran of the Mexican Revolution, and close friend of Senator Carlos Román Celis.

352
Trópico, 22 February 1960, quoted in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 142.

173

some youths who took over a local radio station and invited persons to join.
Receiving word that “La Guitarra” obtained orders to arrest the leadership council,
the cívicos left Zihuatanejo avoiding both the nefarious gunman and an ambush
organized by the state police.
353

From that moment on ACG leaders López Carmona, Vázquez, Sotelo Pérez,
Blas Vergara, and others traveled throughout the state in fear of Caballero’s hit-men
and police forces. Prior to the assassination of Lara on 5 February 1960, López
Carmona received a death threat from another infamous Caballero gunman (and
relative), Edmundo Miranda Añorve, who promised the ACG president “a visit to his
home.”
354
In addition to the possibility of violence, the ACG faced constant red-
baiting that emanated from the governor’s place. Caballero deployed the specter of
communism as a way to describe and discredit the political efforts of the ACG,
facilitated by a national and international Cold War context within which any sort of
dissidence became linked to a host of “subversive” images.
355
In the words used by
Caballero and his supporters: “the agitation [promoted by the ACG] is supported by
the bearded ones of Fidel Castro;” “the agitation headed by leftists…follows a plan
forged against [Mexican] institutions and constitutional precepts by a party that is
not precisely Mexican: the party of [Valentín Campa, Demetrio Vallejo, and Othón

353
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 43.

354
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 29.

355
Spenser, “La nueva historia de la Guerra Fría y sus implicaciones para México,” 108-109; and,
Condés Lara, Represión y rebelión en México, 140-141.

174

Salazar];” and, “the agitators are impostors and traitors of your Patria.”
356
Caballero
ridiculed the ACG in public labeling them as “civilocos” and “persons of low moral
stature,” while also linking the cívicos to local delinquents and criminal elements.
357

Alternating between communists “barbudos” and petty criminals, this public
discourse of counterinsurgency attempted to disqualify and subsume the legitimate
origins of, and political messages espoused by, the ACG.
Yet, the increasingly public efforts of the ACG, in the form of highly-
organized, state-wide rallies and demonstrations, subverted the general’s best efforts.
While reading his “Third Government Report” on 1 April 1961, with Echeverría in
attendance representing President López Mateos along with other prominent
Congress members, the ACG matched Caballero’s speech by organizing large
protests in the key cities of every state region. ACG leaders responded to the
general’s accusation by asserting “that the pueblo of Guerrero is one hundred percent
lopezmateísta and, as such, General Caballero lies when he attempts to portray us as
enemy agitators of the regime.”
358
With the constant articulation of one clear and
coherent message—the disappearance of gubernatorial powers—the ACG began to
forge a systematic opposition united under a common goal capable of uniting a broad
cross-section of guerrerense civil society. Caballero’s use of newspapers to
disqualify the ACG as “civilocos,” the dropping of anti-ACG propaganda leaflets

356
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 72-73; and, Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 76.

357
Diaro de Acapulco, 26 March 1960, quoted in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 150.

358
La Prensa, 19 June 1960, quoted in Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 66.

175

from airplanes, or the organizing of paid pro-governor rallies increasingly failed to
stymie the development of the organization into a mass social movement.
359
Left
with few options, Governor Caballero responded like a general facing massive troop
insubordination: with targeted repression and violence.
Such options, ironically, only expanded the parameters of the ACG struggle
by adding new demands while shedding light on the most repressive aspects of the
general’s gubernatorial term. Adopting a hydra-like approach, Caballero ordered the
arrest of ACG leaders, prompting the issuance of an arrest warrant on 23 April 1960
in the city of Iguala. The following day after a high-profile public rally in the city of
Arcelia that included the participation of ACG leaders, state police stopped the taxi
in which Vázquez, López Carmona, Sotelo, and Olimpo Aura Pineda (co-president
of the Mexico City committee) traveled on their way to Iguala. According to Sotelo,
the state police arrested both the president and vice-president of the organization,
threw them into a police truck, and stopped on the outskirts of Iguala to enact a mock
execution. Having followed the police truck to make sure his comrades reached the
city’s municipal jail, Sotelo recalled that such an act—including the actual firing of
carbines—served to “plant the seeds of terror” in both activists.
360
Reaching the
municipal jail, Vázquez and López Carmona faced the charges: “accused of
committing harm, airing threats, and for criminal association [asociación
Delictuosa].” Sotelo and Aura Pineda immediately left for Mexico City to publicize

359
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 72-73.

360
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 60-61.

176

their detainment, resulting in the sending of a telegram to the President López
Mateos’ office and the presentation of a protection order before the district judge of
Acapulco to “protect them from solitary confinement, bad treatment, and whatever
else puts their lives in danger.”
361
Vázquez and López Carmona would remain in jail
for nearly a month.
Until the detainment of ACG leaders, organized university students from the
State College in Chilpancingo had largely remained, as an organized body, outside of
the ACG social movement. Yet, the decree pronounced on 30 March 1960 that
transformed the institution into a state university radically altered the dynamic
between university students and Governor Caballero. For the decree raised
expectations among the student body, leading them to believe that the new university
would enjoy institutional autonomy, increased funding, and qualified administrative
officials and teachers. Instead, as a professor and militant of the 1960 movement
recalled, “in practice, the State College [and not the university] continued to
exist.”
362
Students demanded the resignation College Director Alfonso Ramírez
Altamirano, citing his authoritarian leadership, mismanagement of the institution’s
budget, and the lack of a university degree as major factors.
363
Experiencing

361
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 99; DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 57; and, Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia,
61.

362
Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 29-30. In 1958 students lifted the black and red flag
of strike to protest Caballero’s choice for school rector. See Mario García Cerros, Historia de la
Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 1942-1971 (Chilpancingo: Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero,
1991), 59-60.

363
Student activism at the State College had begun years earlier, possibly leading Caballero to decree
the autonomy law in order to, as historian Mario García Cerros postulated: “win over the intellectual

177

firsthand the nepotism that characterized Caballero’s term, student appellations made
to the governor fell upon deaf ears as the College Director was a Costa Chica
(Ometepec) compatriot of the general. As discontent grew into the month of April,
violence vividly touched the college student body when a law student was severely
beaten by the state police chief, Captain Pedro Ampudia. After a severe beating and
jailing the student, Teodoro Vega, was informed that it was a case of mistaken
identity. On 20 April 1960 university students marched through the streets of
Chilpancingo demanding the removal of Ampudia from his post for “being a traitor
of the mother country in stupidly stepping on the Mexican Constitution.”
364
Days
after the 24 April detainment of Vázquez and López Carmona, students from both
the State College and Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers Training School finally joined
ACG demonstrations that demanded the release of their leaders and the removal of
Caballero—culminating in a massive 12 June manifestation in Chilpancingo.
365
The
makings of a social “perfect storm” continued to fall into place.

and student sector that had been advocating the creation of the University of the South [since the
1950s]…and prevent the students…from joining the social mobilization that began to express itself
with violent tints in the Costa Grande.” University students first organized to protest Caballero in the
days after he took office in 1957 after an earthquake damaged several of the state college buildings.
Student demands for the reparation of those buildings went unheeded. García Cerros, Historia de la
Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 59-60, 72-73.

364
Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 189; and, García Cerros, Historia de la Universidad,
63-74.

365
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 60; DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 66 & 94; and, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo
2, 149-150. Preliminary plans for an ACG-student alliance began days after the release of Vázquez
from jail. Intelligence documents indicate that Vázquez announced the collaboration as early as 22
May. Direct meetings between university student leaders and Vázquez began on 8 June 1960 with the
purpose of “soliciting help in organizing and carrying out on 12 June a great demonstration in
Chilpancingo.”

178

Such developments defied the evaluations produced by the DFS as early as 2
May 1960. An unknown intelligence officer cited the parallel development of the
ACG and university student movements while emphasizing the distance and
disconnectedness of the two. Arguing for the ACG’s inability to raise “an anti-
Caballero consciousness among the general population,” the officer posited the
unwillingness of university students to join the movement to support his assertion.
The DFS agent confidently stated that “the pueblo in general…has been cool toward
the protests organized by Dario Lopez,” failing to recognize how Caballero-inspired
repression and violence could (and did) unite both movements.
366
A common origin
of grievances and the articulation of a revolutionary nationalist discourse that
portrayed Caballero as a betrayer of the Mexican Revolution and Constitution
facilitated a powerful ACG-student alliance. Joined by a Small Business
organization soon after, the buttressed alliance organized a 12 June demonstration in
the state’s capital city.
367
Building on such momentum and increasing popular
support, over 100 ACG militants from throughout Guerrero traveled to Mexico City
four days later to seek an audience with the president. As speakers Vázquez and
Vergara railed on the “anarchic, violent situation” created by Caballero and his
gunmen in front of the National Palace, ACG members carried signs that
demonstrated the group’s patriotism and respect for López Mateos. Received by a
political functionary of the president, Vázquez—now de facto leader of the ACG

366
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 112-124.

367
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 149.

179

after López Carmona’s refusal to return to Guerrero after his release from prison—
presented their case: “they [ACG] are against the government and authorities of the
state of Guerrero due to the crimes and arbitrary acts that have been recently
committed.”
368

Following the Chilpancingo and Mexico City demonstrations, the general
reacted by intensifying his anti-ACG counterinsurgency prose through pro-
government newspapers and attended an audience with President López Mateos on
22 June. Dismissing all of the accusations launched against his administration and
listing his public works projects, he qualified ACG activists as disaffected Priístas
frustrated with their inability to obtain governmental posts. Moreover, the general
argued, the campaign remained localized primarily in Mexico City because in
Guerrero “exists absolute calm.”
369

The ACG waited only a week to respond. Sending a long, detailed report to
President López Mateos that listed “a series of irregularities provoked [by the
regime] headed by General Raúl Caballero Aburto,” the civic organization expanded
their original singular goal of removing the general from power to include: “1.That
those criminals who have murdered campesinos and the pueblo guerrerense be
castigated [and] 2.That the Law of Responsibilities be strictly and completely
applied, without exception, to all public officials that embezzled state public

368
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 101, 105-106.

369
Diario de Acapulco, 24 June 1960, quoted in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 235.

180

funds.”
370
Describing Caballero’s “degeneration” of the state’s political system and
continual violation of individual rights as the “repression of our aspirations and
citizen behaviors” situated the ACG within a group of regional movements that
sought the redemption of the Mexican Constitution/Revolution through civic
activism based on constitutional, citizen rights. Moreover, they used popular
historical interpretations to justify their demands and activism. Appealing to
President López Mateos using a paternalistic discourse that exalted his patriotism
and presidential power, the document justified federal intervention on the grounds
that “suffering” Guerrero “has always constituted a firm bulwark of our democratic
institutions.”
371
As such, the ACG and other contemporary popular movements in
Mexico City, San Luis Potosí, Puebla, Sonora, Chihuahua, and Morelos tested the
self-proclaimed revolutionary status of the “revolution turned government.” They
tested the PRI regime’s willingness, indeed its ability, to rule hegemonically; to rule,
paraphrasing historian Marjorie Becker, with subtlety, not requiring ideological
conformity or using murder as a gauge of allegiance.
372

370
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 118-123.

371
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 118-129.

372
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 155-162.

181

Acapulco: “a cheap holiday in other people’s misery”
373

One more developing situation, involving the general and an intransigent but
popular municipal president, contributed to the elaboration of a social “perfect
storm” by the summer months of 1960. Since the colonial days of the Manila
Galleon, Acapulco constituted the de facto capital, in commercial and political terms,
of the state of Guerrero. Characterized historically by the commercial domination
and monopoly exercised by foreigners immersed in global markets, the port city’s
legacy survived intact through Mexican Independence and the Revolution of 1910.
As late as 1926 armed popular movements demanded the re-application of an 1828
federal law that oversaw the expulsion of Spaniards from Mexican soil; and,
according to the Vidales rebels, a redistribution of potential wealth and economic
opportunities to the inhabitants of the city and the surrounding Costa Grande. The
so-called “stabilizing [capitalist] modernization” that characterized post-1940
Mexico sought not to undermine the port’s legacy, but to transform Acapulco into a
transnational tourist site capable of attracting national and international tourist and
commercial capital. The presidential administrations of Avila Camacho and Aleman
promoted an inequitable process of urbanization underscored by the expropriation of
surrounding campesino ejidal lands for the development of beaches, resorts, and
other tourist “necessities” carried out by national and international (esp. Canadian
and U.S.) corporations. Landless campesinos from the neighboring Costa Grande

373
Sex Pistols, “Holiday in the Sun,” Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols (Virgin
Records, 1977).

182

and Costa Chica fulfilled the need for cheap labor, as the city’s population doubled
seven times over the course of twenty-three years (1950-1973). Lack of public
services, planning, and residential land characterized their “urbanization”
program.
374

By the time Jorge Joseph began his term as the city’s municipal president in
January 1960 (popularly elected yet also directly appointed by President López
Mateos), he faced a drastically class stratified city with its tax collecting departments
under the control of Caballero’s relatives and a large number of migrants arriving
every day. A longtime Priísta militant with important political anti-Caballero
connections at the national level,
375
the municipal president also exhibited a strong
independent streak. Perhaps his childhood days in the port city, spent delivering
radical newspapers and political pamphlets produced by Juan Escudero and the
Workers Party of Acapulco, left an indelible imprint in his political consciousness.
376

Perhaps Escudero’s radical efforts as Acapulco municipal president from 1921-1923
to morally “cleanse” the city contributed to Joseph’s own early campaigns that shut
down various profitable bars, brothels, and other “sites of vice” owned by Caballero
relatives and associates. The general owned the most important and “elegant”

374
Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 181-186.

375
Namely, President Adolfo López Mateos and Donato Miranda Fonseca.

376
Martínez Carbajal, Juan Escudero y Amadeo Vidales, 53. Joseph also studied in Ayotzinapa at the
Normal Rural in 1926, worked as “youth secretary” of the Socialist Party of the South headed by
Governor Adrián Castrejón in 1929, and worked a number of years as a journalist in Mexico City
during the 1950s—culminating in a press position on the campaign staff of President López Mateos.
Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 76.

183

brothel, the “Quinta Evangelina.” In addition to provoking the intense ire of
Caballero, the closure of such businesses also adversely affected the municipal
treasury, drastically reducing tax revenues. As Joseph’s popularity increased both in
Acapulco and throughout the state with actions that infringed upon Caballero’s
economic activities in the port, the latter plotted the municipal president’s downfall.
The decision by Joseph on in July 1960 to permit the occupation of the Ejido de
Santa Cruz by 4,000 landless heads of families, and the return of 1948 expropriated
lands to their original campesino owners in El Marqués, proved to be the final
straw.
377

As the Joseph-Caballero conflict increased during the summer, the municipal
president faced the impending bankruptcy of the Acapulco municipality. Enrique
Caballero Aburto, described earlier as the governor’s brother and head of the tax
collection office of Acapulco, contributed to the deteriorating situation by, according
to a DFS report, “waning the municipality’s revenues and that it receive only small
payment amounts, though [Enrique’s] office publicly denies such charges as lies.”
378

Unable to pay teacher salaries by September, Joseph also blamed the non-payment of
taxes by hotels that experienced low numbers of tourists. A month later, the

377
Apparently, Joseph initially encouraged the invasion of the Santa Cruz lands, though the land
occupiers later were expelled by members of the Third Infantry Battalion on 8 July 1960. Such acts
distanced Joseph from his powerful ally President López Mateos, polarized Acapulco civil society,
and increased his popularity among anti-Caballero activists. AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 3, 113;
Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 259-262; and, Emilio Vázquez Garzón, El ciudadano
Jorge Joseph (Mexico, 1962), 52.

378
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 2, 123; and, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 96.

184

municipal president resigned after facing a triad of economic, political, and social
attacks, this last one in the form of popular demonstrations led by the self-
proclaimed and enigmatic “King Lopitos” (Alfredo López Cisneros, head of a pro-
Caballero neighborhood association).
379

While Pro-Caballero newspapers stated that Joseph himself asked for a leave
of absence, he articulated his own version of events days after his resignation.
Joseph stated that he left in fear for his life, singling out Francisco Bravo “La
Guitarra” and several police organizations as threats. He also revealed that the
governor bribed two regidores (municipal council members) and threatened the other
four with death if they did not vote to remove the municipal president. After
producing a list of 37 people murdered by Caballero’s police forces, Joseph met with
ACG leaders—including Vázquez—on 19 October at his Mexico City residence.
380

In addition to discussions that sought to further organize and systematize the popular
anti-Caballero movement led by the ACG, the organization now led by Vázquez
suggested the possibility of a state-wide tax strike. In a surprise move to those
attending, the ACG president aired a more radical possibility: a forcible take-over of
the Government Palace in Chilpancingo.
381

379
See Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 210-217.

380
Trópico, 18 October 1960, quoted in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 267. See also,
Jose Gutiérrez Galindo, Y el pueblo se puso de pie. La verdad sobre el caso Guerrero (México, 1961),
202-203; and, García Cerros, La historia de la Universidad Autónoma de Guerrero, 79-81. A
municipal government, or ayuntamiento, is made up of: municipal president, síndico (attorney
general), and a number of regidores (popular representatives).

381
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 153-154; Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 62, 69; Vázquez Garzón, El
ciudadano Jorge Joseph, 118-119; and, Galindo, Y el pueblo se puso de pie, 202-203. The discussion

185

Direct Action
By late October, the state of Guerrero witnessed the articulation of three
disparate social movements into a coherent and systematic offensive against the
government of General Caballero. Joseph’s ouster from power in Acapulco—the
most important municipality in the state—seemingly provided concrete evidence for
one of the ACG’s constant accusations against the general: the violation of
municipal autonomy. On a practical level, the incident permitted the civic
organization to enlist the port city’s various unions and popular organizations from
whom Joseph enjoyed constant support. In almost simultaneous fashion, the
incipient university student-ACG alliance that began in June blossomed into an
outright alliance when students raised the red and black strike flag on 21 October.
Provoked by the threats of expulsion announced by the pro-Caballero rector Ramírez
Altamirano, students belonging to the Federation of University Students (FEU) took
over sections of the university campus and demanded the rector’s resignation. A day
after the announcement, one national newspaper described the composition of the
strike in Chilpancingo: “the University of [Guerrero], the Normal Rural of
Ayotzinapa, a number of high schools, and twenty-two middle schools tumultuously
launched the strike, dangerously complicating the situation of an already battered

in which Vázquez aired his idea took place on 25 October 1960 according to Sotelo. Citing the same
source, Vázquez took control of the ACG sometime after his release from jail in mid-May. Sotelo
remembers that after his release from prision, López Carmona left Guerrero and the ACG along with
his closest sympathizers. At the Iguala house of an old Zapatista on 25 June 1960, Vázquez was
elected president. A DFS report dated 25 October 1960 seemingly confirmed the switch in leadership
when it states that López Carmona “has not wanted to return to [Guerrero] for fear of being
apprehended once again.” AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 159.

186

governor.”
382
Responding intransigently and further stoking the intensity of the
student opposition, the rector proclaimed the automatic expulsion of all striking
students. Following suit, the general re-issued arrest warrants for Vázquez and
López Carmona, while his allied municipal president of Tixtla issued warrants for
two prominent student leaders (and ACG members) at Ayotzinapa: Lucio Cabañas
and Inocencio Castro.
383

Internally, the ACG continued to debate—with newly incorporated allies—
the use of civil disobedience tactics to further weaken the Caballero regime.
Discussions of a state-wide tax strike (the non-payment of taxes) and other union-
based strikes also included the sending of delegations to Mexico City to meet with
the president and federal congress. Yet, such internal debates revealed the
ideological differences that characterized the ACG from its inception. Vázquez’s
more radical insistence on the use of direct, pacific civic action as a pressure tactic
that complimented legalistic procedures vividly contrasted with the fears of
bloodshed expressed by a fearful López Carmona who refused to return to Guerrero
after his earlier arrest in Iguala. Such divisions provided the ACG with a
simultaneously disjointed but generally unified effort with Vázquez in Chilpancingo
organizing mass demonstrations and López Carmona in Mexico City collecting
evidence to present before the federal congress. As both leaders prepared to carry

382
La Prensa, 22 October 1960, quoted in Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 80.

383
AGN, DFS 48-52-60, Legajo 1, 154.

187

out their tasks, the governing general in Guerrero unequivocally chose the path of
violent repression in his attempt to smother the burgeoning social movement.
384

Almost immediately after declaring their strike, university students faced the
aggressions of a rival student “shock” group financed by Caballero. Dubbed the
“Pentathlon,” they attacked striking students on 22 October while the latter explained
their movement to the residents of the San Antonio neighborhood in Chilpancingo.
Women residents of San Antonio saved the students from a worse beating by stoning
the aggressors and later participated in the student movement by forming a “small
popular guard.” That same day, municipal police under the orders of Caballero
murdered campesino Sebastian Salgado Aparicio in the Tierra Caliente town of
Teloloapan.
385
Such instances followed the strategy of targeted, localized violence
exercised by the governor from the beginning of his tenure. Yet, the decision of the
ACG to make Chilpancingo their base of operations in late October, in addition to
the on-going student strike, forced a change in repressive tactics and brought a new
actor onto the stage: the federal army. Making their appearance on the last day of
October, the army’s actions foreshadowed a tragic end to the “Guerrero case.”
Vázquez decided against his previous idea of taking over the state capitol of
Chilpancingo, yet re remained intent upon directly confronting the Caballero regime.
In a strategy that aimed to physically manifest the popular support gleaned by the

384
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 177-178, 183.

385
Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 80; and, AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 161-
162, 169.

188

ACG over the course of one year, a thirty-person contingent of ACG and Frente
Zapatista militants marched to the center of the city on 29 October, cordoned off the
state capitol, and exercised an original tactic in civil disobedience: the civic stand-in
(parada cívica).
386
Standing on an improvised platform, Vázquez decisively
announced to the gathering crowd that “from this moment on, the entrance of
Caballero Aburto into this government building is strictly prohibited.” Strategically
located in the center of the state capital, the permanent civic stand-in allowed the
diffusion of ACG messages to a wide audience. ACG member Antonio Sotelo
recalled that women on their way to the city market and passerby bus drivers
dropping off customers stopped to hear “denunciations of the bad government.” Bus
drivers and passengers, in particular, helped spread the word as they carried ACG
messages to other parts of the state after leaving Chilpancingo.
387
Under the throes
of a civic insurgency, the city remained off limits to the besieged general. Acting on
the orders of Caballero, army soldiers and state police officers (led by Caballero’s
nephew) moved in on 31 October to forcibly dislodge the civic stand-in under a hail
of bayonet strikes and blows. They also arrested Vázquez and Salvador Sámano,
head of the Frente Zapatista (a Zapatista veterans group).
388

386
Sotelo, Breve historia, 70; Hodges and Gandy, Mexico Under Siege, 108; and, Bellingeri, Del
agrarismo armado, 120.

387
Sotelo, Breve historia, 70.

388
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 183; “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” Informe General de la
Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, (Rough Draft, 2006), 15
[FEMOSSP Filtrado hereafter]; Miranda Ramírez, La violación de derechos humanos, 106; and,
Sotelo, Breve historia 70-71.

189

October 31 marked the first of a series of confrontations between the ACG
and various repressive state apparatuses that only increased popular support (and
sympathy) for the civic organization and completely isolated the general. While
Vázquez and Sámano remained imprisoned (and receiving death threats), the ACG
relocated the civic stand-in to a nearby plaza
389
in front of the student-held university
campus that displayed a large black and red flag. Repeated instances of police and
army violence helped fuse the student and civic movements. On the same day of
Vázquez’s detention, student leader Jesus Araujo declared at a demonstration
attended by 10,000 that they “decided to join the permanent popular struggle” and
demand the resignation of Caballero.
390
In the coming days, campesinos,
Chilpancingo small businesses, municipal governments from throughout the state,
and the Chilpancingo city council joined the civic movement culminating in a 6
November demonstration attended by more than 5,000 persons (in a city of 20,000).
Though the act ended with the intervention of the army—and almost 30 wounded
protestors—the violence catalyzed the formation of the Coalition of Popular
Organizations (COP) and the implementation of a city-wide general strike the next
day. No longer alone in the struggle against Caballero, the ACG participated in, and
helped forge, the formation of a guerrerense “historical bloc” that included over 30

389
Before relocating to the Alameda “Francisco Granados Maldonado” on 3 November after another
police attack, the ACG had moved to a kiosk near the central plaza that faced the state capitol. The
second police attack was viewed by dozens of municipal presidents in town for a reunion. Excélsior,
3 November 1960; quoted in Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 314.

390
Excélsior, 1 November 1960, quoted in ibid, 308; and, García Cerros, Historia de la Universidad
Autónoma de Guerrero, 80-100.

190

unions, associations, municipal governments, state bureaucracies, and chambers of
commerce.
391
The COP laid siege to a deteriorating regime through a state-wide tax
strike and the organizing of mass demonstrations while collectively demanding the
resignation of Caballero,
Throughout the month of November the cities of Acapulco, Iguala, and
Chilpancingo experienced demonstrations and daily “lightning political meetings.”
In an attempt to garner popular support and national attention, the ACG sent
numerous petitions and letters to Mexico City addressed to President López Mateos
and Congress.
392
The House of Representatives and Senate initially refused to
discuss a detailed COP petition that listed the constitutional violations and crimes
perpetrated by the Caballero regime presented before them on 9-10 November—the
same day the ACG published a COP list of demands in a national newspaper.
393

391
Arturo Miranda Ramírez, interview with the author, Chilpancingo, Guerrero, 14 May 2007; José
Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007; and, Sandoval Cruz, El
movimiento social de 1960, 34-35. The groups included (not a complete list): the Union of State and
Municipal Workers (SUTSEMID), the Delegation of Communcation and Transport, teachers from
Section 7 of SNTE, Chilpancingo Chamber of Commerce, Breeders State Association, Association of
Fathers, Regional Campesino Committees of Atoyac, San Jeronimo, Taxco, Tecpan, San Pedro and
San Pablo, Tlapa, and La Unión, National Teachers Training School, Union of Electrical Workers,
Association of Cafeticultores of Guerrero, Union of Authentic Copreros of both Coasts of Guerrero,
and various preparatory and university student groups. AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 165 & 183-
187.

392
Under Article 76 of the Mexican Constitution, only the Senate has the power to remove state
governors from power and name interim governors.

393
Published in Excélsior, the petition included sixteen demands with the removal of Caballero as the
first one listed. The others included: the legal prosecution of Caballero and his functionaries for
crimes committed; the absolute respect for the federal Constitution in the state of Guerrero, most
especially that of article 115 that deals with municipal autonomy; the derogation of taxes imposed by
Caballero; the abolition of latifundios; the improvement of primary and secondary education; the
protection of small and big commerce from high tax rates; the prohibition of the “irrational”
exploitation of forests and the implementation of a re-forestation plan; and, the prosecution of

191

Three members from the House of Representatives (Camara de Diputados) promised
at a 12 November demonstration in Chilpancingo—one that included 6500-10,000
participants—to introduce the matter before their chamber “because of the obligation
to listen to the will of the people…and to provided a just solution for the people.”
Disputing recent red-baiting accusations aired by Caballero, Representative Enrique
Salgado Sámano further justified the necessity of taking the case to the House “now
that this movement is not communist but spontaneous, from the people.”
394
While
the return of the three representatives to Mexico City produced minimal impact in
the game of musical chairs played by the unwilling House and Senate, the COP
planned a grand march on the fiftieth anniversary of the Mexican Revolution—not
before police in Acapulco repressed a 16 November protest that left twenty-three
injured and over 200 detained.
395

More than 20,000 guerrerenses silently marched in the streets of
Chilpancingo on the anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, demonstrating an acute
frustration with the federal congress’ unwillingness to act. They reaffirmed that “our
struggle was framed within state and federal laws, especially within that marked by

caciques. Excélsior, 12 November 1960, cited in Gutiérrez Galindo, Y el pueblo se puso de pie, 52-
54.

394
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 4, 183-185. The three politicians were Herón Varela, Enrique
Salgado Sámano, and Moisés Ochoa Campos.

395
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 223. This intelligence memo, dated 16 November 1960, noted that
a large number of citizens in Acapulco demanded the release of those detained during the clash or else
they would free them by force. They also warned that if the Federal Government did not rapidly solve
the “Guerrero problem, many sympathizers [of the social movement] will move to the Sierra and from
there continue their attacks on the governor of Guerrero.” In other words, a veiled threat of guerrilla
insurgency.

192

the state constitution of Guerrero.”
396
Walking through the city streets dressed in
black and under the watchful eyes of soldiers and their bayoneted rifles, they carried
signs that proclaimed the death of the Revolution and pledged support to their
“savior” President López Mateos. Reaching the end of their march in the plaza in
front of the main university building, they sang the national anthem and hung the
national flag alongside the red and black strike banner. A litany of speakers
demanded the resignation of Caballero, the “Judas” of the Revolution; presented
analyses on the present condition of the Revolution; and, decried the “shameful”
performance of their state congressmen. In his speech, professor Domingo Adame
Vega best encapsulated the emergent civic consciousness demonstrated by the COP
and cívicos: “What took place some fifty years ago is happening today in
Guerrero…back then the pueblo saved itself through the use of arms, while today
that struggle is conducted with the weapons of law.” Caballero may have killed the
Revolution, but the cívicos sought its urgent redemption.
397

396
COP leader Pablo Sandoval Cruz, quoted in Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 85.
Prior to the 20 November protest, the COP published a Seven Point Program: 1) General strike by
large and small businesses around the state 2) Continuation of protests against Raúl Caballero Aburto
with the systematic insistence on the disappearance of gubernatorial powers 3) Ayuntamientos will
unite and petition President López Mateos for his intervention, supported with concrete and sufficient
evidence 4) We seek to organize a “monstrous” caravan from all regions of the state to Mexico City to
demonstrate to the nation that the people are against the state regime, especially Caballero Aburto,
and that we are not a small number of professional “agitators” 5) A food boycott will be organized
against functionaries of the state government 6) We will carry out tumultuous demonstrations on the
20 of November, 50
th
anniversary of the Mexican Revolution, in the major cities to demand the
disappearance of gubernatorial powers 7) In view of the national press’ silence in relation to the
“Guerrero Case,” any person or organization that has contacts outside of the state needs to send them
all types of updates and information. See Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 52.

397
Ibid, 55-56.

193

Caballero, forced to travel the state and seek refuge in the Costa Chica in the
face of the cívico takeover of Chilpancingo, responded with more violence. On 25
November battalion troops violently dislodged COP and ACG members from the
Alameda Granados Maldonado, leaving a large number of wounded and cutting off
the striking university students from the Chilpancingo community. Soldiers detained
more than 200 protestors and laid siege to the university, cutting off water, food, and
electricity to the students inside. For the next month, soldiers essentially instituted a
state of emergency within Chilpancingo, restricting access to certain areas and
realizing regular patrols. As Caballero organized a luxurious wedding for his
daughter (attended by ex-presidents Alemán and Ruiz Cortines), campesino groups
from Atoyac headed by Luis Cabañas offered Vázquez 1,600 men to send the federal
government “a message.” By the last day of December, COP leader Sandoval Cruz
recalled, some 22-23 ayuntamientos participated in the social movement. In places
like Taxco, community members took over the municipal government and re-
organized the police forces. Daily demonstrations characterized everyday life in the
cities of Atoyac, Acapulco, Iguala, Tlapa, and Tixtla.
398
By the end of 1960
Caballero ruled in name only.

398
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 255; Castellanos, México Armado, 108-109; Sandoval Cruz, El
movimiento social de 1960, 58-59; Sotelo, Breve historia, 77-80; Estrada Castañón, El movimiento
anticaballerista, 88-89; and, Radilla Martínez, Poderes, Saberes y Sabores, 194-197.

194

Revolution Betrayed, Civic Redemption, and Gendered Citizenship
Before proceeding to the conclusion of the 1960 social movement, a narrative
disruption is necessary in order to briefly explore the political imaginary of the
COP/ACG and to highlight the formation of emergent subjectivities in the course of
social mobilization. In one year, the ACG and COP successfully forged—through
arduous negotiations and activism—a series of multi-class and inter-local alliances
that constituted a “historical bloc” (on a regional level) and expressed an immediate
political goal: the resignation of General Caballero. On a hermeneutical level, the
1960 historical bloc demonstrated a particular interpretation of a betrayed history and
an urgent longing for its rescue; as if the past, Benjamin once wrote, “carries with it
a secret index by which it is referred to as redemption.”
399
Such a vision, one voiced
contemporaneously though disparately throughout Mexico, involved, “a return to
what they considered as the original trajectory of the Mexican Revolution, defined as
Cardenista populism, that in Guerrero they considered blocked by the governor.”
400

Similarly expressed by protestors in 1960 Chilpancingo, “[we are] against the
[politics] that govern our state because it is contrary to all programs of social justice,
because it is the reverse of the Mexican Revolution and without it there will be no
popular progress.”
401
The idea that associated betrayal of the Revolution and 1917
Constitution with the general’s performance as governor moved and united an

399
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 390.

400
Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas,” 90.

401
Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 27.

195

ideologically and socially heterogeneous social movement. Restoration, indeed
redemption, of both the Revolution and Constitution through civic praxis provided
the movement its “spirit of sacrifice.”
402

Such restorative motives led some scholars to emphasize the lack of
radicalism in the ACG/COP political platforms, labeling the organizations as
misguidedly reformist tricked by the “democratic humbug”
403
of the Mexican
Constitution. Yet such evaluations tend to minimize the importance of historical
context/process and neglect popular politics.
404
In a country where the ruling party
sought to co-opt and appropriate (or physically eliminate dissident) popular
organizations, the autonomous and independent origin of the ACG represented a
radical gesture. Moreover, the organization’s interpretation of the Mexican
Constitution that encouraged the actual physical manifestation of hard-earned
political, social, and economic constitutional rights further challenged PRI rule.
Civil dissent in the form of demonstrations, non-payment of state taxes, and general
strikes, intended not to undermine the Mexican state but rather re-enlist its help (as
during the days of Cárdenas cívicos commented) in the struggle against an
unconstitutional governor. In the process, cívicos forced the state to concretely
match its revolutionary nationalist rhetoric. A diverse composition that included

402
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 394.

403
Karl Marx, letter to Frederic Engels, 7 September 1864. See www.marxists.org/
/archive/draper/1974/xx/democracy.html#n57. Other translations refer to “democratic swindle.”

404
Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas,” 94, 99-101; Gómezjara, Bonapartismo
y lucha campesina, 290-294; and, Mayo, La guerrilla de Lucio y Genaro, 34-39.

196

students, campesinos, housewives, professors, small business owners, shopkeepers,
Zapatista veterans, government workers, municipal governments, disaffected priístas,
PCM and PPS militants, and even a small number of right-wing Sinarquistas
prevented an effective red-baiting of the movement. Contrary to General Caballero’s
media proclamations regarding cívico “communism,” ACG and COP members
continually re-affirmed their commitment to President López Mateos and worked
within the legal precepts of the Constitution. In sum, the ACG and COP represented
guerrerense civil society.
In the process of struggling against high taxes, violations of municipal
autonomy, nepotism, and state repression, “cívicos” became citizens through the
active engagement and practice of their constitutional rights. To paraphrase
Armando Bartra, a citizen is made, not born.
405
Yet, who constitutes a citizen? Who
remains on the liminal edges of citizenship? For all of their political innovations, the
ACG and COP faced severe limitations. The ideologically heterogeneous make-up
of the ACG, for instance, tended to produce intense internal wrangling regarding
appropriate tactics, the participation of militants from the PCM and PP, and the
incorporation of economic demands into their program. Intelligence records provide
a glimpse into the last two tumultuous months of the 1960 social movement,
characterized by a power struggle between López Carmona and Vázquez.
406

405
Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 90.

406
Beginning in late October 1960, the Mexico City-based ACG president López Carmona accused
Vázquez (vice-president) of colluding with PPS militants and receiving both money and “orientation”
from a PPS House Representative, Macrina Rabadan. Both leaders also differed over questions of

197

The gendered definition of citizenship practiced and expressed by the
ACG/COP represented an obvious shortcoming. As male guerrerenses became
citizens in the process of struggle against the Caballero regime, the implicitly
masculine subject at the core of citizenship changed little and remained within what
literary critic Claudia Moscovici termed a “single dialectical definition” dependent
on the “partial exclusion of a feminine subject.”
407
Historian Jocelyn Olcott
expressed a similar argument for post-1940 Mexican citizenship in her history of
postrevolutionary women’s political organizing. The granting of full suffrage rights
to women in 1953 failed to displace an assumed “male political subject,” particularly
when such rights were granted by a “chivalrous” president.
408
Guerrero proved no
different. In a male-dominated 1960 social movement with demands largely limited
to the removal of the state governor, issues of women’s labor, sexuality, and
reproductive potential (and who controlled them) remained silenced—as did the

tactics (López Carmona rejected the more confrontational strategy of Vázquez) and the role militants
from leftist parties would play in the organization. By November, López Carmona unsuccessfully
attempted to expel Vázquez from the ACG. See AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 161-162, 177, 185-
186 &240; and, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 4, 161.

407
Claudia Moscovici, Gender and Citizenship: The Dialectics of Subject-Citizenship in Nineteenth-
Century French Literature and Culture (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2000), 112.
Mexican women were not allowed to vote until 1953 and did not do so in a national presidential
election until 1958.

408
Olcott, Revolutionary Women, 240; and, Gabriela Cano, “Una Cuidadanía igualitaria: El president
Lázaro Cárdenas y el sufragio femenino,” Desdeldiez (1995), 73, cited in Olcott, Revolutionary
Women, 234.

198

class-specific contours of such issues.
409
Overthrowing Caballero, not the radical
transformation of gender roles, remained the primary concern of the ACG and COP.
Yet, silenced did not translate into passivity. For the “organic crisis”
410
that
brewed in Guerrero also provided opportunity and space for the transgression and
momentary redefinition of gender roles. If most women participated in the social
movement by fulfilling traditional “helpmeet” roles (e.g. providing food for the civic
stand-in and student strike, or taking over the harvest in place of a peasant cívico
husband), a smaller number manned barricades, formed self-defense units, and
confronted soldiers in Chilpancingo. Peasant women like Gregoria Nario
remembered that campesina housewives actively participated in Atoyac’s ACG
protests with their small children alongside them.
411
Mercedes de Carreto and
teacher Julita Escobar formed part of the COP’s five-person leadership council.
Escobar and Altagracia Alarcón Sánchez signed onto the anti-Caballero movement
as municipal councilwomen from Chilpancingo and Chilapa, respectively. Anita de
Brilanti joined the movement as co-leader of Taxco’s Silversmiths Union, while
Virginia Hernández and Sara Reyes helped lead the Union of Small Merchants of
Tixtla. In Acapulco, the Union of Revolutionary Guerrerense Women led ACG

409
The worlds of peasant women that participated in the Anti-Caballero struggles differed greatly
from that of ACG middle-class women that worked as teachers, government bureaucrats, or municipal
political officials.

410
Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 210.

411
Gregoria Nario, interviewed by Andrea Radilla Martínez, in Radilla Martínez, Poderes, saberes y
sabores, 191.

199

lighting meetings and distributed COP literature.
412
Government workers also
participated. In December 1960, women telephone operators in Chilpancingo
organized themselves and joined the COP. They listened in on phone conversations
between government authorities and provided valuable intelligence to ACG/COP
leaders. Caballero’s assistant attorney general complained that “they could not have
any confidential phone conversations without their proceedings getting reported back
to the subversive leaders.”
413
Photographs taken in Chilpancingo during the
tumultuous month of November reveal the numerous and active public presence of
women during demonstrations and daily political meetings.
Two photographs in particular epitomize the actions of cívicas during the last
months of the general’s governorship. The first shows a middle-aged woman named
Clementina Oliveros walking in front of a group of soldiers with General Julio
Morales Guerrero at the forefront. Angrily gazing back at the soldiers, Oliveros
flashes a “discourteous” hand sign to the offended general. The second photograph
places Chela Natarén at the scene of the massacre that ended the rule of Caballero in
Guerrero. In the words of her friend Virginia Juárez:

412
Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 664; and, AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 4, 185-186.

413
Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 87-88.

200

…around three o’clock the church bells rang; I was in house…the
bells were only used in case of emergencies and people were to gather
and organize when they rang…on Guerrero Street [Chilpancingo] the
people had gathered; there was much firewood and we were told not
to let the soldiers pass. We linked arms with one another, intertwined,
in a manner that they could not pass…but the soldiers fell upon us and
we defended ourselves with pieces of firewood and rocks…All of the
sudden I saw myself in the middle of the street alone, a few meters
from my friend Chela Natarén…they told us that they were fake
bullets, but they were not.

That photograph, taken on 30 December 1960, shows a solitary Natarén charging a
group of advancing soldiers and apparently covering the retreat of her fellow
protestors.
414

“That it should come to this!”
415

Like the rest of his electrician comrades, Enrique Ramírez participated in the
anti-Caballero movement. On the afternoon of 30 December 1960, the electrician
looked for the military officer in charge to ask permission to hang a banner from a
light post. Unable to find the officer, Ramírez decided to climb the post and hang
the banner that read “Death to Bad Government.” A soldier stationed nearby
attempted to prevent the act and shot him in the process. As Ramírez fell and lay
dying on the Chilpancingo street, eyewitnesses quickly spread the word and used
church bells to call COP and ACG members into action. Soon thousands of enraged

414
Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 124, 153, 156, &165.

415
Hamlet (1.1. 137).

201

protestors faced off with soldiers from the 24
th
Infantry Battalion under the command
of General Julio Morales Guerrero. They fired three volleys into the defenseless
crowd. Lasting no more than fifteen minutes, the military attack against the civilian
protestors left at least twenty-three dead (including two soldiers) and forty wounded.
Fifty-five detainees suffered torture at a series of clandestine and makeshift prisons.
Before dawn the next day soldiers stormed the university building, physically
assaulted the striking students, and dragged them off to the municipal jail. The
permanent civic stand-in ended in bloodshed.
416

Working in Huitzuco at the time of the Chilpancingo massacre, Vázquez
received the news by requesting Luis Cabañas for an important meeting. The
prominent campesino leader from Atoyac reminded Vázquez of his previous offer to
organize 1,600 campesinos into a guerrilla force. Many people in the sierras of the
Costa Grande, Cabañas continued, possess hunting rifles and were willing to “grab
the bull by the horns.” According to Sotelo, present at that meeting, Vázquez
responded:

416
Differing numbers of casualties exist depending on the source. Román’s study of the 1960 social
movement, the most exhaustive to date, lists 23 dead and 40 wounded. Government sources at the
time listed a lower number and blamed the victims for having provoked the massacre. My
reconstruction of the events is based on: A 21 February 1961 DFS report that analyzed the factors
that led to the massacre; the testimonies of participants Antonio Sotelo, Pablo Sandoval Cruz, and
Mario García Cerros (the last 2 eyewitnesses); and, the works produced by Román, Castellanos, and
Estadra Castañón. See AGN, DFS 100-10-1 Legajo 7, 102-104; Sotelo, Breve historia, 81-84;
Sandoval Cruz, El movimiento social de 1960, 64-70; García Cerros, Historia de la Universidad
Autónoma de Guerrero, 123-124; Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 555-569; and Estrada
Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 89-91.

202

If the federal government does not order the disappearance of
gubernatorial powers in Guerrero, we cívicos need to raise the
consciousness of the pueblo in order to prepare it for a possible future
confrontation with the State through a war of national liberation [my
emphasis]…if the government of Caballero Aburto does fall, then the
cívico groups will not disintegrate but strengthen themselves in order
to maintain alive the [social] movement…”
417

Five days after the massacre the Senate voted to remove Caballero from power. The
general, who once told a writer that he was a “disciplined soldier” and “would go
wherever I am ordered to,” soon left the country for military attaché positions in
Central America.
418

Conclusion: “1960 produced great lessons for the people”

“A year of history has closed but history continues.”—Antonio Gramsci (1918)

In 1990, historian Alan Knight expressed an “informed hunch” that posited
“the Mexican state was less powerful and less pervasive even in the years of its
heyday (1940-1965), and that civil society was less docile.” Moreover, he
continued, “the ‘new’ social movements [post-1968] display more continuity than

417
Sotelo, Breve historia, 85.

418
Gutiérrez, Y el pueblo se puso de pie, 35.

203

often imagined, and are not necessarily that new.”
419
The history of the 1960 civic
movement seemingly supports Knight’s insight (expressed as a “hunch” almost two
decades ago when paucity characterized post-1940 historical research). Less than
docile cívicos confronted a despotic state governor through civil disobedience and
mass mobilization to reclaim violently repressed constitutional rights. They used
cleavages within the upper echelons of the PRI regime and strategically exposed
gaps between “official” revolutionary nationalist discourse and practice to force the
ruling party into deposing one of their own. Cívicos successfully ousted a loyal PRI
military man who cut his teeth during the revolution on the victorious
Constitutionalist side and dutifully followed orders in the 1952 massacre against
Henriquistas.
Finally, to conclude with Knight’s point, the 1960 civic movement exhibited
both “new” organizational tactics and “old” popular demands. The autonomous
origin of the ACG beyond PRI party structures and the emergence of schoolteachers
as movement leaders formed part of a recent national trend characterized by
independent popular mobilizations that upheld the 1917 Constitution as their banner.
Politically formed within training schools that seriously engaged and sustained alive
the radical legacies of the 1910 revolution and Cardenismo, teachers like Julita
Escobar Adame and Genaro Vázquez played key roles as organizers, leaders, and
organic intellectuals. Old demands—municipal autonomy and economic

419
Alan Knight, “Historical Continuities in Social Movements,” in Popular Movements and Political
Change in Mexico, eds. Joe Foweraker and Ann L. Craig (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publ., 1990), 80.

204

democracy—persisted and mingled with “new” urban middle class demands for the
protection of small businesses from unjust taxes. Other gender-specific longings,
such as the extension of democracy into campesino households, assumed a spectral
form: unrecognized but actively present. An almost religious devotion to the
(legitimacy of the) Constitution united the civic movement’s variegated demands and
participants.
Neither the Chilpancingo massacre nor the designation of Supreme Court
Justice Arturo Martínez Adame as interim governor on 4 January 1961 managed to
suppress the democratic impulse unleashed by the ACG and COP. While “Death to
Bad Government, Death to Caballero” served as the unifying rallying call for over a
year, the yearning for a meaningful democracy in which active citizen participation
ensured the application of constitutional rule formed an implicitly subversive
subtext. After the massacre and Caballero’s ouster, the civic social movement took
direct action. As the next chapter will demonstrate, such action involved the taking
over of municipal governments by ACG and COP members and organizing directly-
elected ayuntamientos (municipal councils). During the two-year interim tenure of
Martínez Adame, ACG/COP ayuntamientos ruled 23 of 75 municipalities.
420

Citizenship—gendered and unable to shed masculinist biases or the male ur-form
subject—continued to signify active mobilization in defense and application of
constitutional rights.

420
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 92 & 104. For a list of the “restructured” municipal governments
see Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 96-97.

205

The next two years would prove crucial for the popular masses of Guerrero.
The 1960 social movement tested the PRI regime’s willingness to devour one of its
unpopular own and live up to President López Mateos leftist rhetoric. Yet, the
ensuing popular ayuntamientos and the ACG’s preparations to enter the 1962 state
elections as an opposition political party interrogated the democratic foundations (or
lack thereof) of PRI rule. How would the PRI handle an independent social
movement-turned-political-party? A political party that critiqued PRI successes and
failures as a ruling party and questioned its self-proclaimed status as “heir” to the
Mexican Revolution? 1960, according to Consuelo Solís, “produced great lessons
for people…and great hope.”
421
Yet the social movement produced more. It created
new political democratic forms, “new configurations of power,”
422
that forced the
PRI to face a populace in Guerrero that demanded the end of boss politics. A year of
history had closed, but the history of democratic struggle in Guerrero continued.

421
Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007.

422
Rubin, Decentering the Regime, 262.

206

Chapter 3:
Re-treading Old Paths, Forging New Routes: The Radicalization of Popular
Movements and the (Re) Emergence of Guerrillas, 1961-1967
“Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programs.”—Karl
Marx
423

Just days before his death in early 1972, Genaro Vázquez responded to leftist
newspaper editorials that criticized his use of violence as a means of inducing social
change: “the violence has been imposed upon us by the executioners that govern and
pillage our pueblo, that murder our pueblo when it protests or defends itself. They
are the ones that have made violence into a ‘magic formula’ [of revolution].”
424

Soon thereafter from the mountains of Atoyac, the guerrilla group led by Lucio
Cabañas explained its motivations for ambushing an army patrol: “the federal army
has committed various illegal acts, crimes…in particular against campesinos…the
campaigns of persecutions have been characterized by a great number of dead,
disappeared, kidnapped, tortured, and illegally detained persons…we will respond
with an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth!”
425
For both Vázquez and Cabañas

423
Letter to W. Bracke, 5 May 1875. See Carlos Marx y Federico Engels, Obras Escogidas, Tomo II
(Moscú: Editorial Progreso, 1955), 7-8.

424
¿Por qué? 10 February 1972, in Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 213-214. Published days after Vázquez’s
controversial 2 February 1972 death in Michoacán, the letter blasted the editorials written by Victor
Rico Galan (a radical journalist jailed during the late 1960s accused of plotting a guerrilla insurgency)
and Heberto Castillo (a longtime socialist activist and UNAM professor).

425
¿Por qué? 17 August 1972, in Juan Miguel de la Mora, Lucio Cabañas, su vida y su muerte
(Mexico: Editores Asociados, 1974), 91-95.

207

violence and direct confrontation with the PRI regime represented the only viable
path for social change by the early 1970s. Yet, how did they arrive at such a
conclusion? How did two activist schoolteachers, who based their prior political
participation on the authority of the Mexican Constitution and the progressive
legacies of the 1910 Revolution, transform into gun-toting guerrilla commanders
waging war on the Mexican State?
In essence, this chapter chronicles a regional history of popular radicalization
in the face of sustained state terror. The engaged citizenry that formed the 1960 anti-
Caballero social movement and organized the short-lived experiment of popular
municipal rule in various parts of Guerrero refused to cede their hard-earned
democratic initiative and return to the paternalistic politics of the PRI regime. In the
course of social mobilization, moreover, participating guerrerenses developed a
gendered civic identity that included political and economic dimensions. Rooted in
the progressive social reforms contained in the Mexican Constitution, they sought
the re-orientation of “an economy designed for export production, corrupt public
officials, and a new group of latifundistas”
426
to one that fundamentally prioritized

426
Padilla, “From Agraristas to Guerrilleros,” 76. The Jaramillistas were among the first in post-1940
Mexico to vigorously highlight the failings of state industrialization policy implemented by Cárdenas’
successors. Prior to the 1946 state elections in Morelos, Rubén Jaramillo and his independent
Agrarian and Workers Party of Morelos (PAOM) distributed literature that passionately described
such failings: “It is no use that we work until we are exhausted, it is no use that the Revolution gave
us land, it is no use that they give us credit if, in the end, the product of our labor is not enough to
satisfy our most urgent necessities…[while] our exploiters sit in their comfortable offices without a
care. From there they conjure up numbers and make calculations about the immense quantities that
each of our harvests should leave them.” Tanalís Padilla, “’Por las buenas no se puede:’ Rubén
Jaramillo’s Campaigns for Governor of Morelos, 1946 and 1952,” Journal of Latin American and
Iberian Studies 7:1 (July 2001), 27.

208

infrastructural and capital support for the exploited ejidal countryside. To do so, the
ACG stipulated, required “saving” the Mexican Revolution from “opportunists” and
“the new rich” that comprised a “corrupt” PRI.
427

Yet, such popular attempts to save the Mexican Revolution using a
constitutional-legal framework implicitly (and increasingly explicitly) asserted that
the PRI regime had failed as the “institutionalized revolution.” Increasing social
inequality and polarization, along with the intensifying of one-party political rule,
challenged the regime’s self-portrayal as the democratic and progressive
embodiment of the Mexican Revolution. High-ranking PRI officials, particularly
those serving as president and minister of the interior,
428
responded to popular
mobilizations by directing a series of civilian massacres, the de facto suspension of
constitutional rights, and the closing of legal channels for the expression and redress
of popular discontent. Vázquez and Cabañas directly experienced this seemingly
linked history of reformist popular mobilization and subsequent violent state
responses.
Throughout the early to mid 1960s, both social leaders figured prominently in
re-treading the “old” paths (on a regional and national level) of electoral
participation and the formation of opposition political parties, independent unions,

427
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2, Legajo 1, 8-10, 106-107, 144.

428
From 1958-1982, the following men served as president: Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964),
Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970), Luis Echeverría (1970-1976), and José López Portillo (1976-1982).
The minister of the interior was considered as the powerful number two position directly under the
president, often occupied by future presidents (as was the case with Díaz Ordaz and Echeverría).

209

and popular front groups as the means through which to achieve a more just and
equitable social order. Beginning with the 1962 state elections in which the ACG
participated as an opposition political party, they would experience the intransigence
of a Mexican state that markedly focused less on co-optation as a form of defusing
popular discontent and more on widespread violence. Through its subsequent
violent and unconstitutional actions, the PRI demonstrated a vow to prevent a repeat
of the 1960 anti-Caballero movement in which the participating masses dictated the
contours and terms of resolution; namely, the removal of Governor Caballero from
power. Thus, in chronicling this guerrerense story of “ideological hardening and
polarization”
429
(from both popular and state perspectives), this chapter demonstrates
how Vázquez, Cabañas, and hundreds of others became revolutionary guerrillas
determined to organize new revolutions, overthrow the PRI regime, and implement
their differing conceptions of socialist states. Facing a regime that punished legal
forms of pacific dissent with (real and/or threatened) violence, they forged an
alternative, “new” political option—one both poignant and imaginative.
To paraphrase historian Greg Grandin, this study rejects the view that
conceives radicalism as the cause of radicalization.
430
Such a view tends to parallel
or regurgitate the “prose of counterinsurgency” deployed by Mexico and other Latin
American states that waged dirty wars after 1954 and blamed Russian and Cuban
“provocateurs” for promoting “inorganic” guerrilla movements waged by duped,

429
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 173.

430
Ibid.

210

manipulated nationals. Rather, this chapter highlights how the erasure of legal
channels of protest and state terror stimulated popular radicalization. The influence
of contemporary political radicalism—primarily the Cuban Revolution, the
emergence of national, continental and global guerrilla wars, and the Sino-Soviet
split—certainly influenced the content of the “New Left”
431
revolutionary
imaginaries of Vázquez, Cabañas, and their guerrilla fighters—as did local-regional
historical legacies and experiences of armed struggle. Yet, state terror contoured the
material form such imaginaries would take and reduced the field of possibilities to,
as the insurgent guerrerenses believed, the use of guerrilla warfare as a means of
overthrowing a violently authoritarian state; and, equally important, radicalized their
initially reformist political demands. Scholars who deplore the use of violence by
New Left guerrillas infected with “elitism and utopianism,”
432
and the latter’s
abandonment of Old Left party and labor union tactics, tend to neglect the specific
contexts from which such guerrilla movements emerged.
433
Guerrero during the

431
Historical works focused on Cold War Latin America tend to define “New Left” as the urban and
rural guerrilla movements that emerged after the 1959 Cuban Revolution and adopted guerrilla
warfare—i.e. direct violent action—as a strategy for revolution. For an insightful essay that rightly
criticized the exclusionary aspect of this definition and redefined the term to include those would did
not take up arms, see Eric Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons: The Shift from an Old to a
New Left in Latin America,” A Contracorriente 5:2 (Winter 2008), 47-73. For a definition of the
Latin American “New Left” as the re-appearance of revolutionary Marxist tendencies long-suppressed
by Stalinism, see Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez,” 101.

432
Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, “Conclusion: The postwar conjucture in Latin America and its
consequences,” in eds., Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, Latin America Between the Second World
War and the Cold War, 1944-1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 332.

433
As such, scholars are able to make blanket statements that collectively describe a heterogeneous
and continental guerrilla New Left as utopianist, vanguardist, petit-bourgeois in make-up, ultra-
violent, and hopeless. Worse yet, such characterizations usually lead to the placing of blame on the
guerrillas themselves for provoking the emergence of military dictatorships. For example see,

211

1960s showcases the manner in which the repeated suppression of popular
movements working within constitutional channels by the Mexican state shaped the
future ACNR and PDLP’s “will to act.”
434

Before forming the ACNR and PDLP, Vázquez and Cabañas, respectively,
traveled and re-traveled the political paths of the Mexican Old Left. Chronicling
their political journeys through the pathways of leftist opposition in political parties,
electoral processes, independent unions, and popular front groups, this chapter
begins with a recount of the 1962 Guerrero state elections—during which both men
closely collaborated—and ends with two massacres during the summer of 1967.
Years of organizing and leading popular mobilizations that demanded political
democracy and economic justice (at times no more than the actual application of
constitutional laws), continually frustrated by state repression, convinced both
activists of the need to forge new routes, new revolutions. Yet, back in 1961- 1962
after the downfall of Caballero, redemption, salvation, and Mexican Revolution
constituted the buzzwords of a newly restructured ACG.

Castañeda, Utopia Unarmed, 427-47; Stoll, Between Two Armies, 89; Bethell and Roxborough,
“Conclusion,” 332.

434
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 15. For a rich and perceptive look at the New Left guerrilla
culture—and its themes of death, rebirth, and carnival—see Ricardo Melgar Boa, “La memoria
submergida: martirologio y sacralización de la violencia en las guerrillas latinoamericanas,” in
Movimientos armados en México, eds. Oikión Solano and García Ugarte, 29-67. For a gender
analysis of the masculinist underpinnings of the “heroic guerrilla” image at the core of guerrilla
identity, see Saldaña-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination, 63-108; and, Ileana Rodríguez, Women,
Guerrillas, and Love: Understanding War in Central America (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1996), 30-61.

212

“A Moment of True Democracy:”
435
The ACG in 1961

What the federal government classified as “anarchy” and the “loss of the
principle of authority,” for guerrerenses the aftermath of the 1960 Chilpancingo
massacre comprised a sort of “democratic spring.”
436
In addition to the end of
Caballero’s gubernatorial term, the release of jailed ACG/COP activists and the
popular occupation of more than half of the state’s municipal governments
seemingly revealed the fruition of democracy at the state and local levels. Yet, the
democratic spring proved ephemeral, internally conflicted, and severely limited.
While Caballero supporters suffered violent backlashes in ACG bastions like Atoyac
and Iguala, cívico leaders faced the possibility of assassination. For instance, an
urban police sub-lieutenant shot and killed a prominent cívico in an Iguala bar just
days after the Chilpancingo massacre.
437
The COP disintegrated as some
participating groups (such as the Union of State Employees and the Federation of
University Students) re-affirmed their intrinsic links to the PRI party structure while
the new interim gubernatorial administration co-opted important COP leaders. In
contrast, ACG members who followed their organization’s autonomous stance
looked to the capture of municipal governments as a means to ensure and consolidate

435
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 91.

436
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 104; and, José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco,
Guerrero, 9 March 2007. This brief period, as characterized by professor and PPS militant Martín
Tavira Urióstegui, “was perhaps the only occasion during which direct democracy functioned in
guerrerense lands.” See Tavira Urióstegui, “Proceso Revolucionario y Democrático en Guerrero,” in
La transición democrática en Guerrero, 159.

437
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 6, 107.

213

the democratizing impulse forged during the anti-Caballero struggle. Yet, as
sociologist Alba Teresa Estrada Castañón discerned, this singular focus largely
replaced the type of political work and organizing with campesino, civil, and
syndical organizations that characterized ACG efforts during the 1960 social
movement. Consequently, such abandonment led to a neglect of the broad reformist
demands postulated in November 1960 in the sole pursuit of municipal power and
divided the ACG (and an increasingly irrelevant COP) at the very moment it required
political cohesion to build upon their victory over Caballero. Facing an interim
governor pressured by the federal government to undermine the cívico
municipalities, the latter failed to organize an effective defense.
438
Over the course
of little more than a year, they succumbed to corruption and internal wrangling over
political posts.
439

Internally, the ACG also experienced intense political strife previously and
uneasily glossed over by the group’s negotiated stance against Caballero. With the

438
For instance, the interim governor accused Vázquez of “selling” municipal presidencies to the
highest bidders. See Adriana Meza Velarde and Andrés Rubio Zaldívar, “Luchas sociales en el estado
de Guerrero: los movimientos radicales,” mimeographed copy (Chilpancingo, 1982-1986), 13, cited
in, Castellanos, México armado, 111.

439
Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 97-98. See also Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 92-
93; Román Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 618-619, 636-637; Bellingeri, Del agrarismo
armado, 122-123; Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez,” 99-100; and, Fritz Glockner,
Memoria roja: historia de la guerrilla en México (1943-1968) (Mexico: Ediciones B, 2007), 121-
122. According to former ACG and ACNR militant, Sotelo Pérez, Iguala did experience “a moment
of true democracy; decisions were based on discussions attended by the pueblo, and the municipal
police was re-organized on the basis of citizen suggestions.” In contrast, Atoyac experienced a
different fate, according to local historian Wilfrido Fierro: “following the fall [of Caballero] cívicos
turned the movement into a human pack of hounds, each vying for the best bones in municipal and
state governments…consequently divisions arose.” See Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 91; and,
Wilfrido Fierro, Monografía de Atoyac (Mexico, 1973), 201, quoted in Radilla Martínez, Poderes,
saberes y sabores, 199-200.

214

Senate’s removal of the general from power, the ACG’s unifying platform
disintegrated and the question of how to proceed divided the leadership council. For
López Carmona and other disaffected priístas, the raison d’être of the ACG vanished
with the Senate’s vote to oust the general. To continue their social activism without
giving the interim governor a chance to work, they believed, only produced the
“permanent conservation of upheaval.”
440
A simple transfer of gubernatorial power
from one PRI-anointed governor to another proved insufficient for Vázquez and his
more radical supporters. Improving the lives of impoverished guerrerenses required
much more they argued in pamphlet dated 10 January 1961: “the fundamental and
integral restructuring of ejidos; the economic fortification of municipalities; the
disappearance of latifundios; the liquidation of cacicazgos; the abolition of state
unemployment and the authentic democratization of all popular organizations.”
441
In
other words, Vázquez and his radical cadres called for the profound socio-economic
re-structuring of everyday guerrerense life—a call whose radicalism echoed
progressive facets of the Mexican Constitution, demanded their actual
implementation, and signaled national contemporary afflictions of the Mexican
countryside.

440
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 29. The quote comes from a manifesto written by López Carmona
included in a DFS report dated 28 January 1961. In the manifesto, a now-expelled López Carmona
explained the “true” origins and motives of the ACG while portraying Vázquez as a dishonest ultra-
radical beholden to PPS politicians, interested only in destabilizing the state government.

441
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 6, 141. For a list of the November 1960 demands see the previous
chapter; and, Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 103.

215

Fundamentally, such internal division involved competing visions of the PRI
regime and its relationship with what PRI theoretician Mario Ezcurdia once termed
“the principles of the Mexican Revolution,” as codified within the 1917
Constitution.
442
The López Carmona faction conceptualized that relationship as
organic and firmly legitimate. Refusing to consider the anti-democratic Caballero
regime as symptomatic of the PRI’s ruling methodology at the national level, the
group conceived the praxis of the 1960 social movement in a manner that resembled
the colonial-era relationship between loyal (but rebellious) New Spain colonial
subject and Spanish king. Such popular protest questioned not the legitimacy of the
ruling party, but the actions of a few “bad” local functionaries that deserved the
reprimands issued from PRI leadership.
443
Throughout the movement, López
Carmona resisted the incorporation of activists belonging to leftist political parties—
who he labeled as “habitual protestors”
444
—and continually recast the origins of the
ACG as strictly nationalist and priísta. In the December weeks leading up to the
Chilpancingo massacre, the Mexico City-based ACG president attempted to expel
Vázquez and other more radical ACG members for supposedly collaborating with

442
Mario Ezcurdia, Análisis teórico del Partido Revolucionario Institucional (México: Costa-Amic,
1968), 146.

443
For instance, an ACG bulletin published in Mexico City newspapers in mid-November 1960 stated
that “the PRI should expel General Raúl Caballero Aburto from its ranks, in virtue that he claimed he
was wealthy before becoming governor and given that the [PRI] is not solely constituted by wealthy
persons, and taking into consideration that the only elements that support him now are rich hotel
owners and merchants, in their majority foreigners, the PRI has the obligation to ask Caballero Aburto
to leave its party.” AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 222.

444
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 4, 161.

216

PPS members and “harming the popular movement of Guerrero even more than they
already have with their [recent] actions.”
445
Those “recent” actions—the state-wide
tax strike, the permanent civic strike in Chilpancingo, and massive demonstrations—
that finally captured the attention of the federal government and national press
frightened López Carmona. Such actions, he and his supporters correctly realized,
pointed to a radicalization of the social movement (and its demands) that would not
end with the removal of Caballero from power. Provided an additional impetus by
the Chilpancingo massacre, the ACG entered what government intelligence agents
dubbed “a new combative phase” that witnessed the election of Vázquez as president
and the definite abandonment of lopezcarmonista politics during the first days of
January 1961.
446

By “new combative phase” the DFS agents referred to the take-over and re-
organization of municipal councils and presidencies by the Vázquez-led ACG in the
immediate aftermath of the Chilpancingo massacre. In contrast to the
lopezcarmonista approach that assumed federal intervention in the face of
gubernatorial despotism, the more direct vazquista methodology tested the

445
AGN, DFS 48-52-60, Legajo 1, 240. For the struggles between López Carmona and Vázquez, see
AGN, DFS 48-54-60, Legajo 1, 185-186, 222-223; and, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 29.
446
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 6, 141. The DFS identifies Vázquez as president of the ACG and
Sotelo Pérez as vice-president by 10 January 1961. López Carmona and his cadres either were
expelled or willingly left the group sometime later that month. On 28 January 1961 he published an
editorial that lambasts Vázquez and the new ACG, accusing the former of corruption, low moral
standards, and demagogy. See AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 29. In September 1962, López
Carmona and other expelled ACG members backed the gubernatorial PRI candidacy of Raymundo
Abarca Alarcón as members of a rival “authentic” ACG. AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 127.

217

willingness of the PRI regime to fulfill, indeed embody, its radical rhetoric and
revolutionary myths. For the newly-elected ACG leader, such tactics represented a
logical prolongation of the 1960 social movement by continuing to put into practice
constitutionally protected civic rights and discursively justifying such praxis by
citing the Mexican Constitution and the progressive legacies of the 1910 Revolution
(e.g. patriarchal grassroots democracy, municipal autonomy) as the sources of
inspiration for the movement. The pre-1961 demand for the removal of Caballero
and the post-1961 ACG occupation of municipal governments both signaled a
popular desire to exercise some level of democratic impact on their state’s political
life as citizens; to politically express themselves beyond the rigid confines of the
PRI’s theater of electoral spectacle by designating their own local and state
authorities. Restoring municipal autonomy after three years of Caballero-imposed
officials marked not only an important political victory but also an attempt to
institutionalize the democratic effervescence unleashed by the anti-Caballero
movement at the municipal level. “Maintaining the spirit of [democratic] struggle
alive,” COP leader and PCM militant Dr. Pablo Sandoval Cruz recalled, and raising
awareness “that the pueblo needed a space of [political] power through [popularly-
elected] ayuntamientos” constituted the primary challenge for the ACG from 1961-
1962.
447

447
Estrada Castañón, El movimiento anticaballerista, 106. Sandoval Cruz worked with the ACG
throughout 1961 by editing and publishing the short-lived cívico newspaper, Unidad. According to
Sotelo Pérez, the ACG ceased belonging to the COP by the end of January 1961 due to the
“opportunism” demonstrated by certain COP leaders (including university student leader Jesús

218

As discussed previously, such democratic attempts produced mixed results
throughout 1961. By the end of the year, few municipal governments remained in
the hands of ACG militants and those that survived (e.g. Atoyac) faced internal and
external threats. Yet, the anti-Caballero social movement and the experiment in
popular municipal rule drastically contoured the socio-political topography of
Guerrero. Local-regional caciques and PRI leaders now faced an active and
heterogeneous body politic constituted by citizens willing to act in the defense and
practice of constitutional rights. During the course of struggle, democracy in
Guerrero acquired (or recuperated) social and economic hues considered inseparable
from its political, usually strictly electoral, definition. Guerrerenses that participated
in the 1960 social movement and in the recuperation of popular municipal autonomy
decided they wanted to exert “some control over the conditions of their existence:”
448

the expansion of (limited) democracy to the workplace, varying levels of
government, voting booths, independent labor unions, schools, but not necessarily to
homes or traditional gender roles. A stark contrast to the PRI definition of
“democracy” forged in the midst of economic miracles and political centralization,
the guerrerense version signaled a need to re-negotiate the “governing framework”
449

Araujo): “only Dr. [Pablo] Sandoval demonstrated his political maturity and never severed his ties
with Genaro [Vázquez].” Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 88-89.

448
Cornel West, “The Indispensability Yet Insufficiency of Marxist Theory,” in Cornel West, The
Cornel West Reader (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 1999), 223.

449
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 161.

219

established in the decades that followed the 1910 Revolution. More than five years
before the 1968 Mexico City student movement, regional civic insurgencies in
Guerrero, and similar ones in San Luis Potosí, Morelos, and Puebla, challenged the
PRI regime’s ability to rule hegemonically; that is, the ability to respond to popular
dissidence with nuance and negotiation rather than with violence and terror. Such
early 1960s movements, in particular the 1962 Guerrero state elections,
foreshadowed (or overdetermined?) what historian Ilán Semo termed “the decline of
[revolutionary] myths:” a beginning of national crises and the emergence of a New
Left.
450

That old-time Mexican Left

1960 brought Vázquez back to his native state and transformed him into a
regional social leader with national reach. The formative years he spent in Mexico
City during the 1950s as a student aspiring to become a teacher and lawyer, as an
activist struggling for union democracy within the 1958 Revolutionary Teachers
Movement (MRM), and as a representative of guerrerense campesino groups before
the national Agrarian Department provided him vital organizational experience and
entrance into Mexico’s variegated leftist world.
451
He also learned in the course of

450
Ilán Semo and Américo Saldívar, México, un pueblo en la historia, volumen 4 (Puebla:
Universidad Autónoma de Puebla/Nueva Imagen, 1982), 9-11.

451
For a recent study that examines how teacher syndical activism in Mexico City during the 1950s
influenced the later social movements of Guerrero see, O’Neill Blacker-Hanson, “La Lucha Sigue!
(‘The Struggle Continues!’) Teacher Activism in Guerrero and the Continuum of Democratic Struggle
in Mexico,” Ph.D. Dissertation (University of Washington, 2005).

220

those struggles that constitutional rights required organized popular action to ensure
their application—a lesson in full display throughout the 1960 anti-Caballero
movement. Yet, in the early days of 1961 after his election as president of a newly
restructured ACG, Vázquez faced a moment of political uncertainty that constituted
neither the first or last during his life as social activist. What was to be done? In the
midst of anticaballerista harassment, popular municipal rule, and the disintegration
of the COP, the ACG leader emerged as a sort of “coordinator” over thirteen
popularly-elected ayuntamientos. The ACG organized state-wide assemblies that
collected grievances, created programs that offered solutions to immediate socio-
economic problems, and presented them before a disinterested interim governor.
452

Demands for land, credit, roads, potable water, electrification, schools, medical
clinics, and jobs—long-held yet unredeemed promises from the federal
government—fell upon deaf ears.
453
In Atoyac, such government apathy led to
popular action. Cabañas joined Vázquez and other ACG leaders in a series of land

452
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007; and, Andrés Rubio
Saldívar, “ACNR, PDLP y GPG, por Andrés Rubio,” 8, included in the Movimiento Armado
Socialista Digital Archive, Folder “Trabajos de Investigación,” José Luis Moreno Borbolla ed.,
Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de los Movimientos Sociales A.C. (A CD-ROM copy of this
Mexican Guerrilla digital archive was provided to the author by ex-guerrilla José Luis Moreno
Borbolla in February 2007). Huarachudo refers to an impoverished person incapable of affording
shoes and forced to wear cheap sandals.

453
Humberto Jurado Guízar, Revista de América, 12 February 1972, included in Ortíz, Genaro
Vázquez, 42-48.

221

invasions that used “Viva Zapata!” as their battle standard and cast local class
warfare as a struggle between the “huarachudos and the privileged.”
454

Yet, for Vázquez such actions suffered from a series of absences: an absence
of organization, an absence of unifying political program, and an absence of political
direction. Taking over municipal governments and recuperating stolen land
represented important popular conquests. The crucial question for the ACG leader
revolved around the issue of how to maintain and reproduce those victories. In other
words, how could the lower and middling classes of Guerrero carve out a space of
democratic power within the state political system in order to exert some level of
control over their everyday lives? In search of answers, and facing increased
persecution at the hands of a reconsolidated state government,
455
Vázquez returned
to the place that shaped his activist consciousness. Reaching Mexico City in March
1961, he discovered a city rife with political vibrancy, activity, and division. His
travels through the labyrinthine Mexican left reveal the beginning of complex
political fissures neatly (though incompletely) encapsulated within a temporal dyad

454
A decade later, the same struggle would be recast as a guerrilla war between the poor and the rich.
“La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 17; and, Consuelo Solís, interview with the
author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007.

455
Here I refer to a temporary suturing of elite divisions that occurred after the removal of Caballero
from power. As the previous chapter describes, the clandestine political maneuvering of Donato
Miranda Fonseca (a crucial member of President López Mateos’ cabinet angered by the general’s
appointment as governor over him) against Caballero played a role in the latter’s downfall and the
ACG victory. By early 1961, unity within the “revolutionary family” had been restored though, as
historian Salvador Román perceptively suggested, Miranda Fonseca’s actions may have cost him the
presidential dedazo. See Román, Revuelta cívica en Guerrero, 636-637.

222

(Old v. New) and the last gasps of a Cardenista approach to redeeming the Mexican
Revolution.
456

Vázquez entered a variegated leftist world experiencing the repercussions of
the 1958-59 Railroad Workers’ strikes and the Cuban Revolution. The former
provoked serious internal discussion following the dubious performance of the PCM
(along with the POCM and PP)
457
and President López Mateos’ violent response in
his use of the army to suppress the strikes in 1959. As a union strike that began by
positing wage hike demands and ended in a 100,000 plus national mobilization that
sought union democratization and autonomy, the results of the Railroad Workers’
strikes stimulated debates regarding the political role of the PCM (and the PP).
Unable to shed the “labor unity” fetishism of the 1940s and trapped within a
(pseudo-) Marxist teleology obsessed with discovering a section of the national
bourgeoisie capable of carrying through a national-democratic revolution, the PCM,
according to critics like José Revueltas, failed to act as a revolutionary vanguard

456
Of course, “last gasps” do not necessarily signify the total exhaustion or death of Cardenismo as a
political imaginary/methodology. Popular interpretations of Cardenismo, not to mention popular
memories of the michoacano president, have proven resilient and re-occurring (c.f. presidential
election of 1988). See chapter six for a brief discussion of Cardenista populism vis-à-vis the neo-
populism of Luis Echeverría.

457
Leading oft-expelled PCM militant and brilliant writer José Revueltas to write his Essay on the
Headless Proletariat: a severe criticism of the PCM’s participation, or lack thereof, in the various
strikes as representative of the party’s general failure in constituting a true vanguard party of the
Mexican proletariat. See Revueltas, Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza (Mexico: Era, 1980
[1962]). For a description of the strikes, see Mario Gill, Los ferrocarrileros (Mexico: Ed.
Extemporáneos, 1971); Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1992), 203-207 & 216-223; and, Hodges and Gandy, Mexico under
Siege, 70-81.

223

party.
458
Worse yet, the party’s infamous dogmatism—“a struggle between those
that simply recite Marxism versus those who attempt to comprehend and realize
[Marxism]”—contributed to the elaboration of rigid theory that failed to reconcile
“with the particularities of the Mexican environment.”
459
Such misunderstanding led
not only to a mishandling of the Railroad Workers’ strike, but also to flawed
analyses of other contemporary social movements such as the land invasions that
rocked northern Mexico in 1958-1962 or the civic insurgencies in Guerrero and San
Luis Potosí. Despite adopting a “new democratic revolution for national liberation”
thesis at the 1960 Thirteenth Congress that signaled a rupture with previously-held
Browderist/popular front dogma,
460
the PCM continually failed to realize that power
and politics were not the exclusive domains of the party and/or state. The “new
revolution” would arrive from elsewhere.

458
Carr, Marxism and Communism, 224; and, Revueltas, Ensayo sobre un proletariado sin cabeza,
83.

459
Such dogmatism also led to frequent purges of PCM militants who would go on to play crucial
roles in organizing rural and urban social movements. Revueltas, “Sobre la crisis del Partido [1943],”
in José Revueltas, Escritos políticos (Tomo I) (Mexico: Era, 1984), 33; and Carr, Marxism and
Communism, 223. Revueltas was expelled from the PCM for the first time shortly after publishing
this article in 1943.

460
Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo, ed., Historia del comunismo en México (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1985),
277-279. The PCM thus rejected the belief that socialism was a posible achievement by working
within the legacies and framework established by the Mexican Revolution. In contrast to the PCM,
the Vicente Lombardo Toledano-led PP failed to discard such notions. In 1947 Lombardo declared :
“Let’s not aim for socialism in our country tomorrow.” By the 1960s, he and his PP continued
trapped within what Roger Bartra characterized as “the political and theoretical space of the 1910
Mexican Revolution,” attaching their definition of revolution (and its evolution) to the PRI state. See
Bartra, “Marxism on the Gallows,” in Bartra, Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the
Post-Mexican Condition (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 204.

224

Domestically, the Railroad Workers’ strikes exposed the inability of the PCM
to make the “new revolution,” painfully exposing the party’s theoretical
misperceptions and practical unpreparedness. On a continental level, the 1959
Cuban Revolution fulfilled a similar revelatory function in relation to Latin
American Communist parties.
461
For a generation of young leftists that witnessed
the violent suppression of brief “democratic springs” by authoritarian states in the
years following World War II, and their communist parties continual towing of a
non-confrontational muscovite line that stressed electoral participation, the
revolution led by Castro and Guevara seemingly provided a new path for radical
social transformation; a “new” tactic of rural guerrilla warfare; a “new”
revolutionary protagonist in the form of the peasantry; a “new” battleground in the
countryside; and, a “new,” urgent recasting of the Marxist dialectic that believed
armed insurrection created the “objective and subjective conditions favorable to
revolution.”
462
Revolution appeared as a tantalizing, realizable goal in contrast to
communist parties’ post-WWII Sisyphean efforts to achieve equitable economic

461
Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas,” 101.

462
Che Guevara, “Cuba: ¿Excepción histórica o vanguardia en la lucha anticolonialista?” in Ernesto
Che Guevara, América Latina: Despertar de un continente (La Habana: Centro de Estudios Che
Guevara/Ocean Press, 2006 [2003]), 264. In highlighting the tendency of Latin American communist
parties to tow Moscow’s line, we should not overemphasize the Latin America-Moscow connection.
As Barry Carr reminded us, communists in nations like Mexico necessarily engaged, in dialogical
manner, local traditions and politics beyond the realm of PC politics. The PCM may have failed as a
vanguard revolutionary party, but it did produce a number of historically crucial cadres like Cabañas
that shaped the history of post-1940 Mexico. As Padilla writes, “while the PCM played an important
role in popular mobilizations throughout Mexico, it did so almost in spite of itself.” See Barry Carr,
“The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State: Marxism’s Contribution to the Construction
of the Great Arch,” in Everyday Forms of State Formation, eds. Joseph and Nugent, 326-328; and,
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 10.

225

development and social democratization in alliance with the ever-illusory and
inexistent nationalist-democratic bourgeoisies in the face of state repression. Latin
America’s “Cuban-fired”
463
New Left thus emerged from a historical context
characterized by violently frustrated social democratic aspirations, repressive
authoritarian regimes, emergent countercultural practices,
464
and a Caribbean
“revolution desired by all.”
465

463
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 15. See also Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro
Vázquez Rojas,” 101. In a recent intervention, historian Eric Zolov forwarded a forceful
reconceptualization of the Latin American New Left that includes the “non-armed aspects of radical
challenges to political and social norms” such as counter-cultural, bohemian, and subversive practices.
Such “non-armed aspects” paralleled and at times intersected the armed New Left and both
constituted an overarching “New Left sensibility” that “confronted state power, on the one hand, and
patriarchal forms, on the other.” While I agree with Zolov’s argument, I would argue that the
Mexican non-armed New Left, historiographically, has received much more attention that its armed
counterpart (of course, with the exception of the EZLN)—a disparity my project attempts to correct in
a small way. Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons,” 48-51.

464
Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual Horizons,” 49-53.

465
Glockner, Memoria roja, 66. Not only leftists were impacted by the Cuban Revolution. A number
of scholars demonstrated how after the revolution counterinsurgency, in the words of historian Gilbert
Joseph, “became the well-honed, high-tech art of counterrevolution.” Grandin traced the origins of
such techniques to the U.S.-supported overthrow of Guatemalan president Jacobo Arbenz in 1954,
though later refined following the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco. French journalist Marie-Monique Robin
also traced aspects of U.S. counter-insurgency techniques to France and that country’s military
experiences in the Algerian national liberation war. See Gilbert Joseph, “What We Now Know and
Should Know: Bringing Latin America More Meaningfully into Cold War Studies,” in Gilbert Joseph
and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America’s New Encounter with the Cold War
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 24; Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 185-188; Marie-
Monique Robin, Escuadrones de la muerte: la escuela francesa (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana,
2005); and, Marie-Monique Robin, Death Squadrons: The French School (Brooklyn, New York:
First Run/Icarus Films, 2003). For a work that mentioned the influence of French counterinsurgency
strategy (especially from their Algerian experience) in American military training see, Andrew J.
Birtle, U.S. Army Counterinsurgency and Contingency Operations Doctrine, 1942-1976 (Washington,
D.C.; Center of Military History/United States Army, 2006), 162-164, 229-230. Birtle noted that
French Lt. Col. Paul Aussaresses, infamous for his repression of Algerian rebels durign the 1950s and
supporter of torture as a counterinsurgency tactic, visited Infantry and Special Warfare schools in the
U.S. during the early 1960s.

226

Geographic context, of course, shaped the impact, meanings extracted from,
and popular reception of the Cuban Revolution. As stressed in the previous chapter,
there were many Cuban Revolutions. The utopian and radical messages gleaned
from Radio Rebelde by aspiring teachers crowded around a shortwave radio in
Ayotzinapa, Guerrero or by university students in Morelia, Michoacán dramatically
contrasted the counterinsurgent lessons gleaned by military specialists at Panama’s
School of the Americas.
466
In Mexico the island revolution, at least initially prior to
Castro’s definition of the revolution as Marxist-Leninist, provided a unifying
impulse under the banner of internationalism, anti-imperialism, and revolutionary
redemption. Moved by the prospect of agrarian reform in Cuba and the revolution’s
anti-colonial implications (e.g. the nationalization of industries), former president
Lázaro Cárdenas convened the Conference for National Sovereignty, Emancipation,
and Peace in March 1961 in Mexico City.
467
For several days sixteen Latin
American delegations, a number of national leftist and progressive organizations,
and representatives from the Soviet Union, China, and several African countries
discussed U.S. imperialism; the need to enact agrarian reform programs and

466
Arturo Miranda Ramírez, El otro rostro de la guerrilla: Genaro, Lucio y Carmelo, experiencias
de la guerrilla (Mexico: El Machete, 1996), 19; Glockner, Memoria roja, 96-97; and, Eric Zolov,
“¡Cuba sí, yanquis, no!”: el saqueo del Instituto Cultural México-Norteamericano en Morelia,
Michoacán, 1961,” in Daniela Spenser, ed., Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el
Caribe (Mexico: CIESAS/Porrúa, 2004), 175-214.

467
The conference was partly sponsored by the World Peace Council in which Cárdenas served as one
of the organization’s three Latin American leaders. See Olga Pellicer de Brody, México y la
Revolución Cubana (Mexico: Colegio de México, 1972), 96; Zolov, “Expanding our Conceptual
Horizons,” 71; and, Sergio Colmenero, “El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, la Central
Campesina Independiente y Cárdenas,” Estudios Políticos 2:2 (July-September 1975), 13.

227

strengthen labor unions; called for the nationalization of natural resources; and,
denounced Third World poverty. Tagged as “subversive” and “anti-patriotic” by the
mainstream Mexican press, this poor person’s Bandung conference produced a final
document at its culmination that stressed the importance of defending the Cuban
Revolution and demonstrating solidarity with the rebellious island.
468
“Cuba,”
Cárdenas would later declare after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, “is not alone.”
469

Significantly, the conference uneasily unified the broader Mexican Left—
PCM, PP, POCM, progressive activists, Cardenistas, excommunicated and/or
“heretical” Marxists—for a fleeting moment. For the Cuban Revolution (and the
Bay of Pigs), as historians Eric Zolov and Ilán Semo elucidate, functioned as a
metaphorical mirror that transformed the achievements and principles of the
Mexican Revolution “into objects of social reflection and ideological contention.”
470

Agrarian reform and the nationalization of industries in Cuba invited both
comparison with early twentieth-century Mexico and prompted domestic debates on
the current progress (or lack thereof) of the Mexican Revolution after decades of
“institutionalization.” Such debate forced President López Mateos to famously

468
Semo, El ocaso de los mitos, 64-65; Pellicer de Brody, México y la Revolución Cubana, 96-100;
Condés Lara, Represión y rebelión en México (Tomo I), 198-204; and, Zolov, “¡Cuba sí, yanquis
no!,” 187-188. For interviews and speeches given by Cárdenas before and during the Conference, see
Elena Vázquez Gómez and Domingo Alonso, eds., Palabras y documentos públicos de Lázaro
Cárdenas: mensajes, discursos, declaraciones, entrevistas y otros documentos, 1941/1970, vol. 3
(Mexico: Siglo Veintiuno, 1979), 105-115.

469
Lázaro Cárdenas, Ideario político (Mexico: Era, 1972), 285.

470
Semo, El ocaso de los mitos, 57; Zolov, “¡Cuba sí, yanquis no!” 176.

228

declare in July 1960 that his government “was within the Constitution, of extreme
Left.”
471
For Mexican leftists like Cárdenas, still beholden and faithful to the
progressive discourses of the 1910 revolution, Cuban achievements exposed
Mexican failures. In contrast to the PCM’s call for an ambiguous “new revolution”
in the aftermath of the 1958-59 national strikes, Cárdenas exhorted the need for self-
criticism and introspection in order to put the revolution back on track.
472
In sum,
the former president called for redemption. The Conference for National
Sovereignty, Emancipation, and Peace, limited and circumscribed as it was by a
media blackout, produced the incipient blueprints for how to achieve that elusive
redemption of the Mexican Revolution. Five months later the Movement of
National Liberation emerged under the tutelage and leadership of Cárdenas during
the first days of August 1961.
Having reached Mexico City in March 1961, Vázquez participated in the
Cárdenas-led attempts to rectify and save the revolution. As representatives of the
ACG, both he and Blas Vergara attended the Conference for National Sovereignty,
Emancipation, and Peace.
473
At the conference Vázquez discovered that what was

471
Colmenero, “El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional,” 12. While offering an opportunity to open
dialogue with the Left, such comments (in addition to the Cuban Revolution) motivated right-wing
business and Catholic groups—aided by the U.S. ambassador Thomas Mann—to organize an intense
anti-communist propaganda campaign. Pellicer de Brody argues that popular fear of the Cuban
Revolution was manipulated by business interests to force the PRI regime to provide them with
advantageous material and political support. See Pellicer de Brody, México y la Revolución Cubana,
366.

472
Cárdenas, Ideario político, 34-37; and, Zolov, “¡Cuba sí, yanquis no!,” 216-218.
473
Accounts differ on whether Vázquez actually participated both in the Conference and the founding
of the MLN as an official representative of the ACG. Gómezjara argues that the ACG, represented

229

rotten in Guerrero was rotten in Mexico, much of Latin America, and the rest of the
Third World. Final conference resolutions that stated political independence proved
impossible without economic emancipation paralleled the definition of democracy
forged in the course of the anti-Caballero struggle in 1960 Guerrero. The call for
anti-imperialist struggle, and the positing of a revolutionary Cuban exemplar,
resonated with guerrerense experiences of popular struggle during the 1950s against
multi-national corporations based in Acapulco. As we shall see later, the ideas of
U.S. imperialism embedded in the specific guerrerense and Mexican contexts and the
centrality of anti-imperialism as the path to national self-determination comprised
key components of the ACG and ACNR political imaginaries. In 1961, particularly
after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion in April of that year, such ideas saturated the
leftist political milieus inhabited by Vázquez.
474
Anti-imperialism, represented most
immediately by the Cuban Revolution, capably (though fleetingly) unified a
fractured and disarrayed Mexican Left.
475

exclusively by Blas Vergara, officially participated in the elaboration of the Conference’s final
document but not in the founding of the MLN in August 1962. See Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y
lucha campesina, 282; and, Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez Rojas,” 102-103. For
accounts that place Vázquez at both events, see Glockner, Memoria Roja, 114-119; and, Castellanos,
México Armado, 70. In any case the MLN included the participation of a score of future guerrilla
leaders including Vázquez, Cabañas, Arturo Gámiz, Pablo Gómez, and César Yáñez.

474
Ledda Arguedas, “El movimiento de liberación nacional: Una experiencia de la izquierda
mexicana en los sesentas,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 39:1 (January-March 1977), 232; and,
Semo, México: un pueblo en la historia, 64-67.

475
Despite ideological and tactical differences, the various Mexican lefts remained largely committed
to a revolutionary nationalism incarnated in the state that emerged from the Mexican Revolution.
Differences over “the development of productive forces,” industrialization, or the nationalization of
resources nonetheless presupposed a strong central postrevolutionary state as the key historical agent;
and, epistemologically, shared the same positivist teleologies of progress, development, and science.
For Mexico, see Carr, “The Fate of the Vanguard under a Revolutionary State,” 331-339. For a

230

The civic leader spent the rest of 1961 splitting time spent in Mexico City
and Guerrero. As Cárdenas, intellectuals from the Círculo de Estudios Mexicanos
(CEM)
476
, PP, PCM, and PRI militants worked to organize the foundation of the
MLN during the rainy summer months, Vázquez participated in several ACG
protests. Now permanently in the sights of government intelligence agencies, he
traveled to Chilpancingo in June to help organize a counter-demonstration scheduled
for the ACG bastion of Iguala on the 25
th
of the same month. With the help of PP
militants, the cívicos sought to counteract a PRI “political rally that stressed unity
with the President of the Republic and the Mexican Revolution.” Vázquez “stayed
in Chilpancingo all day and during the night continued to roam the
University…accompanied by a lone schoolteacher,” the DFS memo concluded.
477

Upset with the interim’s governor “lenient” treatment of ACG members in the
aftermath of the Chilpancingo massacre, the DFS actively tracked the man they
labeled a “communist agitator” as he traveled to and from Mexico City and
Guerrero.
478

broader continental epistemological critique, see Saldaña-Portillo, The Revolutionary Imagination in
the Americas, 6-12, 17-27.

476
The CEM was founded in 1954 by a group of leftist public intellectuals and scholars that defined
the group as “independent leftist” in political orientation. Zolov described the organization as a type
of “left-wing think tank” that sponsored conferences with heavy emphasis on political economy.
Noted members included: Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Fernando Benítez, Pablo González Casanova, Jesús
Silva Herzog, and Leopoldo Zea. See Zolov, “From an Old to a New Left in Latin America,” 60-61;
and, Semo, México, un pueblo en la historia, 66.

477
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 8, 52.

478
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 7, 102 & 107. Fearing “anarchy,” popular violence, and a
disorganized state PRI organization, the DFS argued that Martínez Adame should “have made the
Guerrero ‘pueblo’ feel the force his Government.”

231

During his travels throughout 1961, Vázquez prominently displayed the
political lessons he learned as a student and young teacher participating in the
teacher union struggles of the late 1950s and as a cívico leader in 1960 Guerrero: the
value of non-sectarian political positions and the importance of forging political
coalitions under key unifying demands. Such lessons most likely attracted him to the
MLN. While sources disagree over his presence at the August 1961 founding of the
organization (indeed, MLN documents do not list Vázquez or the ACG), the MLN’s
unification of progressive groups under the banner of anti-imperialism, the defense
of national sovereignty, democratization of the nation, and the redeeming of the
Mexican Revolution, not to mention the weighty figure of Cárdenas, proved alluring
and hopeful. Despite its seemingly subversive name, considering an international
context marked by radical national liberation movements, the MLN represented “an
agglutinating organism”
479
composed of various social movements and political
interests, largely integrated by middle-class leftist urbanites and with a limited
presence in the countryside. The MLN couched its constitutionally-based demands
within the discourse of revolutionary nationalism and called for their actual
application. To achieve national liberation, they postulated the following: the

479
Elisa Servín, “Algunas ramas de un árbol frondoso: el cardenismo a mediados del siglo xx,”
Historias 69 (2008); Arguedas, “El movimiento de liberación nacional,” 233; and, Adela Cedillo
Cedillo, “El Fuego y el silencio: historias de las Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional Mexicanas (1969-
1974),” Licenciatura Thesis (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, 2008), 78. The MLN did
include some dissident campesino groups affiliated with the CNC and others belonging to the PP
and/or UGOCM. Important campesino leaders include Jacinto López and, later on, Rubén Jaramillo.
For a list of the participating organizations, see Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, Programa y
Llamamiento (México, 1961), 70-71.

232

proactive participation of the state in economic areas to ensure a more equitable
model of capital accumulation; agrarian reform accompanied by serious
modifications to constitutional Article 27 and the Agrarian code; the right of workers
and peasants to form independent and democratic labor unions; the release of
political prisoners and the derogation of Article 145; the implementation of laws that
strictly regulated foreign investment; and, the passing of laws that ensured the
participation of opposition political parties in all elections.
480

One can trace the profound influence of previous popular movements in the
political program of the MLN. Populated by people that participated in the
Jaramillista rebellions, the labor strikes of the late 1940s, the 1952 Henriquista
presidential campaign, and the massive teacher, telegraph and railroad workers
movements of 1957-1960, the MLN drew from the political imaginaries of
movements that legally challenged the PRI regime over the “true” nature and
purpose of the Mexican Revolution.
481
Instances of state repression had not yet fully
exhausted the widely-held belief among the majority of progressives and leftists that
the post-revolutionary state and the 1917 Constitution still represented the vehicle
through which to achieve a more just and equitable society.
482
In extolling the

480
Arguedas, “El movimiento de liberación nacional,” 234; Movimiento de Liberación Nacional,
Programa y Llamamiento, 62-69; and, Semo, Mexico, un pueblo en la historia, 66-68.

481
Servín, Ruptura y oposición, 16.

482
Faith in economic “development” (industrial, in particular) as the solution to historically chronic
“underdevelopment” (subdesarrollo) underscored progressive beliefs regarding the appropriate (re:
interventionist) role of the Mexican state vis-à-vis capital and labor. See Carr, “The Fate of the
Vanguard Under a Revolutionary State,” 332-342.

233

Cuban example, Cárdenas emphasized the inadequacy of armed struggle in Mexico
“to improve the living situation of our people” in the days that followed the
Conference for National Sovereignty, Emancipation, and Peace. At the MLN
founding conference, the former president reaffirmed that “[the MLN] is a licit
organization, that does not undermine the principles established in the
Constitution…it will be an organization that will contribute to the realization of the
postulates of the Mexican Revolution, consecrated in our political Constitution.”
483

In other words, Mexico, unlike revolutionary Cuba, already possessed a Revolution
structurally capable of improving the lot of Mexico’s impoverished masses. Mexico
required not armed struggle but political will and legal popular mobilizations with
the aim of pressuring the PRI regime.
The re-emergence of Cárdenas—and by connection of Cardenista
revolutionary nationalism—and the foundation of the MLN confirmed for Vázquez
the legitimacy of the 1960 anti-Caballero movement in relation to the movement’s
motives, demands, and civil disobedience tactics. As a constitutionally-based
movement that sought the removal of a corrupt, alleged “betrayer” of the Mexican
Revolution and Constitution from the governorship, the 1960 civic insurgency
paralleled the MLN in their respective desires to re-orient or reinvigorate the
“institutionalized revolution.” The political paths of Vázquez and Cárdenas thus
intersected. In November 1961 the former president helped create a National Union

483
Vázquez Gómez and Alonso, eds., Palabras y documentos vol. 3, 120, 134; and, MLN, Programa
y Llamamiento, 5. The first quote from Cárdenas referred to a speech he gave on 10 March 1961 at
the Workers University of Mexico to commemorate that institution’s 25
th
anniversary.

234

of Land Solicitors (UNST), designed to aid campesinos through the bureaucratic
labyrinths of federal agrarian offices, and appointed Vázquez as secretary general.
484

The ACG now possessed a stable organizational and political link to guerrerense and
national landless and smallholding campesinos. Upon his return to Guerrero at the
end of 1961, ready to organize “a fabulous reception” for Cárdenas in Iguala, the
ACG leader briefly stopped in the state of Morelos. At a moment of personal
political clarity and confidence, Vázquez met with Rubén Jaramillo, a man who
possessed extensive experience in dealing with the PRI regime.
485
For two decades,
Jaramillo used strikes, guerrilla warfare, the formation of an oppositional political
party, and land invasions as tactics to force the regime to live up to its revolutionary
rhetoric. For two decades he faced state terror and repression. While the two men
failed to “arrange coordinated political actions,” the brutal assassination of Jaramillo,
his wife, and three sons committed by the Mexican army some six months later was
to profoundly affect Vázquez and a generation of future guerrillas.
486

484
“La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 17; and AGN, DFS 32-16, Legajo 1, 102.
Vázquez also participated in the failed “Political Movement of Mexican Youth” in December 1961.
Created by independent leftists and Marxists intent on moving beyond the “quotidian Stalinism” that
permeated traditional Lef t parties in Mexico, the group was short-lived but managed to publish a
manifesto that: “[called] for youth from all societal sectors to take the legacy of the 1910 Revolution
into their hands and defend the continuation and affirmation of a popular politics, thus creating a route
to higher stages of our social movement.” See Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez
Rojas,” 103-104.

485
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 9, 265; and, Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez
Rojas,” 104-105.

486
At one point, as Padilla writes, President Adolfo López Mateos had physically embraced Jaramillo
to signal reconciliation and a willingness to work together to solve agrarian disputes in Morelos. The
embrace, captured in a famous photograph, would come to be known as the “abrazo de Judas.”
Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Váquez Rojas,” 104-105; and, Padilla, Rural Resistance in
the Land of Zapata, 209, 216-218.

235

The Guerrero State Elections of 1962

“With the Mexican Constitution in hand, we work within the Law.”—ACG, March
1962
487

“Enough with the Caballero Aburtos…we want a government of the people for the
people.”—Genaro Vázquez, 2 December 1962
488

Vázquez returned to his home state at the end of 1961 to discover an
increasingly militarized Guerrero, particularly in the Costa Grande. For in
September a peasant uprising rallied under the banner of “justice for the poor,” led
by dissident general and revolutionary veteran Celestino Gasca,
489
erupted
throughout various Mexican regions, including the Costa Grande municipality of La
Unión. While the Mexican military quickly and violently repressed the rebels in La
Unión, it expanded its counterinsurgency operations to target non-violent dissidents
belonging to the ACG and leftist political parties. From the simulated executions of

487
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-16-2, Legajo 10, 215.

488
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-16-2, Legajo 1, 194.

489
Historian Elisa Servín perceptively argued that the Gasca uprising—connected to the 1952
Henriquista opposition movement—represented the last “coletazo (movement)” rooted in the political
and tactical legacies of the 1910 Revolution. By late 1961, as Padilla showed, even the venerable ex-
zapatista Rubén Jaramillo was considering a change to the type of modern guerrilla warfare that
characterized subsequent groups. General Gasca emitted a manifesto in September 1959 that called
for the precise time for revolution one year later. Small groups of campesinos from Guerrero,
Chiapas, Veracruz, Puebla, Oaxaca, Coahuila, and Mexico heeded the general’s call for “justice for
the poor” and the re-vindication of agrarian demands. The plan to take over rural municipalities and
military barracks as a way to extend the insurrection from the countryside to the cities utterly failed.
On the Puebla-Veracruz border, a contingent of 500 campesinos led by ex-zapatista Ubaldino
Gallegos managed to stave off military contingents armed with artillery and light tanks for ten days.
In sum, Time magazine reported 100 dead, 200 wounded, and over a 1000 detained. See Elisa Servín,
“Hacia el levantamiento armado: del Henriquismo a los Federacionistas Leales en los años
cincuenta,” in Movimientos armados en México, eds. Veronica Oikión Solano and Marta Eugenia
García Ugarte, 307-332; Semo, México, un pueblo en la historia, 82-83; and, Padilla, Rural
Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 196-210.

236

ACG leader Antonio Sotelo in San Luis San Pedro to the incarceration of nearly 100
persons, the short-lived Gasca rebellion provided an excuse to localize, target, and
silence opposition to regional PRI governments.
490
In San Luis Potosí, a state that
experienced a civic insurgency analogous to the ACG anti-Caballero movement in
1959-60, state agents arrested civic leader Dr. Salvador Nava and accused him of
belonging to the Gasca rebellion. DFS internal memos asserted that in a context
where “popular opinion in the relation to the PRI is that the Party has not fulfilled in
satisfactory fashion its obligations [to the citizentry],” the arrest of Nava and
supporters “should be handled by the Authorities with an iron fist [mano férrea] to
prevent Navismo from recuperating strength.”
491
The iron fist would increasingly
become the option of choice for the PRI regime in dealing with social dissidence.
In the midst of militarization and targeted repression, Vázquez sought to
refashion the ACG into an oppositional political party in accordance with a new end:
the taking over of political power via electoral means. The year-long
counteroffensive waged against the popular municipal governments by the PRI and

490
Sotelo Pérez, Breve historia, 101-102; and, Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 93-94. In the aftermath of
the Gasca uprising in the Costa Grande, Secretary of Defense Gen. Agustín Olachea ordered the
construction of an air force base in Zihuatanejo (a Pacific seaside resort city in northwest Guerrero) to
facilitate the rapid transportation and deployment of soldiers and equipment. See Miranda Ramírez,
La violación de derechos humanos, 114.

491
DFS memo quoted in Condes Lara, Represión y rebelión, 180; 158-184. In 1958, Nava helped
create the Potosí Civic Union (UCP) as a political party that challenged the decades-long
gubernatorial dictatorship of Gonzalo N. Santos (a compadre of ex-President Manuel Avila Camacho)
and his cronies. Running for the office of municipal president of San Luis Potosí, Dr. Nava and the
UCP organized a massively supported tax strike as a tactic to force an end to the Santos cacicazgo. In
December 1958, Nava won the elections and after a successful two-year stint as municipal present he
attempted to run for governor in 1961. The PRI responded by violently attacking Navista supporters,
prevented Nava from running, and used the Gasca uprising to arrest him in September 1961.

237

the interim governor the party designated, Arturo Martínez Adame, evidenced the
insufficiency and fragility of the ACG’s previous strategy (or lack thereof) in the
aftermath of the 1960 anti-Caballero movement. Moreover, rumors about the PRI’s
gubernatorial candidate for the upcoming state elections threatened popular gains
since 1960. For Dr. Raimundo Abarca Alarcón, an obscure military doctor from
Iguala, enjoyed the complete and unified support from the state’s traditional
cacicazgos—the same brokers of political and economic power slighted previously
by General Caballero Aburto and his support for PRI-allied agricultural unions prior
to his removal. With the 1962 elections, caciques from throughout the state viewed
an opportunity to close ranks and reinstall a particularly undemocratic form of ruling.
They possessed a powerful ally, the man who designated Abarca Alarcón as the PRI
candidate: Donato Miranda Fonseca, cacique from Chilapa and Secretary to the
López Mateos presidency.
492

ACG leaders and members approached the 1962 state elections both
optimistic of the democratic possibilities and wary of possible state retribution.
Guerrero’s recent history provided dramatic examples of both possible outcomes
(perhaps best captured by the 1960 anti-Caballero movement). Vázquez most

492
Miranda Fonseca enjoyed a long career in public service prior to his post in the López Mateos
administration. As a former local and federal deputy, senator, state and federal judge, diplomatic
representative, and head of Miguel Alemán’s presidential campaign in 1946, the lawyer and former
mayor of Acapulco lost out on his bid to become governor of Guerrero in 1956—to General Caballero
Aburto. His personal relationship with López Mateos extended back to their law studies during the
late 1920s and their subsequent participation in a 1929 student strike. In 1964 he lost the presidential
“dedazo” (pick) to Gustavo Díaz Ordaz despite the initial wishes of López Mateos to designate him as
the next president of Mexico. Roderic Ai Camp, Mexican Political Biographies, 1935-1993 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1995), 472-473.

238

vividly represented the seemingly irreconcilable duality that would characterize the
ACG’s historical trajectory as opposition political party. While his participation
with the MLN evidenced a willingness to work within the confines of the post-
revolutionary state and a belief in Cardenista “revolutionary nationalism,” his
experience with the 1960 Chilpancingo massacre provided him pause as to the
democratic capacity of the PRI regime. His late 1961 meetings with two emblematic
political figures, described in the previous section, further highlight the tension. In
mid-December, he helped organize a public reception in Iguala for Cárdenas whom
Vázquez described as the “noble exponent of the true Mexican Revolution.”
493
That
same month, the ACG president also met with peasant leader Rubén Jaramillo.
Considering his personal history (as Zapatista fighter, cooperative leader, reoccurring
guerrilla chieftain, gubernatorial candidate, PCM member, and land invasion
organizer), Jaramillo may have warned Vázquez not to trust the Janus-faced PRI
regime.
494
An ACG editorial published in an Acapulco newspaper perhaps best
captures the uneasy tension: “We do not discard the possibility that we will now
suffer reprisals but as ACG members we are prepared to demonstrate that, with the
Mexican Constitution in hand, we work within the Law.”
495

493
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 9, 82; and, AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2, Legajo 1, 8.

494
I have been unable to obtain details on the meeting between Vázquez and Jaramillo. Gómezjara
makes a brief reference to the meeting in “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez,” 104.

495
La Verdad, 5 March 1961, quoted in, AGN, DFS 100-10-1-16-2-62, Legajo 10, 215.

239

The attempt to institutionalize the popular democratic power unleashed in
1960 beyond the restrictive political confines of the PRI began in February 1962.
During two separate meetings in coastal Atoyac and the “hotlands” city of
Tlapehuala, the ACG agreed to enter the upcoming state electoral fray and contend
for a variety of municipal and delegation posts.
496
The governorship, too, emerged
as an electoral target. Drawing from their bastions of support in the Costa Grande
and Tierra Caliente, the reconstituted ACG began to exhibit a markedly class
character expressed within a rural cultural idiom that pitted the rich versus the poor.
While still advocating a popular front strategy parallel to the MLN, the group
included members from regions that experienced turmoil, class polarization, and
radicalization during the post-1960 era of popular municipal rule. ACG militants
from Atoyac, for instance, participated in land invasions during 1961 that included
the participation of both Vázquez and Cabañas. The participation of PPS and Frente
Zapatista integrants also evidenced a leftward shift in political demands, if not in
their decision to participate in the electoral process. One particular Frente Zapatista
activist, its leader José María Suárez Tellez, possessed a long personal history of
agrarian and radical struggles that zigzagged in and out of the labyrinthine PRI
structure.
497

496
Miranda Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos, 116; “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,”
FEMOSSP Filtrado, 17; and, Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 124.

497
Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez,” 105-107. Since the 1920s, Suárez Tellez had
worked in agrarian redistribution efforts and regional agrarian parties in the state of Guerrero. During
the late 1920s and 30s, he joined the PCM and participated in a series of popular movements that
earned him the wrath of Guerrero caciques, including that of Miranda Fonseca. During the 1940s, the

240

Vázquez publically expressed the intentions of the ACG in early March by
stating, in the words of a DFS agent, “that his organization from now on demands the
definitive purging of the PRI’s caudillo methods and invites the pueblo to freely
express their demands in an upcoming ACG congress in Iguala.” Subsequent
declarations reported in the state press announced that the upcoming Iguala congress
“would demonstrate to the PRI that the ACG was the true representative of el pueblo
and thus the voice of the masses.”
498
Such statements marked a profound political
shift in the discourse of the ACG. Political and socio-economic criticisms—first
emergent in the latter stages of the 1960 social movement—moved beyond personal
figures (a la General Caballero) to become systemic critiques. Thus, for the duration
of the 1962 elections, the ACG placed the PRI on trial for, in their words,
“betraying” the Mexican Revolution and Constitution. A vast “movement of the
masses, a social movement throughout the state of Guerrero” would serve as critical
jury.
499

The ACG publicly presented their systemic critique and proposed solutions at
a March 11 rally in the historic city of Iguala. Aided by university student and
agrarian leaders, Vázquez unveiled a twenty-two point program that meshed a

combative agrarian leader abandoned the PCM, worked as a federal deputy for the PRI, and joined the
Worker-Peasant Party (POCM) after his stint within the PRI. By the time Suárez Tellez joins the
ACG he was serving as leader of the Frente Zapatista—a CNC-affiliated group composed of Zapatista
veterans of the Mexican Revolution.

498
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 10, 204; and, AGN, DFS 100-10-1-16-2-62, Legajo 10, 215.

499
Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007.

241

refashioned Cardenismo with local legacies of struggle that involved issues of grass-
roots patriarchal democracy and control over agricultural production. Exhibiting
recent ideological influences on ACG leaders, the program reads like a local-regional
version of the MLN’s national program minus the calls for anti-imperialist struggle.
Like the MLN program, the ACG electoral platform stipulated demands already
enshrined within the Mexican Constitution, yet largely ignored or distorted by
government officials after 1940, and called for their actual application. Redemption,
not revolution, thus comprised the subtext of the twenty-two point program.
Working within a constitutional framework, the ACG forcefully identified the
symptoms of a malady that threatened to consume the “Mexican Revolution” as a
contested political project and ideal.
500

In contrast to the MLN program, the ACG platform managed to link national
problems with local grievances in precise fashion.
501
In the realm of agriculture,
demandsfor the industrialization and cooperativization of agricultural production,
and the breakup of large landholdings signaled the chronic difficulties faced by small
and middling copra and coffee producers in coastal Guerrero. Such demands

500
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 8-10.
501
Ibid. The program’s land tenure demands also included: a broadening of Agrarian Reform; the
reduction of “small”property units to thirty hectares; and, an increase in the creation of industrial,
forestry, and livestock ejidos. The reduction of ejido sizes refers to changes made to the Agrarian
Code in 1943 by-then President Manuel Avila Camacho. He neutralized the collective ejidos
championed by Cárdenas but at times rejected at the local level by campesinos that possessed
different conceptions of land tenure. Avila Camacho also increased the hectare size of certain ejidos
(depending on what cash, exportable crops they produced and mostly owned by large handholders) to
be untouched by land redistribution. In sum, this decree facilitated the development of large
landholdings designed for capitalist commercial agriculture. See Tzvi Medin, El sexenio alemanista
(México: Era, 1990), 14-15.

242

harkened back to campesino efforts during the 1950s to organize independent rural
unions and control their crops’ multi-stage production process as an attempt to
circumvent the economic hegemony of the regional commercial bourgeoisie (see
chapter 2). In calling for land redistribution and campesino control over production,
the ACG both highlighted the failings of state-led agrarian reform since the late
1930s and, like the Jaramillistas in Morelos, prefigured the massive campesinos
mobilizations that shook Mexico during the 1970s—campesinos moved by “issues of
production, self-management, autonomy, and democracy.”
502
At bottom, such
demands demonstrated a rural willingness and desire to redefine a PRI-led capitalist
modernization program that used the countryside as an exploited subsidizer of urban
development and industrialization. They wanted what Cárdenas had promised long
ago during his presidential campaign: “Mexican agriculture will be modernized
[along collective lines]…this modernization will also achieve a more just and equal
nation…campesinos will be the principal beneficiaries of economic development,
with an increased standard of living.”
503

Despite the subsequent “exclusionary modernization” programs enacted by
Cárdenas’ successors, such promises and hope, to paraphrase sociologist Andrea

502
Gerardo Otero, Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation in Rural Mexico (Boulder:
Westview Press, 1999), 1, 26, quoted in Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 53. For the
1970s campesino movements, see Armando Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata: movimientos
campesinos posrevolucionarios en México, 1920-1980 (Mexico: Era, 1985), chapter 8.

503
Everardo Escárcega López, Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana, volumen 5: El cardenismo:
un parteaguas histórico en el proceso agrario nacional, 1934-1940 (Mexico: siglo XXI, 1990), 27.

243

Radilla Martínez, persisted in the Guerrero countryside.
504
The intertwined notions
of citizenship and democracy, as articulated through membership in the PRI party,
similarly endured. With the 1960 anti-Caballero movement freshly in the
background, a movement that witnessed guerrerense men and women alternately
inhabiting and refashioning citizenship throughout the course of social struggle, the
1962 ACG program called for “actually existing” democracy: “the democratization
of the political system of the Ejido, the Municipality, the District, the State, and the
Nation.”
505
As presented by the ACG, democracy was redefined from an amorphous
theory limited to the high chambers of national government to a practiced form of
governance meaningful in the everyday lives of guerrerense male heads of
households—a form of governance that refused to recognize barriers between the
political, the social, and the economic realms. Indeed, citing the ejido as the first
social level targeted for democratization evidenced the inseparability between
political participation and economic production.
506
What remained ambiguous,
though contested, were the contours of democracy and citizenship for women.

504
Radilla Martinez, Poderes, Saberes y Sabores, 114-115.

505
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 9.

506
Starting with the ejido simultaneously signals the radicalism of the ACG proposition and its
preservation of a patriarchal rural order. Agrarian reform during the 1930s and thereafter depended
upon the maintenance of patriarchal peasant households with a sexual division of labor that assigned
peasant women unrecognized, unpaid domestic labor. In addition, the increase of rural poverty during
the so-called Mexican Miracle often forced peasant women to obtain employment outside the home
(as in other historical eras) in addition to domestic duties: cooking, cleaning, and raising children. As
Padilla and Warman demonstrated, rural women most crucially subsidized the PRI’s post-1940
capitalist modernization program. Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 165-166; and,
Warman, “We Come to Object,” 253.

244

(Indeed, the ACG did not seek to radically undermine traditional gender roles.)
Decades of women’s mobilizations and struggles succeeded in obtaining the right to
vote in national elections in 1953 without necessarily disrupting the gendered codes
of citizenship that upheld male authority and tended to posit women as political
“helpmeets.”
507
Nonetheless, women played crucial roles in the 1962 electoral
campaign, as practical exigencies provided opportunities to transgress normative
gender roles. The role of caregiver often gave way to that of political organizer or
local ACG leader. As supporters and voters of an opposition political party, their
transgression proved more subversive than their male counterparts in the eyes of the
PRI regime.
508
They risked becoming Malinches, synonymous with treason.
Treason. Communists. Huarachudos. Insane (cívi-locos). Such pejorative
labels graced the pages of local and regional newspapers as the ACG began a
whistle-stop campaign tour throughout Guerrero after presenting their program in
Iguala. From March 1962 until their state congress in August, Vázquez, Cabañas,
and the ACG leadership organized a series of public demonstrations and protests
connected by a common theme: save the Mexican Revolution and Constitution by
voting the corrupted PRI out of state and local offices. As expressed in an ACG

507
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 101; Olcott, Revolutionary Women, 8, 234; Maxine Molyneux,
“Twentieth-Century State Formation in Latin America,” in Hidden Histories of Gender and State in
Latin America, eds. Dore and Molyneux, 50-57; and, Vaughan, “Modernizing Patriarchy,” 208-210.

508
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 161-168; Olcott, Revolutionary Women, 15-22;
and Elaine Carey, Plaza of Sacrifices: Gender, Power, and Terror in 1968 Mexico (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 4-7.

245

leaflet: “in the upcoming elections in Guerrero, citizens will elect hombres [my
emphasis] completely committed to popular interests…Will never again permit the
betrayal of our pueblo’s heroic struggle…we repudiate electoral fraud and we will
end the imposition of outside party officials [paracaidismo político].”
509
At meetings
that drew anywhere between hundreds and thousands of participants (numbers
depend on the source either DFS agents or ACG militants), ACG orators lambasted
the PRI as corrupt, expressed support for revolutionary Cuba, and presented the
twenty-two point program—all the while affirming their commitment to the electoral
process and a President López Mateos that guaranteed safety for the ACG.
510

Viewing the ACG through the lens of a global Cold War that tended to equate all
dissidence with a nebulous spreading specter of communism (re: national security),
government agents that followed ACG leaders focused on public expressions of
support for Cuba, socialism, and communism. For instance, at a July gathering in
Acapulco, the attending DFS agent translated the criticisms voiced by MLN leader
Braulio Maldonado against large landowners, North American capitalism, and the
Catholic Church as “a clear provocation to perturb social order against governmental
systems.”
511
For the PRI regime, dissidence signified subversion.

509
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 42.

510
Ibid; AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 55; and, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 86-87.

511
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 71-72. A separate DFS report on the social and economic
state of Guerrero, dated 25 May 1962, identified Vázquez as an “important agitator serving as an
instrument of the PPS and known communists like Luis Sánchez Arreola, Luis Arenal Bastar, and
Macrina Rabadan.” The report further identifies the ACG as a “very strong organization responsible
for the principal eruptions of agitation in the state” though it numbers only “5,000, in contrast to the
250,000 that the ACG leader presumes.” The DFS report failed to provide a record number, citing

246

During the summer months of 1962 the ACG vividly displayed the social
capital it gained as a leading anti-Caballero organization two years earlier. Various
unions, municipal presidents, ejidal commissaries, and other local officials joined the
campaign as the ACG prepared to compete electorally.
512
The party posited
candidates for the position of regidor in seventy municipalities and for diputado in all
of Guerrero’s electoral districts.
513
At their second state-wide congress in
Chilpancingo on the first day of August, the ACG elected, after vociferous internal
debate, their candidate for governor: José María Tellez Suárez. Upon accepting the
nomination, Tellez Suárez remarked, “they called ACG members crazy when we
organized against Caballero Aburto and yet the movement succeeded in defeating
him…[despite the typical PRI electoral fraud tactics] justice will take us to
victory.”
514
To begin the official gubernatorial campaign, the ACG chose a small,
yet symbolic town near Iguala. At Ixcateopan, supposed burial place of the last
Aztec emperor Cuauhtémoc, Vázquez extolled the virtues of Tellez Suárez while

only page numbers (246-258). In 1960 Guerrero’s population numbered 1,186,716. See Ochoa
Campos, Guerrero, análisis de un Estado problema, 17.

512
An ACG pamphlet distributed in May 1962 included the names of the following supporting
organizations: Revolutionary Bloc of Guerrerense Students, State Miners Union, State Association of
Small Merchants, Union of Silver Workers, Acapulco Hotel and Restaurants Workers Union, and
dissident Coprero unions. AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 42. Gómezjara also cited the
participation of state-level PPS and Frente Zapatista militants. Gómezjara, “El proceso político de
Jenaro Vázquez Rojas,” 105.

513
At the time there were 77 municipalities in Guerrero. A regidor is a community representative that
serves before the municipal government within the ayuntamiento. A diputado serves in the federal
Camara de Diputados (roughly analogous to the United States House of Represantatives).
Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 288-289; and, Miranda, La violación de derechos
humanos, 117-118. See also, AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 70-71, 79, & 86.

514
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 106-108.

247

accusing ex-president Aleman of betraying the Mexican Revolution by allying
himself with bankers, the “political clergy, and Yankee imperialism.” A similar
theme of betrayal and redemption marked the subsequent speech given by ACG
Tierra Caliente leader Blas Vergara as he called for campesino unity to prevent “the
Revolution from falling into the hands of opportunists.” Lucio Cabañas, by now
president of the FECSM, followed decrying the unleashing of PRI violence against a
rural Teacher Training School in Chiapas.
515
Not allowing the nationalist symbolism
of Cuauhtémoc’s grave to by unnoticed, Suárez Tellez provided the conclusion:
“We prefer to sink into the shadows of not-being rather than ignominiously lose our
inalienable right to elect our governing officials.”
516

Vázquez and Cabañas collaborated closely from the August congress to the
elections that took place on 2 December 1962 as they, Suárez Tellez, and the ACG
traveled the lengths of the state eliciting popular support.
517
Significantly, the
campaign assumed an explicit class tone
518
as the ACG posited itself as the party of

515
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 116-118.

516
Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 289.

517
José Bracho, interview with author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007. As with the 1960
movement, Cabañas managed to forge broad support from the student sector. As leader of the
FECSM and graduate from Ayotzinapa Teacher Training School, he elicited student support and
participation in the campaign. He also cultivated support in his native Atoyac using student and
family networks. For a short description of his political work in Atoyac, see AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-
62, Legajo 1, 142-143.

518
Though always sympathetic to certain socialist ideas since he began his activist career, Vázquez
demonstrated a more pronounced leftist radicalism during the 1962 electoral campaign. Undoubtedly
influenced by political contacts he made in Mexico City between 1960 and 1962, he obtained help
from PCM dissidents during the transformation of the ACG from social movement into opposition
political party. According to Sotelo, Leonel Padilla, Carlos Farias, and Augusto Velasco—members
of the PCM (b)—aided the ACG president throughout the electoral campaign. Sotelo also mentioned

248

the “humble people” struggling against a PRI constituted by “groups of the
perfumed” and supported “by uptight [i.e. wealthy] ladies.” With the twenty-two
program in hand, they told poor campesinos from the outskirts of Iguala in late
September that they struggled “for a true democracy that highlights and resolves the
economic problems of the humble people and the implementation of true social
justice.”
519
In late October in Iguala, Suárez Tellez laid bare the contours of class
struggle embedded in the elections: “the struggle now is not between me and Dr.
Abarca but rather between the poor versus the rich.” On election day, the ACG
gubernatorial candidate told the people of Teloloapan “he was the candidate of the
pueblo, that is to say, of the poor, of the campesinos and all workers in general that
are tired of suffering hunger and misery caused by bad government officials who
solely seek to enrich themselves.”
520
Such criticisms tended to stop at the figure of
the national president, López Mateos. Vázquez and Suárez Tellez resorted to the
time-proven formula of representing the president as tricked and betrayed by his
corrupt underlings while ensuring ACG supporters that the López Mateos guaranteed
a fair and free election. Such reassurances and the overwhelming level of popular
support displayed throughout the campaign created much confidence within ACG

that by this time, Vázquez had begun reading classic Marxist texts (Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire and
Lenin’s “What is to be Done?”) and contemporary literature produced on national liberation
movements while maintaining a study of Mexico (Morelos, Zapata, Villa and Jaramillo). See Sotelo,
Breve historia, 102-103.

519
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 144-145.

520
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 162, 194.

249

ranks. Just weeks before the election, Vázquez told an Iguala newspaper “We know
we will win the elections because the pueblo is with us…from the 25
th
[of
November] we will not leave Chilpancingo until six years later.” Even on the night
of the elections, the ACG president predicted an overwhelming victory.
521

Yet, PRI electoral fraud impeded an ACG victory. PRI officials controlled
polling booths throughout the state at times accompanied by military and state police
units that harassed and intimidated voters.
522
Attacks against the ACG during the
campaigns had been largely limited to PRI-sponsored yellow (and red-baiting)
journalism, constant vigilance by government spies, and harassment. Acapulco did
witness a brief shoot-out in late October when ACG member Paula Aviles called the
supporters of PRI candidates Abarca Alarcon and Ricardo Morlet Sutter (for
municipal president) “male homosexuals [maricones].”
523
Yet, state repression
began in earnest in the days after the fraudulent elections. On 5 December, state
agents detained Suárez Tellez along with a large score of ACG militants while days
later the state justice department issued an arrest warrant for Vázquez and others

521
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 144, 185. For the Vázquez interview and victory prediction
see: Correo de Iguala, 18 November 1962, and El Día, 2 December 1962, quoted in Gómezjara,
Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 289-290.

522
Sotelo, Breve historia, 106-107. ACG leader Antonio Sotelo recalled that soldiers and police
officers controlled the voting process. Votes casted by deceased and newly born persons went for the
PRI while PRI election officials manipulated cast voting cards (changing them from ACG to PRI).
Sotelo describes how ACG militants in the Costa Grande municipality of Tecpan de Galeana began to
do the same with the cast voting cards when they discovered the PRI ruse. An undated ACG
pamphlet recorded by DFS agents on 29 December 1962 described PRI tactics: the use of military
troops and hired gunmen to prevent voting, the non-counting of votes cast for the ACG, and the
payment of 15 pesos by caciques to campesinos to vote for the PRI. AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62,
Legajo 1, 267.

523
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 161-162.

250

citing as motive, “the voicing of criticism against the PRI, Dr. Raymundo Abarca
Alarcon, and Donato Miranda Fonseca.”
524

As the ACG struggled to reorganize and marshal protests amidst state
persecution, military and state police units mobilized throughout the state occupying
municipal palaces, detaining protestors, and encircling dissident communities in the
Costa Grande and Tierra Caliente. Attempts to capture municipal palaces in bastions
of support like Tecpan, Acapulco, and Iguala failed in the face of military rifles.
Throughout the last week of December, Vázquez and Iguala ACG leader Israel
Salmeron dispatched telegrams to President López Mateos rightly protesting the
military occupation of municipal palaces as constitutional violations that “sowed
terror” and pitted “the army versus the people” at the behest of local caciques.
525

Vázquez questioned such acts, including the continued persecution of ACG members
by state police officers, as unnecessary since “the [ACG] has always acted within the
Law.” At a protest in Iguala on 30 December, the ACG president re-asserted the
legality of the ACG: “the ACG will continue the struggle as always respecting the
laws and the words of the President of the Republic.”
526

Unlike the legalistic focus of the ACG, the PRI regime viewed the opposition
political party through the lens of national security and political stability. Popular

524
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 13, 33; and, “Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 19.
Suárez Tellez would spend almost a year in detainment.

525
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 262.

526
AGN DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 266, 268-270.

251

protest would not dictate the resolution of the conflict as it did at the end of 1960.
Thus, on 30 December 1962 in Iguala, state police officers and soldiers opened fire
on a large ACG crowd led by Vázquez that had organized a “permanent sit-in” in
front of the municipal palace. As the crowd commemorated the 1960 massacre and
organized to prevent the newly “elected” PRI candidates from assuming their posts
in the municipal palace, shots rang out killing seven and injuring twenty-three.
527

After years of persecution, some ACG members, including Vázquez, carried firearms
for protection and responded with gunfire. One police officer died, shot down either
by his fellow officers or ACG fire. Though Vázquez managed to escape the
massacre, government officials subsequently charged him with the death of the
police officer in absentia. Both internal DFS investigations and the outgoing
governor blamed the ACG for provoking the attack.
528
While at least 156 ACG
members sat in jails, some wounded by gunshots, Governor Adame Martínez
misleadingly announced in his final report that “a group of agitators, with the sole
purpose of disturbing public order, attempted to take over the municipal palace of
Iguala…provoking and attacking the police who repelled the aggression.”
529
The

527
“Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 19; Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 96-97; Bellingeri,
Del agrarismo armado, 124-125; Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 290-291; and, Sotelo,
Breve historia, 108-109.

528
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-62, Legajo 1, 279 & 281-290. DFS accounts claim that the gunfire began
when state police attempted to frisk ACG members who were carrying weapons. Refusing to be
frisked, the ACG members opened fire and the police responded in kind. The reports fail to mention
any dead casualties, citing only the number of detained.

529
Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 125. A memorandum produced by the U.S. embassy
characterized the massacre as a “communist inspired armed attack against local authority in Iguala.”
The note continued by designating the ACG as a local chapter of the “communist-controlled MLN”

252

massacre marked the beginning of a violent militarized campaign against so-called
“agitators” that was to last for more than a decade.

New Routes: 1963-1966

Vázquez escaped Guerrero with the help of MLN militants directly connected
to former governor and MLN leader Braulio Maldonado. While the persecuted
leader took refuge in the vast capitalist agricultural fields of Sinaloa and Sonora
picking cotton and tomatoes, ACG members and supporters experienced what the
ACG newspaper “30-30” described as terror. The students, poor and middling
campesinos and campesinas, housewives, small businesspersons, teachers, and
dissident municipal officials who participation made the ACG possible for more than
two years now faced illegal imprisonment; the ransacking of homes; state
indictments on trumped-up charges; and, torture. In Mexico City, Consuelo Solís
and her four young children faced the constant vigilance of state agents largely
without the presence of her husband.
530
Military units concentrated on the ACG

and that the events of 30 December “were clearly the doings of the MLN.” The author, Embassy
counselor Robert Adams, concluded with an assessment: “The outcome of the Iguala incident has,
however, been favorable to our interests here, as it is a clear indication that the government, using the
combined strength of the Army, the Attorney General’s office, and state and municipal authorities, is
prepared to engage in a carefully planned operation to thwart the Cardenistas and the MLN.” U.S.
Embassy in Mexico, Confidential Airgram to the Department of State, 3 January 1963, National
Archives-National Security Archives, RG 59, 1960-63, Box 1511, Folder 712.00/12-362. Document
obtained from Kate Doyle, ed., “After the Revolution: Lázaro Cárdenas and the Movimiento
Nacional de Liberación,” National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 124, posted 31
May 2004.

530
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-63, Legajo 1, 323; Sotelo, Breve historia, 109; Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez,
73-74; and, Castellanos, México armado, 112-113.

253

strongholds in the Costa Grande municipalities of Tecpan, Atoyac, and San Jéronimo
employing scorched earth tactics. The violence also spread southward into
Vázquez’s home region of the Costa Chica. By mid-1963 an article titled “Terror in
Guerrero” appeared in the independent leftist journal Política:
During the months of March and April, hundreds of soldiers, in
armored vehicles, have dedicated themselves to destroying
communities. Among others…Santa Lucía in Tecpan de
Galeana…Contepec de los Costales, San Luis Acatlán, La Barra and
others in the Costa Chica. Over 400 homes in the last three cited
communities were destroyed by military vehicles and set ablaze by
soldiers, leaving in misery more than 2,000 families. The military
“victory” was sealed by the detainment of dozens of campesinos, with
beatings and mistreatment for the victims—including women and
children—for the “crime” of having participated in the political
opposition.
531

The article continued by delineating some of the specific techniques of terror utilized
by the rampaging soldiers:
…murder and torture were the modalities favored by the military,
practiced on, among others, José Hernández and Juan Barrientos,
campesinos from the Costa Grande…one local leader of coffee
producers nicknamed “Tobacco” from El Ticuí, municipality of
Atoyac de Alvarez, was viciously tortured this past March:
they cut off his testicles and tongue to make him confess that he “hid
weapons” and was finally killed by splitting his body in half [en
canal]…the crime was committed by soldiers under the command of
Colonel Olvera Fragoso…such is the “duty” fulfilled by 20,000
soldiers deployed in Guerrero…
532

531
“Terror en Guerrero,” Política, 15 May 1963, 28, quoted in Bartra, Guerrero bronco, 99-100.

532
Ibid. El Ticuí also hosted the state’s only fabric and weaving factory which, in October 1963, was
closed. Factory workers’ leaders, including David Reyna Flores, were soon thereafter assassinated.
See Miranda, La violación de derechos humanos, 133-134.

254

One of the Costa Grande communities cited above, Santa Lucía, provides an
example of how political persecution and economic exploitation congealed during
the terror campaigns of 1963. The ejido formed part of thirteen others whose forests
had been conceded to a logging company, Maderas Papanoa, during the 1940s.
Federal law dictated reciprocity between the logging company and ejidos:
employment, just wages, and a percentage of earnings marked for the eijdos. In
theory, company and ejidos enjoyed an equal business partnership. Yet, reality on
the ground proved different in the land of caciques. Melchor Ortega, a powerful
right-wing businessman and personal friend of ex-president Miguel Alemán,
controlled Maderas Papanoa and intimidated the participating ejidos when they opted
to cancel the logging contract in late 1962.
533
According to a protest sent by the
ejidal commissary of Santa Lucía to the Secretariat of National Defense in
November 1963, Ortega used his influence with the head of the Acapulco military
zone to send in army troops. On 23 September, twenty five soldiers entered the ejido
and began ransacking homes, brutalizing campesinos, and stealing money. They
simulated the execution of five campesinos by hanging them near their homes until
some fainted. Taking three of the tortured campesinos with them, the soldiers moved
on to the neighboring ejido of Las Humedades for a repeat performance. Reaching
the city of Petatlán, the soldiers turned over the detained campesinos to judicial

533
Francisco Gómezjara, La explotación del hombre y los bosques de Guerrero (Mexico: Cuadernos
para Trabajadores, 1979), 12-13, 21-23.

255

authorities accusing them of homicide.
534
Due to Ortega’s maneuverings, according
to one Santa Lucía resident, “the presence of military soldiers was transformed into
something common and ordinary.”
535

Santa Lucía serves as a microcosm for rural Guerrero.
536
The defeat of
political opposition and dissidence through force permitted caciques like Ortega
(with their allies in the governor’s palace) to re-assert their power, and enlist the aid
of a deployed military force that reached a level of 25,000 by the end of 1963.
Persecuted activists like Vázquez, tagged with an arrest warrant, lived in semi-
clandestine fashion dodging state agents while continuing to partake in oppositional
political work. Using his network of MLN contacts, the ACG leader traveled
throughout the country searching for new political routes. In early January 1963,
Vázquez secretly entered Mexico City to participate in the founding of the
Independent Campesino Central (CCI), an independent organization that claimed to
represent 100,000 campesinos on a national scale and worked to further agrarian
reform. Like the MLN, the CCI housed a variety of political and ideological
currents, forging links with the PCM and independents leftists. Later in April,
Vázquez worked in the creation of the Electoral Front of the Pueblo (FEP), a PCM-

534
AGN, SDN box 74, folder 229, 388-390.

535
Anacleto Ramos Ramírez, quoted in Gómezjara, La explotación, 43.

536
The Costa Chica town of El Pacífico serves as another microcosm. On 31 July 1963, the residents
were subjected to ten hours of torture, ransacking, and rape at the hands of soldiers and state police
officers. They raped women, executed seven campesinos, and ultimately set the town on fire before
retreating. Charges that community members belonged to the FEP (see below) provoked the attack.
Política, 15 September 1963, quoted in Gómezjara, Bonapartismo y lucha campesina, 293.

256

dominated electoral party that would run a socialist candidate in the presidential
elections of 1964. Yet, as Gómezjara acutely observed, these supposedly “new”
political routes kept returning a frustrated Vázquez to the “round universe of Stalinist
reformism” and intra-leftist divisions—culminating with the FEP in another electoral
campaign.
537
Nonetheless, as the 1960 and 1962 movements evidenced, Vázquez
and the ACG rarely restricted their political activity to one avenue seeking political
and economic reform.
Repression pushed the ACG leader and a number of companions (who later
became guerrillas)
538
to flirt with the heretical margins of Mexican Marxism to
obtain new political routes. By March, his friendship with Cárdenas and the ex-
president’s intercession afforded Vázquez some protection. He, a group of ACG
comrades, and guerrerense teachers, most of which had studied at Vázquez’s alma
mater the National Normal of Mexico, organized a sort of Marxist reading group
they dubbed “Melchor Ocampo.” Coming into contact with PCM dissidents from
José Revueltas-inspired “Sparticist” cells and the Bolshevik Communist Party,
Vázquez and the ACG leadership intensely studied and engaged a pre-Stalinist
revolutionary Marxism-Leninism that also included Maoist strands; a type of re-

537
Ibid, 292; Sotelo, Breve historia, 111, Colmenero, “El Movimiento de Liberación Nacional,” 18-
23; Carr, Marxism and Communism, 225-230; and, Castellanos, México armado, 113. In regard to
Gómezjara’s assessment of the ACG’s electoral participation, Bellingeri signaled that the latter’s
electoral campaign of 1962 was never “legal” in a strict sense. The ACG was not permitted to register
as an official party and they exhorted the populace to write them in as independent candidates (a legal
right under the Mexican Constitution). Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 127.

538
They included José and Ismael Bracho, Pedro and Donato Contreras Javier, Fausto Avila, and
Demóstenes Lozano Valdovinos. José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9
March 2007; and, Sotelo, Breve historia, 120-122.

257

encounter with the radical “Third Period” of the Comintern when revolution
appeared imminent and tangible.
539
Such study and engagement profoundly changed
the ACG in terms of political doctrine and organizing structure.
540
Months later, in
Iguala during the month of October 1963, they presented their “new route.”
The ACG “new route” represented a New Left thrown gauntlet fashioned by
the experiences of 1960 and 1962, and enhanced by the Mexico City political travels
of the ACG leadership. A reflective document that evaluated the national context
and recent political experiences, the “New Route” portrayed a PRI regime unmasked
as an anti-popular and anti-democratic ruling institution aided by so-called
opposition parties and dependent upon a “Cardenismo…that misleads campesino and
student sectors with its pseudo-leftist positions as mediated by the MLN.” The ACG
thus clearly enunciated its break with the Cardenista experiment of the early 1960s
despite past alliances between the Guerrero group and the MLN, not to mention the
personal friendship between Vázquez and Cárdenas. On a broader level, the break
with the MLN symbolized a break with the Mexican Old Left. Criticisms of the PPS

539
In 1960 the PCM purged José Revueltas and the “Karl Marx” Mexico City cell from its ranks.
Revueltas then founded, with help from other expelled PCM militants, the Leninist Sparticist League
(LLE). According to Adela Cedillo, the group used Revueltas’ Essay on the Headless Proletariat
(1962) as a theoretical foundation to argue that in the absence of a true vanguard revolutionary party,
the goal of the LLE was to organize that missing revolutionary vanguard party of the proletariat. By
the time Vázquez encountered the heretical Marxists in 1963, the LLE had split in two: the LLE and
the Bolshevik Communist Party. See Cedillo, “El fuego y el silencio,” 80; Roberto Simon Crespi,
“José Revueltas (1914-1976): A Political Biography,” Latin American Perspectives 6:3 (Summer
1979), 103-108; Paulina Fernández Christlieb, El espartaquismo en México (México: Ediciones “El
Caballito,” 1978); and, Carr, Marxism and Communism, 210.

540
Concepción Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007; Bellingeri, Del
agrarismo armado, 127-128; Miranda Ramírez, La violación de derechos humanos, 134-136; and,
Andrés Rubio Zaldívar, Comandante Genaro Vázquez Rojas (San Luis Acatlán, 2003), 17.

258

as a petit-bourgeois party and the PCM as an “opportunistic” non-party unwilling to
“openly struggle in the streets for the reforms included in its program” further
cemented the rupture. Singling out the CCI as a failed communist creation, the ACG
leadership accused the PCM of “complementing the [PRI] measures of control and
mediation for campesinos, [thus] providing fresh impetus to the official and
discredited CNC.”
541
The influence of Mexican “Sparticism” and Revueltas in such
vibrant critiques complemented the local-regional political experiences of Vázquez
and the ACG.
A theme of unmasking and revelation permeates the “New Route” document.
Having unmasked the PRI and its slavish oppositional parties, the authors move to
questions of political demands. 1960 and 1962 violently taught the surviving ACG
members that “the electoral path does not solve their [working class and campesinos]
problems and the secret, universal vote is a bourgeois trick.” Rather, they posit the
necessity of:
…a popular revolution that does not signify the changing of persons
in charge of the bourgeois government; rather, it means a radical
political and economic regime change; that signifies the installation of
a popular and democratic government in which participate the
workers, poor campesinos, revolutionary intellectuals and sectors of
the bourgeoisies that coincide with our demands; that signifies the
first stage of socialism; these objectives are not attained
with an electoral stance…voting cannot end class struggle and the
destruction of a bourgeois State from which we suffer…
542

541
For the quotations, see “The New Route,” in Gómezjara, “El proceso político de Jenaro Vázquez
Rojas,” 111-114.

542
Ibid, 113.

259

The “New Route” concludes with a call for revolutionary praxis with traces of
Luxemburg, Liebknecht, and Guevara: “revolutionaries struggle…to destroy
bourgeois society…revolutionary ideals are not for simple exhibition but to put them
into practice.”
543

As the principle author of the document, Vázquez leaves the question of how
to enact revolutionary praxis unanswered. Furthermore, contradictions riddle the
political visions and criticisms forwarded in the “New Route” manifesto. For
instance, the call for a “popular revolution” and the enactment of a “democratic and
popular government” closely resembles political lexicon present in the MLN’s
founding documents or the PCM’s call for a “new democratic revolution for national
liberation” adopted at the Thirteenth Congress in 1960. At the time the “New Route”
was presented, moreover, Vázquez still belonged to the MLN and continued to work
with the non-communist faction of the CCI after the organization split in 1964.
Thus, the “New Route” should be read as a forceful declaration still in processual
development when Vázquez presents it to the ACG leadership in October 1963; and,
as an example that evidences the contradictory, at times uneven, process of political
radicalization. In other words, declaring a new route did not signify the immediate
adoption of armed revolution. Though his break with the PCM proved final,
Vázquez continued to work politically in a largely non-sectarian manner,

543
Ibid, 114. Concepción Solís remembered that by 1963-64 Vázquez certainly was “already reading
Marx and Engels, Lenin too…the classics, Imperialism by Lenin and Das Kapital by Marx…he taught
us, reading to us those works.” Concepción Solís, interview with the author, 25 May 2007.

260

collaborating with dissidents and leftists of all stripes. All the while, the ACG
slowly transformed into the nucleus, dubbed “30
th
of December,” of a future
revolutionary vanguard party.
544

Cabañas’ search for a new route diverged from Vázquez—particularly after
the latter’s break with the PCM—proving more localized and prolonged. Cabañas
followed a different path through the Mexican Left. As a descendant of agrarian
revolutionaries, he grew up listening to stories of Zapata, the Vidales brothers, de la
Cruz, and Cárdenas from great-uncles who fought in the Zapatista army and
alongside the Costa Grande guerrillas of the 1920s. In contrast to Vázquez, Cabañas
did not leave Guerrero for his education. Forged in the tradition of leftist struggle of
the Rural Teacher Training School of Ayotzinapa, cradle of Guerrero communism,
he entered the world of Mexican communism during the late 1950s as a student.
Following the ACG electoral campaign, he completed his studies at Ayotzinapa and
received the title of rural schoolteacher. Following a brief stint teaching in the Costa
Grande community of El Camarón, Cabañas obtained a teaching post in the
mountain town of Mexcaltepec (near Atoyac de Alvarez) and immediately immersed
himself in a local community struggle versus a logging company. Siding
immediately with the community, he helped local officials draft petitions that
demanded the logging company fulfill its reciprocal obligations (profit sharing,
paved roads, potable water, telephones, and electricity). A non-response from the
company prompted community residents to blockade roads that accessed the

544
C, Marxism and Communism, 222; and, Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 128.

261

surrounding forests and sawmills. Such direct actions forced the company to begin
fulfilling its contractual responsibilities, though state officials transferred Cabañas to
a school in Atoyac for his “subversive” participation. By mid-1964, the charismatic
schoolteacher distanced himself from the ACG permanently, joined the PCM, and
assumed the PCM-assigned duty of organizing Costa Grande campesinos for the
communist fraction of the CCI.
545

Continually embroiled in local community struggles and movements,
Cabañas constituted an emblematic archetype of the post-1940 rural schoolteacher as
local organic intellectual. In contrast to their pre-1940 counterparts, portrayed
largely as secular missionaries beholden to the demands of an expanding state and
inspiring campesino resistance in existing historiography, rural schoolteachers after
1940 tended to serve as the articulators of local grievances against the state.
546

Trained at rural institutions largely characterized by political radicalism and
designed to cater to the sons and daughters of campesinos, schoolteachers often grew
up and labored in similar conditions of poverty and misery as that of their students.
At schools like Ayotzinapa, the boundaries between studies and politics, classrooms
walls and the surrounding impoverished communities proved permeable and
practically non-existent.
547
Unlike the empty rhetoric of the PRI, the demands for

545
Serafín Núñez Ramos, interview, Gerardo Tor, dir., “The Guerrilla and the Hope: Lucio Cabañas”
(2005). Cabañas had joined the Communist Youth (JCM) in 1959.

546
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 100.

547
A FECSM gathering in Michoacan, April 1961 provides an example of these intertwined duties:
“At the present hour organized students should possess the following thinking: WORK, STUDY, and

262

democracy and agrarian reform voiced at such schools exhibited an immediate
urgency. Cabañas once remarked that he honed his political abilities as a student at
Ayotzinapa during the 1960 anti-Caballero movement: “We, students from
Ayotzinapa, would enter all the little pueblos and communities, organizing political
meetings and cultivating campesino support…We were born in Ayotzinapa.”
548

Activism and pedagogy thus tended to congeal as an inseparable responsibility of the
rural schoolteacher. Practical exigencies faced by a largely illiterate peasant
population in Guerrero and other parts of rural Guerrero, too, reinforced the local
standing of teachers. Both Cabañas and Vázquez often helped campesinos elaborate
and present petitions before governmental offices. Padilla’s assessment of the role
played by schoolteachers in the Jaramillista movement perhaps proves more accurate
to the Guerrero case: “As these educators became the first to encounter the
contradictions of spreading the government’s doctrine of progress and

ORGANIZE to rescue our Revolution and unite it with other American attempts to establish
democracy, peace, and progress. The Cuban Revolution inspires us. All this highlights the necessity
of establishing a constant and collective dialogue that seeks to find methods and forms to have our
ideas reach the Government of Mexico.” AGN, DFS 63-3, Legajo 7, 108.

548
“Así me fui a la Sierra: Habla Lucio Cabañas,” in Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 53. Felix Bautista, a
comrade of Cabañas throughout the latter’s days as student, teacher, and guerrilla leader, recalled that
at Ayotzinapa during the late 1950s and 1960 they listened to Radio Rebelde out of Havana, and
received radical literature from China and Russia. See Gerardo Tort, dir., The Guerrilla and the
Hope: Lucio Cabañas (2005). For teacher activism and political organizing during the 1920s and 30s
see, Mary Kay Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico,
1930-1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997); and, Elise Rockwell, “Schools of
Revolution: Enacting and Contesting State Forms in Tlaxcala, 1910-1930,” in Everyday Forms of
State Formation, 170-208.

263

modernization, they often went from agents of state consolidation to village leaders
who articulated community grievances against the state itself.”
549

Village leaders yet with national reach. As student activist and one-time
national president of FECSM from 1961-1963, Cabañas possessed access to a
national network of potentially like-minded rural students and schoolteachers.
Through FECSM, a federation that linked the students of twenty-nine rural Teacher
Training Schools, the guerrerense befriended future guerrillas like Arturo Gámiz and
allotted him the opportunity of establishing organizational and personal links
throughout the country.
550
Like many other rural teachers, Cabañas also belonged to
the PCM and the MRM, national organizations that encouraged the creation and
consolidation of local political networks. During 1964 Cabañas and a group of
comrade teachers traveled throughout the Costa Grande organizing local MRM
chapters and attracting teachers as an attempt to displace the PRI-allied teacher’s
union (SNTE). Simultaneously, the unceasing teacher-activist worked with the CCI,
recruiting campesinos and organizing congresses that denounced the low prices of
coffee and copra manipulated by cacique middlemen; the inexistence of credit

549
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 100.

550
Alberto Guillermo López Limón, “Los mártires de Madera: rebeldía en el estado de Chihuahua,
México (1965), in Enrique Camacho Navarro, ed., El rebelde contemporáneo en el Circuncaribe:
Imágenes y representaciones (Mexico: UNAM, 2006), 264. The FECSM was not one mind on
political ideology. While president of the organization, Cabañas faced accusations that he was a PCM
and MLN puppet. According to DFS intelligence reports, 18 schools left the organization to form
their own, accusing Cabañas of being an acolyte of the MLN and PCM. AGN, DFS 63-19, Legajo 1,
41-42.

264

available to small and middling ejidatarios; and, the continued forestry conflicts with
logging companies.
551

Through his constant activism, Cabañas thus managed to forge a series of
convergent local, regional, and national networks that involved the participation of
students, schoolteachers, campesinos, the families of schoolchildren, and local
governing authorities sympathetic to popular demands—networks that later proved
crucial as Cabañas escaped state persecution and forged a clandestine guerrilla army.
Yet, back in the 1964-65, the schoolteacher continued to tread the PCM path
fundamentally based on acts of civic dissidence and the organizing of campesinos
and teachers. Periodically leaving the Costa Grande, he traveled to Tlapa in
February 1965 to organize the First Indigenous Campesino Congress of La Montaña
under auspices of the CCI-communist faction and joined by MRM leader Othón
Salazar. During the gathering, Cabañas delivered the sort of scathing criticisms that,
along with his constant participation in local agrarian struggles, raised the ire of state
officials and caciques. Raising the theme of a betrayed Revolution, he proceeded to
list a number of Judas presidents responsible for the betrayal and called for “the
humble classes, so often the victims of injustice and forced to live in misery, to
organize a general strike.”
552
Similar gatherings held throughout 1965, characterized
by vociferous criticisms of the state and federal governments, led local caciques to

551
Serafín Núñez Ramos, interview, Gerardo Tor, dir., “The Guerrilla and the Hope: Lucio Cabañas”
(2005); Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 105; and, “Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 21.

552
AGN, DGIPS box 447, 190-199. The IPS author of the report also identified Cabañas as a
representative of the PCM-linked FEP.

265

petition the Department of Public Education to transfer both “communist agitators”
Cabañas and fellow PCM teacher Serafín Núñez out of Guerrero.
Exiled to the northern state of Durango, the teachers reached their new post
in Tuitán and immediately helped organize the Women’s Union of Tuitán. From
December 1965 to July 1966, Cabañas and Serafín created headaches for local
caciques as they and the Women’s Union organized a 50-60 km march on foot to the
capital city of Durango demanding food for their children and jobs for their
husbands.
553
By the time the MRM managed to secure their return to Guerrero in
mid-1966, Cabañas had participated in the Congress of the Durango Federation of
Workers and Campesinos and supported a multi-class civic movement that
demanded the creation of a local steel industry.
554
Evidencing his commitment non-
violent forms of political activism, Cabañas rebuffed the efforts of Gámiz’s guerrilla
survivors to enlist his help in reconstituting the guerrilla movement in Chihuahua.
555

Prior to his return to Atoyac in August 1966, he enrolled in a PCM political
preparation course in Mexico City where he met Raúl Ramos Zavala—future urban

553
Serafín Núñez, interview, Gerardo Tort, dir., “The Guerrilla and the Hope: Lucio Cabañas,”
(2005).

554
The local steel plant struggle refers to the Movement of the Cerro del Mercado. See Paul
Lawrence Haber, Power from Experience: Urban Popular Movements in Late Twentieth-Century
Mexico (University Park: The Penn State University Press, 2006), 129-130.

555
Years later while recounting his path to becoming a guerrilla leader, Cabañas recalled that the
remaining members of the Gámiz-led GPG visited Guerrero to meet with him (1965-1966): “…after
the death of Gámiz they visited us…they were here scouting and reconnoitering the mountains well
before us.” Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 70.

266

guerrilla leader and theoretician.
556
He finally reached Atoyac to find the municipal
capital embroiled in a school conflict with undertones of class struggle.
In contrast to Cabañas’ public displays of dissidence and protest, Vázquez led
a semi-clandestine political life from 1963-1966. In the immediate months after
proposing the “New Route” for the ACG in October 1963, the persecuted civic
leader worked as director of economic planning for the newly constituted and CCI-
allied Revolutionary Agrarian League of the South “Emiliano Zapata” (LARSEZ)—
an independent rural union that demanded land redistribution and justice for
campesinos.
557
Throughout 1963 and 1964, the ACG collaborated with groups like
the CCI and the MLN, helping to organize Costa Grande campesinos and anti-
Alarcon demonstrations. Yet, privately Vázquez and ACG cadres worked to
transform the organization from an opposition electoral party into a potential
revolutionary vanguard party. By August 1964, the ACG circulated a founding
manifesto of sorts that unequivocally identified the “capitalist cacique” as the rural
point of convergence between the PRI, its methods and modalities of repression,
capitalist modernization, and an exploitative social order. To combat the PRI and its
“capitalist caciques,” the ACG called for the creation of “clandestine committees of

556
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 35-36; and, “Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 25. As
head of the Young Communists (Juventud Comunista Mexicana), Ramos Zavala would break from
the PCM in 1970 after disagreeing with the party’s unwillingness to engage in armed struggle.
Though killed before its official creation in 1973, Ramos Zavala helped create the material, political,
and theoretical foundations of the Communist League of September 23
rd
.

557
Tita Radilla, interview with the author, Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, 15 May 2007. Radilla’s
father, Rosendo, both participated in the ACG and helped create LARSEZ.

267

struggle,” with three to seven members, engaged “in the labor of propaganda,
agitation, organization, and direction of the Pueblo, working in clandestine fashion to
ensure the continuity of popular struggle.” The manifesto moved beyond the “New
Route” to provide a Seven Point Program that called for: the removal of Governor
Alarcon Abarca; radical agrarian reform, political freedom and the creation of a
government constituted by the popular classes, “scientific” management of the
national economy, the expropriation of mines owned by “North American”
capitalists, and the rescue of Guerrero’s “forestry riches” from “rapacious” lumber
companies (and Melchor Ortega) that violated campesino forest usage rights.
558

Rooted in the local contemporary history and experiences of Guerrero, the Seven-
Point program provided a clear “New Route” for all of Mexico.
The manifesto, and its call for the Pueblo “to respond to each state repressive
action in kind,” prompted a government investigation into whether “communist
guerrilla cells” existed in Guerrero.
559
Such fear, along with the continued activist
defiance of ACG-allied groups like LARSEZ, prompted the PRI regime and Gov.
Abarca to unleash violent repression on these groups, “justified” by a decree he
passed in May 1965 that practically suspended constitutional guarantees in the state.
Any idea, plan, or program that “tended” to destabilize the public order would result
in prison time and monetary fines. Read in a different light: any idea, program, or

558
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-64, Legajo 1, 390-392; and, Antonio Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses
(Mexico, 1979), 72-77. This latter source contains an invaluable collection of ACG, CAP, and ACNR
literature: letters, proclamations, communiqués, and internal proceedings.

559
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-64, Legajo 1, 392; and, AGN, DFS 11-136-65, Legajo 8, 59.

268

plan that challenged or criticized the PRI would result in violence and persecution.
560

Vázquez becomes “the most dangerous agitator of the state,”
561
in view of the ruling
regime, persecuted throughout 1965-1966 while ACG militants suffer the risk of
assassination at the hands of state police forces. In the face of such violence, a series
of cívico-allied groups led by a cadre of ACG leaders, created the Pueblo’s Council
of Self-Defense (CAP) in April 1966 to help facilitate coordinated responses to state
repression. Adopting the Seven Point Program, the CAP mobilized weekly
demonstrations that protested “the same political and economic repressive situation
created by the bad government of Abarca Alarcon” and the murder of CAP militants
like Pedro Cortes in San Luis Acatlán.
562
By November, a crucial event provided the
CAP another demand: the arrest and kidnapping of Vázquez in front of the Mexico
City MLN headquarters by Guerrero state police.
563

560
“La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 21; and, Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 105. For
examples of state terror directed against members of the CAP, see AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 21,
31, 64. These documents describe a CAP-led demonstration that protested the murder of a 14 year old
boy, son of ACG/CAP leader Elpidio Ocampo from Iguala, by state police forces. In the attempt to
apprehend the elder Ocampo, police agents shot and killed his son, Delfino. Ocampo later joined the
guerrilla ACNR. AGN, DFS 11-136-66, Legajo 14, 103-105 contains a denunciation made by
Vázquez against Acapulco police officers (including the police chief, a brother of the governor) that
murdered four Mendoza brothers. See also, Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses, 96-99.

561
AGN, DFS 100-10-3-4-66, Legajo 1, 136.

562
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-66, Legajo 20, 326-327, 334-336; and, AGN, DGIPS, box 500, file 5, 53-55.

563
AGN, DGIPS box 500, file 5, 283-284, 294, 309. Vázquez was arraigned for the charges of
homicide (dating back to the massacres of 1960 & 1962), defamation of public officials, criminal
(delictuosa) association, injuries, and resisting arrest.

269

Final Push: The Massacres of 1967
While Vázquez languished in an Iguala prison cell, Cabañas found himself
embroiled in another local community struggle. In 1967 the teacher joined an Atoyac
movement organized by the poorer local families of schoolchildren in a protest
seeking to ouster an unpopular school rector. Beginning in April, a coalition of
schoolteachers, families, civic activists, and campesinos initiated a series of protests
and public meetings that explicitly demanded the removal of the school rector,
popularly perceived as corrupt and arbitrary, and the reinstatement of a dismissed
popular teacher (accused of imparting “communist” ideas).
564
Cabañas explained the
specific demands of the movement in a 1969 PDLP communiqué distributed
throughout Atoyac: “free public education; that no quotas should be charged on the
parents of schoolchildren, and that school authorities not demand that students wear
daily school uniforms.”
565
The liberation of political prisoners, including Vázquez,
and the removal of Gov. Abarca Alarcon soon joined the list of original demands as
the movement radicalized in the face of intransigent local and state governments.
By mid-May, the local oligarchy demanded the personal intervention of the
governor and initiated a campaign of terror and threats, leading Cabañas to proclaim
in a 17 May assembly, “…if they kill or injure anyone of us, then we will finish off

564
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 24, 67-69. The teacher was Alberto Martínez Santiago. His
father, Arcadio Martínez, was killed in the 18 May 1967 massacre.

565
AGN, DGIPS box 549, file 3.

270

all of the rich townspeople.”
566
The arrival of state officials—judicial, educational,
and state police leaders—on18 May did not lead to the removal of protestors who
had taken over the Plaza Cívica. As Cabañas presented a speech around 10 am, state
police officers fired into the crowd of peaceful protestors. Seven deaths—five
protestors and two state police officers—and dozens of injured comprised the
casualty list of an operation in which Cabañas constituted the principal target for
state police shooters. The massacre stopped only when army soldiers stationed in
Atoyac intervened.
567
With the help of the local populace, the charismatic
schoolteacher escaped into the neighboring mountain range, thus initiating a seven
year period of clandestine political organizing and anti-government struggle.
568

Popular rage throughout the Costa Grande had not dissipated when another
massacre occurred in Acapulco. A thousand campesinos copreros from the Regional
Union of Copra Producers of Guerrero (URPC), organized by PRI federal deputy and
CNC leader Cesar Angel, marched on their union’s Acapulco headquarters on 20
August 1967 to prevent their leadership from incorporating the union into the fold of
the CNC. Upon reaching the union building, state police officers, “white guards,”

566
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 57.

567
Tita Radilla, interview with the author, Atoyac de Alvarez, Guerrero, 15 May 2007; AGN, DFS
100-10-1-67, Legajo 24, 99-101; AGN, DFS 100-10-3-67, Legajo 1, 202; AGN, DGIPS box 462, file
1, 3-4, 265-267, 535-536, 688 . See also Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 109; Hipólito Simón, Guerrero,
amnestia y represión (Mexico: Grijalbo, 1982); and, Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 178.
Subsequent intelligence reports placed the entire blame on the activists: AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo
24, 99-101.

568
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 53-56. Government documents dated 18 May 1967 reveal that Guerrero’s
Attorney General office was attempting to hold Cabañas responsible for the Atoyac movement.
AGN, DGIPS box 462, file 1, 265.

271

and paid gunmen stationed within the confines of the headquarters opened fire on the
unarmed protesting copreros. The gunfire only stopped when soldiers intervened
and temporarily detained the aggressors (finding seventy high-powered rifles),
leaving between twenty-three and forty dead and dozens of injured copreros in the
street.
569
Subsequent government investigations, like those for the earlier massacres,
blamed the victims.
570
Impunity for the executioners reigned as the pacific
democratic struggles of the 1960s ended bloodily.

Conclusion

“All we asked the government for was justice. We did so through petitions. Nothing
provided resolution. On the contrary, the government threw the federales at us to
finish us.”—“Ignacio,” ACNR campesino guerrilla, July 1971
571

Scholars generally posit 1968 as the year in which, to paraphrase sociologist
Philip Abram, a vast popular movement unmasked the PRI regime’s pretensions to
be a revolutionary and democratic state.
572
Yet, in the different rural regions of Cold

569
AGN, DGIPS box 1488A, file 3, 57-67; “Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 26; and,
Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 133-134.

570
A DFS intelligence memo produced three days before the coprero massacre by an undercover
agent reported that during the coprero meeting “instructions were given that stated no one was to
carry weapons during the protest and that they adopt a posture of prudence in case of provocative
acts.” The dissident copreros led by Del Angel planned to “demand the revocation of the $.10 per
kilo tax on copra and insist that Jesús Flores Guerrero, president of the URPC, provide a report on the
current economic situation, a program of the work conducted until the current date, and his plans for
the future of the union.” AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 25, 12.

571
Augusto Velardo, ¿Por qué? 22 July 1971, 29 July 1971, and 5 August 1971, included in Ortíz,
Genaro Vázquez, 70-71.

572
Abrams, “Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1:1
(March 1988), 77. My sentence paraphrases the following statement from Abram’s essay: “It is in
documents like Fidel Castro’s courtroom speech—and almost uniquely in such documents—that the
pretensions of regimes to be states are unmasked.”

272

War Mexico, “1968” occurred in 1943 (Morelos), 1961 (San Luis Potosí), or 1965
(Chihuahua). Guerrero, perhaps adding to its singular reputation, possesses a variety
of “1968s” to choose from as the state opened the decade with democratic civic
effervescence and reached its conclusion bloodied, frustrated, and enraged—with
feelings of vengeance. A guerrerense student at the National Polytechnic Institute of
Mexico City poignantly captured the popular “structure of feeling” in August 1967 at
a student assembly, as summarized by an infiltrated regime spy:

…[in] Acatitla state police under orders from the Governor burned
down campesino homes and raped women…the student said they
need to inform the President of the Republic that they are tired of so
much injustice that is committed in Guerrero and they are committed
to taking up arms if necessary…they can no longer wait for promises
from the Federal Government…this was not a threat but a
warning…
573

During the six years covered by this chapter, guerrerenses witnessed and
directly experienced the congealing of subjective violence (dramatic acts of state
terror) with systemic violence (the everyday appropriation of unpaid campesino
surplus-labor to subsidize PRI-led capitalist modernization), leading many to
conclude that only emancipatory violence—that sort Benjamin once termed as
“divine”—provided the possibility of justice, vengeance, and redemption.
574
While

573
AGN, DFS 63-3-67, Legajo 25, 168-171.

574
My thinking on these different types of violence has been greatly influenced by Slavoj Zizek. See
Zikek, Violence, 1-8, 12-15; Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Reflections: Essays,
Aphorisms, and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Schocken Books, 2007

273

the 1960 Chilpancingo massacre represented and was largely interpreted as an
isolated act of violence attributable to a single despot, the bloody outcome of the
1962 ACG electoral campaign and the subsequent campaigns of state terror that
targeted dissidence and protest helped expose the systemic inequalities that made the
PRI regime possible. State violence unleashed against law-abiding citizens working
within the legal system to obtain political and social reform—and protective of local-
regional cacique powerbrokers—led activists like Vázquez and Cabañas to a
conclusion similar to one expressed by Arturo Gámiz, Pablo Gómez, and the Gáytan
brothers during their 1964-1965 Chihuahua guerrilla movement: “we are convinced
that the time to talk to them [the state] in the only language they understand has
arrived…the time to base ourselves on the 30-30 and 30-06 carbines, more than the
Agrarian Code or the Constitution, is here.”
575

Years after the Atoyac massacre while in the Sierra of Atoyac surrounded by
PDLP guerrillas, Cabañas remembered that time when politics was reduced to the
language of automatic gunfire. He remarked that for an armed movement to begin it
needed certain factors: “poverty, the existence of revolutionary orientation, a ruling

[1978]), 277-300.; and, Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 253-258.

575
“Resolución Cuarta,” II Encuentro en la Sierra “Heraclio Bernal” (México: Linea
Revolucionaria, 1965), included in the Movimiento Armado Socialista Digital Archive, Folder
“Grupo Guerrilla Popular”, José Luis Moreno Borbolla, ed., Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de
los Movimientos Sociales A.C.. Salvador Gaytán, an ex-member of the Chihuahua guerrilla and
whose brother Salomón was killed in the 23 September 1965 assault on the Madera military barracks,
reiterated the same theme during a week-long caravan organized by the “ex-militantes del
Movimiento Armado Socialista” from 30 March-April 6 2007 (video, notes, and interviews in
possession of the author who participated in the week-long event).

274

bad government, a direct mistreatment of the populace at the hands of government
authorities.” Yet, he cautioned, the Pueblo can endure those factors. What they will
not allow “is a massacre…that they will not silently endure.”
576
The next chapter
will demonstrate that vast sections of Guerrero refused to endure as everyday men,
women, students, elders, teachers, and campesinos dangerously decided to support
two separate guerrilla insurgencies—both creative and imaginative.

576
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 55.

275

Chapter 4:
“There was no other way:”
577
The National Revolutionary Civic Association
and the Struggle for National Liberation

“I am a campesino
from the state of Guerrero
my rights were taken away
and they made me a guerrilla.
I left my mother and children
And my wife as well
the Pueblo have always suffered
I will have to defend it.
The Pueblo has its own laws
its laws and requisites
but we are left with nothing
the rich have everything.
I already left for the mountains
perhaps that was my destiny
to defend my People
even if it costs me my life.”—Untitled Corrido, circa 1970
578

Throughout Mexico’s decades-long Pax Priísta, men and women who took
up arms against a violent, undemocratic state expressed a sentiment analogous to that
of the unknown corridista-guerrilla cited above: “…they took away my rights and
made me a guerrilla.” In Morelos, followers of Rubén Jaramillo passionately argued
that “they made him into a rebel.”
579
Just days before their 1965 attack on the
Madera barracks in Chihuahua, Arturo Gámiz and Salomón Gaytán wrote in a

577
Concepción Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007.

578
Radilla Martínez, Poderes, Saberes y Sabores, 209.

579
Padilla, Rural Resistance in the Land of Zapata, 139.

276

communiqué that after a long process of unfruitful, constitutionally-based struggles
against local caciques, “they embraced arms [armed struggle] as a means to create
the justice that is denied to the poor.”
580
Not limited to rural Mexican guerrillas,
urban insurgents that emerged during the 1970s after participating in a series of
violently suppressed doctor and student movements expressed a similar reaction:
“the great maker of guerrillas is the state.”
581

By the summer of 1967 both Vázquez and Cabañas reached a similar
conclusion. Almost eight years of organizing civic movements, independent rural
unions, forest communities, the parents of poor schoolchildren, rural schoolteachers,
and landless peasants—within constitutional, legal parameters—led to state
persecution. While the imprisoned ACG leader survived assassination attempts
(with the help of fellow prisoners) in Iguala’s municipal jail, the communist teacher
sought refuge, like his Zapatista great-uncles decades before, in the imposing
mountains that towered above Atoyac after yet another massacre. Such persecution
extended throughout guerrerense civil society as the state and federal PRI
governments enacted a veritable state of emergency that de facto suspended
constitutional rights and violently punished dissidence and regime criticism. The
terror campaigns of 1963, organized in the aftermath of the tumultuous 1962 state

580
“Hablan los jefes de la guerrilla: Si no sale Giner del poder habrá sangre,” Indice 11 September
1965, in Movimiento Armado Socialista Digital Archive, Folder “Grupo Popular Guerrillero,” José
Luis Moreno Borbolla, ed., Centro de Investigaciones Históricas de los Movimientos Sociales A.C.

581
José Luis Moreno Borbolla, ex-member of the Communist League of September 23 (LC23S),
quoted in “Confesiones de un joven guerrillero de los años setentas,” Diario Monitor, 31 July 2007.

277

elections, constituted a vivid foreshadow of what was in store for a rebellious region
intent on reclaiming and enacting constitutional rights.
Yet, state terror did not end such attempts; rather, it radicalized populations
and efforts. State terror made guerrillas and guerrilla supporters. It contributed to
the emergence of an unstable vanguardist-masculinist (New Left) revolutionary
subjectivity consistently challenged by guerrillera combatants and peasants with
memories of past armed struggles.
582
Many poor and middling campesinos, women,
students, teachers, and municipal officials shared Cabañas’ sentiment when he
stated: “…if they kill one of us, what we’ll do is go to the mountains and we will not
again ‘play’ pacifically…we were tired of struggling pacifically [constitutionally]

582
Josie Saldaña identified this model of Cold War/New Left revolutionary subjectivity as a crucial
factor in the failures of Latin American revolutionary movements. A racialized and masculinist
subjectivity, it articulated a developmentalist model of making revolution that posited guerrilleros as
missionaries of revolution intent on converting “pre-modern,” “pre-conscious,” and “pre-political”
peasants, Indians, women, and blacks into “modern” and “ideological” revolutionaries. Guerrillas
like Che Guevara and Mario Payeras “represent[ed] indigenous peoples and peasant subalterns as the
horizon of their messianic, revolutionary errands, as the agents/objects of a revolutionary
developmentalism.” While not fully escaping such tendencies, both the ACNR and PDLP represented
a different type of guerrilla movement, one more akin to the EZLN that Saldaña provided as a
counter-example, in their ability to demand “the reconstitution of the Mexican state and economy
[and]…claim the role of the state for themselves to dictate the terms of a developmental project in
which they are already fully implicated in.” In other words, this chapter will argue that the ACNR
(and PDLP in Chapter 5) anticipated the praxes of revolution evident in Central America during the
1970s and 80s and in 1994 Chiapas. Using sociological terms that delineate Cold War revolutionary
“waves,” the ACNR and PDLP thus represented a pre-figuration of second wave (1970s and 80s) and
third wave (1994) guerrilla movements while simultaneously influenced by first wave (1959 Cuban
Revolution to 1967) movements. A historical perspective that embraces the importance of local
historical contexts and traditions highlights the categorical messiness of the guerrilla ACNR and
PDLP. Saldaña-Portillo, Revolutionary Imagination in the Americas, 9-10, 12, chapters 3 & 6;
Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution, 16-18, 209-230; and, Mark T. Berger, “Romancing
the Zapatistas: International Intellectuals and the Chiapas Rebellion,” Latin American Perspectives
28:2 (March, 2001), 150-155. See also Ileana Rodríguez, Women, Guerrillas, and Love, xvii-xix, 41-
48.

278

without achieving anything.”
583
This chapter chronicles one radicalized expression
of such popular fatigue and frustration: the emergence of the guerrilla National
Revolutionary Civic Association (ACNR). Led by civic leader-turned-guerrilla
leader Genaro Vázquez, the ACNR sought the national liberation of Mexico and
democratic revolution as prerequisite stages for the future installation of a socialist
regime.
584

The ACNR and the Party of the Poor (PDLP), covered in the next chapter,
represented the culmination of a protracted and multi-faceted social process of
popular struggle in Guerrero. This social process linked an immediate regional
historical context characterized by violently repressed popular movements based on
the 1917 Constitution with unredeemed rural promises that stretched back to the
Mexican Revolution and Cardenismo. Both facets shaped the revolutionary praxis
and programs of the ACNR and PDLP as guerrilla organizations with one foot in the
“Cuba-fired”
585
New Left and the other in Guerrero’s local histories of rebellion
populated by centuries of guerrilla memories, defeated demands, and persistent
longings. The international politics of vanguardist Marxism-Leninism resided, at
times uncomfortably, alongside the local politics of vengeance, redemption, and

583
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 57.

584
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007.

585
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 15.

279

dignity; “foquista” national liberation next to “seeking a new way of life;”
586

destroying the bourgeois state with “let’s take up arms and kill state police, those
who committed massacres.”
587
The ability of Vázquez and PDLP leader Lucio
Cabañas to make their differing notions of revolutionary Marxism conversant with
local-regional political registers defined by notions of local patriarchal democracy,
campesino land tenure, and economic democracy (i.e. producer control over
production process) partially explains the ACNR and PDLP’s organic emergence,
organization, popular bases of support, and survival.
This chapter and the next thus present the history of the guerrilla ACNR and
PDLP as a sort of Benjaminian monad; that is, a momentary crystallization and/or
rapid eruption of rural utopias, imaginings, politics, and longings condensed in the
short period between 1967 and1974. To imagine a revolutionary future, a world
described by Cabañas in which “the poor own everything because they are the
workers,”
588
required both the ACNR and PDLP to “take a tiger’s leap into the
past”
589
and harness unredeemed campesino longings to mobilize revolution; and, an
embrace of the anger, vengeance, and indignation provoked by state massacres as
revolutionary politics and cohesive energy. In other words, Vázquez and Cabañas

586
Ex-PDLP guerrilla Juan Martínez, interviewed in Gerardo Tort, dir., “The Guerrilla and the Hope:
Lucio Cabañas” (2005).

587
Cabañas, quoted in Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 55.

588
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 323.

589
Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” 395-397.

280

needed to know that, paraphrasing sociologist Timothy Wickham-Crowley, people
carried their rebellious histories with them.
590
While the ACNR and PDLP exhibited
political differences and experienced differing levels of success in forging
revolutions with campesino communities that possessed long memories, the groups
constituted, in the words of ACNR ex-guerrilla José Bracho, “two projects of the
same political phenomenon.”
591

“The Bad Government of Caciques:”
592
Guerrero at the end of 1967

“For in the exercise of violence over life and death more than in any other legal act,
law reaffirms itself [my emphasis]. But in this very violence something rotten in law
is revealed…”—Walter Benjamin
593

Seven years of massacres committed by state forces revealed the rottenness
of regional PRI rule in Guerrero. In the tense days after the 1962 Iguala massacre,
Vázquez described a social atmosphere of terror and injustice homologous to the
Guerrero of late 1967 after the Atoyac and Acapulco massacres:

590
Wickham-Crowley, Guerrillas and Revolution in Latin America, 131.

591
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Mexico, 9 March 2007.

592
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 24, 175.

593
Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 286.

281

…various accusations were launched against the Pueblo [people]
guerrerense, identifying us as communists; then, of being a
“rebellious Pueblo”…repeating the old mantra that we are an
“ungovernable Pueblo”…once again arbitrariness and injustice
produced grieving households, sacrificing humble people of our
Pueblo, imprisoning and persecuting all ACG members that had
committed no crime other than maintaining alive the 1910
revolutionary ideal of “effective suffrage” without impositions…to
the exercise of [constitutional] rights, the government responded with
violence…
594

The exercise of state violence as a response to the popular “exercise of rights”
characterized the gubernatorial tenure of Raymundo Abarca Alarcón (1963-1969).
Indeed, Abarca’s assumption of power required not only the 1962 Iguala massacre of
ACG members but also the military counter-civic campaigns throughout 1963 that
punished electoral inconformity with scorched earth policies. As governor, the
Iguala military doctor-turned-politician criminalized social dissidence with the full
support of local-regional caciques most vividly embodied by the figure of Donato
Miranda Fonseca.
595
Decree 29, passed in May 1965 by the state legislature,
represented a regional manifestation of Article 145 of the Federal Penal Code: the
infamous law of “social dissolution” passed during World War II that severely
punished those that “propagate ideas, programs, or conduct that tend to produce
rebellion, sedition, riots, disorders, and the obstruction of the functioning of legal

594
Internal ACNR document, 19 January 1963, quoted in Miranda, La violación de derechos
humanos, 131.

595
See Chapter Three for biographical sketches of both Alarcón and Miranda Fonseca.

282

systems.”
596
De facto application of Article 145, like Decree 29, targeted regime
critics, leftists, and, in Guerrero, masses of citizens that attempted to redeem their
constitutional rights. Yet by late 1967, Decree 29 and the massacres of Atoyac and
Acapulco signified something more profound and far reaching: the nearly “complete
suspension of constitutional guarantees.”
597
Guerrero had become a state of
emergency.
The revelation of rotten cacique law paralleled the beginnings of a national
agrarian crisis that heralded the end of the so-called economic “Mexican Miracle.”
An economic model that posited a polarized countryside (divided into an
undercapitalized ejidal sector and a lavishly protected agro-capitalist sector designed
for export) as the subsidizer of rapid industrial development and feeder of growing
cities faced exhaustion. Population growth strained an ejidal economy meant to feed
an internal market (and produce an exportable surplus) at artificially suppressed
prices with minimal credit, technological support, and irrigation. The lack of
meaningful land redistribution
598
from 1940-1965, and rural population growth,

596
Bellingeri, “La imposibilad del odio: la guerrilla y el movimiento estudiantil en México, 1960-
1974,” in AA.VV., La transición interrumpida, México, 1968-1988, 53, quoted in, Eric Zolov, Refried
Elvis, 122. As Zolov noted, Article 145 was not repealed until 1970. The definition for Decree 29 is
the following: “any person who propagates or distributes an idea, program, or plan through whatever
medium that tends to disturb the public peace and order of the state or subverts juridical and social
institutions will face a prison term of 2-10 years and a fine of 10-10,000 pesos.” “La Guerra Sucia en
Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 21.

597
“La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 21.

598
That is, the distribution of arable, quality land. Both the López Mateos and Díaz Ordaz
administrations redistributed land, but mostly of poor quality. According to Gerardo Otero, only 10%
of land distributed by Díaz Ordaz was arable. Otero, Farewell to the Peasantry, 58-59.

283

produced large numbers of landless peasants in the countryside. Those small and
middling peasants
599
who retained land, in the absence of significant state support,
forcibly turned to a rural commercial bourgeoisie that monopolized agricultural
markets through its control over credit. As described in Chapter Two, they
controlled access to markets, credit, water, processing plants, transportation, seeds,
and fertilizers. These “caciques”—linked to national financial and industrial
interests along with transnational corporations—remained firmly entrenched
throughout the 1960s. Large-scale agro-business largely located in northern Mexico
focused on export crops and producing livestock feed for a bourgeoning internal (and
state subsidized) livestock business, thus also contributing to a dramatic decline in
agricultural production and growth by 1965. By the early 1970s, Mexico’s status as
a nation that exported agricultural products ceased and became a nation dependent
upon the importation of agricultural goods.
600

599
Middling peasant landholders were at times referred to as “minifundistas” (owned less than ten
hectares of land). See Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development, 79.

600
The problem was not one exclusively related to land tenure and depended on specific regions.
From 1940-1960, the PRI regime redistributed 13 million hectares (32,110,000 acres) while 1960-
1976 witnessed the redistribution of 30 million hectares (74,100,000). Other factors to consider
include: the super-exhaustion of land provoked by agro-business utilization of ecologically-corrosive
fertilizers and insecticides; and, the emergence of super-plagues caused by the overuse of insecticides
and herbicides. See Armando Bartra, “Crisis agraria y movimiento campesino en los setentas,”
Cuadernos Agrarios 11 (December 1980), 19-27; Armando Bartra, “Sobre las clases sociales en el
campo mexicano,” Cuadernos Agrarios 1 (1976), 25-28; Juan Felipe Leal and Mario Huacuja
Rountree, “Los problemas del campo mexicano,” Estudios Políticos 2:5 (January-March 1976), 20-
28; Blanca Rubio V., “Estructura de la producción agropecuaria y cultivos básicos, 1960-1970,” in
Historia de la cuestión agraria mexicana, tomo 7: La época de oro y el principio de la crisis de la
agricultura mexicana, 1950-1970, ed. Julio Mogel (Mexico: Siglo XXI/CEHAM, 1988), 156-170;
and, Hansen, The Politics of Mexican Development, 77-83.

284

The coastal regions of Guerrero, as primary bastions of support for the
guerrilla ACNR and PDLP, experienced the national agricultural decline with the
dramatic fall of international coffee and copra prices during the mid-1960s. While
relatively high international prices for copra and coffee during the 1950s enabled
ejidatarios guerrerenses a modicum of improvement in their lives (while spurring
social stratification), a regional rural commercial bourgeoisie linked to transnational
corporations based in Acapulco continually mediated the possibility of ejidatarios
obtaining just returns for their labor. The drop in international prices only intensified
the economic precariousness experienced by small and middling peasants subject to
a rigid system of cacique domination. Intermediaries and merchants that provided
credit to peasants at loan-shark rates and bought their harvests for low prices created
a sort of debt-ejido system that forced indebted ejido owners to illegally sell their
lands. By the late 1960s, this system led to the re-concentration of land in the hands
of a few wealthy regional caciques and their web of commercial intermediaries.
601

Peasants often supplemented ejido labor with alternative sources of wage labor. In
the end, the so-called Mexican Miracle had “pauperized” them.
602

Yet, as the previous chapters demonstrated, rural guerrerenses actively
resisted. Two decades of ejidatario and cívico attempts to democratize processes of
cultivation, production, and exchange through syndical and political means exposed

601
Ivan Restrepo Fernández, Costa Grande de Guerrero: Estudio socio-económico (Mexico:
Venecia,1975), 87-104, 196-200.

602
Otero, Farewell to the Peasantry, 56-73.

285

the violent determination of regional caciques to maintain existing relations of
domination. Basing “protest and popular struggle…within the legal framework of
the Constitution” in the words of a CAP communiqué dated August 1967, resulted in
state terror that violently increased in proportion to the radicalization of popular
demands.
603
Massacre after massacre revealed that the federal government not only
failed to heed cries of protest against injustice but that it formed a double-helix of
power with local-regional caciques. Questions emerged whether the PRI regime,
like the state government, “had allied itself with exploitative cacique factions that
repress the Pueblo.”
604
The “bad government” label used to describe state
governorships began to assume federal contours as poor and middling guerrerenses
corporeally experienced “the degeneration of the powerful [and] the decadence of a
social system that no longer guaranteed the redistribution of land, schools, and
security…people lived with fear.”
605

People also lived with anger. Campesino leader Hilario Mesino recalled
widely-held visions of retribution after the massacres of 1967: “we [campesinos]
were mad.”
606
Similarly, Cabañas remembered that indignation and rage spread
throughout the Costa Grande region after the Atoyac massacre. With machetes in

603
AGN, DFS 100-10-1, Legajo 25, 203.

604
CAP letter to President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, November 1967. AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo
26, 117-119.

605
Ibid, 207.

606
Hilario Mesino, interviewed in Gerardo Tort, dir., “The Guerrilla and the Hope: Lucio Cabañas”
(2005); and, Hilario Mesino, interview with the author, 17 May 2007.

286

hand, campesinos from the surrounding mountain communities wanted to descend on
Atoyac and exact revenge on the “rich” merchants they blamed for the massacre.
607

Such collective anger implied collective indignation and a class-tinged sense of
solidarity. The rich-versus-poor or shoes-versus-sandals (“huarachudos”) class
dyads that recurrently emerged after the anti-Caballero social movement and during
the ACG electoral campaign gained new force with each massacre of guerrerenses.
Corridos, gossip, conversations over metates, and graffiti—those reliable mediums
of popular hidden transcripts—began to express an urgency that things needed to
change.
608
Radical black and red slogans began to cover the walls of Atoyac’s main
streets.
609
Many campesinos demanded the recovery of dignity and the end of
humiliation. At their most violent, they talked of killing the rich.
610

Lázaro Cárdenas predicted this type of popular violence. In February 1966,
the ex-president wrote in his personal notes, “these people live in desperation and if

607
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 58; and, AGN, DGIPS box 462, folder 2, 16.

608
Radilla, Sabores, Saberes y Poderes, 207-213. In her sociological study on Costa Grande
cafeticultores, Radilla identified during the late 1960s a sequence of violent “ruptures” provoked both
by state terror and “the idea of subversion that penetrates minds and expresses itself in a mentality of
changes.” Radilla uses oral interviews and corridos to support her conclusions.

609
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 26, 3. DFS agents first reported the appearance of black and red
slogans in Atoyac that attacked the state governor on 9 September 1967.

610
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 26, 31; DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 29, 10-11; and, AGN, DGIPS
box 463, folder 1, 836. In the first document, Fernando Gutiérrez Barros, head of the DFS, reported
that “representatives from private sector and businesspersons” feared Cabañas and his warning that
“at any moment groups of campesinos would fall upon them to kill businesspersons and merchants
that did not believe in their ideals.” Wealthy caciques, their functionaries that collected (and bought)
campesino harvests, and urban merchants/businesspersons tended to constitute “the rich.” The last
document, according to IPS, provides a list of local “rich” that Cabañas has supposedly targeted,
holding them responsible for the 18 May massacre: Wilfrido Fierro, Juan Garcia, Juvencio Luna, and
Martin Salas Torres.

287

conditions continue they will kill those who steal their labor. And they, in turn, will
be killed accused of being assassins when it was the inexistence of justice that
moved them to do so.”
611
Not limited to a foreshadowing of an imminent explosion
of popular “divine violence,”
612
he also predicted the reaction of PRI regime
officials. Assassins, bandits, thieves, criminals, and terrorists populated the pages of
intelligence reports, memorandums, and telegrams as descriptive labels for the
Guerrero rebels even when PRI officials knew otherwise—when they knew that the
ACNR and PDLP counted on vast campesino support. For to admit the legitimacy of
armed popular struggle in this southern state would reveal the illegitimacy of a
national regime self-proclaimed as the “Revolution turned into government;” that is,
an exposure of the fragile and dynamic relationship between popular sovereignty (as
the legitimizing aspect of the state’s monopoly of violence) and popular will. During
the eclipse of the “Mexican Miracle,” the PRI regime chose to violently repress a

611
Lázaro Cárdenas, Obras: Apuntes 1913-1940, volume 1 (Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica,
1972), 118-119; quoted in Bartra, Guerrero Bronco, 123.

612
Benjamin defines “divine violence” as the violence that exists beyond the “mythical” violence that
sustains state law. While “mythical” violence serves to protect and ensure state monopoly over the
right to create law, “divine” violence is a direct, popular challenge: “If mythical law is lawmaking,
divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them.”
“Divine” violence, according to Benjamin, involved a wide range of types: from revolutionary terror
and rebellion to the “divine judgment of the multitude of a criminal” that used violence as a means
without a prescribed end. Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 295-300. Similar to the image of
campesinos descending upon Atoyac from their mountain communities with machetes in hand, Slavoj
Zizek posited the descending of favela crowds into Rio de Janeiro’s “rich” sections to loot during the
1990s as an example of divine violence. Zizek, Violence, 202.

288

variety of popular wills. In Guerrero, state violence revealed what Leon Trotsky and
Max Weber argued long ago: without violence there is no state.
613

“In April all the hills are bald”

The rains did not come early in 1968. A stifling, arid heat dominated Iguala
and the surrounding hilly outskirts during the month of April. Small homes clung to
the limited shade generously provided by small trees. Stubborn shrubs offered hints
of dull color to a moonlike landscape interrupted by small hills and imposing
mountains. Dryness, unrelenting sun, and incessant CAP activism characterized this
part of Guerrero known as the birthplace of the Mexican flag.
614
Almost one year
and a half had passed since state police detained Genaro Vázquez in Mexico City
and transported him to Iguala’s municipal jail. Amidst the heat and the dryness—not
to mention various assassination attempts—the imprisoned ACG leader reached a
variety of conclusions during his turbulent stay in Iguala. For one, revolution
represented the only way to obtain profound political and socio-economic change in
Guerrero and throughout Mexico. Yet, to enact such a conclusion required his
immediate freedom. Despite that “in April are the hills are bald…there is no water

613
This is not a strict reductionist argument on my part. I agree with Weber when he followed up his
famous statement on states and violence with: “Violence is, of course, not the normal or sole means
used by state.” As Chapter Six will demonstrate, the PRI regime exhibited a variety of “means”
throughout the most violent parts of the “Dirty War” in Guerrero. Max Weber, “Politics as
Vocation,” in Weber: Political Writings, ed. Peter Lassman (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 310; and, Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 1-11.

614
For a sample of CAP activism in Iguala throughout 1967 see: AGN, DGIPS box 462, folder 2, 94,
425-426, 690 & 977-978; DGIPS box 463, folder 1, 205; and, DFS 100-10-1-67, Legajo 24, 147-148,
202-203.

289

and anything green is [practically] inexistent,” Vázquez decided that the time to
escape had arrived.
615

Imprisonment and the continued persecution of social activists—culminating
in the Atoyac and Acapulco massacres—convinced Vázquez that the PRI regime
would allow and/or directly participate in the continued repression of dissidence
committed to constitutionality and the legal arena. Thus, in August 1967 the ACG
leader formulated a clear statement of political intent, addressed to ACG cadres,
calling for “the development and consolidation of the Vanguard Proletarian Party
[for] the Armed Political Combat of the Masses.” National liberation, “the
implementation of a popular democratic government and the installment of
socialism” constituted the political ends for an ACG called to transform into a
revolutionary vanguard organization. Titled, “Programmatic Principles of the
ACG,” the document represented both a declaration of reformulated principles and a
plan of action meant for internal consumption. Combining national and international
political and socio-economic Leninist analyses under the rubric of “dialectical
materialism,” Vázquez argued that the time for revolution (“national liberation” in
his terms) had arrived. The “contradictions” unleashed by the global war that
posited socialism versus imperialism (as “the most advanced stage of capitalism”)
favored “the forces of revolution against the decadent and reactionary forces of the
exploiters.” Only national liberation offered the possibility of escaping the yoke of

615
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007. Thirty-nine years later
the landscape and climate displayed a strong resemblance with Bracho’s description. I was there to
chronicle the anniversary of Vázquez’s escape on 21 April 2007.

290

an “oligarchic pro-imperialist and neocolonial” PRI regime that sided with the
sponsor of global imperialism, the United States, and ruled its people under “a
backward and feudal political autocracy.”
616
The time had come, Vázquez
concluded, for cívicos to become revolutionary.
For Vázquez, the bloody 1960s in Guerrero confirmed his Leninist
assessment of an impending global revolution unleashed by the conditions of
exploitation that underscored imperialism. Or, as he argued in the document,
Marxism-Leninism, “as a scientific theory and interpretation of the world,” allowed
him to forge a political perspective that bridged the local and the global.
617
In
contrast to the anti-imperialisms of the MLN or PCM, the definition advanced by
Vázquez exhibited urgency: an urgency to defeat the local-regional violent
manifestation of imperialism in Guerrero to create the antechamber of national
revolution; an urgency to capitalize on the “favorable conditions” for global
revolution; an urgency to stop the massacres. When Lenin wrote that the political
aspect of “parasitic” imperialism consisted of reactionary violence, Vázquez could
point to the various massacres that occurred during the 1960s and a regional
commercial bourgeoisie that controlled campesino production and exchange of
crops.
618
Like the Mayan Marxists described by Grandin in his study on Cold War

616
Santos Méndez and José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007 &
15 May 2007; and, “Lineamientos Programaticos de la A.C.G.,” 22 August 1967, in Aranda, Los
cívicos guerrerenses, 107-122.

617
Ibid, 107-109.

618
Lenin, El imperialismo, fase superior del capitalismo, 115, 125-136.

291

Guatemala, Marxism (and I add Leninism) “as a theory of how to understand and act
in the world” gave Vázquez “a means to insist on [his] consequence.”
619
How to
generalize that experience among Guerrero’s campesinos constituted a key challenge
in the transformation of the ACG from civic organization to a revolutionary
vanguard armed party.
At first glance, it seems that the imprisoned ACG leader elaborated the
contours of yet another Latin American New Left guerrilla group that emanated hints
of the ever-paradoxical “democratic centralist” and vanguardist structure faithful to
Guevarist notions of the insurgent “foco.”
620
Yet, Vázquez grounded his argument
for revolution vis-à-vis a Marxist-Leninist armed party in seven years of local history
and decades more of national history. The formation of an armed organization
responded to local exigencies, primarily the need for self-defense and to facilitate the
type of arduous political work (“raising political consciousness”) required in
cultivating popular support. Such needs represented the necessary initial

619
Grandin, The Last Colonial Massacre, 182.

620
As defined by Che Guevara, “insurrectional foco” referred to a small group of vanguard
revolutionary guerrillas dedicated to the harassment of state military forces through hit-and-run
actions. Guevara envisioned a dialectical relationship between the guerrilla foco and a broader
popular struggle; the former aiding in the development and strengthening of the latter. In 1963, he
wrote that guerrilla warfare “was a war of the People, a struggle of the Pueblo…waging guerrilla
warfare without popular support is the prelude to an inevitable disaster.” Moreover, the guerrilla foco
represented a defensive measure, the first stage of a mass popular revolution in gestation according to
Guevara. He presents three “fundamental lessons” gleaned from the experiences of the Cuban
Revolution: 1) “Popular forces can win a war against the army 2) It is not necessary to wait until all
conditions for making revolution exist; the insurrection [foco] can create them 3) In underdeveloped
America the countryside is the basic area for armed fighting.” See Che Guevara, “Guerra de
guerrillas: un método,” in Che Guevara, América Latina: Despertar de un continente, ed. María del
Carmen Ariet García (Centro de Estudios Che Guevara/Ocean Sur, 2003), 391-397; and, Che
Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare, eds. Brian Loveman and Thomas M. Davies Jr. (Wilmington, Delaware:
Scholarly Resources, 1997), 50.

292

prerequisites for a revolutionary organization in processual development. In his
critique of contemporary Mexican guerrilla groups, Vázquez elucidated his vision for
the development of the ACG into a revolutionary organization using Che Guevara’s
much-maligned and misinterpreted theories. Armed struggle waged through an
insurrectional guerrilla foco, the ACG leader argued, only succeeds with popular
support—a relationship cemented by “a revolutionary program of [popular] political
and social demands.” Groups like the Revolutionary Movement of the Pueblo
(MRP),
621

…fell into a deviation of the principle of historical materialism that
tells us…that the masses make revolutions, not heroes or select
individuals…[they] succumbed to the error of adventurism, exposing
the lack of revolutionary organization and their complete
disconnection from the masses; circumstances that facilitated police
infiltration and their repression by the government.
622

In stark contrast, he posited the ACG as an organization that emerged from
within a series of popular movements that forged an organic relation with the
“masses” and “proletarianized” ACG “petit-bourgeois” cadres. To become
“professional revolutionaries,” Vázquez concluded, ACG militants needed to study
Marxism-Leninism in order to help convince the masses that “only with armed
struggle will it be possible to effectively defend the rights of the People under the

621
The MRP was an incipient guerrilla group disarticulated by state security forces in August 1966
before it went into action. Noted leftists like journalist Víctor Rico Galán, Raúl Ugalde (leader of the
FEP), leaders from the 1965-66 Medical Workers Strike, and other MLN and FEP militants formed
part of the group. See Castellanos, México armado, 83-84; and, Aguayo, La charola, 125-131.

622
“Lineamientos Programaticos de la A.C.G.,” 22 August 1967, in Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses,
120.

293

existing political-social conditions.”
623
Vázquez thus clearly enunciated and exposed
the discursive specter that haunted the 1963 “New Route” document. Armed
revolutionary struggle directed by a revolutionary vanguard organization provided
the vehicle upon which to forge and consolidate new political paths. Political work
thus involved not Marxist-Leninist proselytizing missions among the masses, but
convincing guerrerenses on the question of revolutionary praxis. Indeed, his ideas
on “democracy, national liberation, and the installment of socialism” presupposed
(and emerged from) the types of demands forged during seven previous years of
guerrerense social movements. Definitions of what constituted socialism certainly
varied between campesinos and ACG professional revolutionaries. Yet, shared
histories of state repression provided the opportunity for common ground. As
Atoyac campesina Gregoria Nario remarked when recalling the ACG movements, “If
socialism ensured food, education, health, and recreation for our children, then the
path was marked before us.”
624
The Marxism-Leninism of Vázquez and the ACG
developed in relation to underlying local-regional definitions of local patriarchal
democracy, economic justice, and land tenure—and campesino expectations of a
state that could provide and ensure such demands.
After producing and distributing the document in late August 1967, Vázquez
and the ACG commenced planning on how to engineer the former’s escape from the

623
Ibid, 122.

624
Gregoria Nario, interviewed by Andrea Radilla Martínez in Radilla Martínez, Poderes, Saberes y
Sabores, 195.

294

Iguala prison. Initial attempts carried out by a number of National Polytechnic
Institute (IPN) student leaders and “northerners” failed to free Vázquez at least three
times.
625
In the aftermath of such failures, the ACG decided to directly participate in
the planning and liberation of Vázquez, organizing a commando group of seven
militants. Inexperienced yet among the most committed of ACG members—all but
one or two emerged from the “Melchor Ocampo” study group and led the various
organizations that constituted the CAP—the group began military training in the
Atoyac sierra. José Bracho, Abelardo Velázquez Cabañas, Roque Salgado, Filiberto
Solís (Vázquez’s brother-in-law), Pedro Contreras, Donato Contreras, and Prudencio
Casarrubias trained at the Contreras family coffee plot passing as temporal laborers
hired to clean the coffee trees.
626
After months of training, the ACG’s first guerrilla
commando unit decided to exercise their military training by robbing Domingo
Ponce, a rich coffee cacique who owned the region’s coffee mill, to obtain money
and weapons. In late February 1968, the unit attacked Ponce at his mill. During the
exchange of gunfire, Ponce fell mortally wounded as did one of his workers and the

625
Ex-ACG and commando member Donato Contreras Javier propagated this version. Jaime Solís
Robledo and Carlos Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia: la fuga de Genaro Vázquez Rojas,
narrada por Donato Contreras Javier, integrante del comando que lo liberó (Mexico: Los Reyes,
2003), 51-52.

626
For the “Melchor Ocampo” group, see Chapter Three. Bracho, Salgado, Solís Morales and the
Contreras brothers studied at the National School of Teachers in Mexico City—where they met
Vázquez, and like the ACG leader, graduated from the institution as teachers. Casarrubias was an
ACG member from Chilpancingo who had joined the organization during the 1962 electoral
campaign.

295

first ACG casualty, Casarrubias.
627
Fearing detection, the ACG commandos fled the
Costa Grande to begin preparations for Vázquez’s escape.
628
Reaching Iguala, they
encountered a robust support network constituted by ACG members like “Mamá
Lipa,” an elderly woman and ardent cívica who secretly passed messages to Vázquez
in prison—ACG members who angrily had not forgotten the 1962 massacre.
629
The
massacre, according to ACNR guerrilla Concepción Solís, “did not extinguish
people’s demands or passion…it was as if the hate increased within them.”
630

After intense preparation, and the “acquisition” of a getaway car in the state
of Hidalgo, the first ACG commando unit moved to rescue Vázquez on 22 April

627
Miranda Ramírez, La violacion de derechos humanos, 150; and, “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,”
FEMOSPP Filtrado, 32-33.

628
State officials knew little if anything about the group. IPS agents attributed the killing of Ponce to
Cabañas who was in the initial stages of consolidating a small guerrilla force. In a report dated 26
February 1968, IPS agent OFG wrote “the gang led by Cabañas continues to ravage the mountains in
the municipalities of Atoyac and Coyuca de Benítez…this past Saturday Mrs. Aureliana Balizo was
forced to pay $1,500 pesos so her business establishment in Tepextitla would not be
destroyed…[Cabañas] is also responsible for the murders of cafeticultores Guadalupe Fierro and
Domingo Ponce.” AGN, DGIPS box 473, folder 2, 296.

629
José Bracho, interview with the author, 9 March 2007. According to her surviving son and
daughter, Mamá Lipa (Pérez) was a campesina who waged a life-long struggle to protect and maintain
her lands. At one point Vázquez helped her protect her lands from an ejidal commissary. She “was
very strong….she would go to [political and ejido] meetings and always voiced her opinions…she
never remained with her arms crossed doing nothing…all so she could provide something for her
children because we had nothing.” Aurora, interviewed by Jamie Solís Robledo, in Solís Robledo and
Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia, 133.

630
Concepción Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007. Solís remembered that
during the 1962 electoral campaign, Vázquez organized reading and study circles in Iguala and
surrounding campesino communities: “…in Iguala [ACG militants] read the ‘A,B,C’s of Socialism’
to the inhabitants of the peasant communities…they taught them that the poor were not born poor
because God willed it…they were born because they formed part of an exploited peasant class…there
was a better more just way to live.” Iguala, “was a politicized community, with young and old
women that actively and passionately participated in the ACG struggles.”

296

1968.
631
A reconstituted group of seven that now included Ceferino Contreras
(father of Donato and Pedro), they ambushed a group of three police officers
escorting Vázquez to a nearby medical clinic—not before giving the officers an
opportunity to peacefully handover the ACG president.
632
The brief skirmish left
Salgado—leader of the ACG group—gravely wounded, along with two police
officers. Another police officer lay dead in the street. Separation provoked by the
gunfight, and the failed engine of the getaway car, forced improvisations on the part
of the guerrilla unit. With Vázquez in their custody, the group left the city taking a
difficult northwest route on foot that led them to a series of dry hills that separated
the small town of Icatepec from Iguala. In these dry hills, intermittently interrupted
by tree-covered gulches, Mexican soldiers ambushed the armed cívicos. Aided by a
small plane that had traced the escape route, soldiers from the 49
th
Infantry Battalion
killed Sólis Morales in the ensuing battle. Bracho received a bullet wound in the
head that knocked him briefly unconsciousness, but managed to hide under the cover
of rocks. Wounded and with limited mobility, Salgado, “a sensitive [twenty-one

631
To reconstruct the escape of Vázquez I utilize oral interviews, public talks, published testimonies,
and declassified DFS and DGIPS documents. See José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco,
Guerrero, 9 March 2007; Santos Méndez, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March
2007; Concepción Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007; José Bracho, talk with
the Icatepec community, 21 April 2007; Santos Méndez, talk with the Icatepec community, 21 April
2007; Solís Robledo and Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia, 58-77; AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-68,
Legajo 2, 36-37 & 44; AGN, DGIPS box 2946A, 1-8; and, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 205 -226 & 229-
247.
632
As José Bracho remembers, “we did not want them to die.” José Bracho, talk with the Icatepec
community, 21 April 2007. Vázquez expressed a similar opinion in a letter he sent to national
newspapers in early June 1968. AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-68, Legajo 2, 110.

297

year old] son…an inexhaustible organizer,”
633
and rural schoolteacher, heroically
covered the retreat of the remaining four cívicos by taking on dozens of soldiers.
Campesinos from Icatepec later told Donato Contreras Javier that at least six soldiers
died in their attempt to re-capture Vázquez.
Vázquez and the remaining survivors, with the exception of Bracho, Donato
Contreras, and Ceferino Contreras, escaped the Iguala region by traveling southwest
into the Sierra Madre del Sur that separates the Tierra Caliente from the Costa
Grande. After passing the fertile Rio Balsas region, they sought shelter in
Chapultepec, a small community north of the city of Tlacotepec. A grueling trip on
foot through a region known for its lack of water and nearly impenetrable forested
mountain ranges, the ACG leader and his comrades managed to escape only with the
help of pre-organized “clandestine committees” and “armed self-defense
committees.” Past ACG and CAP political organizing in the homeland of the old
Zapatista General Heliodoro Castillo provided the fleeing group with a vigorous
support network that provided shelter, food, and protection.
634
Bracho recalled that
months before the daring escape, he lived in Tlacotepec passing out “El Cívico”
newspapers and “re-organizing the cívico committees that Genaro [Vázquez] had left

633
Santos Méndez, talk with the Icatepec community, 21 April 2007. At that same public event, José
Bracho asserted that Vázquez had tabbed the young Roque Salgado as his successor should anything
happen to him.

634
This region of Tlacotepec actively participated in the 1960 anti-Caballero movement after the
general imposed a municipal president allied to a local forestry cacique. See Chapter 2, fn. 82.

298

with [campesino] defenders of the forests [during ACG campaign].”
635
Donato
Contreras asserted that the escape depended upon “clandestine armed self-defense
committees” organized in 1965 throughout the Tierra Caliente, Centro, and Costa
Grande regions during the emergence of the CAP. The committees, he remembered,
“were formed with people who sympathized with the movement; with ACG
people…the idea was to elevate the political consciousness of the people.”
636
Past
political work and organization, beginning with the anti-Caballero movement in
1960, thus provided the possibility for the incipient guerrilla group to survive. The
suppression of popular municipal rule, electoral theft, and massacres failed to erase
the popular memories and experiences derived from such insurgent times. Or, to
use a term from James Scott, such political electricity, “even if it is beaten back and
driven underground, something irrevocable has nonetheless occurred.” That
irrevocable political electricity, charged with popular rage and demands for a
different world, sustained the embryonic guerrillas.
637

In dramatic contrast, intelligence agents from the DGIPS translated such
political electricity as “the total lack of civic valor among rural guerrerenses for not
collaborating with any type of authority.” As result, agents OFG, PLL, and RMP
argued, “state investigations have failed, principally due [also] to [rural] hermetic

635
José Bracho, talk with the Icatepec community, 21 April 2007. A DGIPS memo dated 25 April
1968 asserted that Vázquez could count on help from “numerous nuclei of people and sympathizers of
the ACG” in the municipal regions of Iguala, Teloloapan, and Coyuca de Catalán (Tierra Caliente).
AGN, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 218.

636
Solís Robledo and Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia, 55-57 &71-73.

299

attitudes and practically non-existent collaboration.” Yet, lack of cooperation did not
translate into popular support for Vázquez; rather, the agents concluded, “the few
that have helped have done so out of fear of reprisal from the Cívicos.”
638
Such
unwillingness to recognize popular support for Vázquez and the ACG tended to
characterize, albeit in schizophrenic fashion, internal correspondence in the Mexican
military, DGIPS, and DFS agencies. State cognizance of the various conditions the
enabled the eventual development of two separate guerrilla movements in Guerrero
only emerged, in haphazard and contradictory fashion, in relative proportion to the
guerrillas’ military strength. Yet, in April 1968, the PRI regime’s criminalizing
discourse (for internal and public consumption) that tagged Vázquez and Cabañas as
simple bandits paralleled pronouncements expressed in the semi-controlled regional
and national press. In the days after the escape, newspapers decried a “coming war
of guerrillas” organized by a “delirious Left” and “Communists” who had waged
earlier “holy wars” against a series of state governors. The union/re-union of
Vázquez and Cabañas formed a constant fear and theme in the regional press (and

637
Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 215.

638
AGN, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 242. In this same memo, the agents asserted (despite the
criminalizing discourse) that out of the 27 “bandit/outlaw gangs” in the Costa Grande and Costa Chica
of Guerrero, only the one led by Cabañas displayed “an ideological character” (238). Moreover, a
DGIPS memo dated 7 May 1968 (written by an unidentified author) argued for a dualistic
counterinsurgency campaign against Vázquez and Cabañas that included the military “extermination”
of the “bandits” before the upcoming state elections; and, the formation of a “good information
network with campesinos of the region, facilitated by a military brigade integrated by medical
officials, that distributes foodstuffs and medicine, includes experts in agrarian matters etc. etc. that
travel throughout the sierras and co-opting demands expressed by the bandits, while placing in the
brigade one or two discreet persons dedicated to collecting intelligence.” See AGN, DGIPS box
2946A, 1-8. By late 1968, this counterinsurgency plan began to be carried out by the Mexican
military.

300

state intelligence services). One Guerrero newspaper, the Trópico, even asserted that
Cuban guerrillas had kidnapped Vázquez.
639

In contrast to their evaluations of popular support, intelligence agents
correctly anticipated that the Costa Grande, Atoyac in particular, comprised the
destination point for Vázquez and his companions. They recognized that the various
sesame seed-producers, coprero, cafeticultor, and other campesino unions that
collectively formed the CAP derived political strength in the Costa Grande. While
the ACG leader sought refuge in mountainous Chapultepec (arriving there in June
and staying for a month and a half), military units exercised a wide-ranging
disarmament campaign in the Atoyac municipality in the days after the escape.
General Juan Manuel Enriquez Rodríguez, commander of the 27
th
Military Zone
based in Acapulco, asserted in an interview on 26 April 1968 that the campaign
aimed “to prevent any sort of social disorder that expressed support for Vázquez by
members of the [CAP].”
640
In a city already polarized by the 18 May 1967 and
coprero massacres, and the armed anti-cacique actions directed by Cabañas, such

639
By schizophrenic I am referring to internal divisions over how to deal with the emerging guerrilla
movements and the subsequent carrying out of seemingly contradictory counterinsurgency programs.
For summaries of the newspaper articles quoted above, see: AGN, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 207,
211, 213, & 231-234. Newspapers also ridiculed state forces after it became apparent that they had
failed to apprehend Vázquez. In a report dated 5 May 1968, DFS director Gutiérrez Barrios described
a series of “alarming” articles in the local press on the activities of Vázquez and Cabañas that
ridiculed the failure of state police efforts. Such articles, the DFS director concluded, “are being
capitalized on by supporters [of Vázquez and Cabañas] who conduct political work on their behalf.”
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-68, Legajo 30, 407.

640
AGN, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 235-236 & 243. According to DFS director Gutiérrez Barrios, the
campaigns also attempted to prevent “Vázquez from establishing contact with Cabañas.” The director
also described an increased military presence throughout the Atoyac municipality. AGN, DFS 100-
10-1-68, Legajo 30, 384-386.

301

military campaigns only increased popular discontent. Citizens in Atoyac
complained that their city was turned into a “fortress” where “people of renowned
moral dignity” suffered intrusive searches at the hands of soldiers. In rather
prophetic fashion, DGIPS agents predicted an increase in negative popular reactions
to military operations and “a loss of confidence in the armed Institution (the
military).”
641

As Atoyac militarized, Vázquez elaborated a new ideological program for
the ACG in the mountains above Tlacotepec. Discarding the Seven-Point program,
he created a Four-Point manifesto to serve as the ideological foundation for a
guerrilla ACG now committed to the overthrow of the PRI regime via guerrilla
warfare—a medium that displayed deeply historical regional origins and recent
Cuban influence. The new program stated:
(1) The overthrow of the ruling oligarchy formed by major capitalists
and large landowners allied to the Yankee Imperialism that oppresses
us; (2) The establishment of a coalition government composed by
workers and campesinos, students and progressive intellectuals; (3)
Achieve complete political and economic independence for the
nation; (4) The implementation of a just social order of life that
benefits the working masses of Mexico.
642

With new program in hand, Vázquez left Chapultepec in mid-July and traversed the
Sierra Madre del Sur, reaching the Contreras’ coffee ejido in San Vicente de Benítez

641
AGN, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 218-219. Adding to the uneasy situation, the commander of the
32
nd
Infantry Battalion (stationed in Atoyac) refused to allow any sort of event commemorating the
first anniversary of the 18 May massacre. AGN, DFS 100-10-1-68, Legajo 30, 420.

642
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, Legajo 2, 289-291; and, Miranda, La violación de derechos humanos,
164.

302

(approximately 15-20 miles north of Atoyac). After the difficult trip and calling for
high-ranking ACG militants to reunite in late August, he organized two separate
guerrilla units alternately stationed in the coffee-producing communities of San
Vicente de Benítez and El Paraíso.
643

From one of those locations, dubbed “Revolutionary Outpost ‘José María
Morelos,’” Vázquez sent a prescient letter on 1 August 1968 to the expanding
student movement in Mexico City. Expressing “decided and unmitigated” support
for their movement, he presented an argument advocating for the use of
“revolutionary violence” as the only way to achieve “a more just and free way of
life” in the face of a “neo-Porfirian state…[that utilizes] a political methodology of
systematized violence.”
644
The solution, he argued, consisted of “creating an armed
political vanguard in the countryside as the foundation for developing the Pueblo’s
armed struggle for its liberation.” Vázquez exhorted students to clarify, in precise
fashion, tactical and political objectives without succumbing to the “masks of false
bourgeois legality” or “mediating positions of the wrongly-named PCM.” Only an
armed response to the “violence and repression exercised by the reactionary forces
that govern [them],” and the creation of an armed revolutionary organization,
sufficed as appropriate courses of action. Guerrillas in Guerrero, Vázquez

643
Santos Méndez, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 15 May 2007; and, Miranda
Ramírez, El otro rostro de la guerrilla, 42-45.

644
Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 194-195.

303

concluded, had begun to tread the new course of revolution—one that “combatants
throughout the nation, including revolutionary students, will have to travel, not by
choice but forced by the brutal annihilation of democratic liberties carried out by the
pro-imperialist oligarchy that governs the Country.”
645
Eight years of dealing with
the Janus-faced PRI regime helped Vázquez provide warning and caution to the
student movement months before that infamous night in Tlatelolco. Guerrero had
already lived through its own various “1968s.”
Unlike previous letters sent to the press during the summer of 1968 that
justified the escape operation and rejected the criminalizing label of “bandits,”
646
the
letter addressed to Mexico City students contained Vázquez’s first public call (and
justification) for armed struggle. Yet, he announced the call to arms before the
actual re-organization of the ACG into a guerrilla group took place. The
transformation of the ACG into the National Revolutionary Civic Association
(ACNR) occurred in the weeks after the letter’s date. Meeting in a site called “El
Triángulo” (near Atoyac), the cívicos accorded the conversion into “revolutionary

645
Ibid, 196-198.

646
See Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses, 123-126; AGN, DFS 100-10-1-68, Legajo 30, 375-377 &
384-386; DFS 100-10-16-2-68, Legajo 2, 121-122; and, AGN, DGIPS box 530, folder 3, 231-232. In
the first cited letter, Vázquez wrote: “I am not surprised by the hurtful epithet of bandit used to
describe us because we know that such epithets were used in past times to qualify illustrious and
humble advocates of the People…our struggle is rooted and inspired by national history and reality;
our struggle and demands, even with updated criteria, are the same as those voiced by Hidalgo,
Morelos, Guerrero, Juárez, Zapata, and Villa. That is to say, we demand an authentic application of
Agrarian Reform, the rescue of national mineral riches from the hands of exploitative foreign
companies, the broadening and restitution of workers’ rights, and a government truly of the people,
that loyally serves our interests.”

304

cívicos,” discussed and adopted the Four-Point program, and re-defined the structure
of the new ACNR. Vázquez emerged as leader of an ACNR defined as a broad
political-military revolutionary structure, beholden to a guerrilla “Popular Armed
Nucleus” camped in the mountains of Guerrero, and sustained by two organizational
levels: Committees of Clandestine Struggle (CLC), constituted by 3-6 persons,
organized secret support networks in communities and recruited potential ACNR
militants; and, Armed Liberation Committees (CAL) that engaged in armed actions
both in rural and urban settings.
647
Campesinos, workers, and students—particularly
those with old ACG ties—represented the ideal candidates for CLCs and potential
commando recruits for CALs. Both CLCs and CALs would provide its best
militants to the “Popular Armed Nucleus.”
648
Clandestinity, popular support, and the
spread of rebellion beyond the borders of Guerrero thus represented key factors in
both facilitating an ACG-ACNR transformation and the making of a new national
revolution against the PRI regime. For, as ex-ACNR guerrilla José Bracho recalled,
“the ACNR was formed with visions of national liberation.”
649

647
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007.

648
Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 129-134; Rubio Zaldívar, Comandante Genaro Vázquez, 24-25; Bellingeri,
Del agrarismo armado, 136-138; and, Miranda Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos, 163-
165.

649
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007.

305

“Liberty can only be obtained with the rifle…”
650

Making a new revolution proved arduous for the ACNR. Despite a regional
and perhaps even a sporadically present national sentiment that “there was no other
way”
651
to obtain profound political reform in Mexico (especially after the 1968 and
1971 student massacres), violent armed struggle was not the most appealing of paths.
A score of academics, Ranajit Guha and James Scott among the most influential,
have usefully reminded scholars of revolution that violent popular rebellions
represent dangerous political actions of last resort. Deadly risk accompanied rare
attempts to “turn the world upside down” or create “governments of the poor for the
poor.” “Insurgency,” thusly wrote Guha, “was a motivated and conscious
undertaking on the part of the rural masses.”
652
Like governing regimes, some
scholars (particularly sociologists) find it difficult to treat peasant rebels, to quote
Guha once again, “as an entity whose will and reason constituted the praxis called
rebellion.”
653
Outside agitators or mobilizers (to use resource mobilization jargon)
tend to attract the most attention from both governments afflicted with images of
omnipresent Cuban communists and sociologists focused on organizational process
to the detriment of historical origins. Adding to this strange assortment of
bedfellows, as sociologist Wickham-Crowley insightfully noted, a number of

650
Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses, 176.

651
Concepción Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007.

652
Guha, “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency,” 46.

653
Ibid.

306

Leninist vanguardist revolutionaries in Cold War Latin America assumed the
presence of restive peasant masses just waiting for a group of “professional
revolutionaries” to lead them. In each framework, agency is displaced from the rural
masses to outside mobilizers; thus, producing the portrait of a Pavlovian peasantry,
limited to reactive and spontaneous measures determined by empty stomachs until
the arrival of outside leadership and organization.
654

Vázquez and the ACNR failed to fully evade such short-comings. Nor did
they wholly adopt Leninist modes of organizing or implement some of the more
extreme interpretations of “foquismo” (a la Regis Debray). For Vázquez and his
ACNR guerrillas emerged from within a series of wide-ranging, yet violently
suppressed, social movements that provided them with knowledge of and intimate
connection to the rural people they wanted to lead in revolution. Years of political
organizing and consciousness-raising through the COP, ACG, and CAP predated and
set the foundation for the ACNR to obtain popular support in a new stage of armed
struggle. Schoolteachers that graduated primarily from the National Teachers
Training School in Mexico City, political ground zero for Vázquez during the 1950s,

654
I am indebted to sociologist Timothy Wickham-Crowley for the intellectual connection between
resource mobilization-minded sociologists and Leninist guerrillas. See Wickham-Crowley, Exploring
Revolution: Essays on Latin American Insurgency and Revolutionary Theory (New York: M.E.
Sharpe, 1991), esp. 3-30. Marjorie Becker takes credit for the Pavlov-State-Peasantry metaphor. See
Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire, 4. Historian Jean Meyer added another strange (yet historically
specific) bedfellow to the mix in a short essay on rural Mexican rebellions: middle-class Catholics.
Writing about the initial (failed) phases of the 1926 Cristero rebellions, Meyer described how
politically organized middle-class Catholics belonging to La Liga believed only they could organize
“hapless" but insurgent campesinos and lead them to victory in overthrowing the nascent
postrevolutionary Mexican state. See Jean Meyer, “Reflexiones sobre movimientos agrarios e
historial nacional en México,” in Prodyot Mukherjee, ed. Movimientos agrarios y cambio social en
Asia y Africa (Mexico: Colegio de México, 1974), 241-264.

307

formed the guerrilla core of the ACNR. José and Ismael Bracho, Roque Salgado,
and Fausto Avila accompanied Vázquez from ACG to ACNR days. Familial ties,
too, influenced the incorporation of schoolteachers Concepción and Filiberto Solís
during the early 1960s.
In the Guerrero countryside, older campesinos like “Mamá Lipa,” Rosendo
Radilla (disappeared by the Mexican military), Petronilo Castro (also disappeared),
and José Martinez nourished the ACG, CAP, and ACNR struggles with their
memories of Zapata, experiences during the 1910 Revolution, and/or their struggles
to consolidate Cardenismo and agrarian reform in Guerrero.
655
Radilla, in particular,
traversed a long path of political and social activism. During the 1940s, he formed
part of the Rural Defense unit that guarded coffee-producing ejidos in the Atoyac
mountains. He led independent syndical attempts to organize cafeticultores during
the 1950s and prominently participated in the 1960 anti-Caballero social movement.
As an ardent ACG militant, Radilla organized campesinos during the 1962 electoral
campaign and later worked as a peasant representative for the CAP-allied
Revolutionary Agrarian League of the South “Emiliano Zapata.”
656
Campesinos like
Radilla and “Mamá Lipa”, who experienced each instance of state repression

655
Petronilo Castro joined the 1910 Revolution at the age of 11. According to Santos Méndez, Castro
helped and materially supported both the ACNR and PDLP. José Martinez was an ex-Zapatista who
led the CAP-allied organization, the Union of Independent Sesame Producers, in 1965. Santos
Méndez, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007; José Arturo Gallegos Nájera,
La Guerrilla en Guerrero (Guadalajara: Centro de Investigaciones Histórica de los Movimientos
Sociales A.C, 2007 [2004]), 243; and, Solís Robledo and Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia, 46-
47.

656
In 1974, soldiers detained and disappeared Radilla for composing guerrilla corridos that praised the
actions of the ACNR. Tita Radilla, interview with the author, 15 May 2007.

308

alongside fellow ACG members, made the emergence and survival of the ACNR
possible.
From the end of 1968 till mid-1970, the ACNR experienced a developmental
phase best characterized as an “accumulation of forces.” The transition from a
popular front civic organization to a political-military force based on secrecy,
compartmentalization, and (most importantly) survival required a patient clandestine
restructuring of support networks. By the end of 1968, the ACNR depended heavily
on the Costa Grande organizations that previously comprised the CAP; namely, the
Union of Coffee Producers (UPC) at one time organized and led by ACNR
commando Pedro Contreras. With Contreras and the UPC, the guerrilla organization
counted on a level of cafeticultor support in the mountains above Atoyac and
potential collaborators that knew well the mountainous nearly inaccessible region.
During these last months of 1968, Vázquez and his 20 guerrillas attempted to
establish contact with Cabañas near the mountain village of Las Trincheras but failed
due to, as Bracho recalled, “the overwhelming presence of soldiers; in other words,
the objective conditions of war prevented the possibility of unification.”
657

Moreover, the guerrillas soon found themselves enmeshed in a local cacique power
struggle (uncles of Cabañas incidentally) that exposed the group’s tenuous base of
support in the Atoyac region—a base made fragile primarily by the military
presence. Offered money by one cacique to kill his rival, a man already on a list of

657
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007.

309

executions agreed upon by the ACNR, the guerrillas decided against the action most
likely fearing popular reprisal and the ever-increasing military patrols.
658

Lack of military capacity and inaction led to internal conflicts within the
ACNR.
659
Unable to assist the mountain coffee communities that sustained them
(for instance providing protection against abusive military patrols or cacique
gunmen) or continue the type of organizational political work that characterized the
CAP, divisions and indiscipline emerged. In January 1969 the ACNR convened an
assembly to debate the problems and voted to punish Abelardo Velázquez Cabañas,
Pedro and Donato Contreras Javier—all original members of the armed group that
liberated Vázquez. According to Bracho, the three challenged Vázquez for the
leadership position of the ACNR, arguing that they participated in his escape and
their coffee ejidos served as the group’s first base. Vázquez responded by asserting
that the masses related the ACNR to his leadership status forged during the past
ACG and CAP struggles. After several tense moments that witnessed the drawing of
weapons, the three challengers decided not to accept the punishment and left the
group permanently.
660
Losing their primary link to the region’s coffee producing

658
Rubio Zaldívar, Comandante Genaro Vázquez, 26-27.

659
Donato Contreras recalled an argument with Vázquez provoked by the group’s inaction. When
camped in Filo Mayor (highest point of the Sierra Madre del Sur), Contreras argued for a series of
military activities aimed at recovering money and distributing it to the impoverished peasant
communities that sustained the ACNR. Vázquez refused, arguing that the group was not militarily
prepared to engage in such actions (including a proposal to ambush military patrols). Solís Robledo
and Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia, 181-182.

660
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 15 May 2007; and, Miranda Ramírez,
La violación de los derechos humanos, 170. Donato Contreras remembered the incident differently.
He argued that Vázquez wanted to execute his brother Pedro Contreras for having an affair with a

310

communities, and thus the possibility of solidifying a support network fully invested
in guerrilla warfare, the ACNR accorded to leave the Costa Grande for Vázquez’s
hometown of San Luis Acatlán in the Costa Chica region (south of Acapulco).
661

Longtime ACG/CAP militants Antonio Sotelo and Fausto Avila joined the guerrilla
group on a permanent basis.
In contrast to the initial rural failures and internal conflicts, ACNR urban
militants managed to organize a “rearguard” supply cell in Mexico City by early
1969. Led by schoolteacher Concepción Solís Morales (Vázquez’s sister-in-law),
the urban cell was tasked with obtaining money and supplies for the main rural
“Popular Armed Nucleus” at that time in transit to the Costa Chica. According to
DFS intelligence memos, Solís Morales also passed ACNR letters from Vázquez to
leftist newspapers like ¿Por Qué?, distributed communiqués to Mexico City activists
and students, transported weapons, organized safe-houses, maintained

married woman. This incident led to a major dispute over tactics described above in fn. 72. Solís
Robledo and Cantú Lagunas, Rescate para la historia, 175-177. The three that departed attempted to
organize their own “Guerrilla Group of the South,” but failed to do so in 1969.

661
Bracho recalled that before leaving the Sierra of Atoyac, the guerrilla nucleus did engage in
“economic actions” that assisted widows and orphans of the region. José Bracho, interview with the
author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007. See also, AGN, DFS 100-10-1-69, Legajo 33, 201-202.
In this report, dated 19 March 1969, the DFS director places both the PDLP and the ACNR as
operating in the mountains above Atoyac—with both groups having recently received military
training from mysterious “northerners.” Gutiérrez, the DFS director, guessed that the northerner with
the ACNR—nicknamed “El Gaytán”—was a survivor from the 1965Madera barracks attack. It was
most likely Salvador Gaytán, a GPG member who survived the 1965 Madera barracks attack only
because his group failed to arrive in time. Gaytán confirmed his presence in late 1960s Guerrero
during a talk he gave on 5 April 2007 in Fundición, Sonora (in possession of the author).

311

“expropriated” money funds, and organized other rearguard urban cells.
662
Solís
Morales self-described
663
her role as that of a “supplier” responsible for obtaining
funds and necessary supplies for the rural ACNR. In April 1969, the urban cell
exercised one such dramatic method of procurement when at least five guerrillas
attempted to rob a Banco Mexicano Comercial in Mexico City. While three
managed to escape the ensuing gunfight, police officers immediately detained two:
Florentino Jaimes Hernández and Juan Galarza Antúnez. Both suffered brutal
torture at the infamous Military Camp Number 1 (CM1) in Mexico City. Police
officers and/or interrogators beat Galarza to death. The torture sessions produced
information that located the remaining members of the bank assault party in
Guerrero. Members of the Mexican military detained Jorge Manuel Torres, Santos
Galarza Millán, and Epifanio Avilés Rojas in May and June 1969 and sent them to
CM1. The detention of Avilés Rojas, a rural schoolteacher in Coyuca de Catalán,
inaugurated the Mexican Dirty War for he was the first disappeared.
664

662
Miranda Ramírez casted doubt on the large number of duties assigned to one militant, arguing that
the DFS fabricated some duties as to incriminate Solís Morales with more criminal charges. Miranda
Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos, 180.

663
Concepción Solís Morales, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007. In the
transcript of his “interrogation,” Jorge Mota González asserted that he worked with Solís Morales in
receiving and mimeographing communiqués received from Vázquez. He also mentioned that she sent
money, medicines, and clothes. See AGN, DGIPS box 2492, folder 1, 251-253 & 255. Mota
González was the militant that delivered money to Vázquez after his escape (in Tlacotepec) and
received a letter from Vázquez to ¿Por Qué? that explained his decision to escape prison.

664
“La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 35-36. In May 1969, imprisoned at the
infamous Lecumberri prison, Jaimes sent out a letter published in several newspapers that denounced
the murder of Galarza and defended the revolutionary acts of expropriation. He contradicted the
public “official” version that stated Galarza died of a heart attack. See AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70,
Legajo 2, 315. Interestingly, a counterinsurgency program proposed by Secretary of National
Defense General Marcelino García Barragan just days after the failed bank robbery recommended the

312

Nor was he the last. Increased military presence and continuous search-and-
destroy army patrols also motivated Vázquez to leave the Atoyac region.
Accompanied by three ACNR guerrillas, he reached the mountains north of San Luis
Acatlán in May 1969. In Iliatenco and Tlaxcalixtlahuaca the ACNR encountered a
largely indigenous population with limited prior contact or relationship to past ACG
and CAP movements. To use then-contemporary “guerrilla-speak”, the ACNR
failed to account for “objective” conditions when moving to an unknown region
embroiled in indigenous campesinos-versus-cacique conflicts “objectively” different
from other agrarian conflicts throughout Guerrero (and a region easily accessible to
the military). They also failed to consider “subjective” conditions in entering a site
previously not politically worked (“consciousness-raising”) by ACNR cadres. After
making a national call for armed revolution through a series of communiqués, local
exigencies forced Vázquez and his small remaining group to travel the mountainous
region with the grueling task of convincing impoverished communities to risk
everything in rebellion. For two months, according to the “interrogation”/torture
transcripts of Jorge Mota González (urban ACNR militant), the ACNR failed “to
enact any armed actions…walking [through various communities], staying the night

“immediate removal of the lieutenant of the military patrol [in Coyuca de Catalán] after having
proved his strong connection to the ANTUNEZ and GALARZA [sic] families…families that include
criminal relatives recently involved in the assault on an armored bank truck in Mexico City.” See
AGN, DGIPS box 549, folder 3, 3.

313

and dining in the homes of Genaro’s friends…[Vázquez] paid for the food and
lodging.”
665

Determined to implant an ACNR guerrilla foco in the region, the small group
stayed in the Costa Chica mountains nearly a year establishing an encampment near
Tlaxcalixtlahuaca.
666
In late May and June, state authorities discovered ACNR
literature that justified bank “expropriations” as revolutionary acts distributed in
front of the State Capitol in Chilpancingo and the women’s Rural Teachers School in
Palmira, Morelos (where a sister of Bracho taught).
667
Yet, Vázquez knew that the
ACNR floundered. The cultivation of popular support enacted through individual
meetings with campesinos proceeded painstakingly slow yet did provide a temporary
safe-haven from military persecution. Thus, in July, the “Political-Central Central
Directive” of the ACNR organized an assembly with the intent to re-direct the
group’s effort. A series of conclusions collectively pointed to the preeminence of
military actions over “political work with the masses” as the best method to capture
popular support and create “an Insurrectional Center” from which to spread
revolution. To that end, “solidifying a mobile Nucleus of Armed Combat,” the

665
AGN, DGIPS box 2492, folder 1, 252-253.

666
“Interrogation of Fausto Avila Juárez (a) ‘Alejandro,’” AGN, DGIPS box 2492, folder 1, 438-439.
Avila Juárez declared, presumably under torturous duress, that he joined Vázquez in the Costa Region
in 1969 “[helping him] by talking with campesinos from the region and convince them to help
Vázquez…when he had free time he taught local campesinos how to read.”

667
AGN, DFS 100-10-1-69, Legajo 33, 407; and, DFS 63-19-69, Legajo 6, 212. The Palmira
document called for students to join the ACNR as part of a broader “Popular Front of Resistance
against the government of Díaz Ordaz…and to create an armed Pueblo that is capable of confronting
the reactionary Power of the Military and Police.”

314

intense study of Marxist-Leninist literature by guerrilla combatants, and the “careful
and adequate strengthening of the supply lines between rural and urban groups”
emerged as prerequisite tasks.
668
In sum, as historian Andrés Rubio Zaldívar
perceptively suggested,
669
military actions served the purpose of rapid
territorialization; that is, the using of armed acts as a means to forge strong links
with, and obtain a degree of legitimacy from, the mountain communities. Targeting
local caciques for revolutionary “expropriations” or “execution” offered the
possibility of simultaneously obtaining local popular support and providing military
practice for the ACNR. Violence enacted against perceived enemies of the local
populace would constitute “a style of revolutionary work under our direction that is
able to elevate the struggle of the masses of workers to seek national liberation and
Socialism.”
670

The change in political direction led to the “expropriation” of funds from a
local usurer and the “revolutionary execution” of a cacique in late 1969. Yet, such
actions only recaptured the attention from local, regional and federal authorities, and
mobilized repressive state apparatuses. While the Costa Grande and Tierra Caliente
had suffered two anti-guerrilla military campaigns by the end of 1969, the Costa
Chica remained forgotten until the ACNR armed actions. The appearance of an

668
“Conclusiones llevadas a cabo por la A.C.N.R. en las Montañas del Sur,” in Aranda, Los cívicos
guerrerenses, 127-128.

669
Rubio Zaldívar, Comandante Genaro Vázquez, 29.

670
“Conclusiones llevadas a cabo por la A.C.N.R. en las Montañas del Sur,” in Aranda, Los cívicos
guerrerenses, 127-128.

315

ACNR-linked “Committee of Clandestine Struggle” in Jalisco and the armed actions
of Cabañas initially helped conceal the location of the main ACNR guerrilla unit.
671

Yet, someone revealed the location of the ACNR to local officials while Vázquez
distributed a series of communiqués during the first half of 1970 that denounced the
upcoming presidential elections as an “antidemocratic electoral farce” that conceal
“an anti-popular oligarchic [PRI] regime.”
672
Weeks after the presidential
“elections” that witnessed the ascendency of Luis Echeverría, the Mexican military
organized “Operation Friendship” in the region of Iliatenco and Tlaxcalixtlahuaca.
The “friendly” military search for Vázquez left behind a trail of torture, rape,
extrajudicial executions, and illegal detentions (see Chapter Six). Avoiding the
military operation by just days, the guerrilla group left the Costa Chica and returned
to Atoyac.
673

The scope and function of such counterinsurgent anti-guerrilla military
operations contradicted public declarations made by state and federal officials that
characterized both Vázquez and Cabañas as simple bandit-criminals. For as early as
April 1969 Secretary of National Defense General Marcelino García Barragan
declared to an assembled group of military officers in Acapulco that they faced
“rural guerrillas [distinguished] by their radical ideology…[not unique to Guerrero]

671
AGN, DGIPS box 550, folder 1.

672
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, Legajo 2, 287-291, 295-306.

673
AGN, SDN box 93, folder 279, 49-50; and, “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado,
36. Military interrogators obtained the date of Vázquez’s departure from Costa Chica residents and

316

since similar situations exist throughout great parts of national territory.”
674
General
García Barragan proceeded to suggest the use of medical battalions as a more
effective counterinsurgency technique than the deployment of “flying [rapid-
deployment] columns” that only raised “[popular] tension in the area [of operation].”
In essence, the general provided a blueprint for the type of military operations
realized in the coastal regions of Guerrero from 1968-1970: use of medical
battalions in rural communities as a way to obtain popular support (and information);
the re-organization of local Rural Defense auxiliaries suspected of collaborating with
guerrillas; the deployment of battalions to the most inaccessible points of the Sierra
Madre del Sur; the co-optation of community elders and leaders as intelligence
sources; and, the “arming and discreet supporting of the Torreblanca family of San
Jeronimo in their hostile actions against the rival Cabañas family.”
675
In concluding,
General García Barragan affirmed that “the Mexican Revolution, fortunately, was
the only vaccination against the Communist and Church viruses that bad Mexicans
tenaciously sought to infect in the consciousnesses of the poor masses.”
676

ACNR supporters Sixto Flores and Marcial Juárez through torture. For a more detailed account of the
military operations see Chapter 6; and, Baloy, La guerrilla de Genaro y Lucio, 90-94.

674
AGN, DGIPS box 549, folder 3, 1-2.

675
Ibid. The general essentially called for the arming of a paramilitary family/clan unit to combat the
Cabañas-led PDLD and the ACNR. Since early 1968, the Torreblanca and Cabañas families had
clashed over the death of a Torreblanca man—brother to the municipal president of San Jerónimo.
The family proceeded to accuse Manuel García Cabañas, municipal president of Atoyac and cousin to
Lucio Cabañas, of the murder. State threats to arrest García Cabañas produced popular outcry
throughout the coffee-producing mountain communities. See AGN, DGIPS box 473, folder 2, 379-
380, 450, 558-559.

676
AGN, DGIPS box 549, folder 3, 3-4.

317

“Operation Friendship” in the Costa Chica evinced that the upper echelons of
the Mexican military and ruling party experienced a dramatic change of attitude
between 1969 and 1970. Everyday campesinos became the “bad Mexicans” targeted
for counterinsurgent elimination regardless of constitutional rights. In his metaphor,
General García Barragan confused the malady (and what type) for the cure. For it
was that very Mexican Revolution metaphorical “vaccine”—an almost religious
campesino devotion to the Constitution and memories of popular mobilization—that
facilitated the emergence of the guerrilla ACNR when campesinos perceived its PRI
betrayal. Thus, Vázquez and the ACNR continued to enjoy rural support throughout
Guerrero despite numerous failed attempts to consolidate a guerrilla “foco” in both
the Costa Chica and Costa Grande by 1970. Yet, a logistical and political gap
separated the sort of moral authority accorded to the ACNR and the physical
manifestation of that support in the form of a broad campesino base capable of
sustaining the incipient guerrilla group. As discussed above, Vázquez and the small
number of ACNR guerrillas agreed upon military actions and “armed propaganda” as
the means through which to rapidly create such a support base before the Mexican
military forced them to leave the Costa Chica.
The ACNR guerrillas discovered a divided region rife with campesino
discontent and ire directed against the increasingly violent military actions when they
entered the Costa Grande in the fall of 1970. While tens of thousands of Mexicans
angrily jeered President Díaz Ordaz at the opening game of the 1970 World Cup in
the Azteca Stadium, soldiers violently searched for the guerillas PRI officials

318

publically claimed not to exist.
677
Under the cloak of “anti-narcotics” campaigns,
military operations terrorized municipal capitals and mountain communities with
extrajudicial assassinations, unjustified detainments, and widespread torture. Such
practices polarized communities as wealthy merchants and caciques, directly
threatened by the PDLP, tended to collaborate with the increased military presence.
Military officials also enacted the practice of using (willing and/or coerced)
campesino spies (“madrinas”) as sources of intelligence. Yet, repression provoked
heterogeneous responses, particularly when military violence directly affected all
sectors of Costa Grande society. PRI-linked rural organizations like the League of
Agrarian Communities and Campesino Unions, local deputies, and ejido
commissaries lodged persistent protests with state and federal authorities. Poor and
middling campesinos sent letters to political and military authorities essentially
begging for the return of disappeared loved ones. They also refused to vote in the
presidential elections of July 1970. Increasingly, campesinos came to support two
separate guerrilla movements as military repression intensified.
678
State terror had
thus created a political topography amenable for insurgency; a population of

677
Enrique Krauze, Mexico: Biography of Power (New York: Harper Perennial, 1998), 728; and,
Julio Scherer García and Carlos Monsiváis, Los patriotas: de Tlatelolco a la guerra sucia (Mexico:
Nuevo Siglo/Aguilar, 2004), 79-85.

678
Please see Chapter Six for more details. According to DGIPS agent “OFG,” PDLP attacks and
expropriations of wealthy coffee caciques led to the initiation of military “anti-narcotic” campaigns in
February 1970. See AGN, DGIPS box 550, folder 1. For military abuses in the Costa Grande ca.
1970, see AGN, DGIPS box 586, folder one; DGIPS box 2364, folder 1, 324-325; DGIPS box 2364,
folder 1, 556-557; and, DGIPS box 586, folder 3. Electoral abseentism was not limited to Guerrero.
According to Samuel Schmidt, Echeverría was elected by a vote of 21 percent of eligible voters with
58 percent abstaining. See Samuel Schmidt, The Deterioration of the Mexican Presidency: The
Years of Luis Echeverría (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1991), 32-33.

319

simultaneously frightened and enraged campesinos receptive to an ACNR
communiqué’s suggestion “that they denounce the bad deeds of the rich and the
imperialist authorities so that the guerrilla can dispense justice for them.”
679

Denunciation and the meting of justice comprised two constant themes in the
ACNR’s communicative efforts to convince campesinos on the necessity (and
inevitability) of armed struggle. The practice of “armed propaganda,” as a political
recruitment and persuasion method, involved (though not exclusively) the
distribution, publication, and propagation of communiqués. Throughout 1970 the
guerrilla group sent a number of documents to regional and national newspapers via
their Mexico City urban cell that touched upon a number of themes: a revolution
betrayed by the victors of 1910; exposing the “anti-national ruling oligarchic regime
allied with North American monopoly imperialists;” the farcical1970 presidential
elections as one part of a dyadic form of ruling that also included extreme violence;
the political and moral bankruptcy of the PRI and other political parties; a revisited
José Revueltas thesis that Mexico lacked a revolutionary vanguard party;
denunciations of political repression and counterinsurgent violence; and, the
necessity of armed struggle as the only path capable of guaranteeing national
liberation.
680
In these documents Vázquez, Bracho, and other ACNR authors
attempted essentially to expose the violent nakedness of the PRI regime, revealing

679
AGN, DGIPS box 550, folder 1.

680
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, Legajo 2, 301-306; and, Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses, 149-157.
The various documents are dated, respectively: February, March, and November-December 1970.

320

what they identified as the coercive and illegitimate foundations of its political
rule—that “wild zone of arbitrary, violent power” at the core of modern
sovereignties and out of popular, democratic reach described by political philosopher
Susan Buck-Morss.
681
In sum, they sought to unravel the political threads that
connected an “oppressed” nation (“the Pueblo/People”) and an oppressive PRI-state
(“the government of the rich”):
…the entire Pueblo of Mexico knows that remaining subject to a
social, political, and economic order ruled by a pro-imperialist
oligarchy of capitalists and large landowners signifies an eternal
defeat…depending on a regime that constantly betrays and sells our
national interests can lead to the loss of our nationality, our
nation…
682

Expressed in different symbolic terms, the ANCR wanted to forcibly remove
(recover?) the Mexican flag from the official PRI emblem. Anti-imperialist national
liberation provided the sole means through which to save Mexico (“patria’) from
PRI “anti-national” vendepatrias (traitors) at the service of foreign imperialists. The
theme of a revolution betrayed, so prevalent in the cívico movements of the 1960s,
thus vividly reappeared in the ACNR program yet with major differences. Ten years
of violently suppressed popular struggle in Guerrero had armed the guerrillas with a
re-interpretation of post-revolutionary Mexican history that posited the betrayal of
the Mexican Revolution not in 1960, 1962, 1966, or 1968; rather, in the genesis of
the post-revolutionary state itself:

681
Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe, 4, 5-15.

682
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, Legajo 2, 301-302.

321

…our combat (expressed with the honor, dignity and energy of free
men) responds to the exploitation and political repression that so long
has affected the working masses of the south and other regions of our
country…the assassinations of 1910 revolutionary popular leaders
Ricardo Flores Magón, Francisco Villa and Emiliano Zapata are fresh
in our memory. As are the killings of Feliciano Radilla, Rubén
Jaramillo and his family, Pedro Cortés Bustos and many other social
leaders, sacrificed by the rich rulers and their repressive apparatuses;
the genocidal repression of the railroad workers, teachers,
telegraphers, oil workers, doctors, and many more; the bloody
repression of the university and polytechnic students in 1968 and
1971; the massacres of the Guerrero Pueblo in 1960 and 1962…
683

Like the subversive plays of Rodolfo Usigli, the armed praxis of the Cristeros, or
Daniel Cosío Villegas’ 1947 article “La Crisis de México,” the ACNR offered a
potent historical critique of the PRI regime that exposed the “oligarchic dictatorial
form of its political rule…concealed by tricks and lies” and demolished foundational,
legitimizing myths.
684

Grounded in local-regional popular memories inhabited by martyred
campesino leaders and popular failures, the ACNR historical narrative
simultaneously represented a call for (justified) revolutionary action in the face of
state repression and a forceful reminder for potential revolutionaries of all stripes to
re-engage national traditions of struggle. In the only interview he granted as

683
Aranda, Los cívico guerrerenses, 171.

684
ACNR communiqué, AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, Legajo 2, 301. See also Rodolfo Usigli, “Estado
de secreto [1935]” and “El gesticulador [1938]” in Teatro Completo de Rodolfo Usigli (Mexico:
Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1997 [1963]), 351- 403, 727-802; Daniel Cosío Villegas, “La crisis de
México,” Cuadernos Americanos 32 (1947), 29-51; and, Charles A. Hale, “The Liberal Impulse:
Daniel Cosío Villegas and the Historia moderna de México,” Hispanic American Historical Review
54:3 (August 1974), 479-498.

322

guerrilla leader, Vázquez remarked to a ¿Por qué? journalist that the ACNR’s
“[political] orientation was inspired by and grounded in the concrete realities of
[Mexico], in its unresolved problems…[the ANCR] is neither pro-Soviet, pro-
Chinese or pro-Cuban but pro-Mexican [sic].” At an earlier campesino assembly
attended by the same journalist, Vázquez exhorted his audience, “to remember the
feats of Morelos, Zapata and Villa.”
685
As discussed above, the Four Point ACNR
political program was similarly couched within broad nationalist terms that spoke of
national liberation, social democracy, and the participation of campesinos, workers,
students, progressive intellectuals, and “the working masses in general.” The non-
dogmatism of Vázquez’s political thinking and his penchant for popular front
organizational structures carried over into this Marxist-Leninist guerrilla
transformation. Like in 1960 or 1962, leftist ideological purity or party orthodoxy
mattered less than the specific path needed to reach a liberatory end goal. For the
man described by his wife Consuelo Solís as “admiring Che [Guevara] but [José
María Morelos] even more,” and who read “Sentiments of a Nation” to his children,
the end goal was quite clear.
686
By the end of 1970, the overthrow of the PRI regime
via the proliferation of rural guerrilla warfare and “combat unity among
revolutionaries” comprised “the correct method of armed struggle…to achieve the

685
“Guerrillas en Guerrero,” ¿Por qué? 160 (22 July 1971), and, “Seguiremos la lucha…” ¿Por qué?
161 (29 July 1971), in Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 67-78.

686
Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007.

323

complete and definitive liberation of our Nation and a social order more just and
truly beneficial for the majority of this country.”
687

Entering into Action

During the fall of 1970, the ACNR set up camp in the mountains east of
Atoyac in a small community called El Refugio. Without the assistance of the
Contreras family in San Vicente de Benítez, Vázquez and the small number of
guerrillas elicited the support of several local families, including: the Piza Fierro, de
Jesus, Adame, Garay, and Benítez families.
688
In particular, the assistance of Samuel
Adame, local campesino leader and CCI member, proved crucial. He provided the
ACNR entrance into the region, organizing small assemblies during which he
introduced the guerrillas and exhorted campesinos to “join the cause that takes from
the rich and gives to the poor.”
689
Such negotiated support enabled the guerrillas to
operate in a mountainous area that contained small towns and hamlets, and populated

687
ACNR communiqué, AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-70, Legajo 2, 303.

688
On 30 November 1970 DGIPS agent “OFG” posted a report that alleged the members of the Piza
family from “El Refugio,” embroiled in a fight over the position of Ejido Commissary, invaded the
nearby community of “El Quemado” killing one person and injuring four others. “OFG” goes on to
list several members of the Piza family—Justino, Angel, and Ranulfo Piza—as “unconditional
elements of the group of agitators led by Lucio Cabañas, who has indoctrinated various groups of
ejidatarios of Atoyac with extreme Leftist ideologies.” It seems that “OFG” misidentified the Piza
family members as PDLP and not ACNR supporters (thought likely plausible that they supported both
groups). Angel Piza Fierro was detained and disappeared by the Mexican military in October 1971.
AGN, DGIPS box 586, folder 3.

689
This information was obtained from campesino Sulpicio de Jesús de la Cruz by military and police
interrogation through the use of torture. de Jesús was detained days after the Agustín Bautista
Cabrera kidnapping in mid-April 1971. He was later re-detained on 27 June 1972 and disappeared.
See Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos (hereafter CNDH), folder PDS/95/GRO/S00111.000,
number 162-R. (Specific case available online at:
http://www.cndh.org.mx/lacndh/informes/espec/desap70s/expedientes/RURAL/162-R.htm).

324

largely by coffee-producing campesinos amidst increased Mexican military
surveillence. Daily activities, gleaned from ACNR guerrilla Justino Piza Fierrero
through torture, also included the daily cleaning of weapons; the organizing of small
groups tasked with guarding the camp or dispensing disciplinary actions; weekly
shooting practice; and, the gathering of intelligence on military movements by
Santos Méndez, Hilario Adame, and Jorge Mota González.
690
By early December,
the group accorded to carry out the kidnapping of a local wealthy cacique with the
intention of raising monetary funds and publicity. They targeted Donaciano Luna
Radilla, manager of the Atoyac branch of the Bank of the South.
691

Dressed as soldiers and using an “expropriated” taxi to follow the bank
manager, an ACNR group dubbed the “Committee of Armed Liberation ‘General
Juan Alvarez’” (comprised by Vázquez, Bracho, Méndez, and several others)
kidnapped Luna Radilla on 29 December 1970. Days after the action, the ACNR
released a communiqué to newspapers dated 6 January 1971 and addressed “to the
People of Mexico” that explained their motivation for kidnapping Luna Radilla,
“general representative of the Bank of the South in the region and member of a group
of wealthy families.”
692
After noting that they demanded “a special tax” charged on

690
AGN, DFS 199-10-16, Legajo 4, 273, 283-304 & 318-323, in Miranda Ramírez, La violación de
los derechos humanos, 217-218.

691
“Interrogation of Jorge Mota González,” AGN, DGIPS box 2492, folder 1, 256-258.

692
What the ACNR did not mention in the communiqué was that popular versions of the 18 May 1967
Atoyac massacre—the event that forced Cabañas into the sierra—posited Luna Radilla (“Chano”) as
one of the shooters that targeted the protestors. For the popular versions see, Simón Hipólito,
Guerrero, amnistia y repression (México: Grijalbo, 1982), 42.

325

the banker’s family in exchange for his return, the authors denounced the images of
domestic tranquility exported by the PRI for international consumption. In Guerrero
reality proved different as the ACNR authors provided details on the violent
counterinsurgency campaigns launched by the military under the cover of counter-
narcotics operations. They denounced the military’s use of napalm bombs, the
assistance of “specialized American police (FBI, CIA),” and the “bestial murders
committed by the 48
th
Infantry Battalion in indigenous mountain communities of [the
Costa Chica]…Antonio Espinobarros, Irineo Juárez Castro, among others.” With
such repression causing popular suffering, the communiqué continued, “it should be
no surprise that the impoverished masses and its armed group should charge special
taxes on the same rich class that is the principal culprit of the situation that Mexico
suffers.” Should the repression continue, the authors concluded, “those of us in the
armed forces of struggle say to you [the PRI]; you will have our adequate
response.”
693

After his family paid the “special tax,” the ACNR guerrillas released an
unharmed Luna Radilla. In addition to obtaining 500,000 pesos, the ANCR also
received the desired publicity that could potentially increase the visibility and
political power of the guerrilla group beyond its meager military capacity. DFS
agents discovered the distribution of the 6 January 1971 communiqué in the
Residential Units of Tlatelolco in Mexico City and various university campuses, in

693
AGN, DGIPS box 586, folder 3; DGIPS box 2492, folder 1, 257-258; and, DFS 100-10-16-2-71,
Legajo 2, 345.

326

addition to the received media coverage.
694
Back in the Costa Grande, more military
units continued to pour into the region under the orders of new president Luis
Echeverría and his Secretary of National Defense General Hermenegildo Cuenca
Díaz. The ACNR kidnapping of Luna Radilla joined the various killings of local
caciques and “expropriations” committed by the Cabañas-led PDLP since late 1969.
By the spring of 1971, Echeverría, General Cuenca Díaz, and other high-ranking
officials realized that the Costa Grande actively and clandestinely supported two
separate guerrilla insurgencies. They deployed a multi-faceted approach that
combined constant public declarations, social works, and increased repression.
Echeverría deployed neo-populist rhetoric and promises that posited his
administration as “truly revolutionary [in contrast to] the impostor or dreamer of
revolutions; or, the anarchist, provocateur, or traitor moved by forces or interests
foreign to what we as Mexicans know.”
695
General Cuenca Díaz followed such
“revolutionary” pronouncements by ordering a “social labor” military campaign for
the Costa Grande in April 1971 described by local newspapers as vast and
unprecedented. Three hundred doctors, dentists, barbers, social workers,
veterinarians, and shoe cobblers were mobilized to the Costa Grande beginning 13

694
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-71, Legajo 2, 345; and, DFS 11-4-71, Legajo 128, 159-172.

695
1 April 1971, AGN, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 68. Interestingly, on 18 March 1971 the
Acapulco newspaper Prensa Libre published a picture of Vázquez and described the criminal
accusations against him as false: “he is not responsible for the assaults, kidnappings, and crimes…his
struggle is of another type.” DFS director Captain Luis de la Barreda, chagrined, immediately
identified and recorded the names of the newspaper’s manager and executive director. AGN, DFS
100-10-1-71, Legajo 37, 378-379.

327

April 1971.
696
The ACNR greeted the “social labor” campaign with another
kidnapping.
Many in Atoyac remembered Jorge Bautista as one of the town “rich” that
directly participated in the 18 May 1967 massacre. Many more campesinos knew
Bautista as a wealthy regional coffee planter (and dealer) unhesitant to use violence
as a method to suppress popular challenges. On 11 April 1971, the “Committee of
Armed Liberation ‘Emiliano Zapata’” expropriated sixty quintals of coffee from
Bautista and kidnapped his son, Agustín Bautista Cabrera. The same day the ACNR
cell released a letter assuming responsibility for the kidnapping, framing the action
as a response to the deeds of Jorge Bautista: “an exploitative cacique, persecutor and
assassin of campesinos; tracking guide to the military and poppy cultivator supported
by official interests.”
697
Inspiration for this action exhibited a distinctly campesino
source in which Bautista represented caciques throughout Guerrero and Mexico.
Targeting a specific and perceived class enemy of the cafeticultores that supported
them in the Atoyac mountains allowed the ACNR to both present their analysis of
national campesino exploitation and posit their group as a primarily rural
organization. As such, the act aimed at re-establishing contact (if not at least
support) with campesino networks severed by military repression and the necessarily
clandestine operating nature of the guerrilla group. After accusing Bautista for the
recent murders of six campesinos in the communiqué, the authors directly called

696
AGN, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 92-93.

697
ACNR communiqué, 11 April 1971, in Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses, 161-162.

328

upon “poor campesinos” “to maintain alive the ideals of Zapata to achieve liberty
and justice for the People…a goal possible through Revolutionary Armed Struggle
[sic], the only path left to the People that for so long has been tricked and their rights
trampled upon.” To ensure the safe return of Agustín Bautista, they demanded an
undisclosed monetary sum, threatening to kill the son if the family refused.
Bautista’s lifeless body appeared days later.
698

The Bautista kidnapping, acccording to historian Andrés Rubio Zaldívar, was
Mexico’s first “formal political kidnapping” due to the widespread national media
diffusion it received and Jorge Bautista’s political connections (he later became
minister of communications).
699
Furthermore, the act undermined the “social labor”
aspect of the military’s counterinsurgency campaign designed only days prior to the
kidnapping. Days before the abduction on 30 March 1971, General Cuenca Díaz
wrote that the “criminal groups” (re: ACNR and PDLP) “did not represent a threat
from a military perspective…but a general plan designed to impulse the state
economy through literacy programs, electrification, the diffusion of potable water,
medical assistance, and a reduction of foodstuff prices…aims to undermine the
motivations of the supposed movement of bandits.”
700
Yet, the killing of Bautista
transformed “Operation Spider Web” into a search-and-destroy campaign that

698
Ibid; and, AGN, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 102-104 & 170-173. See also, Bellingeri, Del
agrarismo armado, 144-145.

699
Rubio Zaldívar, El comandante Genaro Vázquez Rojas, 36.

700
AGN, SDN box 93, folder 279, 26-31; and, SDN box 93, folder 286, 3.

329

targeted real and imagined supporters of the guerrilla groups. Recently declassified
daily reports confirm the detention of dozens of Costa Grande residents from April to
June 1971, including a number of subsequently disappeared campesinos.
701
Certain
last names—Cabañas, Barrientos, Fierro, and de Jesús—practically ensured
detention. Military forces arrested the father of Vázquez, the ardent Priísta Alfonso
Vázquez, when the latter conducted business at the Atoyac offices of the Bank of the
South.
702
The widespread repression and intensified military operations forced the
ACNR to flee the region, traveling through the Sierra Madre del Sur to the Tierra
Caliente, Mexico City, and ending at the home of Vázquez’s in-laws in the state of
Hidalgo.
703
Cabañas and the PDLP, too, felt the effect of “Operation Spider Web.”
During the Bautista kidnapping, the PDLP camp was located near the ACNR base:

701
AGN, SDN box 93, folder 286, 3-65. Such documents, usually addressed to the military leaders in
Mexico City like General Cuenca Díaz, and political leaders like Attorney General Mario Moya
Palencia, also indicated strict orders banning communication with the media or local authorities. The
latter was ordered because “some local authorities have familial or friendship links with members of
the gangs…[thus] no information will be provided to them” (7-8). Some state government leaders did
disagree with the illegal character of such operations. In late April DGIPS agent “OFG” reported
divisions between state police forces and the state Attorney General’s office, whose head, “Salvador
Castro Villalpando, has been demonstrating partiality and favor to those recently detained.” See
AGN, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 194-195.

702
José Bracho, interview with the author, 9 March 2007; AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-71, Legajo 3, 15;
and, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 487. Alfonso Vázquez was taken to Military Camp Number 1 in
Mexico City where he spent more than three months, returning to Atoyac in September. Bracho’s
brother, Ismael (also a rural schoolteacher and cafeticultor union leader), was detained during this
time. See AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-71, Legajo 3, 157.

703
“Interrogation of Jorge Mota González,” AGN, DGIPS box 2492, folder 1, 259-261; “Interrogation
of Raúl Pano Mercado,” DFS 100-10-16-2-71, Legajo 4, 279-280; and, DFS 100-10-16-2-71, Legajo
5, 1-3.

330

“we were on the other side [of the River Santiago] in La Pedregosa…[later
experiencing] the persecution.”
704

The ACNR returned to their Costa Grande base in El Refugio sometime in
early May 1971. Yet, the continued arrests and torture interrogations of ACNR
supporters consistently placed the small group in peril. After a small wedding
celebration on 13 May 1971, for instance, soldiers managed to encircle El Refugio
effectively trapping the guerrillas. The ensuing battle left a local ACNR supporter
dead but allowed the group to escape the military operation. Harassed by bomb-
dropping army helicopters and foot patrols for eight days, the ACNR abandoned
their guerrilla camp and continued moving northward into the most inaccessible
section of the Atoyac mountains.
705
With the rural ACNR wing continually on the
run, their Mexico City urban cell under the command of Concepción Solís re-entered
into action. At the end of May, the 9-10 person cell—“Urban Commando 22
April”—composed by teachers and university students assaulted an “Azteca de
México” commercial store in Mexico City, taking some 78,000 pesos.
Demonstrating what ex-ACNR guerrilla José Bracho described as the guerrilla
group’s “capacity for rural, urban, and sub-urban mobility of action,” the urban cell

704
Suárez, Lucio Cabañas, 62, cited in Miranda Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos, 218-
219.

705
Miranda Ramírez, El otro rostro de la guerrilla, 113-114; “La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero,”
FEMOSPP Filtrado, 39-40; and, AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-71, Legajo 3, 19. The last document, dated
3 May 1971, quoted a Lieutenant Coronel claiming to have discovered the ACNR camp and
mentioned they would locate it the next day with the use of helicopters “[after which] they will begin
to conduct massive detentions of those persons named by prisoners in Chilpancingo and Air Force
Base Number 7 in Pie de la Cuesta.”

331

struck again weeks later attempting to rob a taxi revenue collecting site that shared
office space with the Mexico City PRI committee.
706
One member failed to escape
the assault and subsequently turned in the rest of the urban cell after a number of
torture sessions. All suffered excruciating torture and interrogation led by DFS agent
Miguel Nazar Haro—a man remembered equally for his cold sadism as for his steely
blue piercing eyes. By July 1971, the urban wing of the ACNR collapsed.
707

Meanwhile, in the mountains above Atoyac, military units persisted in their
persecution of Vázquez and the few remaining ACNR guerrillas. In late June near
the rural hamlet of San Vicente de Jesús, soldiers surprised the camped guerrillas
who managed to escape after a brief gun battle. While Vázquez and four others
made their way back to El Refugio, soldiers detained five campesinos from the
region accused of supporting both the ACNR and PDLP. Contrary to local
testimonies and internal state documents, military correspondence subsequently
noted that the five detained campesinos—Eusebio Arrieta Memije, Miguel Cadena
Diego, Cresencio Calderón Laguna, José Ramírez Samaycón, and Inocencio
Calderón—died in combat. All five men, disappeared to this day, joined the ranks of
an increasing number of casualties victim to the daily realization of “Operation

706
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007. For a particularly
harrowing description of the torture suffered under Nazar Haro, reminiscent of World War II Nazi
tortures suffered by Jewish women, see Castellanos, México armado, 128-129.

707
Concepción Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007.

332

Spider Web.”
708
In early July, soldiers detained nine campesinos in El Refugio after
the ACNR left the region and most likely headed to the safety of proletarian
neighborhoods in Acapulco. Allegedly finding high-powered rifles and leftist
literature in several El Refugio homes, General Cuenca Díaz identified the
campesinos as “common bandits that operated in the Costa Grande.”
709
The prose of
counterinsurgency consistently emitted by Cuenca Díaz and the Secretariat of
National Defense, one that criminalized the ACNR and denied the existence of
campesino guerrillas, provided an effective counterbalance to ACNR communiqués.
Moreover, President Echeverría’s recent announcement of a “democratic aperture”
beginning throughout the country after the 10 June 1971 student massacre begged
the following question: how could guerrillas exist in an already “revolutionary”
nation experiencing a process of democratization? On 22 July, state governor Israel
Nogueda Otero unequivocally retorted to local newspapers: “the guerrillas don’t
exist…when you present me with pictures of guerrillas training in El Paraíso, San
Vicente de Benítez or other towns, then I will believe that they exist.”
710

A beleaguered ACNR provided a forceful and much publicized response a
day later through the leftist journal ¿Por qué?. For five days sometime in June, the

708
“La Guerra Sucia en Guerrero, FEMOSPP Filtrado, 40; Comisión Nacional de Derechos Humanos
[hereafter CNDH], Informe especial sobre las quejas en materia de desapariciones forzadas
ocurridas en la década de los 70 y principios de los 80 [hereafter Informe especial] (México, 2001),
case numbers 014-R, 047-R, 048-R, 235-R, and 407-R.

709
AGN, SDN box 91, folder 276, 16.

710
“Versión oficial: No hay guerrillas,” El Trópico, 21 July 1971, reproduced in AGN, DGIPS box
1195B, folder 3, 383-384.

333

guerrilla group hosted a ¿Por qué? journalist that attended campesino assemblies,
chronicled internal guerrilla life, and interviewed Vázquez. Published as a three-part
series that extended from late July to early August, the report exposed the existence
of “Guerrillas in Guerrero” to a national audience.
711
Beyond the limited military
capacities of the ACNR, the reports catapulted Vázquez and the group into the
national spotlight. The ACNR became the revolutionary guerrilla vanguard of a new
Mexican revolution. Vázquez’s interview allowed the guerrilla leader to reconstruct
the historical trajectory of the guerrilla movement, beginning with the cívico
movement of 1960, as the legitimate social expression of repeatedly repressed
popular movements. Explaining the raison d'être of the ACNR as a political option
of last resort “after struggling through all possible and legal forms” debunked state
declarations by simultaneously demonstrating the political (versus criminal) and
organic (versus “outside” communist) origins of the guerrilla movement.
712
In
addition to the interview, photographs included in the reporting revealed a small but
determined campesino guerrilla force able to travel throughout the mountains of
Guerrero with the active support of a peasantry weary of repression and exploitation.
Decades before the Chiapas rebels, the ¿Por qué? reports comprised a guerrerense
version of “Ya Basta [Enough]!”
The journalistic exposure also enabled the ACNR to diffuse a series of
political arguments, namely justifying the necessity (and primacy) of rural guerrilla

711
The articles are reproduced in Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 67-83.

712
Ibid, 71.

334

warfare in the national liberation of Mexico; the disqualifying of leftists attracted by
pronouncements of “democratic aperture” and critical of armed struggle; and, the
undermining of Echeverría’s self-styled neo-populist government. Vázquez must
have realized that Echeverría’s recent comments about initiating a national
“democratic aperture” and programs that promised the second coming of agrarian
reform
713
could further divide an already disarrayed and fractured Mexican Left.
714

Moreover, the re-initiation of state revolutionary rhetoric and practice (in the form of
increased public-social spending or land redistribution, for example) potentially
undermined the historical and ideological foundations upon which the ACNR armed
struggle was based. Vázquez thus used the interview as an opportunity to expose the
rural, violent underpinnings of Echeverría’s “democratic opening” and criticize
leftists attracted to the allure of democratic promises. After describing how the
Mexican military violently organized strategic hamlets in the Costa Chica, the
ACNR leader described the self-proclaimed revolutionary nationalism of Echeverría
as false: “Nothing exists concretely, in his actions...an absolute gap exists between

713
Schmidt, The Deterioration of the Mexican Presidency, 71; Castellanos, México armado, 172;
and, Américo Saldívar, “Una decada de crisis y luchas (1969-1978),” in México, un pueblo en la
historia Tomo 4, ed. Enrique Semo (Mexico: Nueva Imagen/Universidad Autónoma de Puebla,
1982), 219-220. Echeverría expressed the “democratic aperture” comments during the summer of
1971. Earlier that year in April, the Echeverría administration promulgated the New Federal Law of
Agrarian Reform (that replaced the previous Agrarian Code passed in 1942). Echeverría also
released a number of students jailed for the 1968 movement and two important labor leaders
imprisoned since the 1958-1959 national strikes: Valentín Campa and Demetrio Vallejo.

714
One particularly important example of leftist division occurred in September and December 1970
when dozens of Communist Youth leaders and members left the PCM to begin the work of organizing
urban guerrilla cells. Two Communist Youth leaders, Ignacio Salas Obregón and Raúl Ramos Zavala,
would play key ideological and organizational roles in the later founding of the guerrilla Communist
League 23 of September (Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre). See Castellanos, México armado, 165-
230; Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 159-172; and, Carr, Marxism and Communism, 266-271.

335

what he says and what he does.”
715
With “reformists” next in the crosshairs, he
repeated his wide-ranging call for national revolutionary unity—under the broad and
non-sectarian Four-Point ACNR banner—while concurrently excluding those leftists
who disagreed with violent rebellion as a political option. Political pragmatism and
ideological flexibility did not extend to the question of praxis: “those [leftists who
support Echeverria] do so by convincing themselves without concrete evidence
gleaned from objective reality…we reject the hypothetical, the abstract.” The
ACNR, Vázquez concluded, desired to form alliances “with the sincere nationalist
who maintains a combative political position and does not sign secret pacts or
treaties [with the government].”
716

With publicity and political capital came increased state repression and
surveillance for ACNR militants. Throughout the summer of 1971 military
detachments combed the small network of coffee-producing communities between
Atoyac and San Vicente de Benítez that supported the ACNR since 1970. In late
August, Vázquez convened a small assembly during which he allowed most of the
guerrilla group to disband and return to their communities. Spending only a few
more days in the Costa Grande, the ACNR leader and 3-4 guerrillas (including
Bracho and Samuel Adame) permanently left the region headed north for Iguala.
717

715
Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 78-79.

716
Ibid, 80-81.

717
Miranda Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos, 256-261. Army intelligence sources
seemingly anticipated the ACNR’s move out of the Costa Grande. An “extra-urgent” telegram sent
by Cuenca Díaz to the commanding generals of Guerrero’s military zones on 19 August 1971 reported

336

In light of the increased persecution led by the Mexican military, Iguala represented
a relative safe-haven for the ACNR guerrillas. Bracho, Vázquez’s second-in-
command, described the city and surrounding communities as “a zone organized and
won over by the cívicos and [still] possessed a solid political structure capable of
helping the ACNR.” An ACG and CAP political mainstay throughout the 1960s, the
region offered logistical support, safety, militants, and potential kidnapping
targets.
718
After Bracho recruited two local rural schoolteachers in October 1971,
Arturo Miranda Ramírez and Gregorio Fitz García, the reconstituted guerrilla group
selected a new target. “The idea of kidnapping this man,” Bracho recalled, “was to
force the government into presenting disappeared detainees…alive.”
719
The
kidnapping operation, in other words, would serve as a guerrilla response to state
terror.
On the evening of 26 November 1971, the (seemingly always) monotone
Jacobo Zabludowsky, Mexico’s most watched news anchor, read a communiqué
from the “Armed Committee of Liberation ‘Vicente Guerrero’” that announced the
kidnapping of Dr. Jaime Castrejón Díez. Described in the communiqué as “rich
owner of the Coca-Cola factories in Acapulco, Iguala, and Taxco, rector of the State

that “new intel” located Vázquez north of the Costa Grande region (heading toward the state capital of
Chilpancingo). AGN, SDN box 91, folder 276, 106.

718
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007.

719
Ibid; Arturo Miranda Ramírez, interview with the author, Chilpancingo, Guerrero, 14 May 2007;
and, Miranda Ramírez, La violación de los derechos humanos, 260. Miranda Ramírez and Fitz García
were tasked with preparing the group’s escape from the región after the kidnapping. They
subsequently obtained a safe house in Cuernavaca.

337

University of Guerrero, and noted member of the pro-imperialist oligarchy that
governs [Mexico],” the ACNR guerrillas demanded the release of nine ACNR
comrades “to be sent to a country of their choice:” Florentino Jaimes, Mario
Menéndez, Demóstenes Onofre, Concepción Solís, Ceferino Contreras, Antonio
Sotelo, Rafael Olea, Santos Mendéz, and Ismael Bracho. They also demanded that
state authorities present before judicial courts a group of disappeared campesinos
accused of participating with the ACNR.
720
Finally, the family of Castrejón Díez
was to provide 2.5 million pesos as a ransom fee, “money that will go to the victims
of state repression.” Such an act, the authors asserted, “constitutes the armed
response from the People’s forces against the grave and criminal repression
exercised in the southern region of our Nation by police and army…and the
indescribable tortures suffered by political prisoners.”
721
Newspapers throughout the
country published the ACNR communiqué the next morning.
Days earlier on 19 November when Castrejón Díez, his wife, and driver
traveled on the Taxco-Chilpancingo road early in the morning, four ACNR guerrillas
dressed in military uniforms intercepted the car and kidnapped the doctor (also rector
of the state university, former municipal president of Taxco, and close to

720
These included campesinos from the Costa Chica, Costa Grande, and at least one schoolteacher:
José Garay (disappeared in 1974), Francisco Garay, Sixto Flores, Cliserio de Jesús, Efrén Gutiérrez,
Miguel García Martínez, José Ramírez, Crecencio Calderón (disappeared), Mellado Martínez, Juan de
Jesús, Hilda Flores, Eusebio Armenta (disappeared), Marcos Saldaña, Angel Piza (disappeared), and
Justino Piza. See Alberto López Limón, “Concentrado General Desaparecidos [Excel Worksheet],”
FEMOSPP Filtrado.

721
Aranda, Los cívicos guerrerenses, 167-168; and, AGN, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 654-659. See
also, Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado, 148-149.

338

Echeverria).
722
The kidnapping provoked a national media frenzy with government
officials denouncing the “criminal act” committed by “cow-thieves and bandits”
motivated solely by monetary considerations. Governor Nogueda placed the blame
not on guerrillas but on “simple bandits”—claims seconded by military
authorities.
723
Amidst the frantic media coverage and increased military operations
in the mountains south of Iguala, the ACNR guerrillas established contact with the
doctor’s family on 24 November. By the time Zabludowsky read the famous
communiqué on the evening of 26 November, the Castrejón family was moving the
ransom money to a chosen mediator: Bishop Sergio Méndez Arceo, the liberation
theologian of Cuernavaca. The bishop paid the ransom money the next day while
government officials prepared the departure of nine ACNR militants to Cuba.
Castrejón safely returned to his home on 1 December and the freed ACNR guerrillas
arrived in Cuba. According to journalist and historian Laura Castellanos, a “guerrilla
group had obligated the government to free political prisoners and transport them
safely to another country” for the first time in national history.
724

While the Castrejón kidnapping produced important tangible results (and
represented the most important armed action of the ACNR), it failed to stop state
terror and persecution in Guerrero. On the contrary, military units and DFS agents

722
AGN, DFS 80-9-71, Legajo 1, 1; DGIPS box 1195B, folder 3, 624-626; SDN box 122, folder 371,
3; and, Castellanos, México armado, 132.

723
El Día, 22 November; El Sol de México, 24 November 1971; El Día, 27 November 1971; and, El
Sol de México, 1 December 1971, all in Ortíz, Genaro Vázquez, 91, 100, 109-110 & 146.

339

intensified counterinsurgency operations that disrupted ACNR support networks and
forced Vázquez to leave the state. With the help of the longtime cívico Elpidio
Ocampo Mancilla (detained and disappeared in February 1972), the small remaining
group made their way to Mexico City via the state of Puebla.
725
They eventually
reached the safe-house in Cuernavaca at the end of December but DFS agents
remained close on the trail having found the car used in the Castrejón kidnapping in
Mexico City. Torturing the car owner, Vicente Irais Sánchez, led agents to a number
of other ACNR militants closely linked to Vázquez in the days before and after the
Castrejón abduction.
726
With militants coerced into providing information under
torture, Vázquez and Bracho (along with two female schoolteachers) opted to leave
Cuernavaca for the safety of Guerrero’s mountains. Selecting to enter the state
through the minimally guarded border with Michoacán, the ACNR leader and his
trusted lieutenant picked a rather inexperienced driver to take them back to the
coastal mountains. On 1 February 1972, the five-person group set out from Mexico
City. That same day, Vázquez’s wife Consuelo Solís gave an exclusive interview to
Excélsior after spending three days illegally detained with her daughter at the CM1.

724
Castellanos, México armado, 133; José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9
March 2007; and, AGN, DGIPS box 1195B, folder 4, 3, 6-9.

725
The former police chief of Iguala in 1961-1962 after the fall of Caballero Aburto, Ocampo was
detained on 20 January 1972 in Puebla. He was last seen alive at the Military Camp Number One in
February 1972. According to both Concepción and Consuelo Solís, the latter (widow of Vázquez)
saw Ocampo while both were detained at the military camp. Concepción Solís, interview with the
author, Mexico City, 25 May 2007; and, Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30
May 2007.

726
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007; and, Miranda Ramírez,
El otro rostro, 67-69.

340

A saddened and frightened Solís prophetically told the reporter: “[Vázquez] will die
for his struggle…I am resigned that I have lost him, that I will never see him
again…and I am preparing my children for the possibility that their father will soon
be a dead man.”
727

Conclusion: “No one died in the accident”

Bracho recounted the final moments of the ACNR leader and, subsequently,
the ACNR:

…we took the female schoolteachers to lessen any suspicions…a car
with only three men would arouse too much suspicion plus one of the
teachers was friends with a priest near Morelia that had agreed to
house us on the way to Guerrero…we stopped in Toluca to fill the car
with gasoline but we felt that a car was following us…so we left the
city headed to Morelia…around midnight or one in morning we
reached a place with many trees, cold, and with seemingly endless
curves…Genaro thought we could reach Morelia and then the small
town of Ipana [sic] where the priest lived…it was my turn to sleep
since we took turns. I was seated in the passenger seat while Genaro
was sitting in between the schoolteachers in the back…suddenly the
crash woke me from my sleep. I felt the crash, I felt something hot
cloud my vision…I turned around to see Genaro…he was slumped
over, along with the teachers. They did not demonstrate visible signs
of life but Genaro was breathing…no one died in the accident…not
Genaro or the schoolteachers…when I got out of the car to help
Genaro he was alive.
728

727
Excélsior, 1 February 1972, quoted in Castellanos, México armado, 135; and, Consuelo Solís,
interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007.

728
José Bracho, interviews with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March & 15 May 2007.

341

The automobile that transported Vázquez, Bracho, and three others crashed
during the early hours of 2 February 1972 on the “Road of a Thousand Peaks” near
the city of Morelia. Driving inexperience, possibly the lack of sleep, and a
ridiculously difficult road with many curves all contributed to Salvador Flores Bello
losing control of the automobile and crashing into a bridge eave. Vázquez and the
two schoolteachers, María Aguilar Martínez and Blanca Ledesma Aguilar, were
taken a Morelia hospital while Flores Bello and Bracho escaped separately into the
surrounding forest. Military authorities arrested the schoolteachers hours later,
taking them and Vázquez’s cadaver to Morelia’s Military Hospital. They
promulgated an official version describing the death of the ACNR leader: “at 1:30
am today on the México-Nogales road near the town of Bajúmparo, Michoacán, a car
accident occurred in which a Dodge crashed into a bridge, resulting in the injuries of
two women…one man died, he being Genaro Vázquez Rojas, identified by a
wedding ring.”
729
Military and state police also recovered a cache of weapons,
ammunition, homemade bombs, leftist literature, documents, and a tape recorder.
More importantly, they obtained large sums of money and a diary that contained the
names and addresses of Vázquez’s associates. Authorities captured Bracho two days
later, severely injured and in need of medical attention.
730

729
AGN, DFS 100-10-16-2-72, Legajo 5, 107; and, DGIPS box 673, folder 2. The initials GVR were
engraved on the wedding ring found on Vázquez. Consuelo Solís told me that the jeweler (in 1958)
had mistakenly engraved the couple’s wedding rings, switching the rings with the appropriate
engraved initials. Consuelo Solís, interview with the author, Mexico City, 30 May 2007.

730
José Bracho, interview with the author, Acapulco, Guerrero, 9 March 2007; and, “La Guerra Sucia
en Guerrero,” FEMOSPP Filtrado, 47. Some of the literature captured by the military included the

342

Yet, surviving ACNR members never accepted the official version. In the
interview cited above, Bracho remains convinced that soldiers killed Vázquez by
striking him in the head with a rifle butt (indeed, the official report describes a
fractured cranium as cause of death)—an argument strengthened by the fact that only
the ACNR leader died during the accident. Flores Bello and Consuelo Solís have
expressed similar sentiments, arguing that the military killed Vázquez presumably on
orders given at the upper echelons of the PRI. “Genaro did not die in an accident,
my husband was killed,” Solís remarked in 2007.
731
As early as two days after the
automobile accident, students from the combative University of Michoacán in nearby
Morelia spread “rumors” (according to DFS agents) that “members of the military
killed Vázquez…they [student organization] argued that they were prevented from
seeing the cadaver in order to conceal wounds caused by gunfire.”
732
State officials
and military authorities moved quickly in an attempt to quell doubts in the aftermath
of the accident. On 3 February a military convoy transported the cadaver from
Morelia through the Tierra Caliente while one hundred soldiers from the 48
th

Infantry Battalion moved into San Luis Acatlán to ensure “security.” The convoy