Lázaro Cárdenas

Lázaro Cárdenas (born May 21, 1895, Jiquilpan, Mexico—died October 19, 1970, Mexico City) was the president of Mexico (1934–40), noted for his efforts to carry out the social and economic aims of the Mexican Revolution. He distributed land, made loans available to peasants, organized workers’ and peasants’ confederations, and expropriated and nationalized foreign-owned industries.

Cárdenas was largely of Indian descent. After a rudimentary education, he received his first job in a local branch of the Public Revenue Office.

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Mexico: Resurgence under Cárdenas

In February 1913 President Francisco Madero, who had led the struggle to overthrow the long dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, was taken prisoner and assassinated on the orders of the rebellious general Victoriano Huerta, who now seized control of the government. Huerta’s repressive military dictatorship provoked civil war almost immediately, and Venustiano Carranza headed the new revolutionary forces. At age 18, Cárdenas joined a branch of the revolutionary army led by General Guillermo García Aragón, and within a year he had risen to the rank of captain. When the revolutionary forces split into opposing factions, he remained loyal to Carranza, whose army triumphed in 1920. In that year Cárdenas was appointed general, the highest rank in the Mexican army, and continued to participate in military campaigns until 1929.

Like most of the revolutionary military leaders, General Lázaro Cárdenas was also active politically, and in 1928, at age 33, he was elected governor of his native state of Michoacán. He served in that position for a full term, until 1932. Cárdenas also played an important role in forming a nationwide party to reinforce the revolutionary regime. Under the leadership of former president Plutarco Elías Calles, in office from 1924 to 1928, the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR) was launched in 1929, and in the following year Governor Cárdenas was chosen to be the party’s president. Cárdenas worked hard to transform the PNR from a loose federation of state parties, each led by a military-political caudillo (boss), into a truly national party and a major element of stability in the revolutionary regime. Cárdenas was minister of the interior for six weeks in 1931 and minister of war and marine for five months in 1933. It was from the latter job that he retired to become the PNR’s candidate for president in the 1934 election.

Cárdenas turned out to be an extraordinary presidential candidate. Although his election was assured, he spent the year between his nomination and polling day carrying out an intensive campaign. He visited virtually every city, town, and village in the country, meeting with local leaders and ordinary citizens and building up an extensive personal following in all parts of the country. During this campaign, he made clear his intention to carry out PNR’s six-year plan of social and economic reform.

Once elected president, Cárdenas moved cautiously at first. The army, the civil administration, and much of the political structure of the regime remained under the control of former president Calles, who had wielded vast influence while in power. During his first year in office, President Cárdenas spent much of his time establishing his own influence in these branches of the administration. Finally, he felt strong enough to have Calles sent into exile in the United States in 1936.

As president, Cárdenas carried out a wide range of reforms. Under the agrarian reform program, he distributed nearly twice as much land to peasants as had all of his predecessors combined, such that by the end of his administration about half of the country’s cultivated land was held by previously landless farmers. He also extended the services of government banks so that the peasants who had received land under the reform could borrow money. In an effort to provide a political base for the land-redistribution program, he organized all of its beneficiaries in a new National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesina, or CNC). This was but one more step in strengthening the general political structure of his new regime. Another major step in this direction was taken early in 1936 when most of the country’s dispersed central labour groups were organized into the Confederación de Trabajadores de Mexico, which, for the next generation, continued to represent at least half of the country’s organized workers.

Cárdenas also reorganized the government party. In 1938 a national convention restructured the party and renamed it the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM). Whereas in the past only government employees and aspiring politicians were members of the party, the new organizational scheme allowed mass groups to join the PRM directly. Four “sectors” of the party were established: labour, peasant, “popular,” and “military.” Most national labour groups were affiliated with the first; the CNC constituted the second; a variety of middle-class groups made up the third; and the armed forces were incorporated into the last. In the next administration the military sector was suppressed, and since then the military role in Mexican politics has been reduced considerably.

The Cárdenas administration was best known outside Mexico for its efforts to expropriate foreign-owned industries. In 1937 the government expropriated the nation’s principal railways, and in March 1938 President Cárdenas signed a decree nationalizing the country’s oil industry. After short-lived experiments of putting both of these industries under the control of their workers’ unions, they were placed under autonomous public corporations, which were to function more or less like any other large private industry.

When his term in office came to an end, President Cárdenas presided over the election of his successor, General Manuel Ávila Camacho. He intended to withdraw from active political life. With the outbreak of World War II, however, in which Mexico became an active participant early in 1942, Cárdenas returned to public office. He served as minister of national defense from 1943 to 1945, and in the last year of his term he was made commander in chief of the Mexican army. He retired once again late in 1945.

For the following 16 years, he held no public office. In 1961, however, Cárdenas became the executive member of the Commission of the Balsas River Valley, which ran one of the country’s major regional electrification and development agencies, in the state of Guerrero. His sharply diminished responsibilities notwithstanding, he remained a major figure in national politics. He became the symbol of the left in the government party, which was renamed the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1946. He remained the major supporter of the cooperative type of agrarian reform and the chief opponent of U.S. economic and political influence in Mexico. Cárdenas never withdrew from the government party, although he continued to support alternative political organizations. In the early 1960s he sponsored a rival group to the CNC, the Independent National Peasant Confederation (Confederación Nacional Campesina Independiente), and patronized—but never joined—a left-wing political coalition, the National Liberation Movement.

After the victory of the Fidel Castro revolution in Cuba in 1959, Cárdenas became the most forceful ally of the Cuban revolutionaries in Mexico. Basically, however, Cárdenas’s political influence substantially declined during the last years of his life. Nevertheless, he remained a highly controversial figure and a rallying point for those who were critical of the policies of succeeding administrations.