Plutarco Elías Calles

Mexican revolutionary and political figure Plutarco Elías Calles came from dire poverty and a dysfunctional family, his father was a severe alcoholic who never married his mother, and he got involved in politics at an early age. A supporter of reformist President Francisco I. Madero, who appointed him Commissioner of Police, Calles took to politics like a duck to water, and it wasn't long before he had risen up through the ranks to become an army general. He was commander of the federal army in his home state of Sonora during the Mexican Revolution, and his forces defeated those of another Mexican revolutionary, Pancho Villa, at the Battle of Agua Prieta in 1915. He was eventually made governor of Sonora and gained a reputation as a fervent reformer, concentrating especially on the rights of workers, he gave them the right to collective bargaining, which they never had, and instituted a social security program, among other things. However, his reformist policies incurred the wrath of Sonora's wealthy and powerful landowners, known as "hacendados", and their allies in the upper echelons of the Catholic Church, all of whom fought his efforts at every turn. Eventually relations between Calles and the Church deteriorated to the point where he expelled all Catholic priests from Sonora. In 1919 Calles was appointed Secretary of Commerce, Industry and Labor by President Venustiano Carranza. Unfortunately for Carranza, Calles paid him back by allying himself with Gen. Álvaro Obregón, who overthrew Carranza the next year. Obregon thanked Calles for his support by naming him head of the Interior Ministry, the agency whose responsibilities included internal security and intelligence gathering. Calles used his position to secure the support of organized labor for the government, and to that end allied himself with the Laborist Party. In 1924 Calles ran for President and won. As president he established several banks whose sole purpose was to help the poorest of the country's campesinos (farmers) and peasants. He also founded the Banco de Mexico, which eventually became the country's largest bank. A trip to Europe exposed him to the policies of the "social democracy" movement, and when Calles returned to Mexico one of his first acts was to push for land reform. It was a fact of life in Mexico that almost all of its land was owned by a small number of extremely wealthy and powerful families (the Terrazas family, for instance, owned more than one million acres in Chihuahua state alone), which resulted in a virtually feudal system of sharecropping and near slavery for most of the rest of the people. Calles' government managed to get foreign banks and countries to forgive some of Mexico's crushing debt. He also reformed the country's civil and criminal codes. Calles' administration came into conflict with the US government on several issues, one of them relating to the large holdings held by American oil companies. Mexican law stated that all minerals and other valuable substances under the soil belonged to the state, which meant that underground oil reserves were under the control of the Mexican government rather than the oil companies; they didn't like that a bit, since it could conceivably give the government justification for nationalization of the country's oil reserves. Calles announced that he intended to enforce that part of the Mexican legal code, which other Mexican governments had not done, and reaction from American government officials was immediate, he was branded a Communist by the American ambassador and the Secretary of State threatened an invasion of Mexico if the law, known as Article 27, was enforced. In 1927 Calles' government canceled the operating licenses of oil companies that refused to comply with Article 27, and there was talk of war in Washington circles. However, when the ultra-right-wing American ambassador to Mexico, a political appointee, was replaced by a more experienced diplomat who began negotiations with Mexico on the subject, tensions eased and an agreement acceptable to both sides was reached. Calles' old nemesis, the Catholic Church, was still causing trouble for him, however. In 1926 he decided to put an end to his problems with them once and for all and had legislation passed called "The Law Reforming the Penal Code" but was commonly known as "The Calles Law". Among other things, it deprived the Church of the right to own property (its considerable landholdings were a source of much of its revenue), outlawed religious orders and exempted the clergy from many rights enjoyed by Mexican citizens, such as trial by jury and the right to vote. The Church, on its part, noted that Calles was a Freemason and accused him and his administration of being involved in a Freemason conspiracy to destroy the Church. This campaign struck a chord in deeply religious Mexico, especially in the more conservative areas, the equivalent of the US "Bible Belt" in the South, and in 1926 a revolt known as The Cristero War broke out. The fighting was marked by atrocities on both sides, with, as usual, innocent civilians bearing the brunt of most of them. It was estimated that about 100,000 people died in the fighting before a truce, negotiated by the American ambassador, was signed in 1929. However, Calles decided not to honor the terms of the truce and after the Cristeros had surrendered and laid down their arms, he mounted an offensive that resulted in almost 6,000 of them, including more than 500 of their leaders, being arrested and shot. He also took education out of the hands of the Church and replaced it with a public education system as a way of avoiding what he had termed the "indoctrination" of Mexican youth by the Church. The war also took a toll on the country's priests, approximately 4,000 were shot or expelled from the country. By 1934 there were less than 350 priests in all of Mexico, a country of more than 15 million. In 1928 former president Obregon was elected President to succeed Calles, but before he took office he was assassinated by a Catholic zealot. Calles then appointed himself "Jefe Maximo", or Supreme Chief. The next year Calles founded his own political party, the National Revolutionary Party (PNR). It would eventually morph into the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), which would rule Mexico for the next 70 years. Calles appointed others as "President", but they were just frontmen; he held the real power. The government grew increasingly authoritarian. It stopped land reform and redistribution and banned strikes, infuriating its supporters in the powerful labor movement. In 1934 he picked Lázaro Cárdenas, an old political ally, to be his presidential candidate, believing that he could control Cardens as he had the others. However, after Cardenas became President he showed that he had no intention of being Calles' puppet. Conflicts erupted between the two over a variety of issues, such as Cardenas' support for labor unions, his endorsement of strikes and his opposition to Calles' increasing reliance on the use of private militias, modeled on Adolf Hitler's Nazi "storm troopers", to ferret out and crush opposition. Cardemas turned out to be a formidable opponent, and set about to systematically isolate Calles from his political base and support. He removed powerful Calles allies from important government positions. Eventually Cardenas forced Calles out of power, and he went into exile in the US. In 1941 he was allowed back into Mexico and divided his time between Mexico City and Cuernavaca. Calles died in Mexico in October of 1945.