Revolutions - 9.27- The Institutional Revolution

Episode Date: March 12, 2019

The winds have now swept Mexico. To what end? I'll be in Copenhagen: CPH:DOX March 26

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.27, The Institutional Revolution. Well, it's hard to believe, at least for me, that we have reached the end of the line of the Mexican Revolution. I have been aiming at it since I first got the idea in my head to follow up the history of Rome with a show examining great political revolutions in short 12 to 15 episode long series. So since I started, the Mexican Revolution has a lot of, always been way ahead down the road in the future, and now suddenly it's disappearing into the rearview mirror. It's all in the past. So today we're going to wrap it all up. And as you can

see, this episode is gargantuan, so let's just get to it. Oh, wait first, two quick personal appearance notes before we move on to this final summation. I have accepted an invitation to speak at the 2019 Copenhagen documentary film festival about Roman history and the fate of democracy in Europe. that will be on March the 26th, so it's just a few weeks away, and I will post a link in the show notes, but I'll be in Copenhagen in just about two weeks. And then also to my UK friends, please put this on your calendar. I will be at Waterstones Gower Street on Tuesday, 28th of May, giving some version of that same presentation. I also hope to add a few other UK dates to revolve around that. Those possibilities are still up in the air, but May the 28th in London at Waterstone's Gower Street is firm. So please mark that

on your calendar, and hopefully I'll see some of you either in Copenhagen in a few weeks or London in a few months. Okay, now let us close out the Mexican Revolution. For reasons that should become clear in today's episode, we wrapped up the detailed narrative of the Mexican Revolution last week with the inauguration of Alvara O'Rogone as president of Mexico in 1920. The country he and his Sonoran allies inherited was in very bad shape. Ten years of chaotic violence had thrashed the Mexicans economically, politically, socially, physically, and emotionally. Some areas were, of course, harder hit than others. Some parts of Mexico never saw a gun fired in anger for the whole 10 years.

But just because you weren't confronted by the direct violence of the revolution in the civil war, no part of Mexico escaped without feeling some related consequences. Between 1910 and 1920, Mexico lost about 7% of its population. Depending on the count you want to use, the country suffered close. to two million dead combining civilian and soldiers, give or take a couple of hundred thousand. Probably another 300,000 or so migrated north into the United States, either as temporary refugees or political exiles or permanent immigrants. And on top of the general fallout from their own revolution, by 1920 the whole world was reeling from the global flu pandemic that killed close to

50 to 100 million around the globe and claimed at least a half a million lives in Mexico. The direct human cost of the past 10 years was shocking, and the tools available to rebuild the country were in shambles. The economy was wrecked. The fields were unplanted. Mines and factories were shuttered. Its political institutions had no legitimacy. And on top of that, everyone still seemed to have a gun pulled on everyone else. And this is the country new President Obrugan inherited. It was a far cry from what Mexico had been just 10 years earlier when it was entering the 35th year of the Porfuriato, arguably the most stable regime in Latin American history since the Spanish had been kicked out a century earlier. Perferio Diaz had taken over

a political, unstable country and held it together for 35 years, pursuing order and progress using his infamous mix of Pan Opalo. He invited the foreign capitalists to invest in Mexico in order to rapidly modernize their technological communications and transportation infrastructure, and this influx of foreign investment turned Mexico into a bonanza of resources and cash crops to be extracted and exported to eager buyers abroad. Meanwhile, Diaz and his cronies oversaw the large-scale acquisition and consolidation of property. What had been free land or communal land from time immemorial was now claimed, merged, and ringed with fences or barbed wire. From 1876 to 1910, close to 130 million acres of land was expropriated and the era of massive, quasi-feudal Asciendas peaked. All of this was justified in the name of increased efficiency

and modern development, and by any economic measure, Mexico was a success. And if you kept your eyes on the progress, you hardly noticed what it took to maintain order. The political repression, the corrupt bargains, the silencing of dissent, the intimidation, threats, and violence. This was all tolerable as long as times were good. But after 20 years of high-flying progress and growth, things turned stagnant. When the global economy started taking downturns after the turn of the century, spiking dramatically with the crash of 1908 and the subsequent recession, the progress and prosperity that had justified Dias' authoritarian order disappeared. Suddenly, hungry peasants were growing cash crops to ship to the United States while their families starved. Workers lost their

jobs and had wages cut just as prices for basic necessities were rising. The middle classes suffered from a lack of trade and business, and could no longer tolerate arrogant treatment at the hands of the Hefe's Politicos and the Scientifical Elite who still live fat and happy in the Jockey Club in Mexico City, planning their next trip to Paris. The rapid introduction of railroad, telegraphs, new mines, and land expropriation had disrupted traditional ways of life, especially in the once wild and mostly autonomous north, which, as we've seen, became a hotbed of revolutionary theory. But still, right up until the very end, the Porfriotto seemed stable, secure, and unassailably permanent.

Then, all at once in a rush, Dias, his fossilized cronies and scientifico advisors, discovered that the base upon which the Porfriotto rested was not a fat pyramid, but a narrow pole. When Francisco Madero marched around the country channeling the grievances of an entire nation, the Porphyrians discovered their allegedly invincible political machine was rusted down and broken. with a swiftness that shocked everyone, including Madero and his allies, the Porphyrian regime was toppled and Diaz was put on a boat to Europe. To many observers at home and abroad, that seemed like it would be the end of it, that the quote-unquote Mexican revolution would go down as roughly six months of skirmishing over the winter of 1910, 1911, which paved the way for a more open and democratic government. But while he sailed for exile, Perferio Dias had his last dark laugh. Madero has unleashed the tiger.

Let's see if he can control it. Madero could not. The Mexican Revolution transformed from one isolated event into a series of rolling conflicts across time and space. And as the historical event we call the Mexican Revolution progressed, it progressed through stages, the opposing sides changing about every 18 months or so. First, the Democratic reformer Madero against the calcified autocrat, Pofrio Diaz, then the counter-revolutionary ex-Poferrians toppling the idealistic but weak and naive President Madero,

then the constitutionalists of the North rebelling in the name of democracy, civil rights, and the rule of law, against General Huerta's military dictatorship. Then after Huerta was overthrown, the centralist and increasingly conservative constitutionalists, fighting the more populist and federalist conventionists. And then when the Constitutionalists won, scattered and disparate regional rebellions, fighting against the entrenching authoritarian regime of President Caranza. Then finally, a split among the Constitutionalists coalesced around the Agua Prieta Coalition, which ousted Caranza in 1920.

And, of course, present for every stage of this, from 1910 to 1920, the Zapatistas were waging their own guerrilla war in the South for land and justice. It took us 20 episodes to cover the twist and turns of those 10 years. And there was no guarantee that the Plinko ball of history was inevitably going to land on Obergon and the Sonoran's winning and consolidating power in 1920. There are so many what-ifs to choose from. For starters, what if Diaz had just handled the succession crisis better back in 1908? What if he had not been such a doofus and arranged to transfer power to Bernardo Reyes? It's entirely possible the Porphyrian regime would have just kept right on chugging.

What if Madero hadn't been so quick to turn his back on his friends and embrace his enemies after expelling Dias? What if Madero had kept Felipe Anhalis at the helm during the ten tragic days instead of trusting his life to General Huerta? What if Huerta had stuck to the terms of the pact of the embassy and backed Felix Diaz for president in 1912? Would the quote-unquote revolution have gone down as a brief chaotic storm in a sea of Porfarian order and progress? What if, after they combined to defeat Werta, Villa and Carranza had agreed to mutual retirement rather than force everyone to choose sides in a civil war that was far more personal clash than ideological struggle? What if, and this is a big one, Via had listened to Anhalis in early 1915 and lured Obrgonne away from his supply lines, cut him off, and annihilated him. I think at that point we're talking about President Anhalis inaugurating a new constitution written to be purposefully decentralized and, federalist. And this is not even counting the number of times and places the United States could have

chosen to become more or less involved and change the course of events in entirely unpredictable ways. All of these what-ifs had very plausible alternatives that would have changed what post-revolutionary Mexico would have looked like politically, economically, militarily, socially, how land would have been redistributed or not redistributed, whether they still would have had a strong central executive political system or gone with a decentralized federalist system, whether they would be free market capitalists or something resembling anarcho-socialists, whether they would have been ruled by soldiers or civilians, whether they would have been democratic or authoritarian, whether they would have been turned into an American protectorate or maintained their sovereign independence.

The winds that swept Mexico were truly a tornado with dozens, hundreds of possible outcomes being spit out the other side. Revolutions are like that. The Mexican Revolution is really like that. And even though Obergon and his Sonoran allies are ultimately what got spit out the other side, it's not like they couldn't have been swept right off again. For the entirety of the 1920s, armed revolts against the central government continued to erupt. Executions, assassinations, and pitched battles continued to play a regular role in Mexican politics.

The only major difference is that this time the new regime managed to survive. It was, without question, their single greatest accomplishment. Obergoen laid the groundwork for this survival because he was a skilled natural politician who was described in one biography as, quote, fanatically pragmatic, which pretty much gets to the heart of it. When he assumed the presidency, Obergoen's principal aim was stabilizing the national government so it could be the vehicle of national reconciliation and reconstruction. And catching a few lucky breaks along the way, he pretty much managed to do what.

he set out to do, though not before the revolution ate a few more of its children. Obergoen came into office needing to placate a whole lot of people. The political coalition he had cultivated during his presidential campaign, and who then rallied to him after the plan of Agua Prieta was declared, was a mix of middle-class liberal reformers, veteran revolutionary soldiers, organized labor and common peasants. Obergoen's seemingly impossible task was to organize, lead, and satisfy, the various expectations of these groups. And this is where his fanatical pragmatism served him so well.

Obedegone promised more land redistribution under Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 and labor laws that would fulfill the expectations set by Article 123. But he also didn't want to antagonize landowners and mining companies and factory owners. So he only pushed things as far as absolutely necessary so that he could say, yes, see, I'm doing something without causing a conservative backlash. So, for example, he formed land commissions that went out in survey teams to dole out six million hectares of land. But only one million of that was ever actually distributed. Now, this is seven times what Caranza had done in his four years in office, so it took a while for people to notice that Obergoen's redistributions were neither as sweeping nor as drastic as he

had promised. The thing, though, is that Obergon was a free market capitalist at heart, no less than Caranza. Obergoen thought maintaining large estates was key to economic rebuilding and feeding the people. He just wasn't so stubborn about it that he was going to refuse to do anything for the people. Obergoen was trying to head off both revolution and counter-revolution at the same time, and he definitely managed to satisfy his friends just enough, and avoid pissing off his enemies just enough that he threatened that. He threatened that. needle. In some places, Obrugone's fanatical pragmatism led him to just throw in the towel and embrace agrarian revolution. For example, in Morelos. Obrugone believed that ending the

endless Zapatista rebellion was critical to the project of reconciliation and reconstruction, and that meant letting them have their own way. Obrugone brought Zapatista leaders like Magana and De La O into the official government fold. Former Zapatista secretaries were given real administrative responsibilities, and it was probably their continued insistence that even the one million hectares of land were ever doled out. And certainly it was Obrugan's pragmatism that led Morelos to be one of the areas in Mexico that you could really say was truly transformed by the revolution. They had fought for 10 years, and they were now a long ways from where they were 10 years ago. If we go back to episode 9.7, we talked about how over the course of the Porfuriato,

Morelos was defined by the steady encroachment of village land by expanding asciendas. By 1910, maybe 20% of the old villages had been consumed or just wiped off the map. 17 families owned 36 asciendas that controlled 25% of the land and all of the good land. By the 1920s, that had all been undone. In April 1922, the National Congress passed an agrarian regulatory law that confirmed redistribution undertaken during the revolution and allowed for even further redistribution in the future. This did not just halt the growth of the Aciendas, it radically shrank them down to size. Sparkling new, legally binding grants of communal lands for the ancient villages were drawn up,

notarized, and registered. Villages no longer rested their claims on 300-year-old documents stored in a sacred lockbox. In addition, 40 or so irregular settlements that had grown up over the course of the revolution were recognized and awarded land of their own. The Asciendas of Morelos were carved up and given back to the villagers. By the end of the 1920s, there were 150 recognized villages, and only four or five estates that were recognizable as Asiendas. The villagers now owned 75% of the good land in Morelos. Zapatistas had won. Ending the Zes'estas, the Zendes. Ending the Zes'esteads, Appetista rebellion was critical to the future stability of Mexico. So too was normalizing relations

with the Colossus of the North. Just a few weeks before Obrugone was sworn into office, the Republican Warren Harding was elected president of the United States. His new administration, like the outgoing Wilson administration, was not thrilled about the violent overthrow of Carranza, and they refused to recognize Obrgon, even though he could now claim a Democratic mandate. One of the principal obstacles to recognition was the new Secretary of the Interior, Albert Fall. Fall had been a senator from New Mexico and was very close with the oil lobby. He had used his previous position as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to lend a belligerent voice to the debates on Mexican-American relations.

Fall and his buddies were absolutely scandalized by the nationalization of subsurface resources promised by Article 27 of the Constitution, and they wanted it removed as the price of American recognition. Obrugone tried to reassure the Americans that he would be respectful of American property, but that striking Article 27 would just not fly for domestic political reasons. To slip out of this dilemma, Obrugène tried to bypass the power of the American oil lobby by making nice with another powerful lobby, American bankers. In the summer of 1922, Mexican negotiators met in New York City with a converseous.

consortium of bankers who owned Mexican national debt. The two sides agreed on a certain amount of national debt that Obrugone's government would assume and made a schedule for repayment. Obrugone hoped that this deal would lead to recognition, which would mean loans and legal arms purchases, but he was disappointed. Though he had advocates in New York and Washington, D.C., the Harding administration continued to withhold recognition. In May of 1923, Obrugène tried again, this time meeting informally with U.S. negotiators about claims of damages and lost property suffered by American citizens during the revolution. Obert Agone now found the Americans far more open to reconciliation. This is partly because by now, the Belicoe Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall had been busted for orchestrating the infamous teapot dome scandal,

which was about the corrupt leasing of federal land to his oil buddies. Fall became the first U.S. Cabinet Secretary to go to prison. So the Mexicans and Americans were now able to come to an agreement. The Mexicans would pay damages for lost property, but most importantly, Obdegone agree that Article 27 would not be invoked retroactively. All U.S. property and concessions acquired before 1917 would be grandfathered in. Though neither Congress actually wound up ratifying the so-called Bukarelli Accords, which is what this is called, it still led to official American recognition of Oberlin. Obergoen's government. The United States sent an ambassador to Mexico City for the first time in three

years, but more importantly, Obergoen now had legal access to American loans and weaponry, which was just in the nick of time to save his regime. Since Mexican leaders didn't know that future historians would be putting a closing bracket on the Mexican Revolution back in 1920, they were still resorting to armed rebellion to oppose a regime in Mexico City they opposed. From 1920 to 1920, that mostly meant hardcore Carrancista generals, who had gotten pushed aside after the first chief was murdered. There's no need to detail these rebellions because they all failed, but it is worth noting that they were all raised by constitutional veterans who had fought alongside Obergoen and the Sonorans for years. But the entropy of victory is a relentless force,

so many old comrades had to be lined up against the wall and shot. By 1923, though, that entropy had reached even inside the core Sonoran clique that had formed the plan of Aguaprieta to overthrow Caranza, and it centered on the eternal problem of political succession. With Obrugon's term set to expire in 1924, and the principle of no re-election now firmly entrenched, it was never too early to decide who was going to succeed him. Two men fancied themselves worthy, former governor of Sonora. and former provisional president, Adolfo de la Huerta. The other was Plutarcho Elias Kaias. Now, I probably should have brought Kaias into this a long time ago, but he's far more important after the revolution than during the revolution, so I just kept putting it off until, well, here we are. But Kaias is very important after the revolution, so here's a little thumbnail

rundown of the future El Hefe Maximo. Caius was born in 1877 in Sonora. So like practically everybody else we've talked about, he only ever knew life under the Porphyriato. He grew up poor, the son of an alcoholic, and was ultimately raised by his aunt and uncle after the death of his mother. This background forced him into a variety of odd jobs once he came of age, but it also primed him to support the presidential aspirations of the reforming apostle of democracy, Francisco Madero. Caius supported the Mataristas and, when they overthrew Diaz, was awarded with a job as a police commissioner. When Madero was murdered, Caius was quick to support the Sonoran rebellion against Werta, and it was here that he began his lifelong alliance with Obrugone.

It was also at this point, around 1913, that his talents really started to show themselves. Though he was a commissioned officer in the constitutionalist armies, Caius's strengths lay in organization and supply, and he spent most of the wars up in Agua Prieta, maintaining the lines of trade to the United States. He was, in fact, still running Agua Prieta when Pancho Villa came around for one of his several final defeats in 1915. That was the time that the Americans let Caranza ferry troops through American territory. Caius is the one who welcomed them. Carranza then appointed Caius to be governor of Sonora in 1915, and then elevated him to Minister of Commerce, Industry, and Labor in 1919.

That move was a part of Caranza trying to undermine Obrugone's home base of support, trying to separate Caius and Obrugone politically. But it backfired. Caius discovered that in person, Caronzo was even less likable and more sinister than he had been led to believe, and the appointment actually brought Obrugone and Caius closer together, with Caius now using his position in the national government to shore up support for Obergoen in the lead-up to the 1920 election. It goes without saying that Caius was one of the principal signatories of the plan of Agua Prieta. When Obergoen took up the presidency, Caius became

Minister of the Interior, and then for a variety of reasons that we won't go into, Obergoon finally decided in 1923 that he would support Caius over De La Huerta to be his successor. De La Huerta was not happy about being passed over, and he started canvassing his own potential supporters to see what might happen if he challenged Obrigon and Caius in the election of 1924. And that canvassing effort brings us now, for one last final time, to Poncho Villa. After making the deal in 1920 to lay down his guns and retire, Poncho Villa stuck to his word. He settled with his men on a sprawling assyenda in a fertile but remote valley in northern Duranga. Naturally concerned about all the people out there who wanted to kill him, this remembrance

remote Asienda was patrolled by his 50 bodyguards, and VIA almost never left the safety of his property. He also kept his interest inwardly focused and concentrated on building up and managing his estate. As promised, he stayed out of politics and made no trouble for the new government. He and Obeder Gone even opened up a conciliatory correspondence with Via often sending praise and congratulations and good wishes to Obeder Gone, and Obrugn always promptly answering. There was even a moment where some would-be rebels came to sound Via out, and not only did Via not join them, he ratted them out to the authorities. But the conciliatory correspondence with Obrugone was a bit phony on both sides. Via was never going to be able to entirely quit the idea that he was still destined for something greater, nor was Obrugone ever not going to think of Via as a potential threat.

By 1923, Via was beginning to offer his opinion. about politics more openly. In a newspaper interview, he stated that he preferred De La Huerta, not Caius, be the next president of Mexico. After all, it was De La Huerta, who had pushed through the terms of Via's peaceful retirement. Now, Via had survived as long as he had, in part because he was instinctively paranoid and careful about avoiding potential assassins. During the revolution, he had earned populist plaudits for frequently dining communally with his men. But this was mostly to avoid having his food poisoned. After retirement, as I just said, Via almost never left his estate, because that would expose him to his enemies. But as the years passed, he relaxed

a bit and would occasionally take trips up to the city of Paral, where he was known and liked and was comfortable. In July of 1923, Via took a trip up to Paral on business, riding in a car with a driver, a secretary, and three armed escorts. He enjoyed a few days in the city, and then on July the 20th, 1923 prepared to leave. Driving the car himself, one of his new favorite pastimes, Via's car approached an intersection and slowed down to turn. As he made this turn, somebody out in the street shouted, Viva Via! A cry, Via was used to hearing whenever he came around.

And it is not without some dramatic charm that it's the last thing he ever heard. Because this Viva Via was the signal for gunmen in a corner apartment to open fire, They unloaded 40 bullets into the car. Via in the driver's seat was hit at least nine times and died instantly, as did his chauffeur and secretary. His bodyguards were injured. One managed to escape alive. The other two were gunned down in a subsequent chase and firefight. The assassins then mounted horses and rode off.

Legend has it that Via's last words were, Don't let it end like this. Tell them I said something. But this was the last bit of the legend of Poncho Villa. really he was just riddled with bullets and died without ever uttering another word. It was for some time a confused mystery who really killed Pancho Villa. Was it personal? Was it political?

Independently organized or ordered by the most powerful men in Mexico? It was incredibly suspicious that no great effort was made to chase down the killers and the hours and the days that followed the murder. Then a few months later a man came forward and wrote a confession where he said that he organized, and carried out the murder of Poncho Villa all by himself. But even after this confession was published, the authorities took their time arresting him. And then when he was finally convicted and sentenced to 20 years in prison, he was quietly pardoned and released three months later. So to cut to the chase here, though nothing official has ever been acknowledged, there is a

mountain of evidence that points to Caius initiating the assassination with Oprah Gone, maybe being aware of it from the start and definitely helping to cover it up. The motives are not hard to divine. A living via was always a threat, especially given the immediate problem of his openly stated preference for President de la Huerta. There is also speculation, though this is all hearsay, that via's death in July of 1923 coincides suspiciously with American recognition of Obergonne just a month later,

that may be finally making Via pay for the raid on Columbus, Columbus was a secret part of the agreement. Friedrich Katz bookends his massive biography of Pancho Villa with the three legends of Via, the white legend, the black legend, and the epic legend. These legends were born as Villa rose to fame with the Division del Norte and only grew after he died. The white legend has Pancho Villa as an innocent man abused by the same cruel system that abused all poor innocent Mexicans.

He had been driven into banditry after learning firsthand the cruel. ways of a world dominated by rapacious ascendados and corrupt Hephaes Politicos. The black legend portrays Veya as a cold-blooded murderer from the start, a psychopath whose only object was death, destruction, and personal enrichment. He started out an evil bandit and grew to become the fifth horseman of the apocalypse. The epic legend, meanwhile, has via transcending white and black, and turns him into a mythical folk hero who starred in a thousand and one adventures told in songs and stories around the campfire. This is where the Robin Hood, an avenging angel anecdotes grew and were exaggerated, and then eventually were just invented out of whole cloth.

Now, as everyone has probably picked up by now, I'm a bit partial to via. This is partly because in the United States he's typically portrayed as a dumb, wild, reckless bandit, and when I started studying the Mexican Revolution I discovered instead, an incredibly complicated man who was one of the great charismatic revolutionary geniuses, not just of his generation, but just in the history of revolution. But I hope, too, that I have not ignored his complications. His easy generosity was widely documented. So, too, was his casual cruelty. Poncho Villa killed a lot of people, not just signing execution orders, but with his own hand, often simply in a flash of momentary anger. He is also guilty of ordering massacres. There is no moral paradigm you can draw up

that makes Poncho Via a good man in any reasonable sense. And now it has all passed into myth, with the angelic and demonic parts of Via still battling in the historical imagination. So which is true? The white legend, the black legend, or the epic legend? All you can say is yes. The death of Poncho Villa marks another great what-if point in the history of the Mexican Revolution, because he was not there to join Adolfo de la Huerta when he went into revolt. Denied his Sean at the presidency and now accusing Obrugone of capitulating to the Americans and selling out Mexico, De La Huerta declared himself in rebellion in December of 1923. But now enjoying open and legal access to American loans and American arms,

Obrugone was able to pretty easily suppress De La Huerta's rebellion by the spring of 1924. De La Huerta went in exile, a bunch of the generals who followed him. All old constitutionalist comrades were shot. A few more children fed into Saturn's ever-gaping maw. The victory paved the way for Caius to be overwhelmingly elected with 84% of the vote in July of 1924. When Caius was inaugurated on November the 30th, 1924, it was the first peaceful transfer of presidential power since 1880. Peaceful, if you don't count the large revolt that just got put down by a potential alternate candidate.

But given the fact that one president had peacefully handed power to a successor after an election for the first time in 44 years, I think we can give them credit for it. From the outside, it was presumed that Caius would be Obrugan's, puppet. But for at least two years, Obrugone really did keep his nose out of active presidential politics. Besides, he and Caius agreed on enough that Obergoen didn't need to monitor his every move, which was mostly true. But there were two places Caius wanted to plant his own flag. One was relations with the United States. The other was relations with the Catholic Church. In these two places, Caius would help plunge Mexico right back into chaos.

First of all, he immediately repudiated the Buccarelli Accords and almost started a war with the United States, which was only resolved when American diplomats managed to talk Caius into seeing things the American way, or else. He also rankled the Americans by allowing that new international pariah, the Soviet Union, to establish its first official embassy in the Americas in Mexico City in 1925. This led some in the United States to start calling Caius a Bolshevik, which is pretty funny. given what I'll tell you about Caius here in a minute. But unquestionably, the most provocative and destabilizing thing Caius did was pass a set of laws designed to implement the most draconian, anti-clerical aspects of the Constitution of 1917. Pragmatist Obergon had never wanted to touch the religious stuff, and he never enforced those parts of the Constitution.

But Caius was a devout atheist, whose revolutionary motivations were driven in part by a detestest. station of the church. For him, eliminating the church from public life was a big part of what the revolution was supposed to have been about. So in July of 1926, he passed the so-called Caius laws, which all but made it illegal to be a priest in public. Priests had to register with the government. They couldn't wear religious garb in public. A priest who criticized the government could get five years in prison. Then Caius went around closing monasteries and convents and religious schools. Now, messing with religion is bound to inflame passion, and Caius inflamed quite a bit more than that. It inflamed a massive armed rebellion that would go on for the next

three years, and is dubbed the Cristero War. Centered in the Bahiao of West Central Mexico, bothered Idago's old stomping ground, radical Catholics rose up in defense of the church on January the 1st, 1927. The Federal Army General, in charge of suppressing this revolt, initially relayed that it was going to be more of a hunt than a campaign, but soon enough, at least 50,000 active cristeros were involved in the rebellion. My friends, try to eradicate religion at your own peril. Between Caius antagonizing the United States and starting the Cristero War, ex-president Obrugone thought that maybe he now needed to be a bit more hands-on. He started making more frequent trips to Mexico City to confer with Caius, and then in June of

1927, he announced he was running for president again. This announcement flew in the face of the principle of no re-election, but Obergaun and Caius waved this aside, saying, oh, we just meant no consecutive re-election. But Obergaun's bid for re-election wasn't just offensive in principle. Other old constitutionalist leaders who had been waiting for their turn to be president got pretty mad because Obergoen was going to block them, and maybe just trade off terms with Caius forever. To head off another rebellion, two of these guys, both long-standing friends, allies, and comrades of Obrugone and Caius, were arrested and executed on probably trumped up charges of fomenting a rebellion. So when you start to look back, the post-revolutionary peace and reconciliation was built atop a graveyard.

With no serious challengers, Obrugène then won his non-relection re-election in July 1928. It was quite a landslide, too. Obrugn won 100% of the vote against the 0% won by invalid or blank ballots. But the semi-expected game of alternating terms with Caius never happened. On July 17, 1928, just a few weeks after his thunderous election, Obergoon attended a celebratory luncheon in a town on the southern outskirts of Mexico City. Obrugone had the place of honor on the dais, flanked on either side by a dozen friends and supporters. The Cristero War was still raging, and a young radical Catholic named Leon Torre approached the dais with a sketchbook in hand, pretending to be doing portraits of the attendees.

This seemed innocuous enough and allowed him to get right up close to Obrugone. When he did, Toro pulled out a pistol and fired five bullets into Obrugone's head, point blank. Alvaro Obrgon, the most successful of all the Mexican revolutionaries, followed the near universal fate of Mexican revolutionaries and died a bullet-ridden death. Alvaro Obrugon occupies a weird place in the memory of the Mexican Revolution. He was made by the revolution, of course. He went from obscure chickpea farmer and prosperous entrepreneur to victorious general and president of Mexico in just a few short years. and by virtue of winning the revolution that had made him, Obergoen then turned around and made the revolution,

defining in hindsight what it had all been about. Obergoen stamped his own personality on the New Mexico that was born from the ashes of the old Mexico. But thanks to his fanatical pragmatism, Obrugone claims no great idealistic mantle or expansive revolutionary vision. From his very first campaign as a colonel, in the militia. Obrugone was cautious and careful and Fabian. He lacked the color and flash and machismo

of Via and Zapata. He certainly lacked their charismatic ability to rouse the passion of the people. And as an unintended consequence of his victory, Obrugone never bathed in the transcendental glow of martyrdom like Madero and Sepata and Via. His life just doesn't have the same tragic arc nor the same romantic tug, even though Obrgon too was ultimately a fascinated. But though Obergon will never have one-tenth of one percent as many books, movies, and songs written about him as are written about Via and Zapata, who represented the perennially crestfallen aspirations of the revolution, who represented what it might have been about. Obergoen represented the practical achievements of the revolution,

what it really was about. And though it can at times forget about him, Mexican history ultimately runs through Alvaro Obrugan. The death of Obrugan led to a succession problem. He had just been elected president. So who would be president now? Would Caius stay in power? For six weeks, no one knew, as leaders in Mexico City scrambled for a response. But in September of 1928,

Caius gave a farewell speech as president and said, no, I will not remain president. We will instead appoint an interim. president who will oversee new elections scheduled for the following year. The principle of no consecutive re-election would thus remain in place. Once this interim presidency was underway, don't worry about who the interim president was, doesn't matter. Kaias slid over to Minister of War, and from that perch initiated one of the most consequential

political projects in Mexican history. Concluding that no one person had the charisma or force of personality to hold a stable regime together, especially with no re-election being such an important revolutionary ideological point, Caius organized a new political party to occupy the center of political life and hopefully arrest the cycles of rebellion and upheaval. In March 1929, Caius and other leaders founded the Partido Nacional Revolusonario, or PNR, which was meant to turn Mexico into a one-party state. The PNR would bring together an officially recognized labor union with peasant worker confederations and professional and state worker organizations, making them all members of the party.

The charter of the party then mandated that all these new members paid dues, giving the PNR a huge war chest and national member base. With these resources, the PNR ran candidates for office at the local, state, and national level, identifying, grooming, and elevating worthy party men to be. the future leaders of Mexico. What this did in effect was recreate the Porfarian apparatus, except as a party dictatorship instead of a personal dictatorship. The PNR would go through some name changes and reorganizations, eventually settling in 1946 on calling itself the Partido Revolutionario Institutional, the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI, which was both

kind of a contradiction in terms, and the party that ran. Mexico for the rest of the century. The arrival of the PNR kicked off a period known as the maximato, because with a party in place and no need to worry too much about which guy happened to be president, Caius was able to run everything from whatever office he happened to be holding. Caius was soon known as El Hefe Maximo, and so we call it the maximato. The beginning of the maximato also marks a sharp conservative turn, just as the quote-unquote revolutionary party was being founded. They declared land redistribution to be at an end and started all but forbidding strikes in the party-controlled labor unions. Violence and intimidation came back

with a vengeance. The Communist Party was outright banned, making it laughable that Caius was ever considered a Bolshevik, which he really, really was not. The launching of the maximato also coincides with the end of the Cristero War, which had now been raging for three years. The Cristero rebels were ultimately doomed by geography and access to money and weapons, but they did not go down without a hard and bitter fight. The casualty numbers are brutal, upwards of 100,000 dead on both sides. This is a really big conflict. Probably another 250,000 people emigrated north to the United States. But in 1929, the American ambassador finally brokered a ceasefire, where the government promised it wouldn't be quite so draconian, in its enforcement of the anti-clerical laws.

Not that there were many priests left at this point. In 1926, there were about 4,400 priests in Mexico. By the early 1930s, there were just 334 in the whole country. 17 states had no registered priest at all. The rest had been killed or emigrated. And though Caius agreed to the ceasefire, he couldn't walk away without rounding up and executing a final batch of about 5,000 Christero rebels.

So, yeah, it's really hard to nail down when the Mexican Revolution actually ended. In Morelos, the Maximato brought in a new breed of politicians who slowly displaced the old-Gar-Zapatista revolutionaries. They were slicker and more adept at party politics. Among them, Zapata's own son Nicholas, who was far more interested in self-enrichment and doling out favors to his friends than his father, on whose name he traded. The state was also repopulated both as local families grew, and migrants moved into the area, putting stress on all the finely, carefully aligned allotments of communal land. And the fall of the Asiendas had also brought an inevitable consequence. Everyone was pretty much down to subsistence farming.

Very few profitable crops were being grown. All the sugar mills were broken and dilapidated, so of course no more sugarcane was being grown. Not that the villagers really cared that, much. I mean, harvesting sugar sucks. But it was a trade-off. They had self-government. They had their own land, but they didn't have a lot of money. Many villages turned to the expedient of hacking down forest to make charcoal as a way to generate some cash. But mostly, they just didn't care, though they were concerned about the conservative turn of the national government, as Caius declared in 1929 that land reform was complete and at an end. But just as the conservative maximato

was entrenching itself. A monkey wrench got thrown into the new political machine. That monkey wrench's name was Lassarro Cardinus. Cardinus was from a younger cohort than most of the people we've talked about so far in the series. Most of those guys seem to have been born in the 1870s. Cardinus was born in 1895, and he joined the revolution as a teenager during the fight against Huerta. A native of the southern state of Michoacan, Cardinus first joined an affiliated Zapatista outfit, before migrating north and joining the constitutionalists, eventually serving as an officer under Caius. A smart, talented, and courageous soldier, Cardinus advanced fast and was finally promoted to general at the age of 25, just as Caronzo was being expelled from office.

Cardinus then held a variety of political posts through the 1920s, benefiting mightily from his relationship with Caius. Caius, in fact, trusted him so much that Cardinus was made the first president of the PNR. And though Cardinus was not Caius's first choice to be the candidate's party for president in 1934, there didn't seem to be anything to fear from it. But Cardinus was cut from a different cloth.

He was a truly committed progressive socialist who had watched the party's conservative turn with alarm. As the official state party candidate, Cardenas could have sat back in Mexico City and coasted to victory in the 1934 election. But instead, he went on a 2,000-mile campaign across Mexico glad-handed, meeting people, listening to their problems, and most importantly, building up his own base of popular support independent of El Hefe Maximo. Cardenas ran on a six-year plan to fulfill the unmet promises of the revolution. a six-year plan that was approved by the party because it was supposed to be campaign promises, not a legislative agenda.

After winning the election of 1934 with a cool 98.2% of the vote, it took Cardenas very little time to assert his independence from El Hefe Maximo. With his own context in the labor unions and the peasant organizations, Cardness revealed that he was serious about worker rights and massive land redistribution. He set out to institute a brand of agrarian socialism based on state-owned communal property. Ignoring the old guard's complaints, he also moved to purge more corrupt members of the party, men who had become parasites, not leaders, especially the cronies who huffered around Caius. Caius, for his part, just kept moving to the right and was now enamored with fascism

and the possibility of turning Mexico into a fully fascist state, which makes the earlier American attacks that Caius was like a secret Bolshevik, pretty funny in retrospect. But as Caius was fitting himself for a leather uniform in jackboots, Cardinus co-opted the PNR right out from under him. After systematically purging most of Caius's allies, Cardinus made his final move in April 1936, ordering the arrest of Caius and a handful of others on charges of corruption and expelling them from the country. Caius was allegedly reading a Spanish translation of Mind Kampf when he was arrested. Now fully his own man and able to fully implement his own vision for Mexico. Cardinus's term as president is the furthest point that you can still plausibly extend the date of the Mexican Revolution.

Because during his term in office, Cardinus pushed relentlessly for long-delayed implementation of Articles 27 and 123. now the core of what the revolution had been about. He partnered with more militant labor unions to pass broader labor rights and wage and benefit increases. He also implemented the last great land confiscation and redistribution. And frankly, when you go back and assess everything, it's actually the only great land confiscation and redistribution project of the whole revolution. Upwards of 180,000 square kilometers of ASEANDA land was seized by the state, Invoking Article 27 and carving out land from these large estates, Cardinus organized them as state-owned

worker collectives, assigning individual plots to be worked by individual families, but which would not be owned by the individuals the land would be owned collectively. This is obviously massively controversial, both on the right and on the left, as some with more anarchistic or decentralist leaning, said you're just turning the Mexican state into one great ostendado, the boss to end all bosses. The right, meanwhile, said Cardenas is a Mexican Stalin. But Cardinus' political position was unassailable, and though he was ruling a one-party state, even without that invulnerable structural advantage, he probably still would have won election.

He was massively popular while in office, probably the most popular president in Mexican history. With the arrival of the great sweeping reforms of President Cardenas, We return to Morelos one last time. Cardinus made a surprise visit to the state early in his term to guarantee even more land for the villages, to take over even the last remaining Asienes. His vision of agrarian socialism also included a plan to uplift the whole state from its somewhat impoverished condition. He ordered a state-owned sugar mill be constructed, where villages could bring cane that they might now viably grow. This was a noble enough plan, but the reintroduction of sugarcane once again put Morelos on the radar of businessmen who saw the potential for white gold.

The population of the state started to boom as businessmen and workers moved in, hopefully trying to recreate the old planter aristocracy. But this process was arrested because the villages all had ironclad proof of their ownership of the land. As for the old Zapatista generation, those that yet lived had settled peacefully. There were no more rebellions. Peace had come. Ildardo Magana, who inherited the Zapatistas from Zapata himself, found a prominent place in the army and in the administrations of the post-revolutionary governments, and he always urged them in the direction of land and justice for the people. He became an ally of Cardinus, and eventually, in 1936, was appointed governor of Michoacan.

and then declined an offer to succeed Cardenas as president of Mexico. Not that he would have made it. Maganya died in 1939. Meanwhile, de la O, the most aggressive of all the Zapatistas, managed to just live and live and live. He served in a variety of military and political posts until retiring to his village, where he died peacefully in 1952. At that point an honored legend of the revolutionary generation. A wake for him was held on. on the floor of the National Congress, and he was buried with full military honors.

The legend of the Zapatistas, the unflinching, uncompromising defenders of peasant justice and autonomy, then continued to spread across the world, even as Morelos itself remained at peace. The Zapatista symbols and ideals would be folded neatly into liberation Marxism and Latin American revolutionary struggles right up to the present, and I cannot leave without mentioning that in response to Nafta, taking effect on January 1, 1994, in what many assumed would be the return of the hegemony of the Colossus of the North, a band of self-declared rebels went into armed revolt in Chiapas, under the name of the Zapatista Army of National Liberation. They never were defeated. They're still out there. By 1938, President Cardenas had been in office for four years, and done more than anyone to actually

fulfill the promises of the revolution that was by now 20 years in the past. It was time to put the capstone on his project. Article 27 of the Constitution of 1917 stated unequivocally that the subsurface resources of Mexico belonged to the nation. Cardinus did not agree with the compromises and grandfathered clauses his predecessors had allowed in exchange for recognition and good relations with the United States, especially as oil was now Mexico's most lucrative and largest resource, and much of it was monopolized by foreign ownership. In 1930s, in 1936, Mexican oil workers, numbering close to 20,000, started demanding collective bargaining contracts with the oil companies who refused. Cardinus, being Cardinus, backed the workers to the

Hilt. And eventually, they all forced the companies into arbitration with the arbiters coming back with a verdict of a $26 million package of pay, benefits, and pensions for the workers. The companies refused to comply, and they sued. The Mexican Supreme Court then ruled. in favor of the workers. They said that the companies had to abide by the arbitrator's decision. When the company still refused to recognize the terms or the authority of the government to impose those terms, Cardenas canceled their concessions and said, if you don't pay, I'm going to nationalize everything, not just the oil, but all the extraction facility sitting on top of that oil. The companies had the expert technical workers and international financing needed to run all

of that extraction equipment, and so they called Cardinus' bluff. But Cardinus wasn't bluffing. On March the 18th, 1938, Cardinus nationalized the oil and the equipment. The companies withdrew with their technical experts and anything valuable that wasn't nailed down. They then begged the U.S. government to do something, but by now we're at FDR and his good neighbor policy towards Latin America and Roosevelt declined to get involved. A few months later, Cardinus founded Pemex, a state-owned oil company that became the model for other nationalistic petro-states to follow. Now, it took a bit to get Pemex back up and running, but in a few years, World War II started, and pumping Mexican oil to the Allies became far more important than

who owned what, and the United States sent technical advisors to get Mexican oil production at peak efficiency. And by then, plenty of Mexican experts had been trained in their own right. Pemex is today one of the largest oil companies in the world. It is a major source of revenue for the Mexican state, and also, because of that, is a major center of corruption and graft. The nationalization of oil was the last great revolutionary act of the Mexican Revolution, and probably the last possible point where you can say this is where the Mexican Revolution ends. Because though we are a long way from where we started, 30 years now since Madero started plotting his run for the president, it was in keeping with the spirit of completing the undone tasks of the revolution. After this, a new generation of Mexican leaders would come along, men who were too young to have fought in the revolution, and who carried Mexico into the second half of the 20th century into the Mexican miracle and all that,

all of which is beyond the scope of this series. I want to finish here today and finish the whole series by asking, what was it all about? For everything that happened, what had changed and what was still the same? Because as we've seen so often, revolutions are like great tidal waves that rise up and crash down and then recede. And after the waters have retreated, one is left to wonder how much the permanency level has changed. And for all the chaos and destruction of the Mexican Revolution, there is a Toquevillean nature to the whole thing. And in case you've forgotten, Toqueville's Ancian regime and the French Revolution stresses the ultimate content. of French political and social history. This was a necessary counterweight to arguments

about a cataclysmic year zero bringing a new world into existence amongst the zip thudding of the guillotine. So first, we'll talk continuity. Politically, aside from the social articles of the Constitution of 1917, it's basically just the Constitution of 1857. It's a federal system with a bicameral legislature and a strong president. That basic structure did not change. We don't have an emperor being declared or a parliamentary democracy or radical federalism or anarcho-socialism. The political framework is the same. On top of that, at least with the founding of the PNR, the Porfarian structure of a managed sham democracy is also pretty much in place. No less than the Scientificos, the founders of the PNR wanted not much politics, but a lot of administration.

So, managed elections, suppression of opposition groups, and an artificial democracy run out of the presidential palace in Mexico City. Check, check, check. There was briefly a change in the nature of the personnel running the state. Almost no one from the old Porfarian oligarchy was present in the post-revolutionary administrations, and even those that had been invited back by Caranza were invited back on the same terms that Diaz had offered as he consolidated power in the 1880s. You can have economic wealth, but not political power. Replacing this old Porfarian elite was a new class of Paublean self-made men of the revolution. But in a few years, the state naturally fell back into the hands of the same type of men who had run it previously,

and who always wind up in charge of any country, frankly. People who came from wealthy families that lived in capital cities, enjoyed good university educations at elite schools, had a cosmopolitan outlook about the world, The meritocracy in the post-revolutionary world was a bit stronger, but it's not like the Porfirio didn't have space for up-and-comers who showed talent, promise, and a willingness to tow the regime's line. So the children of the new elites in post-revolutionary Mexico naturally saw themselves as the rightful leaders of Mexico, the only capable leaders of Mexico.

Workers and peasants were there to be ruled, not share in power. So pre-revolution, post-revolution, that's all the same. On a less cynical note, another bit of continuity is that despite the fact that Mexico had been heavily militarized during the revolution and all the guys who took it over in the 1920s had been army officers, they moved to neuter and control the standing army as a source of independent political power, and they reestablished civilian rule. Unlike many Latin American neighbors, Mexico would not become a military dictatorship, a military dictatorship that, for example, Huerta had been trying to build. On the economic front, at least until Cardinus came along and then frankly after he departed the scene, Mexican leaders focused on economic progress by way of importing foreign capital and exporting natural resources. Mexico occupied exactly the same place in the global economy during the maximato as it had during the Porphyriado, except oil now outpaced mineral

and agricultural exports as the principal profit-making enterprise. Remember, the Sonorans who took over Mexico in the 1920s were basically all free market capitalists. What also stayed the same, slowly and more and more over the years, was that Mexico continued to labor under social and economic inequality. Despite the existence of Article 27 and 123, workers and peasants in most places sunk back down materially to where they had been during the Porphyriado. Sure, there were now structures for addressing their grievances and they were more organized, and there was a bit more access to land, but that was all, of course, managed by the state. And of course, women made no gains at all, socially, economically, or politically in what hopes that they had had were just dashed. They

didn't even get the right to vote until 1953. So that's a huge majority of the population that wound up with very little to show for all those revolutionary winds. For most people, it was a storm that passed rather than something that carried them off to the promised land. So there's a lot of. So there's a lot of continuity. Not a lot of it very good, but there is one bit of good continuity, and that is that Mexico remained independent and undismembered, which was not exactly a foregone conclusion, given that the United States launched multiple military invasions of Mexico during the revolution. Many, many political and business interests up in the United States would have gladly occupied Mexico City and installed a puppet president, or turned Mexico into an outright protector of the

United States. Plenty of others would have supported the secession of the northern states, and then either annex those states outright or turn them into dependent protectorates. These things were proposed. Plans were drawn up. And say what you want about Caranza, and I have said plenty. His stubborn nationalism and unflinching self-confidence served all of Mexico pretty well. He kept staring down the Americans, and the Americans kept blinking and saying, Ah, well, hell it ain't worth the trouble. So in terms of independence and sovereignty and geographic boundaries, the Mexico that went into the revolution was the same one that came out the other side, and that is quite an accomplishment.

So it's all the same then, huh? It was all for nothing? Well, wait, not so fast. The big difference is hard to concretely articulate, but it's a very similar dynamic to what happened in France after the revolution there. The sense of self-worth of even the lowest peasant was elevated. They now had a sense of themselves. They had a sense of self-confidence.

Everyone had spent a decade railing against and fighting and mocking the old bosses. Those guys had been literally chased off their estates. The old oligarchical elite, when they returned to those estates, now complained that people no longer knew their place. Ten years of being told you're a person, not a slave, had sunk in. So even on these large estates that had rich owners and poor workers, the old lord and surf dynamic was played out. It didn't work anymore because people would stand up for themselves. And the owners and managers, themselves scarred by the revolution, wanted to avoid reigniting a revolution, so conditions got better, and self-respect spread. This is all very vague and hard to define,

but it is a victory for a revolution that so many people no longer knew their place. Politically, as I just said, the system is practically the same, but there were important differences. There is a difference between a one-man dictatorship and a party dictatorship, however gray that distinction may be. No re-election, the slogan that had kicked off the revolution, was permanently implemented. No Mexican president since Obrugène has ever been re-elected. And though it was all managed from behind the scenes, party control resolved the problem of succession. Mexico 1810 to 1910 is a series of coups, rebellions, and revolutions. Mexico 1910 to the president is regularly scheduled peaceful transfers of power.

That's not nothing. And it's certainly a change wrought by the revolution. Another change wrought by the revolution is that even though this is a bit of a sham democracy, it is now a sham social democracy. No longer could leaders totally ignore the workers and peasants as previous rulers had. Even if it was cynical and manipulative, one had to affect a more populous tone, rhetoric, and policy. Obrugone himself set the precedent by stressing his own humble origins and being approachable to his constituents. A little too approachable in July of 1928, but you take my point.

There were also big structural changes to the status of the church and public education. Even with the compromises to end the Cristero War, the political and economic power of the Catholic Church in Mexico was broken. It had been a rock-solid pillar of the conservative order going back to the vice royalty of New Spain. Now, it had been battered by liberal assaults in the latter half of the 19th century, but now it was just done. The state owned all their property. Most of the priests were dead or in exile. The Catholic Church had no seat, even informally, at the table where decisions were being made. Now, I don't want to overstate this. Religious belief, of course, remains strong, especially in the rural areas, and things these days are a lot more lax.

But the revolution wasn't end to the church's position as a dominant political institution. And all those attacks on the church were part of another big change of how education would be handled. In the late Porphyriado, the church was still handling nearly all primary education. By the beginning of the maximato, the state was building out a huge network. of universal, free, secular schools to educate all Mexican children equally. The ideology of the victorious revolutionaries, shared by almost everyone, was that education was the key to unlocking the promise and potential of every Mexican. Porfirio Diaz was happy to have millions of literally uneducated peasants out there living

in ignorance and poverty. The revolutionaries were not. So universal, secular education, that is another big result of the revolution. Now, were it not for the coming of Lassarro Cardenas, there would be even fewer economic and social changes to talk about, but he did come along. Cardinus embraced the promises of Article 27 and Article 123 and turned large parts of Mexico into a system of agrarian socialism, which is a huge change wrought by the revolution, however long that change was delayed. And this is to say nothing of the nationalization of the oil in 1938, which is a huge change economically. The long-term economic relationship between Mexico, the United States, and the rest of the world is well beyond the scope of our show here. But suffice it to say that Mexico has been more forthrightly self-assertive since the revolution than it was prior to the revolution.

A strong sense of nationalist honor had sunk deep into the collective psyche, though Dias's old adage remains in effect. Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States. As Mexico moved forward into the 20th century under the leadership of the PRI, they had to decide for themselves on an official ideology of the revolution and what it had all meant. In the same way that any post-revolutionary authority needs to embrace the legitimizing memory of their revolutionary founding, while also not encouraging anybody to get any ideas. There was a strong desire to impress upon the people that, look, they did it, they won, so now we are a happy social democracy.

P-R-I. So the Constitution of 1917 was retroactively framed as the culmination of what the original aspirations of the Revolution had been, even though no one during the Revolution had a shared list of things that they were actually fighting for. And then, of course, the quote-unquote they, who made the Revolution, became a hilariously mixed-up pantheon of heroes, all celebrated together in murals and in official memorials as one big happy family. Via and Carranza and Apata, Madero, and Obrugan and Caius, altogether like sharing a beer, as if they hadn't spent ten years trying and oftentimes succeeding in murdering each other. Now, the United States celebrates its founding fathers altogether, and though there was vicious infighting between them, they were mostly

moving in the same direction. The French Revolution, meanwhile, has its lists of heroes and villains, depending on your contemporary political affiliation. Conservatives have one list, leftists have another. It's all still debated, but they don't like put up pictures of Mara taking tea with Lafayette. And then there's Russia, while the Russians just literally airbrushed people out until the October Revolution was staged by Stalin's bushy mustache shimmering in the angelic light reflected off Lenin's bald head. But official Mexican memory just jams everyone altogether. There is a monument of the Mexican Revolution in Mexico City. It repurposed the abandoned remains of a new legislative piece.

palace that had been started, but not completed, during the latter days of the Porfariado. Turning an abandoned Porfirian shell into a monument to the revolution is pretty great symbolism. But there they interred the bodies of Madero, Caranza, Cajas, and Cardinus. Madero had never trusted Caranza. Caius had helped overthrow Caranza, and Cardinus had then expelled Caius from the country. In the 1970s, the Mexican government reinterred the body of Pancho Villa in this monument, to rest forever beside Caranza, his most hated enemy. Various governments have tried off and on over the years to get Sepata's body moved

into the monument of the Mexican Revolution, but his family won't allow it, to the last, refusing to give his moral and political legitimacy to anyone but the people of Morelos. We will end with a little connective anecdote that, will serve to transition us back to the Russian revolution. After Cardinus's hard left turn in the 1930s, Mexico became a refuge for left-wing European political exiles, most especially absorbing 20 to 30,000 Spaniards fleeing the victorious-fascist regime.

In 1929, a certain Russian communist had been driven out of Russia. Nobody, given this guy's revolutionary credentials, really wanted him in their country. and so by 1936 he was basically living under house arrest in Norway. Cardinus offered this communist exile asylum, and in 1937 this guy and his wife settled in Mexico City. He then spent the next few years living in relative comfort, but by 1940, Stalin's NKVD wanted to end him for good. After dodging one set of gunmen in May 1940,

the exile was at his desk on August 20th, 1940, when an assassin crept in armed with an ice axe. The assassin closed his eyes as he crashed the ice axe into the exile's head, fracturing his skull, but leaving him with the strength to wrestle with the assassin until bodyguards burst into the room. But the injury was fatal. After surgery the next day, the old exile died at the age of 60. Leon Trotsky was dead.

Stalin had killed him. And when I come back, we will go all the way back to the very beginning and try to understand how it had come to this.