80 years ago…

If I’d thought about it, I would have posted yesterday on Alvaro Obregon’s assasination, 17 July 1928.  Tom Buckley, of the Mexico City News — which is FINALLY available on-line — does an excellent job in reviewing the fall-out from that seminal event in Mexican history:

The assassin, José de León Toral, was immediately set upon by the shocked and angered crowd. He was savagely beaten, but one of the congressmen present managed to calm the aggressors, convincing them that Toral must be taken alive in order to uncover the plotters behind the president-elect’s murder.

The resulting interrogation – after the threat of torture to his family – revealed that Toral, a Catholic fanatic, was a member of the Religious Liberty Defense League, a radical group implicated in a previous attempt to kill Obregón.

The alleged conspirators in the failed attempt to kill Obregón in November 1927 – Miguel Agustín Pro Juárez, Humberto Pro Juárez, Luis Segura Vilchis and Juan Tirado Arias – had been friends of Toral. When they were executed upon the order of then-President Plutarco Elías Calles – Toral was eager to take revenge.

Obregon is an intriguing figure, practically unknown outside Mexico, but as a policial genius, should probably be up there with (less kindy remembered ) contemporaries like Mussolini or Lenin.  Not that Obregon couldn’t be an SOB (he was a ruthless, self-taught general with no compunction about having enemies slaughtered, or assasinated when necessary), but had a sense of humor (he claimed his severed arm was found because of his personal greed.  He joked he’d sent a subordinate out with a gold peso and waited for the arm to come crawling off the field to grab it).

His biography, the “rags to riches” story of an orphan who, by pluck, luck (and the timely invention of a garbanzo harvester) was a self-made millionaire would have earned him a spot in the local histories of his native Sonora.  Having grown up among the Mayo and Yaqui peoples (for a time, he taught school in the indigenous communities), he recruited irregular units for the Constitutionalists, while reading German military manuals and teaching himself the art of modern warfare.  His photographic memory aided not only his learning curve, but — extremely unusual among people with that particular gift — he was able to synthicize his knowledge in new situations.  Like battlefields.

Having recruited indigenous irregulars, Obregon also created fighting units out of radical farmer and labor groups, earning him the trust of the Mexican “left”.  Coupled with his known business acumen and ties to U.S. business leaders (among others, he’d done some business with Herbert Hoover, back during the First World War, when Hoover was in charge of stockpiling food for European relief efforts) made him “acceptable” to the United States, which had problems with the ultra-nationalist Venustiano Carrenza.

On top of all that, Obregon was something of an intellectual — he wrote maudlin poetry — and won over the theorists, eventually settling on a Socialist path for the Revolution, though with support of conservatives like Jose Vasconcellos.

Although he had to overthrow Carrenza to attain the presidency (stolen in the 1920 election) and faced a short revolt at the end of his term, Obregon’s term in office marked the beginning of post-revolutionary Mexico.  There was genuine worry that his second term (thanks to a constitutional change in the Presidential term of office, and some fancy legal manouvers) might lead to a new dictatorship.  His murder kept Plutarcho Elias Calles in power (though not in office) for several years as a not-so-behind the scenes arbitrator, but with the result that the Mexican system — and political stability — would continue, and the Revolution could move on to a more creative path and economic development.