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From Agraristas to Guerrilleros: The Jaramillista Movement in Morelos

2007; Duke University Press; Volume: 87; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-130

1527-1900

Tanalís Padilla,

Politics and Society in Latin America

The 1940s witnessed a resurgence of agrarismo in Morelos, Mexico, the homeland of Emiliano Zapata. Under the leadership of Rubén Jaramillo, campesinos fought for better crop prices, credit, and land reform.1 The struggle of the Jaramillistas, as the participants became known, lasted from 1942 until Jaramillo’s assassination in 1962. As the movement unfolded in the years between the end of the Cardenista presidency and the height of the cold war, it acquired characteristics crucial to our understanding of postrevolutionary Mexico. Influenced by the legacy of Emiliano Zapata’s agrarianism, the hope created by Lázaro Cárdenas’s (1934 – 40) populism, the disillusionment brought about by subsequent administrations, and the renewed expectations for radical change inspired by the Cuban Revolution, the Jaramillistas are emblematic of campesino resistance during this period. As post-Cardenista administrations abandoned a commitment to the countryside, they quelled Jaramillista petitions with violence. In response to this repression, campesinos drew on the Zapatista legacy of armed struggle — first in self-defense and later, in the wake of the successful Cuban Revolution, as a programmatic and tactical strategy significantly more radical than earlier calls for political and economic reform.The present study focuses on the final episode of the Jaramillista struggle, from 1959 to 1962, when Jaramillo, at the head of some six thousand campesinos, initiated an attempt to settle 27,000 hectares of the Michapa and Guarín plains in western Morelos.2 The Jaramillistas proposed a planned agrarian settlement — a colonia — that would include subsistence farming and Cardenista-style cooperative industrial projects. While the Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization (DAAC) initially approved the proposed colonia, the Jaramillistas’ plans were blocked by local cattle ranchers and the federal government. In 1962, the army forcibly removed the settlers and targeted their leaders, culminating in the assassination of Jaramillo and his family.The years from 1940 to 1968, a period officially hailed for its political stability and rapid economic growth, have only recently begun to receive attention from bottom-up historiography, mostly in the realm of popular culture.3 This body of research builds on the methodology employed in influential studies of the interaction between the state and popular sectors.4 The bulk of this scholarship has focused on the urban world. And yet, rural Mexico is an arena where defining elements of the contemporary situation played — and continue to play — themselves out. It thus constitutes an important site for understanding the revolution’s legacy. The agrarian question — in many ways the soul of Mexico’s revolution and the heart of the PRI’s legitimizing rhetoric — continued to haunt the government as it abandoned rural needs in favor of urban interests. Campesinos fought back against increasing agricultural commercialization and concentration. In northern Mexico, they carried out a series of land invasions in the late 1950s, and by the 1960s similar revolts cropped up elsewhere in the country. By the 1970s, campesino unrest had reached endemic proportions.5 Not coincidentally, these decades of rural turbulence also produced a vigorous anthropological debate regarding the fate and class character of Mexico’s campesinado.6 More recently, scholars have extended this analysis to the process of political class formation and the historical construction of campesino identity.7 Yet, the historiography of post-1940s agrarian movements is slim.This examination of the Jaramillista trajectory seeks to identify key ways in which campesinos battled the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolution and redefined themselves continuously, drawing on new repertoires of struggle. In 1959, these became increasingly influenced by the Cuban Revolution. A remarkably long-lasting movement, the Jaramillistas incorporated many modalities into their struggle. Their movement not only provides insight into campesino resistance in Morelos during the “Mexican miracle” but also occupies an important place in the history of postrevolutionary rural mobilizations. The Michapa and Guarín project sought to put both Zapatista and Cardenista ideals into practice through legal channels. Although open to participation in the revolution’s modernizing project, the Jaramillistas were not willing to abandon certain defining practices of campesino life and livelihood. Rather, they sought to secure the tools necessary to survive as rural dwellers. In the face of an increasingly capitalist-friendly state whose development plans sacrificed small-scale rural production, the Jaramillista colonia project presented an initiative to support campesino production and make it a viable form of subsistence.During these two decades of struggle, the government repeatedly repressed Jaramillista efforts to secure campesino demands, support the interests of mill workers, protect the rights of ejidatarios, and take power through state elections. In 1942, 1946, and 1953, the Jaramillistas took up arms in self-defense, later returning to legal channels when offered amnesty. However, after the government sent the army to disrupt the settlement at Michipa and Guarín in 1962, this pattern came to an end. The Jaramillistas were edging toward more-radical forms of armed rebellion based on the foco theory of Ernesto “Che” Guevara and the Cuban revolutionaries. The assassination of Jaramillo was the death knell for the movement, leaving us to speculate about the actual path it would take. Yet the final phase of the movement and the government’s ultimate repression in 1962 does reflect a shift in rural mobilizations, from rebellions rooted in the agrarista tradition to the modern guerrilla groups that spread through rural Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. Mexico never experienced the large-scale armed rebellions that some other Latin American governments confronted. Still, from the 1960s onward the government has been bedeviled by a series of small guerrilla groups, each a radicalized offshoot of earlier reformist mobilizations.Three years after the state crushed the Jaramillistas in 1962, the government was confronted by a militant movement led by Pablo Gómez and Arturo Gámiz in Chihuahua. This group attacked military headquarters in Ciudad Madera in a strategy reminiscent of the Cuban revolutionaries’ assault on the Moncada barracks. The army killed most of the rebel leaders in the ensuing skirmish. Cited in popular histories as a starting point for Mexico’s modern guerrillas, the dramatic nature of the episode obscured its position within “a long trajectory of campesino and popular struggles that had always been halted through military repression.”8 Later, the Mexican government confronted a campesino guerrilla army in the coastal state of Guerrero. Here, Genaro Vázquez and Lucio Cabañas took up arms after their peaceful organizing efforts were met with a government massacre. It took the Mexican government nine years and 24,000 army troops to eliminate Cabañas and his “Party of the Poor.”9 In the same period, an urban guerrilla group — the September 23 Communist League — spread to several cities, its ranks fueled by survivors of the 1968 student massacre.10 Today, guerrilla conflicts continue in Mexico. The 1990s have witnessed the Zapatistas in Chiapas, as well as the People’s Revolutionary Army (EPR) and the Insurgent People’s Revolutionary Army (ERPI) operating in Guerrero and Oaxaca — reminders that guerrilla insurgency did not vanish with the end of the cold war.Although some rural mobilizations continued through peaceful means, militant groups emerged, with organizational and programmatic structures that resembled Cuba’s Sierra Maestra model: one in which small, armed cells organized throughout the countryside in the hopes of producing a generalized uprising. Within the tense international climate following the Cuban Revolution, rural uprisings took on new meaning — both for their armed militants and for a government motivated by U.S. fears about communism in Latin America. Michapa and Guarín exemplify the radicalization of campesino movements within the context of post-1959 cold-war politics. The Jaramillista trajectory reflects an important moment of transition: from movements that operated largely within the agrarista tradition rooted in the revolution to the guerrilleros that would increasingly emerge from the 1960s onward.The Jaramillista movement was deeply rooted in the soil of Morelos and its 1910 revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, it unfolded in a Mexico profoundly transformed by the revolution (1910 – 1920) and its ensuing political project. Jaramillo and many of his supporters had fought in Zapata’s army and would invoke this experience to legitimize their demands and defend themselves from government attacks. Yet, many of the Jaramillistas’ defining characteristics hearken to the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. In spite of its top-down nature, the Cárdenas administration gave credence to campesino initiatives, validated their claims to land, credit, and water, and created agroindustrial campesino cooperatives.Jaramillo’s personal trajectory as an agrarian leader reveals this Cardenista influence. Jaramillo met Cárdenas during the 1934 presidential campaign and agreed to mobilize campesino support if Cárdenas promised to build a sugar mill to benefit the Morelos population.11 Construction for the “Emiliano Zapata” mill began in 1935, and by 1938 it was functioning as a cooperative of workers and campesinos. Designed to mitigate class exploitation, these types of agroindustrial collectives were a hallmark of Cardenismo. In Morelos, the Zacatepec mill was devised to revitalize the state’s sugar economy — devastated by the years of revolutionary conflict — and provide jobs for a growing population with increasingly limited access to land. The cooperative’s governing body, the campesino-worker council, elected Jaramillo as president. The manager, appointed by Mexico’s president, was subordinate to this council, a control that lasted only two years, since in 1940 the balance of power shifted in favor of the manager. By 1942, mill workers and campesino suppliers were so dissatisfied by the manager’s policies that they organized a joint strike demanding both better wages and working conditions for workers and higher prices for campesinos’ sugarcane. Jaramillo, one of the main strike leaders, was persecuted by the manager’s hired gunmen; after several attempts on his life, he took up arms and fled to the mountains, along with about 75 other men.This action exemplified the legacy of Zapatismo in Morelos. At the age of 13, Jaramillo had joined Emiliano Zapata’s Army of the South. At 15, he became a first captain in the infantry. In 1918, when the war took a turn for the worse, he withdrew from the struggle and reportedly advised his men: “The people, and even more so future generations, will not allow themselves to live enslaved. We will once again continue our struggle. And even if we are far from each other we will not lose sight of one another and when the moment comes we will once again reunite. Put your rifles away where you can easily find them again.”12 While this statement may have been constructed decades later as Jaramillo began to write his autobiography, it nevertheless captures the significance of the Zapatista tradition for campesinos. In Morelos especially, Zapata’s spirit flourished through living memories and legends that evoked his presence. When the state appropriated Zapata’s image, placing him alongside Francisco Madero, Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregón, and Francisco Villa as a national hero, it implicitly legitimized the campesinos’ right to land.13 It is no surprise that Morelos campesinos viewed Jaramillo as Zapata’s heir.More than two decades after the death of Zapata and the dissolution of his army, the Jaramillistas would return to armed struggle when faced with threats from hired gunmen, state police, or even the army. But while Jaramillistas would pick up arms on three different occasions, they continued to fight by means of legal petitions, taking advantage of political openings when opportunities presented themselves. The movement’s trajectory displayed this tactical and programmatic resolve. The result was a campesino movement that employed a variety of tactics — petitions, electoral politics, land invasions, and armed struggle. The revolutionary rhetoric of the official party, despite its authoritarian practices, provided campesinos with a strategic space in which to act. If campesinos spoke loudly enough, the state would have to attend to their demands or risk tarnishing its revolutionary legitimacy.A year after Jaramillo first took up arms, President Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940 – 46) granted him amnesty. Jaramillo used this opportunity to work through legal channels with other Morelos campesinos, creating a political party that championed workers and agricultural producers. Jaramillo knew agrarian law and had built a reputation for defending the rural poor. The platform of the Partido Agrario Obrero Morelense (PAOM) called for a return to the agrarian and labor reforms carried out under Cárdenas. When the PRI responded to the Jaramillistas’ electoral challenge with fraud and repression, the movement’s leadership went underground. They would resurface, however, in 1951 to make a second bid for the governorship of Morelos. This time, the PAOM campaign coincided with a major split in the PRI — between younger university-trained supporters of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and older revolutionary generals who backed Miguel Henríquez Guzmán. For many Mexicans, especially in the countryside, the 1952 elections represented an opportunity to return to Cardenista policies.14 The Jaramillistas were one of many groups allied with the Federación de Partidos del Pueblo Mexicano (FPPM), Henríquez Guzmán’s party. The FPPM campaign presented the most serious electoral challenge to the PRI between 1940 and 1988. The government responded to this challenge with a two-pronged strategy of fraud and repression, at both the national and local levels; the Jaramillistas again confronted the heavy hand of the state. In response, they once more took up arms, issuing the “Plan de Cerro Prieto” that denounced the betrayal of the revolution and condemned Mexico’s capitalist system and its political and economic subjugation by the United States. As I have argued elsewhere, the state’s use of repression against the Jaramillista electoral campaigns radicalized Jaramillista tactics and demands.15The Jaramillistas remained underground until 1958, when President Adolfo López Mateos (1958 – 64) came to power with a renewed agrarista rhetoric. The president’s overtures to campesinos included an official pardon for Jaramillo — an opening the Morelos leader used to resume work through legal channels. Together with six thousand other campesinos, he sought to establish a popular colonia in the vacant lands of the Michapa and Guarín plains. The Jaramillistas couched this initiative in terms of development and progress, appealing to the regime’s proclaimed commitment to modernity. On these lands emerged a process of dynamic rural mobilization and political struggle based on campesinos’ constitutional right to land. The Jaramillistas’ previous experience converged with broader historical memory and acquired a new tone in light of international response to the Cuban Revolution. However, the Mexican constitution provided the legal framework for what would prove to be the last Jaramillista mobilization. As in numerous rural movements to come, Mexican law validated their claims, while the organizing process generated innovative and distinct political practices.16The social composition of the Jaramillistas reflected the transformation of Morelos’s political economy, with change taking place at an increasingly dramatic rate by 1960. Socioeconomic transformation in Morelos was conditioned by three principal factors: its proximity to Mexico City, its warm climate and appealing natural springs, and improvements in road networks, especially the Mexico City – Acapulco highway.First, its geographic relationship to the nation’s capital made it convenient for industrial expansion. Since the 1940s, the state government sought to attract industry by granting tax exemptions for periods of 10 or 15 years.17 Morelos’s proximity to the nation’s capital also translated into a relatively weak local elite that often derived its power from the federal government. Although the practice of naming outsiders as state governors — one of the catalysts of the Zapatista rebellion — waned in the first decades following the revolution, by the 1950s Mexican presidents were again appointing non-morelenses to the state governorship.18 The state’s economic power, too, lay in the hands of Mexico City or transnational capitalists who financed industrial expansion, housing developments, and tourist ventures.19 The most dramatic examples of how Morelos came to serve Mexico City industry occurred in the early 1960s with the construction of CIVAC (Ciudad Industrial del Valle de Cuernavaca) and the 1965 tax breaks granted to industry.20 That such projects and legislation were enacted in the wake of the elimination of the Jaramillistas and their proposal for Michapa and Guarín vividly reveals the type of development the state and federal governments would commit to.The state’s warm climate and numerous natural springs also sparked transformation during this period. The subtropical vegetation and medicinal springs had lured elites as far back as pre-Columbian times, when Aztec lords had lavish gardens built in places such as Oaxtepec. Hernán Cortés also marveled at Morelos’s beautiful landscape, and during the colonial period and the nineteenth century the area served as a leisure and recreational space for the elite.21 Although the revolution and its aftermath disrupted these activities, Mexico’s tourist industry began to boom in the 1950s, and entrepreneurs set their sights on this state easily accessible to Mexico City. In the coming decades, water parks marked the landscape. By the 1940s, developers began soliciting land and water concessions — most often held by ejidatarios — and their projects became increasingly ambitious in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to swimming and other recreational facilities (golf courses, tennis courts, and walking trails), many of these projects included luxury hotels and vacation homes.22 Housing developments became big business, as land speculators flocked to satisfy elite demand for weekend homes in the “city of eternal spring,” as Cuernavaca became known.The experience of Ahuatepec, a community on the outskirts of the state capital, vividly illustrates the violence of this process. The comuneros of Ahuatepec had been in possession of their land since “time immemorial,” and in 1944, President Ávila Camacho officially designated them as ejidos. In 1958, however, U.S. businessman Donald Stoner and Mexican banker Agustín Legorreta sought to build the housing project “Jardines Ensueño” on these ejido lands. Stoner and Legorreta cited the clause in Ávila Camacho’s 1944 presidential decree stating that ownership rights to any “small properties [pequeñas propiedades]” present within the Ahuatepec ejido should be respected, and such properties thus remained eligible for resale. The comuneros, whether small property owners or ejidatarios, refused to sell their lands, despite constant intimidation by state police, who on one occasion invaded the town and set several houses on fire. Thanks to allies in the state government and to loopholes in Ávila Camacho’s decree, Stoner appropriated 110 hectares of this land. Some ejidatarios reported that the police tortured them until they agreed to sell their plots.23 Jaramillo joined the Ahuatepec comuneros in defense of their lands and spoke at some of their rallies. Several years later, in 1965, comunero leader Enedino Montiel and his wife were hacked to death with machetes; Ahuatepec residents attributed their bloody deaths to orders from Stoner and Legorreta.24Finally, as road construction accelerated in Morelos, so did the number of visitors and the value of land. The 1952 construction of the Mexico City – Acapulco highway had particularly significant implications, as Morelos became the connecting zone between the nation’s capital and the historically significant port city and popular tourist destination. Although it shared some cultural and regional characteristics with Guerrero, Morelos boasted well-watered and accessible terrain, while Guerrero suffered from blistering heat and often impenetrable mountains.25 The government also opened up dirt roads throughout the state connecting previously isolated villages to major highways. While these roads were small and often flooded under heavy rain, they increased commerce (and the role of middlemen), monetized the economy, and furthered the introduction of commercial goods.26 In part because of its proximity to the nation’s capital, Morelos served as a major migratory pull both for Mexico City residents in search of a more tranquil life and for laborers for whom Morelos was a temporary settlement in a search for work that increasingly landed them in Mexico City. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, migration acted as a consistent source of the state’s population increase. The resulting economic growth acted as an additional migration pull, which strained state resources. In the 1940s, 20 percent of the state’s population had been born elsewhere, a figure that increased to 25 percent by 1960 and 27 percent by 1970.27 The state’s total population more than tripled in the same 30-year span.28The composition of the Jaramillistas, especially those engaged in the Michapa and Guarín project, reflected this social and economic flux. Participants included land-poor subsistence farmers, sharecroppers, rural day laborers, and migrants from Guerrero. Rural schoolteachers who joined the ranks brought in important ideological resources. While much of the rural population underwent a process of proletarianization, campesino culture persisted, often sustained by familial or other social ties to those who still retained land.29 As the social composition of the countryside’s population changed, their demands expanded to include “issues of production, self-management, autonomy, and democracy.”30 Thus, as demands for land acquired broader political and economic dimensions, they posed new threats to regional and national elites.With their dry, rocky soil, the Michapa and Guarín plains seemed, at first glance, an unlikely source of contention. Their potential, however, lay in the nearby Amacuzac River, which could be used to irrigate the lands that extended into the municipalities of Coatlán del Río, Tetecala, Puente de Ixtla, Miacatlán, and Amacuzac. Most of the Michapa and Guarín plains had been distributed to campesinos during the administration of Plutarco Elías Calles (1924 – 28). However, they remained uncultivated — the ejidatarios received no technical support, and their attempts to work small portions of this land were blocked by nearby ranchers who appropriated the plains to graze cattle. In 1959, a group of local campesinos learned of a private initiative to irrigate the area. They decided it was time to assert their rights, so they went in search of Jaramillo.31The initiative soon became much more than an action to reclaim an ejido. Under Jaramillo’s leadership, the ejidatarios formed a committee with landless campesinos from Morelos and neighboring states; they devised an ambitious project to create a new colonia and distribute the 27,000 hectares of land among six thousand campesinos.32 The committee’s demands emphasized campesino initiative and self-sufficiency. Their first appeal to the president asked for loans to begin the process of irrigation and distribution. They proposed to hire a technical assistant to divide the land equitably and efficiently, and they emphasized campesino participation in the entire process. The Jaramillistas promised not to deplete government resources but rather to use the credit efficiently and pay it back in a timely and honest manner. Moreover, they pointed out, the project would benefit not just the peasant families themselves but also the state economy, the federal government, and the entire region of the plains.33 Jaramillo and the committee simultaneously worked out the legal details of the project with the Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization, and in March 1960 the project was approved. The DAAC assigned engineer Federico Tafoya to provide technical assistance.34The Jaramillistas named the colonia after Otilio Montaño, one of Zapata’s closest allies and the principal author of the Plan de Ayala. This choice staked a claim to a Zapatista legacy and reflected a desire to implement Zapatismo in Morelos. Combining subsistence farming and modern commercial ventures, they planned to provide croplands for rural dwellers and to introduce canneries for commercial production of tomatoes, cantaloupe, and watermelons. They also proposed sugar-and rice-milling co-ops, whose profits would benefit the community as a whole. The Otilio Montaño colonia, they emphasized, would implement the “latest innovations offered by modern science.”35 Other projects included the construction of dams on the Amacuzac River, rainwater-collection reservoirs, and a 30-km road to the colonia. The proposal included plans for streets, modern housing, running water, electricity, and telephone and telegraph service, as well as all “other necessary facilities for a modern population center.” The estimated cost was $480 million pesos, to be paid back over ten years, at 7 percent interest.36In establishing that each settler family would have a plot of land (0.1 hectares) while simultaneously proposing large-scale rice and sugar cooperatives and commercial processing for crops such as tomatoes, the plans for Michapa and Guarín paralleled aspects of the Plan de Ayala. One Jaramillista actually described the colonia project as an updated version of the latter.37 Although the plans were quite different in other respects, Zapata himself had been conscious of the need to cultivate commercial crops. For example, the revolutionary leader had warned the residents of Villa de Ayala, “If you keep on growing chile peppers, onions, and tomatoes, you’ll never get out of the state of poverty you’ve always lived in. That’s why, as I advise you, you have to grow cane.”38 Where Zapata confiscated sugar mills and distributed the surrounding lands, he insisted that the mills keep running, not as private property, but as public works.39Despite the PRI’s appropriation of the figure of Zapata and its claimed monopoly over the revolution, the ideals that the Zapatistas had fought for — campesino dignity, autonomy, and subsistence — continued to permeate Mexico’s rural landscape and exposed the PRI’s deepening alliance with private and commercial interests. The Jaramillistas’ plans were ultimately stymied by the interests of cattle ranchers, industrialists, and tourist developers — evidence of the gulf between the PRI’s revolutionary claims and the economic and social realities the party supported and created. As the state abandoned agrarista ideals, the Jaramillistas reclaimed them in their alternative development proposal for Morelos. They carried Zapata’s flag and embraced modern development proposals such as those promoted under Cárdenas.The Jaramillista plans for roads, schools, and recreation centers demonstrated an eye toward progress. Economic autonomy and self-sufficiency were two main goals for the colonia. One participant, José Rodríguez, described how “the plan would give land to the campesinos but in a more advanced way: with credit and guarantees. It was going to be a colonia with technical direction. . . . That was the intention, to form an agricultural, industrial, and commercial center because everything would be manufactured and produced there. And there would be work not only for the campesinos that were there but for those all over the state. Jaramillo’s vision was extensive.”40But one of the first problems the Jaramillistas faced came from nearby ranchers and local political bosses who had taken over part of the plains to pasture their cattle. These ranchers and caciques began to mobilize some of the original ejidatarios in a campaign to discredit the Jaramillistas as outsiders, then argued to the DAAC that these turncoat ejidatarios’ use of the lands constituted legal and functioning ejidos. They provided tractors and barbed wire to these co-opted campesinos (some of whom these same ranchers had previously blocked from using the land) in order to make it look like the land was being cultivated.41 In response, Jaramillo invited authorities to see the patchy and haphazard appearance of these cultivated areas, revealing the ranchers’ fraudulence.When Jaramillo presented his proposal for the Michapa and Guarín plains, he recognized that these lands had been distributed as ejidos. However, they had remained uncultivated for over three decades, and according to agrarian law the original recipients had therefore forfeited their legal rights. Jaramillo and Tafoya sent aerial photos of the plains to show that they lay fallow.42 Jaramillo also made numerous trips to Mexico City to acquire the final signature from Roberto Barrios, the head of the DAAC, so the Jaramillistas could prove to local rancheros, caciques, and state políticos (as they referred to corrupt state authorities) that they had obtained legal rights to the land. But Jaramillo’s visits to the agrarian offices invariably resulted in long hours of w