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Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley. Forced Marches: Soldiers and Military Caciques in Modern Mexico.

2014; Oxford University Press; Volume: 119; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ahr/119.1.221

1937-5239

Will Fowler,

Migration, Health, Geopolitics, Historical Geography

Ben Fallaw and Terry Rugeley's edited volume is a most welcome contribution to what remains a remarkably underresearched field: the history of the Mexican armed forces. It includes a jointly written introduction as well as individual chapters by Fallaw and Rugeley and five other scholars (Daniel S. Haworth, Stephen Neufeld, Benjamin T. Smith, Thomas Rath, and Paul Gillingham), with David Nugent providing a particularly thoughtful concluding essay that draws on the different contributors' findings. The fact that Mexican military history has attracted scant attention from historians is certainly one of the great mysteries of this country's historiography. Of all institutions, the army was notoriously influential in the country's political life following the consummation of independence in 1821. For the greater part of the nineteenth century, the most important changes and reforms came about as a result of army-led or army-backed cycles of pronunciamientos, with civilian rulers like Benito Juárez having been more the exception than the rule. Of the thirty-eight men who served as president between 1821 and 1910, twenty-six were army officers, with generals such as Nicolás Bravo, Anastasio Bustamante, José Joaquín de Herrera, and Antonio López de Santa Anna having presided on multiple occasions and others, like Porfirio Díaz, for a very long period of time. Following the 1910–1920 Revolution, moreover, it was revolutionary warlords and military chieftains who governed the country until General Lázaro Cárdenas's six-year term in office came to an end in 1940, ushering in an astounding (by Latin American standards) civilian-led period of governance that has lasted up to the present day. One would have thought, considering the army's major involvement in politics between 1821 and 1940 and its highly atypical yet noteworthy ostensible withdrawal to the barracks and away from the presidential palace thereafter, that this would have been one of the most studied institutions in modern Mexican history. Why and how did the army repeatedly and consistently intervene in politics for well over a hundred years? Why and how did the army then completely withdraw from the political scene during a period of history when military juntas took over the reins of government in numerous Latin American countries (Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay) in the 1960s–1980s? In a country where political and criminal violence has been a regular feature in the landscape, from the hit-and-run operations of the insurgent guerrilla forces of the 1810s to the more recent drug-fueled paramilitary assaults, it is truly extraordinary that so little has been written about Mexico's formal and informal armed forces. As this volume goes to show, “the military and militia reflected and perpetuated social divisions … shaped society, altered the economy, affected ethnicity and gender roles, and molded faith in religion and science” (p. 11). And yet scholarly studies dedicated to the Mexican army have been few and far between. This is particularly so for the nineteenth century, where, apart from William A. DePalo Jr.'s The Mexican National Army, 1822–1852 (1997), there is no significant or substantial published study worthy of mention. The twentieth century is better served but, even then, the number of relevant dedicated studies is astonishingly small. The titles that come to mind are Edwin Liewen's classic Mexican Militarism: The Political Rise and Fall of the Revolutionary Army, 1910–1940 (1968), Keith Brewster's more recent Militarism, Ethnicity, and Politics in the Sierra Norte de Puebla, 1917–1930 (2003) and Roderic Ai Camp's two seminal volumes, Generals in the Palacio: The Military in Modern Mexico (1992) and Mexico's Military on the Democratic Stage (2005). Few general histories of the Mexican army exist, and these provide what amounts to a very general historical overview. They are also dated in their historical outlook, written prior to the new Mexican historiographical wave of the 1970s.