“We Don't Have Arms, but We Do Have Balls”: Fraud, Violence, and Agency in Post-Revolutionary Elections

This paper analyzes electoral practice in multiple sites during the early years of the PRIísta state. Revising the traditional narrative of systematic, uncontestable electoral fraud, the analysis stresses a marked level of popular agency, particularly in municipal elections, which translated into clear grassroots inputs into and vetoes over the personnel and the policies of local government. Politics in postrevolutionary (post-1940) Mexico was strongly influenced by substantial and sometimes strident dissent. Some of this dissent was expressed through popular protests, which took place in a limbo between the well-publicised, setpiece strikes of railwaymen, doctors and students and the less visible acts of everyday, ‘weapons of the weak’ style resistance. These were large enough to have a (difficult to measure) impact on state and federal governments; yet small enough to slip through the (gaping) cracks of the postrevolutionary state’s rudimentary historiography. Other dissenters took to the strongly competitive primary elections of the PRI; primaries which, for all their flaws, regularly permitted the contestation and participation that constitute the main elements of Robert Dahl’s minimum definition of polyarchy. The democratic opening these primaries enabled was, in some ways, comparable to that of the late twentieth century; it ended abruptly when these elections were abolished by party fiat in 1950.