Out of the Shadows: Mexico’s Reckoning with State-Led Violence in the Recent Past, 1927–40

In October of 1927, fourteen men were assassinated by federal soldiers by the side of a highway outside of Mexico City. Among them was one of two prominent generals who were running for president in opposition to the re-election of former president Alvaro Obregón. They and their anti-reelectionist supporters regarded Obregón’s potential return to power to be an unacceptable violation of the Mexican revolutionary prohibition against presidential reelection; they also feared a return to the personalist politics of the pre-revolutionary period. The government’s justification for the killing of political dissidents, in what is now remembered as the Huitzilac Massacre, was that the anti-reelectionists were in open rebellion against the government, and that their executions were both just and necessary. Yet the victims were never tried or convicted of any crime, nor were their assassins. However, eight years later, at a moment of momentous political transition in Mexico, the federal government itself reopened the case, and impelled the army to investigate the massacre. This paper is based on the military’s extensive files of its multi-year investigation (1936-39), which were very briefly made available to the public for the first time in 2010. It demonstrates that the reformist government of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-40) turned the massacre from political liability into a valuable asset, as the investigation of the killings became a powerful symbol for a broader, public repudiation of intra-elite and state-sponsored violence in Mexico’s recent past. It argues that this explicit turn away from political violence was an essential part of Mexico’s postrevolutionary political consolidation that helps to explain the success of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and its predecessor parties in dominating Mexican politics at all levels for the rest of the twentieth century.