(Author's Note: Here are the first of the excerpt chapters, mwhaaaaa… I have tricked you into learning history. Anyway, toodles.)
[Excerpt from: The Second Mexican Civil War by Alejandro Martínez (2013) - University of Texas Publishing]
Due to the rapidly increasing production of synthetic rubber throughout the mid-1920s, the marginal price of global rubber prices dropped roughly 7.5%. And while this did not affect the major producers in places like Indonesia or Brazil, the local farms run by small businesses or families were already operating on tiny margins.
The distinction would prove decisive.
The great rubber estates could absorb a seven-and-a-half per cent decline. They could reduce wages, postpone investment, renegotiate loans, or simply accept a bad year. A family farm in the Mexican countryside could not. For thousands of small producers, the difference between a modest profit and a modest loss was less than the cost of a sack of maize.
By the beginning of 1928, the consequences were becoming apparent.
Across the southern and eastern states, small rubber producers began defaulting on loans. Merchants who had previously extended credit against the expected value of a year's harvest stopped doing so. Equipment went unrepaired. Acreage was abandoned. Labourers were dismissed. Families who had spent decades cultivating small plots found themselves with land they could no longer afford to work.
It was not, by itself, an economic catastrophe.
It was something more dangerous: a reservoir of unemployed men in a country already at war.
The Mexican government had spent two years fighting the Cristeros, a Catholic insurgency whose strength lay precisely in the countryside. The Cristero movement had never possessed the resources to defeat the Republic in conventional battle. It did not need them. Its armies lived among the villages, knew the roads and mountains, disappeared into the countryside when federal troops approached, and returned as soon as they had passed.
The collapse of the small rubber economy gave the movement something it had previously lacked in sufficient quantity: men.
Not ideologues, for the most part. Not professional soldiers. Men who had worked fields, repaired machinery, driven animals, traded produce and carried rifles for local protection. Many had little interest in the theological arguments that had consumed Mexico's politicians. What they had in common was that the government had ceased to appear capable of protecting their livelihoods.
The Cristeros were ready to give them another explanation.
The government had destroyed the Church.
The government had seized land.
The government had taxed the countryside.
And now, they said, the government had allowed foreign industrial interests to destroy Mexican agriculture.
It mattered little that the last accusation was economically dubious. In a civil war, accuracy was less valuable than usefulness.
By March 1928, Cristero bands that had previously numbered dozens increasingly appeared in formations of several hundred. Federal commanders began reporting attacks on railway lines, telegraph stations and isolated garrisons with a frequency that suggested something more organised than the familiar guerrilla campaign.
The government responded in the only way it knew.
It sent soldiers.
This was the beginning of the second escalation.
Federal troops entered districts where the government had already become unpopular and began searching villages for weapons. Suspected sympathisers were arrested. Livestock was confiscated. Telegraph lines were guarded. Roads were patrolled. In some regions, the army burnt buildings suspected of having been used by insurgents.
Every measure made military sense.
Almost every measure made political sense in the opposite direction.
A farmer who might have tolerated the government could tolerate a tax collector. He might even tolerate a soldier passing through his village. He was considerably less inclined to tolerate the seizure of his horse on suspicion that his neighbour was a Cristero.
The insurgency expanded.
By May, the government was no longer merely fighting the Cristeros. It was fighting the consequences of fighting the Cristeros.
The distinction would become crucial in Veracruz.
Veracruz had never been entirely pacified, but its importance made instability there uniquely dangerous. It was Mexico's principal gateway to the Gulf and one of its most important railway centres. Whoever controlled Veracruz did not merely control a city. They controlled a connection between the interior of Mexico and the outside world.
The Cristeros understood this.
They did not initially attempt to seize Veracruz itself. Instead, they attacked the railway.
Bridges were damaged. Telegraph wires were cut. Trains were ambushed. Federal units sent to reinforce isolated garrisons found themselves travelling through territory in which every village might provide information to the enemy.
For Washington, the reports were alarming.
American citizens lived and worked throughout Mexico. American companies had substantial commercial interests there. The United States had no appetite for another Mexican intervention after the experiences of the previous decade, but neither did it intend to watch American property and American citizens become hostages to a widening civil conflict.
President Coolidge's administration therefore pursued the same policy it had pursued since the beginning of the Cristero crisis: pressure Mexico to restore order while avoiding direct involvement.
The policy was reasonable.
The timing was not.
On 17 July 1928, Álvaro Obregón was assassinated.
The effect was immediate.
Obregón had been many things to Mexico: president, general, revolutionary, political boss and, above all, one of the few men whose personal authority extended across the fractured military establishment. His death removed the one figure around whom the competing revolutionary factions might have organised themselves without immediately reaching for their rifles.
Mexico now had two crises.
The first was the religious war.
The second was the question of who controlled the revolutionary state.
The two quickly became indistinguishable.
Obregonistas suspected the Callistas. Callistas suspected the Obregonistas. Generals began calculating where their units would stand if the political dispute became a military one. Politicians who had spent years speaking of constitutional government quietly began counting regiments.
Meanwhile, the Cristeros continued recruiting.
The rubber crisis had not created the rebellion, but it had changed its character. What had once been a stubborn religious insurgency was becoming a broader rural revolt. The distinction between a Cristero fighter, a local militia member and a dispossessed agricultural worker was increasingly difficult to maintain.
By August, federal intelligence estimated that tens of thousands of armed men were operating outside direct government control.
The number was almost certainly exaggerated.
The danger was not.
The government could survive an insurgency.
It could survive a political crisis.
It could survive a military rebellion.
It could not easily survive all three simultaneously.
The first serious international incident occurred in late August.
A federal supply train travelling toward Veracruz was attacked outside the city. The attackers intended to seize weapons and ammunition. They did not know that several American passengers were aboard.
The fighting lasted less than an hour.
When it ended, American citizens were dead.
The American response was restrained at first. Washington demanded an investigation and compensation. Mexico promised both.
But Mexico could not investigate territory it did not control.
And that was becoming the central fact of the crisis.
By September, the federal government controlled Veracruz itself but exercised increasingly uncertain authority beyond the city. Cristeros held the countryside in places. Bandits held other parts. Local political bosses maintained their own armed men. Federal troops held the railway and major roads.
Nobody knew where one authority ended and another began.
Then the army began to fracture.
The death of Obregón had left officers without a universally accepted political future. Some remained loyal to President Plutarco Elías Calles. Others believed that Calles had betrayed the revolutionary settlement. A third group was less ideological and simply feared being on the losing side.
In September, a federal regiment refused orders to advance into a Cristero-controlled district.
Another regiment attempted to enforce the order.
The two units exchanged fire.
It was a small engagement.
It killed fewer than fifty men.
Historically, such an incident might have been forgotten.
In 1928, it became a symbol.
For the first time since the Revolution, there was an unmistakable possibility that the Mexican Army might begin fighting itself.
The Americans now faced a decision.
Their diplomats warned that the Mexican government might no longer be capable of protecting foreign citizens in Veracruz. The State Department recommended evacuation. Naval vessels were dispatched to the Gulf.
The evacuation began in October.
It was supposed to be routine.
It was not.
On the morning of 19 October, fighting broke out on the northern approaches to Veracruz. Cristero forces attacked federal positions guarding the railway. Federal artillery responded. The Americans, who had already begun removing civilians from the city, found themselves caught between the two sides.
An artillery shell struck near the harbour.
Whether it was fired by the Cristeros or the federal forces was never conclusively established.
Three American sailors were killed.
The United States demanded an immediate ceasefire around the harbour.
The Mexican government replied that it could not guarantee one.
That answer ended the argument in Washington.
On 23 October, President Coolidge announced that American forces would temporarily occupy Veracruz for the protection of American lives and property.
The language was deliberately familiar.
It was the language of 1914.
The operation was presented as limited, temporary and defensive. The United States would occupy the harbour, customs facilities and railway installations. American forces would not advance into the interior unless attacked.
The first Marines landed before dawn.
Within hours, the customs house was under American control.
By evening, the railway terminal was occupied.
The Mexican government protested.
The Cristeros protested.
The surviving Obregonistas protested.
For perhaps the first time in years, all three agreed on something.
The Americans had to leave.
The irony was not lost on anyone.
For two years the Mexican government had claimed that the Cristeros were a threat to the sovereignty of the Republic. Now American Marines were standing in Mexico's principal Gulf port because the Republic had proved incapable of securing it.
The occupation transformed the political landscape overnight.
The Cristeros, who had previously fought against the government in the name of religion, now declared themselves defenders of Mexican sovereignty.
Obregonistas who had considered rebellion against Calles postponed their plans.
Even politicians who despised the Church condemned the occupation.
The American intervention had achieved something that Mexican governments had repeatedly failed to achieve: it had given Mexico a common enemy.
Washington had expected the occupation to stabilise the situation.
Instead, it nationalised it.
Within weeks, American patrols were being fired upon outside Veracruz. At first the attacks were isolated. Then they became systematic. The United States expanded its defensive perimeter, occupying additional railway junctions and coastal positions.
Every expansion created another incident.
Every incident created another expansion.
The Americans were trapped by geography.
They could control Veracruz harbour.
They could not control Veracruz state.
They could guard a railway station.
They could not guard every mile of railway between the station and Mexico City.
They could defeat any Mexican formation that attacked them conventionally.
They could not defeat an insurgency that simply refused to fight conventionally.
And the Mexicans understood this.
By December, the occupation had become a war without a declaration.
American troops held Veracruz.
Federal troops held Mexico City.
Cristeros dominated substantial areas of the western countryside.
Military rebels were organising in the north.
Local commanders increasingly acted independently of whichever government claimed to command them.
Mexico had not formally divided into two sides.
It had become something worse.
It had divided into several.
The appointment of Emilio Portes Gil as interim president in December provided a temporary political centre, but not a solution. Portes Gil inherited a government whose authority was challenged by Catholics, generals, revolutionaries, regional bosses and, now, a foreign army occupying one of the country's most important cities.
The Americans, meanwhile, were discovering the limits of their own power.
They could win battles.
They could not manufacture a Mexican government capable of ruling Mexico.
The occupation had been intended to last weeks.
By January 1929, nobody in Washington could say when it would end.
The situation deteriorated further in March, when General José Gonzalo Escobar launched the military rebellion that historians would later recognise as the final collapse of the old revolutionary order. In another Mexico, Escobar's revolt might have been the decisive military crisis.
In this Mexico, it was merely another fire.
Rebel forces attempted to seize positions around Veracruz while the Americans remained in the city. Federal troops moved to suppress them. Cristero bands attacked both sides when opportunity presented itself.
For several days, the absurdity of the situation was almost complete.
Mexican rebels were fighting Mexican government troops outside an American-occupied Mexican city, while American soldiers stood between them attempting to prevent the fighting from reaching the harbour.
It was no longer possible to describe Mexico as being in the Cristero War.
Nor was it sufficient to call the conflict an army rebellion.
The Revolution had fragmented into competing wars.
Historians would later mark the autumn of 1928 as the beginning of the Second Mexican Civil War.
At the time, nobody knew that.
They only knew that Mexico was coming apart.
And, for the first time in a generation, there was a foreign army standing on Mexican soil.
The most extraordinary part of the crisis was that the United States had not intended to start a war.
Neither had the Mexican government.
Neither had the Cristeros.
Neither had the generals.
There had been no grand conspiracy, no single decision that made the conflict inevitable.
There had simply been a seven-and-a-half per cent fall in the price of rubber.
A few thousand bankrupt farmers.
A few thousand unemployed men.
A rebellion that acquired new recruits.
A government that responded with soldiers.
A president who was assassinated.
An army that began to fracture.
A railway that could no longer be secured.
And, finally, an American shell of a decision: to occupy a port until order was restored.
The tragedy of 1928 was that by the time the United States occupied Veracruz, there was no longer anyone capable of restoring that order.