The Mexican Revolution

The immediate challenge to existing regimes in country after country usually came from disaffected members of the traditional ruling groups and from the expanding middle sectors resentful of their exclusion from a fair share of power and privilege. This was evident at the outset of Latin America’s bloodiest 20th-century civil conflict, the Mexican Revolution of 1910, when a dissident member of the large landowning class, Francisco Madero, challenged Díaz for reelection, lost, and rose in rebellion, promising to bring genuine political democracy to Mexico. The dictatorship, decaying from within, collapsed, but it was many years before the country settled down, since Madero’s uprising unleashed forces that neither he nor anyone else could control. Miners, urban workers, and peasants saw an opportunity to seek redress of their own grievances, while rival revolutionaries bitterly fought against each other. The end result was a system built around an all-powerful political party—the Institutional Revolutionary Party (Partido Revolucionario Institucional; PRI), as it ultimately called itself—that skillfully co-opted labour and peasant organizations. More benefits accrued to labour leaders than to the rank and file, and implementation of the land reform proclaimed by the new constitution of 1917 was mostly halfhearted until the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40). But it superficially appeared that almost everybody received something, and after Cárdenas Mexico became a model of political stability in Latin America.

Broadening of political participation

The Mexican Revolution evoked widespread admiration elsewhere in Latin America, especially for its commitment to socioeconomic reform, but the Mexican political system had few imitators. In the Southern Cone, a common pattern was the broadening of participation within a more conventional democratic system where at least the middle sectors gained a meaningful share of power and benefits. This happened in Argentina following an electoral reform of 1912 that made universal male suffrage effective for the first time and paved the way for the Radical Civic Union party, with strong middle-class support, to take power four years later. In Chile a reformist coalition won the election of 1920, but strife between president and parliament brought a relapse into instability and short-lived military dictatorship. By the time Chile returned to stable political life in 1932, it had been equipped with a new constitution that was less susceptible to oligarchic obstructionism and an apparatus of social legislation that benefited both the middle class and urban workers, though it largely ignored the peasantry. However, Uruguay outstripped all others both in political democratization and as a pioneer welfare state, with minimum-wage legislation, an advanced social security system, and much else, even before 1930.

Elsewhere the record was mixed. Costa Rica came close to approximating the pattern of the Southern Cone, and in Colombia the Liberal Party, after its return to power in 1930, went partway toward incorporating labour as an actor on the national scene. Ecuador in 1929 became the first Latin American nation to adopt woman suffrage, though it still required literacy to vote (and far fewer women than men could read). Within four years Brazil, Uruguay, and Cuba—of which only the first retained a similar literacy test—had followed suit. But in Peru a president who flirted too far with social and political reform at the time of World War I was ousted by military coup. In the following decade the banner of reformism in Peru was taken up by Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, founder of the Aprista party and heavily influenced by the example of the Mexican Revolution. The Apristas’ program combined economic nationalism with Latin American solidarity and called for incorporation of the Indians into the mainstream of national life, but the party never gained control of government until the 1980s, by which time it had lost much of its original character. In Venezuela, thanks to oil revenue and effective use of the military, Juan Vicente Gómez stayed firmly in control as dictator until his final illness in 1935; and in Brazil the oligarchic regime of the so-called Old Republic held on until the economic crisis of the Great Depression through careful sharing of power among political factions of the largest states.

Expanding role of the state

The world depression—which saw governments changed by irregular means in every Latin American country except Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, and Honduras—temporarily ended the progress being made toward political democracy. Even where constitutional rule was not interrupted, chief executives felt the need (as also in the United States) to take emergency measures, and the enlargement of government functions in dealing with the economy outlasted the emergency itself. At the same time, leaders everywhere were coming to the conclusion that social ills must be ameliorated, if only to ward off revolutionary threats from below. Various countries (such as Colombia in 1936 and Cuba in 1940) adopted constitutional reforms incorporating the principle already enshrined in Mexico’s constitution of 1917, of expressly subordinating property rights to social need.

Brazil had actually pioneered large-scale state intervention in the economy with its coffee “valorization” program, which was finally abandoned during the depression as too expensive; but between 1930 and 1945, under President Getúlio Vargas, the national government for the first time actively sponsored social legislation, encouraged labour unions while tying them closely to the state, and began construction of a major iron and steel complex under state auspices. Vargas was an authoritarian ruler but a constructive one. Nor was he the only military or civilian strongman who moved to expand the functions of the state both to take the edge off worker discontent and, if possible, to strengthen the national economy against new emergencies. A paradoxical but instructive example was Cuba’s notoriously corrupt Fulgencio Batista, who in 1933 staged a military coup to overthrow a government of the reformist Authentic Party, then preserved most of its social and labour reforms and added some more. After sponsoring the liberal Cuban constitution of 1940, he managed to become a democratically elected president.