Insurgency, Counter-insurgency and Policing in Centre-West Mexico, 1926-1929 by Mark Lawrence

Author:Mark Lawrence [Lawrence, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, Americas, Mexico, Military, Other, Religion & Spirituality
ISBN: 9781350095472
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2020-02-20T05:00:00+00:00

Violence beyond the political community: Hard

As the Cristeros were always a battlefield state, exposed at any moment to Federal incursions, the fluidity of territorial control dictated options for repression and control. Where Cristeros expected to remain largely in control, as one of the two of the five zone models described by Stathis Kalyvas, the Cristeros were incentivized to behave as ‘stationary’ insurgents, moderating their military and logistical demands as much as possible in order to shore up popular collaboration and the intelligence networks this offered. The short-term costs for ‘stationary’ insurgency in terms of forgoing pillage were high, yet the long-term benefits promised to be substantial. By contrast, areas beyond Cristero political control which offered only temporary occupation at best were more likely to be used for short-term benefit, namely by pillage and intimidatory killings, prioritizing the short-term gains over long-term costs. In these areas, Cristeros were indeed ‘bandits’ for they were targeting individuals either explicitly beyond the insurgent political community (in the case of agraristas and their pro-government Defensas) or implicitly by being civilians under Federal control.99 The Federation often exercised the same implicit calculations in their strategy. When General Ortiz’s four hundred-strong force of soldiers and agraristas raided Huejuquilla on 4 September 1926, his troops, even at this early stage of hostilities, treated the inhabitants as outside the political community, sacking shops, robbing private houses and rustling cattle.100 But the insurgent Cristero side, unlike the incumbent nominally in control of most territory, had to make these calculations on a daily basis.

Confiscation was also enacted by Federal authorities as a means of punishing the relatives of Cristero rebels. Boys caught aiding the Cristeros were sometimes sent to reform schools in order to be deradicalized.101 In August 1927 the sacristan José Trinidad Mora, who commanded a Cristero band raiding Santa María de Ocotán (Mezquital, Durango), ‘liberated’ a reform school: ‘we released some youths from a boarding school (internado) where the Government was driving them to perdition, and we took all we could, including the son of the school director whom we have as our prisoner’.102 Families in Federal areas of control were punished if they had sons fighting with the Cristeros. A father in Nayar (Durango) who had fled with his Cristero son had his house confiscated in his absence and complained in December 1929 that Federal troops were still billeted at his property, preventing him from returning home despite the supposed amnesty offered under the ‘Arreglos’.103 Given the remoteness of the insurgency in Mexico’s centre-west Cristero reprisals usually fell upon isolated communities and individuals. In early 1928 Federal troops and defensas dispersed some 150 Cristeros after fighting in western Durango. The Cristeros retreated towards Nayarit in groups, including that led by Valente Acevedo, whose men en route made an example of an unfortunate farmworker from the Nayar called Fernando Santillana who, having refused to join the Cristeros, was shot and his body left to decompose hanging from a tree.104

The Cristero policy of reconcentrating livestock and population away from Federal

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