The film was The Storm That Swept Mexico, a 2011 documentary on the 1910-1920 Mexican revolution and how the issues involved have played out since — leading up to the 1968 massacre in Mexico City in which police and the army sent in fully armed forces and started shooting unarmed, peaceful demonstrators who were protesting the amount of money Mexico was spending on the 1968 Olympic Games while poverty and privation still gripped most of the country. It was one of those depressing “the more things change, the more they stay the same” stories; it begins with the turn of the last century, when the dictator Porfirio Diaz had been in power for a quarter-century and he had filled his government with a group of technocrats called the cientificos, essentially the Mexican version of today’s Heritage Foundation in the U.S. They believed that the future of Mexico lay in opening the country to foreign — especially American — direct investment, and largely gave away the country’s patrimony of natural resources to U.S. (and European) companies who ran the mines and oilfields with an iron hand. Diaz had taken power in 1876, four years after the death of Benito Juárez, and before he emerged as a Right-wing dictator he’d actually been a general in Juárez’s army and had helped immeasurably in Mexico’s successful resistance to the French occupation of 1862-1867. The fact that a liberal general turned into such a conservative dictator is a nice bit of historical irony the filmmakers (director Ray Telles and writers Telles, Kenn Rabin and Manuel Tsingaris) didn’t bother to mention, nor did they point out the role of the Roman Catholic Church in Mexican politics — the church has always aligned itself with the most Right-wing elements of Mexico and the film doesn’t mention the Cristeros, the fanatically religious counterrevolutionaries who started a short-lived reign of terror against the Mexican government in 1926-28 (their name came from their war cry, “¡Viva Cristo Rey!” — “Long live Christ the king”).
They mostly tell a
pretty straightforward story of the Revolution and how the politics of the
Mexican civil war played out in later decades, starting with Francisco Madero
and his publication of the book La Sucesion Presidential en 1910 in 1908 (a moderate book that argued that Diaz ought
to allow the free election of a vice-president
who could take over after he died — like a lot of aging dictators, Diaz did not pick a successor
out of fear the anointed successor might try to topple him ahead of schedule).
It didn’t mention an even more scathing book about Mexico published in 1909, Los
Grandes Problemas Nacionales by Andrés
Molina (a name I have a particular fondness for because I personally know his
granddaughter, San Diego activist Gracia Molina de Pick), but it does mention that Madero managed to become president of
Mexico after he picked up two generals who led their own private armies and
gave him the needed military force: Pascual Orozco, who’s been pretty much
sidelined in the histories; and Francisco “Pancho” Villa, who’s become legendary.
(One fact unmentioned in this film is that Villa was born with the name
“Doroteo Arrango” — one with far less outlaw or revolutionary “cred.”) Madero
took power as a moderate revolutionary and was faced with the much more radical
demands of Villa, who was based in the northern state of Chihuahua, and
Emiliano Zapata (who remains enough of a name to conjure with in Mexican
history that the resistance movement to the North American Free-Trade Agreement
in Chiapas in 1994 called itself the Zapatistas — having heard a great deal about those Zapatistas it was odd to watch this movie and hear
the word refer to the original
ones), who was from the state of Morelos just south of Mexico City and whose
key demand was that the large estates, the haciendas, on which peons had labored in conditions perched
between slavery and feudalism for centuries, be broken up and the peasants each
be given individual farms. Essentially Madero and his associates were trying to
make an American-style revolution — moderate reform that would leave the ruling
classes pretty much in place — while Villa and Zapata were the Mexican
equivalent of the French Jacobins,
wanting to tear down the material economic basis of the ancien regime and start over.
Villa remains probably the most enigmatic
figure of the revolution; he’d been a bandit before he got into politics and he
behaved more like a thug even when he was a revolutionary (the film makes the
same comparison between Villa and Zapata Lesley Byrd Simpson did in his book Many
Mexicos: when the two arrived in Mexico
City together Zapata’s men went door to door and begged for food, while Villa’s
men just took whatever they wanted — including the eons-old privilege of
conquerors, rape). At the same time he was an innovative military commander who
pioneered the use of trains in warfare (previous commanders had regarded trains
primarily as ways to supply their armies; Villa used trains to move the troops
themselves about quickly to avoid the battles he didn’t want to fight and mass
his troops together for the ones he did) — indeed, it’s unfortunate that this
film didn’t tell one of the most interesting stories of Simpson’s book: that,
in the later battles between Villa and the more moderate general Alvaro
Obregón, Villa’s men tore up the railroad tracks as they retreated — and
Obregón assigned a detail in his army to lay tracks along the roadbeds so his trains could keep
the chase going. Villa also organized the wives and girlfriends of his soldiers
to accompany them into the combat zones, and while these so-called Soldaderas mostly tended to their men’s sexual needs between
battles and served as nurses for the wounded, at times they actually took up
arms themselves — and Villa also allowed himself to be photographed and filmed,
knowing that the use of then-modern communications media would keep his name in
the forefront of the revolutionary struggle both in Mexico and in the U.S.
(where there was actually a lot of public support for him until he started
stating raiding parties on the U.S. side of the border). Indeed, Villa actually
signed a contract with the Mutual Film Company to make a movie about him,
including footage of him actually fighting, and the film was completed and
released — though, alas, it’s one of all too many silents that’s lost today
(though this documentary includes surviving newsreel footage of Villa and
indicates, among other things, what good casting Wallace Beery was in the 1934
film ¡Viva Villa!).
The film also
goes into the role of the U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, who
served while William Howard Taft was president (it was interesting to be seeing
still pictures of Taft right after having read James Bradley’s marvelous book The
Imperial Cruise, describing his mission to
Asia in 1905 during Theodore Roosevelt’s presidency and going into the whole
sorry history of U.S. imperialism in Asia and the open, proud, out-front racism
that underlied it, and noting that as president he was playing the same game as
President in Mexico he’d played as Roosevelt’s Secretary of War in Asia) and
who kept looking for a figure in the Mexican revolution the U.S. could support
in exchange for a free hand in Mexico for U.S. companies. The film doesn’t
mention some of the most interesting figures in the early history of the revolution,
including Madero’s brother Gustavo (who organized his own secret police and
thought — rightly — that Francisco was dangerously naïve about how to deal with
his enemies) and Bernardo Reyes, a Porfirist general who tried to lead a counterrevolutionary
coup, but it does go through the bloody succession of caudillo leaders (it’s a Spanish term, literally meaning “man
on horseback,” to describe a military leader who takes over and rules a country
by force), including interim presidents Victoriano Huerta and Venustiano
Carranza (who ripped off the country so thoroughly that the verb “carrancear,”
meaning “to steal,” entered Mexican Spanish), before the so-called Constitutionalistas led by Obregón and Plutarco Elias Calles essentially
won the civil war in 1920 and set up the Partido National de la
Revolución (PNR) which — later known as the
Partido de la Revolución Institutional (PRI — and the oxymoronic character of the name “Institutional
Revolutionary Party” says volumes about how it ruled!) — effectively ruled
Mexico without serious challenge for the next 80 years.
Then he went about organizing land reform (setting up collective farms called éjidos in northern Mexico and individual plots in the south) and expropriating the foreign oil companies (with compensation — some of the most heartrending footage in the documentary shows people giving their jewelry and kids smashing their piggy banks and putting the results in boxes called “Dinero” to raise the money to pay off the oil companies), setting up the state-owned Pemex (Petroléos Mexicanos) to control the country’s oil industry from wellhead to gas station (Pemex remains to this day the only brand of gasoline available in Mexico). Cárdenas was represented in the interviews by his son Cuáhatemoc (whose name reflects one aspect of the Mexican revolution unexplored in this documentary — a deliberate and propagandistic playing-down of the Spanish part of Mexico’s heritage and a celebration, almost an exaltation, of the Native part), who ran for the presidency twice and at least the first time (in 1988) was almost certainly denied the victory he deserved by election fraud on the part of the PRI. It seems that Lázaro Cardenas thought he could establish a progressive Mexico that would remain in place after his six years in the presidency were up — among other things, he opened Mexico to refugees from fascism, not only people who fled Spain after Franco’s forces won their civil war (it was an obvious place to go not only because Mexico was offering to take them in but because it was a Spanish-speaking country and therefore they didn’t have to worry about learning a new language) but refugees from the rest of Europe, too, including Jews (at a time when there was still enough anti-Semitism in the ruling class of the U.S. that aside from a handful of celebrities, almost no European Jews were admitted to the U.S. during World War II and the Holocaust). Instead, as the PNR turned into the PRI and the presidents stopped coming from the military (Cárdenas’s immediate successor, Avila Camacho, was the last president of Mexico who had started out as a general) and instead came from the ruling class’s intellectual elite (a throwback to the days of Diaz’s cientificos!), Mexico’s progress gradually reversed. The ultimate betrayal of the revolution came in the early 1990’s, when Mexico’s ruling elite signed on to the so-called “North American Free Trade Agreement” (NAFTA), which essentially reversed Article 27 of the 1917 Mexican constitution (the article that had said all natural resources collectively belonged to the Mexican people and could therefore not be sold to private companies, especially foreign-owned ones) and also destroyed Mexico’s system of agricultural subsidies, smashing the economic basis of Mexico’s farming communities and forcing millions of peasants off the land and to the Mexican cities in search of industrial jobs — and, if they couldn’t find them (and few could), then leading them to emigrate to the United States (the real reason why the number of undocumented immigrants to the U.S. swelled from the 3 million of 1986, when the Reagan-era amnesty bill was passed, to the 12 million of the late 2000’s before the 2008 recession closed enough job opportunities in the U.S. that the undocumented population actually shrunk by a million as quite a few immigrants returned to Mexico).
There are problems with The Storm That Swept Mexico — quite a few of the interviews are in Spanish (with English subtitles instead of voiceovers) and at least five veterans of Zapata’s army are included, which since Zapata was killed in 1919 suggests that these were probably filmed for a much earlier documentary made for the Mexican audience, probably in the 1970’s or early 1980’s — and one outrageous historical mistake: the show treats the Zimmermann Telegram as authentic — a legitimate offer from German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann to Mexican president Venustiano Carranza offering to return Texas, Arizona and New Mexico to Mexico if Mexico would enter World War I on the German side and help them defeat the U.S. that was “leaked” to the British Secret Service and then passed on to the New York Times and other U.S. media. In fact it was written by the British Secret Service as an elaborate fake to incense U.S. public opinion and get America into the war on the British side — and it worked; the relatively isolationist Southwestern states reacted the way the Brits had wanted them to and joined the East Coast coalition pushing the U.S. into the war. Overall, though, it’s an impressive documentary even though it would be even stronger if it had taken the story past 1968 and gone into NAFTA, the rise of the (new) Zapatistas in response, the PRI’s first defeat in a presidential election in 2000 (to Vicente Fox, the candidate of the National Action Party or PAN, which had been formed back in the 1940’s by the Roman Catholic Church to combat the anti-clericalism of the revolution!) and the current furor in Mexico over the current PRI president’s proposal to allow foreign oil companies back into the country and partially privatize Pemex — which shows, if nothing else, how “live” the issues raised by the Mexican Revolution really are!
