PRI (Mexico)

THROUGH ITS HISTORY, the PRI, or Partido Revolucionario Institucional (Party of the Institutional Revolution), has evolved from its revolutionary origins, with each six-year presidential administration taking on a character that ranges from left of center to centrist.

In February 1913—during the Mexican Revolution of 1910—the military “man on horseback,” General Victoriano Huerta, contrived in the murder of the duly elected President Francisco Madero. Reformist foment, which had aided Madero in ousting the aged strongman Porfirio Diaz in 1910, now rose up again to cast out the ruthless usurper Huerta. On March 26, 1913, one of the revolutionary jefes, or chiefs, Venustianzo Carranza, issued his Plan of Guadalupe, which promised (speciously) to carry out the progressive reforms for which Madero had gathered together his revolutionists in 1910. From that point on, the bearded Carranza became the de facto leader of the revolution, its primer jefe, or “first chief.”

However, the commitment of Carranza to reform was only a matter of political calculation. Only leaders like Francisco “Pancho” Villa in the North of Mexico and Emiliano Zapata in the southern state of Morelos really hoped to champion the lot of the poor campesinos, the peasants who had rallied to the call for revolution. Inevitably, the revolution entered a second phase, in which Zapata and Villa challenged the rule of their first chief. However, those who wished to keep the established social order under Carranza possessed the best field general, Alvaro Obregon. In April 1915, Villa's celebrated Division del Norte, the Division of the North, was annihilated at Celaya. Emiliano Zapata was lured into an ambush by government forces and shot to death on April 10, 1919. Finally, the turn came for Carranza himself to die before the bullets of assassins in May 1920. He was succeeded in power by his own commander, Alvaro Obregon—the next “strongman.”

With the coming of Obregon, it appeared that the violence of “la Revolucion” had come to an end. Anita [Page 354]Brenner wrote in The Wind That Swept Mexico that Mexico “was new, it was a new world where fear was skewered.” Yet it would prove deadly still for those who attempted to disrupt the peace that Obregon imposed on Mexico. On July 23, 1923, Pancho Villa, who like Zapata had kept to the original ideals of the revolution, was assassinated, reportedly at Obregon's insistence.

Nevertheless, the great problem of land reform still eluded solution since the great landowners, the hacendados, still backed the establishment, now headed not by Diaz but by the other former general, Obregon. Thus land reform, which had brought Zapata to the revolution, remained a serious threat to Mexican stability. Brenner wrote in Idols behind Altars that “insistently Mexico has died and killed for a phrase: Land and liberty.” At the same time, the Mexican working class looked for political representation in industries where, as often as not, the ultimate say rested with absentee investors in the United States.