Reassessing Cardenismo: The Mexican Right and the Failure of a Revolutionary Regime, 1934-1940
Author(s)
Sherman, John W.
Abstract
By the mid-1930’s, when President Lázaro Cárdenas gave a new impulse to the reform agenda of the Mexican revolution, the institutional church and army, traditional bulwarks of the political right, were weakened or in the process of being co-opted. However, various Roman Catholic organizations and publicists, business interests, and such right-wing political movements as the Dorados and Sinarquistas mounted a strong and at times violent campaign against the Cárdenas administration. Their appeal to popular nationalism and to religious and family values in opposition to the perceived antinational leftism of Cárdenas evoked strong support at the “grassroots” level. This in turn caused Cárdenas to choose a more moderate figure as his successor in the 1940 presidential election. Even so, it was possible to impose the official candidate only by massive fraud.
