The hand-picked puppet president who exiled his puppeteer and seized Mexico's oil
Plutarco Elías Calles chose Lázaro Cárdenas for Mexico's presidency in 1934, expecting obedience. Instead Cárdenas outmanoeuvred his patron, forced him into exile, nationalised the oil industry to create Pemex, handed vast estates to smallholders, and then did something rare: he gave up power peacefully in 1940. Polls rank him Mexico's most popular 20th-century president.
Cárdenas was born in 1895 in Jiquilpan, Michoacán, one of eight children of a family of Purépecha ancestry whose father ran a billiard hall. He left school at eleven, and after his father died he supported the household from the age of 16, working as a tax collector, printer's helper and jailer while reading history voraciously. He hoped to teach, but the 1913 coup against President Madero pulled him into the Revolution. Serving with northern commanders, above all Calles, he became a brigadier general at 25.
A posting to the Huasteca oil region showed him foreign companies dodging Mexican taxes and treating the area as conquered land. There he grew close to General Francisco Múgica, an anticlerical socialist who became his ideological mentor. As governor of Michoacán from 1928, amid the Cristero conflict between state and Church, Cárdenas broke up haciendas into ejidos, collectively held lands worked in individual plots, opened a hundred rural schools and built a state-funded confederation of workers and peasants, a template he later applied nationally.
Calles had dominated Mexico through compliant successors since leaving office, a period known as the Maximato, and he assumed Cárdenas would be another. The new president instead removed him and rebuilt the ruling party around peasant leagues, labour unions and the army, folding soldiers into the party partly to discourage coups. In 1938 he expropriated the oil industry and founded Pemex. He also created the National Polytechnic Institute and El Colegio de México and gave refuge to Spanish Republicans.
Admirers call him the Revolution's greatest constructive radical; critics label him an authoritarian populist. He was the first post-revolutionary president to serve a full six-year sexenio, the term still used today, and in December 1940 handed the office to Manuel Ávila Camacho, a moderate with little military reputation. He died in 1970.
Source: Lázaro Cárdenas
