The period from 1946 to 1952 was a turning point in Mexican politics. Elites put aside the socially redistributive programs of land reform, worker support, and socialist education, which had shaped the first two decades of the post-revolutionary period. Instead, they embraced the twin policies of industrial growth and political stability. Infrastructure investment, favorable tax breaks, and protectionist trade policies benefited the financial entrepreneurs, factory owners, and large-scale merchants. Bans on radical parties, increasingly restrictive voting controls, and electoral fraud minimized disruption and kept the system in place. At the center of these changes was postrevolutionary Mexico's first civilian president, Miguel Alemán Valdés, and his coterie of high school and university friends—the so-called “amigos.”
Since Alemán's days, discussion of the sexenio has generated considerable polemic. On the right, national and international figures lauded Alemán as the architect of a modern, urbanized and industrialized Mexico. On the left, many criticized the president for betraying the ideals of the Mexican Revolution.
In this book, Ryan M. Alexander assesses the underlying motives, ideology, and politics of Alemanismo in an effort to offer some balance to this highly polarized debate. To do so, he relies explicitly on José Ortega y Gasset's ideas on the importance of generational changes in politics and implicitly on Roderic Camp's pathbreaking work on the Alemán camarilla and Jorge Gil Mendieta and Samuel Schmidt's work on political networks. As for sources, he bases much of the book on careful readings of the letters and interviews collected together at the Fundación Miguel Alemán.
In fact, the most original and well-argued sections use these sources. There are some excellent revelations about Miguel Alemán's early years, his driving political ambition, his pragmatic alliance making, and an interesting, if not entirely convincing, case for his “efficient, disciplined and relatively popular” rule of Veracruz during the late 1930s. Alexander also provides a very clear summation and valuation of the key policies of Alemán's presidency, including Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI), the green revolution in the countryside, and urbanization. As such, the book has considerable value and would be very apt for use in US classrooms.
However, Alexander's approach is limited and evidences imperfect examination of the sources. For example, how can one study 1940s Mexico without examining the copious documents of the internal security forces, the Dirección General de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales? By relying instead on correspondence among members of the elite and interviews conducted decades after the period in question, Alexander can emphasize the consistency and power of the Alemán regime. For Alexander, Alemán and his colleagues possessed “a coherent, sincere vision of national development.” When in office, they had “nearly imperial power” (14) and were undergirded by a political party, which was little more than “an instrument of political control for the president” (179). Such assertions overplay the degree to which Alemán's policies were coherent expressions of a guiding ideology rather than ad hoc strategies quickly put in motion in response to widespread popular mobilizations. The introduction of food subsidies after the devaluation of 1948, the attempts to woo the mass media, the sacking of numerous governors, and the controversies over Alemán's own re-election were all engineered not out of a well-defined program but to stop marches on the street.
In addition, the same privileging of coherency leads to vast misjudgment of the power of the state and the ruling party. As many scholars have now demonstrated, the state of the 1940s was not the leviathan it became in the 1970s. Elections—in particular the PRI primaries held between 1946 and 1950—still allowed for considerable popular input.
Beyond these problems of substance and architecture, the book includes some minor irritants. Alexander's reluctance to condemn the corruption of Alemán and his cronies often bleeds into hagiography. Ramón Beteta, one of Alemán's most corrupt ministers and the person responsible for the massive economic balls-up that was the handling of 1948 devaluation, is described as “one of the most talented policymakers and economic thinkers of his generation” (171). That assessment was not shared by the British ambassador, who opined that he “has not sufficient sagacity to camouflage his sudden accretion of wealth,” and seems to be taken entirely from an interview with his close friend Antonio Carrillo Flores.
Such myopia can generate historical inaccuracies, or at least imbalanced arguments. Contemporary complaints about Alemán's nepotism and his links to the bloodthirsty paramilitary group, La Mano Negra, are dismissed as found “in the files of nearly every governor or other major public official” (62). With this starting point, Alexander finds that the accusations that Alemán protected death squads responsible for the murder of hundreds, if not thousands, should be “regarded with a high degree of skepticism.” In his chapter on US-Mexican relations, Alexander neglects to mention that one of the key bargaining points throughout the period was the issue of drug trafficking. Both the US State Department and the US Federal Bureau of Narcotics were convinced that Alemán's amigos, for example, like Carlos Serrano and Jorge Pasquel, were involved in the trade. Furthermore, those agencies used such accusations, made publicly at sessions of the United Nations and in the pages of the US press, to shift Mexican drug policy toward a more prohibitionist stance. Alemán's most long-lasting legacy may have been the war on drugs.
Additional minor errors, perhaps inconsequential, also dot the work. The great cartoonist, Abel Quezada, becomes “Quesada” (17). Enrique Parra Hernández, Alemán's “minister without a budget” and allegedly also his pimp, is described as the future governor of Oaxaca (56), a promotion that might have surprised the Mexican crowds that sang “Parra, Pasquel y Parada/Son puritos cabrones/E hijos de la chingada.” The governor of Oaxaca, Manuel Heredia (actually, Manuel Mayoral Heredia), is described as having been chief of the Department of State Assets (56); in fact, he was the head of the communications ministry in Veracruz.
