In the early morning of 23 September 1965, 13 poorly armed rural teachers, students and peasants organised as the Grupo Popular Guerrillero (GPG) attacked the military barracks located in Ciudad Madera, Chihuahua. After a brief firefight, eight had been shot dead and five managed to flee. This tragic event became a reference for future generations of guerrillas in Mexico. In fact, the Liga Comunista 23 de Septiembre, one of Mexico's largest insurgent organisations of the 1960s and 1970s, was named after this event.
This book's central argument is that, unlike some other guerrilla groups across Latin America that were mainly inspired by the Cuban Revolution and Che Guevara's 1961 book La guerra de guerrillas, the GPG had an extensive social base comprised principally of an agrarian movement of landless agriculturalists and small ranchers resisting violence and dispossession of their lands aided by students, particularly normalistas (students at teacher training schools). ‘This focus’, Elizabeth Henson writes, ‘requires resisting the teleological collapse into a narrative focused on the guerrilla, whose glamor eclipses the earlier, more inclusive and heterogeneous movement’ (p. 5).
A former member of a small US Marxist-Leninist organisation, Henson describes herself as ‘an unrepentant soldier in an army that was defeated’ (p. xvi). Her aim is to convey ‘the everyday life of the [Chihuahua] movement, both the mística – the dedication – and the challenge’ (ibid.). That she does very well, capturing the almost spiritual dimension of socialism and so many individuals’ faith in, and total commitment to, the cause. Henson does so by telling a story with ‘specific actors on specific days performing specific acts’ (p. 211). These details are what the book masters, largely in the form of vignettes. We learn about the political education of GPG members, some of whom would die in the 1965 guerrilla attack on the Madera army base, and the milieu of the political Left in 1960s Chihuahua. Communist groups, peasant unions and normalistas interacted and engaged in ‘direct action’: long-distance marches, union and political organising, nonviolent protests, peaceful land invasions and occupations of the local agrarian reform offices. Many of these actions were taken under the leadership of the Unión General de Obreros y Campesinos de México (General Union of Workers and Campesinos of Mexico).
The triggers for direct action and, ultimately, the creation of the guerrilla, are shocking – notwithstanding the academic studies that have questioned the ‘pax priísta’ (the myth of a time of social and political stability from 1940 to 1968 when the nation was under the control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party [Partido Revolucionario Institucional, PRI]) by documenting the many instances of popular discontent and state repression. In Chihuahua, with the rapid expansion of logging in the 1950s, the Bosques de Chihuahua company (owned by the state's four largest livestock investors) evicted long-term settlers from their lands with extreme violence, including gendered hate crimes. As Henson documents, thugs hired by the company raped women and girls. The raped bodies ‘were tokens in a battle among men whereby the caciques affronted the honor of men who could not protect their women’ (p. 14). Moreover, the perpetrators of these crimes also worked for the rural police, thus blurring the line between official and nonofficial violence. Then, when the movement engaged in direct action against this violence and demanded land, the government responded with evictions, arrests, imprisonment and repression. For example, Chihuahua governor Práxedis Giner Durán (1962–8) repeatedly called out federal troops against protesters. ‘His recalcitrance’, according to Henson, ‘did more than Che's Guerra de guerrillas to turn a mass social movement into an attack on the federal army’ (p. 9).
The book fits within two history subfields: the now growing study of guerrilla movements in Mexico (especially in Spanish), and an older field of research on rural movements in postrevolutionary Mexico. Henson adds more to the first than to the second, largely because she has made excellent use of the declassified archives of the Ministry of the Interior at the Archivo General de la Nación. However, she failed to delve into agrarian archives such as the Archivo General Agrario in Mexico City, which has been open to researchers since the late 1990s.
The particularities of Chihuahua's postrevolutionary land reform were key in shaping the agrarian movement studied in this book. In Mexico, agrarian laws and policies shaped the nature of the rural movements that challenged the state, the terms of these conflicts, and the potential forms of bargaining and negotiation. These were not the campesino villages of central Mexico petitioning for land within a 7-km radius from the main population centre, nor were all participants campesinos. In fact, many were small property owners and workers in the agricultural and cattle sectors. In Chihuahua, agrarian reform was largely based on the colonisation of unpopulated lands through an agrarian variant called nuevos centros de población (new population centres). It was through these new centres that most participants in the protest movement organised. And, as Aleida García Aguirre details in her 2012 article ‘El movimiento campesino de Chihuahua, 1960–1965, contra los certificados de inafectabilidad agraria’ (Chihuahua Hoy, 10, pp. 129–56), what the movement challenged was the weak spot in agrarian law in Chihuahua: the certificado de inafectabilidad ganadera (certificates granting cattle owners special exemption from agrarian reform). Created in 1937 by President Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–40) in order to promote livestock production, these certificates legitimated large property holdings otherwise forbidden by law, with little clarity over what would occur once they expired 25 years later. Between 1939 and 1955, the federal government granted Chihuahua 205 (out of a total 800) certificates – not surprisingly, most of them in the municipalities involved in this agrarian movement. These aspects of the agrarian movement's history and relationship to the state are scattered throughout the book. However, because the author's central focus is on the agrarian movement that served as the social base of the guerrilla, a chapter that examined this topic in greater depth would have been helpful.
