The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers offers a meticulously researched social and political history of aftosa, or foot-and-mouth disease, focusing on Mexico but deeply entangled with global developments. As the cattle business expanded in the United States and Latin America from the late nineteenth century, related environmental conditions enabled the spread of animal diseases such as rinderpest in Africa and elsewhere 2018.Footnote ¹ Aftosa became another paradigmatic case of a ‘commodity disease’ that brought concerns and responses on multiple scales, with long-lasting effects 2011.Footnote ² Rath transforms our understanding of the aftosa outbreak and how Mexican and US actors, from veterinarians, diplomats and ranchers to troops and campesinos, shaped both concrete and tentative solutions to this economic problem. Encompassing a myriad of perspectives – on both sides of the US–Mexican border and beyond – and a diversity of voices, the book dissects this critical juncture and the many ways the aftosa campaign was perceived and negotiated. These range from the bloody management of mass slaughter (‘sanitarian rifle’) to the scientific optimism inspired by new vaccination methods, and, in between, secrecy, riots, natural and cultural borders, sovereignty claims and the traumatic cultural memory among campesinos of military officers ordering mass graves for cows.

A milestone in mid-twentieth-century scientific diplomacy, the US–Mexican aftosa eradication campaign – one of the largest forms of US aid funded at that time – has generated diverse interpretations among prior scholars. These interpretations have ranged across histories of agricultural modernisation, US imperialism and peasant resistance to it, while others are narrowly local. The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers goes further, building on these theses and proposing a more nuanced alternative by reconsidering a highly relevant but overlooked set of sources: the related archival materials of the USDA in Washington DC (pp. 10–11). The approximately 80 boxes, holding the main US records of the commission, counterbalances the Mexican gap due to the incineration of the same materials on the Mexican side in August 1952 (p. 4). Through the lens of new evidence, and the attentive scrutiny of what these sources say explicitly, and suggest implicitly, Rath sheds light on the contested facets of a well-known history that deserved a non-polarising, non-nationalist account, balancing how sectorial decisions and policy-making were both contingent on and the outcome of the fragile governing of the Mexican countryside. His primary contributions are to demonstrate the extent and diversity of the actions, defiance and challenges related to the eradication of aftosa and to describe the cattle business on both sides of the US–Mexican borderland, the international state of veterinary science (from the more US–British imperial masculine preference for slaughter to the European–South American trend of vaccination), and the opportunistic and personal understandings Mexican governments and authorities held of cows and cattle over the decades. Simultaneously, Rath is interested in thinking about how Mexican politicians, ranchers and scientists found ways out of the US-imposed vision of the aftosa outbreak, establishing a parallel path, such as allying with Argentinian and Brazilian scientists and their new vaccination methods while, crucially, maintaining diplomacy with US experts, although this was sometimes in name only.

The book is divided into six sections, each beginning with captivating anecdotes that draw the reader into the world of the cattle business, sanitary inspections, riots and diplomatic intrigues. Covering the period from the colonial to the post-revolutionary era, chapter 1 introduces the relations between animals – ‘as sources of wealth, energy, symbolic power and disease’ (p. 32) – and state formation in Mexico, explaining the conditions surrounding the aftosa outbreak, allegedly initiated by breeders seeking to improve Mexican cattle by introducing Brazilian Cebu bulls. Chapter 2 focuses on science and diplomacy as seen through the formation and negotiations of the US–Mexican Commission for the Eradication of Foot-and-Mouth Disease (Comisión México–Americana para la Eradicación de la Fiebre Aftosa, CMAEFA), created in 1947, and the infrapolitics that emerged around it. Chapter 3 delves into the ‘sanitarian rifle’, defined as the mass (and often indiscriminate) slaughter of supposedly infected cattle, and explores the varied forms of opposition, revealing the chaotic messiness of governing both epizootic agents and human actors. Chapter 4 shifts to the perspective ‘from below’, examining the riots and secrecy encountered by military officers and veterinarians, as well as the ways in which the aftosa eradication campaign was deliberately sabotaged and resisted. Chapter 5 explains the formation of the ‘Livestock State’ in Mexico and how the aftosa crisis served the state’s purpose of regulating, sanitising and modernising the Mexican countryside – an effort that, as Rath shows, reveals the ‘strengths, weaknesses, and many contradictions’ (p. 191) of the developmentalist attempts by the Partido Revolucionario Institucional. Finally, chapter 6 explains how the US–Mexican aftosa eradication campaign acted as a model for the internationalisation of regulations and veterinary practices concerning animal diseases during the Cold War era, highlighting the roles of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, and institutional frameworks such as the Pan American Center for Foot-and-Mouth Disease (PANAFTOSA). This short description of the chapters does not do justice to all the detailed episodes Rath portrays. Each chapter allows one story to evolve after the other, while sustaining the main argument, showing the author’s ‘surgical’ judgement. Some chapters are worthy of being developed into books of their own. Readers may be overwhelmed by the diversity of minimal details, although these are necessary to demonstrate the multiple perspectives presented.

Expanding the rich historiographies on cattle in Latin America and beyond, the book makes the deliberate choice (pp. 8–9) to understand cows as livestock, or ganado – that is, as a commodity. By focusing specifically on ‘red meat’ and related production, Rath narrows the analytical prism to examine the economic, political and scientific dimensions of aftosa eradication – a goal that proves to be both extensive and complex enough if one aims to provide a full spectrum of perspectives. This contribution certainly offers a solid foundation for future work that could integrate methods from animal history and environmental history, including multispecies ethnography, more-than-human or neo-materialist approaches. Although the book is not entirely disengaged from such frameworks implicitly, alternative narratives may yet be developed by scholars who choose to decentre the (anthropocentric) state and dominant economic clusters.

Another merit of Rath’s book lies in its framing of aftosa eradication during the Cold War era and the Green Revolution in Mexico and Latin America. The often ‘crop-centric’ orientation of scholarship in this period has tended to marginalise the parallel histories of veterinary science – histories that frequently co-determined, rather than merely followed, developmentalist agendas. The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers thus emerges, thematically and methodologically, as a key reference for the history of veterinary sciences and animal diseases in Mexico and Latin America, as well as in their contested global contexts, as the final chapter demonstrates. Rath’s intervention calls for closer attention to the dynamics of transnational cooperation (and resistance to US policy) in the study of commodity diseases. Brazil, Argentina and Mexico – through their extensive scientific institutions and livestock industries – fostered what Marcos Cueto has termed ‘scientific excellence in the periphery’ 1989.Footnote ³ A transnational framework, rather than a narrowly national one, thus promises to emerge by globalising the already well-researched local histories of aftosa and other cattle diseases in Latin America. Ultimately, such a reframing seeks to unsettle conventional historiographical boundaries between colonial and postcolonial knowledge production, as well as between international governance, developmentalist nationalism and US inherency in Latin America. Beyond its relevance for Mexican–US historians, The Dread Plague and the Cow Killers will appeal to scholars interested in commodity diseases and agricultural sciences more broadly, as well as those studying US–Latin American relations and the role of international organisations during the Cold War.