Within the Mexican anarchist movement which he founded, Rhodakanaty, the passive intellectual and theoretician, saw his ideas advanced from the very beginning of his career by young men less moderate in temperament and more oriented toward action. The Bakuninist organizing group La Social, formed in 1865, served as an early focal point for their activities. Unfortunately, because it operated as a secret organization, little is known about La Social. Apparently its membership during the 1860’s, limited to about a dozen, consisted mostly of students. La Social kept the membership list a well-guarded secret, however, and the names of the less prominent members remain unknown. In addition, the complete nature and scope of its activities were not recorded. As a result only the most prominent individuals and some of their projects can be identified.
1
Although La Social broke up after a few years, not to be re-formed until 1871, some of its original members—Rhodakanaty, Francisco Zalacosta, Santiago Villanueva, and Hermengildo Villavicencio—later played an important part in the creation of the nineteenth-century Mexican agrarian and urban labor movements. Much of the agrarian movement came to rationalize the needs of Mexico’s campesinos in terms formulated by that staunch defender of the mores of the French peasantry, Proudhon. The urban labor movement, although originally conceived along Proudhonist-mutualist lines, from the very beginning adopted Bakunin’s secret society as a tactic of organization.
Born in Durango on March 1,1844, the son of an officer in the liberal army of Ignacio Comonfort, Francisco Zalacosta followed the victorious liberal forces when they entered Mexico City in 1854. Upon the death of his father during the Wars of the Reforma, in the late 1850’s, Zalacosta became the ward of a wealthy Mexico City family. He attended preparatory school in the capital city and shortly before he graduated joined a group of students studying under the direction of Rhodakanaty. Soon Zalacosta participated in theoretical discussions regarding the nature of socialism and its proffered solutions to social ills. Rhodakanaty’s essays provided him with the necessary introductory material. Although Zalacosta soon left the preparatory school in order to enter medical school, he was one of Rhodakanaty’s most ardent disciples—a discipleship which led him to become one of the original and most active members of La Social.
2Santiago Villanueva, born in Mexico City in February 1838, began work in a cabinet shop at a young age in order to aid his poverty-stricken working-class parents. As a teenager he took up woodcarving and apparently mastered that craft. In 1861 Villanueva completed a course in art at the Academy of San Carlos and began attending classes in anatomy at the medical school. During his tenure in the medical school he came into contact with Zalacosta and through him with Rhodakanaty. At that time in his life he must have presented an interesting picture. Rhodakanaty referred to him as a “bohemian-type youth with little self discipline.”
3 Rhodakanaty’s interpretation of Proudhon and Bakunin attracted Villanueva to anarchism, and he spent the rest of his short life organizing urban workers and propagandizing the doctrine.
Hermengildo Villavicencio, born in the state of México in 1842, also attended medical school where he came into contact with Rhodakanaty by way of Zalacosta. By late 1864 these students and unknown others had formed a small group, and in January 1865 they adopted the name El Club Socialista de Estudiantes. Later that year the group renamed itself La Social, Sección Internacionalista.
4 The name indicated an emotional allegiance, if not a real one, with the Bakuninist faction of the First International Workingmen’s Association.
In October 1864, led by Villanueva, the group undertook its first project and reorganized the first Mexican mutualist organization, La Sociedad Particular de Socorros Mutuos. In November of the same year they reinstituted the ten-years defunct mutualist association of tailors known as the Sociedad Mutua del Ramo de Sastrería.
5 The workers who joined these new organizations were inclined toward the more passive type of self-help mutualist groups which did not espouse ideological commitments. The original Mexican mutualist associations, formed in the 1850’s, had been little more than attempts to develop group savings plans in order to provide life insurance sufficient to cover burial costs and to provide medical care for those in need. But the zealous students pressed their revolutionary ideas on the workers, a task made easier by the workers’ wretched living and working conditions. The students argued for mututalist societies which would demand immediate pay raises and reduced working hours and which as “resistance societies would defend themselves against the attacks of the state and capitalism.”
6In March 1865 the two newly formed mutualist societies received word from the workers in the textile factories of San Ildefonso in the neighboring town of Tlalnepantla and La Colmena in Mexico City that they wanted to “organize in order to protect their interests.”
7 The two mutualist societies elected a delegation to meet with the workers, and Zalacosta and Villanueva were selected. The resultant conferences produced the Sociedad Mutua del Ramo de Hilados y Tejidos del Valle de México and included the workers of the two factories.
8On March 15, 1865, the delegation of representatives from the older mutualist organizations joined the newly organized laborers and other employees of the two textile factories in an inauguration dance celebrating the formation of the new mutualist society. The factory owners attended the affair. Either they did not know the intentions of their newly organized employees or they exhibited uncommon intelligence and attended in order to create good will and to avoid a possible cataclysm. The historical circumstances behind the decision by the workers to organize were indeed dreadful. The San Ildefonso plant, though large, depended upon local consumption.
9 The turmoil caused by the French invasion of 1862 and continuing liberal resistance reduced its profits, and in January 1865 the workers in the plant suffered a reduction in their already pitiful pay amounting to one-half real for each approximate yard of material they produced. In addition, about fifty workers lost their jobs in an apparent economy move by the factory management. Moreover, the
tienda de raya (company store) did not reduce its prices after the reductions in wages and thus commanded the greater part of a worker’s pay.
10 Then the owners decided to increase the length of the working day and reset working hours to extend from 5:00 in the morning to 6:45 in the evening for women and 7:45 for men.
On June 10, the employees of the San Ildefonso plant walked off their jobs. The following day their counterparts at La Colmena followed their example.
11 The first strike in Mexican labor history had begun. The workers, perhaps hoping to gain governmental protection, issued a short and pathetic manifesto describing their plight and sent it to the imperial government of Maximilian. The government reacted by creating a
gendarmería imperial in Mexico City and its environs and sent a directive to the imperial representative in the district ordering him to offer assistance to the proprietor of the San Ildefonso factory.
12On June 19, 1865, the government representative, Eulalio Núñez, went to the factory with a contingent of about twenty-five armed men. Upon his arrival, Núñez was confronted by an angry mob and he ordered his men to fire, wounding several strikers. Núñez arrested about twenty-five of the workers and incarcerated them in the jail at Tepeji del Río. Prior to their release, the authorities warned them that if they ever returned to San Ildefonso they would be shot.
13 The first strike in the long struggle of the Mexican labor movement thus ended in an unmitigated defeat.
The background of events in Tlalnepantla is important in understanding the reasons for the developing mass unrest in mid-nineteenth-century Mexico. Throughout the episode the organizing efforts of the anarchists proceeded unimpeded by an imperial government obviously preoccupied with its continuing struggles with the liberals under Benito Juárez. The political instability of Mexico, which bred contempt for government in the long run, permitted in the short run the organizing success of a handful of anarchist activists. Furthermore, it is clear that the workers in the factories of San Ildefonso and La Colmena were responsive to the intrusion of anarchist organizers and were stimulated in their strike efforts because the general economic crisis had affected production and contributed to the intolerable working conditions in the factories. These conditions, typical of the period, would be repeated elsewhere.
In an attempt to recover from their defeat at Tlalnepantla, Villanueva and Villavicencio, following Bakuninist principles, created a new organizing group and called it La Sociedad Artística Industrial. The name derived from an expired mutualist organization originally formed in 1857.
14 The Sociedad became the principal center of anarchist activity and urban labor organizing for extended periods during the late 1860’s and the 1870’s. Its membership initially was dominated by engravers, painters, and sculptors to whom Villanueva and Villavicencio, following the pattern of their mentor Rhodakanaty, began to teach Proudhonist philosophy.
While his cohorts faced defeat at Tlalnepantla, Rhodakanaty continued to insist upon his long-envisioned communal agricultural colonies, and in January 1865 he began working on that project at Chalco in the southeast corner of the state of México. He explained his ultimate goal as “the undoing of the relationship between the state and the economic system, the reorganization of property, the abolition of politics and political parties, the complete destruction of the feudal system, and the expedition of agrarian reform laws. This is socialism and this is what we want.”
15Rhodakanaty founded a school for
campesinos in Chalco which he named La Escuela del Rayo y del Socialismo. This school, as the name implies, was dedicated to the instruction of the
campesinos in reading, writing, oratory, methods of organizing, and libertarian socialist ideals.
16 The reason for his choice of Chalco is unclear, but progress was encouraging enough so that Zalacosta, apparently attracted by Rhodakanaty’s description of the situation, left Mexico City in November 1865 to join his colleague.
The obvious intent of Rhodakanaty’s curriculum was to produce literate and socialist
campesinos capable of effective oratory and possessing knowledge of organizing methods. A student named Julio Chávez López soon attracted the attention of Rhodakanaty, who wrote to Zalacosta about him : “… among them there is a young man who works on a hacienda near Texcoco. He has already learned how to deliver a speech with a fair degree of eloquence. He has informed me that he intends to deliver a speech espousing the virtues of socialism very soon.
17 I have told him about you and he has said to me that he will make an attempt to write you.
18 His name is Julio Chávez.”
19Zalacosta’s arrival in Chalco in November 1865 eliminated the immediate need for Chávez López to write to him regarding his plans. For the next two years Rhodakanaty and Zalacosta worked together in the school, recruiting and teaching
campesinos. Proudhonist agrarian ideology proved to be particularly appealing. The
campesinos, especially Chávez López, became intent on taking violent steps to redress their grievances and restructure the agrarian order in the Chalco area. Rhodakanaty, who dreaded the implications of violence, left the school in 1867 and returned to Mexico City and his teaching position in the preparatory school. He felt he had accomplished the first stage of his project and turned the school over to Zalacosta, the man of action, for the next step, “because the school is no longer a school, but now is a club
por y para la libertad.”20Rhodakanaty and Zalacosta profoundly influenced Chávez López. The latter demonstrated his mastery of the anarchist lessons of his mentors when he wrote : “… I am communist-socialist. I am socialist because I am the enemy of all governments, and I am communist because my brothers wish to work the lands in common.”
21Shortly after Rhodakanaty’s departure, Chávez López collected a small band of followers and began to raid haciendas in the area between Chalco and Texcoco. Within a couple of months he extended his activities south into Morelos, east to San Martín Texmelucan and west to Tlalpan.
22 The government authorities in the area initially labeled him as a bandit, but they soon realized that his forces constantly grew and that his intentions exceeded those of a mere brigand. In March 1868, Antonio Flores, the prefect of Texcoco, warned the government :
Julio Chávez and his gang of thugs are creating tremendous problems, as much for the Supreme Government as for state officials. He is recruiting the indigenous class with promises of hacienda lands. His successes are such that, if you do not take opportune, energetic, and violent measures immediately, it will be too late. Of course you are aware that the indigenous people are a vast majority of the population in the countryside. Until recently I was not greatly disturbed, but the rebel forces continue to grow and if they are not dealt with soon their strength will be overwhelming…. These rebels started out in Chalco and have recently raided Coatepec, Acuantia, and other places, each time recruiting more individuals of a like mind.
23
In March 1868 additional government forces arrived in the area under the command of General Rafael Cuéllar. The general had launched an energetic campaign to crush Chávez López earlier in the year before his movement could grow any stronger, but Cuéllar immediately realized that his troop needs exceeded his original estimate. Unable to find his adversary, Cuéllar called for more troops and complained that “the
sublevación” had become a genuine threat and that it received illegal aid from the villagers. In addition, he observed that the rebels received logistical support from General Miguel Negrete of Puebla, a known advocate of agrarian reform on behalf of the
pueblos and a long-time opponent of President Juárez.
24 As the struggle continued, Cuéllar determined that the villages provided the basis of Chávez López’ strength; he began a controversial scorched-earth military policy in the Chalco-Texcoco region. But the revolt continued. Uprisings in Chalco and Tlalmanalco had to be put down with considerable loss of life.
25Constant controversy hampered the government’s counterinsurgency efforts. The prefect of Texcoco complained about the revolt’s growth and argued that unnecessary abuses and atrocities committed against them by Cuéllar alienated innocent peasants.
26 Complaints of this nature resulted in the dispatch of even more troops to put a quicker end to the revolt and also precipitated a government investigation of Cuéllar’s behavior. Judge José María Aimarás presided over the inquiry, but he failed to uncover what he considered credible evidence in spite of petitions of complaint drawn up by groups of citizens in Coatepec, Chicoloapan, and Acuantia. These groups, Cuéllar charged, sympathized with Chávez López; he claimed further that Prefect Flores committed atrocities.
27 Charges of corruption also plagued government military operations against the rebels. These allegations charged Cuellar with selling government-owned arms and ammunition to hacienda owners for his own personal profit. Despite eyewitness testimony in support of the charges and a lengthy investigation, no final disposition of the accusations materialized.
28Cuéllar, harassed by
campesino revolutionaries on one side and civilian observers who complained about his tactics on the other, resorted to martial law and mass arrests in those villages where he suspected the populace of aiding Chávez López. He then decided to deport large numbers of the citizenry of Acuantia, Chalco, and Coatepec, and the entire town of Chicoloapan, to Yucatán. Once again Flores objected to Cuéllar’s actions and this time the national government temporarily admonished Cuéllar that the detained persons should first be judged in accordance with the law.
29 But the government reversed itself a few days later. President Juárez and Ignacio Mejía, the secretary of war, after examining the reports, determined that Cuéllar had acted correctly : “[The]
jefe político of Chalco [Cuéllar] has stated that they are guilty … they are to be sent to Yucatán.”
30Flores and other observers continued, however, to appeal, insisting that many of those to be deported had nothing to do with the insurrection. In a final plea, they argued that the investigative reports were invalid because Judge Aimarás, who had supported Cuéllar’s action, was an outsider who had ignored the citizenry’s petitions and “did not understand the depth of trouble and abuse that the people had suffered. Their opposition [to Cuéllar] had gotten the
pueblo of Chicoloapan into trouble.”
31 After a few months’ delay, the government carried out the deportation edict and referred further appeals to the government of the state of México. The final decision stated that “in view of new evidence” some of the defendants would receive prison terms only, but “the entire
pueblo of Chicoloapan, which was in support of Julio López, was deported properly to Yucatán by the Minister of War.”
32Chávez López survived Cuéllar’s campaign during 1868 and discovered growing support for his cause. Early in 1869 he traveled to Puebla where he found agrarian unrest at an acute stage. He began to toy with the idea of a general armed uprising and asked Zalacosta for his reaction: “I have finally arrived here; there is much discontent among the brothers because the generals want to take over their lands. What would you think of it, if we made the socialist revolution?”
33 The reference to the generals’, or other outsiders’, desire to seize the land, was thereafter, during the remainder of the Reforma epoch and until the revolution of 1910, a continuing theme in the agrarian struggle. However, because of the lack of data, it is not possible to estimate the extent of land seizures during the Reforma. Later, during the early years of the Díaz regime, the agrarian land disputes, debated in the working-class press, in each case originated with the seizure of land from a local community by an outside landgrabber during the Reforma.
Two days before Chávez López launched his all-out effort for a general agrarian uprising, he was somewhere between Chalco and Puebla in the extreme southeastern part of the state of México. He knew of the Juárez government’s intent to subdue his movement and realized the poor chances for success, but he remained steadfastly committed to his cause: “We are surrounded by a battalion, [but] it is of no consequence. Long live socialism! Long live liberty!”
34The uprising led by Chávez López represents an important turning point in the history of the Mexican agrarian movement. It marked a departure from the prepolitical pillaging and rioting that had typified its predecessors. For the first time, agrarians expressed immediate goals which they derived from an ideological critique of the Mexican government.
35The causes of the Chalco dispute were deeply rooted in the past. Long before the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century, the province of Chalco was one of the principal centers of habitation in the central valley of Mexico. Its major town, or
cabecera, Chalco, on the basis of political importance and population, ranked third behind Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, and Texcoco, a principal ally of the Aztecs. After the Spanish intrusion, Texcoco declined rapidly and Chalco soon replaced it as the second-ranking Indian city in the valley. According to tribute statistics, Chalco retained both its size and its political importance, relative to the other pre-Columbian settlements, except Mexico City, throughout the colonial period.
36While Chalco retained its relative importance, it, like other indigenous settlements, was decimated by the epidemics of the sixteenth century. Depopulation occurred so rapidly during the latter half of the century that the lands became unoccupied faster than they could be redistributed or absorbed by Spanish seizures. By 1600 much of the land in the Chalco area was abandoned; the indigenous population was simply too small to cultivate the vacant territory. Village agriculture came to be increasingly concentrated in the area contiguous to settlement. Indian town officials under pressure of tribute arrearage and labor levies, or
repartimiento, either sold or rented property to Spaniards, which, in any event, when vacant, could be acquired by Spaniards from the crown. By the eighteenth century the Chalco area was characterized by Spanish-Creole-owned haciendas that dominated Indian society in the province. The largest, most powerful, and most enduring haciendas established near Chalco during this period were San Juan de Dios and Asunción.
37 The augmentation of Spanish land-holdings did not go unnoticed by the Indians, and even in the early colonial period the villagers set about in the courts to defend their acreage.
38 The
pueblos found it convenient to claim communal village ownership, even when the parcels in question had been privately held, because the titles indicating municipal ownership were easier to establish in the Spanish records, which often listed towns as sovereign but failed to mention the names of individual holders. In this way, as a means of defense, communality in
pueblo life was exaggerated beyond what it had actually been.
39 This stress on individual village rights laid the basis for the popular later agrarian demand that the
municipio libre, or politically free and economically independent village, become the fundamental political-social unit of the nation.
40 But, despite their vigilance and energetic self-defense, the villages could not hold off the conquerors. The result in the Chalco-Río Frío, eastern Morelos, and northwestern Puebla area was the early emergence of the most primitive form of agrarian social protest, social banditry. The region teemed with small “bandit armies.” This center of banditry later became the locale of organized, ideological agrarian insurrection.
By the close of the colonial epoch the process of land polarization—that is, impoverished villages vis-à-vis the great estates—was quite advanced, and this process continued throughout the nineteenth century.
41 Moreover, the population of the villages continued a comeback that began in the early eighteenth century.
42 By the late nineteenth century the population of Chalco province was estimated by García Cubas at 54,002.
43 Of a population consisting of 3,494 in the
cabecera of Chalco and its five
pueblos, “2,460 speak Spanish and Náhuatl.”
44 This resurgence of the indigenous population created new pressures upon the
pueblos and the reduced amount of land that remained available to their inhabitants. The close of the colonial period, however, signaled the introduction of yet another element—the political revolutionary. The fiery rhetoric of the struggle for independence stirred up the
campesino masses, as the following attracted by Miguel Hidalgo and José María Morelos indicates. The problem of land distribution was now broached in the national political arena for the first time, and it would hereafter play a significant role. In Chalco it was within this milieu of the omnipresent great estate and the increasing impoverished and landless population in the countryside that agrarian turmoil developed.
In 1866, Emperor Maximilian interceded in a dispute between one of Chalco’s
pueblos, Xico, and a local hacienda because the large estate had acquired most of the land in the area and the people of Xico complained that they could not feed themselves after paying traditional crop obligations to the hacienda.
45 A contemporary dispute between the
pueblo of Coatepec in Chalco province illustrates the conflict that developed in the latter half of the nineteenth century between liberal ideas and the corporate structure of the indigenous countryside. The citizens of Coatepec petitioned the Emperor: “… because of the Ley Lerdo we were the first to lose our land. We did not comply with the terms of the law because we did not know how.”
46 The villagers claimed landownership records over two centuries old and demanded that the local authorities be removed from control of
pueblo lands because of “betrayal.”
47 The conditions that became the basis of the Chávez López insurrection had been created.
On April 20, 1869, Chávez López issued his manifesto calling the Mexican people to arms in order to establish a new agrarian order and to resist what he described as the oppression of the upper classes and the political tyranny of the central government. The manifesto was an important document in the development of an agrarian ideology, not only because it introduced the European socialist concept of class struggle into the Mexican agrarian movement, but also because it placed the hardships endured by the
campesinos within a historical context and identified culprits. It called for the revered principle of autonomous village governments to replace the sovereignty of a national government viewed to be the corrupt collaborator of the
hacendados. This anarchistlike support of the local municipality as the ultimate dispenser of justice in the countryside has been a common thread in many agrarian revolutions. As Eric Wolf observes: “The peasant utopia is the free village, untrammeled by tax collectors, labor recruiters, large landowners, officials. … for the peasant, the state is a negative quantity, an evil, to be replaced in short shrift by their own ‘homemade’ social order. That order, they believe, can run without the state; hence, peasants in rebellion are natural anarchists.”
48The ideological content of the manifesto was also significant because of the men who collaborated in writing it. Rhodakanaty, a European ideologue, working with a number of social revolutionaries, exerted a profound influence upon the developing ideology of the Mexican agrarian movement. His ideology, which the working-class press publicized during the 1870’s, echoed the sentiments of contemporary Spanish Bakuninists who organized large numbers of peasants in Andalusia and Catalonia. The success of this appeal in the Mexican countryside is not surprising, given the similar conditions. The manifesto dramatically expressed the new class-struggle type of ideology emerging from the increasingly desperate Mexican agrarian movement :
The hour of understanding for men of good heart has arrived; the day has come for the slaves to rise up as one man reclaiming their rights that have been stolen by the powerful few. Brothers! The movement has arrived to restore the countryside, to ask explanations of those who have always demanded them of us; it is the day to impose obligations on those who thought only they had rights…. Those that have taken advantage of our physical, moral, and intellectual weakness are called latifundistas, terratenientes, or hacendados. Those of us who have patiently let them grab what belongs to us are called workers, proletarians, or peones. We peones have given our lives and interests to the hacendados and they have subjected us to the greatest possible abuses; they have established a system of exploitation by which means we are denied the simplest pleasures of life. How does this system of exploitation operate? It is a system that dedicates itself exclusively toward blighting the very existence of the peón. Our parents were acquired by the hacienda at the wage of one real per working day. It was not possible to survive on this amount because the stores located on the haciendas sold their goods at greatly inflated prices : much more expensive than the cost of things that month by month and year by year we make by hand. The costs of these store-bought articles created debts that were charged to our parents. How would they be able to settle debts like those when they were earning no more than one miserable real for a day’s work? …
When we came into this world we were faced with the debts of our parents, which were passed on to us. In this way we became slaves obligated to continue working in the same place, under the same system, with the pretense of paying the now-famous debts. But our wages were never increased, nor was credit ever granted to us and we found ourselves in the same situation as our parents.
And who is it that has cooperated to keep us muted, in humiliation, in ignorance, and in slavery? The Church, especially the Church. … Its hypocritical missionaries…. The Friars who say everything is in vain…. The priests who have deceived us…. Let religion reign, but never the Church and even less the priests. … If the priests are evil, so are all those men who give orders. What can we say about that which has been given us and called government and which in reality is tyranny? Where is the good government? …
The hacendados have been the strong men who, relying upon the military that they themselves maintain in order to safeguard their properties, have laid claim to possessions in whatever places they have desired, and they have done so without effective protests. What do we want? … We want: the land in order to plant it in peace and harvest it in tranquility; to leave the system of exploitation and give liberty to all in order that they might farm in the place that best accommodates them without having to pay tribute; to give the people the liberty to reunite in whatever manner they consider most convenient, forming large or small agricultural societies which will stand ever vigilant in the common defense, without the need of outsiders who give orders and castigate.
Fellow Mexicans! This is the simple truth with which we will win one way or another in order to bring about the triumph of liberty. We are going to be persecuted, maybe shot full of holes, but this is not important because we carry our dreams with us. What choice do we have with our lives? Death is better than the perpetuation of oppression and misery. As liberals we reject the oppression. As socialists it wounds us. As men we condemn it. Abolition OF THE GOVERNMENT, ABOLITION OF EXPLOITATION!
We want land, we want order, we want liberty. We must emancipate ourselves from all our miseries; we need peace and stability. Finally, what we need is the establishment of a social contract among men based upon mutual respect. Long live socialism! Long live liberty!
49
he anarchists encountered overwhelming obstacles in their attempt achieve the ideological goals expressed in the manifesto. Cuéllar’s forces surprised and apprehended Chávez López without a fight shortly after he issued his manifesto. However, a few days later, his
campesino friends attacked and routed the soldiers detaining him. Chávez López escaped and with his companions went into the nearby hills, from where they began to successfully enlist increasing numbers of
campesinos. The dire apprehensions of Antonio Flores, prefect of Texcoco, seemed to be coming true. After sufficient recruits had enlisted, the insurgents successfully moved against the town and hacienda of San Martín Texmelucan, located on the main road halfway between Chalco and the city of Puebla. The federal troops they encountered fled, leaving their weapons behind. Chávez López collected all the money he could find in the town and then, setting a precedent to be followed in later times, burned the municipal archives.
After reading his manifesto and explaining his ideology, gathering more followers, and regrouping his army, he next advanced upon the town of Apizaco in Tlaxcala and once again routed the garrison, burned the municipal archives, and collected available money and arms. Reconnoitering and planning strategy, Chávez López understood that his movement needed a widespread base of support in order to succeed; with this objective in mind, he sent a lieutenant, Anselmo Gómez, with a contingent of fifty men northward into the state of Hidalgo, far in advance of the main force, in order to stir up the countryside. Chávez López followed with the “army” which now numbered about fifteen hundred poorly armed men.
50As he advanced, Chávez López continued his attempts to gain the support of the people in the countryside by reading and explaining the ideology of his manifesto. He also demonstrated the practical application of the manifesto by seizing haciendas and redistributing the land to the
campesinos.51 In this drive to the north he demonstrated considerable military skill by evading Cuéllar’s main forces. Chávez López continued to attract new recruits, to burn municipal archives, and to seize considerable amounts of money, but he failed in his attempts to requisition sufficient arms—a failure which would be his undoing. The contingent under Anselmo Gómez also enjoyed success in its recruiting efforts; by June 11, when it captured the town of Chicontepec in Veracruz, it numbered about 150 men. The government
jefe in Chicontepec provided an insight into the reaction of the well-to-do elements of society to Chávez López’s ideology and his motley army when he informed the minister of war that “the bandit Anselmo Gómez leading 150 men has taken the town and is committing all manner of outrages against private property while proclaiming to the people his refusal to recognize any form of government.”
52Chávez López, in the meantime, had moved past his own home town of Texcoco to the relatively large town of Actopan, located seventeen miles northwest of Pachuca. He established a camp there and began to prepare an attack, but federal troops surprised and defeated his poorly equipped and trained forces before they could launch their assault on the town. The federal troops took Chávez López prisoner and conducted him to Actopan; then, after ascertaining that his scattered followers no longer constituted a threat, they returned him to Chalco, where the government of Benito Juárez ordered him executed by firing squad in the courtyard of the Escuela del Rayo y del Socialismo on the morning of September 1, 1869. One brief résumé of this episode relates that Chávez López shouted, “Long live socialism!” just as his executioners fired—a believable story in view of his past behavior.
53 The eventual fate of Anselmo Gómez and the contingent of men who invaded the state of Veracruz is unknown.
54A significant aspect of the Chávez López movement was the conscious appraisal by the
campesinos themselves of the ills that beset their society. Previous “agrarian uprisings” had usually been led by relatively well-educated, liberal, and financially well-to-do military leaders who promulgated “plans”; or they were genuine
campesino insurrections which articulated little and merely resulted in land seizure. With the advent of the Chávez López uprising, the historian encounters for the first time in Mexico a
campesino movement which called for the reordering of society and advocated the formation of “agricultural societies which will stand ever vigilant in the common defense, without the need of outsiders who give orders and castigate.”
55 The agrarian uprisings that originated in the same area during the 1870’s and 1880’s continued the challenge that Chávez López presented. The call for “agricultural societies,” then, presaged the
municipio libre, which became a regular part of agrarian terminology in the 1870’s and such a sacrosanct image by the twentieth century that the “First Chief of the Revolution,” Venustiano Carranza, in his address to the Constitutional Convention at Querétaro in 1916, pledged, in an attempt to gain delegate backing for his program, to give the
municipio libre his full support as the “political” and “economic” basis of free government.
56
Whether or not Rhodakanaty expected his school in Chalco to become the starting point for a violent agrarian revolution is not clear. But he obviously wanted no part of violence when it occurred. He originally founded the school to prepare the way for the establishment of communal agricultural colonies and he purposely selected a region of both traditional and strong
campesino resistance to the great estates. When Rhodakanaty noticed the revolutionary Chávez López, he encouraged him. The teacher undoubtedly expected trouble when he left the school because he noted that it had become a group ready to take action in order to achieve “liberty.”
57 At the critical stage he placed Zalacosta in charge. Zalacosta, who consistently demonstrated a capacity for violence, ultimately influenced Chávez López and thus helped shape the course of events at Chalco.
58Rhodakanaty returned to Mexico City where he once more began working with his former colleagues from La Social. But his role as the central figure in Mexican socialism had passed to Santiago Villanueva and others, who, in his absence began a successful drive to organize the urban workers and to form a central workers’ council. Although Rhodakanaty continued to play a prominent role, leadership increasingly passed to younger and more dynamic men.