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From Agraristas to Guerrilleros:
The Jaramillista Movement in Morelos
Tanals Padilla
The 1940s witnessed a resurgence of agrarismo in Morelos, Mexico, the home-

land of Emiliano Zapata. Under the leadership of Rubn Jaramillo, campesinos
fought for better crop prices, credit, and land reform.1 The struggle of the Jara-
millistas, as the participants became known, lasted from 1942 until Jaramillos
assassination in 1962. As the movement unfolded in the years between the end
of the Cardenista presidency and the height of the cold war, it acquired charac-
teristics crucial to our understanding of postrevolutionary Mexico. Influenced
by the legacy of Emiliano Zapatas agrarianism, the hope created by Lzaro
Crdenass (193440) populism, the disillusionment brought about by subse-
quent administrations, and the renewed expectations for radical change inspired
by the Cuban Revolution, the Jaramillistas are emblematic of campesino resis-
tance during this period. As post-Cardenista administrations abandoned a com-
mitment to the countryside, they quelled Jaramillista petitions with violence. In
response to this repression, campesinos drew on the Zapatista legacy of armed
strugglefirst in self-defense and later, in the wake of the successful Cuban
Revolution, as a programmatic and tactical strategy significantly more radical
than earlier calls for political and economic reform.
The present study focuses on the final episode of the Jaramillista struggle,
from 1959 to 1962, when Jaramillo, at the head of some six thousand campesinos,
initiated an attempt to settle 27,000 hectares of the Michapa and Guarn plains
I would like to thank Susan Fitzpatrick, Cindy Forster, Luis Hernndez Navarro, Christina
Jimnez, and Gil Joseph for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. I would also
like to extend my gratitude to the two anonymous HAHR reviewers for their insightful
comments and to Mary Kay Vaughan and Kathryn Litherland for their keen editorial
suggestions.
1. My use of the term campesino includes subsistence farmers, sharecroppers, and rural
wage workers.
Hispanic American Historical Review 87:2

doi 10.1215/00182168-2006-130
Copyright 2007 by Duke University Press
256 HAHR / May / Padilla
in western Morelos.2 The Jaramillistas proposed a planned agrarian settle-

menta coloniathat would include subsistence farming and Cardenista-style
cooperative industrial projects. While the Department of Agrarian Affairs and
Colonization (DAAC) initially approved the proposed colonia, the Jaramillistas
plans were blocked by local cattle ranchers and the federal government. In 1962,
the army forcibly removed the settlers and targeted their leaders, culminating
in the assassination of Jaramillo and his family.
The years from 1940 to 1968, a period officially hailed for its political sta-
bility and rapid economic growth, have only recently begun to receive atten-
tion from bottom-up historiography, mostly in the realm of popular culture.3
This body of research builds on the methodology employed in influential stud-
ies of the interaction between the state and popular sectors.4 The bulk of this
scholarship has focused on the urban world. And yet, rural Mexico is an arena
2. For works on the Jaramillistas that deal with other episodes of the movement, see
Tanals Padilla, Por las buenas no se puede: Rubn Jaramillos Campaign for Governor of
Morelos, 1946 and 1952, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Studies 7, no. 1 (July 2001):
2148; Donald Hodges, Mexican Anarchism after the Revolution (Austin: Univ. of Texas
Press, 1995); Plutarco Garca Jimnez, Lucha electoral y autodefensa en el jaramillismo,
Cuadernos Agrarios 10 (JulyDec. 1994): 95116; Hubert C. de Grammont, Jaramillo y
las luchas campesinas en Morelos, in Historia de la cuestin agraria mexicana, vol. 8, Poltica
estatal y conflictos agrarios 19501970, ed. Julio Moguel (Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno,
1989), 26176; and Garca Jimnez, El movimiento jaramillista: Una experiencia de lucha
campesina y popular del periodo post-revolucionario en Mxico, in Cinco siglos de historia
regional, ed. Horacio Crespo (Cuernavaca: Centro de Estudios Histricos del Agrarismo en
Mxico, 1984), 30110.
3. See, for example, Gilbert Joseph, Anne Rubenstein, and Eric Zolov, eds. Fragments
of a Golden Age: The Politics of Culture in Mexico since 1940 (Durham: Duke Univ. Press,
2001); Anne Rubenstein, Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A
Political History of Comic Books in Mexico (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); and Eric
Zolov, Refried Elvis: The Rise of the Mexican Counterculture (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1999). Sociologists and anthropologists have also contributed to this topic, and
methodology often crosses traditional disciplinary lines. See, e.g., Neil Harvey, The Chiapas
Rebellion: The Struggle for Land and Democracy (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1998); Jeffrey
W. Rubin, Decentering the Regime: Ethnicity, Radicalism, and Democracy in Juchitn, Mexico
(Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 1997). Other historical works dealing with this period but
not in the realm of popular culture include Steve Niblos Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity,
Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1990); Barry Carr, Marxism
and Communism in Twentieth-Century Mexico (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1992); and
Rafael Loyola Daz, Ocaso del radicalismo revolucionario (Mexico City: UNAM, 1991).
4. For example, Gilbert Joseph and David Nugent, eds., Everyday Forms of State
Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico (Durham: Duke Univ.
Press, 1994).
From Agraristas to Guerrilleros 257
where defining elements of the contemporary situation playedand continue

to playthemselves out. It thus constitutes an important site for understanding
the revolutions legacy. The agrarian questionin many ways the soul of Mex-
icos revolution and the heart of the PRIs legitimizing rhetoriccontinued to
haunt the government as it abandoned rural needs in favor of urban interests.
Campesinos fought back against increasing agricultural commercialization and
concentration. In northern Mexico, they carried out a series of land invasions
in the late 1950s, and by the 1960s similar revolts cropped up elsewhere in the
country. By the 1970s, campesino unrest had reached endemic proportions.5
Not coincidentally, these decades of rural turbulence also produced a vigor-
ous anthropological debate regarding the fate and class character of Mexicos
campesinado.6 More recently, scholars have extended this analysis to the pro-
cess of political class formation and the historical construction of campesino
identity.7 Yet, the historiography of post-1940s agrarian movements is slim.
This examination of the Jaramillista trajectory seeks to identify key ways
in which campesinos battled the institutionalization of the Mexican Revolu-
tion and redefined themselves continuously, drawing on new repertoires of
struggle. In 1959, these became increasingly influenced by the Cuban Revolu-
tion. A remarkably long-lasting movement, the Jaramillistas incorporated many
modalities into their struggle. Their movement not only provides insight into
campesino resistance in Morelos during the Mexican miracle but also occu-
pies an important place in the history of postrevolutionary rural mobilizations.
The Michapa and Guarn project sought to put both Zapatista and Cardenista
ideals into practice through legal channels. Although open to participation in
the revolutions modernizing project, the Jaramillistas were not willing to aban-
don certain defining practices of campesino life and livelihood. Rather, they
sought to secure the tools necessary to survive as rural dwellers. In the face of an
5. For a description of land invasions in the late 1950s, see Hubert C. de Grammont,
La Unin General de Obreros y Campesinos, in Moguel, Historia de la cuestin agraria
mexicana, 22260. For the 1960s, see Armando Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata (Mexico
City: Ediciones Era, 1985), 8993; and for the 1970s see Dolores Trevizo, Dispersed
Communist Networks and Grassroots Leadership of Peasant Revolts in Mexico, Sociological
Perspectives 45, no. 3 (2002): 285315.
6. For a review of this literature, see Cynthia Hewitt de Alcntara, Anthropological
Perspectives on Rural Mexico (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
7. For the former, see Gerardo Otero, Farewell to the Peasantry? Political Class Formation
in Rural Mexico (Boulder: Westview, 1999); for the latter, see Christopher Boyer, Becoming
Campesino: Politics, Identity, and Agrarian Struggle in Postrevolutionary Michoacn, 19201935
(Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 2003).
increasingly capitalist-friendly state whose development plans sacrificed small-

scale rural production, the Jaramillista colonia project presented an initiative to
support campesino production and make it a viable form of subsistence.
During these two decades of struggle, the government repeatedly repressed
Jaramillista efforts to secure campesino demands, support the interests of mill
workers, protect the rights of ejidatarios, and take power through state elec-
tions. In 1942, 1946, and 1953, the Jaramillistas took up arms in self-defense,
later returning to legal channels when offered amnesty. However, after the gov-
ernment sent the army to disrupt the settlement at Michipa and Guarn in 1962,
this pattern came to an end. The Jaramillistas were edging toward more-radical
forms of armed rebellion based on the foco theory of Ernesto Che Guevara
and the Cuban revolutionaries. The assassination of Jaramillo was the death
knell for the movement, leaving us to speculate about the actual path it would
take. Yet the final phase of the movement and the governments ultimate repres-
sion in 1962 does reflect a shift in rural mobilizations, from rebellions rooted in
the agrarista tradition to the modern guerrilla groups that spread through rural
Mexico in the 1960s and 1970s. Mexico never experienced the large-scale armed
rebellions that some other Latin American governments confronted. Still, from
the 1960s onward the government has been bedeviled by a series of small guer-
rilla groups, each a radicalized offshoot of earlier reformist mobilizations.
Three years after the state crushed the Jaramillistas in 1962, the government
was confronted by a militant movement led by Pablo Gmez and Arturo Gmiz
in Chihuahua. This group attacked military headquarters in Ciudad Madera
in a strategy reminiscent of the Cuban revolutionaries assault on the Moncada
barracks. The army killed most of the rebel leaders in the ensuing skirmish.
Cited in popular histories as a starting point for Mexicos modern guerrillas, the
dramatic nature of the episode obscured its position within a long trajectory of
campesino and popular struggles that had always been halted through military
repression.8 Later, the Mexican government confronted a campesino guerrilla
army in the coastal state of Guerrero. Here, Genaro Vzquez and Lucio Caba-
as took up arms after their peaceful organizing efforts were met with a govern-
ment massacre. It took the Mexican government nine years and 24,000 army
troops to eliminate Cabaas and his Party of the Poor.9 In the same period,
an urban guerrilla groupthe September 23 Communist Leaguespread
8. Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata, 83.

9. Armando Bartra, Guerrero Bronco (Mexico City: Ediciones Sinfiltro, 1996),
13740.
to several cities, its ranks fueled by survivors of the 1968 student massacre.10
Today, guerrilla conflicts continue in Mexico. The 1990s have witnessed the
Zapatistas in Chiapas, as well as the Peoples Revolutionary Army (EPR) and
the Insurgent Peoples Revolutionary Army (ERPI) operating in Guerrero and
Oaxacareminders that guerrilla insurgency did not vanish with the end of
the cold war.
Although some rural mobilizations continued through peaceful means,
militant groups emerged, with organizational and programmatic structures
that resembled Cubas Sierra Maestra model: one in which small, armed cells
organized throughout the countryside in the hopes of producing a generalized
uprising. Within the tense international climate following the Cuban Revolu-
tion, rural uprisings took on new meaningboth for their armed militants and
for a government motivated by U.S. fears about communism in Latin America.
Michapa and Guarn exemplify the radicalization of campesino movements
within the context of post-1959 cold-war politics. The Jaramillista trajectory
reflects an important moment of transition: from movements that operated
largely within the agrarista tradition rooted in the revolution to the guerrilleros
that would increasingly emerge from the 1960s onward.
The Zapatista Legacy and the Cardenista Experience
The Jaramillista movement was deeply rooted in the soil of Morelos and its 1910
revolutionary upheaval. At the same time, it unfolded in a Mexico profoundly
transformed by the revolution (19101920) and its ensuing political project.
Jaramillo and many of his supporters had fought in Zapatas army and would
invoke this experience to legitimize their demands and defend themselves from
government attacks. Yet, many of the Jaramillistas defining characteristics
hearken to the presidency of Lzaro Crdenas. In spite of its top-down nature,
the Crdenas administration gave credence to campesino initiatives, validated
their claims to land, credit, and water, and created agroindustrial campesino
cooperatives.
Jaramillos personal trajectory as an agrarian leader reveals this Cardeni-
sta influence. Jaramillo met Crdenas during the 1934 presidential campaign
and agreed to mobilize campesino support if Crdenas promised to build a
sugar mill to benefit the Morelos population.11 Construction for the Emiliano
10. The name of the September 23 Communist League honors the guerrilla leaders in
Chihuahua who attacked the Madera barracks on that date in 1965.
11. Rubn Jaramillo, Autobiografa (Mexico City: Ed. Nuestro Tiempo, 1967), 3132.
Zapata mill began in 1935, and by 1938 it was functioning as a cooperative of

workers and campesinos. Designed to mitigate class exploitation, these types
of agroindustrial collectives were a hallmark of Cardenismo. In Morelos, the
Zacatepec mill was devised to revitalize the states sugar economydevastated
by the years of revolutionary conflictand provide jobs for a growing popula-
tion with increasingly limited access to land. The cooperatives governing body,
the campesino-worker council, elected Jaramillo as president. The manager,
appointed by Mexicos president, was subordinate to this council, a control that
lasted only two years, since in 1940 the balance of power shifted in favor of the
manager. By 1942, mill workers and campesino suppliers were so dissatisfied by
the managers policies that they organized a joint strike demanding both better
wages and working conditions for workers and higher prices for campesinos
sugarcane. Jaramillo, one of the main strike leaders, was persecuted by the man-
agers hired gunmen; after several attempts on his life, he took up arms and fled
to the mountains, along with about 75 other men.
This action exemplified the legacy of Zapatismo in Morelos. At the age of
13, Jaramillo had joined Emiliano Zapatas Army of the South. At 15, he became
a first captain in the infantry. In 1918, when the war took a turn for the worse,
he withdrew from the struggle and reportedly advised his men: The people,
and even more so future generations, will not allow themselves to live enslaved.
We will once again continue our struggle. And even if we are far from each
other we will not lose sight of one another and when the moment comes we will
once again reunite. Put your rifles away where you can easily find them again.12
While this statement may have been constructed decades later as Jaramillo
began to write his autobiography, it nevertheless captures the significance of the
Zapatista tradition for campesinos. In Morelos especially, Zapatas spirit flour-
ished through living memories and legends that evoked his presence. When
the state appropriated Zapatas image, placing him alongside Francisco Madero,
Venustiano Carranza, Alvaro Obregn, and Francisco Villa as a national hero,
it implicitly legitimized the campesinos right to land.13 It is no surprise that
Morelos campesinos viewed Jaramillo as Zapatas heir.
More than two decades after the death of Zapata and the dissolution of his
army, the Jaramillistas would return to armed struggle when faced with threats
from hired gunmen, state police, or even the army. But while Jaramillistas would
12. Ibid., 16.

13. For an analysis of the appropriation and official uses of the image of Zapata, see
Samuel Brunk, Remembering Emiliano Zapata: Three Moments in the Posthumous
Career of the Martyr of Chinameca, HAHR 78, no. 3 (1998): 45790.
pick up arms on three different occasions, they continued to fight by means of

legal petitions, taking advantage of political openings when opportunities pre-
sented themselves. The movements trajectory displayed this tactical and pro-
grammatic resolve. The result was a campesino movement that employed a vari-
ety of tacticspetitions, electoral politics, land invasions, and armed struggle.
The revolutionary rhetoric of the official party, despite its authoritarian prac-
tices, provided campesinos with a strategic space in which to act. If campesinos
spoke loudly enough, the state would have to attend to their demands or risk
tarnishing its revolutionary legitimacy.
A year after Jaramillo first took up arms, President Manuel vila Cama-
cho (194046) granted him amnesty. Jaramillo used this opportunity to work
through legal channels with other Morelos campesinos, creating a political party
that championed workers and agricultural producers. Jaramillo knew agrarian
law and had built a reputation for defending the rural poor. The platform of the
Partido Agrario Obrero Morelense (PAOM) called for a return to the agrarian
and labor reforms carried out under Crdenas. When the PRI responded to
the Jaramillistas electoral challenge with fraud and repression, the movements
leadership went underground. They would resurface, however, in 1951 to make
a second bid for the governorship of Morelos. This time, the PAOM cam-
paign coincided with a major split in the PRIbetween younger university-
trained supporters of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines and older revolutionary generals
who backed Miguel Henrquez Guzmn. For many Mexicans, especially in
the countryside, the 1952 elections represented an opportunity to return to
Cardenista policies.14 The Jaramillistas were one of many groups allied with
the Federacin de Partidos del Pueblo Mexicano (FPPM), Henrquez Guzmns
party. The FPPM campaign presented the most serious electoral challenge to
the PRI between 1940 and 1988. The government responded to this challenge
with a two-pronged strategy of fraud and repression, at both the national and
local levels; the Jaramillistas again confronted the heavy hand of the state. In
response, they once more took up arms, issuing the Plan de Cerro Prieto that
denounced the betrayal of the revolution and condemned Mexicos capitalist
system and its political and economic subjugation by the United States. As I
have argued elsewhere, the states use of repression against the Jaramillista elec-
toral campaigns radicalized Jaramillista tactics and demands.15
14. For a historical account of the Henriquista campaign, see Elisa Servn, Ruptura y
oposicin: El movimiento henriquista, 19451954 (Mexico City: Cal y Arena, 2001).
15. Padilla, Por las buenas no se puede.
The Jaramillistas remained underground until 1958, when President

Adolfo Lpez Mateos (195864) came to power with a renewed agrarista rhet-
oric. The presidents overtures to campesinos included an official pardon for
Jaramilloan opening the Morelos leader used to resume work through legal
channels. Together with six thousand other campesinos, he sought to estab-
lish a popular colonia in the vacant lands of the Michapa and Guarn plains.
The Jaramillistas couched this initiative in terms of development and progress,
appealing to the regimes proclaimed commitment to modernity. On these lands
emerged a process of dynamic rural mobilization and political struggle based on
campesinos constitutional right to land. The Jaramillistas previous experience
converged with broader historical memory and acquired a new tone in light of
international response to the Cuban Revolution. However, the Mexican consti-
tution provided the legal framework for what would prove to be the last Jara-
millista mobilization. As in numerous rural movements to come, Mexican law
validated their claims, while the organizing process generated innovative and
distinct political practices.16
Morelos: A Changing Landscape
The social composition of the Jaramillistas reflected the transformation of

Moreloss political economy, with change taking place at an increasingly dra-
matic rate by 1960. Socioeconomic transformation in Morelos was conditioned
by three principal factors: its proximity to Mexico City, its warm climate and
appealing natural springs, and improvements in road networks, especially the
Mexico CityAcapulco highway.
First, its geographic relationship to the nations capital made it convenient
for industrial expansion. Since the 1940s, the state government sought to attract
industry by granting tax exemptions for periods of 10 or 15 years.17 Moreloss
proximity to the nations capital also translated into a relatively weak local elite
that often derived its power from the federal government. Although the practice
of naming outsiders as state governorsone of the catalysts of the Zapatista
rebellionwaned in the first decades following the revolution, by the 1950s
16. Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion, 28.

17. In Jiutepec, this 10-year exemption was granted to a cement factory in 1944; in
1953 it was granted to a lime-processing plant. In 1953 this exemption was extended to a
match-making plant for 15 years. See Patricia Arias and Luca Bazn, CIVAC: Un proceso
de industrializacin en una zona campesina (Mexico City: Cuadernos de la Casa Chata,
1977), 31.
Mexican presidents were again appointing non-morelenses to the state gover-

norship.18 The states economic power, too, lay in the hands of Mexico City
or transnational capitalists who financed industrial expansion, housing devel-
opments, and tourist ventures.19 The most dramatic examples of how More-
los came to serve Mexico City industry occurred in the early 1960s with the
construction of CIVAC (Ciudad Industrial del Valle de Cuernavaca) and the
1965 tax breaks granted to industry.20 That such projects and legislation were
enacted in the wake of the elimination of the Jaramillistas and their proposal
for Michapa and Guarn vividly reveals the type of development the state and
federal governments would commit to.
The states warm climate and numerous natural springs also sparked trans-
formation during this period. The subtropical vegetation and medicinal springs
had lured elites as far back as pre-Columbian times, when Aztec lords had lav-
ish gardens built in places such as Oaxtepec. Hernn Corts also marveled at
Moreloss beautiful landscape, and during the colonial period and the nine-
teenth century the area served as a leisure and recreational space for the elite.21
Although the revolution and its aftermath disrupted these activities, Mexicos
tourist industry began to boom in the 1950s, and entrepreneurs set their sights
on this state easily accessible to Mexico City. In the coming decades, water
parks marked the landscape. By the 1940s, developers began soliciting land and
water concessionsmost often held by ejidatariosand their projects became
increasingly ambitious in the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to swimming and
other recreational facilities (golf courses, tennis courts, and walking trails),
many of these projects included luxury hotels and vacation homes.22 Hous-
18. Claudio Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1992), 75.
19. Ibid., 76.
20. CIVAC was an industrial park constructed in the municipality of Jiutepec, outside
Cuernavaca. The government would soon expropriate Tejalpas communal lands to expand
the park. This industrial city paved the way for a series of corridors that would concentrate
in three principal areas: Cuernavaca, Cuautla to the east, and Jojutla to the south. In 1965
the state government expanded earlier tax exemptions for industry, granting relief from
state and municipal taxes and fees for periods of 20 years for industrial enterprises, 10 years
for construction companies, and 5 years for initiatives in the tourist sector. See Arias and
Bazn, CIVAC, 21.
21. See Douglas A. Murphy, Links with an Agrarian Past: The Hotel Hacienda
Cocoyoc and Four Centuries of Estate Continuity and Change (PhD diss., Univ. of North
Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1998), chap. 8.
22. See, for example, Peridico Oficial del Estado de Morelos, May 19, 1940, Feb. 16, 1941,
Jan. 18, 1942, Feb. 22, 1942, and Dec. 8, 1946.
ing developments became big business, as land speculators flocked to satisfy

elite demand for weekend homes in the city of eternal spring, as Cuernavaca
became known.
The experience of Ahuatepec, a community on the outskirts of the state
capital, vividly illustrates the violence of this process. The comuneros of Ahuate-
pec had been in possession of their land since time immemorial, and in 1944,
President vila Camacho officially designated them as ejidos. In 1958, however,
U.S. businessman Donald Stoner and Mexican banker Agustn Legorreta sought
to build the housing project Jardines Ensueo on these ejido lands. Stoner and
Legorreta cited the clause in vila Camachos 1944 presidential decree stat-
ing that ownership rights to any small properties [pequeas propiedades] pres-
ent within the Ahuatepec ejido should be respected, and such properties thus
remained eligible for resale. The comuneros, whether small property owners
or ejidatarios, refused to sell their lands, despite constant intimidation by state
police, who on one occasion invaded the town and set several houses on fire.
Thanks to allies in the state government and to loopholes in vila Camachos
decree, Stoner appropriated 110 hectares of this land. Some ejidatarios reported
that the police tortured them until they agreed to sell their plots.23 Jaramillo
joined the Ahuatepec comuneros in defense of their lands and spoke at some of
their rallies. Several years later, in 1965, comunero leader Enedino Montiel and
his wife were hacked to death with machetes; Ahuatepec residents attributed
their bloody deaths to orders from Stoner and Legorreta.24
Finally, as road construction accelerated in Morelos, so did the number
of visitors and the value of land. The 1952 construction of the Mexico City
Acapulco highway had particularly significant implications, as Morelos became
the connecting zone between the nations capital and the historically significant
port city and popular tourist destination. Although it shared some cultural and
regional characteristics with Guerrero, Morelos boasted well-watered and acces-
sible terrain, while Guerrero suffered from blistering heat and often impen-
etrable mountains.25 The government also opened up dirt roads throughout the
state connecting previously isolated villages to major highways. While these
roads were small and often flooded under heavy rain, they increased commerce
(and the role of middlemen), monetized the economy, and furthered the intro-
duction of commercial goods.26 In part because of its proximity to the nations
23. Presente! (Cuernavaca), Mar. 15, 1959.

24. El Sol de Morelos, Sept. 20, 1965.
25. Lomnitz-Adler, Exits from the Labyrinth, 71.
26. Guillermo de la Pea, A Legacy of Promises: Agriculture, Politics, and Ritual in the
Morelos Highlands of Mexico (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1981), 11213.
capital, Morelos served as a major migratory pull both for Mexico City residents
in search of a more tranquil life and for laborers for whom Morelos was a tem-
porary settlement in a search for work that increasingly landed them in Mexico
City. During the middle decades of the twentieth century, migration acted as
a consistent source of the states population increase. The resulting economic
growth acted as an additional migration pull, which strained state resources. In
the 1940s, 20 percent of the states population had been born elsewhere, a figure
that increased to 25 percent by 1960 and 27 percent by 1970.27 The states total
population more than tripled in the same 30-year span.28
The composition of the Jaramillistas, especially those engaged in the
Michapa and Guarn project, reflected this social and economic flux. Partici-
pants included land-poor subsistence farmers, sharecroppers, rural day labor-
ers, and migrants from Guerrero. Rural schoolteachers who joined the ranks
brought in important ideological resources. While much of the rural population
underwent a process of proletarianization, campesino culture persisted, often
sustained by familial or other social ties to those who still retained land. 29 As
the social composition of the countrysides population changed, their demands
expanded to include issues of production, self-management, autonomy, and
democracy.30 Thus, as demands for land acquired broader political and eco-
nomic dimensions, they posed new threats to regional and national elites.
Local Autonomy and Popular Development:

The Struggle for Michapa and Guarn
With their dry, rocky soil, the Michapa and Guarn plains seemed, at first
glance, an unlikely source of contention. Their potential, however, lay in the
nearby Amacuzac River, which could be used to irrigate the lands that extended
into the municipalities of Coatln del Ro, Tetecala, Puente de Ixtla, Miacatln,
and Amacuzac. Most of the Michapa and Guarn plains had been distributed
to campesinos during the administration of Plutarco Elas Calles (192428).
27. Patrick Livenais, Peuplement et volution agraire au Morelos (Mexique) (Paris:

LHarmattan, 2001), 67.
28. According to census data, in 1940 Morelos had a population of 182,711, a number
that grew to 616,119 by 1970. Direccin General de Estadstica, Sexto censo de poblacin,
1940 (Mexico City: Secretara de la Economa Nacional, 1943); and Direccin General
de Estadstica, Noveno censo de poblacin, 1970 (Mexico City: Secretara de la Economa
Nacional, 1971).
29. Otero, Farewell to the Peasantry? 1.
30. Ibid., 26.
However, they remained uncultivatedthe ejidatarios received no technical

support, and their attempts to work small portions of this land were blocked by
nearby ranchers who appropriated the plains to graze cattle. In 1959, a group of
local campesinos learned of a private initiative to irrigate the area. They decided
it was time to assert their rights, so they went in search of Jaramillo.31
The initiative soon became much more than an action to reclaim an ejido.
Under Jaramillos leadership, the ejidatarios formed a committee with landless
campesinos from Morelos and neighboring states; they devised an ambitious
project to create a new colonia and distribute the 27,000 hectares of land among
six thousand campesinos.32 The committees demands emphasized campesino
initiative and self-sufficiency. Their first appeal to the president asked for loans
to begin the process of irrigation and distribution. They proposed to hire a
technical assistant to divide the land equitably and efficiently, and they empha-
sized campesino participation in the entire process. The Jaramillistas promised
not to deplete government resources but rather to use the credit efficiently and
pay it back in a timely and honest manner. Moreover, they pointed out, the
project would benefit not just the peasant families themselves but also the state
economy, the federal government, and the entire region of the plains.33 Jara-
millo and the committee simultaneously worked out the legal details of the proj-
ect with the Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization, and in March
1960 the project was approved. The DAAC assigned engineer Federico Tafoya
to provide technical assistance.34
The Jaramillistas named the colonia after Otilio Montao, one of Zapatas
closest allies and the principal author of the Plan de Ayala. This choice staked
a claim to a Zapatista legacy and reflected a desire to implement Zapatismo
in Morelos. Combining subsistence farming and modern commercial ventures,
they planned to provide croplands for rural dwellers and to introduce canneries
for commercial production of tomatoes, cantaloupe, and watermelons. They
also proposed sugar- and rice-milling co-ops, whose profits would benefit the
community as a whole. The Otilio Montao colonia, they emphasized, would
31. Ravelo, Los Jaramillistas (Mexico City: Nuestro Tiempo, 1978), 168; and Letter
from Rubn Jaramillo to Director of the DAAC, Sept. 29, 1959, Archivo General Agrario
(hereafter AGA), Nuevo Centro de Poblacin, Otilio Montao 22/5568.
32. Letter from Rubn Jaramillo to Director of the DAAC.
33. Letter from Rubn Jaramillo to President of the Republic, Jan. 17, 1959, Archivo
General de la Nacin, Ramo Presidentes, Adolfo Lpez Mateos (hereafter AGN-P/ALM)
111/348.
34. Salvador Gonzlez Lazcona to Rubn Jaramillo, Mar. 31, 1960, AGA, Dotacin de
Ejidos, Apatzingo de Michapa, Morelos 23/3130.
implement the latest innovations offered by modern science.35 Other projects

included the construction of dams on the Amacuzac River, rainwater-collection
reservoirs, and a 30-km road to the colonia. The proposal included plans for
streets, modern housing, running water, electricity, and telephone and telegraph
service, as well as all other necessary facilities for a modern population center.
The estimated cost was $480 million pesos, to be paid back over ten years, at 7
percent interest.36
In establishing that each settler family would have a plot of land (0.1 hect-
ares) while simultaneously proposing large-scale rice and sugar cooperatives
and commercial processing for crops such as tomatoes, the plans for Michapa
and Guarn paralleled aspects of the Plan de Ayala. One Jaramillista actually
described the colonia project as an updated version of the latter.37 Although the
plans were quite different in other respects, Zapata himself had been conscious
of the need to cultivate commercial crops. For example, the revolutionary leader
had warned the residents of Villa de Ayala, If you keep on growing chile pep-
pers, onions, and tomatoes, youll never get out of the state of poverty youve
always lived in. Thats why, as I advise you, you have to grow cane.38 Where
Zapata confiscated sugar mills and distributed the surrounding lands, he insisted
that the mills keep running, not as private property, but as public works.39
Despite the PRIs appropriation of the figure of Zapata and its claimed
monopoly over the revolution, the ideals that the Zapatistas had fought for
campesino dignity, autonomy, and subsistencecontinued to permeate Mexi-
cos rural landscape and exposed the PRIs deepening alliance with private and
commercial interests. The Jaramillistas plans were ultimately stymied by the
interests of cattle ranchers, industrialists, and tourist developersevidence of
the gulf between the PRIs revolutionary claims and the economic and social
realities the party supported and created. As the state abandoned agrarista ide-
als, the Jaramillistas reclaimed them in their alternative development proposal
for Morelos. They carried Zapatas flag and embraced modern development
proposals such as those promoted under Crdenas.
35. Asunto: Nuevo Centro de Poblacin; Poblacin Otilio Montao, Aug. 10, 1960,
Morelos 22/5568, AGA 22/5568.
36. To Presidente Adolfo Lpez Mateos from the Comit Particular Ejecutivo del
Nuevo Centro de Poblacin Agraria Profesor y General Otilio Montao, Sept. 10, 1960,
AGN-P/ALM 111/348.
37. Jos Rodrguez, interview by Salvador Nez, July 14, 1979, Nepatln, Puebla.
38. Cited in John Womack, Zapata and the Mexican Revolution (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), 24041.
39. Ibid., 235.
The Jaramillista plans for roads, schools, and recreation centers demon-
strated an eye toward progress. Economic autonomy and self-sufficiency were
two main goals for the colonia. One participant, Jos Rodrguez, described how
the plan would give land to the campesinos but in a more advanced way: with
credit and guarantees. It was going to be a colonia with technical direction. . . .
That was the intention, to form an agricultural, industrial, and commercial cen-
ter because everything would be manufactured and produced there. And there
would be work not only for the campesinos that were there but for those all over
the state. Jaramillos vision was extensive.40
But one of the first problems the Jaramillistas faced came from nearby
ranchers and local political bosses who had taken over part of the plains to pas-
ture their cattle. These ranchers and caciques began to mobilize some of the
original ejidatarios in a campaign to discredit the Jaramillistas as outsiders, then
argued to the DAAC that these turncoat ejidatarios use of the lands consti-
tuted legal and functioning ejidos. They provided tractors and barbed wire to
these co-opted campesinos (some of whom these same ranchers had previously
blocked from using the land) in order to make it look like the land was being cul-
tivated.41 In response, Jaramillo invited authorities to see the patchy and haphaz-
ard appearance of these cultivated areas, revealing the ranchers fraudulence.
When Jaramillo presented his proposal for the Michapa and Guarn plains,
he recognized that these lands had been distributed as ejidos. However, they
had remained uncultivated for over three decades, and according to agrarian law
the original recipients had therefore forfeited their legal rights. Jaramillo and
Tafoya sent aerial photos of the plains to show that they lay fallow.42 Jaramillo
also made numerous trips to Mexico City to acquire the final signature from
Roberto Barrios, the head of the DAAC, so the Jaramillistas could prove to local
rancheros, caciques, and state polticos (as they referred to corrupt state authori-
ties) that they had obtained legal rights to the land. But Jaramillos visits to the
agrarian offices invariably resulted in long hours of waiting and unanswered
requests. Under pressure from the cattle ranchers and developers with their
eyes on the region, Barrios clearly had second thoughts about his initial autho-
rization to the Jaramillistas. One campesino recalled, When we had every-
thing fixed and ready, he [Barrios] must have felt the pressure; all of a sudden he
turned on us. That was it! And from then on the only one who would see us was
40. Jos Rodrguez, interview.

41. Federico Tafoya Ingeniero Postulante to Jefe del DAAC, Oct. 3, 1960, AGA
22/5586.
42. Rubn Jaramillo to Jefe del DAAC, Aug. 3, 1960, AGA 22/5568.
his secretary, Lazcano, who would tell us again and again, Mr. Barrios is out
with Lpez Mateos.43
After a year and a half of paperwork, trips to Mexico City, and unanswered
petitions, the Jaramillistas were growing impatient. Jaramillo had filled out the
necessary forms, paid numerous fees, and had an initial document signed by
Barrios giving the Jaramillistas the go-ahead. On February 5, 1961, the Jaramil-
listas began to settle and work the contested land. The local ranchers reacted
this time by paying campesinos 20 pesos each and providing them with food
and alcohol in exchange for posing as the legitimate ejido owners. According to
Jaramillistas, the Zacatepec manager sent three truckloads of refinery workers
to pose as ejidatarios.44 The ejidatarios bought off by local ranchers spearheaded
complaints against Jaramillo and Tafoya, accusing the first of land invasion and
the latter of falsifying documents.45 The ranchers tactics, in conjunction with
the Zacatepec manager with the governments tacit approval, illustrate the
power network arrayed against campesino initiatives for land reform.
Jaramillo continued his appeal to various agrarian authorities. His tone
revealed campesinos swelling frustration: I know that there are numerous
vested interests whose parties are taking action, . . . backward politicians and
caciques of ranches and towns who want to stop the peoples will . . . but they
will not be able to, because the needs of the people are greater than all the
authorities, and all the laws. This is why it is indispensable that these needs be
taken care of.46
These petitions fell on deaf ears, and the DAAC reversed its earlier approval
for the project. The executive secretary of the agrarian office now argued that
these lands were ejidos and small properties and therefore could not be used
to create a new colonia. Instead, he offered the Jaramillistas territory in the
state of Quintana Roo, a proposal that Jaramillo rejected.47 As with previous
43. Ravelo, Los Jaramillistas, 170. The symbolism in this recollection illustrates the
degree of collaboration the campesinos witnessed between different government offices.
44. Comit Ejecutivo del Nuevo Centro de Poblacin Otilio Montao to Presidente de
la Repblica, Nov. 20, 1961, AGA 22/5568; and Ravelo, Los Jaramillistas, 180.
45. Oscar Revio Ros to Agente del Ministerio Pblico Federal Adscrito al Juzgado de
Distrito, Cuernavaca, Morelos, Feb. 21, 1961, AGN/P-ALM; Salvador Lazcona to Director
General de Asuntos Jurdicos, Feb. 24, 1961, AGA 22/5568, Nuevos Centros de Poblacin
Otilio Montao.
46. Rubn Jaramillo to Delegado Agrario en el Estado, Aug. 23, 1961, Archivo General
de la Nacin, Ramo Direccin General de Investigaciones Polticas y Sociales (hereafter
AGN-DGIPS), box 2916, exp. 1/148.
47. Letter to Rubn Jaramillo, Felix Serdn, and Jos Sols Surez from Secretario
Ejecutivo de Asuntos Agrarios, May 8, 1961, AGA 22/5568.
government offers for land in Baja California, the campesinos were not will-
ing to move.48 Barrios then made a deal with Jaramillo: if he would order the
campesinos to vacate the land, the DAAC would solve the conflict in favor of the
Jaramillistas.49 Jaramillo agreed and convinced campesinos to withdraw from
Michapa and Guarn.
Jaramillos decision sparked controversy among his followers. Even though
the Jaramillistas acquiesced, they were increasingly frustrated and began to
talk of an armed invasion. Although legal channels were getting them nowhere,
perhaps the government would be persuaded through more forceful measures.
The following exchange illustrates the mood: At one meeting of about one
thousand campesinos, we already had eight hundred weapons. People were say-
ing [to Jaramillo] Jefe, we have to go in by force, give us the go-ahead. Jara-
millo found himself caught between his supporters call for direct action and
his own preference to work through official channels. He opted to give legal
tactics another chance. We did not come as rebels; we came as settlers, he
said.50 Jaramillo harbored hope in President Lpez Mateos, who had expressed
a commitment to agrarian ideals and had declared that during his term no piece
of land would remain uncultivated and no campesino would go without land.
Moreover, the president had met personally with Jaramillo and granted him
amnesty. Jaramillo understood the seriousness of armed struggle and knew
that it did not always represent a position of strength vis--vis the government.
In response to a reporters query, he asserted, Thats what my enemies would
want: that I take up arms so they can declare this movement illegal, separate
me from the people and the land, and have me shot in the mountains. No, my
struggle is here right now.51
Jaramillo sent numerous appeals to the president, citing the abuses of the
Morelos authorities and asking for federal intervention. But the president did
nothing.52 When Barrios failed to act on his promise, the Jaramillistas reoc-
cupied the Michapa and Guarn plains in the early days of February 1962,
almost a year after the first attempt. Three hundred men, women, and children
began once more to build houses and prepare infrastructure. They cleared land
48. In 1944, President vila Camacho offered the Jaramillistas land in the San
Quintn in Baja California, but Jaramillo rejected the offer, viewing it as a form of exile.
Jaramillo, Autobiografia, 96.
49. Comit Ejecutivo del Nuevo Centro de Poblacin Otilio Montao to Presidente de
la Repblica; and Ravelo, Los Jaramillistas, 172.
50. Ravelo, Los Jaramillistas, 171.
51. Manjrrez, Matanza en Xochicalco, 152.
52. Rubn Jaramillo to Presidente de la Repblica, Feb. 12, 1962, AGA 22/5560.
for a school, administrative offices, and a recreation center. The struggle lent
them resolve. Participants described their experience in Michapa and Guarn
as empowering, using language similar to the testimonies of participants in
Jaramillos gubernatorial campaign. Campesinos had supported Jaramillo in the
1946 and 1952 elections because he promised to prioritize their needs; as one
Jaramillista recalled, it was a chance to elect someone who enforced the law,
who would actually institute the federal labor law and agrarian codes.53 Now,
through the Otilio Montao project, the Jaramillistas sought to put these laws
into practice.
Indeed, the rising tensions over Michapa and Guarn illustrate the vari-
ous issues at stake. The profit potential of this land had not gone unnoticed.
Requests for irrigation projects dated back to the vila Camacho administra-
tion. The government had denied these earlier petitions, explaining that it was
unable to allocate the necessary resources due to Mexicos war effort. Ejidal
commissariats made a second request in 1951 that was also ignored.54 Now, in
1959, it was a group of Mexico City businessmen who sought to make use of
the land. Entitled the Cuenca Sur project, this proposal called for a hydro-
electric plant and irrigation for coffee, avocados, nuts, and other products that
campesinos could be taught to farm. In addition, they proposed to establish
several poultry and sheep farms. The project also included tourist development
and industrial expansion designed to assist Mexico City with its production
needs and would span the states of Morelos, Guerrero, and Mexico.55
The campesinos knowledge of commercial plans for Michapa and Guarn
had initially propelled them to assert their rights to the land: if the government
was finally going to irrigate the plains, then it should be for the benefit of rural
dwellers and not for a project reportedly spearheaded by ex-president Miguel
Alemn, millionaire Alfredo del Mazo, and the former manager of the Zacate-
pec refinery, Eugenio Prado.56 Both the Otilio Montao and the Cuenca Sur
projects were framed in terms of progress and modernity, but their social visions
differed dramatically. While the Jaramillistas sought to commercialize prod-
ucts such as sugar, rice, and cantaloupe, they also wanted campesinos to have
53. Jos Rodrguez, interview.

54. Wenceslao Velasco Ayala to Presidente de la Repblica, Jan. 18, 1951, AGN, Ramo
Direccin General de Gobierno (hereafter DGG), vol. 265, exp. 2/311G(14)5.
55. Formally reintroduced to Gustavo Daz Ordaz in 1964, the proposal had been
developed and introduced for processing in 1959. Filemn Vega to Presidente de la
Repblica, Dec. 20, 1964, AGN-DGIPS 2916.
access to individual subsistence plots. Moreover, the commercial components of

the Jaramillista project were structured as cooperatives that would benefit the
local population. The architects of the Cuenca Sur proposal, in contrast, stated
that while it would instruct local ejidatarios on how to farm certain commercial
products, the profits would not be distributed collectively. Moreover, the prod-
ucts proposedcoffee, avocados, and nutswere not currently being farmed
in the region, nor were they staples in the campesinos diet. As such, the proj-
ect would contribute to the continued commercialization and decline of tradi-
tional peasant agriculture, which over the previous two decades had resulted in
increasing land concentration and an agricultural structure in which campesino
families had to invest greater amounts of labor just to ensure survival.57 Like-
wise, aspects of the tourist and housing-development projects corresponded to
a state vision that favored commercial enterprise over the social needs of the
rural population.
As the Jaramillistas continued to face harassment from cattle ranchers and
their hired ejidatarios, Jaramillo made plans to arm as many settlers as pos-
sible to defend against this aggression. The Jaramillistas had few weapons, but
they were enough for self-defense. They agreed that if the authorities came to
remove them and attempted to arrest their leaders, the people would engage in
unarmed resistance while the armed leaders would elude capture.
And the government did send the army to remove the settlers. Eyewit-
nesses report that hundreds of soldiers arrived in the middle of the night on
February 13, 1962. They detained six people, each charged with possession of a
deadly weapon and social disruption [disolucin social].58 Significantly, authori-
ties reported their attempt to arrest Jaramillo directly to the Estado Mayor
PresidencialMexicos elite presidential military commandthus illustrating
the presidents involvement in the matter.59 Jaramillo, in the meantime, issued a
complaint against the Morelos governor, the representative of the DAAC, and
the attorney general (procurador de justicia). But the state judge absolved all the
57. For a detailed account of this process in Moreloss oriente, see Arturo Warman,
We Come to Object: The Peasants of Morelos and the National State, trans. Stephen K. Ault
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), chap. 5.
58. Presente! Feb. 25, 1962. The crime of disolucin social dated back to World War
II, when it was passed to target Nazi activities in Mexico. It provided for jail sentences for
individuals or groups who conspired to disrupt the public order or engage in any other
activity that challenged Mexican sovereignty. After its passage, however, this law was used
almost exclusively against labor, campesino, student, teacher, or communist organizers.
59. Feb. 19, 1962, DGIPS 2916, exp. 1/148.
accused parties, noting that the ranking federal military officer for the state of
Morelos, Pascual Cornejo Brun, had acted on orders from above.60
The federal governments involvement ushered in another round of state-
sanctioned violence against the Jaramillistas. The administration attempted (as
it has since 1942) to win first by co-opting the movement; when this maneuver
failed (as likewise had occurred in each previous incident), the PRI shifted to
repression. When the Jaramillistas invoked Zapatista and Cardenista notions
of development, they peeled away the layers shrouding a government policy
ever more bereft of its constitutional mandates. The states legitimizing frame-
work rang hollow as the Jaramillistas revealed the endurance of popular local
memory over an official history that could only incorporate certain strands of
regional mythology. Repression was the only possible response to this threat
to legitimacy.61
Each time the government attempted to appropriate or do away with popu-
lar radical alternatives, they reappeared in new and innovative ways.62 Earlier
Jaramillista armed actions had been interpreted as a return to Zapatas armed
agrarismo. In the shadow of the triumphant Cuban Revolution, however, the
implications of such militancy would change.
It Is in the Michapa Plains Where

the Current Regime Will Define Itself
The battle over Michapa and Guarn took place at a moment when the Cuban
Revolution had rejuvenated the Left and forced the PRI to grapple with the
legitimacy of its own institutionalized revolution. To accomplish this task,
President Lpez Mateos masterfully reasserted an independent foreign policy
vis--vis the United States while continuing to repress domestic popular move-
ments. The United States aggressive stance against Cuba provoked nationalist
and anti-imperialist sentiments throughout Latin America. In Mexico, it con-
tributed to a climate that permitted the Left to participate more directly in
politics.63 The formation of the Movimiento de Liberacin Nacional (MLN) in
60. Juicio de Amparo, 80/962, Feb. 15, 1962, Casa de la Cultura Jurdica de Morelos
(hereafter CCJM).
61. Florencia Mallon, Local Intellectuals, Regional Mythologies, and the Mexican
State, 18401994: The Many Faces of Zapatismo, in Legislating Culture, special issue,
Polygraph 10 (1998): 68.
62. Ibid.
63. Olga Pellicer de Brody, Mxico y la Revolucin Cubana (Mexico City: El Colegio de
Mxico, 1972), 90.
1961 was one of the clearest manifestations of this attempt to regroup. Former
president Lzaro Crdenas broke with tradition and reentered the public light
as a vocal defender of the Cuban Revolution and the most prominent leader of
the MLN. This short-lived reformist movementwhich brought together a
wide range of social actors, including leftist elements of the PRI, intellectuals,
students, and some members of the Communist and Socialist partiesbecame
a force to contend with. With the public mobilized in support of Cuba, Lpez
Mateosneeding a means to validate his partys own revolutionary creden-
tialsannounced his support of Cubas right to self-determination. In 1960,
Mexico hosted Cuban president Osvaldo Drticos; during the visit Lpez
Mateos couched his praise for the Cuban Revolution in carefully nationalist
terms. We are confident, declared Mexicos president, that just as the Mex-
ican Revolution was, the Cuban Revolution will be another step toward the
greatness of the Americas.64 Mexico lent Cuba diplomatic support by opposing
U.S. calls for OAS economic sanctions against the island, and it stood as the
one Latin American state to maintain diplomatic ties with Havana after 1964.65
Initially, U.S. diplomats reacted angrily to Mexicos defiance. In a July 1961
telegram, U.S. ambassador to Mexico Thomas Mann suggested that if Mexico
did not remain receptive to Washingtons recommendations on, among other
issues, foreign investment and the battle against communism, the United States
could withdraw from discussions in [the] friendliest and most relaxed man-
ner, expressing understanding of Mexican policy, and then simply put a slow
man on the job of passing on Mexican request[s] for assistance.66 In Decem-
ber, Mann reiterated this recommendation with evident frustration: it needed to
dawn on Mexico that cooperation has to be a two-way street, and that Mexico
needs [the] US more than we need Mexico. It is important that in the weeks
ahead each statement by a US official and each action on loan applications be
carefully considered in light of [the] probable effect on Mexican decisions.67
However, these initial frustrations soon gave way to a mutual understand-
64. Cited in ibid., 21.

65. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a few Latin American countries slowly began to
renew ties.
66. Proposal to tie loans to anti-communist measures, U.S. Embassy in Mexico,
secret telegram, John F. Kennedy Library, National Security Files (hereafter JFK-NSF),
CO-Mexico, General 1/615/62, box 141, and National Security Archives (hereafter, NSA,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB124/doc04.pdf (accessed June 22, 2005).
67. Memo of conversation with President Lpez Mateos, U.S. Embassy in Mexico,
NSA, JFK-NSF CO-Mexico, General 1/615/62, box 14, and NSA, http://www.gwu
.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB124/doc08.pdf (accessed June 22, 2005).
ing between Washington and Mexico City. President Lpez Mateos made it
clear to Washington that while it was politically unfeasible to sever diplomatic
ties with Cuba, when fundamental issues [were] at stake he was willing to be
helpful.68 Not only did Mexican authorities aid U.S. intelligence by supply-
ing the American consulate with detailed passenger lists of people traveling to
Cuba, but under President Gustavo Daz Ordaz (196470), Mexicos embassy in
Havana shared intelligence information on Cubas domestic situation with the
United States.69 Indeed, Washington reached an informal understanding . . .
at the highest levels to maintain relations with Cuba so one OAS country can
have [a] foot in [the] door which might sometime be helpful.70 While this level
of cooperation remained highly classified, Mexicos policy of double-dealing
could be detected in the ways the government sought to control domestic
enthusiasm for the Cuban Revolution.71 Actions such as the repression of dem-
onstrations against the Playa Girn invasion and the photographing and con-
fiscation of materials from passengers returning from Cuba revealed the gov-
ernments efforts to temper pro-Cuban sentiments.72 Although Lpez Mateos
initially characterized his administration as extreme left within the Constitu-
tion, by July 1961 he appeared to qualify this bold statement by declaring he
would repress any demagogical excess that, whether from the left or the right,
attempted, outside the constitutional framework, to disrupt national life.73
This apparent centrist position was not born out in policy. Not only were reli-
68. Lopez Mateos Visit, 2/202/22/64, Lyndon B. Johnson Library, National Security
Files (hereafter LBJ-NSF), CO-Mexico, and NSA, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/
NSAEBB/NSAEBB83/us02.pdf (accessed July 7, 2005), emphasis in original.
69. See, for example, U.S. Embassy in Mexico, Confidential Telegram, Sept. 8, 1967,
LBJ-NSF, CO-Mexico, Memos and Miscellaneous, vol. 3, 3/6711/67 (2 of 3), and NSA,
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB83/us10.pdf (accessed July 7, 2005).
70. Jrgen Buchenau, Por una guerra fra ms templada: Mxico entre el cambio
revolucionario y la reaccin estadounidense en Guatemala y Cuba, in Espejos de la guerra
fra: Mxico, Amrica Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico City: CIESAS, 2004),
145. U.S. Embassy in Mexico Secret Telegram, June 28, 1967, LBJ-NSF, RG 59, CFPC
6769, POL CubaA, and NSA, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB83/
us09.pdf (accessed July 12, 2005).
71. For a good discussion of this policy in light of the recently declassified documents,
see Kate Doyle, Double Dealing: Mexicos Foreign Policy toward Cuba, Mar. 2, 2003,
NSA, http://www.gwu.edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB83/press.htm (accessed July
15, 2005).
72. Pellicer, Mxico y la revolucin cubana, 103.
73. Poltica, July 1, 1960, and June 15, 1961, cited in Pellicer, Mxico y la revolucin
cubana, 23 and 104.
gious and anticommunist groups quick to praise the presidents assertion, but
pro-Castro demonstrations were often violently dispersed, while right-wing
anti-Cuban protests went unchallenged.74
It was in this atmosphere that the Jaramillistas joined the massive rallies
staged by the MLN and added their voices to outcry throughout Mexico and
Latin America against U.S. imperialism in Cuba. As had occurred during the
1952 Henriquista campaign, however, there was a wide gap between the leader-
ship, which was ultimately accommodating to the political system, and the pop-
ular base willing to engage in radical action. So while Crdenas and even Lpez
Mateos framed their defense of Cuba in nationalist terms, Jaramillo expressed
admiration for Cubas agrarian reform and hailed it as a model to be followed.
Indeed, who best to identify the PRIs hypocrisy than campesinos whose land
petitions were met with repression? While earlier Jaramillista appeals had been
couched in Zapatista and Cardenista terms, the imprint of the Cuban Revolu-
tion was manifest in the final episode of the Jaramillista struggle. The Jara-
millistas identified with the islands revolution, and Jaramillo hailed Castros
actions as an example to be followed. In 1961 he remarked, [T]he accomplish-
ments of this revolution in terms of land redistribution coincide with our own
revolutionary aspirations. . . . The campesinos in that revolution did things
better than we did, and with their government the Cubans have the guaran-
tees that we lack.75 The Cuban Revolution increasingly became a source for
new discourses of resistance, including Che Guevaras foco theory and Mao-
ist notions of a peoples revolutionary army. In their recollection of events of
this period, Jaramillistas place their struggle within the general effervescence
inspired by the Cuban example. Recalls Pedro Garca, Committees of women,
workers, and campesinos visiting from Cuba would seek Jaramillo out. . . . I saw
them here in Cuernavaca. It wasnt just because he defended Cuba; they admired
Jaramillos social struggle. But still, imagine, Jaramillo speaking in Cuernavaca,
the vacation center of the North Americans.76 Some Jaramillistas spoke of an
invitation to Jaramillo to visit the island. It is uncertain whether there existed an
actual invitation for Jaramillo to visit Cuba. Castros close diplomatic relation-
ship with the Mexican government led him to follow a strict hands-off policy
toward Mexican dissidents (much to the dismay of the Mexican Left). Still, the
significance of the story lies in the links Jaramillistas established between their
movement and the Cuban Revolution.
During the Bay of Pigs invasion, Jaramillo spoke at a rally in Cuernavaca
74. Pellicer, Mxico y la revolucin cubana, 104.

75. La Voz de Mxico (Mexico City), May 30, 1961.
76. Pedro Garca, interview by the author, May 5, 1999, Cuautla, Morelos.
condemning U.S. aggression against Cuba. According to one federal agent

reporting on this rally, both Jaramillo and his wife, Epifania Ziga, spoke in
favor of communism, declaring that such a system was detrimental only to mil-
lionaires but not to the people (el verdadero pueblo). Ziga declared that the
Cuban Revolution should not be seen as an event foreign to their own hearts,
but as a source of liberation for the Mexican people.77 Such public proclama-
tions about the virtues of communism appear somewhat anomalous, given that
Jaramillo seldom made reference to this doctrine. Perhaps the context in which
Jaramillo and Ziga alluded to Castros economic system led the agent to sim-
plify their declarations or to equate support for Cuba with support for com-
munism. Certainly, this was the attitude of U.S. intelligence sources, which,
for example, viewed the MLN as a rabidly anti-United States, pro-Cuba Com-
munist front.78 Likewise, one CIA document characterized Jaramillo as a
communist agrarian leader.79 Jaramillo, who had often been labeled a bandit
by the local and national press, was now increasingly branded a communist.
Paula Batalla recalled, They started calling him a communist. I dont know
what communism means, but thats what they accused him of, and thats why
they started persecuting him again.80 Another Jaramillista reflected, [T]hey
are saying that were what they call communists. Maybe we are. If demand-
ing lands and saying that we dont want to be robbed anymore is Communism,
then maybe were communists.81 Indicative of the symbolic importance left-
ist intellectuals attributed to the Jaramillista struggle, early in 1959 a Morelos
newspaper headlined its coverage on the land struggle: It is in the Michapa
77. Investigaciones Polticas y Sociales, Apr. 26, 1961, Estado Morelos, AGN-DGIPS,
box 1980, 2-1/G1/17.
78. Trips and Conferences: Presidents Trips to Mexico, JFK-NSF, 6/62,
5/11/625/31/62, box 237, and NSA, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/
NSAEBB124/doc11.pdf (accessed June 22, 2005).
79. Central Intelligence Agency, Meeting at National University of Mexico in protest
against visit of president, June 24, 1962, CIA, FOIA Electronic Reading Room, EO1999-
00042, http://www.foia.cia.gov/browse_docs_full.asp?doc_no=0000828153&title=
MEETING+AT+NATIONAL+UNIVERSITY+OF+MEXICO+IN+PROTEST+AGAIN
ST+VISIT+OF+PRESIDENT&abstract=&no_pages=0004&pub_date=6%2F24%2F1962&
release_date=8%2F28%2F2002&keywords=MEXICO%7CKENNEDY+PRESIDENT%
7CVISIT%7CPROTEST&case_no=EO%2D1999%2D00042&copyright=0&release_dec=
RIPPUB&classification=U&showPage=0001 (accessed June 28, 2005).
80. Paula Batalla, Donde quiera que me paro soy yo (Morelos: Comunicacin Intercambio
y Desarrollo Humano en Amrica Latina, 1988), 103.
81. Un da en la tierra de Zapata: Testimonios sobre la vida y la muerte de Rubn
Jaramillo, La Cultura en Mxico, Suplemento de Siempre! July 11, 1962.
plains where the current regime will define itself.82 For those committed to the
Jaramillista colonia at Michapa and Guarn, the Lpez Mateos administration
revealed itself as authoritarian.
The Otilio Montao colonia project not only threatened the interests
of local cattle ranchers but also charted a different course from projects like
the Cuenca Sur that were typical of Mexicos development strategies during
the Mexican Miracle. No less threatening to the government, however, was the
example the colonia would set for other campesinos nationwide. The Jaramil-
listas understood the larger significance of their grassroots project. One par-
ticipant speculated, If Rubn [Jaramillo] had organized that city, because it
would have been a city born completely from one moment to the next, with all
the political and moral capacity that Rubn taught, it would have been a huge
inspiration, maybe even for the entire nation.83 Another participant in the land
takeover recalled Jaramillos speeches at Michapa and Guarn and affirmed that
Jaramillos vision for the lands was socialist. When the committee was formed
I participated and he would say The system of government here will be social-
ist. . . . Everyone will work and everyone will rest.84 Such references to social-
ism were vague, but they were indicative of the influence of rural schoolteachers
who, since the Crdenas administration, had disseminated programs of socialist
education. While this curriculum had long been abolished, teachers who par-
ticipated in rural mobilizations continued to speak with such language, which
was likely understood in terms of an old, comprehensible polarityrich and
poor, exploiters and exploited.85 As Mary Kay Vaughan found for rural school-
teachers, socialism . . . was more a feeling than a theory.86 Now the triumph of
the Cuban Revolution reinforced these ideas of social justice. While Jaramillista
references to socialism were rare, Jaramillo and some of those close to him, such
as Zacatepec worker and Communist Party member Mnico Rodrguez or rural
schoolteacher Jos Rodrguez, espoused the need for worker ownership of the
means of production. With the Cuban Revolution, the language of socialism
would acquire renewed legitimacy.
82. Presente! Mar. 25, 1959.

84. Ibid., 178.
85. Alan Knight, Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico,
19101940, HAHR 74, no. 3 (Aug. 1994): 430.
86. Doa Socorro Melndez, cited in Mary Kay Vaughan, The Implementation of
National Policy in the Countryside: Socialist Education in Puebla in the Crdenas Period
(paper presented at the Seventh Conference of Mexican and U.S. Historians, Oaxaca, Oct.
1985), 17, cited in ibid., 430.
The Jaramillista land invasions did not occur in a vacuum. The Mexican
government was still reeling from the massive rural mobilizations that had
recently taken place in northern Mexico. Between 1958 and 1962, the Gen-
eral Union of Mexican Workers and Campesinos (UGOCM) led major land
takeovers in Sinaloa, Baja California, Nayarit, and Colima. There, the process
of soliciting land had gone on for years. Not only did petitioners not receive
the promised ejidos, but several of their leaders were assassinated.87 In fact, the
resolutions passed at the UGOCMs 1957 congress, which took place in Los
Mochis, Sinaloa, included a measure to avenge each future political assassination
by executing a landlord.88 Through its numerous land invasions, the UGOCM
succeeded in drawing attention not only to Mexicos extensive latifundismo but
also to the way in which foreign landownership had quietly expanded in the
postrevolutionary decades. The Green Cattle Companyowned by Cananea
Consolidated Copper Companywas the target of one such mobilization. His-
tory seemed to repeat itself, with this UGOCM mobilization echoing the 1906
strike against Cananea in Sonora and the brutal repression leveled against it.89
Owned by a family with U.S. citizenship, CCCC included several metallurgical
plants, two banks, a slaughterhouse, and a meatpacking plant; news reports of
the time referred to it as a state within the Mexican state.90 Not only was this
almost half-million-hectare latifundio one of the biggest in the country, but
it was also located within one hundred kilometers of the international border,
where, under Mexican law, foreigners could not own property. When contin-
ued demands for land expropriation were returned with requests for patience,
UGOCM members decided to stage a number of symbolic takeovers, occupying
the land and raising the Mexican flag. When authorities arrived to remove them,
campesinos peacefully dispersed but returned again and again, until authorities
87. Gerrit Huizer, Land Invasion as Non-Violent Strategy of Peasant Rebellion: Some
Cases from Latin America, Journal of Peace Research 9, no. 2 (1972): 127.
88. Ibid.
89. During the dictatorship of Porfirio Daz, the U.S.-owned Cananea mines
in Sonora were notorious for their unjust labor practices, which included reserving
managerial positions for U.S. personnel and paying U.S. workers higher wages for the
same jobs conducted by their Mexican counterparts. When workers went on strike in 1906
demanding, among other things, equal pay for equal work, the governor of Sonora called
in the Arizona Rangers, whose repression left several dead. The number of murdered
workers increased when Dazs rurales arrived and hanged those they perceived to be leaders.
Cananea became a vivid symbol of both U.S. control over Mexican resources and the
regimes willingness to sacrifice Mexican lives for the sake of foreign business interests.
90. De Grammont, La Unin General de Obreros y Campesinos, 238.
jailed the leaders and fenced off the latifundio.91 Soon after, in part as a reprisal
and in part as an indication of the elite anxieties aroused by such mobilizations,
the army removed a group of 150 families who had been permitted to remain
within latifundio boundaries since 1954. The army destroyed the communitys
rustic infrastructure, leaving them homeless in the dead of winter.92 Within five
days of the invasions in Sonora, campesinos in Sinaloa took over latifundios in
the districts of Culiacn and Guasave. There, too, the army was quick to arrive.
Campesinos staged similar actions in Baja California and Nayarit.93 In all, about
20,000 people participated in the land invasions, and the government eventu-
ally agreed to expropriate and redistribute land. The promised redistribution,
however, took place in a way that deliberately undermined the UGOCM, as the
state granted titles only to those who applied via the government-controlled
National Campesino Confederation (CNC).94
Such land conflicts demonstrated the shortcomings of Mexicos agrarian
reform and were alarming signs of the critical situation in the countryside.
Despite President Lpez Mateoss agrarista language, the state continued to
deepen its commitment to an economic model that put campesinos existence
at risk. As it would increasingly do in decades to come, the government sided
with private commercial interests and made way for a commercial project in
which campesinos were conceived of only as laborers. In Morelos, land redistri-
bution in the 1920s had dismantled the hacienda system. However, new struc-
tures of exploitation were rising from those ashes, and along with them waves
of campesino protest. As the Jaramillistas exhausted all legal channels in their
efforts to settle and work the Michapa and Guarn plains and the government
responded with the army, the militants reconsidered the feasibility of legal
channels. The Jaramillistas no longer turned to strategies inherited from the
Zapatista struggle and implemented during the Crdenas years. Instead, they
would begin to contemplate the ways that Guevarist tactics might be put to use
in Morelos. While their past armed actions had been primarily defensive in
nature, and they had officially lost both elections, the Jaramillistas had already
proven their capacity to survive persecution from hired gunmen, state police
forces, and the army, as well as to mobilize massive numbers for their political
campaign. For this reason, the government could not take this renewed phase
of the struggle lightly.
91. Ibid., 244.

92. Ibid., 24445.
93. Ibid., 24546; 25556.
94. Ibid., 24647.
Politically, the Jaramillistas had long been a thorn in the governments

side. As a campesino movement fighting in Zapatas homeland, the Jaramillis-
tas embodied the living legacy of the battle for tierra y libertad and stood as an
implicit denunciation of the governments efforts to institutionalize the revolu-
tion. That the Jaramillistas were prevented at Michapa and Guarn from put-
ting into practice projects that melded Zapatista and Cardenista ideals, while
Cuba underwent its socialist revolution, renders their plans for a clandestine
organization especially significant.
From Self-Defense to Guerrilla Strategies
The Jaramillistas are a perfect example of the process by which state repres-
sion radicalized social actors. The Michapa and Guarn experience produced
an all-too-familiar dynamic: Lpez Mateos had pardoned Jaramillo, who then
opted for legal channels once again. Still, the Mexican government responded
with force. Faced with this situation, there was a growing faction of Jaramil-
listas who supported a new strategy of clandestine organizing to break this
cycle. Prompted as a means to confront the new wave of repression, these plans
were still in the beginning stages. Jos Rodrguez, an advocate of this strategy,
remembers warning Jaramillo, The situation is more dangerous than before,
precautions need to be doubled . . . you cant be publicly active. Things need to
look quiet while the organizing is done in successive groups of three or five.95
Rather than organize large-scale mobilizations, the idea was to go about things
the other way around, giving the impression that all was calm in the country-
side while organizing clandestinely. People were to organize in cells and go to
Jaramillo for help, training, or instructions, and then return to their communi-
ties. Jaramillo would travel from place to place to meet with these groups and in
this way begin to set up a structure in Morelos that could be used as a launching
point for mobilization in the region and eventually the rest of Mexico.96
These plans clearly indicate a new phase for the Jaramillistas, one that
linked community development, political education, and armed resistance. The
plan sought to create small cooperatives of about 50 people in the places where
Jaramillo had strong support. This process would allow the Jaramillistas to cre-
ate a socialist region without calling it that or decreeing it as such.97 With this
plan, Jaramillistas would establish their own style of socialism: [W]e would
95. Jos Rodrguez, interview by Salvador Nez, June 16, 1979, Nepatln, Puebla.
96. Ibid.
build our own blacksmith shop to make hoes and plows. We would also have a
carpenter, pottery and butchers shop. Others would specialize in the cultivation
of beans, corn, etc., until we are self-sufficient. But we would not stop interact-
ing with the people, we would continue to be in the struggle.98
Through this strategy local leaders would teach through example: In
many places people will see that they are poor because they live with individual-
ist lifestyles, we will be setting an example. . . . We had read how in China there
existed liberated zones in which the Red Army ruled and they carried out this
type of thing.99 Jaramillo was to initiate this plan by going completely under-
ground. Operating clandestinely, he would form truly revolutionary organiza-
tions consisting of 10 to 20 people, each from a different village of Morelos,
Guerrero, or Puebla. The members of these organizations would receive a rig-
orous political education and be responsible for organizing groups of five or so
people in their own villages, to whom they would transmit their political knowl-
edge. This cell structure would be the mechanism through which the basis of
a revolutionary consciousness would be formed. In this way, the Jaramillistas
hoped to reduce their long-standing dependence on Jaramillo, a crucial step in
ensuring the movements survival. The broad-based organization formed previ-
ously by the PAOM party structure would provide fertile ground for this highly
trained secret group to organize. The plan was to create many Rubns, as one
Jaramillista put it.100 Group members would work rigorously to link ideologi-
cal formation and the solving of concrete community issues. One advocate of
this idea explains, In all the towns these cells would establish the basis for
revolutionary consciousness and analyze problems in a different way and dis-
seminate that language and education so that people could see the solution to
their problems differently. Once established, they would analyze the issues of
land, water, industry, the high cost of living, everything. As a result of this pro-
gram they would engage in struggle with the larger group to create widespread
consciousness.101
Such a strategy was meant to create the basis for a peoples revolutionary
army, one that would grow directly out of the communitys effort to resolve
material demands. Its proponents anticipated that local authorities would react
with force to the first instances of this type of organizing. Caciques might seek
to disrupt a popular assembly or beat or incarcerate participants. Such provoca-
tions would force the town to organize and, ideally, lead them to community
98. Ibid.
99. Ibid.
100. Ibid., 193.
101. Ibid.
self-defense. [T]hats how well-trained armed groups would emerge. These

small groups, trained in secret, could take the lead in defending the people.102
These notions echo the main tenets of Guevaras foco theory: that armed resis-
tance should rely on an irregular army, that the support of the countryside is
vital in ensuring mobility for these forces, and that revolutionaries must be
ready to create, rather than wait for, the appropriate conditions to wage a revo-
lutionary war.
This plan was one in a series of tactics by which the Jaramillistas continu-
ally redefined themselves. It represented a strategy to continue popular orga-
nizing in the face of government repression. But it also stood as an example
of how peasant militancy continued to escalate in the face of continued state
repression. Given the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, it is impossible not to
read Jaramillista proposals that included a cell structure organization, a peoples
revolutionary army, and calls for community socialism as a move toward the
types of guerrilla groups that appeared throughout Latin America beginning
in the 1960s.
It is difficult to determine the extent to which the Mexican government
was aware of the proposed strategy. Mexico boasted an extensive intelligence
apparatus organized through the Direccin General de Investigaciones Polti-
cas y Sociales, and we know this agency kept a watchful eye on the Jaramillistas;
it is reasonable to conclude that the government had at least some awareness
of the plan. With the Cuban experience still fresh in everyones minds, the
government could not overlook this looming organizing strategy, especially so
close to the capital. When the federal government tried to arrest Jaramillo on
charges of social disruption, it added him to the long list of agrarian and labor
leaders whose struggles were viewed as threats to national security. Persecution
of the Jaramillistas fell within the familiar cold-war framework of communist
containment, a mission dramatically intensified with the triumph of the Cuban
Revolution.
Not only were the Jaramillistas radicalizing their tactics of struggle, they
were also building broader alliances. During this time, Jaramillo and 17 of his
supporters joined the Mexican Communist Party (PCM). Other Jaramillistas
may have done so as well.103 The presence of Jaramillista leaders in the PCM

103. Based on an interview with Mnico Rodrguez, Hodges placed the number at
220; Mexican Anarchism, 66. In the Centro de Estudios del Movimiento Obrero y Socialista
(hereafter CEMOS) archives, membership cards exist for Jaramillo, his wife, his three sons,
and 13 other PAOM members.
reveals an important dynamic in the movement. While some Jaramillistas were

pushing toward clandestine militant actions, others sought wider popular alli-
ances. Both tactics demonstrate how Jaramillistas sought to expand their move-
ment beyond a traditional agrarian one to a broader-based popular, political,
and nationalistist struggle. Jaramillo became increasingly explicit about the
relationship between the campesino fight for land and the demands of workers.
He offered solidarity to striking teachers and railway workers, and on Inter-
national Workers Day he spoke against the governments co-option of this
holiday, and he urged all workers to demand not only higher wages and fewer
work hours but also the nationalization of all major industries. It was necessary,
he stated, to engage in a political fight to gain public and economic power as
mandated by Article 39 of the Mexican Constitution, which placed all power in
the hands of the people who have at all times the inalienable right to alter or
modify the form of government.104 Jaramillo had begun to cast his struggle in a
different light in comparison with earlier electoral campaigns; he stated that the
PAOM was not a vehicle to gain political posts but rather to resolve economic
and social problems of its members. . . . Our struggle is not about electoral poli-
tics but about political economy.105 The Jaramillistas increasingly presented an
alternative to an unresponsive and often violent state.
Ultimately, Jaramillos relationship with the PCM was an attempt to extend
the scope of the Jaramillista struggle and to imbue it with an institutional frame-
work that might channel the energy and discontent of the campesinos into orga-
nizations of a national scale. While Jaramillo was cautious about his relationship
to the PCM and showed distrust of the leadership, it was an important source
of contact with intellectuals in Mexico City. At the same time, PCM leaders
were anxious to extend their influence in the countryside and saw Jaramillo as
a potential channel for that expansion. PCM leaders did not hesitate to exag-
gerate the ideological connections between themselves and the Jaramillistas.
For example, after Jaramillos death, the PCMs newspaper, La Voz de Mxico,
published an article stating, In the last years of his life, Jaramillo did not limit
his struggle to an immediate fight for land. Rather, he explained to campesinos
that their complete liberation depended on the socialist transformation of soci-
ety. He educated them in the Marxist-Leninist principles using the simplest
forms.106 The Jaramillista land takeovers at Michapa and Guarn are evidence
of both the exaggerated nature of this statement and the gulf that separated the
104. May 1, 1962, CEMOS, box 46, fol. 90.

105. Interview published posthumously in Impacto (Mexico), June 6, 1962.
106. La Voz de Mxico, June 10, 1962.
PCM leadership from its rural baseone in which party intellectuals theorized
while campesinos risked their lives through practice. And it was precisely the
more radical aspect of the popular base, as well as campesinos willingness to
engage in direct action, that elicited state repression. This had been the case
with the Henriquistas, whose leadership proved accommodating to the PRI
after they lost the 1952 elections. It was the case when the politicians allied
with the UGOCM, and yet again with the PCM, whose high-ranking members
often disdained popular organizing and expelled members unwilling to follow
the party line more in tune with the Comintern than with Mexicos political
reality.107 As the Cuban Revolution radicalized in the early 1960s, the Mexican
government tempered its defense of Havana, and the MLN languished in its
lack of programmatic action; the PRI once again seemed to have weathered the
storm. But the challenge to its institutionalized revolution would remerge in
the 1968 student movement and the armys brutal assassination of hundreds of
unarmed civilians in Mexico Citys Tlatelolco Plaza. This massive show of force
produced its own radicalized social actors, as it pushed significant numbers of
students into Mexicos countryside to join, form, or live among clandestine
organizations.
The seeds of militant action had long existed in the Jaramillista move-
ment. Some of the leadership read the anarchist publication Semilla Libertaria,
and programs such as the Plan de Cerro Prieto exposed a more radical slant in
its calls for a new revolution. Moreover, the Jaramillista cadre had turned to
armed struggles on occasions past.108 While the movement did not spread to
the national level, its demands consistently referenced wider legitimating ide-
als inherent in the Zapatista and Cardenista political projects. Aside from what
might be considered a more formal ideological training, there was a certain
organic quality to the relationship between Jaramillo and the movements popu-
lar base. His familiarity with agrarian law, his determination to push forward to
the highest level, and his refusal to be co-opted earned him the trust of Morelos
campesinos. When these strategies proved futile, Jaramillistas appealed to inter-
national principles of justice disseminated decades earlier by the Flores Magn
107. Barry Carr, La izquierda mexicana a travs del siglo XX, trans. Paloma Villegas
(Mexico City: Ediciones Era, 1996), 18990. The Partido Popular, under the leadership of
Vicente Lombardo Toledano, had originally been allied with the UGOCM but turned its
back on the organization as members engaged in land invasions in northern Mexico.
108. Still, their dependence on one leader, their consistent appeal to the Mexican
Constitution, and their participation in elections belies the anarchist character attributed to
the movement by Donald Hodges in Mexican Anarchism, intro. and chap. 3.
brothers and renewed in the 1960s with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution.
Since the Jaramillista leadership read works by Mao and some historical studies
on the Soviet Union, it is not surprising that many of their principles would be
articulated in language reminiscent of communist discourse. Ultimately, the
Jaramillistas ability to educate people alarmed the government. The state may
have appropriated the revolution, but to popular groups such as the Jaramil-
listas, the war had won them concrete rights which they continued to defend.109
Our problems are old, Sirs, replied one Jaramillista to Siempre! writers doing
a story on Morelos. They are the problems of all the campesinos on this land.
We have been fighting for justice for a long time, so long, that weve even lost
the fear we had when we began.110
These reporters had gone to Morelos to document the situation soon after
another wave of government repression that finally succeeded in eliminating
Jaramillo. In the early afternoon of May 23, 1962, several military vehicles, con-
taining some 60 soldiers and several armed civilians, surrounded Jaramillos
home in Tlaquiltenango.111 Among those later identified as leading the opera-
tion were Jos Martnez, captain of the Zacatepec military detachment, and
Heriberto Espinosa, El Pintor, a known Zacatepec gunman. The soldiers
surrounded the house; Captain Martnez called for Jaramillo to come out and
accompany them, otherwise they would machine-gun his home. Jaramillo
came out but refused to follow orders to get in the car. When one of Jaramillos
stepsons emerged with the official pardons given to Jaramillo and his wife by
President Lpez Mateos, Martnez put them in his pocket and told the young
man not to complicate matters. In the commotion, the eldest daughter, Raquel
Jaramillo, slipped out of the house and went to Tlaquiltenangos municipal pres-
ident, Inocente Torres, to seek help. Torres stated that the arresting forces had
a federally issued arrest warrant from the general prosecutors office.112 When
Raquel returned, she found that her parents and her three brothers had all been
taken by the soldiers. Gone were also Jaramillos personal documents, including
the DAAC authorization for the Michapa and Guarn plains. A few hours later,
the bullet-riddled bodies of the five family members were found on the outskirts
109. Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata, 91.

110. La Cultura en Mexico, Suplemento de Siempre! July 11, 1962.
111. This account of Jaramillos assassination is based on articles published in Poltica,
June 1 and 15, 1962; and an interview by the author with Raquel Jaramillo, Jaramillos
stepdaughter and the only survivor, Sept. 3, 1999, Colonia Rubn Jaramillo, Morelos.
112. Interview with Raquel Jaramillo, Sur Crtica Morelense, Nov. 2, 1978.
of the Xochicalco archaeological ruins near Cuernavaca. The victims had been
shot with machine guns from the front and finished off with a final shot to the
head.
The cartridges found at the site of the murder were stamped FNM, the
mark of the National Ammunition Factory, which produced ammunition exclu-
sively for the Mexican army and a few police agencies such as the Federal Judi-
cial Police. State authorities washed their hands of the matter, declaring that the
incident had occurred under the aegis of federal institutions. Federal authori-
ties, however, remained silent. They neither conducted a formal investigation
nor pointed to a scapegoat in the assassination. Operation leaders Captain Mar-
tnez and Gustavo Ortega Rojas (the head of the state police) were transferred
and promoted to positions in Mexico City and San Luis Potos, respectively.113
Some Jaramillistas interpreted this as both a reward for doing the governments
dirty work and as a means to protect them from possible Jaramillista retaliation.
The state showed no interest in investigating, there was no attempt to stage an
escape, the military was clearly involved, and the whole operation was conducted
in broad daylight. All this suggests that the government intended Jaramillos
murder to serve as a warning for campesinos: those who did not accept official
party perks in exchange for their silence and complicity, and instead continued
to push the regime in a direction that it was unwilling to go, would suffer from
the states heavy hand.
Indeed, the murder of the Jaramillo family became etched in popular
memory and would be transmitted in numerous corridos. One warned UGOCM
leader Jacinto Lpez and PCMLa Laguna militant Arturo Orona of what
Mexicos president might to do them:
Cudate, Jacinto Lpez Beware, Jacinto Lpez,

Escndete, Arturo Orona. Hide yourself, Arturo Orona.
No vaya el compadre Lpez It could be that the compadre
[Mateos] Lpez
cara de buena persona appearing to be a good man
despus de un gran abrazote, will warmly embrace you
a darles caja y corona. and then give you coffin and wreath.114
So clear was the states message with the Jaramillo assassination that only a few
months later, when a high-ranking military officer was dispatched to Mexicali
113. Poltica, June 15, 1962.

114. Cited in Manjarrez, Matanza en Xochicalco, 155.
to dissuade Alfonso Garzn, a popular peasant leader tied to the MLN, from
running against the PRI in local elections, the officer gave Garzn two choices:
(1) either quieting down and fading into the background or (2) becoming a
national figure in Mexico, along with Rubn Jaramillo. Garzn chose the first
alternative, after some hesitation, being persuaded by the assurance that in his
case, he would be martyrized by hanging rather than simply being shot.115 The
offer was backed by a show of force as troops were dispersed throughout the
Mexicali Valley in the days before the confrontation.116
Jaramillo was not the first or last campesino leader murdered by the state.
But the particularly blatant show of force surrounding the execution of Jara-
millo and his family shocked even the official press. Upon news of the assas-
sination, letters of protest poured into the presidents office. Many local and
national newspapers condemned the massacre and demanded that those respon-
sible for the crime be prosecuted.117 Organizations such as the Independent
League of Agrarian Communities in Jalapa told the president, [I]f this crime
goes unpunished, history and the opinion of future generations will hold you
directly responsible.118 Another letter bitterly pointed out, Yet another crime
may be added to those committed by the revolutionary government.119 Orga-
nizations from Cuba, El Salvador, and an international womens group sent let-
ters urging justice in the death of the Jaramillo family.120
Despite the heavy military presence at the funeral, thousands of grieving
campesinos surrounded the five coffins of the Jaramillo family. Those closest
to the Jaramillista leadership observed cautiously from a distance. Cresencio
Castillo recalls how he and Pedro Garca went to a hill near the cemetery. I
had to watch, even if it was from afar. I went to the hill and watched as they
buried him. A friend lent me his binoculars and with them I could see every-
115. Recent DevelopmentsGarzn and the Movimiento de Liberacin Nacional,

Sept. 24, 1962, NA RG 59, 196063, box 1510, folder 712.00/9162, and NSA, www.gwu
.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB124/doc26.pdf (accessed June 22, 2005).
116. Ibid.
117. Articles expressing this shock appeared in La Prensa, Novedades, Impacto, Exclsior,
Siempre! Presente! and Poltica. See Manjarrez, Matanza, 15562.
118. Grupo de Vecinos de la Colonia Moderna de Monterrey to Presidente de la
Repblica, June 6, 1962, AGN/P-ALM, 541/531.
119. Alberto Larios to Jefe de la Oficina de Quejas de la Presidencia, May 25, 1962,
AGN/P-ALM, 541/531.
120. Confederacin de Supremos Consejos del Rito Primitivo Universal de Cuba to
Presidente de la Repblica, May 29, 1962, AGN/P-ALM, 541/531; and Manjarrez, Matanza,
159.
thing, all the movement, and how all around the cemetery were those rotten
soldiers.121 A group of reporters that included Carlos Fuentes went to Morelos
shortly after and were told by one Jaramillista, [T]heres a lot of government
these days prowling around Morelos. Now, after they killed Jaramillo, we are
being watched more than ever, as if peasants as humble as us could be danger-
ous.122 The campesino answered the Siempre! writers: Who killed Jaramillo?
I think you know. He was killed because of the fight he led for justice for the
campesinos. Up there in Mexico City they talk a lot about freedom. Some kind
of freedom.123
It is difficult to know with certainty who issued the order to kill Jaramillo.
The day after the murder, an agent from the Direccin Federal de Seguridad
traveled to Morelos to confirm rumors of the assassination. In Cuernavaca, the
head of the states public security forces informed him that, as far as they under-
stood, the federal agents were complying with orders from the President.124
Jaramillo had suffered numerous attempts on his life since 1942. However, all
of these came from hired gunmen or the local police force. In 1962, it was the
federal army that kidnapped and killed the Jaramillo family. The assassina-
tion resulted from the logic of a state party that did not hesitate to use force
when co-optation failed. The Jaramillista struggle had long posed a political
and economic threat to the state. By the early 1960s, Morelos was increasingly
coveted for its potential to meet the needs of the capital. The campesino life-
style defended by Jaramillo, as well as the economic project the Jaramillistas
proposed, were incompatible with those of investors and policymakers who saw
Morelos as the ideal place to build industrial corridors, housing developments,
tourist resorts, andas in most of Mexicofarm commercial crops.
Politically, the Jaramillista struggle also stood as a threat. Jaramillos char-
ismatic leadership, his ability to mobilize popular sectors, and his tradition of
armed struggle became more difficult to ignore after the Cuban Revolution
and its rejuvenation of the Mexican Left. That President Lpez Mateos had,
in a public act of reconciliation, embraced Jaramillo as a gesture of his will to
work with the agrarian leader marked Jaramillos assassination as an official
act of betrayal. To this day, Jaramillistas refer to Lpez Mateoss gesture as
121. Cresencio Castillo, interview by the author, Sept. 18, 1999, San Roque, Puebla.
122. La Cultura en Mexico, supplement of Siempre! July 11, 1962. In the Mexican
countryside, campesinos use the term government to refer to the army.
123. Ibid.
124. Informa sobre la muerte del lder campesino Rubn Jaramillo y Familia, May 24,
1962, Direccin Federal de Seguridad, vol. 366262, H 16 L1.
the abrazo de Judas (Judas embrace). His death came to symbolize the fate
of those who laid down their arms and placed their trust in the government.
For subsequent armed campesino groups, the lesson of Jaramillos assassination
would be acutely remembered, and his name would be invoked in movements
in many parts of Mexico, including the Chiapas rebellion.125 The familys mur-
der symbolized the Mexican states lack of accountability and demonstrated the
scant recourse available to campesinos who sought justice. While the brutality
of the crime shocked even conservative circles, the states selective use of force
increasingly became standard practice.
Mexicos Left interpreted the crime within the framework of cold-war
politics. Jaramillos public condemnation of U.S. imperialism, combined with
the fact that he was killed only a couple of months before Kennedys visit to
Mexico, led some to believe that the order came from Washington. According
to this view, Lpez Mateos acted on Washingtons orders, or at least wanted to
show that when it came to subversivesespecially communistsMexico stood
firm.126 One news magazine carried a full-page cartoon depicting Kennedys
welcoming committee (made up of clergy, businessmen, and politicians), led
by a military general handing the American leader Jaramillos head on a sil-
ver platter.127 The following version was echoed by many: [T]he order really
came from the White House, since he [Jaramillo] gave his support to the Cuban
revolutionary cause and gringo invasions were the order of the day. That really
did him in because before, mostly due to his religious background, they almost
trusted him. But once he declared himself in favor of Castro Ruz, they said this
one is not one of ours.128
My inquiry into U.S. State Department records under the Freedom of
Information Act yielded a report from the U.S. embassy in Mexico describing
the assassination and summarizing the agrarian leaders struggle. The docu-
ment speculated that a Mexican federal government agency took the law into
125. Carlos Montemayor, Chiapas, la rebelin indgena de Mxico (Madrid: Espasa

Calpe, 1998), 67. For example, on Oct. 26, 1996, in front of six hundred delegates gathered
for the National Indigenous Congress in Mexico City, Comandante Ramona from the
EZLN turned over a Mexican flag to Flix Serdn, a 79-year-old campesino activist and
Jaramillista veteran. Serdn has also been named honorary major of the EZLN.
126. Aura Hernndez, Librepensamiento, supplement of La Jornada Morelos, May 23,
2000.
127. Poltica, June 15, 1962.
128. Jos Rodrguez, interview by Salvador Nez, June 16, 1979, Nepatln, Puebla.
In the 1920s, Jaramillo had been a Methodist pastor.
its hands and executed the five persons.129 Interestingly, a State Department
document dated May 6, 1962 (17 days before Jaramillos assassination), was
denied to me because it contains security-classified information.130 Wherever
the actual order to assassinate Jaramillo originated, cold-war ideology provided
a nationally and internationally legitimizing framework for government repres-
sion in Mexico and throughout Latin America. It was in this vein that leftist
groups speculated about U.S. involvement.
Conclusion
Guerrilla movements in Mexico remain understudied. Yet their presence in

a country hailed for its political stability and the longevity of its ruling party
speaks volumes about the extent to which some social actors challenged the
PRI. The Jaramillistas provide a critical link between rural rebellions rooted in
the revolutionso meticulously studied by historiansand guerrilla struggles
that permeated the Mexican landscape but have been denied by the official ver-
sion of history and ignored by most scholars. The Jaramillistas challenged the
states economic project and legitimized their rebellion based on Moreloss his-
tory of resistance. The Zapatista experience bequeathed a collective memory of
armed struggle that future leaders used to mobilize campesinos to protect and
preserve their hard-won rights. Campesinos held onto the example and memory
of Zapata, whose figure inevitably acquired mythic proportions. And yet, as the
revolutionary state consolidated itself and put forth a new set of rules for its citi-
zens, campesinos refashioned their forms of struggle and found creative ways of
dealing with the terms and conditions set forth by the new rulers.
Throughout the Jaramillista struggle, the Zapatista legacy appeared in
their bottom-up agrarian distribution, their desire to subsist as campesinos, and
their willingness to take up arms in order to do so. Cardenismo, too, was an
ever-present element, providing a legal framework of institutionalized agrar-
ian policy with peaceful reformist demands for change and the knowledge and
memory of a state responsive to petitions from below. Thus, if the Jaramillistas
armed incursions were fashioned in the tradition of Zapata, their electoral chal-
lenges represent the influence and appropriation of Cardenismo. These tenden-
cies coexisted, as is clear in the Jaramillista proposal for a population center in
Michapa and Guarn. The fact that this phase of the struggle occurred during
129. NA II, 712.00/52962, despatch #1482.

130. NA II, 712.00/6562, box 1510.
the triumph of the Cuban Revolution added another dimension to the move-
ment, both for the participants and for the state. While cold-war politics had
been at play in Mexico since the end of War World II, the triumph of the Cuban
Revolution sparked a renewed set of hopesor threats, depending on ones per-
spectivein Mexico and throughout Latin America. For the PRI, with all its
claims over the revolution, events in Castros Cubathe immediate process of
distribution of wealth and full-fledged social reformsexposed the limitations
of Mexicos revolutionary party. It threatened one of the PRIs pillars of legiti-
macy. State violence increasingly radicalized the Jaramillistas; in the context of
the cold war, and especially after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, they
would acquire the characteristics of modern guerrillas.

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From Agraristas to Guerrilleros:

The Jaramillista Movement in Morelos

The 1940s witnessed a resurgence of agrarismo in Morelos, Mexico, the home-

Hispanic American Historical Review 87:2

in western Morelos.2 The Jaramillistas proposed a planned agrarian settle-

where defining elements of the contemporary situation playedand continue

increasingly capitalist-friendly state whose development plans sacrificed small-

8. Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata, 83.

The Zapatista Legacy and the Cardenista Experience

Zapata mill began in 1935, and by 1938 it was functioning as a cooperative of

12. Ibid., 16.

pick up arms on three different occasions, they continued to fight by means of

The Jaramillistas remained underground until 1958, when President

Morelos: A Changing Landscape

The social composition of the Jaramillistas reflected the transformation of

16. Harvey, The Chiapas Rebellion, 28.

Mexican presidents were again appointing non-morelenses to the state gover-

ing developments became big business, as land speculators flocked to satisfy

23. Presente! (Cuernavaca), Mar. 15, 1959.

Local Autonomy and Popular Development:

27. Patrick Livenais, Peuplement et volution agraire au Morelos (Mexique) (Paris:

However, they remained uncultivatedthe ejidatarios received no technical

implement the latest innovations offered by modern science.35 Other projects

40. Jos Rodrguez, interview.

53. Jos Rodrguez, interview.

access to individual subsistence plots. Moreover, the commercial components of

It Is in the Michapa Plains Where

64. Cited in ibid., 21.

74. Pellicer, Mxico y la revolucin cubana, 104.

condemning U.S. aggression against Cuba. According to one federal agent

82. Presente! Mar. 25, 1959.

91. Ibid., 244.

Politically, the Jaramillistas had long been a thorn in the governments

From Self-Defense to Guerrilla Strategies

self-defense. [T]hats how well-trained armed groups would emerge. These

102. Ravelo, Los Jaramillistas, 19394.

reveals an important dynamic in the movement. While some Jaramillistas were

104. May 1, 1962, CEMOS, box 46, fol. 90.

109. Bartra, Los herederos de Zapata, 91.

Cudate, Jacinto Lpez Beware, Jacinto Lpez,

113. Poltica, June 15, 1962.

115. Recent DevelopmentsGarzn and the Movimiento de Liberacin Nacional,

125. Carlos Montemayor, Chiapas, la rebelin indgena de Mxico (Madrid: Espasa

Guerrilla movements in Mexico remain understudied. Yet their presence in

129. NA II, 712.00/52962, despatch #1482.

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