Published in Challenging Authoritarianism in Mexico: Revolutionary Struggles and the Dirty War, 1964—1982, Fernando Herrera Calderón and Adela Cedillo, editors (New York: Routledge, 2012). This is an early version of Agrarian Revolt in the Sierra of Chihuahua, 1959—1965 (Tucson: University of Arizona, 2019).
introduction
Madera, Sierra of Chihuahua, Mexico. Just before dawn on September 23, 1965, a squad of 13 poorly armed young men who called themselves the Grupo Popular Guerrillero de la Sierra (GPG) attacked an army base on the edge of this town of 12,000 inhabitants, expecting to find some 70 soldiers asleep in the barracks. Minutes later, soldiers who had camped on the outskirts fell on them from behind and cut off their retreat; they killed eight guerrillas but five escaped with the help of townspeople into the surrounding mountains. Four soldiers were killed and a fifth died of wounds; soldiers killed a deaf milkman when he disobeyed an order to halt. The governor of the state, former revolutionary war general Práxedis Giner Durán, refused efforts of family members to remove the bodies and ordered them to be thrown into a common grave without shrouds. “They wanted land? Give it to them until they’re full!”2
Weeks after the attack, President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz ordered 5,000 hectares of land to be distributed to the Ejido Belizario Domínguez3 and Giner signed an agreement giving 39,000 hectares to form the Ejido Huizopa, both in the municipality of Madera.4 In 1971, President Luis Echeverría distributed 256,000 hectares of Bosques de Chihuahua (Chihuahua’s Forests), the local logging company and the guerrilla’s principal antagonist, to form the largest ejido in the republic, that of El Largo, whose members continued to supply lumber to the company.5
The attack on the base developed from a popular movement that had organized demonstrations, land invasions, and armed self-defense by campesinos6 and students throughout the state during the previous six years. Mid-century industrial growth—the so-called Miracle—had long put increasing pressure on campesinos, both landless workers whose demands for ejidos had languished for decades and serrano smallholders confronting encroaching timber barons. In November 1959, caciques had assassinated a Madera schoolteacher who had been advising campesinos in conflict with Bosques de Chihuahua, setting off a cycle of recurring protests. Students at the normal schools (teachers’ training schools, called normalistas) joined petitioners for ejidos in land invasions, many of them in the fertile valley of the Río Conchos, dominated by vast agribusiness. Protesters occupied the downtown plaza in front of the Office of Agrarian Affairs (DAAC) for months at a time on two separate occasions. Students from the preparatory schools (high schools), the state university, and the normal schools raised both their own demands and those of the campesinos. In the sierra, smallholders and ejidatarios battled caciques allied with Bosques de Chihuahua as they sought to open new tracts to large-scale timbering. These various currents of resistance united in the General Union of Mexican Workers and Campesinos (UGOCM), under the auspices of Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Popular Socialist Party (PPS), whose General Secretary in Chihuahua was the young normalista and later schoolteacher Arturo Gámiz, a member of the PPS youth section who had attended secondary school at the Instituto Politécnico Nacional (IPN) in Mexico City and taken part in the wave of strikes which ended with an army occupation of the dormitories.7 The strength of the movement was such that two presidents of the republic were compelled to meet with its leaders.
The armed component of Mexico’s first guevarist group came from the sierra, from people whose propensity for armed self-defense easily loaned itself to foquista revolutionary theories then gaining currency within the broader movement. Unlike many later armed movements undertaken by students frustrated by their inability to bring about social change through other means— this was not the case in Guerrero—the roots of the original GPG were endemic. I would argue for the importance of the popular movement that produced the GPG and against its teleological collapse into fascination with the guerrilla, a figure that tends to eclipse all others. As in the revolution of 1910, Chihuahua fielded an army whose social origins were various.
The attack represented the confluence of two traditions of armed struggle, one being foquismo inspired by the Cuban revolution of 1959 and the other dating back to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Apache Wars, when mestizo settlers were given land in return for defending the frontier. These serrano ranchers, who have been described by Alonso, Fuentes Mares, Jordán, Katz, Knight, Nugent, and Orozco8 in similar terms, now fought to defend semi-autonomous rural communities in isolated hinterlands threatened by the expansion of logging. The Revolution of 1910 began in the sierra and they had been a major component of Pancho Villa’s Army of the North.
In the early 1960s, the UGOCM led hundreds of land invasions and demonstrations receiving broad support; federal agrarian officials had ordered the state authorities to satisfy some of protesters’ demands, but the state remained adamant in opposition. Giner’s recalcitrance resulted in the radicalization of protests. In early 1964, the Grupo Popular Guerrillero (GPG), led by Gámiz and Salomón Gaytán, whose father had fought for the expropriation of a local hacienda and whose land had been taken by the caciques, emerged in the sierra and withstood repeated attempts by rural police and federal troops to dislodge them, expropriated a large cache of automatic weapons, and enjoyed the protection of local campesinos.
The Cuban Revolution of 1959 mounted a challenge to the traditional communist parties, the PPS and the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM), who took their leadership from Moscow. The orthodox parties had long given up on revolution and advocated the negotiation of successive stages, based on the notion that Latin America’s mode of production was semi-feudal and must evolve into capitalism to create the conditions for socialism. This strategy tied the masses and their vanguard to an alliance with sectors of the elite, while emphasizing the importance of the urban working class over rural workers and subsistence farmers.
The Cuban Revolution would not have happened without the handful of guerrilla fighters based in the rugged mountains who acted in defiance of the traditional communist party, which only offered support when faced with a fait accompli. It also would not have happened without the workers and students in the cities and canefields, whose contribution has been downplayed in the official myth.9 But it was the barbudos from the sierra and not the party leaders who took power and whose achievement opened the way for a new formulation of revolutionary strategy.
With foquismo, Latin America became a source of ideas; other exports have been Liberation Theology, la nueva canción, and dependency theory. Foquismo held that a small band of dedicated revolutionaries could demonstrate elite vulnerability and grow into a magnetic center, a foco, capable of attracting campesinos, students, workers, and foreign journalists, eventually maturing into a people’s army. The initial conditions were unimportant, what mattered was the revolutionary will. This theory received its definitive explication in Revolution in the Revolution?10 written by the French philosopher and journalist, Régis Debray. First published in French in 1967, it would not have been available to the militants of the UGOCM but the ideas were already in wide circulation.
Foquismo implied a dramatic break with existing practices and beliefs. By insisting that the revolutionaries could themselves bring about the necessary conditions for the mobilization of forces sufficient to bring down US-backed dictatorial regimes, the foquistas challenged the orthodox doctrine, which required the maturing of objective and subjective conditions. They also posed an explicit challenge to the traditional party, by insisting the vanguard would emerge in the course of struggle. The image of triumphant barbudos entering Havana on tanks proved irresistible to tens of thousands of young people. Their attempts to apply the Cuban model to a variety of circ*mstances resulted in disaster.
The guerrilla movement led by Arturo Gámiz was among those failures. Gámiz seems to have believed the Cuban myth, which he had studied in Che Guevara’s Guerra de Guerrillas, and he and his companions took the leap between being convinced of the necessity for armed struggle to believing the same masses who mobilized for land invasions were only waiting for the signal to rise up in arms. The consequences were tragic and resulted in repression that drove the remnants of the movement underground. It later emerged in two distinct currents: as successor guerrilla organizations, the GPG–Arturo Gámiz and the Movimiento 23 de Septiembre (September 23rd Movement), and in the legal and aboveground Committees for Popular Defense, who fought for urban land in Chihuahua City.
Cuba’s support for all Latin American movements except Mexico became more pronounced as the US blockade tightened and Cuba had less to lose. Mexico had been the one Latin American government that defied the USA in refusing to join the Organization of American States’ boycott of Cuba.11 The Cuban refusal to support Mexican revolutionary movements contributed to the blanket of silence which muffled the Mexican experience for many years. While members of solidarity movements in the USA publicized atrocities committed by regimes in Brazil and the Southern Cone, they ignored similar activities in Mexico, where they occurred under a civilian regime.
Agrarian Struggles
The struggle for land has animated generations of revolutionaries but the small farming unit, whether cooperative or not, rarely provides a dignified living. The failure of the ejido system was obvious long before the dissolution of Article 27 of the Constitution, which promised land to the landless, in the early 1990s and cannot be blamed only on greed and corruption. The ejidos assumed an impossible burden: to provide social justice and a livelihood to their members, to feed the growing cities and their march to industrialization, and to provide the state with a mechanism for the political incorporation of campesinos. Their creation did not take into account demographic pressure on lands that were frequently marginal to begin with. Economic conditions in the country as a whole and beyond its borders favor large agricultural extensions geared to foreign markets; the corn and beans subsistence farm in the long run produces only migrant workers. The small plot at best is part of a mixed strategy for family survival: illegally rented out or marginally farmed and combined with wage labor, migration, handicrafts, and small-scale retail sales, it provides an additional source of income or food.
The miseries of wage labor must have been a powerful incentive to demand increased land. Working conditions in the expanding lumber industry were grim; accident rates were high in both the monte and the sawmills. In the monte, the workers camped out for weeks, in danger from animals, falling trees, and other injuries. In town the work was more secure, although poorly paid and dangerous as well.12 Conditions in mining were even more perilous, tightly controlled, and isolated.13 The majority of migrant workers remained caught in a cycle of seasonal migration, with low wages, family separation, and periodic deportation, unable to get ahead.
The destruction of latifundio laid the basis for modern Mexico as it freed capital to flow into industry. But changes in land ownership have not brought substantial improvement in the lives of campesinos. The ejidos and smallholders have been isolated as large-scale entrepreneurial agriculture has expanded and captured more of the market. The largest ejido in the Republic, El Largo, in the Madera district, derives little benefit from its forests; profits go to the companies, which control its processing and distribution.14
Chihuahua
“To annoy a Chihuahuan serrano is not only injust but dangerous, and it is pointless to try to make him recognize any authority.” — José Fuentes Mares
The Sierra Madre Occidental is a heavily forested chain of mountains and canyons running north and south between Chihuahua and Sonora. There the indigenous people revolted five times during the seventeenth century against Jesuit attempts to concentrate them in villages. Abandoned with the Jesuit expulsion in 1767, they fled to the sierra and took up nomadic herding, preferring their isolated rancherías until the mid-twentieth century.
The first mestizos arrived in search of gold and silver in the 1630s. Nearby ranches supplied beef and tallow and developed into haciendas. Other settlers arrived in the eighteenth century to populate a string of military settlements established to withstand attacks by nomadic Commanche and Apache warriors. Their settlers were given land grants and tax exemption as inducements to remain in inhospitable territory.15 After Independence, these pioneers battled US incursions, the French Intervention, and the Wars of Reform with no help from a distant federal government, while the California Gold Rush increased pressure on US tribes to move south across the border.
In 1886, soldiers defeated Victorio and the Apache wars came to an end. The truce between smallholders and hacendados likewise ended as the haciendas sought to expand, now free from the threat of invasion, and rancheros defended their independence. The completion of the railroad linking Juárez with Mexico City led to an export cattle boom and rise in land prices, harming local communities.16 The pueblos resented the railroad for expropriating land, cutting down trees, carrying out minerals, and moving in troops. The railway brought benefits as well and the railway workers bore the germs of socialism, bringing migrant workers into contact with international labor insurgency and contributing to the Revolution of 1910.17
In 1884, the federal government began to survey the enormous tracts of land which smallholders had used as a commons. The surveyors were granted as much as one-third of the land in payment; the rest was sold to investors, many of them foreign. The elite enclosed the commons, depriving smallholders of firewood and pasture; landowners also sought expansion into the military colonies. A political assault combined with the economic threat: in line with Porfirian centralizing policies, local elected political leaders were replaced by appointed jefes políticos, often local caciques or outsiders; attacks on the municipio libre were among the principal causes of a number of rural rebellions, including the one at Tomóchic.18
During the Indian wars, the people of the serrano frontier had been constructed as the embodiment of civilization in contrast to savage Indians. Once the savages who defined the serranos as gente de razón were gone, the serranos themselves, in their recalcitrant resistance to authority, were constructed as obstacles to progress.19 Now the elite no longer needed them to fight and coveted their land. In the words of Friedrich Katz, the frontier was becoming a border. The serranos were poor and egalitarian and their frontier democracy depended on a weak state. The culture of armed resistance forged over decades of warfare continued to animate them while the consolidating Porfirian state attempted to impose a monopoly on violence.20
Madera
In 1899, Arizona rancher William C. Greene purchased the copper mine at Cananea, Sonora; he went on to buy dozens of mines and several million acres of timberland in Chihuahua. He also purchased the railway from El Paso to Terrazas, north of Madera, hoping to extend it to provide timber to the Cananea mine.21 He constructed the sawmill town of Madera in a valley and formed the Sierra Madre Land and Lumber Company. Madera began as a company town, with 100 US-style wooden houses, still known as the American barrio, for foreign managers, and another neighborhood, without running water or electricity, for the Mexican workers.22
In 1906, Mexican workers at the Cananea mine went on strike, demanding equal pay with US workers and an eight-hour day. The strike turned into a riot, rebellious miners burned company installations, and several people were killed. In response, Greene called on a mob of US vigilantes led by Arizona Rangers and subdued the strikers. The strike exposed the shaky underpinnings of Greene’s incipient empire; he went bankrupt in the recession of 1907. In Madera, 2,000 workers were laid off after working months without pay. Greene’s property in the Sierra passed into the hands of the state of Chihuahua, who sold some of it to US investors.23 These vast holdings, together with the immense landholdings of the family of the newspaper magnate, William Randolph Hearst, the Hacienda Babícora, were fought over for decades by local campesinos, many of them smallholders dispossessed by expanding haciendas and railroad construction in the 1880s. In the years preceding the 1910 Revolution, the Guerrero District— which Fernando Jordán called the Longitude of War24—rebelled again and again.
In 1938, following decades of protest, President Lázaro Cárdenas granted a portion of the Babícora to the Unión de Veteranos de la Revolución; gunmen kept the community from taking possession. The following year, they invaded the land and their leader, Socorro Rivera, was assassinated.25
Between 1946 and 1952, business interests centered around the Banco Comercial Mexicano bought sawmills, railways, and obtained forestry concessions for hundreds of thousands of hectares and formed the company Bosques de Chihuahua, headquartered in Madera City. The founders of Bosques included Miguel Alemán Valdez, former president of the republic; Eloy Vallina, a Spanish empresario who founded the Mercantile Bank; General Antonio Guerrero; banker Carlos Trouyet; two former governors, Teófilo Borunda and Tomás Valle; and members of the powerful Terrazas and Almeida families. The concession included nearly 260,000 hectares in addition to lumber obtained from private and ejidal owners. The group went on to found Comermex, one of the most powerful financial institutions in the Republic. They constructed several factories in nearby Colonia Anáhuac to produce plywood and cellulose, the latter to fill orders for wood pulp resulting from changes in the paper manufacturing process.26 The Chihuahua group also sold lots to cattlemen, although the land was not theirs to sell; Tomás Vega Portillo, José Ibarra Ronquillo, and the Hermanos Prieto formed the company, Cuatro Amigos (the Four Friends), with 250,000 hectares and attempted to dislodge local smallholders who had attempted to regularize land titles based on possession in vain.27
With the aggressive push to extract timber from the forests of the sierra, industrialists backed by state authorities used local caciques, mostly notably the Cuatro Amigos, to appropriate land through intimidation and violence.28 The land hunger shown by protesters reflected the precarious condition of hundreds of rancheros throughout the area, many living for generations on lands now claimed by Bosques de Chihuahua. Mining areas such as Batopilas and Dolores, near the Sonora border, had long polluted the surrounding countryside and consumed its forests for timbers and fuel. But the impact of mining was local compared with that of timbering, whose production was now being exponentially increased to supply the needs of a growing market. The increase in unsustainable lumbering also threatened the survival of indigenous people by eroding the material basis of their culture.
From the UGOCM to the Grupo Popular Guerrillero
Governor Práxedis Giner Durán, who ruled Chihuahua from 1962 to 1966, failed to understand a significant tenet of the regime’s success: they governed through negotiation and reforms from above, using them to defuse and deflect struggles from below and only resorting to violence when all else failed. During a time of mass social effervescence when the movement offered ample opportunities for compromise and concession, Giner met protest with repression. Nor did the local caciques mediate between the state and the campesinos; instead they devolved into sheer brutality: rape, torture, kidnappings, the torching of homes, assassination, and the expropriation of land and livestock. It was the affront to the dignity of the campesinos, as much as the demand for land, that fed the revolt that eventually turned into an assault on the state itself. The serranos had long been willing to endure poverty and isolation in return for autonomy; now industrialization was encroaching, behind the guns of the same small-time caciques they had been battling for decades.
Francisco Luján Adame, a Madera schoolteacher and member of the UGOCM, had spent years helping the local campesinos with their petitions for ejidos, including that of Cebadilla de Dolores, where he had been the registered agent since 1949.29 On November 26, 1959, Luján was stabbed to death at his home in Madera.30 The UGOCM organized a caravan protesting his murder; 600 people joined it on the way to Chihuahua City, some 175 kilometers away. Sympathy strikes broke out in the nearby processing plants where workers were also negotiating for changes in their contracts; normalistas took to the streets in support striking workers and campesinos.31 The murder of Professor Luján began a cycle of protest and repression. Shortly afterwards, Alvaro Ríos Ramírez arrived from Mexico City as the state delegate to the UGOCM to continue Luján’s work. It was Ríos who introduced direct action tactics of long-distance marches between cities, land invasions, and occupations of public spaces; he organized the mass meeting in Madera where he, Arturo Gámiz, and the Gómez brothers spoke together for the first time.32
Arturo Gámíz García, who became the General Secretary of the state chapter of the UGOCM and later leader of the Grupo Popular Guerrillero, was born in Suchil, northern Durango, in 1940. Little is known of his early life beyond his participation in the PPS youth group and the strike movement at the IPN.
He arrived in Chihuahua in 1957 and taught elementary school in La Junta, a sawmill town on the edge of the sierra, until 1959 when he entered the State Normal School in Chihuahua City where he came into contact with activists of the UGOCM.33
Pablo and Raúl Gómez Ramírez were also members of the PPS and leaders of the UGOCM in Delicias, the irrigated agricultural district along the Río Conchos. Both were teachers in the rural normal schools; Pablo was also a medical doctor. Both ran for local offices on the PPS ticket in the state elections of 1965.
On December 11, 1962, Arturo Gámiz arrived at Mineral de Dolores to give classes to 85 children. Dolores was close to the Sonora border, virtually inaccessible due to lack of adequate roads and bridges, a former mining town dating from colonial times. Gámiz had met the Gaytán brothers, UGOCM activists from the area, in Chihuahua City, where they suggested the assignment to Dolores, which had been without a teacher for some 28 years. Gámiz initially gave classes in the plaza, while the community constructed a new building.34
The Gaytán family were smallholders who had been dispossessed. The father, Rosendo, had fought with Socorro Rivera for the Babícora. His sons Juan Antonio, Salvador, and Salomón were active in the UGOCM.35 Salomón and Juan Antonio Gaytán lost their lives in the armed movement; a third brother, Salvador, participated in both the GPG and in the September 23rd Movement, fought in Guerrero with Lucio Cabañas, and only returned to Chihuahua in 1992.
The nucleus of the nearby36 ejido Cebadilla was formed in 1948, as the community sought to regain land which had been taken by Francisco Portillo to form the Hacienda Sírupa, granted a 25-year certificate of inaffectability by Alemán.37 The community pressed for additional land, winning parcels of various sizes over the years. They are now engaged in small-scale logging. Cebadilla had long been a center of operations for the Ibarra family who manufactured illicit sotol there.38 The Ibarras had constructed a barbed wire fence through the town center to keep the townsfolk from watering their animals at a spring-fed pond; activists later tore down that fence.
On December 7, 1962, Salvador Gaytán won election as sectional president in Dolores as a candidate of the PPS against the local boss who had held that office for decades and invited Gámiz to the area. The community wrested control of its reservoir and communal orchard from the caciques; they built basketball and volleyball courts and initiated vaccination campaigns. They built a bridge over the Sírupa River. They renewed the petition for amplification of the Ejido Cebadilla, which had languished for a number of years in the hands of the agrarian bureaucracy.39
In January 1963, interim governor Raúl González Herrera sent UGOCM leaders, including Alvario Ríos, to meet with President Adolfo López Mateos and Roberto Barrios, director of the federal DAAC.40 They returned to lead land invasions throughout the state. Although police and army forces dislodged most of them, 310 campesinos succeeded in founding the Community Professor Francisco Luján Adame in Gómez Farías.41 In May, Gámiz published a series of articles in La Voz de Chihuahua, a small radical newspaper, detailing the misery of rural communities subjected to forced expropriations, human rights violations, and the accelerating exploitation of their forests.42 The state government replied with violence and repression.
In September 1963, the UGOCM and 300 campesinos, students, and teachers occupied the central plaza in downtown Chihuahua City in front of the Departamento de Asuntos Agrarios y Colonización (Department of Agrarian Affairs and Colonization, DAAC), again receiving massive popular support. Among their demands were the retention of Pablo and Raúl Gómez in their current teaching positions, the release of political prisoners, and an end to logging.43 Concerns about excessive logging and its impact on the watershed were not paramount but were present. In the morning they mounted mute protests on the patio of the nearby statehouse and in the early evening they paraded about downtown with banners. One of their banners read: “A cow gets 30 hectares, and us—how many? and when?”44 They had a number of inconclusive meetings with the governor, Eduardo Juarez Santoscoy, state director of the DAAC, and Francisco Javier Alvarez, director of the State Department of Education.45 These meetings indicated both the pressure exerted on the state by the continuous protests and the state’s attempts to pacify the movement through promised concessions. One wonders how much time Gámiz and the other teachers spent in the classroom.
On September 23, Gámiz met with Vicente Arreola, representating Bosques de Chihuahua, in the office of the state prosecutor, Hipólito Villa Rentería; Arreola promised to put an end to the harassment of campesinos.46 On September 25, 1963, outgoing President López Mateos granted a meeting to five leaders of the UGOCM, among them Ríos, Gámiz, and Pablo Gómez. A few days later Arturo Gámiz was arrested by the state judicial police; massive demonstrations led to his prompt release.47 Gunmen continued to intimidate the campesinos in the sierra with impunity, protected by the police and soldiers. As the violence practiced by the state and its surrogates increased, so did the militancy of the campesinos and students.
In October 1963, the UGOCM organized the semi-clandestine First Encounter of the Sierra Heraclio Bernal48 in Cebadilla de Dolores. Two hundred delegates, among them PPS militants from six states, attended the event. Influenced by Cuba’s turn to socialism, participants debated the use of armed struggle to achieve global revolution but finally voted against it.49 Nevertheless, the First Encounter signaled the beginning of a break on the part of the more radicalized sectors of the PPS, its youth group, and the UGOCM.50
After the meeting, students destroyed the Ibarra’s barbed wire fences and the army arrested five students.51
In December 1963, police and soldiers closed the rural normal schools and arrested Arturo Gámiz along with other leaders of the UGOCM and dozens of students. When informed that the students were demanding the reopening of their dormitories, Giner remarked, in a meeting with the state Secretary of Internal Affairs, “I would rather turn those schools into pigpens. But in Mexico City they do not understand.”52 In response to the petition of women students, Giner replied, “Why do they want dormitories, since they like to sleep with the campesinos in the fields?”53
The army assisted landlords in taking back invaded lands and mercenaries assaulted campesinos in the sierra; several civilians were wounded by gunfire. Seven campesinos of Dolores were hung from trees in an attempt at interrogation, among them José de la Luz Gaytán, age eleven.54 When gunmen employed by the Ibarra clan fired on UGOCM members in Huizopa, State Attorney General José Melgar de la Peña denounced them in an article published in the newspaper, Norte. However, no arrests were made in that case.55
Gámiz went face-to-face with the governor a number of times, once arguing with him publicly in the patio of the state house.56 General Antonio Gómez Velasco arrived in Chihuahua in December 1963 as chief of the military zone and forced José Ibarra to leave Madera.57 The campesinos continued to insist on their demands.
In January and February 1964, the UGOCM organized yet more land invasions, with the participation of vast numbers of campesinos, students, and normalistas. Some of the occupied properties belonged to the Hacendados of the Revolution, among them the families of Antonio Guerrero, Pedro Almada, Rogelio Quevedo, and prominent politicians, Hilario Gabilondo and Ignacio Siquieros; others belonged to Anderson Clayton Company, US cotton growers.58 The governor responded by closing the normal schools yet again and sending soldiers and rural police to clear the land, arresting protesters, and accusing their leaders of federal crimes. The opposition intensified.
The Second Occupation of the DAAC
The coming presidential elections added tension to an already explosive situation. Vicente Lombardo Toledano announced the PPS’s support for PRI candidate Gustavo Díaz Ordaz and the state section of the UGOCM came under increasing pressure to contain the mass movement. A split in the UGOCM became inevitable, between Gámiz with his advocacy of armed self-defense and national and state leaders, Jacinto López and Alvaro Ríos. Meanwhile, Judith Reyes, protest singer, editor of the radical newspaper, Acción, and the only woman in the leadership of the local UGOCM, ran for the federal senate under the banner of the People’s Electoral Front (FEP).59
In 1964, the United States ended the Bracero Program, which had provided agricultural work to tens of thousands of Mexican campesinos since the beginning of World War II. Thousands of workers returned to Mexico, many settling in the border states, exacerbating the demand for land and work. The rural normal school of Saucillo, recently moved from Flores Magón, with 300 female students between the ages of twelve and eighteen, and Salaices, with 300 males, were under continual surveillance by police and soldiers who held the students under an ineffective but menacing state of siege; nevertheless, the students continued to participate in land invasions.60
On February, campesinos and students once again occupied the offices of the DAAC; the police dislodged them with tear gas and arrested 30 students. Protesters returned and began a sit-in at the Plaza Hidalgo where they stayed until June, while students sent them rations and supporters baked tortillas on the patios of downtown apartment buildings.61 While exhausting and disruptive to family life, these occupations and invasions provided a forum for new ways of collective living; they should be examined in their own right and not only in terms of their results.
In March, Pablo Gómez announced his candidacy as substitute deputy in Delicias for the PPS, while his brother Raúl Gómez ran for federal deputy in Guerrero; Arturo Gámiz, now in hiding, announced his support.62
Federal officials, less beholden to the local interests of cattlemen, timber interests, and other large landowners and hoping to prevent another Cuba, attempted to diffuse the growing climate of violence, sending federal officials to negotiate with the state; their efforts were unsuccessful.63
When presidential candidate Gustavo Díaz Ordaz attempted to speak in the capital, Chihuahua, in April, a student climbed the reviewing stand and attempted to take microphone and the crowd began yelling slogans against the local authorities, the PRI, and the candidate himself. Security forces escorted Díaz Ordaz from the platform; the crowd then burned the reviewing stand, scorching the façade of City Hall.64
Meanwhile, in Delicias, a number of agrarian leaders, among them Raúl and Pablo Gómez, were arrested; Díaz Ordaz secured their release and met with them briefly, promising to find a solution to the agrarian question.65 On April 12, the state released a number of political prisoners; others, among them Judith Reyes, were arrested for burning the reviewing stand.66
In April, Pablo Gómez chased down a bus carrying two students from Saucillo, young women who had decided to take up arms and join the guerrillas in the sierra; Gómez convinced them to return to school.67 On June 7, 300 campesinos, exhausted by months of struggle, abandoned the occupation of the plaza, accepted the governor’s promise of support, and returned home in buses sent by the state.68
When Gámiz was released from jail following the occupation of the DAAC, he took up arms, along with a handful of comrades, and never went back to teaching. The mountains and canyons of northwestern Chihuahua offered an ideal terrain and a population accustomed to armed self-defense. They named the new organization the Grupo Popular Guerrillero de la Sierra (GPG).
With the support of local serranos, the GPG carried out a series of attacks on detachments of both the army and state police, confiscating weapons and ammunition and rescuing prisoners. According to the report published by former president Vicente Fox’s Office of the Special Prosecutor, agents of the Federal Security Directorate (DFS) were able to infiltrate the circles of students and campesinos in and around the UGOCM, but were never able to penetrate the GPG itself, at least in Chihuahua.69 While both state and national security forces regarded the GPG, UGOCM, and their supporters as “communists” and “subversives,” publicly they called them common delinquents and horse thieves. According to the report, the federal agents assigned to the case lacked sufficient training to analyze the politics of the group or the causes, which led them to take up arms.70
What seems clear is that the state underestimated their capacity for action and support among serrano communities and that the surveillance was insufficient. No one in the leadership of the GPG’s clandestine group was ever arrested;71 Gámiz was detained in connection with urban protests but quickly released. The state was helpless to prevent the development of these guerrillas, which contributed to the confidence that led them to assault the barracks.
The first public action of the GPG took place in Madera in February 1964, when they burned a bridge and then a house and captured a radio station in Mineral de Dolores.72 In May 1964, Salomón Gaytán shot Florentino Ibarra, José Ibarra’s brother, in revenge for the assassination of Carlos Ríos, a Pima activist with the UGOCM, and went into hiding.73 The Secretary of National Defense sent a company of soldiers after the guerrillas, who hired guides among the serranos who led them about in circles; the troops resorted to torturing civilians, hanging them in trees, and dangling them from helicopters flying close to the rocks.74 In July, the GPG attacked the Ibarra home in Cebadilla where the judical police were staying, burned the house, and set its residents free in their underwear.75
The state attorney general’s office created a group of spies within the student movement and paid them to inform; they temporarily achieved a split in what had been a united front of campesinos and students. Schoolteachers were beaten and fired from their jobs.76
In May 1965, Salvador Gaytán took up arms and left office. He penned a declaration, which ended with his promise to lay down arms whenever the authorities brought the caciques to justice.77 Several successful attacks on soldiers followed, adding to the guerrillas’ cache of automatic weapons.
The Second Encounter of the Sierra Heraclio Bernal and its Resolutions
In the city, students from the normal schools founded support groups and some of them attempted to join the forces in the sierra but soon returned to town, overwhelmed by the harsh physical conditions. At this point the GPG realized the need for training to incorporate townsfolk.78
In January 1965, while Gámiz was in the sierra, the state UGOCM split. Supporters of Lombardo wanted to turn towards electoral campaigns, putting a brake on the mass actions. The supporters of Gámiz proposed participation in the elections while continuing the mass protests and building a parallel, clandestine organization for armed campesino self-defense. This tripartite strategy, of mass protests, electoral participation, and armed self-defense, seemed a refusal to choose among alternatives. In fact, the group’s goal was to unite the leaders emerging from the mass movement into a political–military foco headquartered in the sierra with its own urban support network that would eventually form links throughout the country.79 This position recognized that the limits of armed self-defense in the sierra had been reached and proposed a national strategy.
In January 1965, the Second Encounter of the Sierra Heraclio Bernal was held in northern Durango. Five Resolutions were presented to clarify the GPG’s objectives, facilitate their national diffusion, and encourage the leadership to coalesce; they ended with a call for immediate armed struggle. These documents, along with Gámiz’s pamphlet, “Student Participation in the Revolutionary Movement,” were widely disseminated.80
The Resolutions are the only written indication of the ideology that motivated the GPG, although I would argue that they did not adequately reflect the group’s ability to maneuver on the ground. The text exhibited a curious mixture of teleological orthodox Marxism and foquismo; much of the analysis appears to be borrowed wholesale from Marxist–Leninist analyses then in vogue. They are remarkable for their lack of a specific analysis of Chihuahuan history or recent events in Mexico, such as the wave of strikes which had rolled through Mexico City a few years before which Gámiz had participated in. They portray no understanding of the corporative nature of the Mexican state or its ability to co-opt autonomous movements through rewards and preemptive reform. In the Resolutions—as in Giner’s Chihuahua—the state offered only palos and no pan. They contained scathing attacks on the PCM and the PPS and advocated the creation of armed guerrilla groups throughout the countryside. I would suggest that the Resolutions’ failure to account for the state’s propensity to negotiate may have stemmed from the authors’ having taken much of the analysis wholesale from a source which did not take Mexico into account.
The GPG in Mexico City and Beyond
In early 1965, members of the GPG established a headquarters in Mexico City and engaged in military training, contacted other revolutionary groups, such as the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo, and attempted unsuccessfully to raise money for further actions in the sierra.81 The person they trusted for military training was a former captain of the Mexican army, Lorenzo Cárdenas Barajas, who claimed to have trained Fidel Castro’s companions during their years in Mexico. Cárdenas Barajas may have been acting on behalf of the National Defense Department.82
In spring, the National Education Ministry announced that certain teachers, among them Pablo Gómez, would be reassigned to schools far from their zone of influence to separate them from the movements they led.83 Raúl had already been assigned to the small town of Ojinaga on the US border.
GPG members formulated a plan to assault the army barracks in Madera while still in Mexico City. It was a curious target for a group that had repeatedly announced their battle was with the state and not federal government. This insistence, however, did not accord with the revolutionary aspirations outlined in the Resolutions, which aimed at broader targets. The barracks themselves were provisional and consisted of buildings owned by Bosques de Chihuahua; they housed detachments sent to Madera in pursuit of the GPG itself.
The original plan was to assault the barracks, occupy downtown, take over the bank and the radio station, and broadcast an appeal to local campesinos to rise up in arms. The group counted on acting with some 30 to 40 combatants armed with the automatic weapons expropriated earlier. The GPG had been emboldened by previous success and judged that an action of so spectacular a character could lead the campesinos to join them in a popular guerrilla war.84 Not everyone was comfortable with the plan, particularly Pablo Gómez who hesitated until the last minute.
Two weeks before the attack, Arturo Gámiz and Salomón Gaytan published a letter accusing Giner of cowardice and reiterated that once their goals were met and the local caciques removed and the land returned, they would lay down their arms.85
In early September, they left for Chihuahua City, where they met to make final plans. They typed up stencils of the Resolutions of the Sierra and printed them on a borrowed mimeograph machine, calling themselves “Ediciones Línea Revolucionaria” and joking that their ink-stained fingerprints covered the documents.86 Some of them sequestered a taxi from Torreón to Chihuahua; they held the driver for several days then paid him a considerable sum of money and released him. Afterwards, the driver remarked, “They seemed like good kids.”87
On the way to Madera, they encountered a number of mishaps. Salvador and Juan Antonio Gaytán travelled for a week through the sierra on foot, without provisions, carrying some 60 pounds each of automatic weaponry, which had been expropriated and stashed in various locations. They were delayed by late summer rains and neither they nor the weapons made it to the assault.
The university students sent to Madera to reconnoiter had attracted police attention, failed to find the meeting place, and gone back to the capital. Among the information they failed to relay was the fact that there were some 125 troops, not 70 soldiers, in the barracks.88
The group that met on the eve of the assault consisted of 14 people with a pitiful assortment of firearms, including two muskets, a single-loading shotgun, two .22s, molotov co*cktails, some dynamite, and homemade grenades that failed to detonate. The plans had counted on 31 people with high-powered weapons. They decided to go ahead, planning to assault the barracks and retreat to the nearby sierra. Gámiz met arguments for waiting for arms and information with accusations of cowardice.89
Just before dawn, they formed a semicircle around the barracks and Ramón Mendoza shot out the light bulb above the main door. “Surrender! There’s no hope!”90 Surprise gave the guerrillas an initial advantage. Then they hesitated instead of retreating; troops fell on them from behind and cut off the retreat. The firefight lasted approximately one and a half hours. Army troops killed eight, including Gámiz, Gómez, and Salomón Gaytán. The other dead were eventually identified as Miguel Quiñonez Pedroza, director of the rural school at Ariseáchic in the Sierra Tarahumara; Rafael Martínez Valdivia, a law student at the university; Oscar Sandoval Salinas, a student at the state normal school; Antonio Escóbel Gaytán, campesino and nephew of Salomón Gaytán; and Emilio Gámiz García, state normal school student and Arturo Gámiz’s younger brother. Of the thirteen, only Pablo Gómez, 39 years old and father of five children, was older than 25.
Five guerrillas escaped: Ramón Mendoza into the sierra with the help of a railway worker who shielded him behind the locomotive; Florencio Lugo, with a bullet wound in his leg; Guadalupe Escóbel Gaytán; Francisco Ornelas; and Matías Fernández.91 Five soldiers were killed and ten were injured.92 Some townspeople claimed that many more soldiers were killed and secretly buried; the story indicates the respect in which the guerrillas were held.93
The bodies of the dead guerrillas were heaved onto the back of a lumber truck and paraded around town in the rain, then dumped on the plaza and left overnight. All were mutilated, sown with machine gun fire, and Gámiz’s head was shattered.
General Tiburcio Garza Zamora, Commander of the Fifth Military Zone, arrived with Giner from Chihuahua that day, where the governor had given a press conference stating, “Nothing happened here, absolutely nothing.”94 Family members arrived to claim the bodies; Giner ordered them into a common grave.95
Immediately after the action, the Fifth Military Zone took charge, preventing state and other federal authorities access, forbidding the autopsies required by law, and only cooperating with the federal security agency.96 Meanwhile, the army unleashed a ferocious wave of repression, mobilizing troops and sending planes against the five survivors. Hundreds of townsfolk were arrested, stripped, and held overnight at the Madera airport, bound hand and foot. Colonel, later General, José Hernández Toledo, who presided over the attack on students in Hermosillo in 1967 and the massacre at Tlatelolco a year later, joined the search party.97 On September 25, the state congress called on the federal government for aid, enumerating the guerrilla actions of the year before.98
On September 30, journalist Victor Rico Galán and photographer Rodrigo Moya travelled to Madera and Cebadilla de Dolores; their sympathetic account was published in the national magazine, Sucesos para todos,99 two weeks later, receiving national attention. The UGOCM, PPS, and PCM condemned the action performed by the guerrillas.100
On October 31, 1965, defying military orders, Pablo Gómez’s wife and niece cleaned the grave and left flowers; 500 people arrived at the cemetery two days later.101
Aftermath
The breakthrough in the discussion of revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 70s came with the opening of the archives of the National Security apparatus by President Vicente Fox in 2001, which allowed researchers access to long-hidden information. The opening had been intended to discredit the PRI; in fact, the documents demonstrated a depth of corruption and brutality from which the PAN itself could not claim immunity.
On September 23, 2003, Carlos Montemayor presented his novel, Las armas del alba: Una novela,102 a thoroughly researched but fictional recreation of the events, in the Municipal Theatre of the City of Chihuahua, to an overflowing crowd including relatives of Lucio Cabañas and Genero Vásquez. The four surviving attackers shared the platform. Born in Parral, Chihuahua, Montemayor had left the state to attend the UNAM as a young man. He had been acquainted with members of the GPG in Chihuahua City where he had collaborated with the radical newspaper, Acción, and he experienced the government’s attempt to portray them as criminals as a moment that changed his life.103 His novel broke the silence that had muffled these events for decades.
Montemayor later published La fuga,104 about Ramón Mendoza’s escape from prison, and a posthumous novel, Las mujeres del alba.105 These works opened the floodgates of public memory, allowing the public discussion of matters that had been shrouded in secrecy for decades.
The Chihuahuan guerrilla movement was a turning point between old methods of struggle harkening back to the Revolution of 1910 and earlier battles on the frontier and forms derived from the New Left and its repudiation of orthodox communist movements; it opened the door to a series of armed movements whose demands went far beyond the fulfillment of the agrarian provisions of the Constitution of 1917. In the midst of the so-called Miracle— economic growth, urbanization, and the rise of a middle class—it revealed the depth of discontent, both among campesinos destined to pay the price and among students supposed to be its beneficiaries. Events in Chihuahua and throughout the Republic in the 1960s and 70s shattered whatever remained of the ruling regime’s claims to a revolutionary heritage and led the way to autonomous social movements which proliferated in the following decades. Los Primeros Vientos—the first winds—swept out the old and made room for the new.
Notes
1 A version of parts of this article was published in Chihuahua Hoy 2009, the Interdisciplinary Annual Journal of the Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
2 Victor Rico Galán, “De la desesperación a la muerte,” Sucesos para todos, 13.
3 El Heraldo de Chihuahua, 1 October 1965, 1.
4 Paco Ornelas Gómez, Sueños de libertad (Chihuahua: [no publisher], 2005), 195.
5 Luis Aboites, Breve historia de Chihuahua (México, DF: El Colegio de México, 1994), 166.
6 The term campesino refers to smallholders of rural property, ejidatarios, and landless agricultural workers. See Christopher R. Boyer, Becoming Campesinos (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).
7 Jesús Vargas Valdez, “Los Olvidados,” La Fragua de los Tiempos, March 18, 2001,
http://www.madera1965.com.mx/buscadocs.html (accessed April 10, 2011).
8 Ana M. Alonso, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico’s Northern Frontier (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1995); José Fuentes Mares, ...Y México se refugió el en desierto: Luis Terrazas, historia y destino (México: Editorial Jus, 1954); Fernando Jordán, Crónicas de un país bárbaro (México: Asociación Mexicana de Periodistas, 1956); Friedrich Katz, The Life and Times of Pancho Villa (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Alan Knight, The Mexican Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Daniel Nugent, Spent Cartridges of Revolution: An Anthropological History of Namiquipa, Chihuahua (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Victor Orozco Orozco, Diez ensayos sobre Chihuahua (Chihuahua: Doble Hélice, 2003).
9 Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2002), 2.
10 Régis Debray, Revolution in the Revolution? Armed Struggle and Political Struggle in Latin America (New York: Grove Press, 1967).
11 Mexico played a double game with Cuba and the USA, relaying information to the US State Department on occasion. See Kate Doyle, “Mexico’s Foreign Policy Toward Cuba,” National Security Archive website, March 2, 2003, http://www.gwu. edu/%7Ensarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB83/index.htm (accessed May 15, 2011).
12 María Guadalupe del Socorro López Álvarez, “Poder, desarrollo y medio ambiente en el ejido forestal ‘El Largo’ y sus anexos: Chihuahua (1971–1994),” MA Thesis, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, Unidad Xochimilco, 1996, 21–36.
13 John M. Hart, in The Silver of the Sierra Madre (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2008) discusses the working conditions in the Batopilas mine, just south of the Guerrero District.
14 See François Lartigue, Indios y bosques: Políticas forestales y comunales en la Sierra Tarahumara (México, DF: CIESAS, 1983); López Alvarez, op. cit., 38.
15 Katz, 12.
16 Mark Wasserman, Capitalists, Caciques, and Revolution: The Native Elite and Foreign Enterprise in Chihuahua, Mexico, 1854–1911 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 104.
17 Ibid., 76.
18 See Heriberto Frías, Tomóchic (Chihuahua: Instituto Chihuahuense de la Cultura, 2006).
19 Alonso, op. cit.
20 Ibid., 46.
21 Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands (New Haven: Yale, 2006), 99.
22 Miguel Angel Parra Orozco, Oro Verde: Madera, Vida de una Región Chihuahuense (Chihuahua: [no publisher], 1998), 42–44.
23 Parra Orozco, 51; Francisco R. Almada, El Ferrocarril de Chihuahua al Pacífico (México: Editorial Libros de México, 1971), 158.
24 Jordán, op. cit.
25 Noé G. Palomares Peña, Propietarios Norteamericanos y Reforma Agraria en Chihuahua, 1917–1942 (Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1991), 129–131.
26 Aboites, 160.
27 Parra Orozco, 99.
28 Aboites, 160–161.
29 Registro Agrario Nacional, Chihuahua City, 1160/23.
30 El Heraldo de Chihuahua, November 28, 1959, 3.
31 Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, Informe Histórico a la Sociedad Mexicana, “Inicios de la guerrilla moderna en México,” [draft version] National Security Archives, http: www.criterios.com/Documentos/050_El_inicio_ de_la Guerrilla_Moderna_en_ Mexico.pdf (accessed March 15, 2006), 16.
32 Vargas, op. cit.
33 Ibid.
34 Santos Valdés, 83, 87.
35 Parra Orozco, 99.
36 There has been confusion in the secondary sources about the Mineral de Dolores and Cebadilla de Dolores. The former is a colonial mining town and the latter a community dating from the early twentieth century. Nearby is a relative term; there is no road connecting the two and they are divided by a deep arroyo.
37 RAN, Chihuahua City, 1160/23. These certificates could be granted to livestock owners to allow them to hold more land than the constitution allowed.
38 “Inicios...”, 12.
39 Santos Valdés, 71.
40 AGN, DFS, Exp. 100-5-2, L-1, H-102-103.
41 Santos Valdés, 73.
42 La Voz de Chihuahua, May 12, 1963.
43 AGN, Exp.100-5-3, L-1, H-115 & 148.
44 Photo, http://www.madera1965.com.mx (accessed July 24, 2008).
45 AGN, DFS, Exp. 100-5-2, L1, H-135.
46 AGN, DFS, Exp. 100-5-3, L-1, H-202.
47 “Inicios...”, 11.
48 Heraclio Bernal was a revolutionary bandit who fought against the Porfiriato in northern Durango.
49 Fiscalía Especial para Movimientos Sociales y Políticos del Pasado, Informe Histórico a la Sociedad Mexicana, “Orígenes de la guerrilla moderna en México,” National Security Archives, http: www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB180/index. htm (accessed November 30, 2006), 250.
50 “Inicios,” 11.
51 “Madera ‘65: Cronología: ¿Cómo se fue Fraguando el Ataque?,” El Heraldo de
Chihuahua, September 23, 1995.
52 Carlos Montemayor, Las armas del alba: Novela (México, DF: Joaquín Mortiz, 2003), 165.
53 Santos Valdés, 107.
54 Laura Castellanos, México Armado: 1943–1981 (México, DF: Ediciones Era, 2007), 74.
55 “Inicios,” 12.
56 Santos Valdés, 127–129.
57 Ibid., 129.
58 “Inicios,” 13.
59 FritzGlockner,MemoriaRoja:HistoriadelaguerrillaenMéxico(1943–1968),(México,
DF: Ediciones B, 2007), 132.
60 Santo Valdés, 148.
61 Ornelas, 152.
62 “Inicios,” 14.
63 Montemayor, Las armas, 145–146.
64 El Correo de Chihuahua, April 7, 1964.
65 “Madera ‘65,” 3.
66 Ibid.
67 Ornelas, 260.
68 Glockner, 145.
69 Inicios, 10.
70 Ibid., 9.
71 Ibid., 10.
72 Ibid., 18.
73 Santos Valdés, 87.
74 “Inicios”, 19.
75 Ibid., 20.
76 Ibid., 14.
77 Santos Valdés, 81–84.
78 Inicios, 18–19.
79 Marco Bellingeri, Del agrarismo armado a la guerra de los pobres: Ensayos de guerrilla rural en el México contemporaneo, 1940–74 (México, DF: Ed. Casa Juan Pablos, 2003), 86.
80 Copiesareavailableonlineonthewebsitededicatedtothegroup:www.madera1965.
com.mx.
81 Glockner, 180.
82 “Orígenes...”, 261; also see Adela Cedillo Cedillo, “El fuego y el silencio. Historia de las Fuerzas de Liberación Nacional Mexicanas (1969–1974)”, BA Thesis, UNAM, 2008, 112–113 for counter-argument.
83 Santos Valdés, 134.
84 Montemayor, Las armas, 128–133.
85 Castellanos, 65.
86 Orozco, 254.
87 Ibid.,251–253.
88 Montemayor, Las armas, 133–139.
89 Ibid, 203.
90 Glockner, 194.
91 Both Lugo and Ornelas have published testimonies: Florencio Lugo, 23 de septiembre de 1965: El asalto al cuartel de Madera (México, DF: Yaxkin AC, 2007); Ornelas, op. cit.
92 El Heraldo de Chihuahua, September 24, 1.
93 Ornelas, 204.
94 Rico Galán, op. cit.
95 Montemayor, Las armas, 72.
96 “Inicios,” 24.
97 Orígenes, 265.
98 Santos Valdés, 123–124.
99 Rico Galán, op. cit.
100 Glockner, 207.
101 Orígenes, 267.
102 Montemayor, Las armas, op. cit.
103 Mónica Mateos-Vega, “Existe otro México clandestino más peligroso que la
guerrilla: Entrevista con Carlos Montemayor,” La Jornada, February 28, 2007, online (accessed May 29, 2008).
104 Carlos Montemayor, La fuga (México, DF: Fondo de Cultura Economica, 2007).
105 Montemayor, Las mujeres, op. cit.
