The revolution in Mexico, and that's what it now was, was back on the front page of American newspapers.
As part of this process, Sonoran Governor Adolfo de la Huerta resigned his office in preparation for taking up the part of a revolutionary soldier once again. In his place, Plutarco Elías Calles became Governor. Calles was already a figure in Sonoran politics and had been a general in the Mexican revolution and a supporter of Carranza. At this time, he was supporting Obregon and De La Huerta.
Plutarco Elías Calles, who later took Mexico to the edge of fascism and across the line of sectarian brutality.
Calles was a true radical and his policies were brutal, particularly against the Catholic Church. He'd later become the President of Mexico from 1924 to 1928 when his policies resulted in the Cristero War, which might be regarded as the final stage of the Mexican Revolution as well as the point at which Mexican democracy basically essentially a joke in some ways, so much so that when his policies resulted in the assassination by a Cristero supporter of Obregon, who was set to resume office, he became a type of dictator and founded the National Revolution Party, which governed Mexico from its founding until 2000. Calles himself at this point flirted with fascism, which had an influence upon him.
Calles would ironically fall at the hands of an associate, Lázaro Cárdenas del Río, who became President of Mexico in 1934. Cárdenas proved to be independent of his patron and acted against Calles' supporters. Ultimately Calles was charged with being a member of revolutionary conspiracy and deported, ironically, to the United States in 1936. Supposedly Calles was reading
Mein Kampf at the time of his arrest. As an exile, he made contact fascists in the United States although he rejected their anti Semitism and of course their hostility to Mexicans. He was allowed to return to Mexico, in retirement, in 1941, and began to modify his views, supporting Mexico's entry into World War Two.
Cárdenas, for his part, remained a revolutionary, but not a fascist, and continued the suppression of the Catholic Church throughout his Presidency. That feature of Mexican politics would not abate until 1940 when Manuel Ávila Camacho became President.
While this site is not, obviously, the history of Mexico website, all of this ties into the purpose of this blog which was to look at events in the 1890 to 1920 time frame with a particular focus (among other focuses) on the Border War with Mexico. While this phase of this time frame and the attendant history are clearly winding down, the events described here are critical elements of it. Over time, we've seen a democratic revolution that took the eclectic Francisco I. Modero into office as a true democrat devolve into continual revolutionary cycles which at one time promised to put a collection of democrats in power, only to have that fall apart and leave the radical Venustiano Carranza in charge. In 1920, that was flying apart as Carranza schemed to control who would replace him as President of Mexico. That would ultimately see the more radical Obregon come to power followed by Calles, who was an extremist who flirted with fascism during his lifetime. Only beginning in 1940 did Mexico begin to turn away from that direction, although it would take sixty years for real democracy to return to the country after that date. In 1920, it was dying.
Oskar von Watter. He commanded German government forces that entered the Ruhr to put down the Communist rebellion there. In 1934 he'd cause a monument to be put up in Essen in honor of Freikorps soldiers who had died in the 1920 rebellion. He died in 1934 and was buried in Berlin's Invalid Cemetery, a cemetary associated with Prussian military figures.
On the same day the Ruhr Rebellion in Germany came to an end with the German government firmly in control General von Watter ordered his soldiers to abstain from "unlawful behavior", but it was too late. Reds caught with firearms were simply killed in many instances.
