Myths of Demilitarization in Postrevolutionary Mexico, 1920-1960

At the end of the Mexican Revolution in 1920, Mexico’s large, rebellious army dominated national politics. By the 1940s, Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) was led by a civilian president and claimed to have depoliticized the army and achieved the bloodless pacification of the Mexican countryside through land reform, schooling, and indigenismo . However, historian Thomas Rath argues, Mexico’s celebrated demilitarization was more protracted, conflict-ridden, and incomplete than most