‘Sincere friendship and a profound interest in sharing the triumphs and concerns of friendly nations’ is how Eduardo Hay – Mexico's foreign minister for most of the Cárdenas presidency – summarised the modus operandi of the government in external affairs. While Roosevelt had his Good Neighbour Policy, Cárdenas developed la política del buen amigo, an approach that was ‘equal parts realism and idealism’ (p. 17). This policy, argues Amelia Kiddle, had significant impact throughout the region; her argument therefore shifts the focus of 1930s diplomacy away from the traditional lens of the United States and its supposed interventionism–isolationism pendulum, and makes a compelling case for a genuinely inter-American prism.
The book opens with an account of the voyage of the Durango, a warship repurposed in 1940 to fight a different sort of battle: one of public relations. The vessel embarked on a ‘three-month-long artistic, military, commercial, and athletic mission of goodwill’ around Latin America. The beginning is, of course, the end, for the Durango’s trip came in the final year of the Cárdenas sexenio, and Kiddle then steps back to explain in rich detail how Mexico developed both the capacity (through the growth and professionalisation of its diplomatic corps) and the desire to project national identity abroad. From the outset, the book establishes the existence of a sort of hemispheric cardenismo, and indeed an anticardenista counterpart, and here it contributes a good deal to a crucial but unresolved debate: that of the Mexican Revolution's international impact.
The first chapter is essentially an ethnography of Cárdenas’ diplomatic corps, supported by a very useful appendix in the style of Roderic Ai Camp. Most were revolutionary veterans, most were born within a few years of 1890, and they represented a broad cross-section of Mexican states (though not evenly; as Kiddle points out, Sonora and Chihuahua were notably under-represented, in contrast to the abundance of jaliscienses and michoacanos). Among the cohort was Palma Guillén, who faced hostility in Colombia not only as the first Latin American woman appointed as a Head of Mission in the region – Alexandra Kollontai was the first overall, representing the USSR in Mexico from 1926 – but also as the representative of what was perceived to be a strongly anticlerical state. This chapter also gives an overview of structural changes in the diplomatic service, and while professionalisation did take place to a significant degree, the diplomats were nevertheless ‘often operating on a shoestring budget [and] had to be creative’ (p. 45).
Kiddle repeatedly makes the case for a marked shift in approach, not necessarily at the very outset of the Cárdenas sexenio, but more concretely with the appointment of Eduardo Hay as foreign minister in late 1935 bolstered by Ramón Beteta as undersecretary in 1936. These changes happened as part of a broader replacement of callistas – supporters of the outgoing president, Plutarco Elías Calles – as Cárdenas surprised many by comprehensively ousting Calles in a relatively peaceful manner. However, Cárdenas also inherited a change, in the form of the ruling party's 1933 six-year plan, which led to the explicit inclusion of ‘socialist education’ as state policy in the 1917 Constitution's amended Article 3. Chapter 2 demonstrates that however it manifested itself domestically, Article 3 became – and was allowed to remain – a defining aspect of Mexico's image abroad: ‘sensationalistic news reports regarding the persecution of Catholics in Mexico and gruesome tales about the murder of priests and rural schoolteachers captivated readers’ attention throughout Latin America’ (p. 47). It wasn't all doom and gloom, though; many Latin Americans were inspired by (and approved of) these anticlerical moves, and Kiddle underlines the ‘significant variation in the Latin American responses that Mexican diplomats reported on’ (p. 49). At this point I confess I was hoping to know how much of a contrast this represented when compared with the reception of Calles’ anticlerical policies – one would think that constitutional amendments might be appreciated more readily than, for instance, waging war against Catholic guerrillas – but that lies beyond the formal boundaries of the study. The answer may be implicit in Kiddle's noting that Latin American governments were willing to overlook the ‘socialist’ nature of the education reforms in order to borrow some of their structural aspects.
Chapters 3 and 4 cover events – the Spanish Civil War and the 1938 oil expropriation respectively – which might seem, prima facie, to be broadly self-contained, if temporally overlapping. Both, though, are shown to be deeply enmeshed in the wider projection of Mexican state identity. As with socialist education, diplomats allowed the perception of a consonance between Mexican and Spanish Republican interests to circulate and strengthen. In some cases, this consonance was complete; where missions were controlled by rebels the Mexican diplomats took over Spanish interests (officially in Uruguay and unofficially in Costa Rica, for instance). In other locations, it was more about Mexican identity than Spanish interests; praise for Cárdenas’ position became a proxy for criticism of conservative governments throughout the region and Mexico's image as Latin America's progressive vanguard was bolstered considerably. The oil expropriation only augmented this; in perhaps the clearest demonstration of a hemispheric cardenista sentiment, Kiddle describes the ‘overwhelmingly positive response of workers, students, and intellectuals throughout the Americas’ (p. 110). Radio is shown to be a crucial medium used by Mexican diplomats (alongside newspapers) to promote expropriation as a justifiable policy. However, this ‘created tensions that made it difficult to officially sanction Mexico's oil expropriation’ – only Bolivia lent official support to the nationalisation (p. 117). Nonetheless, efforts to sell more oil to Latin America were relatively successful; it was the Second World War that shifted exports so dramatically back to the United States.
Chapter 5 covers the dissemination of technical expertise – ‘Mexican Development, Hacia Afuera [Abroad]’ – while Chapter 6 returns to the voyage of the Durango in the context of cultural and artistic diplomacy. There were notable successes in both arenas, and a particularly striking aspect of Kiddle's research is the view of the (often sympathetic) Latin American outsider towards post-revolutionary Mexican development. In national and local studies, this development often seems very grubby: compromise, cynicism, violence and hypocrisy abound. Yet viewed from without, we get a sense – sometimes rather surprising – of Mexico as ‘el faro [lighthouse] de América’: Mexico saw itself as ‘secular, leftist, nationalist, popular, and devoted to the interests of workers and rural people alike’, but politicians and diplomats successfully sold the idea that this ‘represented a path to social, political and economic development for the entire region’ (pp. 199–200).
Here I am perhaps more cynical than Kiddle, who states that it ‘speaks to the depth and breadth of these ideas that Mexico continued to enjoy this international reputation for decades to come’ (p. 200). I wonder if instead it speaks to their fundamental vagueness. The Mexican Revolution was always more powerful in its rhetoric than in its practice, even at its most socially progressive. That is a minor gripe, though. This book is a most welcome addition to the literature on Cárdenas, foregrounding a previously underplayed aspect of his presidency and making a plausible case for Mexico as a leading regional player in the 1930s. It is a fine study of how diplomacy works, of how the Cárdenas government wished to portray itself and its lineage abroad, and how Latin Americans forged links, relationships and discourses which, while not entirely able to escape US influence, were rather more autonomous than one might expect.
