As Agent 15 of the Mexico City judicial police made his way home for lunch on a day early in December 1926, he saw a balloon floating in the breeze. He rushed to the rooftop observatorio of his apartment building, where he spotted a girl around 14 years old, wearing a lilac-colored dress, standing on a nearby roof and holding a string. Certain that the balloon had been released from this location, he ran down the stairs, and, while crossing the street, looked up to see yet another balloon.Footnote 1 Balloons had been drifting through the sky since early morning, so many and from so many directions that police struggled to find where they were coming from.Footnote 2 When the balloons popped, flyers came tumbling down, urging Catholics to engage in peaceful protest against government anticlericalism by adorning their houses with yellow and white stripes in honor of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her upcoming feast day, December 12.Footnote 3 Accompanied by a beat policeman, Agent 15 approached two men in the building where he had seen the girl with the string, surmising that they had aided the launch. Although a search yielded nothing more incriminating than a stick with four strings, he arrested the men. He and other balloon-chasing police officers were obeying specific orders in hunting down the perpetrators that day, but in a broader sense they had become enforcers of laws introduced in the 1917 constitution that sharply restricted the scope of religious expression and observation in public.Footnote 4
In addition to pursuing thieves and murderers, the job of police now included listening for priests with foreign accents, following gaggles of modestly dressed women who may have been violating the prohibition on participating in religious orders, closing prayer rooms in hospitals, and breaking up prayer sessions in private homes. Moreover, they were now charged with investigating lay organizations suspected of supporting the pro-Church Cristero Rebellion, which had broken out in the countryside only days after the girl in the lilac dress allegedly launched the seditious balloons. These new police activities expanded the meaning of “crime” beyond its conventional associations with deviance and poverty. Cutting across boundaries of class and gender, police now pursued Catholics in polite society, under a new kind of criminal law: violating the ideological vision of modern Mexico that revolutionaries had strived to forge through anticlerical legislation.
Agent 15 assumed his new role with zeal. Not only did he apprehend the alleged balloon launchers on an unsubstantiated suspicion. Taking a red pencil to his incident report, he modified the national motto of “Effective Suffrage, No Reelection” (a celebration of the revolution's victory over Porfirio Díaz's long dictatorship) to “Effective Suffrage and Reelection.”Footnote 5 The scribble was a gesture of support for another rule-bending amendment, this one to constitutional Article 83, which prohibited reelection to public office. Weeks earlier, the national congress had voted to change it to permit reelection for nonconsecutive presidential terms. More pointedly, the amendment cleared the way for the reelection of revolutionary leader Álvaro Obregón. After a decade of battle launched under the banner of “No Reelection,” even the amendment's main proponent, Gonzalo N. Santos, betrayed some sheepishness. He recognized that “anti-reelectionism” was a “revolutionary principle” from a political perspective, but in this case he believed that the “socialist principle that constituted the essence of the Mexican Revolution” should “transcend” the letter of the law.Footnote 6 As he and other Obregonistas insisted, the amendment was necessary to consolidate the achievements of the revolution and prevent the ascension of reactionaries, particularly those within, or influenced by, the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, Agent 15’s scribbled tweak to the national motto, as well as his rooftop investigations, were perfectly in keeping with the new political alignments.
The constitutional amendment was conjoined, ideologically and practically, with revolutionary anticlericalism, a project launched vigorously by President Plutarco Elías Calles in the mid 1920s. A continuation of legal reforms by nineteenth-century liberals, the laws restricted the role of the Church and sought to expand the scope of civil authority, ostensibly to institute a social order predicated on popular sovereignty, social justice, and the rule of law. However, as the actions of Agent 15 and Gonzalo N. Santos suggest, both the framers and the enforcers of anticlericalism tended to regard the law as a malleable instrument whose meaning and purpose sprang from political and social objectives. Laws would have to conform to revolutionary principles. However, as critics of the government rushed to point out, the police forces charged with enforcing the anticlerical laws were themselves immersed in deep and systemic corruption. It was worrisome enough when police pursued lower-class deviants but polite society was shocked and affronted to learn of pious ladies held in basement prisons and nuns banished to the Islas Marías penal colony.
Political manipulation of the law in Mexico, or in other Latin American states, is hardly a recent discovery. As Ricardo Salvatore and Carlos Aguirre have noted, “Law in Latin America has been the source of much more injustice than fairness, has been more often manipulated than revered, and has created. . . a scenario of legal fiction.”Footnote 7 However, as much as historians of law and criminality may identify crime as a social construct, they still tend to focus on actions such as theft and murder that violate the societal norms that brought laws into being. Footnote 8 Scholars identify crime as a struggle between the upper classes who created (and were presumed to abide by) laws and the delinquent poor. As Robert Buffington writes, “Administrative policies and arrest records clearly connected official definitions of crime and lower-class lifestyles.”Footnote 9 This class dichotomy may have reflected discursive realities, but it has led historians to overlook the ways in which upper classes broke laws, and to ignore the ways in which laws violated social norms—or, more precisely, how laws and enforcement became crucial instruments in contentions between conflicting social norms and institutions. In this case, the contention was between civil and ecclesiastical authorities and their respective notions of justice.Footnote 10 This article examines records of enforcement filed by agents in secret-police archives, and discovers how the pursuit of infractions to anticlerical laws changed the meanings of crime and policing. Enforcement of anticlericalism entailed investigating new types crimes, pursuing new types of suspects, and opening new spaces for enforcement and outcomes. Furthermore, the work of the police became more closely aligned with the political objectives of the federal executive.
Policing, Crime, and Corruption
Police intelligence, enforcement, and repression were fundamental to the anticlerical campaign in Mexico City. If the revolutionary government was to limit the scope of religion in public life, its agents would have to apply the laws on the streets of the city, the place with the greatest number of churches, convents, parochial schools, and Church-affiliated charitable institutions. Furthermore, the city police became a vital component of the government's national efforts to dismantle urban support for the armed Catholic rebellion. Though the battlefields of the Cristero Rebellion were in the countryside, activists living in the capital provided logistical and ideological orientation, raised funds, and shipped food, clothing, and bullets to the rebels. Police were tasked with intercepting contraband, seizing printing presses, and investigating acts of urban anti-government violence. However, police could not be counted on as reliable enforcers of legislative ideals; they operated in the uneasy space between the elites who articulated social visions and projects through legislation and the multiple transgressors of such visions.
Strengthening the chain of command, and thus decreasing the gap between the plans of political leaders and enforcement on the streets, had been a goal of national government since the prerevolutionary dictator Porfirio Díaz restructured and professionalized the police in 1879. From then on, the Mexico City police force was under the command of an inspector general who responded to the governor of the city, who, in turn, was appointed by the president. Reformers hoped that trained, uniformed full-time agents would be better equipped than their predecessors to enforce the ambitious penal code issued earlier in the decade and continually augmented during Díaz's presidency.Footnote 11 However, by the 1920s, a decade of revolution had upended some practices and left others intact, and a succession of often short-lived city governments had altered police enforcement practices without developing policies for carrying them out. It was not always clear which laws were current or how police should enforce them. This uncertainty required police to operate with considerable margin and to bend the law to fit varying circumstances, interests, and negotiations—what historian Mario Barbosa calls “discretional” enforcement. In his study of Mexico City ordinances in the 1920s, Barbosa notes that beat cops were closer to the lower-class residents they were supposed to police than to the political elite who sent them to the streets with the mission to create an orderly city. Footnote 12 As Pablo Piccato writes, “Police were often caught in the contradiction of serving a project of modernization and responding to the demands of the urban population from which they came.”Footnote 13 Police were reluctant to enforce laws that infringed on practices in which they commonly indulged. Instead of cracking down on street vendors, vagrants, cantinas, and other violators of poorly defined regulations, police employed “reciprocal arrangements.” In exchange for allowing tamale vendors to sell on street corners, or pulquerías to serve alcohol on Sundays, police charged informal “taxes.”Footnote 14
This discretional enforcement went further than Barbosa and Piccato acknowledge, however, and yielded deep corruption and depredation. Internal investigations show that extortion was so systematic that agents kept shadow ledgers with the names of businesses that their superiors assigned them to tax.Footnote 15 Street vendors and small-time pickpockets unable to pay bribes rotted in jail, but “high-class cheating thieves walk comfortably though the city streets spending lavishly together with police agents who send cash or jewels to their bosses.”Footnote 16 An editorial in La Voz de México noted, “The police are strongly hated among the lower classes.”Footnote 17 The reasons were many. “Discretional enforcement” extended into dark corners of the informal economy, where police engaged in “veritable iniquities.”Footnote 18 Agents made arrests after heists but then divided loot with the thieves. They received kickbacks from brothels, worked with opium traffickers from Spain and China, and charged commissions to kidnappers.Footnote 19 Bribes were also integral to the internal functioning of the police. The payroll was riddled with “aviators” who “landed” in their posts only on payday.Footnote 20 Anyone who wished to join the Inspector General's office had to pay “quotas” to the chief that ranged from 40 to 1000 pesos, depending on the position. Even crossing guards had to pay.Footnote 21 These arrangements of reciprocity hint at the vested interests that complicated the police's role as intermediary between legislators and the public, as enforcers of the rule of law.
In the wake of his election in 1924, President Plutarco Elías Calles took up Díaz's effort to professionalize the police. Publicly, the administration announced an attack on the pervasive corruption with a “moralizing campaign.” The Secretaría de Gobernación (the Interior Ministry) did make some tepid denouncements of malfeasance. The police, Gobernación admitted, had turned a blind eye to “sites of vice” and to ordinance violations. “There is even suspicion of connivance between some agents and thieves.”Footnote 22 Privately, though, officials recognized in the reorganization a political response to the armed rebellion of disgruntled revolutionaries launched in 1923 by former interim president Adolfo de la Huerta. De la Huerta's National Cooperativist Party had previously been a key source of support for Obregón and Calles, who had granted important government positions to his supporters. The judicial police force, in particular, was said to be a bastion of Cooperativists, and the Calles government's denunciations of corruption and the subsequent reorganization of the police were in truth aimed at dislodging these suspected “party agitators.”Footnote 23 Gobernación ordered its secret-police division, known as the Confidential Department, to investigate the political affiliation and the morality of Mexico City police chiefs.Footnote 24
The efforts to consolidate authority depended on loyal police forces that would act in accordance with the state's political objectives.Footnote 25 This imperative, however, did not preclude venality. Indeed, as sociologist Diane Davis argues, allowing corruption to thrive was a condition of maintaining the police's fidelity to the government, for the police had “developed a degree of authority and political sway that often made them difficult to control.”Footnote 26 Calles, himself a revolutionary whose mandate emanated from armed struggle, violent marginalization of rival revolutionaries, and elections (however questionable), placed political objectives above legal normativity. As Mexico City Inspector General Roberto Cruz said in an interview decades later, “You can't always govern by law. If Calles hadn't been like he was, maybe today we'd be talking about how weak his government was. And that wouldn't be okay.”Footnote 27 As much as the administration professed its goal to be the rule of law, Calles aimed, in fact, for the rule of authority. Since the street experience and brutality of police agents were crucial instruments with which to achieve this political consolidation, corruption and impunity persisted.
Gobernación's disclosures of mild criminal connivance under Calles occasioned a wave of accusations from former and current police employees who hoped the moralization signaled a genuine opening. Accusations centered around two men who loomed large in Mexico City police and intelligence agencies and were to play key roles in the enforcement of the anticlerical laws: Valente Quintana and Pablo Meneses. As chief of the Security Commission, which was the investigative division of the Mexico City Inspector General's office, Quintana had gained a reputation as the nation's most brilliant detective, “el Sherlock Holmes mexicano.”Footnote 28 Despite the romantic mythology that surrounded him—literary critic Ilan Stavans praised his “honest character, his dedication, and his incorruptibility”—Quintana was a kingpin of criminal activities.Footnote 29 He ran a clandestine casino in Mexico City, where he employed several agents of the Inspector General's Office and offered “gambling, drinking, everything, with total impunity.”Footnote 30 He and Meneses ran a carbonated water factory, operated by workers who were on the Mexico City police payroll.Footnote 31 Twenty recently fired secret police agents accused Quintana and Meneses of kidnapping and extortion, as well of the murder of a restaurant owner who had threatened to denounce them.Footnote 32 An anonymous letter accused Quintana of arresting a jewelry thief, only to release him after taking his share of the loot.Footnote 33 Another letter alleged that when the “famous thief known as El Telegrafista” had tried to rob Quintana's house, Quintana had caught the man, but instead of placing him under arrest had offered protection for future burglaries in exchange for a commission.Footnote 34 Another source accused Meneses and Quintana of participating in the robbery of a Mexico City-Laredo train—a case the same two claimed they had cracked, to great fanfare—prompting the attorney general to order an investigation.Footnote 35 The Confidential Department's investigations corroborated Quintana and Meneses's criminal activities, as well as widespread drunkenness, nepotism, sexual harassment, and extortion among the police in general.Footnote 36
This abundant evidence of corruption did not yield the promised “general reorganization,” only a mere reshuffling. José Mazcorro, another key player in Calles's secularization campaign, replaced Quintana as chief of the Security Commissions. The chief of the Confidential Department charged Mazcorro to conduct a “thorough investigation into all the crimes the Mexico City police have committed and continue to commit.”Footnote 37 But there was no such investigation; instead, as a Confidential Department agent reported, Mazcorro quickly took up Quintana's tasks, collecting bribes from bordellos and opium dens, as well as strong-arming Mexico City butcher shops into buying meat from his brother-in-law, a known cattle-thief.Footnote 38 Meneses's punishment was reassignment to a less public position within the General Inspector's office. Quintana, who had become a private detective, continued to work closely with the police. The reporters (who were on his payroll) gave him a hero's sendoff when he left the police force. Ironically, the incidents the press celebrated as examples of Quintana's “extreme astuteness, admirable sagacity, uncommon talent, proven bravery” and detective work “worthy of Sherlock Holmes” were among the same crimes in which internal sources accused him of complicity: the Laredo train robbery, jewelry heists, and the robberies carried out by the infamous automóvil gris gang.Footnote 39 Such adulation had the practical function of clearing the way for Quintana and Meneses's work in future cases: both became key investigators of the assassination of president-elect Álvaro Obregón in July 1928.
Beyond shifting personnel from area to another, the police reorganization integrated the diverse enforcement agencies to allow the president to exert increased control over them. Roberto Cruz, who had proven his loyalty as undersecretary of war during the De la Huerta rebellion, became Inspector General of the Mexico City police, replacing Pedro J. Almada. The judicial police force was already a subordinate of the president, but it was now subordinate to the Inspector General's office as well. The chief would no longer receive orders from the governor of Mexico City, but directly from the president.Footnote 40 Gobernación sent orders to investigate suspects of sedition or rebellion directly to the Inspector General's Office. Cruz folded the secret police into the Security Commissions, which now had four divisions in charge of intelligence and arrests, each with a chief and 30 agents.Footnote 41
The responsibilities of the Confidential Department also shifted. According to its charter, its mission was to “investigate the truth and provide in a discreet, faithful, and intelligent fashion information of orientation in order to contribute to the improvement of the revolutionary government and the national collectivity.”Footnote 42 Its tasks now involved intelligence, not enforcement, but in practice its agents investigated potential threats within the government and reported findings to Gobernación. With the rise of the anticlerical campaign and the ensuing armed rebellion, the Confidential Department was given the additional charge of investigating groups and individuals outside the government, and empowered with enforcement authority. These new tasks forced the department to collaborate more closely with other police agencies. Lacking its own jail, the Confidential Department turned suspects over to the Inspector General's office, which detained suspects in its much-dreaded basement lockup. Indeed, the Confidential Department became practically indistinguishable from other police agencies, all of which now served the political purposes of the president.
The reorganization of the police, then, did not spring from a commitment to ethics or the nation's moral mission but rather to an effort to expel potentially disloyal agents and chiefs. More importantly, it aimed to establish a more direct chain of command between the federal executive and enforcement agencies and brought police agencies closer in line with the state by asserting the primacy of the federal executive. Corruption that did not interfere with this alignment was not a pressing concern among authorities. Accordingly, the reorganization did not address the connivance between police and criminals or the predatory relationship agents had with local businesses. After the reorganization, the Confidential Department ended its investigation of police corruption; official reports slowed to a trickle by late 1925. No longer able to blame malfeasance on the previous administration's appointments, the government stopped denouncing corruption in the press. In any case, agents who had been charged with internal investigations now had more urgent, external threats to address.
Legislating Anticlericalism
Most of the anticlerical laws the police were called on to enforce under the new policies dated from the liberal reforms of the mid 1850s. Significant among them were the 1855–56 laws that limited the authority of ecclesiastical courts and forced the sale of Church-owned properties, and the liberal constitution of 1857, which broke with precedent by omitting any distinction of Catholicism as Mexico's official religion. These changes, among other sources of antagonism, provoked a civil war between liberals and conservatives. During the Three Years War (1857–1861), liberals passed new and more aggressive laws that formalized the separation of church and state, prohibited religious orders, and instituted civil marriage. Known collectively as the Reforma laws, they also required churches to request permission from civil authorities to carry out religious ceremonies in public areas, regulated tithes, and placed all Church-administered hospitals and charity institutions under government jurisdiction.
After the war, and the subsequent French invasion that led to the empire of Austrian archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, animosity between the Church and state continued, but ecclesiastical and civil authorities were able to agree on some common principles. The liberal state came to value the church's moralizing influence over the supposedly dissolute populace, and religious activists took advantage of the separation of Church and state to form autonomous organizations dedicated to strengthening religious practices and beliefs.Footnote 43 Further, the political instability of the period during which the Reforma laws were promulgated prevented civil authorities from exercising thorough enforcement. The pragmatic Díaz deliberately continued this trend in order to lessen conflict even more. As a result, public processions, convents, and Church-administered charities continued, unconstitutionally, well into the early twentieth century.Footnote 44
This relative peace between Church and state persisted into the early days of the revolution. The leader of the Díaz opposition, Francisco I. Madero, made clear his sympathy for programs conducted by religious organizations, such as those inspired by the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum, to improve the education and living conditions of the lower classes. His support gave hope to Catholics that enforcement of anticlerical laws would continue to be lax, as it was under Díaz, and the recently formed National Catholic Party (PNC) backed Madero against the pro-Díaz candidate in the 1911 elections.Footnote 45 However, social tensions increased sharply when insurgent peasants and organized workers demanded radical social reforms in the wake of Madero's election. Conservatives, including members of the PNC, supported the 1913 coup led by Victoriano Huerta, who overthrew and killed Madero. In the aftermath, any sympathy between revolutionaries and the clergy came to an end.Footnote 46 Revolutionary factions came together to overthrow Huerta the following year and sent several Church hierarchs and Catholic activists into exile.Footnote 47
Anticlericalism subsequently became central to the rhetoric and practice of revolutionaries who saw no reason to tolerate the Church's constitutional transgressions and political meddling. Pledging to fulfill the vision of a sovereign nation governed by civil authority that had been set forth in the Reforma laws, they took anticlericalism much further. Article 3 of the 1857 constitution had declared education to be free; the 1917 Constitution made it not only free but also secular, prohibiting churches from establishing or administering primary schools. To the ban on ecclesiastical properties, revolutionaries added the expropriation of church buildings. Further, the original Article 123 (1857) had granted the federal authority “exclusive power in matters of religious worship,” but left vague what such matters entailed. The 1917 constitution clarified that authority with a sledgehammer. Redrafted as Article 130, the new constitutional provision formalized the state's authority over the Church by denying the latter juridical personality and granting the federal executive authority to intervene in the administration and comportment of priests. It forbade foreign priests in the clergy, prohibited clergy from criticizing laws or voting in civil elections, and banned newspapers and political organizations whose titles denoted any religious affiliation. Finally, the article gave individual states the authority to determine the number of priests allowed per capita and required clergy to register with local officials. Fearing Mexicans' sympathies toward the clergy, the constitution ruled that violations to these articles could not be judged by jury trial.Footnote 48
Initial application of the 1917 laws came piecemeal, with a few fervently anticlerical state governors enforcing them, some with provocative whims such as the requirement in Tabasco that Catholic priests be married.Footnote 49 Clashes between revolutionaries and Catholic activists grew more frequent and intense as the 1920s progressed. Alarmed by such animosity, conservative Catholics regarded anticlericalism as a violation of the nation's deepest beliefs and practices.Footnote 50 In the summer of 1926, Archbishop José Mora y del Río wrote to Calles that, although the apostles had ordered respect for civil authorities, they had also insisted on “obeying God before men” whenever men imposed laws contrary to divine law. He added, ominously: “We shall never move from this position even if we have to sign our faith with blood.”Footnote 51 At the same time, revolutionary leaders insisted that the anticlerical measures were necessary to consolidate civil authority and enforce a uniform rule of law against an intransigent, reactionary clergy.
Shortly afterward, Calles announced the nationwide application of the anticlerical laws and inserted them into the penal code, which stipulated sanctions. Most infractions were punishable by a 500-peso fine or 15 days in prison, but criticism of the constitution could land a priest in jail for five years.Footnote 52 Similarly, new regulations regarding private schools specified how schools would have to operate in order to attain official recognition: they could not contain any religious images, altars, or prayer rooms; directors could not be members of the clergy; and all schools had to deliver data regarding academic performance to the secretary of public education.Footnote 53 These regulations immediately became known as the “Calles law.” However, what most dismayed conservative Catholics—what led them to compare Calles to Nero—were not simply the new methods the president had devised to constrain religion. Rather, it was clear to the conservatives that Calles intended to upend the tacit tolerance that had undergirded decades of coexistence between Church and state.
After centuries as Mexico's most significant and pervasive institution, with churches, schools, hospitals, and orphanages spread throughout the capital, the Church found itself limited by anticlerical laws to the confines of pews, which now belonged to the state. The hierarchy responded in a public letter that the Calles law “fiercely attacked the divine rights of the Church, rights we are charged to protect. It is so contrary to natural law, which holds religious freedom as the primordial base of civilization and prescribes the individual and social obligation to worship God.” Faced with such a violation of sacred moral values, the clergymen concluded, “To tolerate the situation would be a crime.”Footnote 54 The Church announced the suspension of religious services the following week, on August 1, 1926, the same day the so-called Calles law was to go into effect.
From Crimes of Depravity to Crimes of Devotion
The penal code for Mexico City, promulgated in 1871, offered a straightforward definition of crime: “the voluntary infraction of a penal law, doing what it prohibits or neglecting to do what it demands.”Footnote 55 Within this simple formulation lay what elites believed to be a crucial instrument to make Mexico City orderly, prosperous, and modern: laws, and the police who applied them, would repress the dissolution of the urban poor and protect their social superiors. The psychological, medical, and biographical profiles compiled by late nineteenth-century criminologists such as Carlos Roumagnac showed that delinquents came from families steeped in poverty, alcoholism, and squalid dwellings.Footnote 56 They constituted the urban underworld, feared by literate citizens who knew it only from the safety of the nota roja in newspapers. It was commonly accepted that crime reflected the poverty and depravity of its perpetrators, those who committed such acts as burglary, rape, and murder. If wealthy residents were not above the law, they certainly believed they were above such deviance.Footnote 57 The “fundamental distinction within modern Mexican society,” Robert Buffington has written, was the distinction between criminal and citizen.Footnote 58 Now, turning this concept on its head, revolutionary anticlericalism demanded that police detain priests, nuns, and pious widows for activities that only months before were seen as pillars, not transgressions, of societal norms. According to the new penal code, of course, “crime” included any action that violated the law. Therefore, nuns wearing habits as they tended to the elderly were committing acts that were as criminal as stealing or public drunkenness.
A central task of the new enforcement regime was to inspect institutions affiliated with the Church, such as schools, hospitals, and asylums, to see “if there was any infringement of the Constitutional Precepts going on inside.”Footnote 59 Agents were to close down any chapels they found and remove religious altars from them. While inspecting the Loreto asylum for the sick, agents ordered the nuns to abandon the building, leaving only one nun (and a cleaning lady) in charge of the patients. However, the nuns insisted on taking the patients with them.Footnote 60 In another incident, Agents 49 and 38 inspected a house that was operating as a convent. They explained to the nuns inside that to “conduct convent life” was against the law. However, as the nuns carefully pointed out, what appeared to be cells were only simple beds surrounded by curtains. Their habits, similarly, were not actual habits but simple “uniforms such as those used in any charity institution.”Footnote 61 Unconvinced, the department chief sent another agent who ordered them to change out of their habits.Footnote 62
In schools, nuns and priests removed icons and donned civil clothing in order to satisfy agents' primary demands. At a Catholic school on Morelos Avenue, agents could not find a single student. The chapel had been “stripped of its saints, candleholders, and everything else usually on an altar,” and the caretaker of the school refused to give the names of the nuns.Footnote 63 At La Santísima College, agents stationed a beat cop to watch the back doors while they knocked at the front. A nun answered and, seeing who they were, quickly went back inside. The agents could hear her running through the building, warning the others. Although the director of the school insisted the building was being rented as a private residence, the agents found two prayer rooms with religious artifacts. The director offered the agents a bribe, which they refused (education inspectors, she noted, had always accepted them). Later in the day, when the agents returned to close the prayer rooms, they found a dormitory with 12 beds as well as nuns dressed in their habits. The house, they concluded, was still a convent.Footnote 64
These inspections were not brutish raids. Agents often reported varying degrees of leniency. Such forbearance suggests that police, once again caught between legislators and transgressors, were working out their own negotiations. They were no longer dealing with street vendors, thieves, and vagrants from their own working-class neighborhoods, but with “madres” and “padres” of the church whose religious beliefs they most likely shared and whom they had from childhood learned to respect and even venerate. These religious authorities were also accustomed to being treated with deference. Furthermore, the agents' bosses, practically to a man, had only recently moved to Mexico City from northern states, especially Sonora, where churches were scarce and the few priests active there had earned the aversion of civil and ecclesiastical authorities for their supposedly licentious behavior.Footnote 65 Amid the baroque profusion of churches in Mexico City, in contrast, anti-Catholicism and hostility toward priests were much more moderate. These factors help explain how administrators of religious institutions were often able to circumvent, if only temporarily, aspects of the law.
Agents appeared especially uncertain about how the new laws applied to foreigners. They were flummoxed, for example, by the Presbyterian Normal School, which, “being Protestant,” lacked images of “any nature at all.”Footnote 66 Four agents inspected the Franco-English School with the order to arrest any foreign priests. They rushed in and surprised a French priest who, in the act of confessing a parishioner, ran out a back door with the objects he had used to make an “improvised altar,” the chapel having been previously closed by agents. Asked whether there were any more foreign priests, the director of the school responded “haughtily” and “dared us to try and find them.” The agents left.Footnote 67 At the Asylum of Helpless Elderly, 14 Spanish nuns of the congregation Hermanitas de los Ancianos Desamparados were in charge of 114 elderly residents. Agents closed off the asylum's chapel and vestry and informed the nuns that by wearing habits they were violating the law; however, they did not deport the foreign nuns as the law mandated.Footnote 68 They also inspected a “regeneration asylum,” owned by an English woman, that housed 170 women, including former prostitutes and “incorrigible” girls. Despite the existence of a prayer room and the religious education students received from at least four foreign (Spanish) instructors, the agents did not close the asylum because the British embassy stated that the property belonged to a British citizen.Footnote 69
Being a foreigner did not necessarily keep the police at bay, though. Even those who claimed to have ceased working in religious roles were subject to arrest, which meant that the many priests who had fled to Mexico City from persecution in towns and villages could not find a haven in the capital.Footnote 70 Agents hung around hospitals, asylums, and orphanages to listen for foreign accents. Agent 19 apprehended Manuel Serra in a hospital after he overheard the priest speaking to the mother superior with a Spanish accent.Footnote 71 Agents discovered Italian, French, and Polish priests in hiding in a building owned by the Salesian College of Santa Julia.Footnote 72 They accompanied these and other foreign priests to the port of Veracruz and made sure they embarked on ships sailing either to Havana or all the way to Europe.Footnote 73
The police closed more than 30 schools, convents, and asylums in Mexico City during February and March of 1926.Footnote 74 In late June, they closed 94 more institutions.Footnote 75 Even before church authorities ordered the suspension of public ceremonies in August of that year, this wave of closures drove worship out of ecclesiastical institutions. Religious practice became decentralized and private, which further changed and challenged enforcement. Police struggled to follow the church into more dispersed locations, such as the private residences where nuns, expelled from their official convents, improvised cells, prayer rooms, and chapels. Agents patrolled middle-class neighborhoods looking for groups of conservatively groomed women in sweater vests. In Tacubaya, agents inspecting a house found a chapel, cells, and religious icons. The tenants insisted the building had not been a convent for some time but a private residence where a married couple lived with three nuns, one of whom was the husband's sister. The agents closed off the chapel and confiscated the key.Footnote 76 The comings and goings of several women made agents suspicious of a house on Peñón Street. Inside, they found a prayer room with religious sculptures, an “infinite” number of silver milagros, wooden benches, a confessional, “innumerable candles,” an alms box, and a priest and “numerous women in prayer”—in short, everything required for a church.Footnote 77 Another house had a door leading to a contiguous private chapel that contained a large image, a confessionary, a pulpit, and 13 pews. As the tenant explained, the landlady required her to let people access the chapel through her house.Footnote 78 The shape of religious practice thus shifted with the circumstances; pushed by police from churches and convents, people and rituals slipped off into less visible and more personal spaces.
The constitution banned worship in public spaces outside of churches but said nothing of private homes. After the suspension of public worship, the archbishop urged Catholics to “carry out actions of perfect contrition in order to remain always in a state of grace” and to help the priests who found themselves in “difficult economic circumstances, without the means to maintain themselves and without a house in which to find refuge.”Footnote 79 Many priests had become fugitives, either because they were foreigners or because they refused to register with local authorities. They visited several houses a day, hearing confessions, giving communion, and administering sacraments.Footnote 80 “Rosaries” of private homes hosted clandestine mass, prayer sessions, and holy hours. At the same time, lay Catholics took on more ceremonial responsibilities and requested permission from the archbishop to use religious icons, such as the Stations of the Cross, in their homes.Footnote 81 Wealthy families had the means to support priests, the space to hold ceremonies, and, sometimes the prominence and influence to keep police at bay. Inspector General Roberto Cruz, for instance, allowed his wife to organize clandestine ceremonies followed by grand banquets. Cruz demanded only that no cars park near the front door and that there not be “crowds that would call too much attention.”Footnote 82
These private acts became so common that the government came to consider them as public, and increasingly as illegal, because they provided cover for neighbors, friends, and priests on the lam. The attorney general ordered agents to prosecute priests who officiated in houses and their congregants as well.Footnote 83 As a reporter covering “bootleg religion” wrote, the “thousands of secret masses” were “fraught with danger,” adding that “the police may swoop down and arrest all present.”Footnote 84 Hence, the spectacle of police escorting groups of 15, 20, even 40 or more wealthy Catholics into jail for the crime of attending ceremonies in private houses became commonplace. In most cases, police released attendees from the basement prison once they paid fines, which ranged from 100 to 2,000 pesos.Footnote 85 For most, this was their first stay in a prison, or anything else that stunk of poverty and depravity. Sympathetic Catholics brought prisoners boots because the floor was constantly flooded with filthy water. Once released, they related the experience with a hint of pride for having endured such a “dark and dirty dungeon.” They described the prison much as journalists and government hygienists described the housing of the poor. The “worst torture,” one chronicler wrote, “was not the material discomfort, but the way in which people were crammed together into such a small, diseased space.”Footnote 86 At least as offensive was the “criminal promiscuity” to which these citizens were subjected: “pure virgins with prostitutes, youth and gentlemen of high society with underworld criminals.”Footnote 87 Not only did anticlericalism threaten the beliefs and practices of the otherwise law-abiding decent citizens; enforcement of the laws also subjected them to conditions experienced only by the poor and depraved.
Crimes of Sedition
In addition to ecclesiastical institutions and illegal worship, police targeted lay organizations affiliated with the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty.Footnote 88 Founded in March 1925, the league brought together the Mexico Catholic Youth Association, the Knights of Columbus, the Union of Catholic Ladies, and the National Catholic Labor Confederation, among other groups. Its first act was to set forth its principles, grievances, and demands in a manifesto they later distributed throughout the city streets.Footnote 89 “It is high time,” the manifesto declared, “that Mexican Catholics come together to defend our Religion and our Patria.”Footnote 90 Against the abuses of “revolutionary Socialism,” flyers proclaimed: “We want to be the masters of our conscience; we want to be the masters of the fate of our children; we want to be the masters of our will as Christians; we want to be the masters of our churches and alters; we want the Catholic Church to be free in Mexico.”Footnote 91 The clergy gave the organization its blessing and counsel. The archbishop instructed priests to “strongly exhort” parishioners to join the league and “work together as God wishes.”Footnote 92
Initially, the police had a hard time learning much about the league. Agents were not experienced in espionage or infiltration, and they usually pursued suspicious persons, like so many balloons, only after manifestos appeared or rebellious events occurred. Agent 1 waited for several hours in the offices of the Knights of Columbus until he managed to meet an acquaintance of René Capistrán Garza who led him to a teahouse where he was able to get a glimpse of the president of the Mexican Catholic Youth Association.Footnote 93 Agent 7 had no success with gathering intelligence and attributed his lack of findings to the leadership's decentralization, which “spread responsibility among all members.”Footnote 94 Agent 18 also came up short and compensated for his empty notebook with vague generalizations. “All Catholic organizations,” he wrote to his chief, “belong to the league, and priests have been urging churchgoers to join.” Organizers, he said, included former members of the Díaz government and of the defunct National Catholic Party, as well as bankers and politicians who had supported the coup against Madero. The league, he concluded, was “utterly seditious” and the government should close it down in order to avoid “a. . . religious struggle, which is, as is known, the most terrible type.”Footnote 95 Agent 18’s “discoveries” required no great sleuthing—anyone who had picked up a flyer off the street could have found the same information. Likewise, Agent 9’s interview with unnamed leaders yielded only information the manifestos had already made public.Footnote 96
Gobernación immediately declared the league illegal and seditious, citing the constitutional ban on “political organizations” of religious affiliation.Footnote 97 Yet, strictly speaking, its members were not breaking any laws. The organizations the constitution referred to were political parties, such as the National Catholic Party.Footnote 98 Furthermore, although the clergy was barred from criticizing the anticlerical laws, ordinary citizens were not, and as Agent 7 reported, “prominent fanatics” ran the league, not priests.Footnote 99 Early on, league leaders had assumed their positions publicly without hiding their identities; mixing candor and dignity, they signed manifestos and flyers with their full names and addresses. Yet, the attorney general soon made clear that civilian activists had no immunity. He ordered police to “act energetically” against “Catholic priests or simple individuals” who disturbed public order. Anyone who distributed seditious propaganda, “or execute[d] any act in violation of the constitutional dispositions regarding religion,” would be subject to trial.Footnote 100
This decree gave police a broad net with which to round up and detain the league's leadership for a few weeks in the notorious basement of the Inspector General's office. After this first wave of arrests, activists became more circumspect and their operational structure more clandestine. As one agent reported, there were one or more substitutes ready to take over the responsibilities of each leader should that person be detained. Drawing on the assumption that women were more pious than men, and calculating that police would be reluctant to arrest upper-class women, women leaders assumed key roles as neighborhood organizers.Footnote 101 Also, instead of signing manifestos and posting them on walls, activists floated them surreptitiously across the city in balloons made of crêpe paper. Fire from a burning rag set on a wire frame below a balloon's opening filled it with hot air; firecrackers attached to the frame flung the flyers onto the street below. The league distributed diagrams showing how to fill the balloons and fit them to the wire frames and coordinated collective launchings, with some 50 houses simultaneously releasing 500 balloons over Mexico City while police scrambled below to stop them.Footnote 102 On January 1, 1926, the police arrested José de León Toral, the future assassin of president-elect Álvaro Obregón, for launching flyers that incited soldiers to rebel.Footnote 103Excélsior, the largest Mexico City daily, reported that, “the police have been exercising close supervision over all the city's streets, with constant motorcycle patrols, in order to prevent the league from distributing propaganda.”Footnote 104 In the event that police were unable to prevent a launch, the Confidential Department chief instructed them to identify the houses from which balloons emerged and arrest the occupants.Footnote 105 On the same December day that Agent 15 spotted the girl in the lilac-colored dress, his colleagues apprehended at least five other people, accused of “spreading seditious propaganda via balloons.”Footnote 106 In July 1926, police raided the league's office, taking files and arresting leaders, including several “respectable ladies” from the Union of Catholic Ladies, for distributing seditious materials.Footnote 107 The flyers urged Mexicans to defend their faith against the boorish neo-Caligulas who threw respectable ladies and nuns into prison.
The government contended that the alleged crimes of Catholic activists went beyond nonviolent protests and clandestine ceremonies. It is true that by late 1926, many urban activists had unambiguously embraced violence, but during these earlier raids, police acted on rather flimsy evidence. Sources do not make clear whether Catholics were actually planning violent rebellions in the city, or if the police were inventing plots as a pretext to harass them. In August 1926, Security Commissions chief José Mazcorro declared he had prevented a plot to launch a riot and kill Calles by arresting some 70 “well-known” people, including “wealthy ladies,” and seized “a huge amount of documents and some arms.” Police informed the press that the documents justified further arrests, but these documents are not to be found in the police files. The next day, Mazcorro led a raid on the residence of Josefina Novoa in the suburb of San Ángel. As police entered, Novoa gave a “secret sign” to someone who rang the bells of the nearby San Jacinto church, which alerted the neighbors and parishioners, all of whom rushed at the agents with such force and numbers that the police feared a lynching. Fifty police on motorcycles rushed to the scene to quell the disorder. At the same time, agents raided a house downtown, where they found documents and manifestos calling for open “revolution.” A series of arrests followed, including that of the regional secretary of the Unión de Damas Católicas (and owner of the “Silk Sombrero” hat shop), among several other Catholic activists.Footnote 108
The suspects, mostly women, all belonged to the league, but the police had little on them. Allegedly, the suspects were planning a rebellion. According to police, the documents collected during the searches and subsequent interrogations indicated the “subversive movement” was to break out on August 19 at 9:00 am, when exiled generals were to cross the border from Texas. Police declared that the arrested activists had an arsenal of pistols and rifles, which they had managed to hide before the police arrived. Excélsior (whose editor Félix Palavicini was no supporter of Calles, Obregón, or the anticlerical campaign) noted sarcastically that perhaps the conspirators were plotting a “weaponless revolution.” The police later said that disgruntled revolutionaries in the village of Amecameca, at the foot of the volcanoes southeast of the city, were planning a revolt together with the “respectable ladies.” As proof, they presented one rifle and two pistols. The men arrested, however, claimed that the municipal president had been using the threat of false accusation to force them to work his fields.Footnote 109
Among the many women arrested was Luz Franco viuda de Perches, auxiliary to the neighborhood league leader and widow of a prominent physician.Footnote 110 She allegedly confessed to being one of the plot leaders, a position she had assumed because “nowadays, men are good for absolutely nothing.” Of her correspondence seized by police, two letters from a cousin who managed her hacienda in La Victoria, Torreón, were especially incriminating. In one, the cousin informed “Lucita” that, “the cotton has been blooming nicely, though less than other years, due to the cold weather.” In the other, he asked her to buy him “ten English lessons and two boxes of needles.”Footnote 111 The publication of “Lucita's” letters in Excélsior was surely Palavicini's way of mocking what he perceived as the government's arbitrary exercise of authority into the private lives of respectable citizens. However, although the arrested women went free ten days later due to a lack of incriminating evidence, police were correct in suspecting Luz Franco's involvement in seditious activities. Soon after her release, she fled to El Paso, Texas, where she met with Guillermo Rosas, the private secretary of Félix Díaz (Porfirio Díaz's nephew, who organized the coup against Madero in 1913), as well as exiled members of the Knights of Columbus, who were cobbling together an anti-Calles/Obregón alliance.Footnote 112
Whether or not they had pulled such a group together, it is important to remember that activists did more than pray for solutions. Matthew Butler's argument, echoed by scholars sympathetic to Catholic activists, that revolutionaries applied anticlerical laws with “sectarian vindictiveness” is only part of the story.Footnote 113 Explanations of enforcement as retribution against transgressions of the Church ignore the real threat that Catholic militants, supported at least tacitly by ecclesiastical authorities, represented for the state. Frustrated by the apparent futility of peaceful protests such as the boycott, urban activists increasingly joined their rural coreligionists' embrace of violence. Young militants in Mexico City associated with the Mexican Catholic Youth Association carried out several attempts to assassinate Obregón, whom they regarded as the mastermind of anticlericalism. In November 1927, for example, they tried to toss bombs into his car as he drove through Chapultepec Park to a bullfight.
In the wake of these incidents, authorities dispensed with legal niceties. Calles demanded that Inspector General Cruz carry out the summary executions of the plotters, as well as their alleged accomplices. Mazcorro famously accompanied the condemned men, including the Jesuit priest Miguel Agustín Pro, before the firing squad. After José de León Toral shot and killed Obregón, detective Valente Quintana oversaw his interrogation—which consisted, among other things, in his being hung by his toes, thumbs, and testicles.“Footnote 114 Such torture and other examples of brute force, which to critics ”contrast sarcastically with the legalist meticulousness of which Calles and his friends continually boast,” did not translate into more proactive investigation by police.Footnote 115 Unable to infiltrate Catholic organizations, police did little more than react to events after they occurred.
In April 1928, young activists placed bombs in the Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of congress) and then in Obregón's campaign headquarters. Since no one claimed responsibility, speculation ran from rival revolutionaries to the Obregonistas themselves. There was no suspicion that the perpetrators had been members of the Mexican Catholic Youth Association. Authorities learned who had placed the bombs only after Obregón's assassination in July, when police detained the young man who had lent León Toral the murder weapon. On the one hand, their inability to prevent attacks reflected the inexperience of the police; on the other, the continual harassment and episodes of extrajudicial violence had successfully dismantled activist organizations.
Police were unable to prevent actions such as the assassination of Obregón, but they had significantly weakened the organizational structure of local Catholic organizations, thereby compromising the national and international coordination of the armed rebellion. Breaking up clandestine masses was a very visible aspect of police activity, but the archives of the Confidential Department show that police also intercepted numerous shipments of bullets sent from Mexico City and seized printing presses and propaganda. The already decentralized leadership of the league grew even more fragmented. The young activists who planted the bombs (and had earlier plotted to poison Obregón with a bouquet of flowers) turned to such actions precisely because they were disconnected from other Catholic militants and from the opposition movement in general. Together with the dozens of convents closed, the hundreds of foreign priests deported, and the thousands of crucifixes removed from hospitals, schools, and asylums, these accomplishments suggest that, regardless of the arguable long-term consequences for the Catholic Church, the Calles regime had successfully aligned the police forces with the broader political vision.
Conclusions
The enforcement of anticlerical laws in 1920s Mexico markedly changed understandings of crime and the functions of police. Consolidating authority in a political landscape rife with conflict required a police force able to identify and repress threats from opposition groups. The anticlerical laws required such a force, and their enforcement helped create it. The very process of capturing fugitive priests, inspecting chapels, and arresting upper-class Catholic women, in addition to the normal cast of “common criminals,” brought the police closer to the administration's broad policy goals. Although agents of the Confidential Department appear to have completed their tasks honestly (of course, they were not likely to mention bribes in their reports), the alignment with the federal executive did not curtail corruption among police in general. Indeed, the careers of Quintana, Meneses, Mazcorro, and other key figures involved in both enforcement and delinquency continued successfully for years. Allowing a degree of corruption was part of the reciprocal relationship that encouraged police loyalty toward the executive. By reshuffling corrupt officials, the administration emphasized not morality or transparency but adherence to a politically malleable vision of the rule of law.
The police's orders to arrest and gather intelligence on unlikely criminal subjects such as “respectable Catholic ladies” constituted new criteria of enforcement unrelated to the previous focus on common criminals. The new laws required police to cross lines within the social hierarchy in an unprecedented fashion. According to prerevolutionary social norms, police were to defer to “high-society gentlemen” and prosecute “underworld criminals,” and it was a key objective of the police to keep the latter at a safe distance from the former. It is tempting to see the arrests of respectable citizens, priests, and nuns as signs of a democratization of justice, and there was doubtlessly a degree of class retribution and rough-riding egalitarianism at play when police escorted finely dressed Catholics from their homes, into the wagons, and into the basement prison. Officials pointed to the wealth and status of Catholic dissidents as signs of their reactionary politics and Calles caricatured them as society ladies who “use the Catholic religion as a pretext to vent old grudges.”Footnote 116 However, it was not only the arrest of such subjects that was novel, but also their emergence as political actors. Their public arrests and incarcerations were exemplary punishments, not of wealthy persons as such but as ideological opponents.
Although anticlericalism posed many affronts to members of polite society who yearned for the old order, it was not an attack on social hierarchy per se. The enforcement of anticlericalism did cross boundaries of class and gender but only to the degree that Catholic activism in Mexico City was prominent among the middle and upper classes, and among women. Certainly, the new enforcement imperatives did not include improving the well-being of poor people caught up in the justice system or of peasants engaged in the Catholic rebellion.
This type of policing did nothing to answer to conventional demands for more orderly streets, greater protection of property, or a less vice-ridden lower class. Now, police were to pursue activities that most ordinary Mexicans did not consider criminal at all. The new laws constituted a categorical shift: they were not aimed at restraining deviance (although many viewed “fanaticism” as akin to drunkenness), but at reshaping Mexican society according to an ideological vision that equated secularism with sovereignty and regarded policing as an extension of the political objectives of the federal executive. In particular, they aimed to impose the authority of the civil government upon the Church's understandings of divine law. Breaking up clandestine masses, detaining priests with foreign accents, chasing after balloons: this was the street-level enforcement of anticlericalism, the concrete battles of the clash between rival institutions and notions of justice.
