The State

The period studied in this work comes at the end of a phenomenon of long duration, the last stage of the growth and definitive establishment of the modern state, the state that would create the nation, through a centralised system of control and repression intolerant of any alternative – the ‘nation-state’. The contemporary political system was established, complete with its institutions and ideology, and provided a solution to the problem of power in Mexican society, made up as it was of superimposed and juxtaposed groups.

If this was the character of the movement in the long term, the short-term crisis, the tragic moment, was that of the struggle of factions within the group that was master of the state and was building the state. Obregón had dreamed, like a new Porfirio Díaz, of having Calles as his devoted González, in order to return subsequently to the Presidency; the function made the man, Calles became a politician and, utilising the traitor Morones (he was a traitor in the eyes of Obregón because he had previously made a pact with him), obliged his former leader to consent to the alternating diarchy. The religious conflict took place against the background of these circumstances: Obregón feared it, Morones provoked it, and Calles made use of it.