![]() ![]() If we define the Right as a politics in defense of political hierarchy and social inequality, it is obvious that it can take varied forms: traditional or modernizing religious or secular ideologically overt or secretive and dissembling. (In the 1990s, the new cultural history was no more attentive to the military, for different reasons.) The history of the postrevolutionary Right has also been relatively understudied, although perhaps not to the same degree. In any case, from the 1950s, by regional standards the military appeared quiescent and marginal to the civilian corporate monolith which, most analysts assumed, held the key to dominant-party rule. 2 Alan Knight, >, Miguel Angel Centeno (ed.), (.)ģThe Mexican military has long discouraged scholarly attention.By doing so, it aims to provide some historical perspective for Calderón's actions, illuminate and connect two themes which for a long time have been studied little and separately, and draw attention to some historiographical innovations and opportunities. Instead, it traces in broad strokes the relationship between the political Right and the Mexican military from the end of the Revolution to the early twenty-first century. And yet, here was Calderón, embracing the military as few PRI presidents had done and starting a deployment of troops on a scale unseen in Mexico since the 1920s.ĢThis paper skirts the recent, complicated, and bloody history of Calderón's drug war, the first drafts of which journalists and ethnographers are beginning to write. The military traced its origins to the Revolution, supplied the dominant party with political leaders for decades, policed much of the countryside, and from time to time carried out the regime's dirty work of political repression. Since 1939, the PAN had spent most of its existence contesting the regime of the Party of the Institutional Revolution (PRI), of which the military was an integral part. Calderón was the leader of the Partido Acción Nacional (PAN), Mexico's Catholic center-right party. It was impossible not to be stuck by a certain historical irony. 1 Although some left-wing journalists worried about military's involvement in policing and mocked Calderon's ill-fitting uniform, the President's approval rating improved. Soon after, Calderón began to talk of waging a "frontal war" against organized crime. The following month, television pictures showed Calderón reviewing these forces dressed in olive green military fatigues and surrounded by a cohort of officers. 1 "Calderón's war on Drug Cartels", Los Angeles Times, December 1, 2012.ġIn December 2006, Mexico's newly elected president, Enrique Calderón, sent 6,700 Mexican troops into the state of Michoacán to combat organized crime.
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