Mexico and the American Labor Movement
Part I of Breaking God’s Syndicate | Chapter 3
MEXICO CITY – Luis N. Morones first caught the attention of Samuel Gompers, the 32º Freemason of the D.C. Scottish Rite and founder of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), at a convention organized by the federation in Saint Paul, Minnesota in June, 191617.
Gompers was impressed by Morones’ moderate views on questions of organized labor and tapped the Mexican union leader to establish direct lines of communication between the AFL and Mexico’s labor movements, through bilateral meetings and conferences slated to take place in the United States.
Gompers was interested in preventing the rival Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)18 from gaining a foothold in labor organizations south of the border and taking Morones under his wing gave him leverage over the incipient Constitutionalist government of Venustiano Carranza, which had yet to be recognized by the U.S. Congress.
Carranza, who had financed Morones’ trip to Minnesota, was eager to have the support of his North American neighbor to help him consolidate power as his forces neared victory over the popular armies of Villa and Zapata, which was in turn, weakening his alliances with the working classes.
The mutual interests of his two benefactors catalyzed Morones’ political future, whose rise within the Mexican labor movement had benefited from Carranza’s early pact with workers and as a result of his relationship with Gompers, would find himself in a position to survive Carranza’s own political demise and become a crucial political operative for the ‘Sonoran’ faction that would soon take the reins of power.
Under the watchful eye of James Lord, president of the AFL’s Mining Department and advisor for the Committee on Labor of President Woodrow Wilson’s Council of National Defense, Morones along with 120 delegates from several labor organizations gathered in Saltillo, Coahuila in the spring of 1918, formed the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), which immediately elected him Secretary General for the new organization.
At the conference’s conclusion, Lord and another AFL official, John Murray, extended an invitation to all of the organizations now affiliated to CROM to attend an upcoming AFL convention, which did not sit well with members of Morones’ own Federacion de Sindicatos Obreros del Distrito Federal (FSODF).
Morones’ ambitions had already grown beyond local union organizing, setting his sights on the Pan-American labor federation proposed by the AFL and led by a committee chaired by Murray. After showing up to the AFL convention, ignoring the wishes of FSODF’s membership19, Morones and Gompers convened another conference to take place that November in Laredo, Texas.
Backed by Carranza, Morones publicly rejected any association between his country’s labor organizations and the IWW on behalf of the Mexican delegation, in part to cement his alliance with Gompers and to protect the newly-formed CROM, which would reach its apex of power during the Calles administration and make him the second most powerful person in Mexico.
Inciting the Masses
On June 14, 1926, Plutarco E. Calles signed into law the ley de tolerancia de cultos (law regarding the tolerance of religious cults), or Ley Calles, consisting of 33 new articles based on article 130 º of the constitution, forcing all religious institutions to register with the state and be subject to the restrictions imposed upon it by the legislature.
A year had passed since the schismatic Mexican Church had burst on the scene, and while “Patriarch” Perez Budar had made some progress, the notion that ICAM could ever hope to compete with the four hundred years of indoctrination, 12,000-plus churches and the estimated 3,600 clerics boasted by the Roman Catholic Church in Mexico at the time20 was ludicrous.
ICAM’s plotters in the Calles government had hinged the plan’s success on targeting populations in the textile manufacturing corridor, located between Puebla and Mexico City, as well as other regions where the CROM had some manner of union power, theoretically furnishing them with a solid recruitment base for the national church
The folly in this strategy had become obvious almost immediately since the geographical map of CROM strongholds overlapped almost exactly with those of the Roman Catholic Church, both of which were mostly concentrated in the central plateau of the Mexican republic, comprising parts of Jalisco, Guanajuato, Aguascalientes, Michoacán, San Luis Potosí, Queretaro and Zacatecas, collectively known as El Bajío.
Religious persecution in the final phases of the revolution had galvanized the Catholic leadership, many of them exiled in the United States, and the Church’s staunchest supporters. By 1926, most of the Roman Catholic bishops and clergy members who had found safe haven abroad had returned to find their rights significantly reduced. In the interim, anti-government groups comprised of Catholic civilians, students and lay members of the Church had gained considerable momentum.
War Footing at the Vatican
Bernardo Bergoënd’s Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM), established since 1913 in Mexico City, provided the scaffold for the nation-wide Catholic opposition networks and armed guerillas that would square off against federal troops in the imminent conflict known as the Cristiada.
ACJM, through its merger with a French Marist student association called Centro Union21, had established regional centers in 17 states, including an international center in Texas, along with over 100 local chapters and six regional committees by 1919. Guadalajara, by far its most important center, had 34 local chapters.
Archbishop Orozco y Jimenez, committed to carrying out the directives of Social Catholicism laid out by Pope Leo XIII in the Rerum novarum, oversaw the creation of the Confederación Nacional Católica del Trabajo – a proletarian workers’ union linked to the Church intended to preempt the state’s plans to create its own – in 1922.
Several other groups, like the Union Nacional de Damas Católicas (National Union of Catholic Dames) and the Knights of Columbus began to cross pollinate with all the other Catholic movements and the Church hierarchy to shape a formidable bloc against the liberal policies of the post-revolutionary government, crystalizing in the formation of the Liga Nacional de Defensa Religiosa (the League) in March, 1925.
Professing to defend freedom of religion and the rights of the Catholic Church, the League was the brainchild of Bernardo Bergoënd, who had proposed the idea to the Archbishop of Mexico, José Mora y del Río eight years earlier. Approved by Mora y del Río at the time, the project was put on hold on account of Archbishop Orozco y Jimenez’ judgement that the timing was inauspicious22.
Finally established a month after Perez Budar’s schismatic manifesto appeared on the streets of Mexico City, the League’s own manifesto set off alarm bells in the presidential palace and spurred Calles into action, sending a memo to the governors of all 32 states and military brass exhorting them to keep an eye on the group, which he considered to be in violation of article 130 º of the constitution.
By the end of 1925, the League had divided its membership into 11 zones23 spanning several states across the country. Headquartered in Mexico City, where it had 18 local centers, the League set up an additional 29 regional centers and 127 local ones throughout the republic and became the Catholic Church’s de facto military wing of the Cristero rebellion.
A “Holy” War for Labor
In response to the Ley Calles, the Catholic Church suspended all ecclesiastical and sacramental services throughout the country. Designed to pressure the government by inciting civil unrest, the openly defiant move against the Calles administration was given the go-ahead by the Vatican, which cabled Pope Pius XI’s approval to Mexico’s episcopal authorities via Cardinal Gasparri.
Days after the Ley Calles was officially enacted in November, 1926, the League established a war committee to begin coordinating an armed resistance movement, which had already started to manifest somewhat spontaneously over the previous months. Apprised of this development, Mexico’s Roman Catholic hierarchy stopped short of condemning the League’s lurch towards armed conflict.
Meanwhile, their decision to stop conducting mass in the summer of 1926 turned out to be a godsend for the floundering national ministry of Perez Budar, as thousands of orphaned Catholic churchgoers turned to his temples for a fix.
Rumors of CROM’s and Calles’ involvement in the creation of ICAM were widespread by this time and basically accepted as fact, forcing the administration and Perez Budar to engage in a public relations ploy, launching disparaging invectives towards each other in the media, to try to dispel what everybody already knew was the case.
Regardless, Calles and Morones had seen the writing on the wall and distancing themselves from the national church project was as much a recognition of the fact that ICAM had no real future as it was necessary for their political survival.
Perez Budar, however, thought his star was ascending and that the future of the Mexican Church was bright. Perhaps buoyed by the swelling concurrence brought about by the suspension of Roman Catholic services, but more likely goaded by a mysterious member of his inner circle, the patriarch of ICAM made a very special trip to Chicago, Illinois in September.
Announced in the Church’s official publication, Restauración, in an article titled “The Mexican Patriarch Abroad”24, no reason or destination was specified in the piece, which limited itself to wishing the leader of the Mexican Church a relaxing journey.
In reality, Perez Budar was on his way to be consecrated bishop by Carmel Henry Carfora, Metropolitan Archbishop of the “North American Old Roman Catholic Church”, a dubious religious institution that existed in the United States for no more than a decade and for no other reason than to produce as many branches of anti-Papist Catholic clergy as possible.
Spawned from politically-motivated, schismatic circles in England with direct ties to founding members of the Theosophical Society, Carfora’s church offered Budar the opportunity to tender his credentials as a legitimate clergyman with the power to formally consecrate other bishops through its disputed, but technically valid claims to apostolic succession.
[17 La Diplomacia Obrera: La Estrategia Sindical y Las Relaciones México-Estados Unidos Durante Los Años Posrevolucionarios, Cedillo Fernández]
[18 Minutes of the Executive Council of the American Federation of Labor, 1893–1955 – Part 1. 1893–1924]
[19 La Diplomacia Obrera: La Estrategia Sindical y Las Relaciones México-Estados Unidos Durante Los Años Posrevolucionarios, Cedillo Fernández]
[20 El Patriarca Pérez: la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana, Rancaño]
[21 La Guerra Cristera – Aspectos del Conflicto Religioso de 1926 a 1929, Sedano]
[22 Ibid.]
[23 Ibid.]
[24 El Patriarca Pérez: la Iglesia Católica Apostólica Mexicana, Rancaño]
