Myths, Heroes and Transformations: Churchill, Martin Luther King and AMLO

During the contest to become leader of the Conservative Party, Boris (real name Alexander) Johnson was asked whether he had ever put public service above his own interests. His reply was that he had had to postpone a lucrative book about Shakespeare that the public was desperate to read. A few

Boris Johnson as Churchill

years ago, he published a biography of Winston Churchill. Now, I have not read his book, but there is no shortage of books about Churchill. Rather than a desire to contribute something new to our understanding of our war time leader, I suspect that Johnson’s objective was to associate himself with Churchill. Most Conservative politicians like to portray themselves as a modern Churchill, and preferably as the heir to Margaret Thatcher as well. They tend to gloss over Churchill’s failures in order to conjure up the myth of plucky little Britain left alone to defeat the Nazis and defend the free world. The Soviet Union’s participation in the same war is rarely mentioned. Recently, John McDonnell, the Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, was asked to reply in one word whether Churchill was a hero or a villain. His reply, “Villain”, apparently with reference to the suppression of a coal miner’s strike in 1910, brought immediate opprobrium. Whatever one’s evaluation of Churchill, it was not he who brought about a Transformation of the UK that introduced the NHS and Social Insurance, but the post-war Labour Prime Minister Clement Attlee and the Liberal reformer William Beveridge.

 

William Beveridge

We Brits are not alone in loving our myths. A few years ago, I visited the National Civil Rights

The National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN

Museum in Memphis, Tennessee. The museum is attached to the motel where Dr Martin Luther King was assassinated: one can visit the balcony on which he stood and, rather creepily, the exact position of the gunman in a building across the street. The museum shows a splendid film, which documents King’s campaign for Civil Rights, but also his absolute opposition to the Vietnam War and his unflinching support for workers’ rights, including a garbage worker’s strike in Memphis. One image in the film shows a striking African American man carrying a cardboard sign that reads “I too am a man”. There can be few contemporary politicians who would not associate themselves with Dr

LBJ and Dr King at the signing of the Civil Rights Bill

King  as a champion of Civil Rights, but most prefer the one-dimensional hero of civil rights, and conveniently omit his other campaigns. Nevertheless, The Civil Rights Bill, advocated by Dr King and implemented by President Johnson was certainly a Transformation.

The current president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO), relies on Mexicans’ love for their heroes when he refers to his Cuarta Transformación (“Fourth Transformation”). The other transformations to which he refers are the struggle for independence from Spain (1810-1821), the Liberal Reform of the 1860s, and the Mexican Revolution of 1910-1920. All three are replete with heroes — and villains — who give the Fourth Transformation all the right resonances.

Independence began with the Grito de Dolores (“the shout – or call to action – of Dolores”), father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla’s declaration of Independence from the steps of his church in the small town of Dolores. Hidalgo led an assault on the nearby Guanajuato, important for its silver mining.

El Pípila

Another hero gave the rebels victory: a young boy, known as Pípila, who worked in the mines, died laying an explosive charge at the doors of the granary where the Spanish troops had taken shelter. The Spaniards were massacred and their heads displayed on the walls of the building. Hidalgo died in March 1811. Another priest, José María Morelos y Pavón succeeded as the heroic leader of the struggle. Morelos convened the first Mexican congress in 1813, before dying for the struggle like Hidalgo.

Now, it is hard to argue that independence was a bad thing, but the results of the First Transformation were not entirely positive. For four decades opposing factions (crudely Centralists with a monarchist and pro-church bent, versus Federalists opposed to monarchy and the church) battled for power. Pronunciamientos (rebel proclamations) and the toppling of presidents were frequent. Upon independence, the indigenous peoples of Mexico were declared to be equal citizens with rights and obligations identical to those of non-indigenous citizens. Who could complain? But there were catches, which the newly equal Indians did not like at all. Firstly, they lost the special protections that they and their communities had been granted by the Spanish Crown. Independence eroded their self-government and, in many cases, villages’ communal lands. Individual liberty obliged the he Indians to pay new and very unpopular taxes.

The standard history includes a good number of 19^th century villains. Agustín de Iturbide, independent Mexico’s first ruler (as Emperor Agustín I) gets a bad press, as do the Catholic bishops. Antonio López de Santa Anna gets the blame for numerous pronunciamientos, the loss of Texas, and much of the responsibility for the later loss of California, Arizona and New Mexico. The arch-villain is Emperor Maximilian, the Austrian prince installed by Napoleon III and the Mexican monarchists, in 1862. This was when the Second Transformation occurred. The President at the time was a Liberal, Benito Juárez, an Indian from Oaxaca. Juárez packed the Mexican government into his carriage and wandered around northern Mexico to keep independent government alive and to escape capture. Juárez is AMLO’s ultimate national hero, triumphing in adversity. Eventually, Napoleon, tiring of the enterprise, withdrew his troops. Defeat at Querétaro cost Emperor Maximilian his life in 1867.

 

Juárez in a mural by José Clemente Orozco, National Museum of History, Mexico City

The Liberals were now free to implement their Laws of Reform. One of the most important results of the Reform was the expropriation of all church property. The church owned vast amounts of agricultural land, as well as churches, monasteries and convents. The law prohibited the right of any corporate body to own property. This included indigenous communities, many of which cultivated communal land to meet their expenses. Thus, the Reform laws were a direct attack on one of the fundamental elements of indigenous society. Curiously enough, that villain of history, Maximilian, had proposed laws to protect community land.

Porfirio Díaz

Despite their victory over Napoleon and Maximilian, Juárez’s Liberals. In 1876 they were replaced by a Liberal general, Porfirio Díaz (also an Indian from Oaxaca). Díaz remained in office as a dictator until 1911. His policy of pan y palo (bread and stick), suppressing rebellions and strikes and keeping opponents under his thumb. He also invited foreign capital to build railways and invest in agriculture, mining and petroleum. Landowners were given a free hand to expropriate community land, legally or illegally.

Zapata (centre left) and Villa (centre right)

By 1910, when he was due to be “re-elected” again, Díaz was opposed by political enemies, by a growing and ambitious middle class, and by oppressed peasants and rural workers. The Third Transformation was about to burst on the scene. This was the Mexican Revolution, a ten-year civil war littered with heroes and villains. Hero number one was “the Apostle of Democracy”, Francisco Indalecio Madero, a wealthy landowner and spiritualist from the northern state of Coahuila. His revolutionary slogan was Sufragio efectivo y no reelección (“A free vote and no re-election”). In the north Pancho Villa, a teetotaller and ardent lover of numerous women, led cowboys and other rural workers in revolt. In the southern state of Morelos Emiliano Zapata (played by Marlon Brando in the film Viva Zapata, screenplay by John Steinbeck) led rural villages in revolt under the banner of Tierra y Libertad (“Land and Liberty”) and the Virgin of Guadalupe. Madero, Villa and Zapata are heroes in Mexican school textbooks. The victorious Madero was elected, but turned out not to be a wily enough politician for his enemies in the army. The arch villain General Victoriano de la Huerta deposed and murdered Madero and his Vice President. De la Huerta was in turn deposed by revolutionary armies assailing him from north and south.

 

Pino Suárez (left) and Madero (right) lie dead outside Lecumberri prison

The victorious Constitutionalists led by President Venustiano Carranza and General Álvaro Obregón, a chickpea magnate by trade, wrote the current Mexican Constitution in 1917.  The Constitution set out the basic tenets of the political regime that ruled Mexico rarely challenged until the beginnings of this century: restitution of communal land to the villages, distribution of land from large estates to landless peasants, a degree of workers’ rights, and no re-election to any office in the nation. The

Zapata assassinated

heroes all came to a sticky end. Zapata was ambushed by a colonel in the federal army in 1919. Pancho Villa was given a large estate by the government and retired there but was ambushed in his car in 1923. Carranza died at the hands of federal troops while fleeing the capital and Obregón was assassinated by a fervent Catholic as he ate lunch.

To a degree the regime of managed democracy established by the Revolution brought benefits to peasants and workers, and stimulated industry and tourism. On the other hand, revolutionary leaders enriched themselves and their supporters and those who protested or opposed them could be dealt with very harshly. By the time the rule of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) came to an end in 2000, the system was groaning under the weight of corruption, waste and a young population unable to find employment. The violence created by drug cartels, with whom politicians were complicit, had reached alarming levels. Unfortunately, the new democratically elected governments failed to address profound social inequality, corruption, unemployment and violence. AMLO has promised that his Fourth Transformation will solve these enormous problems.

 

Jeremy Corbyn and AMLO in Tabasco

The United Kingdom is itself in the throes of a process that AMLO might well define as a Transformation: the ineluctable Brexit, in which myths and heroes are very much to the fore. One candidate for the leadership of the Conservative Party, Esther McVey launched her campaign with a framed photo of Margaret Thatcher by her side, much as any devout Mexican might display an

The winning run out in the World Cup

image of the Virgin of Guadalupe. The England cricket team recently won the cricket World Championship in an exceedingly close and tense final match against New Zealand. A fervent Brexiteer, Jacob Rees Mogg, MP, declared that this was proof that we do not need the EU. Rees Mogg’s subtext was the myth of plucky Britain standing alone without the support of the cowardly Europeans who capitulated to the Nazis. We were not bowed by the Blitz and we can take whatever hardships might result from leaving  the EU. Let’s hope that in the case of both the Mexican and British Transformations good judgement and sense prevail over myth.