The Calles Government and Catholic Dissidents: Mexico's Transnational Projects of Repression, 1926-1929

Abstract

During the late 1920s, the Mexican government under President Plutarco Elías Calles (1924-1928) confronted multiple challenges to state consolidation. These included plots by political rivals, foreign relations crises, and several popular revolts. The longest-lasting and most destabilizing of these was the Cristero War, which persisted from 1926 until 1929, with sporadic uprisings into the early 1930s. Despite these challenges, Calles and his handpicked successors not only remained in power at the beginning of the 1930s, but also launched the single-party political system that would endure in Mexico until the end of the twentieth century.