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The Lynching of the Impious

Violence, Politics, and Religion in Postrevolutionary Mexico (1930s–1950s)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2020

Gema Kloppe-Santamaría
Gema Kloppe-Santamaría*
Affiliation:
Loyola University Chicago, Illinoisgsantamaria@luc.edu
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Abstract

This article analyzes the impact that religion had on the act of lynching and its legitimation in postrevolutionary Mexico. Basing its argument on the examination of several cases of lynching that took place after the religiously motivated Cristero War had ended, the article argues that the profanation of religious objects and precincts revered by Catholics, the propagation of conservative and reactionary ideologies among Catholic believers, and parish priests’ implicit or explicit endorsement of belligerent forms of Catholic activism all contributed to the perpetuation of lynching from the 1930s through the 1950s. Taking together, these three factors point at the relationship between violence and the material, symbolic, and political dimensions of Catholics’ religious experience in postrevolutionary Mexico. The fact that lynching continued well into the 1940s and 1950s, when Mexican authorities and the Catholic hierarchy reached a closer, even collaborative relationship, shows the modus vivendi between state and Church did not bring an end to religious violence in Mexico. This continuity in lynching also illuminates the centrality that popular – as opposed to official or institutional - strands of Catholicism had in construing the use of violence as a legitimate means to defend religious beliefs and symbols, and protect the social and political orders associated with Catholic religion at the local level. Victims of religiously motivated lynchings included blasphemous and anticlerical individuals, people that endorsed socialist and communist ideas, as well as people that professed Protestant beliefs and practices.

Keywords

LynchingreligionMexicoCatholicismanticlericalism
Type
Article
Information
The Americas , Volume 77 , Issue 1 , January 2020 , pp. 101 - 128
Copyright
Copyright © Academy of American Franciscan History 2020

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Footnotes

I would like to thank Jaime Pensado, Pablo Piccato, Deborah Kanter, Peter Johannessen, and the anonymous readers of The Americas for providing valuable comments on previous versions of this article. A Women in the Humanities Fellowship from the Mexican Academy of Sciences and a Visiting Fellowship at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, University of Notre Dame, supported research for this article.

References

1. Inspector Fernando A. Rodríguez, Informe dirigido al C. Jefe de la Sección III, Archivo General de la Nación [hereafter AGN], Departamento de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales [hereafter DGIPS], Caja 70, exp. 11.

2. The Second Cristiada or “La Segunda” (c. 1934-38) is considered a sequel of the Cristero War (1926-29).

3. Attacks against maestros were most prominent in Puebla, Michoacán, Jalisco, Querétaro, Veracruz, Aguascalientes, Guanajuato, Morelos, and Chiapas.

4. Socialist education was an ambitious and multilayered national policy aimed at modernizing and integrating rural and indigenous communities through the promotion of a secular, rational, and productive model of citizenry. Because socialist teachers were meant to promote the agrarian reform and undermine the influence of the Catholic Church, their presence was seen as intrusive and threatening to communities’ status quo. See Vaughan, Mary Kay, Cultural Politics in Revolution: Teachers, Peasants, and Schools in Mexico, 1930–1940 (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997)Google Scholar; David L. Raby, “Los maestros rurales y los conflictos sociales en México (1931–1940),” Historia Mexicana 18:2 (October-December 1968): 216–225; and Salinas, Salvador, “Untangling Mexico's Noodle: El Tallarín and the Revival of Zapatismo in Morelos, 1934–1938,” Journal of Latin American Studies 46:3 (2014): 486–487CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

5. For this article, I use the term “Protestant” to refer to all non-Catholic Christian denominations, including Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Lutherans, and Mormons.

6. These states included Puebla, Estado de México, Guanajuato, Oaxaca, Veracruz, Guerrero, and Chiapas. See Deyssy Jael de la Luz García, “Ciudadanía, representación, y participación cívico-política de los evangélicos mexicanos,” Revista de El Colegio de San Luis 24-25 (September 2006-April 2007): 9–46.

7. Cases were reported in these states: Puebla, Michoacán, Estado de México, Veracruz, and Guanajuato, and in Mexico City.

8. The Cristero War was triggered by the anticlerical measures promoted by president Plutarco Elías Calles. The conflict involved violent confrontations among peasants with opposing views about the place religion should hold in the social, political, and economic organization of their communities. See Jean Meyer, The Cristero Rebellion: The Mexican People between State and Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 92–110; and Matthew Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity in Mexico's Cristero Rebellion (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 7–9.

9. I use the term “popular” to refer those religious practices and beliefs observed by lay members of the Catholic Church that were not necessarily sanctioned by the church's official hierarchy. Some examples include the devotion of saints not endorsed by the Catholic Church, syncretic practices such as healing with herbs or consumption of alcohol during religious festivals, and, of particular relevance for this study, the use of violence in the name of religion. I am aware that the divide between popular and official might lead to an understanding of religion as a two-tiered system that defines the first as superstitious and emotional and the latter as true and rational. My use of the terms “popular” versus “official” or “institutional,” however, is meant to be descriptive rather than normative. For a critique of the two-tiered approach, see Paul Vanderwood, “Religion: Official, Popular, and Otherwise,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos (Summer 2000)16:2, 411–421, doi: 10.2307/1052206; Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity, 6–11. For a discussion of the porous relationship between popular and institutional forms of religion in Latin America, see John Lynch, New Worlds: A Religious History of Latin America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), 172–174.

10. Clearly, lynchings are not an exclusively “Mexican” phenomenon, but in the Mexican context, during the postrevolutionary period as well as in the present, they are informed by a particular sense of distrust toward authorities’ capacity or willingness to provide justice. See Alan Knight, “Habitus and Homicide: Political Culture in Revolutionary Mexico,” in Citizens of the Pyramid: Essays on Mexican Political Culture, Wil G. Pansters, ed. (Amsterdam: Thela, 1997), 107–129; Pablo Piccato, A History of Infamy: Crime, Truth, and Justice in Mexico (Oakland: University of California Press, 2017); and Gema Kloppe-Santamaría, “Lynching and the Politics of State Formation in Post-Revolutionary Puebla (1930s–50s),” Journal of Latin American Studies (February 13, 2019): 1-26, doi:10.1017/S0022216X18001104

11. For a discussion of the politics and logics of representation informing the press's accounts of violence and crime during this period, see Piccato, A History of Infamy; and Paul Gillingham, Michael Lettieri, and Benjamin T. Smith, eds., Journalism, Satire, and Censorship in Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2019).

12. There are two main reasons for my focus on Catholic religion in this article. First, the evidence I collected suggests that Catholic groups and individuals, by and large, were the main perpetrators of religious violence in postrevolutionary Mexico. Second, Catholic religion had and continues to have a predominant presence in Mexico. During the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, 98 percent of Mexicans identified as Catholics. See Instituto Nacional de Estadística, Geografía e Informática (INEGI), La diversidad religiosa en México. XII Censo General de Población y Vivienda 2000 (Aguascalientes: INEGI, 2005), 3–5.

13. This understanding of religion builds on the works of sociologists Émile Durkheim and Pierre Bourdieu. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Durkheim defines religion as a set of practices, beliefs, and rituals that concern the realm of the sacred. In his words: “A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.” Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 46. For Bourdieu, the religious field concerns the formation of a relatively autonomous sphere “characterized by the production, reproduction, and diffusion of religious goods.” In Bourdieu's view, this field is not entirely separated from the realm of the political but rather has a tendency to support an “essentially conservative” worldview. See Erwan Dianteill, “Pierre Bourdieu and the Sociology of Religion: A Central and Peripheral Concern,” Theory and Society 32 (2003): 537; and Pierre Bourdieu, “Rethinking the State: Genesis and Structure of the Bureaucratic Field,” Sociological Theory 12:1 (1994): 1–18.

14. The notion of community is used to refer to both urban neighborhoods and rural localities, wherein personal and face-to-face interactions occur with relative regularity. Far from being homogeneous entities, communities are internally fragmented along divisions motivated by religious affiliation, political ideologies, and levels of wealth. As a communal or collectively sanctioned form of violence, lynching can thus be seen as an instrument by which the boundaries of a given community are both imagined and enforced.

15. Ben Fallaw, Religion and State Formation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 13.

16. The Catholic Church's position regarding the use of violence is nuanced and historically contingent and does not always involve an outright rejection of force. From a theological point of view, the principle of “just war” has served to justify violence, either to defend religion or to spread the “true faith” via intimidation and terror (such as during the Spanish missionary wars). In Mexico's postrevolutionary period specifically, the government's attack on religion and on what the Church regarded as Catholics’ “natural rights” to educate their children and to own private property contributed to legitimating religious violence. Still, the Catholic Church hierarchy became more critical of armed forms of resistance during the Second Cristiada than it had been during the Cristero War. This shift was probably based on lessons learned, including the difficulty of controlling the actions of vigilantes and other violent entrepreneurs. On the relationship between violence and religion from a philosophical and theological point of view, see Scott Appleby, The Ambivalence of the Sacred: Religion, Violence, and Reconciliation (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2000); William T. Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); René Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York: W. W.Norton, 1979); and David M. Lantigua, “The Freedom of the Gospel: Aquinas, Subversive Natural Law, and the Spanish Wars of Religion,” Modern Theology 31:2 (April 2005): 312–337. On religion and violence in Mexico, see Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, 25–27; Blancarte, Historia de la iglesia católica en México, 33; Aspe Armella, La formación social y política de los católicos mexicanos: la Acción Católica Mexicana y La Unión Nacional De Estudiantes Católicos, 1929-1958 (Mexico City: Universidad Iberoamericana, 2008), 90; Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity; and Salinas, “Untangling Mexico's Noodle,” 474.

17. For instance, in his pastoral letter published on April 12, 1936, archbishop José Garibi Rivera condemned socialist education as a source of immorality and danger, to be resisted by faithful Catholics. Even more belligerent was the 1944 pastoral letter written by Luis María Martínez, then archbishop of Mexico, in which he openly called upon Catholics to fight the foreign and pervasive influence of Protestantism.

18. For folk Catholicism in particular, the veneration of religious images, including those of patron saints, is a central aspect of religious rites as well as community celebrations and festivals.

19. A number of newspapers, including the government's mouthpiece El Nacional and the New York Times reported the incident. “Cura de Santa Ana Maya, Michoacán, y cuatro señoritas están en la penitenciaria de Morelia,” El Porvenir, June 18, 1931; “Crímenes de la intolerancia religiosa,” El Nacional, July 5, 1931; “Alemán linchado,” La Prensa, June 17, 1931; “Era holandés el comunista que fue linchado,” La Prensa, June 18, 1931; “German Red Reported Lynched in Mexico,” New York Times, June 17, 1931.

20. It is important to recall here that there were important local variations within the state of Michoacán in terms of levels of religious devotion and clericalism. Whereas towns located in the Bajío (such as Santa Ana Maya where the lynching of Musthe took place) were more prone to religious militancy and strong forms of clericalism, those located in Tierra Caliente tended to be more secular. See Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity, 106–107; and Roderic A. Camp, Cruce de espadas. Política y religión en México (Mexico City: Siglo XXI, 1998), 275–278.

21. Liberal anticlericalism was not necessarily informed by anti-religious sentiments. As argued by Pamela Voekel, many Mexican liberal thinkers were actually religious men who believed that religion itself should be be “enlightened,” that, is, based on reason and individual self-restraint as opposed to fanaticism or corporate prerogatives. Pamela Voekel, Alone Before God: The Religious Origins of Modernity in Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 9–10, 155–160.

22. Matthew Butler, “Sotanas Rojinegras: Catholic Anticlericalism and Mexico's Revolutionary Schism,” The Americas 65:4 (April 2009): 535–558.

23. Adrian Bantjes, As If Jesus Walked on Earth: Cardenismo, Sonora, and the Mexican Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1998), 12. See also José Alberto Moreno Chávez, “Quemando santos para iluminar conciencias. Desfanatización y resistencia al proyecto cultural garridista, 1924–1935,” Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México 42 (July-December 2011): 41; Marjorie Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire. Lázaro Cárdenas, Michoacán Peasants, and the Redemption of the Mexican Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 129; Ben Fallaw, “Varieties of Mexican Revolutionary Anticlericalism: Anticlericalism, Radicalism, Iconoclasm, and Otherwise, 1914–1935,” The Americas 65:4 (April 2009): 485–486; Alan Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State in Mexico, 1910–1940,” Hispanic American Historical Review 74:3 (August 1994): 393–444.

24. An important precedent for understanding the defensive and belligerent position of the Catholic Church during this period is the Mexican Catholic schism of 1925 and the particular variant of anticlericalism it unleashed. Promoted by Catholic revolutionaries and Roman liberal clergy, the Mexican Catholic Apostolic Church (ICAM) was founded in order to fight the corruption and vices of Roman Catholicism and to develop instead an autonomous, nationalist, and revolutionary Mexican Catholicism. On this, see Butler, “Sotanas Rojinegras: Catholic Anticlericalism and Mexico's Revolutionary Schism.”

25. “El linchamiento ocurrido en Tetla,” El Nacional, May 17, 1933; Periódico Oficial del Estado de Tlaxcala, September 10, 1933.

26. “Iban a linchar a un supuesto rata sacrílego,” La Prensa, October 18, 1930.

27. James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 144–145.

28. “Una falsa versión originó un tumulto al ser sacadas las imágenes de un templo,” Excélsior, May 7, 1936. A similar case was reported the previous year, also in Mexico City. See “Dos detenidos en la iglesia de Santa María,” Excélsior, November 13, 1935.

29. Adrian Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Mexico: The De-Christianization Campaigns, 1929–1940,” Mexican Studies/Estudios Mexicanos 13:1 (Winter 1997): 87–120.

30. Alan M. Kishner, “Tomas Garrido Canabal and the Mexican Red Shirt Movement,” (PhD diss.: New York University, 1970), 102.

31. “Zafarrancho en la Villa de Coyoacán,” El Nacional, December 31, 1934; “Responsables de crímenes en Coyoacán,” El Porvenir, January 4, 1935; “Mexico Holds 40 for Killing of Five at Church,” Chicago Daily Tribune, January 4, 1935; “War on Red Shirts in Mexico Follows Catholic Slayings,” Washington Post, January 2, 1935; “Churchgoers Shot In Clash With Reds at Mexico Suburb,” Christian Science Monitor, December 31, 1934; “62 Reds Are Held in Mexican Killing,” New York Times, January 1, 1935.

32. “Zafarrancho en la Villa de Coyoacán,” El Nacional, December 31, 1934.

33. Kirshner, “Tomas Garrido Canabal and the Mexican Red Shirt Movement,” 105.

34. “62 Reds Are Held in Mexican Killing,” New York Times, January 1, 1935.

35. “Sistemática violencia,” El Nacional, January 3, 1935.

36. “El linchamiento, táctica de lucha de los fanáticos,” El Nacional, January 7, 1935.

37. Inspector Fernando A. Rodríguez, informe dirigido al C. Jefe de la Sección III, AGN, DGIPS, Caja 70, exp. 11.

38. Knight, “Popular Culture and the Revolutionary State,” 416.

39. Roberto Blancarte, Historia de la Iglesia Católica en México 1929–1982 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, Colegio Mexiquense, 1992), 32; Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 34–35.

40. Diario Oficial, December 13, 1934, quoted in David L. Raby and Martha Donís, “Ideología y construcción del Estado: la función política de la educación rural en México: 1921–1935,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología 51:2 (April-June 1989): 318.

41. Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, 19.

42. Salinas, “Untangling Mexico's Noodle,” 487.

43. Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm in Revolutionary Mexico,” 112; Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire.

44. Mary Kay Vughan refers to rumors circulating among parents about teachers asking children to undress in front of one another as part of their “sex education” lessons. See Vaughan, Cultural Politics in Revolution, 33–34, 90, 122; and Jocelyn Olcott, Revolutionary Women in Postrevolutionary Mexico (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 101–102.

45. Becker, Setting the Virgin on Fire; Fallaw, “Varieties of Mexican Anticlericalism;”

46. Trámite queja del C. Ildefonso Vega, April 9, 1938, AGN, Dirección General de Gobierno, Caja 56, exp. 13, fol.1.

47. Simón Villanueva Villanueva, “El maestro rural en la educación,” in Secretaria de Educación Pública, Los maestros y la cultura nacional, Serie Testimonios 1920–1952, vol. 1, Norte (Mexico City: Museo Nacional de Culturas Populares/SEP, 1987), 185. The same case is narrated by Bantjes in “Idolatry and Iconoclasm,” 116.

48. There is a gendered dimension to this and other acts of violence perpetrated against female teachers. Female teachers were subjected to sexual forms of violence, most commonly rape, by armed groups of vigilantes who opposed the socialist education program. Although I cannot provide here a closer examination of this specific form of violence, extant literature suggests that the rape of female teachers signaled perpetrators’ intention to punish these women qua women, that is, as women who had transgressed prevalent notions of domesticity and sexual submissiveness. See for instance Mary Kay Vaughan, “Women School Teachers in the Mexican Revolution: The Story of Reyna's Braids,” Journal of Women's History 2:1 (1990): 153; and Oresta López, “Women Teachers of Postrevolutionary Mexico: Feminization and Everyday Resistance,” Paedagogica Historica 49:1 (2013): 56–69. For a discussion of the values of femininity, domesticity, and motherhood, which were defended but also challenged by Catholic activists and militants, see Sister Barbara Miller, “The Role of Women in the Mexican Cristero Rebellion: Las Señoras y Las Religiosas,” The Americas 74:1 (2017): 303–323; and Omayda Naranjo Tamayo, “Pensativa de Jesús Goytortúa Santos: imagen y representación de la mujer mexicana en la novela de tema cristero,” Relaciones 123:31 (2010): 59–83.

49. Clemente Mendoza was a well-known vigilante leader, a veteran of the Cristero Rebellion who also participated in the Second Cristiada. He was particularly active in Puebla and Veracruz.

50. “Maestros socialistas sin orejas. Se las cortó un núcleo de gente alzada” Excélsior, November 19, 1935; “Fue horriblemente mutilada una Srita. Profesora,” El Universal, November 19th, 1935.

51. “Otra maestra que ha sido asesinada,” Excélsior, November 23, 1935.

52. “Fue quemado maestro rural y otro más fue vilmente mutilado,” Excélsior, April 21, 1936.

53. For example, the prominent segundero Enrique Rodríguez, alias El Tallarín, was a former Zapatista militant and had thus probably been exposed to this form of violence. For more on El Tallarín, see Salinas, “Untangling Mexico's Noodle.”

54. The picture was taken when the two teachers visited Mexico City in order to demand justice and protection from president Lázaro Cárdenas. “Llegan las maestras a quienes les cortaron los alzados las orejas” Excélsior, November 24, 1935.

55. “Mexicans Hang Teacher,” New York Times, March 27, 1935.

56. “Mayor Hanged in Mexico,” New York Times, June 2, 1935.

57. Secretaría de Educación Pública, El Maestro Rural 6:4 (February 15, 1935), quoted in David L. Raby, Educación y revolución social en México (Mexico City: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1974), 159–160.

58. Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, 120.

59. There are certainly offensive forms of vigilantism that can hardly been seen as bottom-up or popular. The infamous guardias blancas, for instance, were usually hired by local landowners to intimidate and directly attack agrarista peasants. See Alan Knight, “War, Violence and Homicide in Modern Mexico,” Bulletin of Latin American Research 32:1 (March 2013): 40–41.

60. “Otros asesinatos de la banda que manda el criminal Tallarin cometidos anteayer,” La Opinión, March 2,1938.

61. Informando sobre el atentado en que perdieron la vida el professor rural federal y los regidores del Ayto. de Tochimilco, letter to the Minister of the Interior signed by Gov. Maximino Ávila Camacho, AGN, Documentación de la Administración Pública, Serie Asesinatos, Caja 55, 2/012.2 (18), exp. 28.

62. Se protesta enérgicamente por el asesinato del compañero Prof. José Ramírez Martínez, Maestro del Estado de Puebla, letter to the president signed by Jesus Ceja, AGN, Documentación de la Administración Pública, Serie Asesinatos, Caja 55, 2/012.2 (18), exp. 30.

63. Report addressed to the Jefe de la Oficina de Información Política y Social, “Rinde informes de la investigación practicada en la Zona de Teziutlán, Puebla,” AGN, DGIPS, Caja 71, exp. 2; “Tres maestros más fueron asesinados en el edo. de Puebla,” Excélsior, November 17, 1935.

64. Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, 120. This is not to say that religiously motivated lynchings required the leadership of priests. As mentioned earlier in relationship to the lynching of Micaela Ortega, intra-village conflicts and political vendettas— beyond the priest's influence— could also inform mob killings perpetrated by Catholics. Furthermore, in various cases, Catholic women, often referred to as beatas or “fanatics,” had a central role in the rumors leading to lynching and in some cases even in the execution of the lynching itself. In other words, Catholic female devotees could provide the leadership for the organization of lynchings. Kathleen M. McIntyre offers a detailed account of the lynching of pastor Samuel Juárez García and five other Evangelicals by a group of Catholics on October 5, 1935, in Tlacochahuaya, Oaxaca. In testimonies collected by the author, villagers narrated how, after being shot, a Catholic woman smashed Juárez García's head with a metate (a grinding stone) until his brains gushed out. See Kathleen M. McIntyre, “All of Their Customs are Daughters of Their Religion”: Baptists in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920s-Present,” Gender & History 25:3 (2013): 487–488. See also reference to the group of “viejas beatas” who stoned a group of female teachers in Tonalá, Jalisco, (mentioned earlier in the article); or the attempted lynching of Melquiades Lezama allegedly orchestrated by female devotee Josefina de Trujillo. Also, the lynching of a veterinary doctor and members of the military escort that accompanied him in Senguio, Michoacán, on September of 1947, was led by Teodora Medina Guijosa, a “Sinarquista fanatic.” Memorandum written by inspectors Clodomiro Morales Camacho and Ríos Thivol addressed to Lamberto Ortega Peregrina, Jefe del Departamento de Investigaciones Políticas y Sociales, September 4, 1947, AGN, DGIPS, Caja 84, exp. 1.

65. Letter addressed to president Cárdenas and signed by Juan Efraín González on behalf of the Unión de Maestros Federales of the 11th Zone, November 17, 1935, AGN, Documentación de la Administración Pública, Serie Asesinatos, Caja 53, exp. 62.

66. Letter addressed to President Cárdenas and signed by José Parra, October 14, 1935, AGN, Dirección General de Gobierno, Serie Asesinatos, 2. 340/11 10515, exp. 13.

67. Letter addressed to the Minister of the Interior and signed by teacher Luis N. Rodríguez, May 20, 1938, AGN, Dirección General de Gobierno, Serie Asesinatos, 2. 340/11 10515, exp. 13.

68. Raby, “Los maestros rurales y los conflictos sociales en México (1931–1940),” 216–225.

69. Bantjes, “Idolatry and Iconoclasm,” 119.

70. “Templo protestante atacado por exaltados,” La Prensa, April 21, 1944. The use of the national flag by Sinarquistas signaled their appropriation of national symbols and their deployment of a nationalist ideology.

71. The Unión Nacional Sinarquista was characterized by the use of aggressive and even militaristic strategies. Although the Catholic Church considered it part of its strategy to regain “social authority in the wake of leftist revolutions” the Church lacked control over the Unión actions and did not officially approve of its use of violence. Fallaw, Religion and State Formation, 145; Blancarte, Historia de la iglesia católica en México, 85.

72. De la Luz García documents this case in “Ciudadanía, representación y cívico-política,” 21–22.

73. Cases were reported in prior years, but with lesser frequency. For instance, in the 1920s, the New York Times reported two unverified cases of lynchings involving Protestant ministers. The first, in San Juan Tepescolula, Oaxaca, was allegedly perpetrated against two Mexican Protestant ministers; the second was directed against an American Protestant minister in Irapuato, Guanajuato. “Report 2 Preachers Lynched in Mexico,” New York Times, February 7, 1923; and “Report American Lynch,” New York Times, August 3, 1926. To these cases one might add the aforementioned lynching of pastor Samuel Juárez García in 1935 in Tlacochahuaya, Oaxaca. The case is examined in Kathleen M. McIntyre's “All of Their Customs Are Daughters of Their Religion,” 487–488.

74. The persecution of Protestants in other Latin American countries at the time, including Colombia and Brazil, suggests anti-Protestant violence was not limited to Mexico and its history of state-Church relationships. In Colombia, during the period of “La Violencia” (1940s -1950s), anticommunist Catholics sympathetic to the Conservative Party harassed, intimidated, and killed Protestants who were accused of supporting the Liberal Party. In Brazil, anti-Protestant violence was also present during the 1930s and 1940s, following Catholics’ attempt to restore Catholicism as the national religion. In all three countries, violence against Protestants appears to have been underpinned by nationalist sentiments as well as by Catholics’ anxieties regarding the increasing presence of Protestant religions. See Susanne Dailey, “Religious Aspects of Colombia's ‘La Violencia’: Explanations and Implications,” Journal of Church and State 15:3 (1973): 381–405; Erika Helgen, “Anti-Protestant Violence and the Spiritual and Political Purification of the Brazilian Northeast, 1916–1945, ” paper presented to the Latin American Studies Association, New York, May 2016; and Richard Millet, “The Protestant Role in Twentieth Century Latin American Church-State Relations,” Journal of Church and State 15:3 (1973): 367–380.

75. It also enabled the re-opening of the Catholic schools that had been closed down under the previous postrevolutionary governments. Camp, Cruce de espadas. Política y religión en México, 48-9; Nicolás Dávila Peralta, Las santas batallas. La derecha anticomunista en Puebla (Puebla: Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla, 2003), 91–92.

76. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption (Wilmington, DE: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 89.

77. The letter was published on November 8, 1943, and it was meant to promote Catholics’ support of the Mexican government's decision to participate in the Second World War. Quoted in Jean Meyer, “La Iglesia Católica en México 1929–1965,” Documentos de Trabajo del CIDE 30 (May 2005), 22.

78. Deyssy Jael de la Luz García, “El pentecostalismo en México y su propuesta de experiencia religiosa e identidad nacional,” Revista Cultura y Religión 3:2 (October 2009): 204.

79. Quoted in Laura Pérez Rosales, “Censura y control. La Campaña Nacionla de Moralización de los años cincuenta,” Historia y Grafía 19:37 (July-December 2011): 93–94.

80. “Iba a ser linchado un propagandista protestante en Guanajuato,” La Prensa, December 8, 1944.

81. “Iban a linchar a dos propagandistas protestantes en templo de Coyoacán,” La Prensa, March 31, 1945.

82. The percentage of Protestants in Mexico went from 0.4 percent in the year 1900 to 0.91 percent in 1940. De la Luz García, “El pentecontalismo en México,” 205; INEGI, La diversidad religiosa en México, 5–8.

83. Jean-Pierre Bastian, “Protestants, Freemasons, and Spiritists: Non-Catholic Religious Sociabilities and Mexico's Revolutionary Movement, 1910–20,” in Faith and Impiety in Revolutionary Mexico, Matthew Butler, ed. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 83–85; Blancarte, Historia de la iglesia católica en México, 75; McIntyre, “All of Their Customs Are Daughters of Their Religion”; Butler, Popular Piety and Political Identity, 134–136.

84. This type of festivity usually involved the consumption of alcohol and the veneration of religious images.

85. Archbishop Luis María Martínez and other church representatives defended Hispanic Catholicism as the only true religion and associated the United States with the spurious and polluting influence of Protestantism. See Aspe Armella, La formación social y política de los católicos mexicanos, 202–205.

86. Sinarquistas rejected both capitalism and communism, and regarded the United States as an unequivocal symbol of the former. See Cantú, Gastón García, El pensamiento de la reacción Mexicana (la derecha). Historia documental. Tomo Tercero (1929–1940), (Mexico City: UNAM, 1997), 145–153Google Scholar. Although not perpetrated in the name of religion, it is worth mentioning here the occurrence of at least two lynchings, one organized directly by Sinarquistas, that involved US veterinarians and livestock inspectors. These lynchings took place in the context of a series of popular protests against the killing and vaccination of cattle promoted by the Mexican-American Commission for the Eradication of Foot-and-Mouth Disease. See “Robert L. Proctor, Inspector de la Comisión México-Americana Contra la Aftosa, Asesinado de Forma Salvaje,” El Porvenir, February 3, 1949; “Mexicans Kill American,” New York Times, February 3, 1949; and “Cattle Vaccinators Attacked,” New York Times, February 2, 1949. See also Rath, Thomas, Myths of Demilitarization in Post-Revolutionary Mexico, 1920–1960, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013), 124–125Google Scholar; and Ledbetter, John, “Fighting Food-and-Mouth Disease in Mexico: Popular Protest against Diplomatic Decisions,” Southwestern Historical Quarterly 104:3 (2001): 405–406Google Scholar.

87. “Otro sangriento zafarrancho entre Católicos y Protestantes, ocurrió,” La Prensa, March 24, 1945.

88. “Sangriento ataque contra un grupo de Protestantes,” La Prensa, May 29, 1945.

89. Letter addressed to president Manuel Ávila Camacho, signed by Nabor Hernández, Luis Acalco, and Domingo Ponce. May of 1945. AGN, Ramo Presidentes, Manuel Ávila Camacho, Serie Asesinatos/Atropellos, exp. 542.1/1221.

90. Letter signed by José María González and Marcelino Vargas, addressed to the Minister of the Interior, DGIPS, AGN, Caja 98, exp. 20.

91. Informe de Ing. Carlos Reyes Retana, DGIPS, AGN, Caja 98, exp. 20.