Pascal Beltrán del Río-Delahuertismo: prelude to the rebellion

On November 18, 1923, the presidential candidate Plutarco Elías Calles He visited Puebla as part of his electoral campaign, which had begun two months earlier in Monterrey. The state was a political bastion of the former president Adolfo de la Huertawho had assumed power after the assassination of Venustiano Carranza and who served as the president's Secretary of the Treasury Alvaro Obregon.

The political balance established in 1920, in the form of a triangle formed by Obregon, Streets and From Orchard, It was broken. His resignation from the Treasury had taken on scandalous tones. To counteract it, Obregon ordered that the former official be accused of embezzlement. However, the political presence of From Orchard He did not stop growing and had already said that he accepted to be a candidate for the National Cooperatist Party (PNC). Directed by the Potosí deputy Jorge Prieto Laurensthis political group would be key in the origin of the acts of political violence that would be unleashed at the beginning of December 1923.

The legislator had stopped supporting Streetsbecause Obregon He did not recognize his victory in the elections for governor of San Luis Potosí, fearful of the strength that the PNC would acquire with it. The president was disgusted by the way the Constitutionalist Liberal Party had limited his actions and, having just gotten rid of him, he did not want history to repeat itself with the cooperators. Prieto Laurens was disappointed by the lack of support for his claim from Streets, who until September had been Secretary of the Interior. That's why he insisted on pushing a doubter From Orchard to run as a candidate.

On October 31, the violence between Callistas and Delahuertistas stopped being merely verbal. That day, in the Chamber of Deputies there was an attempt to assassinate Prieto Laurens. Both factions fought fiercely for control of the Board of Directors. The Delahuertistas accused the general Arnulfo R. Gomez, head of military operations in the Valley of Mexico, for having been behind the attack. President Obregon responded in very harsh terms, asserting that the accusation was reckless, while Gomez denounced the discovery of a cache of weapons at the PNC headquarters.

The statements from both sides escalated until the visit of Streets to Puebla. From the hotel balconies Arrontethe Callista leaders – among them, Luis N. Morones and Antonio Díaz Soto y Gama—, as well as the presidential candidate himself, launched inflammatory speeches against their adversaries. In Puebla, and also in Tlaxcala, the day ended with gunfights, stones and stabbings between the two sides, resulting in deaths and injuries.

On November 20—a century ago today—, while the cooperators were preparing to take protest in From Orchard as a presidential candidate, General Gomez declared that a rebel movement had been discovered within the Army. On the 23rd, several alleged rebels were brought before a judge by the PGR. On November 29, an event occurred that would mark the decision of the Delahuertistas to renounce electoral activity and undertake armed rebellion. When trying to become president of the Board of Directors of the Chamber of Deputies for the month of December, they failed to complete the quorum. Hours later, its main leaders left Mexico City to prepare the uprising.

On December 6, General Guadalupe Sánchez Galvan —military chief of Veracruz, who had been key in the overthrow of Carranza in 1920—announced his troops' disobedience to the government and took Xalapa. Meanwhile, Salvador Alvarado rose in Jalisco, on the 7th, From Orchard He launched his Veracruz Plan, ignoring the three Powers of the Union. Supported by the rest of the Army and the US government, Obregon He would manage to suppress the rebellion in a few months, which cost 7,000 victims. His main leaders, including From Orchard, Prieto, Sanchez and Alvarado, they went into exile. Thus would end the most notable uprising faced by the winning group of the Mexican Revolution.