Francisco J. Múgica Velázquez was born in Michoacán in 1884, the son of a school teacher. Upon concluding his high school studies, he began a brief career as a journalist in various newspapers that opposed the Porfirian regime.
Subsequently, he enthusiastically joined the Mexican Revolution and went to Texas to obtain weapons with which he fought in Chihuahua, participating in the capture of Ciudad Juárez in 1911. A year later, he was invited to be part of the cabinet of the then governor of Coahuila, Venustiano Carranza, beginning a career with ups and downs in Mexican politics.
Francisco J. Múgica is building a reputation
- From 1915 to 1916, he served as governor of Tabasco, where he stood out for the distribution of land to peasants and for promoting liberal education.
- Later, as a deputy for Michoacán, he managed to capture a left-wing ideology in the Constituent Congress of 1917, legislating on education, land distribution, national ownership of the subsoil and on the secularization of church assets. For this contribution, he is considered one of the best ideologues of the Mexican Revolution. He immediately gave signs of being a radical, since he considered that the political and social revolution should go hand in hand and be embodied in the Constitution.
- He was governor of Michoacán from 1920 until his resignation in 1922, prompted by his confrontations with the church and the landowners, who pressured the then president, General Álvaro Obregón, so that the Michoacán resigned.
- During the Cárdenas presidential term, toasteither his greatest legacy: his decisive influence in the oil expropriation. In fact, it was he who drafted the historic ‘Manifesto’ in which the people were informed about the event.
A bitter presidential candidacy
Starting in 1939, the pre-candidates for the presidential succession of 1940 were outlined. The names that sounded most strongly in the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM), precursor of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), were General Manuel Ávila Camacho and Francisco J. Mugica.
Curiously, Ávila Camacho was a politically unknown man, but instead, Múgica already had a reputation as a radical that weighed on him and for which he had many enemies: the Church, the landowners, the army, some military governors and sectors of society that considered him pro-Russian and Trotskyist.
Some sectors thought that if Múgica became president, the nationalizations and the revolutionary project would deepen, so a civil war would be imminent. As a consequence, the political forces around Cárdenas began to opt for Ávila Camacho; a politician with a lesser social vision and who could be classified as conservative and right-wing.
Why was Francisco J. Múgica not a candidate?
Finally, Ávila Camacho was chosen as successor to Lázaro Cárdenas and Múgica had no choice but to renounce his candidacy, declaring, disappointed, that he had been the victim of a policy of imposition contrary to the ideals of the Mexican Revolution. The stench of betrayal also splashed President Lázaro Cárdenas, whose act has been justified by scholars as a decision to avoid war.
According to the historian Anna Ribera Carbóauthor of the book Francisco J. Múgica: The president we didn’t haveAt the international level, right-wing governments –such as the Francoist, the fascist or the Nazi– were on the rise, which was closely followed by the Cárdenas government and led him to conclude that it was best to opt for Ávila Camacho.
“Cárdenas is a man who followed what happened in Spain very carefully, since 1936. And he had his diplomatic agents working in favor of the Republic. And then he realizes that insisting on a candidate as radical as Múgica was, perhaps, leading the country to a conflict like the Spanish one. So he allowed those forces, within the PRN itself, which were already operating in favor of Ávila Camacho to strengthen themselves ”,
Rivera Carbó mentions in an interview for La Octava.
Regarding this political movement, Lázaro Cárdenas wrote:
“On the other hand, as some important events from the social point of view have taken place in any case, it is not convenient for my successor to be too radical an element. It is essential that the little we have been able to do be consolidated and that he not commit himself to many measures that a radical president could have.”
Last years of Francisco J. Múgica
From 1941 to 1945, he was governor and military commander of the territory of Baja California Sur, where he founded the region’s first newspaper, campaigned against alcoholism, opened public schools, reorganized public health services, and distributed land.
Finally, in 1951, he founded the Mexican Constitutionalist Party, an ally of the opposition PRI candidate, who was running Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. After his triumph in 1952, Múgica withdrew from public life and died in Mexico City in 1954, at the age of 70.