As we talked, I noticed a third figure hanging around and listening to our conversation. A gaunt and bespectacled man, he motioned that he would like to talk to me and we shook hands. He introduced himself as G.E., and sat down next to A.C., who excused himself and retreated with M.F. to the coffee table. I immediately noticed that he was a lot more measured and careful in his speech, avoiding conspiratorial speculations, and sticking to verifiable facts. He struck me as politically savvy, somewhat suspicious but diplomatically polite, and for this reason much more dangerous. Without any preamble he launched into a detailed history of the Unión Nacional Sinarquista from it’s founding into the present day.
The UNS directly traces its formation to the Cristero movement, from which it emerged and to which it sees itself as a direct successor to. To understand the Cristero movement it’s necessary to understand the Mexican civil war, and the series of sweeping reforms that came about as a result of the 1917 constitution of Mexico.
The various factions and causes involved in the Mexican civil war could take several books to cover, so I will not try to explain it here. It is sufficient to say that there were many competing interests, but the liberal Constitucionalistas ended up victorious betraying the more radical Zapatista faction which sought for agrarian reform among the peasantry. The resulting 1917 constitution was drafted by the Constitucionalistas without the consultation of these other factions, and by design it did much to sideline factions of Mexican society deemed either too radical or too conservative.
In particular a series of articles pertaining to secularization and separation of powers were weaponized against the Church under the leadership of Álvaro Obregón, who used them to seize church land, ban religious organizations, and bar Catholic priests from participating in government. In several states Catholic churches were closed down entirely and banned from operating. The oppression eventually culminated in Pope Pius XI issuing an encyclical against the Mexican State entitled Iniquis afflictisque in 1926, decrying the treatment of clergy as criminals. The Church formally reached out to the Mexican government asking them to allow Catholics to participate in public life, however the government doubled down on the repression of Church authorities, closing Churches and publicly torturing and executing several Catholic priests. The systematic use of rape against nuns was also employed as a tool of oppression.
Since many of the rural peasantry had previously been tenant farmers on Church estates, this did not only effect the religious elites but the entire society of rural Mexico. This mixture of prosecuted religious elites and dispossessed rural peasants proved a fertile ground for rebellion, and while the now unemployed and starving farmers took up arms the conservative traditional circles within the Catholic Church provided a logistical network for coordinating their activities and an ideological basis for their struggle.
Although formed from several uncoordinated uprisings, the guerillas quickly became known as the Cristeros, due to their battle cry of “vivo Cristo rey”. A secret society of Catholic women, Las Brigadas Femeninas de Santa Juana de Arco (The female brigades of Saint Joan of Arc) which was comprised “initially of students, and later the wives, mothers and sisters of the guerilla fighters” was formed to support the war effort by providing medical aid and trafficking weapons to the male guerillas fighting in the forests and mountains.
“The struggle continued in the mountains and forests,” G.E. said with a large grin on his face “but we understood that it was necessary to bring the war here, to the capital.” It was the young radical José de León Toral, “a great martyr for our cause” who finally accomplished this. The man responsible for much of the worse oppression, Álvaro Obregón, had been elected president. Before he could be sworn in however, “José de León Toral approached him in a crowd, and before he could react…”, G.E. made the sign of a gun with his hand, grinning from ear to ear as though he himself had pulled the trigger, “bam”. “That’s when they realized they were not untouchable, not even the president.”
This high profile assassination provided the necessary pressure to end the war. Interim president Emilio Portes Gil wasted no time in reaching out to Catholic authorities to negotiate a peace treaty. Tensions remained high, but the Mexican government ended it’s harsh prosecution of the Catholics in exchange for the Church withdrawing support for the Cristero guerillas. [3]
Although the clergy was no longer persecuted to the extent that it had been, the peace talks did little to solve the underlying material causes of the revolution, which had to do with the distribution of land. It also failed to accomplish the goals of more radical members of the cloth, who sought to not just end persecution but reverse entirely the secularization of Mexican society and restore society to the “rightful control of the Catholic Church.” It was these unhappy elements of the Cristero movement which formed the base for the nascent UNS.
Son of a wealthy landowner, José Antonio Urquiza contributed much of the financial support necessary for the founding of the organization, which he foresaw as a Catholic civic organization. Although Urquiza was himself fairly apolitical, many of his allies were influenced by the emerging Falangalist and Fascist movements in Spain and Italy, and following his murder the UNS adopted an aesthetics and political ideology more in line with Spanish Falangismo, canonizing Urquiza as the ideological founder of the organization. To this day it’s common to see his photograph displayed on party propaganda and at rallies.
This ideological proximity to fascism would end up hurting the UNS during the Second World War. Although Mexico was formally neutral, there were practical considerations having to be had due to their proximity to the United States, and in 1944 the UNS was barred from holding meetings in Mexico. In America, somewhat bizarrely, Pachucos (a Chicano subculture in Los Angeles) were confused with the UNS and accused of being Axis subversives by the State Un-American Activities Committee, and targeted for harassment by US servicemen and the FBI.
The effective outlawing of the UNS during the war did much to kill the momentum of their movement. However, with the postwar rise of communism G.E. explained somewhat cryptically that they were able to transform their relationship with America and become “friends” in the 70 and 80s, which helped them rebuild influence in Mexico. I understood this to be a reference to Operation Condor, which saw many right wing organizations throughout Latin America provided with material support by the CIA. It would certainly explain the conspicuous proximity of their headquarters to the Secretaria de Gobernación (Secretariat for Home Affairs). I cannot find any evidence to confirm this, but declassified OSS documents do show that American Intelligence was taking an active interest in their activities. [4]
During this time they fielded several political candidates across Mexico, but did not achieve much electoral success. In face of a general apathy from the population, they have since withdrawn from politics to and reformed to be closer in line with José Antonio Urquiza’s original ideal of a civic and cultural organization.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the UNS has seen a marked decline in relevance. This is partly due to their own success and partly due to the overall decline in religiosity among the Mexican public. The excesses of secularism which inspired their formation during the 1920s is no longer a question, and the secularism of Mexico’s younger generations is one of apathy and resentment towards the Catholic church, not one of outright persecution. The specter of communism no longer hanging over Mexico, the UNS finds itself without any clear enemies to oppose, and their ideological commitments towards establishing a Traditionalist Catholic order in Mexico would be political suicide and is repulsive to the younger generations of Mexicans who have mixed feelings at best towards the Catholic Church. The lack of appeal their organization has to younger people is evident from the fact that everybody I met in the UNS seemed to be in their forties, which is striking given that the average age in Mexico is around thirty. “We have achieved what we needed to” says G.E., with a kind of sad look on his face, “now we wait until we are needed again”.
