Tomás Garrido Canabal: a life dedicated to the Mexican southeast

Tomás Garrido Canabal was born on September 20, 1890 in the Chiapas town of Catazajá, near Tabasco, where he spent most of his life. However, it was in the region of southeastern Mexico where he was formed socially, educationally and politically.

Despite growing up in a conservative family of wealthy landowners, the young Tomás Garrido sought to show his own ideals related to the socialist, democratic and liberal tendencies that were beginning to awaken the revolutionary spirit of the time.

When Francisco J. Múgica established himself as governor of Tabasco in 1915, Tomás Garrido returned to the region after finishing his law studies and managed to get a position as a prosecutor of the Supreme Court of Justice of the State.

At first, Múgica distrusted Garrido when he learned that he came from a family of wealthy landowners; however, Garrido's actions made him change his mind. In fact, Múgica's politics were a great influence for the future Garridista government.

With the resignation of Múgica as governor of Tabasco, General Carlos Greene took office, but, being unknown by his opponents, had to defend his election before President Carranza. This led to Tomás Garrido becoming interim governor.

For this reason, in the second half of 1919, Garrido covered several interim periods, in which he began to integrate policies in agrarian matters. In this way, workers' movements and peasant groups were consolidated.

When the Agua Prieta Plan was enacted, Garrido was one of the first to raise his hand to join the rebellion led by Adolfo de la Huerta, then governor of Sonora, from the southeast. Both were backed by revolutionary generals, such as Álvaro Obregón.

When the Agua Prieta Plan was consecrated, Garrido won Obregón's sympathy. He was appointed interim governor of Yucatán in 1920 and, subsequently, was urged to take the reins of the state of Tabasco, a period that was locally known as garridismo.

In mid-1923, as constitutional governor of Tabasco, Tomás Garrido had to leave the state when the forces of Adolfo de la Huerta besieged the region as part of the rebellion against the presidential candidacy of Plutarco Elías Calles.

In 1925, after Obregonist troops contained the rebellion, he returned to finish his governorship. He promoted policies to position the agricultural and livestock sector as the main economic activities and decreed that in Tabasco women could vote and be voted.

The social development of Tabasco was based on the promotion of agricultural activities that would boost local industry from the distribution of land. However, the latifundia and the conditions of the territory only allowed this plan to be consecrated at the regional level.

In 1926, when Garrido completed his term as governor of Tabasco, he moved to Mexico City to become a senator of the state itself. At this stage he suffered an attack that kept him exiled in the United States.

Although Garrido was far from Tabasco, his closeness to the then governor Ausencio Cruz, who was always faithful to his ideology, allowed him to continue interfering in the political decisions of the region. In this context, the anti-religious campaign was implemented.

This campaign promoted by the Executive Power was imposed in the Tabasco region in a radical way in 1928 to eradicate, censor and completely prohibit everything that was related to the Church and Catholic dogma.

Garrido began a new period as governor of Tabasco in 1931 and with it came the possibility of returning and consolidating his power. One of his first measures was the implementation of the anti-alcohol campaign through the imposition of a dry law throughout the state.

Garri's policies had four focuses of attention: first, to consolidate educational institutions before religious ones; secondly, to direct social and economic development from the countryside and, thirdly, to considerably reduce crime rates.

The fourth was the creation of the so-called Red Shirts, an organization of socialist political position composed mostly of young people focused on maintaining a social order on the issues of anti-religious and anti-alcoholic laws through violence.

By 1934, Garrido left his position as governor to occupy the Secretariat of Agriculture and Development within the presidential cabinet formed by General Calles for the newly elected Lázaro Cárdenas. With him left a group of Red Shirts for Mexico City.

Promoting the Red Shirts as an organization to be established throughout the country brought many negative consequences for Garrido, as the group carried out a shootout against some parishioners in the Plaza Coyoacán on December 30, 1934.

The shooting left five dead and thirty wounded. One of the attackers was lynched to death and sixty-five members of the Red Shirts were arrested. Formally, there were forty-five imprisoned members plus three who participated in the lynching.

The acts of the Red Shirts unleashed the discontent of society and increased political tension, because while they appealed to the revolutionary ideal, the speech of Plutarco Elías Calles invited to stop being a country of caudillos to be one of institutions.

The consequences of this incident and the rupture between Cárdenas and Calles ended the political career of Tomás Garrido. True to his ideal, he decided to go into exile in Costa Rica, where Calles was also exiled, to whom he was loyal.

This brief review of the political figure of Tomás Garrido is only the surface of the documentary wealth that we can find within his personal archive, which, without a doubt, is a primordial documentary source to create a historical perspective of a character like this.