Lázaro Cárdenas

May 21, 1895 – October 19, 1970

Lázaro Cárdenas (1895–1970) was a Mexican general, statesman, and revolutionary who served as the 51st President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. He previously served as a general in the Constitutional Army during the Mexican Revolution and as Governor of Michoacán, and he later served as Secretary of National Defence.

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Biography

Lázaro Cárdenas was born in 1895 in Jiquilpan, Michoacán. He left school at eleven and, after his father's death, supported his family as a tax collector, printer and jailer. He joined the revolution after Victoriano Huerta's 1913 coup and rose through the Constitutionalist forces, above all under Plutarco Elías Calles, becoming a brigadier general at 25.

Calles made him military commander in the oil-producing Huasteca, where he saw how foreign companies operated. As governor of Michoacán from 1928 to 1932 he pressed land reform and organised peasant and worker groups, and he also served as president of the ruling National Revolutionary Party and briefly as secretary of war.

Chosen as the party's candidate, he won the 1934 election and was expected to remain Calles's puppet, but he built his own base among workers and peasants and sent Calles into exile. His government redistributed large estates as ejidos, reorganised the party on sectoral lines, founded the National Polytechnic Institute and, in March 1938, nationalised the foreign oil companies and created Pemex. He gave refuge to Spanish Republicans and to Leon Trotsky.

He handed power peacefully to Manuel Ávila Camacho in 1940 and served as secretary of national defence during the Second World War. In retirement he supported the Cuban Revolution and pushed later presidents to the left. He died in Mexico City in 1970 and is buried in the Monument to the Revolution.