Names Change but Dictators Remain: Luis Cabrera Lobato

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0:00:11.2 Paul Meany: Latin American philosophy and political thought are very rarely read outside of Latin America. A lack of English translations exacerbates the situation. And I will admit, until very recently, I had never read a single Latin American philosopher with my first being Jose Martí from Cuba. But the West has no monopoly on philosophical thought. Most importantly, for libertarians and classical liberals, the West does not have a monopoly on discussing the nature of power and freedom. Today, we’ll be delving into the life and thought one of most important figures of the Mexican Revolution. Luis Cabrera Lobato, the son of a baker who rose to prominence as a lawyer and became easily one of the sharpest intellects of the revolutionaries, as well as a staunch defender of constitutionalism. Luis noticed that without the restraint of law, names change, but dictators remain.

0:01:00.3 Paul Meany: Very recently Luis’s essay, “The revolution of then and now” has just been translated to English for the first time. To celebrate and discuss his life, I’m joined by Luis Barron. Luis is a professor of history at business and economic school at the University of Anahuac, in Mexico. He holds a PhD in Latin American history from the University of Chicago, and his research topics are political, social and legal history of contemporary Mexico, especially the Mexican Revolution and history of economic thought. Thanks for joining us.

0:01:28.3 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: I am really, really honored. Thank you for having me.

0:01:32.0 Paul Meany: So just to start off, Luis dedicated most of his life to vindicating the cause of the Mexican Revolution. But for our English speaking audience, what exactly was the Mexican Revolution of 1910 fought for? And can you give us kind of some context and historical background what Mexico is like at the turn of the 20th century and the problems facing the nation?

0:01:53.1 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Yeah, sure. Let me go back a little bit in time, so I can really give you a full context of what was happening. After the Mexican-​American war in the middle of 19th century, Mexico started a period of very unstable, politically, militarily, having troubles internationally also. So after the Mexican-​American War, Mexico was basically in a civil war for 15 years. And then we had the French invasion of the country and the French established an empire in Mexico for four years. And then after the French left, basically because the civil war in the US was over, and the French could not stay in Mexico anymore, then Mexico started a period of a political dictatorship under Porfirio Diaz. That started in 1876 and went all the way in 1910. So the Mexican Revolution was basically, first a political movement to get rid of Porfirio Diaz, to try to end Porfirio Diaz’s dictatorship. Francisco Madero started that movement, that political movement and when he ran in the elections of 1910 for president, there was a massive fraud and of course he lost and he had to leave the country. Then he came back and he called for a revolution for an armed revolution and the Mexican Revolution as such started in 1911. Porfirio Diaz left the country. And then the period that we consider to be the Mexican Revolution was from 1911, all the way to 1920.

0:03:57.8 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: The revolution had three distinct phases. The first one was the original revolt, the Madero revolt and his presidency when Porfirio Diaz left. Then there was a coup d’etat. The military revolted against Madero and Victoriano Huerta a general took the presidency, and he re-​established a dictatorship in Mexico from 1913 until 1914, when all the revolutionaries revolted, basically under the leadership of Venustiano Carranza and then when Huerta left, there was a civil war in Mexico from 1914 to 1917. When the constitution that rules Mexico today was passed, and then we have the presidency of Venustiano Carranza from 1917 till 1920 when he was assassinated, and then after 1920 Mexico started to have again, institutional politics. And since then, we haven’t had any successful military revolts or coups or anything. So from 1920 all the way to the present, we have had institutional politics. That’s mainly about the context of the Mexican Revolution. The Mexican Revolution, like I said, originally was… The only objective of the revolution was to end the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. And then of course, after he left, the different revolutionary groups, were not in agreement really of what they wanted. So that’s why the revolution extended for the next 10 years, basically.

0:05:55.6 Paul Meany: So just to take it back a little bit, how did Luis’s early life, how did it affect his later political views and how did he come into politics? Did he come into it later in life? Or was he always a political person? Always writing?

0:06:11.3 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: He was born in a very, very small marginalized town in the mountains in the Central State of Puebla in Mexico. So, he was not born to a rich family or nothing like that. And he had to go to school there in this small town. And from there, he started his education. His parents, he was son of a baker and his parents were convinced that he needed to be educated. So he went to school, which was not like the rule for people of rural Mexico. And he was, well, he had an uncle that was governor of the state of Puebla later and then he had another relative who was a journalist. So he started in journalism relatively young. In his 20s, he went into journalism and he started writing against the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz. And he also went to Mexico City to get his education as a lawyer. So he finally became a lawyer and a writer, a journalist, and very early from his early 20s, he started in the opposition movement. So he went into politics also, considerably young.

0:07:38.3 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: When the revolution started, he joined Madero, and he became a federal deputy in Congress, in the Mexican Congress. So he was the three things all together very early on, he was a lawyer, and he was a writer, and he was also into politics. And of course, he took advantage of his relatives being, one governor, the other one in journalism. But basically, he was a pretty much a self-​made man in almost every respect.

0:08:11.1 Paul Meany: And what did he view the problems of the Diaz administration were? Because Diaz was reelected seven times through quite dubious means. I read one statistic that 25% of Mexican land was owned by foreign investors. He was really… He was literally stealing from the poor and giving to the rich, like Diaz was not a good president whatsoever. And so what did Luis say about him early on?

0:08:33.4 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Well, when Luis Cabrera started writing against Porfirio Diaz and his dictatorship he was mainly concerned about… Well, a very liberal, classical liberal central thought, he was concerned about limiting the power of government. He was not against Porfirio Diaz in every way because Porfirio Diaz, during his 30 year stay in the power, he did develop Mexico. Mexico was completely underdeveloped in the 1870s, and by 1910, Mexico had started to… A road to development. There was industry in Mexico, the railroad was constructed and it went all what… We had railroad all over the country, uniting Mexico to the United States, for instance, or commerce between Mexico and the United States was greater. There was a lot of foreign investment in Mexico, not only on land, but also on the industry and on ports and then the railroads also.

0:09:46.8 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: So Luis Cabrera wasn’t really against Porfirio Diaz in every sense, but he was concerned that the power of government should be limited and that the basis of the dictatorship of Porfirio Diaz was precisely that there was no actual limit to what he could do. So he could do good things or really bad things, and that was the main problem there. And that’s why he started writing against the people that surrounded Porfirio Diaz in government, the people that were called the cientificos, the scientists, the positivist liberals in Mexico that thought that government should respond to scientific laws, and that you could develop an underdeveloped country, but with strong government, and that was what Luis Cabrera didn’t like, really.

0:10:55.4 Paul Meany: Yeah, he had a quotation I read in his essay, The Revolution Of Then And Now, where he says dictatorship is wrong, even if the dictator is a man of good intentions and acts honestly, because although he may be correct in his judgments, lacking the support of the law to ensure that he is obeyed, he always needs to resort to force to impose his mandates. And so it seems that there’s a big difference between Luis Cabrera and the other revolutionaries in that he always saw whatever he was doing that had to be limited. He didn’t really trust the good intentions of people, seemingly, he always wanted the law to come first, not people’s ideas. And did revolutionaries after Diaz, did they have a constrained idea of the law, did they want to limit the state or are they much different to Cabrera?

0:11:37.7 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Among the revolutionaries, you can find almost everything. But there was a faction in the revolutionary scene from the revolutionary group that were actually liberals from the 19th century. Venustiano Carranza who became president and who was the central figure for the 1917 constitution. He was educated, basically, in the liberal tradition of the 19th century in Mexico. The same with Luis Cabrera. Luis Cabrera was educated in that tradition, the liberal tradition in Mexico, and that’s why they had that concern about limited government. So Luis Cabrera, when he went into into politics originally with Madero and became a deputy, he, even though he liked Madero, he thought that Madero was not doing a good job because he wanted to see real reforms in Mexico that would limit the government power. And that he thought that it was really important to get Mexico in a tradition of the rule of law, for instance.

0:13:06.0 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: And Madero was not actually doing that. Madero was just saying that democracy was enough for Mexico, that if you gave people the power to choose democratically, the President and the Congress and everything, that everything would be fine. And Cabrera was not okay with that, Cabrera thought that certain reforms were needed to actually get Mexico into the tradition of the rule of law, so he opposed Madero institutionally. Of course, he was never a revolutionary in those years. But after Madero was killed, he joined Carranza and under Carranza, he became basically the most important intellectual in Mexico. And he maintained his liberal thinking, and his principles, his liberal principles all the way from the 1910s to the end of his life in the 1950s. So he was very consistent and that is very peculiar in Mexico, that you can find someone in the liberal tradition that was very consistent in his thought, during all his life.

0:14:24.9 Paul Meany: Did he have a lot of enemies? ‘Cause it sounds like he criticized every single leader of Mexico for stepping outside the bounds of law. Was he a popular figure as well? I can’t really tell from reading, ’cause there’s not exactly a huge amount about him out there, he’s quite an obscure figure almost, even though he was such a heavy-​eating intellectual at the time. But he wasn’t popular amongst politicians seemingly, he was constantly getting flack from them. But amongst the regular, everyday people, do they have an opinion on him at all?

0:14:52.2 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Well he was… Amongst politicians, he was not popular at all. Since he was always criticizing people in power, and he was really, really mean when he wrote, he had a very heavy pen. He was not popular amongst politicians, and the problem with Luis Cabrera is that he was not popular amongst people, because people actually didn’t know him, because very few people in Mexico could read and write until the 1950s. So he was not that popular, he was not that well known outside Mexico City and his state of Puebla, so that’s why he was obscure in a way, and everything that he wrote, since he was against the regime from the 1920s on was published, of course. But he went into a lot of trouble, he was exiled, for instance, for some months in the 1930s because he was against the regime. And then nobody wanted to collect his writings and his thinking and everything and publish it again, until very late in the 1970s and early ’80s. So that’s why he has remained a very obscure figure in Mexican political thought.

0:16:20.4 Paul Meany: But he had a massive impact on the constitution of 1917. And by a lot of people is considered the architect of land reform, or at least the idea of it. Could you go to a little bit into how he impacted Mexico on the constitution and the institutions that are now still existing today?

0:16:37.1 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Yeah, sure. I think we could talk about the two biggest impacts that he had on the constitution. He was not in the Constitutional Congress because he was on a diplomatic mission in the United States while the Congress was in its sessions. Well, most Americans know about the invasion of Pancho Villa, and after Pancho Villa invaded the US, then the US sent troops into Mexico. And Luis Cabrera was sent by Carranza to the United States to solve that conflict diplomatically. So he was not in Congress when the Constitution was drafted, but he had two huge impacts. The first one is that under Carranza, he worked a lot on a constitutional draft, let’s say, let’s call like that. That would make the President of Mexico have more legal powers to govern, but that were explicit powers in the constitution. That is very similar to the US tradition, where you… In your constitution, what you have is people can do everything except what the law prohibits, but the government can only do what the Constitution gives power to the executive or to Congress to do. So Cabrera was in that tradition, let’s enumerate the powers of government in the Constitution, so there is no confusion about what the President or Congress can do.

0:18:25.0 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: And he worked with Carranza and convinced Carranza in a way that that was important to include in the draft of the 1917 constitution. Even though he was not in Congress, he had discussed this with Carranza for many months before. And the other impact that he had precisely was land reform, and what Cabrera wanted with the land reform was to build in Mexico, to construct in Mexico a rural middle class, a class of small landholders that would be the basis of a democracy in Mexico. And in that, he was also very close to what, for instance, people like Tocqueville saw in the United States, that the democracy was strong in the United States, because you had a middle class of people that owned land, that were independent, that were economically independent, and that could be a limit to government. And Luis Cabrera wanted that for Mexico, so in terms of land reform, he wanted to distribute land to towns and to rural population, to get Mexico into a kind of transition from public and communal owned lands to private lands, so we would have that middle class. And that went into the 1917 constitution, and that was really, really, really important. After Carranza was killed and defeated, then in the 1930s, the law was changed, and the land that was distributed after the revolution became communal land in the constitution.

0:20:25.5 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: You couldn’t change that. You couldn’t sell it, you couldn’t privatize it, you couldn’t do anything with that land. So all the way from the 1930s to the end of the 20th century, we had that problem that we had, most land in Mexico was communal, was not privatized, was not privately owned, which was against what Cabrera thought, and in the ’30s, Cabrera was really critical of the way land reform was taking shape in Mexico.

0:21:01.8 Paul Meany: So he was a really critical character, constantly putting the fire under every single politician, but in 1933, and in 1945 or ’46, I think it was, he was offered a candidacy for the president, but declined, and he declined a few different political positions. Why did he constantly decline political power, but kept critiquing people? Did he not feel like he could make a difference himself by being in politics, or did he think it would possibly corrupt him at all?

0:21:28.2 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: No, I think that he considered himself an intellectual, really. He didn’t consider himself a politician in the sense that he saw himself fit to be in power. He thought that he was most influential when he wrote, or when he was working under a politician, really, a professional politician. He didn’t see himself as a professional politician, and also he knew that it was… That to run for the presidency with a candidacy that was not in the official party was basically a losing bet, so he thought… He knew that he was not popular enough, like Madero had been when he ran against Diaz, so he would lose anyway and he wouldn’t make any difference, so he would much rather stay as a critic in journalism, writing and trying to influence from the intellectual perspective people that were actually governing.

0:22:46.1 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: So I guess that’s why he declined the candidacy for president those many times, and also I think that since he saw himself as a very successful intellectual during the Carranza years, I guess that he always tried to go back to that, to get close to someone that was in power, and to influence politicians from that position. That’s what I think, but one of the things that it’s really hard to do when studying Luis Cabrera is that his personal archive’s still in his family, and they don’t let historians look at it, so we don’t… We have very little of his correspondence. We know very little of his personal papers and correspondence, so what we know is from the things that he published really, and that makes it really hard to know exactly why, for instance, he declined the candidacy or things like that.

0:23:57.4 Paul Meany: But what we do have of what he published is absolutely brilliant. I had never heard of this man whatsoever, but I read the essay, The Revolution of Then and Now he published in 1936, and I’d just like you to go through it really quickly, but I’d like to give you three terms to discuss about the essay. The first would be just the revolution itself, the second would be freedom, and then the third one I kinda go into is his critiques of socialism and technocrats in general.

0:24:25.2 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Okay, well, let me tell you first that the essay was written in 1936 and it was mainly written because of what I was talking about in the 1930s, the view of how land reform should be changed completely under President Cárdenas in the 1930s, and he saw the Cárdenas presidency as a socialist, even sometimes he used the word communist, experiment in Mexico. Okay, so he’s writing in a very peculiar context in terms of what is happening in Mexico, this turn to the left after the revolution, this very, very deeply to the left, and he’s also writing in the context of what is happening in the ’30s in the world. He’s also, he was also concerned about international relations and international politics, and he was seeing what was happening in the ’30s where the Nazis empowering in Germany and what was happening in the Soviet Union in the ’30s and in some countries in Latin America also like Brazil which had a right-​wing dictatorship and Argentina also the same thing. So he was writing in that peculiar context.

0:25:49.1 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: So in that essay, when he talks about the revolution, he makes this distinction about the revolution of then, which he considers the revolution that was made to preserve liberty. And the revolution of now, the revolution that is governing the 1930s in Mexico, with this turn to the left with a huge government, with huge powers, that is looking more like a fascist regime in a way from the left. So that’s why he considered what is happening in Mexico something similar to socialism or to communism. So that’s a distinction that he… That’s why he makes this distinction about the revolution of then, the libertarian revolution and the socialist revolution of now in the 1930s. For him, the revolution in Mexico was supposed to be a yeah, a violent anarch movement to destroy the regime that was in Mexico and build a regime completely from zero, but a regime that was based on the law, with very limited powers to government, and that’s the revolution of then, and that’s why in this essay, the revolution of then, he talks about liberty all the time. He said the revolution of then was about, all about liberty, and for him, liberty is mainly a negative conception of liberty, so you should limit the power of government to have people really enjoy every type of liberty or freedom.

0:27:48.2 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: That is the relationship that he sees there between the revolution and freedom, and when he talks about socialism or communism, he’s mainly concerned about regime in Mexico looking more and more like what’s happening in the Soviet Union, and he has another essay which is not translated to English, that is called The Communist Experiment in Yucatan. Yucatan is this state in Mexico, you know the peninsula of Yucatan, and there the land reform was really looking more and more like what was happening in the Soviet Union, and he wrote that, with that in the title, The Communist Experiment in Yucatan because of that, he was concerned that Mexico had been a dictatorship in the 19th century, and now was going to be a dictatorship, but looking more and more to a socialist dictatorship, and that is why that essay has that form, this essay that we’re discussing the revolution of then, the libertarian, let’s call it like that revolution, and the socialist revolution of the 1930s.

0:29:03.4 Paul Meany: One of the points I absolutely love that he makes is he’s talking at a time, the turn of the 20th century, when a lot of people were starting to think this idea of freedom, it’s kind of quaint and yieldy, it’s very cute, but it doesn’t make any sense in this materialist scientific world, where I think a really good point that he latches on to, he says the vaguest of concepts contrast with this deep roots in human nature and that freedom is the very essence of life, which was an excellent way of putting it, is that freedom is so hard to pin down ’cause it’s really everything, ’cause he talks about freedom of speech, he talks about freedom of education, he talks about freedom to work, he talks about all these different ideas, and he’s saying that freedom is a really complicated and big idea, and that’s why you can’t parse it down, that’s also why you can’t limit it to an extent because it is everything for us almost, and he constantly contrasts with the materialists and…

0:29:50.8 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Yeah, I think that he knew very well. I don’t have a proof of this really, but I think that he had read very closely the Federalist, and he thought in a sense that really the basis of everything was life and freedom, that’s a very natural rights kind of liberalism, but since he was more in the later 19th century liberalism tradition in Mexico, that’s why he doesn’t really speak of liberty as a natural right, but he sees liberty and freedom as the basis of everything, of everything, and he talks about liberty in many… Or freedom in many different ways, really. But he always comes to that, if you take away freedom, then you lose everything. So freedom for him is the central concept of political order in Mexico and everywhere, really.

0:31:14.9 Paul Meany: I was gonna say, you said you think he might have read the Federalist, I think that he must have read the Romans an awful lot, ’cause he mentions them by name, but when he talks about, at one point, he says the essence of a dictatorship is not only the nation is governed by a single person or by a few, but above all, that whoever exercises dictatorship is not bound by laws, and this fits really neatly into the Roman, the ancient Romans idea of freedom, and there’s a famous historian, Levy, who has this phrase, an empire of laws, not of men, that’s the best part of the Roman republic, was that no man was above the law, and it seems that that’s kind of the philosophy that he had, that no man could possibly ever be above the law, no man could dictate who deserves freedom and who doesn’t.

0:31:54.7 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Yeah, well, that he started with Romans and Roman philosophy, and none of that is really clear because he cites a lot of Roman thinkers and philosophers. He doesn’t cite or quote American philosophers, for instance. From what I have read, and I have read a lot of him, I can’t remember one single instance that he cites or quotes for instance, Jefferson or Madison or…

0:32:29.3 Paul Meany: Could that be because America might have been viewed as an imperialist power? America had an awful lot invested in Mexico and had a very… They were very interested in the outcome of the Revolution. Did Luis have a negative opinion of America?

0:32:43.2 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Yeah, I think… Yes, I think you’re right in both counts. It was not politically correct in Mexico to quote American thinkers and philosophers, and also I think Luis Cabrera had a negative view of American Imperialism. Both because what the US had done during the Mexican Revolution, that intervention that sent the “Expedición Punitiva” it’s called, the punitive expedition, after the Columbus raid in New Mexico, Pancho Villa invasion to Columbus in New Mexico. And then also the invasion that President Wilson ordered to the Port of Veracruz to impede Huerta to receive money and arms from Germany because, of course, World War I was beginning in 1914 and President Wilson didn’t want the Germans in Mexico. But Luis Cabrera had that negative view of what the US had meant for Mexico during the Revolution. And also in the latest part of his life during the World War, World War II, and what America, the US was doing in Europe. Even Luis Cabrera in those years got closer to government and was an advisor to the Mexican President in the late ’40s and early ’50s. He got closer to government, and he was an advisor in international politics to the Mexican President. So I think you’re right in both counts. He was not politically correct to quote the American thinkers or philosophers, and he had a negative view of what the US meant to international order.

0:34:50.6 Paul Meany: So just to finish off, Mexico today is home to 127 million people, and this man basically helped found the framework of the nation and the rule of law. He has helped establish it as an important concept. So I think it’s really sad that people don’t really know much about him even in Mexico. So I’d just like to ask you, what do you think the value of reclaiming the legacy of someone like Luis is both for libertarians and for people in Mexico and abroad?

0:35:17.7 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: Well, I think what we’re living in many parts of the world, and certainly in Mexico, is really tragic because we’re moving in the wrong direction. We are again like in the 1930s, having a lot of people in an outside politics thinking that the only way to have social justice is through the powers of government. So we’re giving government more and more power to do more and more things because I think for many, many people, social justice or equality is now more important than freedom and liberty. And I am pretty certain, I’m pretty sure when I say that every time the world has moved in that direction, things have not ended well. And that I think is why it is so important to make people realize that there are thinkers like Luis Cabrera and libertarians all over the world that we should read to really value a world where freedom is a central value. I think you cannot have freedom and equality at the same time, I think that’s impossible. And I think that if you move more to equality and give the power to the Government to seek equality among population, nationally or internationally, I think we are moving in the wrong direction. And history teaches us that, and that’s why it’s so important for people to realize what these critics like Luis Cabrera are saying.

0:37:21.0 Luis Felipe Barrón Córdova: I think that’s why it’s so important for people to know that. And in the US, I think it’s really important for people to realize that there are thinkers like Luis Cabrera outside of the US. And that there are strains of liberal traditions all over the world that are very important for people to know, and to study, and try to make the world a better place in terms of everyone being free and have their liberties protected by law. I think that’s why it’s so important. I think what we’re living today in the world looks a lot like what was happening in the 1930s. And if we don’t have the strength and the power to make people realize that these values are there, that these thinkers are there, that these critics that have been there before and were saying, “This is going wrong,” we could end up in a very, very bad situation again. So I think that’s why it’s so important for us to re-​read or read for the first time people like Luis Cabrera inside the US and outside the US.

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0:38:54.1 Paul Meany: Thanks a mil for listening. I hope you enjoyed this podcast. And if you did, you can subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. Portraits of Liberty is written and hosted by me, Paul Meany, and produced by Landry Ayres. You can also visit Lib​er​tar​i​an​ism​.org, to find more shows like this. I hope to see you next time.

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