Lázaro Cárdenas

Lázaro Cárdenas was president of Mexico from 1934 to 1940. His government distributed land on a large scale, strengthened organized labor, and nationalized the foreign-owned oil industry.

Mexican oil expropriation: The 1938 transfer of foreign-owned oil companies’ assets in Mexico to national control. Cárdenas ordered this defining act of economic nationalism in March 1938.
Mexican corporatism: A political system that organizes social groups into state-recognized bodies and incorporates them into governance. Cárdenas reorganized the ruling party around labor, peasant, popular, and military sectors.
Plan of Ayala: A 1911 revolutionary manifesto demanding the removal of President Francisco I. Madero and the return of land to villages. Its agrarian demands anticipated the land redistribution Cárdenas later expanded.
Manuel Ávila Camacho: A Mexican general who succeeded Lázaro Cárdenas as president in 1940. His presidency marked a more moderate course after Cárdenas’s reforming administration.
Plutarco Elías Calles: A Mexican revolutionary general and president who remained a powerful political figure after leaving office. Cárdenas displaced Calles’s influence, reversing the dominance that defined the Maximato.
Petróleos Mexicanos: Mexico’s state-owned petroleum company, founded in 1938 after the oil expropriation. Pemex became the institutional legacy of Cárdenas’s nationalization policy.
Confederation of Mexican Workers: A Mexican trade-union federation founded in 1936 and led by Vicente Lombardo Toledano. The CTM helped channel organized labor into the Cárdenas-era political system.
Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution: A 1917 constitutional provision declaring national ownership of land, water, and subsoil resources, subject to state regulation. Article 27 supplied constitutional authority for land reform and oil nationalization.
Vicente Lombardo Toledano: A Mexican labor leader and intellectual who helped found the Confederation of Mexican Workers. He was a prominent labor ally during Cárdenas’s presidency.
Porfirio Díaz: A Mexican military and political leader whose long rule from 1876 to 1911 favored political centralization and economic modernization. Cárdenas’s land redistribution and resource nationalism challenged patterns associated with the Díaz era.

Linked from 14 pages