Álvaro Obregón

Álvaro Obregón Salido was a Mexican general, inventor, and politician who held the office of the 46th President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924. Born in Navojoa, Sonora, he entered the Revolution following the February 1913 coup that installed Victoriano Huerta as president. Obregón backed Sonora’s decision to align with Governor Venustiano Carranza, head of the northern Constitutionalist Army, and quickly rose to become one of its top generals, alongside Pancho Villa. Carranza put him in charge of revolutionary forces in northwestern Mexico. The Constitutionalists defeated Huerta in July 1914, and the Federal Army dissolved the next month. In 1915, the revolution turned into a civil war between the Conventionists—led by Emiliano Zapata and Villa—and the Constitutionalist faction of Obregón and Carranza. Obregón took command of the Constitutionalist army, defeated Villa, but lost his right arm in the process. The 1917 Constitution took effect, and Conventionist forces were soon crushed by Obregón’s army. When Carranza stepped down and designated Ignacio Bonillas as his successor, Obregón and fellow Sonoran generals Plutarco Elías Calles and Adolfo de la Huerta overthrew them under the Plan of Agua Prieta. Obregón won the 1920 presidential election with broad popular support. His presidency brought educational reforms, a boom in Mexican muralism, moderate land redistribution, and labor laws backed by the increasingly powerful Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers. In August 1923, he signed the Bucareli Treaty, which clarified the rights of the Mexican government and U.S. oil companies, securing U.S. diplomatic recognition. In 1923–24, his finance minister, Adolfo de la Huerta, rebelled after Obregón named Plutarco Elías Calles as his successor. De la Huerta gained support from revolutionaries who saw Obregón mimicking Porfirio Díaz’s style. Obregón returned to the battlefield and crushed the rebellion, aided by U.S. weapons and planes that bombed de la Huerta’s forces. In 1924, Calles was elected president. Obregón retired to Sonora but remained influential. Calles pushed through a constitutional change allowing re-election (but not consecutively), and Obregón won the 1928 election. Before he could start his second term, he was assassinated by José de León Toral during the Cristero War. His political legacy is one of pragmatic centrism, allying with various revolutionary factions to achieve his goals. Historian Linda B. Hall called him “the organizer, the peacemaker, the unifier.” His death sparked a political crisis, leading Calles to found the National Revolutionary Party, later the Institutional Revolutionary Party, which dominated Mexican politics for the rest of the 20th century. Obregón was born in Siquisiva, Navojoa, Sonora, the eighteenth child of Francisco Obregón and Cenobia Salido. His father once owned a large estate, but his business partner backed Emperor Maximilian during the French intervention, and the Liberal government confiscated the property in 1867. Francisco died in 1880, the year of Álvaro’s birth. The boy was raised in poverty by his mother and older sisters. His mother’s family was locally prominent, owning haciendas and holding government posts under Porfirio Díaz. Obregón benefited from these connections, though as an orphan he was the poor relation. He was ambitious. A cousin on his mother’s side, Benjamin G. Hill, became a key ally in the Revolution. Sonora was isolated, sharing a border with the U.S. and having frequent cross-border exchange and American investment. It lacked a direct railway to Mexico City, which shaped its development and role in the Revolution. Sonora had rail links to the U.S. and its economy was tied to the U.S., exporting cattle hides and garbanzos. Obregón’s family situation and the state’s economy led him into garbanzo farming as a young man. As a child, he worked on the family farm, learned the Mayo language from indigenous workers, and his bilingualism later helped him draw Mayos and Yaquis into his orbit. He attended a school run by his brother José in Huatabampo, getting an elementary education, but his mind was “active, inventive, and above all, practical.” He worked various jobs as a teenager, then in 1898 found steady work as a lathe operator at a sugar mill owned by his maternal uncles in Navolato, Sinaloa. This skilled labor experience shaped his views on workers’ rights and gave him a sense of the political power of workers’ anger. In 1903, he married Refugio Urrea.