"...disorganized.
Mexican historians generally agree, even ones sympathetic to the need to impose some kind of postwar stability on the fractious polity, that Reyes was by any definition an authoritarian even if he toed the line of being an outright dictator. Reyismo was in many ways not just a personality cult around the totemic identity of Mexico City's strongman Prime Minister but also the revenge of the European-descended bourgeoisie against three separate factions - the conservative elites who had steered Mexico into war to satisfy their hatred of the United States, the peasantry who had turned much of the countryside into a war zone in the name of Zapatismo, and organized labor, which steeped in proto-syndicalism had destabilized the country first in its program under the cover of the election of Madero and then in colluding in his overthrow when he proved insufficient in sharing their revolutionary zeal. Latin America, from its early years in the anti-Spanish wars of independence, had often been split into opposing camps of conservatives and liberals, generally referred to as Blancos and Colorados respectively regardless of country. Reyismo was undoubtedly a triumph of Mexico's version of the Colorados, the payback of the country's liberal middle and upper-middle urban professional and educated classes who represented the Empire's true base of support but had seen their influence gradually wane over the prior thirty years as Maximilian came to depend on landed oligarchs and the clerical conservatives in the wake of the Revolt of the Caudillos after the initial reformist zeal of his first two decades in power. It was these conservative-liberal Mexicans, often with German, Hungarian or Slavic surnames and first-or-second generation in the country, who attended state schools in Mexico City or Guadalajara and had voted lockstep for the Bloc Independiente and been most skeptical of war with the United States, which they were at most ambivalent towards (and there were quite a few genuine Amerophiles in Reyes' orbit), who now were ascendant, and they were ready to dole out payback to those they were most hostile towards - the agrarian elite, the peasantry, and syndicalists.
It helped, of course, that syndicalism in Mexico was absolutely dead two years after the Revolt of the Red Battalions, and it was there that a new labor movement under men like Morones was able to quickly fill the vacuum starting in the spring of 1917 as the Mexican economy exited the extreme shakiness and staggering unemployment of 1916 to some form of cautious stability. Mainstream labor had, since the 1890s, been associated with the Confederacion Imperial de Trabajadores, which was a labor confederation only on paper. Membership in CIT was mandatory for every union in order to be legalized but it was, in Morones' own words, "a hollow farce" that existed mostly as a way for well-connected bosses to pass on information on restive laborists to the authorities and create a panacea of a claim on the idea that the Empire was in any way sympathetic to labor's concerns. That all said, the CIT did serve a useful purpose in that as it was heavily decentralized but also had been entirely boycotted by the now-annihilated syndicalist movement, the factions that existed to the right of the Red Battalions but well of the left of the loyal sheep that the Chapultepec seemed to expect unions to be, especially in the wake of the war.
This was part of the context of Morones' sudden and rapid emergence as the leader of not only the SME [1] but a strengthened "New Left" in Mexico at only the age of 27. Having denounced the COM-CGTM agglomeration (despite having briefly been a member in 1913), Morones represented the pragmatic but nonetheless democratic socialist tendency within the CIT, which sought not just a facsimile of a labor umbrella organization but an actual one, and thus would need to take over the CIT from the inside. This was done in two ways - the first was through the formation of the Grupo Izquierda Democratica, or Democratic Left Group, within the CIT on March 12, 1917 at an SME congress in Mexico City, and the second was through the pledging of support of the GID for the war against Zapata in the South.
Morones, it turned out, sensed something in Reyes - whom he would only meet a handful of times in person before the latter's death - that other left-wing thought leaders did not, perhaps because Morones famously eschewed the leftist tendency for overthinking dogma and ideology and instead pursued cold, hard compromises that delivered quick results no matter how emotionally unsatisfying. The simple fact was that Reyes' new Convergencia had won the 1916 elections via a combination of fraud at the margins but primarily through one wing of opposition having disqualified itself through the Red Battalions and the other through the war itself; the left and right of Mexican politics, with smaller but more fiercely committed supporters, were essentially unable to take on his coalition of the broad but brittle middle. In trying to manage his big tent, Reyes needed to be all things to all people, and already he was making a show of his Catholic devotion to conservatives while pledging to keep the most popular of Madero's reforms to radicals.
It was clear then that labor had an opportunity to ingratiate itself to Reyes, by making the GID a "congress within CIT" rather than a rival, and by taking out a position that urban bourgeoisie could appreciate in staunchly opposing Zapata. Reyes, for his part, could use the help - while Zapata had been driven out of Oaxaca, he still could threaten the Tehuantepec from his bases in Chiapas and Tabasco, and his army increasingly including Mayan rebels from not only the Yucatan but what was once considered Guatemala. The threat of a peasant uprising across the lower Bajio was thus gone, but in its place an expensive and unpopular counter-insurgency war in one of the most politically chaotic places on the continent. For Reyes, then, it was good to have the growing tides of reformist socialists within the CIT left over from the failure of the Red Battalions in his corner rather than preaching class solidarity with the paisanos, but this "New Left" of Morones would before long have a price..."
- El Jefe de Jefes: Luis Napoleon Morones' Mexico
[1] Mexican Electricians' Syndicate, which Morones helped found
