page_title: Plutarco Elías Calles
section_title: End of the Maximato and exile
hierarchical_section_title: Plutarco Elías Calles / Post Presidency / End of the Maximato and exile
caption_attribution_description: Tomb of General and President Plutarco Elias Calles just outside the Illustrious Person Rotunda in the Dolores Cemetery in Mexico City.
context_page_description: Plutarco Elías Calles was a Mexican military general and politician. He was the powerful interior minister under President Álvaro Obregón, who chose Calles as his successor. The 1924 Calles presidential campaign was the first populist presidential campaign in Mexico's history, as he called for land redistribution and promised equal justice, more education, additional labour rights, and democratic governance.
  After Calles' populist phase he ushered in a state atheism phase. After leaving office he continued to be the dominant leader from 1928 to 1935, a period known as the Maximato, after a title Calles awarded to himself, Jefe Máximo of the Revolution.
  Calles is most noted for his implementation of anti-Catholic laws in the Mexican constitution. This led to the Cristero War, a civil war involving Catholics opposed to the administration. Calles also founded the Institutional Revolutionary Party in 1929. The party had ensured political stability in the wake of the assassination of president-elect Alvaro Obregón in 1928. In its two subsequent incarnations, it held power continuously from 1929 to 2000.
context_section_description: Cárdenas had been associated with Calles for over two decades; he had joined Calles's army in Sonora in 1915. For that reason, Calles and his allies trusted Cárdenas, and Calles believed he could control Cárdenas as he had controlled his predecessors. However, Cárdenas soon revealed himself as an independent. Indeed, conflicts between Calles and Cárdenas started to arise not long after Cárdenas was sworn in. Calles opposed Cárdenas's support for labor unions, especially his tolerance and support for strikes, while Cárdenas opposed Calles's violent methods and his closeness to fascist organizations, most notably the Gold Shirts of general Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco, which harassed Communists, Jews and Chinese.
  Cárdenas started to isolate Calles politically, removing the callistas from political posts and exiling many of his political allies: Tomás Garrido Canabal, Fauto Topete, Emilio Portes Gil, Saturnino Cedillo, Aarón Sáenz, Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco, Pascual Ortiz Rubio and finally Calles himself. Calles and head of the labor organization CROM, Luis N. Morones, one of the last remaining influential callistas and one-time Minister of Agriculture, were charged with conspiring to blow up a railroad and placed under arrest under the order of President Cárdenas. Calles was deported to the United States on April 9, 1936 along with the three last highly-influential callistas in Mexico—Morones: Luis León (leader of the Radical Civic Union in Mexico), and General Rafael Melchor Ortega (one-time Governor of Guanajuato). His son Alfredo and his secretary were also exiled. At the time of his arrest, Calles was reportedly reading a Spanish translation of Mein Kampf; a political cartoon of the era depicts this.
  In exile in the United States, Calles was in contact with various U.S. fascists, although he rejected their anti-Semitic and anti-Mexican sentiments, and also befriended José Vasconcelos, the Mexican philosopher who had previously been a political enemy.
caption: Upon his death, on October 19, 1945, the mortal remains of Calles were deposited in the crypt of his godmother with his wife's Natalia Chacón. In 1969, by orders of the President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz,  his remains were transferred to Monumento a la Revolución.
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