page_title: Plutarco Elías Calles
section_title: Legacies
hierarchical_section_title: Plutarco Elías Calles / Legacies
caption_attribution_description: English: A monument dedicated to Gen. Plutarco Elias Calles, President of Mexico 1924-1928 and a negotiator of peace between the U.S. and Mexico in Nogales in August of 1918.
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: Calles's main legacy was the pacification of Mexico ending the violent era of the Mexican Revolution through the creation of the Partido Nacional Revolucionario (PNR), which became Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), which governed Mexico until 2000 and returned to power for one term in the elections of 2012.
  Calles's legacy remains controversial today, but within the PRI it has undergone a reappraisal. His remains were moved from their original resting place to be interred in the Monument to the Revolution, joining other major figures, Madero, along with Carranza, Villa, and Cárdenas who in life were his foes. For many years, the presidency of Cárdenas was touted as the revival of the ideals of the Revolution, but increasingly the importance of Calles as the founder of the party that brought political stability to Mexico has been recognized. When the son of Lázaro Cárdenas broke with the PRI in 1988, the party leadership began to burnish Calles's reputation as the party's founder. In 1990, a monument to Calles was erected that commemorated his September 1928 speech declaring the end of the age of caudillos. His speech was made in the aftermath of Obregón's assassination and as the political solution to violence at presidential successions was being resolved by the party he brought into being.
  He is honored with statues in Sonoyta, Hermosillo, and his hometown of Guaymas. The official name of the municipality of Sonoyta is called Plutarco Elías Calles Municipality in his honor.
  For his fierce anti-clericalism, Calles was denounced by Pope Pius XI (r. 1922-1939) in the encyclical Iniquis afflictisque (On the Persecution of the Church in Mexico) as being "unjust", for a "hateful" attitude and for the "ferocity" of the war which he waged against the Church.
caption: Calles monument inaugurated in 1990, commemorating his speech of September 1928 declaring the end of the age of caudillos
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