Critical Latin America05 the Laboratory of Revolution

This book recounts the dramatic rule of Tomás Garrido Canabal, one of the strongmen empowered by Mexico’s 1910 Revolution. Garrido tried to turn the backward state of Tabasco into an atheistic, puritanical utopia, all the while relying on banana exports. Laboratory of the Revolution is the first-ever professional study of Tomás Garrido Canabal, revolutionary strongman of Tabasco state between 1922 and 1935. He dreamed of turning Tabasco—an isolated backwater and the quintessential “banana republic”—into a beacon of progress. Garrido’s recipe for that progress consisted of ridding the state of religion, prohibiting alcohol and other vices, championing science, and boosting agriculture and ranching. He only fell from power when a shoot-out in Tabasco furnished the pretext for subordinating the state to President Lázaro Cárdenas’s centrally governed political machine, the forerunner of Mexico’s long-lived one-party system.