Lázaro Cárdenas

President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940 and the most consequential implementer of the 1917 Constitution’s promises of land reform. Under Cárdenas, some 18 million hectares were redistributed, the ejido became the dominant form of post-revolutionary land tenure, PEMEX was created through the 1938 oil nationalization, and the Mexican state consolidated the corporatist structures that would define the PRI era.

Cárdenas’s administration is also the context for the brief 1940 Salazar Viniegra dispensary experiment in public-health-oriented drug policy, which his government initially backed and then suspended under US pressure. In Sinaloa, the Cárdenas-era agrarian settlement is the moment at which Benjamin Smith locates the origin of narcopopulism: the 1940 Mazatlán pact in which ranchers, denied further land expropriation, were permitted to channel their energies into opium trafficking as compensation.