Robbery Under Law: The Mexican Object-Lesson – Evelyn Waugh, 1939 ★★

Taking Oil, Dumping God

Marxism is one of the most profound political movements in the history of mankind. Love it or hate it, the rise of the “workers’ revolution” has left few neutral observers in its wake.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the haters. He condemned Marxism for its negative impact on national economies, its removal of public liberties to serve a nebulous public good, and most especially its avowed atheism. In Mexico in the late 1930s, he called out this “object-lesson” for what he describes as its ruinous effects.

Waugh writes: “Just as the United States earned the gratitude of the world by ‘trying out’ prohibition, so the Mexicans may be said to be trying out Marxism.”

It is hard to tell – especially once he gets going – whether Waugh was more exercised by Marxism or secularism. Both are villainous influences in his telling, turning a young nation away from God, democracy, and a free market; into something akin to Nazi Germany without either the Third Reich’s internal security or global prestige.

The last of Waugh’s travel books from the 1930s, Robbery Under Law is also the most polemical. A specific motivation for its writing was the 1938 expropriation of the Mexican oil industry, which until then had been managed by foreign businesses, particularly British ones. Waugh spends a long chapter detailing how this went down.

The Olmeca oil refinery, located in Mexico's Tabasco region, is today owned by Pemex, a government-run oil company. In the 1920s, Mexico produced more oil than nearly any other country. Today, it is the seventh largest oil producer in the world.
Photo by Luis Manuel Lopez from https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/mexicos-pemex-says-brief-fire-olmeca-refinery-controlled-operations-normal-2026-05-16/

As Waugh explains it, Mexico’s government, under President Lázaro Cárdenas, went through mock negotiations before just seizing the oil refineries and then having captive justices sign off on the theft. Then they proceeded to damage the once-formidable output of their vast oil fields, plunging more Mexicans into poverty:

It was admittedly an embarrassing position for the republican government to find themselves the sovereigns of a vastly richer subject; as we shall see the solution which commended itself to them was to ruin that industry too and reduce the whole country to uniform squalor. Was it improper for the Companies to resist this solution?

It is hard at this remove to be as concerned about a dispute involving property rights versus government oversight, especially as Waugh admits Western businesses held the upper hand for years. Mexican nationalization of the oil industry was part of a broader move which over time softened from hardline Marxism to a kind of democratic socialism. In Waugh’s telling, these are indistinguishable from one another.

A mural depicting a 1906 strike in Cananea, Mexico. Strikes in Mexico are commonplace occurrences, Waugh writes, "like the weather in England, and like it, the habitual excuse for any failure in plans."
Painting by David Alfaro Siqueiros from https://depts.washington.edu/iww/mexicaniwws.shtml

Waugh’s main bone of contention with Mexico’s government is not its confiscatory economic policies but its anti-clericalism. Once he dives into that aspect, Robbery Under Law becomes a more absorbing and compelling work. It just takes too long getting there.

Waugh is at his best early in the book, taking in Mexico’s culture, climate, and national character. He is typically acerbic and amusing, if less denigrating than he was about Ethiopians in his prior travel book, Waugh In Abyssinia.

The landscape impresses him enough to wax a bit rhapsodic in one of the book’s most lyrical passages:

It is superb country; mountainous, volcanic, cracked and pitted with green cultivatable valleys and wooded slopes rising above the snow line, into angular shining peaks; graced, every few miles, by the domes and facades of the conquerors’ churches; when the clouds lift, everything is a shade sharper and brighter in the thin, dry air of the highlands than seems natural to Northern eyes.

He writes with blithe dispatch about what he regards as one of the principal annoyances of Mexican life, the noisiness of its cities:

Besides these purely communicative and representational sounds, there is the abstract noise for noise’s sake – the bashing together of pieces of wood or iron, preferably in the echoing lightwells of the larger buildings, for no other purpose than the general good; for Mexicans feast on sound, as the more ascetic Nordics fast on stillness, and count no man happy until his ear drums are ringing.

The Palace of Fine Arts in Mexico City, seen today. Waugh in the 1930s was impressed by the country's buildings but warns: "Those who come to Mexico with picturesque ideas of a voluptuous night life are usually disappointed."
 Image by Sir_Lee from https://www.hellotickets.com/mexico/mexico-city/mexico-city-at-night/sc-204-4567

Waugh was never one to hide his prejudices; here he explains “it is useless to pretend, as many writers do, that they arrive with minds wholly innocent of other experience.” The problem is once he begins to light upon the politics of the place, his desire to engage the country as he sees it largely disappears. He instead goes through a litany of problems he has as an English citizen and a practicing Catholic with a nation whose rulers display open hostility against both.

At times he becomes philosophical about the situation, comparing it with recent events in Europe. “Politics, everywhere destructive, have here dried up the place, frozen it, cracked it and powdered it to dust. Is civilisation, like a leper, beginning to rot at its extremities?”

This constant downbeat tone becomes a weight, as does a sullen condescension about how Mexicans choose to exercise their independence. It may be that having read Waugh In Abyssinia, I found the guy too soft on fascism. Which may be on me, as Waugh here has at totalitarianism of both the Communist and Nazi kind.

His main express concern is that Mexico could be headed in either direction given the way it is being managed, poorly and with little respect for its people.

Mexican President Lazaro Cardenas is the target of Waugh's criticisms throughout Robbery Under Law: "To ruin the whole nation to reduce the disproportionate prosperity of a part of it is insane. That has been General Cardenas's policy."
Image from https://crisissome.blogspot.com/2016/07/lazaro-cardenas-del-rio.html

The fact that Mexico was a different story than what was going on in Europe at the time seems to pass Waugh by. The policies of Cárdenas are described as identical to those of his predecessor, Plutarco Calles, which proved not the case. In terms of oil expropriation, Cárdenas went much farther; at the same time he brought an end to Calles’s active war against the Catholic Church.

Waugh describes both leaders being in lockstep with the country’s overall Marxist direction, predicting all sorts of horrors to come. Pessimism is his regular fallback position: “It is characteristic of Mexican history that at almost any period one looks at there are abundant reasons for deploring the existing régime; one turns the pages and realizes that one was wrong; the cure was always worse than the ill.”

The treatment of Catholics under Calles were awful indeed: services were banned; parochial education outlawed; a civil war from 1925-1929 left tens of thousands dead. A decade later, Waugh describes empty, desecrated churches everywhere and provinces without clergy. The Church is a target, he writes, because “we hate most savagely not those who have wronged us, but those whom we have ourselves wronged.”

Confiscatory policies, the titular “robbery under law,” extends to private property as well. Waugh notes farms where land has been redistributed to “the people,” those who have an in with the ruling party. The son of a dispossessed ranchero is afraid to clean up his farm: “If it looks worth stealing I shall lose it.”

The execution of the Jesuit priest Miguel Pro (above) was photographed by the Calles regime to discourage Catholic expression; Waugh notes it had the opposite effect. A decade later, he quotes Cardenas: "I am tired of closing churches and finding them full."
Image from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Miguel_Pro%27s_execution_%281927%29.jpg

Much of the time Waugh draws comparisons to other parts of the world: communist Russia, Nazi Germany, and most especially Spain, which had just wrapped up its own civil war.

Spain conquered Mexico from the Aztecs and other indigenous peoples; they introduced Christianity, horses and other features integral to Mexico. The bond between the two nations runs deep, he writes:

The war in Spain was very much more real to them than any other piece of contemporary history; more real even than Roosevelt’s New Deal. They understand the Spanish issue in Spanish terms, without any English and French and American confusions, and felt strongly about it one way or another. It was like part of their own lives.

Waugh’s comparison would not extend to outcomes; the Catholic right won in Spain but lost in Mexico. Today, both countries are near-identical socialist democracies, which quite likely would annoy Waugh but also suggests an element of practical accommodation in how people choose to live which Waugh either couldn’t or wouldn’t foresee.

Another influence on Waugh was his fellow English Catholic Graham Greene, who had visited Mexico and been struck by the anti-Catholic persecutions. Greene wrote about this in his 1939 book The Lawless Roads, which Waugh references in Robbery Under Law. The fact that Greene, unlike Waugh, was a man of the left made his criticisms of Mexico’s strongarm socialism more pertinent as Waugh explains it.

Waugh spends much time contemplating Catholicism's holiest shrine in Mexico, and the painting at its center, "Our Lady Of Guadalupe" (above). "Those who see in the glories of Mexican decoration only the self-advertisement of a clerical caste and the oppression of a people do not know love."
Image from https://www.catholicsandcultures.org/mexico-celebrating-our-lady-guadalupe

Waugh’s faith is ultimately at one with his perspective throughout the book; which makes his passages on Mexico’s Catholicism more pertinent. He writes about the 1927 martyrdom of Father Miguel Pro and its galvanizing effect on Mexico’s faithful, and the shrine of Guadalupe, which honored a reported apparition in 1531 and remains a pilgrimage destination for millions to this day.

Waugh writes of the latter: “it came to teach the Spaniards that the Indians were men and women and souls, to teach the Indians that the Spaniards’ god was the god of all humankind.”

As a signpost of the author’s deepening faith, Robbery Under Law is essential reading. But it is not as intimately concerned with Mexico or its people, and its ideological and religious concerns, however respectable, blur the immersive feeling one usually gets from Waugh’s travel writings of experiencing a part of the world as intimately as he did. Waugh has points to make this time, and while he makes them with eminently reasonable stridency they tend to get in the way.