Chapter 4 examines how the aftosa commission understood and countered opposition, using threats and targeted violence, carefully calibrated concessions, propaganda, mediation by regional bosses and powerbrokers, and information-gathering. It argues that this blend of tactics illustrates the Mexican state’s conceptions of order and security, and supports the notion of the PRI regime as a "dictablanda"- authoritarian but institutionally weak, and reliant on a complicated blend of repressive and consensual mechanisms.

The disease went by many names and people told different stories about it. Scientists called it aftosa, or foot-and-mouth disease. The other anglophone term, hoof-and-mouth disease, was more precise: cloven-hoofed animals carrying the virus typically foamed at the mouth, developed painful blisters, and lost weight. Some aborted and a handful – mainly newborn animals – died. US and Mexican officials argued that the disease was a “dread plague” – a terrifying and grave threat to national wellbeing, akin to floods, storms, or earthquakes.1 From 1947 to 1954 a bilateral commission waged a campaign across central Mexico against this dangerous enemy. Many Mexicans regarded the campaign as a farcical and cruel affair. Most animals seemed to recover quickly, and many farmers believed that the disease was simply a version of a mild, familiar illness which they called mal de yerba or mal de boca – grass or mouth sickness. Few had seen anything quite like the anti-aftosa campaign before: brigades of pith-helmeted veterinarians, cowhands, and soldiers who dressed in bizarre heavy rubber overalls, drove through the country in jeeps, personnel carriers, and souped-up former ambulances, traipsed over the sierra on horses or mules, or paddled along rivers in wooden canoes, imposing quarantine, exacting fines, and dousing farms with acrid chemicals. At the start of campaign, they corralled hundreds of thousands of cows, pigs, goats, and sheep and shot them dead. Compared to run-of-the mill robavacas – cattle rustlers – their motives were hard to understand. Unlike Santiago matamoros, Spain’s legendary Moor-slayer, these men seemed menacing but cowardly, even slightly ridiculous – mere matavacas, or cowkillers.2

Chapter 2 explains how and why the campaign against aftosa adopted the policies it did, focusing on high politics of bilateral diplomacy, the main competing political and economic interests on both sides of the border, and bureaucratic infrapolitics. The Mexican government used international ties, obfuscation and delay to gradually blunt US policy preferences and shift the aftosa campaign from slaughter to vaccination. In this way the campaign illustrates the diplomatic leverage Mexico retained in the postwar period, and how it was used.

Chapter 1 surveys relations between domestic animals and state formation in Mexico from the colonial to the postrevolutionary era, and discusses how the aftosa disease arrived in Mexico. While the aftosa campaign represented an unprecedented effort by the state to intervene in the lives of livestock animals and their owners, it emerged from a longer history. Conquest, war, commodity booms, depressions, and revolution remade people's relations with domestic animals. Through these shifts, Mexico’s government had never been indifferent to animals, whether as sources of food, energy, disease, or symbolic power.

Chapter 5 shows how the aftosa outbreak shaped the Mexican state’s efforts to modernize and regulate livestock from the 1950s to the 1980s. By disrupting existing methods of production and consumption, creating new technical capacities, and offering an example of effective state action, the crisis prompted officials to contemplate more ambitious state intervention. At the same time, the aftosa crisis offered painful lessons about the kind of political compromises and alliances – international and domestic – upon which government action rested. Along with the wane of Cardenismo, the Second World War, and the so-called Green Revolution, the aftosa campaign helps explain why Mexico’s developmental state took the shape it did, and illuminates its strengths, weaknesses, and contradictions.

Chapter 3 explores Mexican opposition to the aftosa campaign, drawing on hundreds of complaints, local studies, and an original database of over 450 incidents of civil disobedience, riots, and rebellions. Rather than portraying resistance as rooted in the Mexican peasantry or rural tradition, this chapter emphasizes the geographical breadth, cross-class character, and the self-consciously modern public discourse of many opponents, and the vigorous but localized focus of most action.

Chapter 6 traces the global repercussions of the aftosa campaign, particularly its effects on new US efforts to control animal disease across the Americas and Europe for economic and military purposes. As such, the story helps to underline the multilateral character of Latin America's Cold War, and the ecological contexts that shaped it.