Gold Shirts

The Revolutionary Mexicanist Action (Spanish: Acción Revolucionaria Mexicanista), better known as the Gold shirts (Spanish: Camisas Doradas), was a Mexican fascist paramilitary organization in the 1930s.

The group was founded by general Nicolás Rodríguez Carrasco in 1933 with the official title of Acción Revolucionaria Mexicana (Mexican Revolutionary Action). Carrasco, who had been a supporter of Pancho Villa until he deserted in 1918, named the group after the dorados, Villa's "golden" group of elite soldiers. The Gold shirts opposed the reforms of president Lázaro Cárdenas and were protected by former president Plutarco Elías Calles, who had become an enemy of Cárdenas. The Gold Shirts often violently clashed with supporters of the Mexican Communist Party and the Red Shirts and demanded the immediate deportation of all Jews and Chinese from Mexico. Although the dorados copied their style from the Blackshirts and Sturmabteilung, copying the anti-communism and authoritarianism of the former and the anti-Semitism of the latter, they nonetheless lacked the fascist mission, being essentially (according to Fascism expert Payne) counterrevolutionary and reactionary and as such were more easily employed by the existing state.

During the Maximato era of the formerly heavily anticlerical Calles regime, the Gold shirts were moderately in favour of religious liberty for the Catholic Church but because they still at times acted in an anticlericalist way against priests wearing the cassock), Cristeros never entered their ranks.

After Calles was deported by Cárdenas on April 9, 1936, the group lost its protector. A few months later, Rodríguez was arrested and deported to Texas in August 1936, from where he continued to lead the group until his death in 1940. After Mexico's declaration of war upon the Axis powers on May 22, 1942, the Gold shirts were banned.