League for the Defense of Religious Freedom
In 1926 in response to the anti-religious measures of the government of General Calles, the Cristero Rebellion broke out under the leadership of the Liga de Defensa de la Libertad Religiosa ( League for the Defense of Religious Freedom). The movement was particularly strong in the rural regions of Guanajuato, Michoacán, Jalisco, and the western part of the state of Mexico. Although the Cristero campesinos were defending their right to keep their churches open and freely practice their faith, their movement also was imbued with unsatisfied agrarian ambitions and ended up involving thousands of armed men. To fight the Cristeros the government mobilized the army and agrarista peasants of Veracruz and other regions, declaring that the Revolution was threatened by the Catholic Church and the Cristeros. It was a confused and cruel war, favored by a post-Revolutionary agrarian situation in which illegality, discontent, and revolt predominated.

The Cristero Rebellion was pacified in 1929 following and agreement between the government and the Catholic Church hierarchy. The Cristero campesinos in the middle believed that their interests had been abandoned in the accord, however, and some continued the fight. In 1934 the conflict erupted again in what has been termed the Segunda Cristiada or la Segunda, this time without the support of the Catholic Church. The agrarian policy and reforms of the Cárdenas period eventually absorbed the movement.

In the early 1930s two currents of thought came to blows over the agrarian question. One side was represented by president Plutarco Elfas Calles, who proposed that a limit be set on land distribution to ejidos, after which the government should consolidate individual landholdings, spurring the mechanization and modernization of agriculture. This strain of thought saw the ejido as a transitional institution, ensuring a labor supply for industrial agriculture and training campesinos to be private farmers or salaried workers for agroindustry. The agraristas themselves, however, believed that agrarian reform should continue until all arable land had been redistributed. The ejido—the inalienable common lands, water, and woods of village communities—was believed to be the solution to the land problem and the basic structure of agrarian life and production, ensuring peasant control over agrarian resources yet allowing large-scale production of such cash crops as cotton and henequen.