On March 18, 1934, municipal and state officials in Huautla de Jiménez, Oaxaca, moved against a locally organized group centered on the charismatic leader Manuel García (also reported in some contemporary press as Manuel Garza), whose followers practiced extended communal rituals and strict obedience to his directives. The confrontation and subsequent investigations—reported across regional newspapers at the time—exposed techniques of sustained group control that historians and social scientists later identify as elements of mass indoctrination: isolation from broader community institutions, ritualized repetition of leader-centered doctrine, economic dependency within the group, and punitive measures against dissenters. The incident unfolded against a volatile backdrop. Post-revolutionary Mexico in the 1920s–1930s saw intense debates over the role of religion, land reform and local authority. Small agrarian communities like Huautla were sites of contested authority, where itinerant preachers or local strongmen could gain followings by promising social order, spiritual solutions or material support. Contemporary press accounts from Oaxaca and Mexico City described a tight-knit community under García’s direction, with followers reportedly relinquishing property and submitting to communal discipline. Local authorities cited concerns about public order and alleged abuse; some followers asserted, both publicly and privately, that they had been coerced or misled. Primary sources are limited and sometimes contradictory. Local newspapers and police reports provide the main contemporaneous record, but these documents reflect the political tensions of the era and the limited investigative standards of rural policing. Later secondary analyses by historians of Mexican social movements reference the Huautla case as a notable early example of organized control tactics in a sectarian setting, while cautioning against overstating its uniqueness: comparable instances of coercive communal movements appear across Latin America in the same period, often underreported. What makes the March 18 action significant for scholars of indoctrination is the combination of practices reported: the leader’s monopolization of authoritative interpretation, routine communal rituals reinforcing group identity, restricted external contact, and economic arrangements that tied members’ livelihoods to their continued membership. These features match frameworks developed in later decades for understanding how groups can systematically shape belief and behavior. The Huautla case therefore serves as an instructive, if locally specific, illustration of how such dynamics operated in a rural, early-20th-century Latin American context. Limitations in the historical record require caution. Names, exact follower counts and the full sequence of events vary by source. Some contemporary accounts may have exaggerated aspects to justify official intervention; conversely, sympathetic accounts by family members or later proponents of communal movements sometimes downplay coercion. No extensive archival dossier has been published that definitively settles all discrepancies, and surviving records are scattered among municipal archives, regional newspapers and oral histories collected decades later. For readers interested in the broader historical pattern, the Huautla episode is best read alongside studies of religious and political mobilization in post-revolutionary Mexico, scholarship on charismatic leadership in agrarian settings, and comparative work on sectarian coercion in the early 20th century. Together these sources place the March 18, 1934, action in a larger story about how social instability, charismatic authority and institutional weakness can produce environments conducive to mass indoctrination practices. In short, March 18, 1934, represents a documented, locally significant case where authorities intervened against a community under a single leader whose methods later scholars recognize as forms of organized indoctrination. The event is important not because it was singularly unique, but because it provides concrete archival and press traces of how such dynamics manifested in a specific time and place—while reminding researchers to treat the fragmented and contested record with scholarly caution.