USS John Rodgers (DD-574) was a Fletcher-class destroyer of the United States Navy. She was launched on 7 May 1942 and commissioned on 9 February 1943. Herman Oliff Parish became her captain that day and held the post until 8 August 1944.
Under Parish she completed a Caribbean shakedown. On 13 May 1943 she left Norfolk, Virginia, with a convoy, crossed by the Panama Canal, and went on to Pearl Harbor for a brief further work-up. Her wartime duty was in the Pacific. She was awarded twelve battle stars for that service, and her whole crew lived through the war.
James Gilbert Franklin took command on 8 August 1944 and remained captain through 31 December 1945. From September 1943 she had been flagship of Destroyer Squadron 25. On 30 October 1944 she headed for a full overhaul at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard in California, then sailed west again early in January 1945. After atomic bombs struck Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Japan collapsed, she guarded the transports that brought occupation forces into Tokyo Bay on 6 September 1945.
She reached Boston, Massachusetts, on 17 October 1945. On 3 November she shifted to Charleston, South Carolina, and on 25 May 1946 she was taken out of commission and placed in the Atlantic Reserve Fleet. The hull went to Philadelphia in 1954 and to Orange, Texas, in 1968. On 19 August 1970 Mexico bought her in the condition she was in.
In the Mexican Navy she served as ARM Cuitláhuac (E 01), named for Cuitláhuac, the Aztec emperor who died in 1520 and ruled immediately before the last of that line. Mexico retired her on 16 July 2001. That retirement closed a stretch of Fletcher-class service that had run about sixty years.
Late in 2006 the small Florida nonprofit Beauchamp Tower Corp. acquired her, intending to exhibit her at Mobile, Alabama. The museum plan collapsed. She lay untended beside a grain pier in the port of Lázaro Cárdenas while liens and penalties rose past two million dollars. In 2008 the Mexican government said it would seize the derelict hull and clear it away. On 2 August 2010 it treated her as abandoned property and directed that she be broken up. Workmen began taking her apart at Lázaro Cárdenas in September 2010 and finished in April 2011.