Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America

by Patrick Iber

  The tension between the domestic and the international layers of the MLN was a source of trouble for the movement, and it achieved few of its goals. Yet if its impact was “ephemeral,” as one historian has argued, its struggles reveal a great deal about Latin American politics in the context of the global Cold War, demonstrating how difficult it was to create a movement for democracy in the face of domestic opposition and international polarization. The history of the MLN reveals at least three important ironies: one having to do with Mexican domestic politics, one with Cuba, and one with the global Cold War.

  Within Mexico the MLN has typically been seen as an expression of Cardenismo in the 1960s. Lázaro Cárdenas was the figurehead of the movement, and it had the sympathies of most of those who had made up his political coalition. (It was also the first major political movement in which his son, Cuauhtémoc, played a major role. Cuauhtémoc’s first bid for the presidency in 1988 and the founding of the center-left Partido de la Revolución Democrática the following year would rely on many of the same parties and people and much of the same platform as had the MLN.) To raise support for the MLN, the elder Cárdenas briefly acted like a president again, campaigning in the countryside. But the irony that the MLN never confronted was the degree to which President Cárdenas was the architect of the state that repressed him in the 1960s. To be sure, the PRI had evolved since Cárdenas’s presidency and had changed its name, and the state had grown in scope and capacity. But the centralized union bureaucracies and the state monopoly on public newsprint that vexed the MLN were products of that earlier time, now turned against the Left. If the MLN was indeed an expression of Cardenismo in the 1960s, it also confronted the undemocratic aspects of the legacy of Cardenista democracy of the 1930s and was substantially defeated by them.5

  The MLN grounded its critique of the Mexican state in the language of democracy, which it understood as essentially populist rather than procedural, in that democratic legitimacy was conferred on governments that acted in ways that benefited “the people” rather than those that held competitive elections. The MLN was inspired by the progressive legacy of the Mexican Revolution and analogized the Mexican experience to the one taking place in Cuba. “Cuban sugar is today what Mexican oil once was,” said Lázaro Cárdenas in 1961: it belonged to the nation and its people. The second irony, then, was that decades of revolutionary degeneration in Mexico had provided the MLN with the tools it needed to see through the government’s claim to represent an evolved form of direct democracy, but the same skepticism was not applied to Cuba. Fidel Castro too claimed to be a democrat because he acted in the interests of the people. In 1961 his claims seemed to many to be both fresh and plausible. But the MLN missed the ways in which the authoritarian aspects of the Mexican system it disliked—the use of political detention and government control of unions and the press—were being put in place in Cuba in the very years in which they held it out as a model. Mexico’s government smoothed its claims to democratic legitimacy with rigged elections and bribed its way to a “free press”; Cuba soon dispensed with both.6

  Observing the final irony requires seeing the MLN as part of the Cultural Cold War. In that context the MLN followed a Popular Front model, bringing together leftist Cardenistas with Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s Partido Popular and small Marxist parties, including the Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM). It categorically rejected anti-Communism and, through the WPC, was a kind of fellow traveler of the Soviet Union’s anti-anti-Communist network. But it was not a Soviet front group. Furthermore, its calls for union autonomy and an independent press inverted traditional Cold War patterns in which these causes were typically associated with anti-Communist groups. The final irony, then, is that the MLN’s platform, if enacted, would have made Mexico more democratic in precisely those ways anti-Communists sought across the continent. Its very existence undermines the equation of anti-Communism and an idea of democracy based in civil society institutions independent of the state, the idea that outlets like the CCF tried so hard to establish. Indeed, the CCF’s local representative in Mexico, the ex-Communist Rodrigo García Treviño, volunteered for a secret and horrendously undemocratic campaign to repress the MLN. The history of the MLN is another reminder that prodemocracy movements in Latin America, whether of the anti-Communist or the anti-anti-Communist variety, used languages of liberation that were implicated in support for empire somewhere on the globe. Perhaps there was no other way.

  Although the MLN was a movement of the 1960s, it inherited an organizational legacy from the Soviet-aligned peace movement of the 1950s. After the major peace conference held in Mexico in September 1949, the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee was established to continue its work. The first important task was signature gathering on behalf of the Stockholm Appeal. The Mexican committee set its sights on 1 million signatures and established prizes and trophies for associates who gathered the most. Much of this activity was undertaken by the PCM, which directed its followers to apply limitless energy to the organization of local peace committees. Members of the national committee of the pro-peace group took to the streets to round up signatures from passers-by; Diego Rivera himself spent a morning in front of the post office in Mexico City, making speeches in favor of peace next to signs reading “Damn the warmongers” and “Down with the atomic bomb.” He then spent the afternoon with David Álfaro Siqueiros and Vicente Lombardo Toledano at a little table, collecting more signatures. In spite of its high-profile endorsements, the signature-gathering campaign did not meet its goals in Mexico. When the final tallies were presented, the Mexican committee furnished 300,000 signatures, about one-twentieth of 1 percent of the reported global total and well short of its own goal.7

  As with its other fellow-traveling organizations, the PCM wanted both to control the actions of the peace campaign and to have membership in those groups represent a broad front. It instructed its supporters not to be “sectarian” in their actions within peace campaigns and as they formed local chapters. These directives did not succeed. The party soon reported that “detrimental sectarianism” had caused Communist groups simply to convert their own cells into peace chapters, and this was leading to inactivity and narrow support for their initiatives.8

  Vicente Lombardo Toledano (standing behind table in dark suit) collecting signatures for the Stockholm Appeal on the streets of Mexico City, 1950. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, DFS, document 11–71–50, binder 1, page 234.

  The figurehead of the Pro-Peace Committee incarnated the contradiction. General Heriberto Jara Corona was not a member of the Communist Party but was no less a believer in the goodness of the Soviet Union for that. Still, he had ample biographical reasons for his peace work. He was born in the coastal state of Veracruz, which was relatively developed industrially, was exposed to international political currents because of its port, and had many areas with strong organized labor movements. The son of a middle-class factory owner, Jara worked as a young man doing accounting in textile factories, where he saw the misery and poor treatment of the workers. In the afternoons he worked as a reader to groups of cigar makers (the work was quiet, and the practice of hiring a reader was common), performing books with social content, like Jack London’s nightmare of a fascist United States, The Iron Heel. Jara became a general during the Mexican Revolution and was ordered by future president Venustiano Carranza, who was then first chief of the Constitutionalist Army, to march on Veracruz to enforce the departure of the North American military from its occupation of that city in 1914. Elected to the Constitutional Assembly in 1917, Jara was a prominent member of its radical wing and was instrumental in crafting the statements of workers’ rights in Article 123. “Political freedom,” he argued at the Constitutional Assembly, “as beautiful as it is, as well guaranteed as you like, cannot be assured if economic freedom is not guaranteed first. Poverty is the worst kind of tyranny, and if we do not wish to condemn our workers to that tyranny, we must emancipate them by voting in effective laws.” Jara was appoint
ed to govern both the federal district of Mexico City and his home state of Veracruz, where he was associated with the causes of the urban working class. Lázaro Cárdenas, while president, made Jara the president of the official party. While president of the Partido de la Revolución Mexicana (PRM), Jara showed a populist rather than a liberal understanding of democracy. He fought with President Cárdenas when Jara advocated nonrecognition of elections in Mexico City that had been won by an anti-Cardenista politician. Jara argued that democracy had to be in accordance with popular will—which plainly meant in favor of Cárdenas—and he thought that that should supersede the results of actual elections.9

  Jara had participated in many ways in the construction of the Mexican state and was an honored member of the official party during all three incarnations: the Partido Nacional Revolucionario, the PRM, and finally the PRI. He had been a close friend of the cultured and talented Soviet ambassador to Mexico, Constantin Oumansky, during World War II but had never been a member of the Communist Party. But by the 1950s the content of his political experiences made him a passionate defender of the Soviet Union. He was named president of the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee and vice president of the Latin American organization, traveling in that capacity to Europe and Moscow. As one of the seven recipients of the Stalin Peace Prize in its inaugural year, 1950, Jara traveled to the USSR, which awed him both physically and morally. He returned to Mexico with a birch sapling and planted it in his garden, cherishing the symbolism of a tree from the country of socialism growing in Mexico.10

  In Mexico, Jara took up advocacy of the peace cause. As the United States prepared for war, Jara wrote for a pamphlet published in Mexico, the Soviet Union spent less and less on war and increased the amount it spent on social services. In response to charges of forced labor in the Soviet Union, he quoted a Russian worker he had met who praised the scientific nature of the USSR’s five-year plans, and who then adeptly pirouetted to a condemnation of the inhumanity of the Taylorist system of production (associated with speedups and the “rational” exploitation of labor in the United States), which he said left workers too exhausted to participate in the world of culture. Jara, like the organization he represented, was the very picture of a fellow traveler: not quite embracing Communism for himself while simultaneously making the case for it for others. He called anti-Communism “nothing … more than the mask for Yankee imperialism to dominate the world” and wrote, “Now, if the desire for justice, if the longing for freedom, if the urge to rid oneself of hunger is called communism, then where justice is absent, there will be communism; where freedom is shackled, there will be communism; where there is hunger, there will be communism, and it will not be imported from the Soviet Union; it will be very national, whatever country it is in.” Jara had seen anti-Communism used to bludgeon Mexico’s non-Communist Left and U.S. troops raising the American flag in his home state. His belief in popular government and the right to national self-determination made him naturally sympathetic to the Soviet Union’s situation in the late 1940s, which he understood as that of another “government of the people” attempting to chart its own path to economic and political liberty, but menaced by imperialism.11

  After Stalin’s death in 1953, the new Soviet leadership that came to power sought to de-Stalinize several aspects of Soviet life, including both culture and foreign affairs, and the idea of peace faded as a cultural force. To improve domestic conditions, the USSR needed to decrease military spending and consequently sought reasonably good relations with the United States. WPC rhetoric shifted from a belligerent anti-imperialism to antinuclear talk of peaceful coexistence. Although the WPC remained unquestionably pro-Soviet, Nikita Khrushchev went so far as to suggest to the WPC leadership that it should act on principle, even if that meant going against the USSR. At the same time, however, Khrushchev believed that the Soviet Union was the only major power genuinely interested in peace, and that decolonizing Asia and Africa would join a great “zone of peace” that would bring the “Third World” closer to the USSR over time. The WPC’s president, Frédéric Joliot-Curie, died in late 1958 and was replaced by his close friend and associate J. D. Bernal, an Irish biologist and Communist. Bernal, in keeping with the times, looked to reach out to non-Communist leaders who shared the values of the WPC, and he struck on the idea of inviting Lázaro Cárdenas to join the organization.12

  The man who had once granted asylum to Trotsky would seem an odd choice for affiliation with a Soviet-aligned group. But Cárdenas, in spite of his sympathy and personal respect for Trotsky and his deep frustration at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, had never been anti-Soviet. In the 1940s he had still never traveled outside Mexico, which remained his sole point of reference. Like his friend Heriberto Jara, he associated anti-Communism with the politics of the privileged. World events and personal contacts moved him rather naturally toward opinions that aligned with those of the WPC. Shocked by the use of nuclear weapons against Japan at the end of World War II, Cárdenas concluded that President Truman was a war criminal. In 1946 he met with Henry Wallace and wrote that Wallace was “not a Communist as his enemies say,” but simply a “progressive democrat, a friend of the working class and an enemy of imperialism.” He and Wallace were thinking in similar ways about politics in the early years of the Cold War, defining themselves as progressive “anti-anti-Communists” in opposition to dominant anti-Communist political cultures. “Communism is the bogeyman of the rich and the hope of the poor,” Cárdenas wrote in his diary in late 1946. He gave his blessing to the Continental Congress for Peace when it took place in Mexico City in 1949, though without violating his custom of refusing to appear in public in support of political causes.13

  Cárdenas remained personally close to the small group that maintained the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee. Heriberto Jara was a close family friend. Elena Vázquez Gómez worked as Cárdenas’s secretary; she and her partner Teresa Proenza were also close associates of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera during the early 1950s, when the painters devoted considerable emotional and physical energy to the peace cause. Proenza and Vázquez Gómez had organized the 1953 Continental Congress for Culture alongside Pablo Neruda. Like Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Vázquez Gómez had been an asset of Soviet intelligence during World War II.14

  Even so, Cárdenas was not directly involved with the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee in the early 1950s. What remained of the committee was managed rather directly by the PCM. Evidence suggests that during its leanest years the Pro-Peace Committee could carry on its activities only because of operational subsidies from the Soviet Union. Jara’s figurehead role obliged him to donate large sums personally, but financial problems were already acute by 1952. The magazine Paz, edited by Proenza, was accumulating large debts until Juan Pablo Sainz of the PCM, speaking with some officials at the WPC, was able to arrange for the WPC to provide financial assistance. With the threat of closure still urgent and Jara unwilling to indefinitely give the magazine loans that were unlikely ever to be paid back, the line of credit from the WPC seems to have been extended. The socially committed poet Efraín Huerta, secretary general of the Pro-Peace Committee, arranged for more money to go to the magazine after further conversations with the WPC. Jara rejected attempts by the WPC to pay back loans he had made, writing that his contributions had been given for personal reasons and then adding, “As for what you [the WPC] are giving for the magazine, you know what you are doing, but I don’t want to know anything about the movement of funds for it.” Jara stopped contributing financially; that the magazine continued publishing for several years would seem to be the result of support from the WPC and, by extension, the Soviet Union.15

  The necessity of such an external subsidy was a sign of broader weakness in the Mexican Left during the 1950s. Vicente Lombardo Toledano continued to work, but the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina (CTAL) had lost ground to the Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores (ORIT) in Latin America. The Confederación de Trabajadores de México, wh
ich he and Cárdenas had built, expelled Lombardo in 1948 and, in joining ORIT, aligned itself with the anti-Communist trade-union movement. Lombardo Toledano’s crushing defeat in the 1952 presidential elections was a measure of his limited influence: he came in fourth, earning fewer than 100,000 votes. For its part, the PCM was passing through very lean years. Suffering from poor leadership and the consequences of expelling many of its more dynamic workers, it retained fewer than a thousand members. Although the aged president Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who served from 1952 to 1958, relied on the Cardenista left wing of the PRI to balance the power of the associates of his conservative predecessor, Miguel Alemán, economic growth helped stabilize the regime, and Cardenistas had to fight to retain influence. The PRI’s machinery for co-opting and undermining challenges to its rule was improved by the development of a professional intelligence service that infiltrated opposition movements.16

  Reflecting the increasingly urban demographics of Mexico, student politics became more important to the Left and its program. After the overthrow of the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954, for instance, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, the son of Lázaro Cárdenas, led a demonstration that laid a floral wreath at the U.S. embassy with a note reading “For the hurt caused by the death of the Good Neighbor Policy.” Lázaro Cárdenas broke from his usual pattern of public silence and issued a statement of support for the government of Arbenz, lamenting the damage done to the sovereignty of Guatemala. After the coup the WPC increased its attention to the defense of peace in Latin America in precisely the same terms, defining peace as the defense of national sovereignty against imperialism.17