by Patrick Iber
In December 1955 word arrived that Lázaro Cárdenas had been awarded the Stalin Peace Prize. His decision to accept it was controversial. Many of his critics had always wanted to believe that he was a Communist and reasoned that only a Communist would accept an award with the name “Stalin” engraved on it. But not all who objected were his political enemies. The historian Frank Tannenbaum had been his friend and counselor in the 1930s, but the anarchism of his younger days had hardened into liberal anti-Communism by the 1950s, and he wrote Cárdenas to warn of the “diabolically clever” actions of the Communists to “lay claim on you before the world.” He continued:
But you do not belong to them. Your life and work on behalf of the Mexican people lies within the Mexican tradition and is inspired by the democratic philosophy of the Western World. You believe in freedom, in justice, in a free press, free assembly, free speech, in human dignity and in that no man has a right to impose his ideas by force upon another. You do not believe in concentration camps or in liquidating people whose political opinions are different from yours, (as illustrated by the case of Trotsky) and you believe in the freedom and equality of little nations.18
Cárdenas did not see the matter in those terms. For him, accepting the Stalin Prize expressed approval of the steps that major powers had made toward peace with each other (talks held in Geneva in mid-1955 had reduced nuclear tensions) and the hope that a thaw in the Cold War would mean the end of interventions. To Tannenbaum, he replied:
If the world is asking for peace; if the old allies of the past war have returned to meeting to try to find solutions to their differences … how can it hurt Mexico or a Mexican to accept the Peace Prize? You refer to the tradition of Mexico and Western democratic philosophy, and go on, “you believe in freedom, in justice, in a free press, freedom of assembly, human dignity, equality of small nations, etc.” We really do believe in those things and we desire them for all to whom those liberties have been forbidden. If it is as you express, and there are peoples on other continents that live under oppression, we ought not to turn around and do the same thing by damaging “small nations” and suppressing freedom of expression.
In February 1956 the Soviet film director Grigori Alexandrov conferred the award in a lavish ceremony in Mexico City, referring to Cárdenas as a “paladin of democracy and independence,” a defender of justice and of the interests of the Mexican people. Thousands packed the room to witness the event; thousands more waited outside to catch a glimpse of Cárdenas as he left. The multitude that turned out to see him was a sign of how many missed his leadership in a rapidly developing but capitalist Mexico. Cárdenas was famously impassive in public and unwilling to criticize his successors in office directly, and the short speech that he made at the ceremony was oblique. He heralded improvements in relations between the great powers and, without mentioning Guatemala by name, stressed the importance of ending the Cold War because of the damage it had done to the sovereignty of smaller nations. Cárdenas described propaganda against Mexican partisans of peace as tendentious, saying that the aspiration for peace was shared by millions of men and women working for universal peace; it was the supreme ideal of the “people.” Cárdenas’s distrust of anti-Communism led him to doubt that Tannenbaum’s concentration-camps-and-secret-police description of the Soviet Union was accurate. But what he objected to most strongly was the Cold War logic that transformed criticism of the Soviet Union into a justification for oppressive intervention in the Western Hemisphere and beyond.19
Heriberto Jara wrote to Lázaro Cárdenas in May 1957, after his prize had been awarded, trying to keep him involved in WPC activity. But Cárdenas, while expressing sympathy, kept to his usual pattern of public silence. International overtures from J. D. Bernal in 1959 were a different matter and did not raise the problem of interfering in Mexican politics. Then, Cárdenas agreed to serve as a member of the WPC on condition that he be allowed to send proxies in his stead to international meetings. Mexican thinkers like Jara and Cárdenas were, for reasons of their own, reworking the message of the WPC through the lens of national liberation, laying the intellectual groundwork for the MLN.20
The president who took office in Mexico in December 1958, Adolfo López Mateos, presented a puzzle to the Mexican Left. Compared with his somewhat dour predecessor, he was young, handsome, and seemingly concerned with the plight of common people. In 1960 he characterized his administration as “extreme left within the Constitution.” But to those who outflanked him on the left—those he considered outside the constitution—he responded with severe repression. In 1958, at the very beginning of his term, an independent railroad workers’ union had issued a series of demands and, toward the end of February of the following year, called for a national strike. López Mateos responded by ordering mass arrests and firings. Leaders of the striking workers were members of the Partido Obrero-Campesino Mexicano (POCM), formed in 1950 by Communists who had been expelled from the PCM. Alleging that the railroad strikes were the consequence of Soviet subversion, the government rounded up other Communists, including leaders of the PCM. (Vicente Lombardo Toledano cannily criticized the leadership of the railroad union, and his Partido Popular ducked persecution.) Charges against the POCM and PCM leaders included the crime of “social dissolution,” created in 1941 by a law that prohibited the dissemination of foreign ideas that could upset public order or affect the sovereignty of the Mexican state. It had been crafted to allow the government to arrest undesirable spies at the dawn of Mexican participation in World War II, but its first use was against the railroad workers in 1959. The POCM and PCM leaders were imprisoned in Mexico City’s notorious “preventive prison,” the Palacio Negro de Lecumberri.21
Outside prison walls the repression of the independent unionists galvanized the Left, which considered the charges of social dissolution illegitimate and unconstitutional. A committee was formed on behalf of the political prisoners, growing out of the activity of a five-year-old Marxist study group known as the Círculo de Estudios Mexicanos, where discussions were being held on the reconstruction of the Left. The geographer Jorge L. Tamayo, a member of the Círculo and a supporter of the peace movement since its earliest days in the country, began paying visits to the jailed railroad workers. Securing their release became a major goal as members of the Círculo undertook to reorganize the committees and the causes of the Left. At nearly the same time, Tamayo, who had traveled to Stockholm for the Tenth World Peace Congress in 1959, also developed a critical view of the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee’s inactivity and scanty public presence under the leadership of Jara. After negotiations with younger members, the eighty-year-old Jara retained an honorary position but accepted reorganization, and the following month the Steering Committee for Peace and International Cooperation was formed with the idea of retaking the initiative that the old peace organization had lost. The new committee, in addition to Tamayo, included a number of other young leaders, among whom were Alonso Aguilar Monteverde, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Elí de Gortari, Ignacio García Téllez, Guillermo Montaño, and Janitzio Múgica. These were the future leaders of the MLN, and most of them were also traveling internationally to events sponsored by the WPC in the late 1950s.22
Lázaro Cárdenas, accompanied for much of the time by Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, made his first lengthy trip outside Mexico from October 1958 to February 1959. He traveled to Paris, Moscow, Beijing, Tokyo, and finally the United States. In Moscow he and Cuauhtémoc were greeted by the Soviet Peace Committee and taken to the Bolshoi Theater. In Beijing they were met by Kuo Mo-jo, the most important personality on the Chinese Peace Committee. At the end of his trip Cárdenas traveled from San Francisco to Chicago to Knoxville, Tennessee, where he examined approvingly the work of the Tennessee Valley Authority. In a diary entry he noted: “All the peoples of the world desire peace. The people of Europe, Latin America and the United States itself have serious internal problems, such as a lack of sources of work for their entire populations … China with its 600 million inhab
itants is solving that problem with an enormous impulse in agriculture while it also develops industry to absorb the excess rural population of each province. Other countries could do this too if the state, and not financiers and industrialists, directed their economies.” When he returned to Mexico, the statements that he made to the press set off another convulsion of speculation that he had been won over to Communism. But what fired his imagination was state-driven development, not Communism as such. He had, it was true, accepted the claims of the Soviet government and of China to be fully representative of their people, and he had failed to notice the millions of deaths by starvation that resulted from China’s Great Leap Forward, under way during his visit. But he saw other self-denominated revolutionary states in terms of the plans they were making to improve the lives of their populations. In the early 1960s Cárdenas defined the ideological program of the Mexican Revolution as “national sovereignty, economic emancipation, comprehensive agrarian reform, political democracy, union democracy, [and] freedom of worship and of the press,” and he read this interpretation of the Mexican Revolution onto other revolutionary states. It was an imprecise analogy: agrarian reforms in the Soviet Union and China (but not Mexico) produced some of the greatest humanitarian catastrophes in all of history. But Cárdenas’s agenda was not really to defend the Soviet Union or China, and their situations were not as analogous to Mexico’s as was that of the country that he noted in his diary really inspired hope: Cuba.23
Castro and Cárdenas had met before. Training for invasion in Mexico after his release from a Cuban prison in 1954, Castro had not been able to count on the automatic sympathy of the Mexican Left. Both Cuban and Mexican Communists thought of him as an “adventurer,” and Cárdenas had been on good terms with Fulgencio Batista during the months in 1940 when their presidential terms had overlapped. But Castro’s allies reached out to Cárdenas when Castro was threatened with deportation, and Cárdenas wrote on his behalf to President Ruiz Cortines, asking him to honor Mexico’s traditional right to asylum. Castro subsequently met with Cárdenas, who described him as a “young intellectual with a vehement temperament and the blood of a fighter.” Cárdenas reasoned that if Castro were to be successful in overthrowing Batista, it would be because it was the will of the Cuban people.24
When Cuba decreed its agrarian reform, Cárdenas compared the steps with Mexico’s own actions and noted that he hoped that Cuba would take a socially integrated approach that would avoid the internal convulsions that Mexico had suffered. Invited to Cuba to celebrate the 26th of July—the anniversary of the attack on the Moncada barracks—Cárdenas appeared triumphantly alongside Fidel Castro. Cuba became the symbol of the democratic aspirations that Cárdenas had for Mexico, for a return to the values that he associated with the Mexican Revolution. He had some reservations about the course of the revolution that he kept private: he shocked visiting Cuban president Osvaldo Dorticós and the others in the room by telling him that he found the “climate of the Revolution … troubling” in 1960, but he would never have said so publicly.25
A photo of Lázaro Cárdenas’s appearance with Fidel Castro at the 26th of July celebrations in Cuba appeared on the 15 September 1960 edition of Política. Many of the writers associated with the MLN contributed to the new magazine, which was denied paper by Mexico’s government newsprint monopoly.
The Cuban example was inspiring to many on the Mexican left, and its defense was largely posed in the language of democratic reform. In the new newsmagazine Política, for which many of those associated with the peace movement and the future MLN wrote, democracy was presented as the goal of the Cuban Revolution. Cuba was described as the most democratic country in the region: in the words of Víctor Flores Olea, “a direct, plebiscitary, concrete [democracy] … in which people and Government are perfectly identified [with one another].” Fidel Castro himself told the assembled crowds in Cuba on 1 May 1960 that “[Cuba’s previous rulers] invented a strange democracy in which you, who are the majority, counted for nothing. Democracy is that in which the majority governs; democracy is that in which the interests of the majority are defended … Democracy is the right to bread, to work, to culture, and the right to count within society.” That he made that argument in the context of announcing that there was no need to hold elections did not seem a problem to those who believed in the unity of Cuba’s government and its people.26
To its critics on the left, Mexico’s government did not satisfy that sort of definition of democracy because the interests of the people had been abandoned. That argument became even more compelling in August 1960, when the government again used the social dissolution law to arrest and sentence the muralist David Álfaro Siqueiros to eight years in prison. Siqueiros, a member of the PCM, had made comments critical of the government of Mexico on trips to Cuba and Venezuela. The government argued that in advocating for the dictatorship of the proletariat, Siqueiros sought the dissolution not only of the Mexican government but of Mexican society itself. But Siqueiros continued to paint while he was in prison, turning his work into a symbol of the power of freedom of expression over state repression. It was the kind of case that the anti-Communist CCF might have taken up on civil libertarian grounds had Siqueiros not been a Communist. Instead, his sympathizers were intellectuals, like Pablo Neruda, who visited in January 1961 and composed a quick verse: “I have seen your painting jailed / which is like jailing a blaze / … Mexico is a prisoner alongside you.” For political prisoners like himself, Siqueiros declared gallantly from behind bars, “Jail is the same thing a battlefield [is to a soldier].”27
In 1960 discussions began in WPC circles about holding a large peace congress—the first in many years—somewhere in Latin America. The Steering Committee decided on Mexico, and in December Latin American delegates arrived in Mexico to meet with Lázaro Cárdenas to plan the event. In mid-January 1961 Cárdenas and the others issued a call to the Conferencia Latinoamericana por la Soberanía Nacional, la Emancipación Económica y la Paz (the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace). The convocation argued that the people of Latin America, like those around the rest of the world, wanted to enjoy freedom and democratic rights, sovereignty, education and culture, independence, and economic development. The declaration asserted that all these positive qualities were found most clearly in revolutionary Cuba.28
Speaking at the inaugural event of the conference on 5 March 1961 to a room full of four thousand people, Cárdenas made explicit an argument that had existed embryonically from the beginning of peace movement campaigning: that there was a distinction between “revolution” and “war.” The difference lay in ends, not means. War, argued Cárdenas, threatened to extinguish humanity, and those who brought it about did so intending to profit from it financially. Revolution, by contrast, sought political and economic changes that favored the collectivity of the people who carried it out. Cárdenas was quick to add that respect for the will of the citizenry was the desired mechanism for change, and that that did not necessarily imply that violence was the only means to express it. What gave the Cuban example such an impact in Latin America, he argued, was that its government understood this distinction: the government and people of Cuba were pacifist, but they defended their revolution. Later in the event, the Brazilian delegate Domingo Vellasco called the Cuban government democratic, “of and for the people.”29
During the conference, commissions were established to write resolutions on four areas of concern: national sovereignty, economic emancipation, peace, and common action. The national sovereignty commission produced recommendations asking for juridical equality among Latin American states, self-determination, nonintervention, anti-imperialism, anticolonialism, defense of the Cuban Revolution, and condemnation of the Rio Treaty, U.S. military missions, and instruments of imperialism like ORIT and the Organization of American States. The economic emancipation group called for economic development, the right to strike, fiscal democracy, agrarian reform, nationaliza
tion, and the rights of workers to freedom, autonomy, and union democracy and again denounced ORIT as an instrument to divide and corrupt the workers of Latin America. Other resolutions expressed solidarity with Cuba and with Africa and Asia, advocated economic cooperation and disarmament, and championed individual liberty and the defense of political prisoners. “The defeat of imperialism is the fundamental condition of any development plan for our countries,” read the final resolution: “The works of the Cuban Revolution show the way to put an end to foreign domination.”30
Lázaro Cárdenas undertook to raise awareness of the causes of the Conferencia Latinoamericana in the manner he had used so effectively during his presidency: by traveling out to villages in person. Accompanied by many of the Latin American and Chinese delegates to the conference—as well as novelist Carlos Fuentes in his capacity as sympathetic journalist—Cárdenas traveled to Querétaro, Guanajuato, Jalisco, and Michoacán. In Guanajuato, Fuentes overheard citizens remark about Cárdenas: “Look at him, he is a true democrat.” “He knows how to mix among the people.” The path forward for Mexico’s democratic reconstruction, reflected Fuentes, would be dependent not on one man but on the active expression of popular will. “Comprehensive agrarian reform, union democracy, and political liberty,” he wrote, “will not be gifts given to the people, nor will it be a single caudillo who obtains them for the people. It will be the people, organized … that achieves them.”31
Organization continued. In May the Provisional Committee for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation, and Peace was formed, dedicated to disseminating the messages of the conference, especially freedom for political prisoners and defense of the Cuban Revolution. On 4 and 5 August a national assembly was held that established the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional, dedicated to the same causes as the March conference: national sovereignty, economic emancipation, and peace. It sought to unite all the “democratic and progressive,” “popular” interests without regard to party and included former members of the PRI, those who identified with the tradition of Cárdenas but had never belonged to any party, members of Lombardo Toledano’s recently renamed Partido Popular Socialista (PPS), and the PCM. The MLN espoused the subversive notions that the results of elections should reflect the outcomes desired by voters, and that demonstrations and speech should not be curtailed by the use of police violence. The document released to the public, a call to the Mexican people, emphasized that the movement situated itself as a nationalist rather than a class-based organization, and it called for the simultaneous pursuit of many objectives: full enforcement of the constitution, freedom for political prisoners, a democratic, honest, and independent justice system, free expression of ideas, comprehensive agrarian reform, union and ejido (communal farm) democracy and autonomy, Mexican control over Mexico’s natural resources, industrialization without recourse to foreign loans, just distribution of national wealth, independence, dignity, international cooperation, solidarity with Cuba, trade with all countries, democracy, honor, well-being, bread and freedom, sovereignty, and peace. Although democracy was not the only possible political goal for an anti-imperialist movement, in this case, the MLN’s nationalism was also part of a democratic program for Mexico.32