by Patrick Iber
Although the movement mobilized, at a minimum, tens of thousands, its impact was limited. What pressure the MLN could exert on the Mexican government came about mostly because of Lázaro Cárdenas. In the wake of the Conferencia Latinoamericana in 1961, President López Mateos called a meeting with Cárdenas in which he pressured him not to travel to Cuba. López Mateos tried generosity. He offered Cárdenas the opportunity to take charge of the PRI; the former president replied that he was not up to the job. Soon thereafter, Cárdenas declared that he belonged to “no party,” simultaneously denying that he was a Communist while also suggesting that he did not see himself as part of the ruling party in Mexico. Although it was obvious that he had not been active within the machinery of the PRI for some time, such a declaration still came as a surprise and raised the possibility that Cárdenas, especially if he were expelled from the PRI, would take large numbers of supporters with him and create a genuine electoral threat to the stability of the regime. He was seen as the only person who had the power to split the PRI, even though his private behavior suggested that he had no desire to do so. At the end of 1961 he accepted an executive position overseeing the Balsas River Commission, a regional development project based in his home state of Michoacán, hoping that in taking the post he might be able to influence López Mateos to grant clemency to the jailed political prisoners. Repeated meetings with López Mateos yielded no results, however, and opened him to charges of co-optation. Cárdenas had helped build the MLN to respond to problems in Mexico, aided by the transformed infrastructure of the WPC. Even as the MLN tried to emphasize its Mexican roots, it would soon come to pay a price for its international connections, however limited they were.33
Many of its detractors saw the MLN not as a domestic movement but as part of the Cold War. Rodrigo García Treviño of the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom, for example, called the 1961 conference a “Russophilic-Cardenista conclave” and imagined that its most important result had been the unmasking of Lázaro Cárdenas as an active agent of Moscow, leading inevitably to his political “liquidation.” Others accused Cárdenas of being a foreign agent and a recipient of “Moscow gold.”34
Both the analysis and the prediction by García Treviño proved inaccurate. It was true that the infrastructure of the peace movement had provided the organizers of the 1961 conference with support and personnel. But Lázaro Cárdenas insisted on maintaining financial and programmatic independence from foreign governments. Vicente Lombardo Toledano had remarked at a meeting of the PPS in December 1960 that individual contributions were needed to pay for the upcoming conference because offers of financial support that had come from the Soviet-bloc countries had been rejected so as to not to invite criticism in Mexico. Clementina Batalla de Bassols, a leader in the Soviet-aligned Women’s International Democratic Federation and widow of Marxist former minister of education Narciso Bassols, was made treasurer of the 1961 conference. She recorded each contribution and expenditure on behalf of the Mexican sponsoring committee and made the results available to the public. The conference sought to be seen, as a point both of pride and of political necessity, as a fully national undertaking and not the result of Soviet or Cuban manipulation. Contributions totaled nearly 300,000 pesos, and no single source dominated. Heriberto Jara made one of the largest personal contributions, of 6,000 pesos. Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s CTAL did receive money from the Soviet Union to keep it operational and might have been a conduit for support of the conference, but Lombardo Toledano’s personal contribution was only 1,000 pesos. The donations of various communal farms dwarfed that amount many times over. If any foreign government managed to contribute to the conference, it did so by circumventing rules in place to prevent it. The Vienna-based International Institute for Peace, the front office for the WPC, made several airline tickets available to Jorge L. Tamayo, but Cárdenas even agreed to pay for those, and the money for the tickets was returned. The need for the work to remain Mexican was well known throughout the movement and stemmed from the wishes of Lázaro Cárdenas himself. At an organizational meeting in March 1961, after Cárdenas had taken his leave, an Argentine journalist and Communist Party member proposed obtaining 100,000 pesos from Cuba for the printing of pamphlets and offered to do so, but Tamayo told her that Cárdenas would not approve.35
Ironically, however, the campaign against the MLN was international. President López Mateos, in negotiating with the United States in 1961, had explained that “Castroism” was a problem of national security for him, and he would take no direct actions to unseat the Cuban leader. But he did offer the CIA cooperation in its efforts to undermine the 1961 conference. Intelligence cooperation with the United States expanded, and Mexico increasingly served as an intermediary for U.S. efforts to monitor events in Cuba. Although the details of the CIA campaign to undermine the 1961 conference are not known, the Mexican government’s steps—which may have been assisted in some respects by the CIA—are clear. The Mexican government sought to infiltrate the MLN with secret police, stifle it by denying it press coverage, and mobilize a phony civic group to oppose it. Even as organizing was just beginning, the Mexican government flooded the MLN with agents of the Dirección Federal de Seguridad, Mexico’s primary intelligence agency. The MLN became so riddled with agents that some of its members argued against adding a youth section because it would invite further penetration by police agents. In a meeting recorded by those agents, others countered that they were already infiltrated by police and, because they were not engaging in any illegal activity, had nothing to hide. As time went on, the government used the information it gathered on prominent members of the MLN to blackmail them.36
The second part of the Mexican government’s plan to undermine the MLN hardly needed to be coordinated: the major Mexican press was habituated to ignoring events that presented the government, and especially the president, in a critical light. A complex network of government advertising, direct special payments to journalists, and a government newsprint monopoly underwrote this system. Although members of the press attended the Conferencia Latinoamericana, nothing on it appeared in the papers. (The major newspapers gave front-page coverage that week to the Sociedad Interamericana de Prensa, meeting in Acapulco, during which many earnest statements were issued celebrating the existence of freedom of the press in Mexico.) The absence of press coverage in major newspapers was the main reason that Lázaro Cárdenas undertook to raise awareness for the cause by traveling to villages in person.37
News coverage of the MLN had to flow through very narrow channels, which the government dammed and dredged as it saw fit. Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s newspaper, El Popular, went bankrupt in 1961, and the government passed its equipment (and its subsidies) to a new paper, El Día, which it hoped would be the moderating press organ on the left. Although the director of the paper was a member of the MLN, he had also recently rejoined the PRI. El Día became popular with left-wing students and professors, but its most significant achievement was to give an outlet for coverage of the Left without allowing it to flow into the mainstream, mass-circulation papers. The paper remained dependent on direct government support for years.38
Two magazines, Siempre! and Política, similarly faced and suffered strains from their involvement with the Left. Siempre! was a colorful and relatively popular weekly that featured large photo spreads, a bit of news coverage, witty political cartoons, a racy photo or two toward the back of the magazine, and regular columnists ranging from Vicente Lombardo Toledano on the pro-Soviet left to the anti-Soviet Víctor Alba, a regular contributor to CCF publications. The magazine’s director, José Pagés Llergo, had a checkered past that included admiration for fascism and a long history as an opportunistic pen-for-hire: he had been employed by both German and Japanese propaganda operations in Mexico during World War II. Siempre!, by contrast with his earlier publications, seemed to tilt to the left, perhaps because its start-up financing came from President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, who used the magazine to break with his rig
ht-wing predecessor. Pagés Llergo’s editorials were easy on whoever occupied the office of the presidency, but he developed a reputation as a tolerant editor: “[My journalists] can write whatever they want, as long as they don’t touch the President of the Republic or the Virgin of Guadalupe,” he once said. However suspect his motivations, Siempre! became the rare place in which a variety of left-wing and centrist perspectives could coexist in print, exchanging opinions and letters. Siempre! actually benefited from the left-wing revival when it inherited a vibrant cultural supplement, La Cultura en México, edited by the MLN sympathizers Fernando Benítez and Carlos Fuentes. The supplement, which frequently published writers including Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsiváis, Sergio Pitol, Luis Guillermo Piazza, Luis Cardoza y Aragón, and Gabriel García Márquez, had been expelled from the conservative paper Novedades in 1961.39
The biweekly newsmagazine Política: Quince días de México y del mundo, in contrast to Siempre!, was thoroughly a product of the Left. It was created in mid-1960 under the direction of Manuel Marcué Pardiñas. He had trained as an agricultural engineer and for years had been involved in the production of a technical, think-tank-type publication for the resolution of Mexico’s agrarian problems, Problemas Agrícolas e Industriales de México, which had survived with a government subsidy. Política, published under the authority of Problemas Agrícolas, focused on current affairs and almost immediately provoked the ire of the government, which refused to sell it paper from the government monopoly importer, Productora e Importadora de Papel, S.A., known as PIPSA.40
Política was not, strictly speaking, the organ of the MLN—it was more like the voice of one particular current of the MLN—but it was the most important magazine that shared its goals. Most of Política’s staff worked with the MLN, and Manuel Marcué Pardiñas had nearly constant access to its leadership, talking frequently with Jorge L. Tamayo, Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, Lázaro Cárdenas, and sometimes Clementina Batalla de Bassols. Without access to PIPSA-subsidized paper, it was forced to purchase excess newsprint on the black market from another newspaper at inflated prices. This pushed its cover price up too high to be a mass-circulation periodical, and the Mexican political police claimed that it received Soviet and Cuban support to continue publication.41
It is in the problems with PIPSA that the ironies of the MLN as Cardenismo in struggle with itself across time can be seen most clearly, for PIPSA was a creation of Cárdenas’s presidential administration. It was established in 1935 by Cardenista progressives who had grown angry with a newspaper that had been too direct in its criticisms of the president. Although the idea for PIPSA had originated in a direct threat to the country’s main private paper producer, one of its creators later insisted that during the government of Cárdenas the press enjoyed complete freedom, and it was never necessary for PIPSA to deny paper to any publications. Nevertheless, it drove the country’s private paper factory out of business and, because it enjoyed monopoly control over the distribution of newsprint, became a powerful instrument for ensuring that the press did not overstep government-established boundaries. In the colorful phrase of Política’s angry staff, PIPSA was “the ignominious guillotine that decapitates freedom of expression.” President Cárdenas had hoped for a responsible state-subsidized press, as he had hoped for responsible union coordination with the state to benefit workers, but in time both of these organizations created with “popular” intentions had been transformed from instruments of cooperation into instruments of control. Cárdenas had seen the corporatist structure of the postrevolutionary regime as potentially democratizing; by the 1960s it proved also to be an enormous obstacle to Mexican democracy.42
The final method that the López Mateos administration employed to make the path forward difficult for the MLN was to authorize the creation of a citizen counterforce under the apparent leadership of anti-Communist ex-presidents Miguel Alemán and Abelardo Rodríguez. The organization, known as the Frente Cívico Mexicano de Afirmación Revolucionaria (FCMAR), issued a call to the Mexican citizenry warning of the danger of the “infiltration of exotic doctrines … [which,] disguised as a false radicalism, aspire to suppress democratic institutions and substitute them with a totalitarian regime that will end our liberties and, destroying country, home, and family, will end forever traditional forms of Mexican life.” Rodrigo García Treviño of the Mexican Association for Cultural Freedom, who had longed for a conservative “Alemanista” rejoinder to “Communism” since the late 1940s, signed the manifesto and joined the FCMAR. The group was capable of mobilizing thousands for rallies against the Left and was used by the government for multiple purposes: to co-opt and control anti-Left mobilization by the Catholic Church, to demonstrate seriousness of purpose to the U.S. government, and to provide politically reliable troops when necessary. (When President Kennedy visited Mexico in mid-1962, for example, members of the FCMAR monitored the crowds that surrounded his motorcade for suspected agitators and showered the visiting president with confetti.) For its part, the FCMAR did a bit of social service work, beat up suspected leftists, and mobilized to make sure that the PRI did not select left-wing candidates for major offices. In his diary Lázaro Cárdenas commented on the creation of the FCMAR: “Anti-Communism has been used as an instrument to fight against freedom and democracy in the countries of Latin America and on other continents.” Although his comment was perhaps not a universal truth, his personal experiences gave it a kind of firm local plausibility.43
Even with all these obstacles, the MLN brought a kind of energy to the Mexican Left that it had not seen in years. Volunteers numbering at least in the tens of thousands fanned out across the country to try to mobilize support for progressive causes. But most of the MLN’s specific campaigns proved unsuccessful, undermined by government intervention. Organizing in Baja California Norte around the issue of salinity in the Colorado River, which harmed Mexican farmers, frightened the United States. Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas (seen by U.S. officials as a Communist sympathizer) seemed poised to be named to head the Mexicali Valley Irrigation District, so López Mateos pressured Lázaro Cárdenas to have his son withdraw from contention. López Mateos then sent federal troops to the Mexicali valley and forced a dissident, MLN-aligned leader to quiet down by threatening him with murder. A new peasant organization created in 1963 by MLN leaders, the Central Campesina Independiente, was supposed to be independent of the ruling party but was captured by it in little more than a year.44
Lázaro Cárdenas speaks at the closing session of the First National Conference of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional on 6 October 1963. The background portraits of José María Morelos and Emiliano Zapata serve to situate the movement as part of a national, rather than international, political movement. From left to right, seated at the table, appear Ramón Danzós Palomino, Manuel Terrazas Guerrero, Marta Borquez, Manuel Marcué Pardiñas, Enrique González Pedrero, Víctor Flores Olea, Lázaro Cárdenas (standing), Alonso Aguilar Monteverde, Ignacio García Téllez, and Guillermo Montaño. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, Collection Hermanos Mayo, envelope 18,421.
The MLN, bringing together as it did several left-wing groups, inevitably suffered from internal tensions. Heriberto Jara, for example, thought that its young leaders had been seized by extremism and gave no credit for the good things that the PRI did. But its real threats to internal cohesion came from party leaders. Conflict with Vicente Lombardo Toledano arose almost immediately. He was apparently disappointed to learn that the Cuban embassy had given its delegates instructions to deal with Alonso Aguilar Monteverde on the recommendation of Lázaro Cárdenas, ignoring members of his own PPS, and began to complain publicly about the MLN. Lombardo Toledano was seen by many of the MLN’s young activists as politically compromised and opportunistic, and so tensions increased throughout 1962. In June the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee—whose work had been merged into the “peace” division within the MLN—called for a national congress of the MLN. Stating that he thought that the peace movement and the
MLN should be separate undertakings, Lombardo Toledano took the PPS out of the MLN at midyear. The remaining leadership of the MLN described the departure of the PPS as an act directed against the “representative sectors of the Mexican Left”—placing Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s organization outside that category.45
In 1963 further conflicts arose regarding the 1964 presidential election. Some, especially in the PCM, wanted to use the MLN to launch a presidential candidate, but the internal line had always been that the organization was multiparty and that members would work within their own parties to have them adopt the principles for which the MLN advocated. Nonetheless, the PCM created the Frente Electoral del Pueblo and offered as a presidential candidate Ramón Danzós Palomino, a member of both the PCM and the MLN. While insisting that it did not want to damage the unity of the MLN, the PCM tried to recruit other members of the MLN to support the Frente Electoral, creating distrust and resentment. Some disillusioned members, such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, distanced themselves from the MLN, and the elections of 1964 proved to be the beginning of a long decline because the organization ceased to be able to motivate the kind of unity and organizational drive that it had had for the eighteen months or so after its creation in late 1961. It had one concrete victory in 1964 when Siqueiros was released early from prison, freed by presidential decree on 13 July, but even that had to wait until nearly the end of López Mateos’s term in office, when it became clear that his successor, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964–1970), would take the action if he did not do it himself.46