Spectator's Journal/Mexico, No Domino

...In May of last year John R. Horton, senior analyst of Latin America for the CIA, is known to have handed in a detailed report on Mexico only to be asked for a revision which would show the country to be so unstable politically and economically as to pose a threat to the United States...

...The domino theory as a succession of political inevitabilities offers too simple a scenario...

...There was the bloody put-down of student-led riots in 1968 followed by a decisive army campaign against incipient guerrilla trouble in the state of Guerrero...

...As chief executive proceeded to make of Guatemala what Cuba is today, the Soviet outpost in America...

...Then last May Interior Minister Manuel Bartlett, evidence in hand that refugee camps along the southern border were being transformed into training grounds for subversion by Bishop Ruiz and his priests,1 called on United Nations refugee personnel to join him in forcibly transferring some 40,000 Central Americans, mostly indigenous Guatemalans, farther up country to a diocese where the bishop is a conservative...

...Whereas every little grumble of Latin American churchmen is routinely blown up by the media to arouse worldwide compassion, the anguished protests of Monsignor Ruiz never got beyond the local press.ver got beyond the local press...

...He has also wisely said that Mexican-American relations are a marriage without possibility of divorce...

...Mexican fashion has changed a good deal since then...

...It is not improbable that Mexico, situated between the Americas like Switzerland in the midst of Western Europe, is more useful to the international left as a neutral way station than as one more battlefield...

...Terrorism in cities and mountain villages has forced this notably democratic statesman to keep Peru in a nearly continuous state of emergency...

...Decent indeed, the Mexican scene, in comparison with the goings on in South America...

...Writing in Conservative Digest Robert Caldwell warns: "Whether the nightmare [a Castro-type regime at the Texas frontier] materializes depends on what happens in Guatemala" because "Mexico is the big prize...

...Jacobo Arbenz, one of the golpistas who had overthrown President Ubico...

...In Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia drugs processed in hundreds of clandestine laboratories scattered through the jungles are being flown out of hidden airstrips to provide international revolution with financing undreamed of up to now...

...So is another fallacy: compression of the Latin American subversion story into a tale based on events of the last few years...

...It is always a temptation to program the future from the excitement of current events, but looking deeper it becomes clear that Soviet penetration of Latin America did not begin with Daniel Ortega or even with Fidel Castro...

...In reality the ruling PRI, despite continual reference to a revolution few Mexicans are of an age to remember, has become a notably staid, bourgeois institution...

...Havoc in Mexico is basic to the domino theory...

...Over coffee in the southern town of Tuxtla-Gutierrez a few months ago, I asked the regional head of the far-left Mexican Workers party (PMT) if their insignia was the hammer and sickle...

...One of the fringe groups is the Communist party itself...

...That year there was a general leftist upsurge as Soviet victories in Europe sparked enthusiasm among Central American students already influenced by Mexican intellectuals and the wandering Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda...

...All this will have to be looked at objectively some day...

...For him "the domino theory was never more valid...

...Some of us write, some make movies and some traffic in drugs...

...Many of the Arbenz crowd fled to the backwoods of Cuba where they offered the emerging rebel leader, Fidel Castro, their experience in the new techniques of peasant revolution...

...One of their number, Colombia's Nobel Prize winner, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, told the Village Voice: "We all do what we can...

...Even the children sabotage everything we do...

...Once Castro took over, Guatemalan activists returned home to begin the long guerrilla struggle that lasted through 1982...

...They hate the way things are, especially they hate all the foreigners in their country, Germans like my husband, all the Czechs, the Cubans, the Chileans...

...By the time half a dozen thoroughly alarmed Latin American governments had broken relations with Guatemala, Washington gave effective support to another military man, Col...

...It happened in the bewildering first decades of independence when Mexicans had hardly got- used to losing their three-century-old status as New Spain, the glory of a worldwide empire Independence put an end to a colonial defense system wherein Spanish seaports and outposts from Oregon to Chile had been fortified against the depredations of English pirates, Protestant preachers, Dutch and even Russian commercial adventurers...

...Peruvian President Baluande recently told the United Nations...

...Certainly it is remarkable that several drastic government moves against local Red surfac-ings brought no organized condemnation from the international media, nc zeroing in of the human rights establishment...

...Excitement cools when it is discovered that El Salvador boasted a Communist party in the late- 1920s and something they called a "red army" by 1930...

...The nation's banks, taken over by a government that admitted to owing $80 billion abroad, remained closed under army guard and the peso fell sharply...

...They envision Marxist subversion, like pieces in a game, moving northward from Nicaragua to push over the government of El Salvador, then in quick succession those of Honduras, Guatemala, and Mexico until revolution rages along the Rio Grande...

...But if it is true that the people reject Communism, why is Mexican foreign policy so left-leaning, so tediously anti-USA...

...Cuba, be it noted, is less than half as far from Mexico as Nicaragua and a quarter of a century of Marxism there has not caused Mexico to collapse...

...A good deal has appeared in the American press about the healthy relations between labor and government in Mexico...

...There were a few days in August 1982 when the world waited for Mexico to fall...

...To insist that Nicaragua poses no threat to Mexico is not to express the hope that the Sandinistas stay in power...

...Horton refused, insisting there were no facts to support such a thesis...

...Coming to power for the PMT or any of the other little far-left parties that peck away at the tough, fifty-year-old hide of Mexico's political colossus, the PRI, Partido Revolucionario Institutional, is as likely as snow falling in Acapulco...

...The Red presence there is nearly as longstanding as in Russia itself...

...Already in the early 1920s it was the "in" thing among Mexican intellectuals to sport bright red armbands bearing the hammer and sickle...

...Whereas a few political columnists carry anti-gringoism to extremes, "anti-gringo" is not a synonym for "pro-Soviet...

...The hitherto ineffectual conservative National Action party made unexpected gains in several local elections last year, while the weekly magazine of widest circulation is the staunchly conservative Impacto...

...There is water between...

...John Hutchinson in National Review says "Central America is a place to defend the world" since "the southern approaches of the United States are no longer safe" and "when the dominoes start falling to the north Mexico, weakened by poverty and corruption, will fall fastest of all...

...They've even started blaming us for the weather," he joked at a luncheon in California...

...The scourge of my country, this marriage of vice and violence...

...He grinned: "Hammer and sickle, of course...

...Between Nicaragua and Mexico, although Americans seem as yet hardly aware of it, lies a brave anti-Communist fortress, Guatemala...

...Then it is that the activist elite panics out of one country in order to sneak into another...

...Meanwhile in South America the professional revolutionaries, Cubans and Central Americans among them, were converging on Chile ahead of the election of Salvador Allende and when his regime collapsed another exodus ensued...

...Within days he resigned from the CIA and the revision job was given to another analyst...

...The 1951 elections brought in the avowed leftist, Col...

...But that move is no more baffling than the continuing discrimination against Guatemala or the promotion to the presidency of El Salvador of Napoleon Duarte...

...Instead of making an effective effort to free the suffering people of Nicaragua, it invites Ortega's little gang of tyrants to a "dialogue...

...Washington, however, moves in mysterious ways when it comes to Latin America...

...The wife of a communications expert on contract to the Sandinista regime, she had been living for two years among the governing elite in Managua...

...The woman from East Germany told me that most of the key positions in the bureaucracy of Nicaragua are held by Chilean Communists who found their way there while Somoza was still in power...

...Working out of Marxist headquarters in San Salvador he attempted to set up a Communist party in Guatemala, was arrested and executed...

...As she talked, any notion I might have had about Sandinistas dominoing their way to Houston gave way to picturing a rescue operation hardly more complicated than the one in Grenada...

...And if that seems unnatural, too good to be true, an explanation comes to mind...

...Here, this is our symbol," and he made a few squiggles on a paper napkin...

...I teased: "But when you finally come to power, what then...

...During a short stopover in Eastern Europe last summer, conversation with an East German woman gave me an insight into Nicaraguan reality I might not have gained inside the country itself...

...Living conditions, she said, were appalling, with ration cards the government's whip to force adolescents to fight the contras...

...For the next six years the target was again Guatemala where the new president, Arevalo, made little effort to stem Marxist infiltration...

...Marxism south of the border has had its ups and downs for over half a century, shifting from country to country not, as conservative pundits would have it, right up the Pah American Highway, but rather like underground sludge oozing in wherever it finds an opening, surfacing whenever it finds support...

...Just now, thousands of miles from Mexico, Texas, and the Rio Grande, the Latin American subversion story is reaching a ferocious climax...

...It was an organizer from Belize, then British Honduras, who brought the Marxist activism he had picked up during a stint in the American Seaman's Union to workers in the United Fruit Company back in the 1920s...

...Mexican foreign policy must always appear to be independent of Washington...

...It works this way: The government agrees to overlook nearly all the old anti-religious laws (which laws, however, remain on the books) and in return the bishops refrain from heaping on the government the kind of disparagement Catholic bishops have come to see as their mission toward governments up and down the Americas...

...Meanwhile strongmen Ubico in Guatemala and Osorio in El Salvador took over those two presidencies and would succeed in keeping Central America virtually subversion-free until 1944...

...Mexicans of today, as inheritors of the architectural and cultural treasures of New Spain, resent the designations "third world" and "developing nation...

...Now as the PSUM (Unified Socialists) it shares Mexico's few pro-Marxist votes with parties like the PMT...

...How does the Latin American Marxist elite look on this plunge into large scale organized crime...

...This accord is an odd one, being between politicians who are Freemasons by tradition and prelates of a religion their predecessors persecuted...

...But everybody is a contra...

...Be that as it may, Mexican schoolchildren are told early on that the Norteamericanos took away half their country...

...An international congress was called and Central Americans were invited to Prague for coaching in ideology, infiltration, and sabotage...

...Pious and peaceable, the hierarchy of Mexico has promoted neither liberation theology nor those nurseries of discontent known as basic communities, while they have treated radical bishops Sergio Mendez Arceo of Cuernavaca and Samuel Ruiz of San Cristobal as outsiders...

...Left-sympathizing Archbishop Penados del Barrio of Guatemala City can be sure that many of the desaparecidos (disappeared ones) he holds prayer vigils for as part of his disparagement program are already gnawing away at the fragile underpinnings of, say, neighboring Belize...

...Remarkably, in spite of severe hardship, there has been no important social unrest...

...Octavio Paz has argued that had Mexico remained Spanish the trauma of 1848 could not have occurred...

...More incredible still, there is reason to think that the disinformation known as the domino theory originated in Washington...

...Shunned by voters as if it were promoting leprosy, the PCM decided a few years ago that a change of name was in order...

...A Red cocaine mafia holds all three major South American countries in a relentless grip...

...Drug traffic gives us a necessary breathing space...

...Such a possibility would explain the serenity, unique in Latin America, of government relations with labor and with the Catholic Church...

...Don't you know the average Mexican has a horror of the hammer and sickle...

...Gavin can take heart in a perceptible trend on the part of educated Mexicans toward favoring the policies of President Reagan and the American right...

...The current American Ambassador, exactor John Gavin, parries the barbs with equanimity...

...Oh no...

...He foresees, and says many Central American observers foresee, a Mexican "convulsion" and finally "the Great Mexican Collapse...

...The current domino theory would lump together this large, stubborn land with the five little republics to its south, all of which could fit into one of its larger states, and expect it, as part of such an improbable line-up, to "fall fastest of all...

...The shift comes each time a door slams shut...

...His address was a cry for help...

...If Tex-ans remember the Alamo, Mexicans remember the day in 1848 when they found that 51 percent of their country had been signed away in the wake of an unnecessary little war few of them knew was going on...

...History and party policy...

...When I met her she had come away ahead of her husband, "unable" as she put it "to go on watching the heartless exploitation of such poor, simple people...

...Little, however, has been said about another stabilizing factor, relations between the Catholic Church and the government...

...Not only does it fail to take into account elementary facts about the history and geography of the nations involved, but it puts the present situation of the key country, Mexico, badly out of focus...

...Decent, peaceful, and quiet...

...Do-good organizations like the American Peace Corps are not admitted...

...Political leaders are forced to take into consideration this sometimes strident nationalism...

...I don't...

...It was a crisis of major proportions, but there was no collapse nor are there any signs of one now...

...Castillo Armas, who replaced Arbenz...

...The domino theorists ask us to believe that this nation of 75 million people, strong enough to weather unprecedented financial disaster, is about to collapse because Nicaragua, a nation of three million, three countries removed, has a Marxist government...

...I asked her about the contras...

...It's Aztec...

...Three years ago when PSUM politicians made their first feeble election gains as municipal counselors in a town in Oaxaca, the governor simply replaced them with men of the PRI...

...Both Osorio and Ubico were ousted, and in faraway Czechoslovakia an Institute for Latin American Studies was set up as a training school for revolution...

...Many of his colleagues fled to Cuba to assist at the first golpe de estado of, believe it or not, Fulgencio Battista...