Building the City of God : Mexico's Ultra-Right Yunque

...These conservative activists are also promoting a new National Sinarchist Union...

...by Irene ortiz W hen vicente fox of the national Action Party (PAN) assumed the presidency of Mexico in 2000 after running as “the candidate of change,” the country, for the first time since the Revolution of 1910–17, found itself governed by a political party whose self-identification is on the right...

...Buendía quotes a pamphlet issued some 30 years ago by the ultra-right Mexican Youth Movement, which advocated an internal confrontation over the question of the pope’s alleged abandonment of the anti-Communist struggle, a confrontation that eventually led to the murder of two young yunquistas in 1975 and the assassination of Yunque founder Ramón Plata Moreno in 1979: For many years the Jewish butchers have slaughtered the lambs that Christ won over with his own blood, and even in our own day they remain pledged to carry out the same satanic tasks...

...Carlos Gabriel Sánchez, a PRI official in the state of Veracruz, offers a plausible interpretation of events...

...3 It sees itself in eternal combat against all the forces allied to prevent the construction of a Catholic state in Mexico: principally Judaism, Masonry, and Communism...

...The Catholic conservatives of the Yunque compose part of a varied Mexican right that has grown, if not in numbers, certainly in strength and influence over the past few decades...

...its party militants are expected to follow certain political lines to remain within the party, and especially to rise within the party hierarchy...

...The political doctrine of the PRI, he tells me, is pragmatism for the sake of maintaining power...

...And the new Judases, infiltrators in our holy church, know that noonelaughsatGod,andthatnoonecanfoolGod.Theworstpart of Hell is reserved for you: “Vengeance is mine,” says the Lord...

...It has been slowly emerging from is in eternal the shadows since the combat against 1980s due largely to the existence of the exhaustive research conducted by a small a secular state number of investiga in Mexico...

...NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: the right Building the City of God: Mexico’s Ultra-Right Yunque Irene Ortiz is a writer and feminist activist based in Cuernavaca, Mexico...

...Her husband, Luis Rodríguez Manzanera, was a founding member of the MURO...

...Its leadership professes an ideology...

...It was called the University Anticommunist Front (FUA), and, until it came apart due to internal dissension in 1961, its actions consisted of confronting “autonomist” students at the Autonomous University of Puebla...

...While manyinthePANseethemselvesasbelonging to the “humanist” political center, the party, founded by Catholic conservatives in 1939, has traditionally been linked to the politics, intolerance, and traditionalism of the Mexican Catholic hierarchy...

...Yunque members have allied with secular neoliberalsinkeypoliticalmomentsbuthavediffered from their free market counterparts in their calls for stricter controls on the independent activities of a variety of social groups: women and sexual minorities, dissident secular groups, indigenous communities, trade unions, and non-Catholic populations in general...

...The document speaks of “the growing influence of Zionism in the life of the nation” and vows to prepare “to combat all those who, being complicit in the conspiracy that tries to gain total control of the party and the government . . . and impedes the restoration of the Christian state...

...never acknowledged his member ship in the organization...

...13 This past August, the struggle between Calderón and Espino led to the creation of a new right-wing party called the Movimiento de Participación Solidaria (Movement of Cooperative Participation...

...It is very much on the cutting edge of the radical right: a movement to overthrow a godless, secular state, and to replace it with a theocratic (Catholic) state...

...It began systematically embedding itself within the PAN, and with less success within the long-ruling Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), in the 1970s, and thereby lost some of The yunqueits secrecy...

...schools...

...public education and the teachers who carry it out...

...12 But it is Manuel Espino, president of the PAN, who is the Yunque’s key operative within the halls of government...

...In his book La revolución mundial (The World Revolution), in which he argued that the 1917 Constitution was destroying the Mexican nation and that Lázaro Cárdenas was a Communist, he clearly projects the struggle of the Catholic ultra-right against the Mexican secular state, which has existed in various forms for more than 150 years.11 The secular state was the child of 19thcentury liberalism, inspired and led by Benito Juárez, who in mid-century implemented the Laws of Reform, separating church from state, removing the privileges of the Catholic hierarchy, and creating a secular system of education and culture that lasted until the end of the 20th century...

...The Yunque can thus be locatedwithinthetraditionalist,religious,andintolerant currents of contemporary conservatism...

...césar natarén NACLA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS report: the right Tremble, traitors, of the MURO, before the “Army of the loyal followers of Christ,” because we will gain the crown by holy violence, and only the violent will enter Heaven...

...and organizing/activity by students, labor, campesinos and urban residents under the umbrella of state-incorporated institutions...

...If it sounds like a plot against President Felipe Calderón, it certainly is...

...From that point on, he was known by his enemies as the “Red Bishop,” mainly for his work in favor of the “church of the poor” that was promoted in his diocese...

...Besides church-orientedgroupswhosepoliticsareshaped by more or less coherent conservative ideologies and theologies, the Mexican right includes secular groups located in academia (particularly in business schools and economics departments) andintheresearchwingsofbanksandsomegovernment agencies that have adopted a neoliberal, “free market,” minimal-state ideology...

...This is why most of them use pseudonyms and act secretly behind the organizations that make up the Yunque’s public face.4 The Yunque’s first facade was formed in Puebla in 1955...

...Tremble, Ramón Plata Moreno.7 It should surprise no one that religious and political fanaticism should in this way turn upon itself...

...and to the many activist groups on the radical right...

...Tremble, you rats...

...That explains its current anger at Calderón’s pragmatic, opportunistic drift...

...Here in our own country we continue to experience the pestilent breath, the foul odor of the godless ones...

...The PAN wants to mold reality to its own expectations...

...Backed by the later PAN governments of Fox and Felipe Calderón, Salinas’s reforms have given the church a hegemonic advantage, against not only other religious denominations Manuel espino, but also the more progressive cur rents of Catholicism...

...Today, the Catholic hierarchy has made a comeback thanks to the constitutional reforms promoted by Carlos Salinas in the early 1990s, reforms that brought Mexico’s Catholic hierarchy very close to the government...

...It has been granted official status after registering with the Federal Electoral Institute with an eye to becoming a recognized political party...

...The Yunque sees itself not as a conservative group trying to preserve some version of the status quo (nor even some Mexican status quo ante) but as a radical organization out to overturn “the system...

...9 Following the agreements that put an end to the rebellion in 1929, there arose several Catholic groupings that came together in the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty (LNDR), created by the church to resist Calles’s anti-religious measures...

...In 1971, members of the MURO assaulted the leftist bishop of Cuernavaca, Sergio Méndez Arceo, dowsing him in red paint at the Mexico City airport as he was returning from a conference in Chile held by the Congress of Christians for Socialism...

...The FUA joined the MURO after its own disintegration...

...tive reporters, notably Álvaro Delgado, who wrote a series of articles on the group in the magazine Proceso and published a book in 2003, and Manuel Buendía, who began his research on the group two decades earlier and was murdered in 1984.1 Mexico’s Federal Security Directorate has also documented the existence of Yunque cells and command centers made up of students and their adult mentors who operated violently and secretly in the 1960s.2 The Yunque, Delgado writes, citing the group’s written internal communications and the testimonies of members and deserters, seeks to “create the City of God in accordance with the Gospels...

...Espino, who has spoken openly about his affiliation with the Yunque, has been charged with maintaining the group’s control of the party...

...The PRI is also on the right but knows how to adapt to reality...

...we are the vengeful arm of God...

...In 1979, Méndez Arceo was forced to resign from his post because of age...

...8 T he yunque is one of the political successors to the cristero movement of the 1920s, which launched a rebellion against the secularization of Mexican government and society under President Plutarco Elías Calles, known to Catholic believers as “the Jew...

...The organization was founded in the 1950s, operating mainly within student-based front groups in the city of Puebla...

...and diverse groups of citizens who harbor intolerant and/or resentful attitudes toward vulnerable social populations and frequently toward the quasi-liberal secular state that allows those populations a measure of freedom and entitlement...

...14 Many groups within the PAN are now closing ranks ralism...

...president of the After his 2000 election, Fox Pan, is the appointed many Yunque mem bers to his cabinet...

...demian chavez / latinphoto.org...

...The armband displays the symbol of el yunque, a semi-secret ultra-right group...

...The PAN is different,” he says...

...Historian and columnist Jean Meyer cites a Yunque document JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 report: the right in support of Calderón, and a Calderón ally, Secretary of Public Affairs Germán Martínez Caceres, has announced his intention of opposing Espino when the latter runs for reelection early next year...

...The . . . plotters have begun to organize via the Movement of Cooperative Participation...

...to the economic conservatism, now called neoliberalism, of Mexico’s entrepreneurial class...

...One of the movements that later emerged from the LNDR was sinarquismo, a movement inspired by Spanish fascism (though unsympathetic with Nazism, which it considered “Protestant”) that created the National Sinarchist Union in 1937, and achieved its greatest power in 1940–41, when its national leader was Salvador Abascal (the father of Carlos Abascal, labor secretary during the Fox administration).10 Salvador Abascal was one of the most prominent ideologues of the Catholic ultra-right...

...In addition to the Labor Department, which throughout the Fox presidency pushed hard to “reform” regulations in favor of greater flexibility in the hiring and firing of workers, the Department of Social Development became home for many Yunque members at the undersecretary level...

...On October 15 of that year, in a parade headed by the Papal Nuncio Jerónimo Prigione honoring the succession of Cuernavaca’s new bishop, all the principals were received at the city entrance by an ultra-right religious group called Semper Fidelis, a successor to MURO, whose members chanted “Welcome, sir, to drive out Satan...

...Buendía, the journalist who was murdered (under suspiciousandstill-unresolvedcircumstances)in1984,traced the groups of the extreme right, and reported on the close links between MURO and a group called TECOS (Educational and Cultural Work Toward Order and Synthesis, a group classified as “fascist” by the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights), as well as its links with the CIA in Mexico.5 The MURO, he reported, “proposed the violent assault on the universities in order to train young people [in combat] and to spread its influence over a broader national territory, thus establishing alliances with like-minded clergy and members of the private sector...

...Moreover, it is worth recalling that Fox’s assistant attorney general, María de la Luz Lima Malvido, when she was a student activist on the ultra-right in the 1970s, had stolen a notebook from Méndez Arceo, “the Red Bishop,” and delivered it to a more conservative prelate who could then advise his colleagues as to the bishop’s daily routines...

...In short, the Yunque has positioned itself not only against the critical, independent movements of the left (movements for indigenous rights and autonomy, reproductive rights, feminism in general, rights for sexual minorities, independent unionism, independent neighborhood movements) but also against most of the long-standing institutions of the secular state (religious plu that has recently circulated, in which the group affirms its historicalmissionoffightingtheforcesofJudaism,supposedly present in the Calderón government...

...And if it fails within the PAN, there is every indication that it will continue the struggle to “create the City of God in accordance with the Gospels” by other means...

...Most new members of the Yunque are pious adolescents recruited from private Catholic JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2008 report: the right During the national Democratic Convention convoked by andrés Manuel lópez obrador in Mexico City’s zócaloin March, a demonstrator impersonates President felipe Calderón...

...If indeed this is the case, we can understand why the Yunque has been so determined to take over the PAN in its bid to finally come to power...

...Of those ultra-right groups, the one that has attained the greatest position of power and influence within the party is the semi-clandestine El Yunque (the Anvil...

...This has led the Yunque into an open confrontation with Calderón and produced a struggle between moderate conservatives and the ultra-right...

...These included Abascal’s private secretary, Raúl Vázquez Osorio, Undersecretary of Labor Francisco Xavier Salazar Saénz, PlanningCoordinatorJesúsRiveraBarroso,andthedepartment’s budget director, Fernando Urbiola Ledezma...

...It brings together diverse PANistas tied to the Yunque, as well as members of the National Sinarchist Union...

...nor should it surprise that the movement’s outward-directed violence targeted not only Jews, Masons, and leftist students, but also centrist Christian democrats and, of course, the progressive wing of the church itself...

...In 1961, a similar organization was formed at the National Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico City, called the University Movement Oriented Toward Renewal (MURO...

...The new party, journalist Katia D’Artigues writes, “has come to be . . . the ultra-conservative brother of the PAN...

...He also reported that among the groups of the ultra-right were some that were so extreme that they confronted other right-wing Catholic groups over the relatively tolerant position of Pope Paul VI regarding the Cuban Revolution.6 The anti-Communist TECOS, for example, declared the pope to be a member of the “Jewish-Masonic-Communist conspiracy” and broke with the church, and therefore with the Yunque, which remained loyal to Rome...

...This group is promoted by the most conservative PAN activists, like René Bolio, who resigned from Calderón’s cabinet in order to actively promote the growth of the new party throughout the country...

...Many of these yunque’s key appointments were made in the operative within Labor Department at the behest of Labor Secretary Carlos Abascal the halls of (a pro-Yunque activist who has government...

...organized, non-ideological individuals who have achieved a certain level of privilege and have undertaken the political defense of their own interests...

...They join the organization in a swearing-in ritual in which they commit themselves to secrecy above all...