The Cardenas Affair
ALBA, VICTOR
The Cardenas Affair Once a powerful leader who almost mesmerized the Mexicans, Lazaro Cardenas is now being used by the Reds and no longer occupies an invincible position By Victor Alba Mexico...
...Today, the situation has been reversed: The Communists are trying to make use of Cardenas...
...Cardenas's word became law...
...Even though half of Mexico's farmers are "ejidatarios" the ejidos provide only 12 per cent of the country's agricultural production...
...He is no longer the unassailable figure in Mexican politics which he had been since 1938...
...How has all this come about...
...And now he has made his spectacular appearance beside the coffin of Frida Kahlo...
...In a country where politics is based on personalities rather than ideology, and where a political figure's slightest act is examined under the microscope and interpreted in countless ways, Cardenas's sallies into the political arena have been regarded as attempts to influence the government of President Ruiz Cortinez...
...Thus, the two chief organs of national expression, Parliament and the unions, which had previously guarded their independence jeal-oush and stood up to the Government in authoritarian periods like that of Calles, were turned into rub-berstamps...
...In thus entering the controversy, however, he ceased to be an unassailable figure in Mexican politics...
...What is involved in the whole affair is a Communist attempt to create the impression that Mexico's Communists are supported by the government of President Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, thereby neutralizing current efforts here and in Washington to revive the atmosphere of mutual confidence which the Caracas Conference did so much to disturb...
...While he was President, impelled more by circumstances than by any fixed purpose, Cardenas made use of the Communists (while neutralizing them to some extent by offering refuge in Mexico to Leon Trotsky...
...Mexico," declared the President, "is the enemy of all totalitarianisms...
...Cardenas's position in Mexican politics rests in large part on the "Cardenas myth," to which the Communists have contributed as much as did, in their time, the American oil companies...
...Among those standing guard around the coffin were former President Lazaro Cardenas (who welcomed Leon Trotsky to Mexico) and the Communist painter David Siqueiros (who took part in the first attempt on Trotsky's life...
...Hitherto known as "the sphinx of Jiquilpan" (after the village where he lives), he intervened more and more in political questions...
...Yet, Mexico may ultimately be the gainer if, by liberating itself from myths and taboos, it is able to clarify its thinking and seek new solution to its problems...
...When Cardenas nationalized oil, he had the entire Mexican people behind him—even die rightists...
...The talk is that he has been influenced in this by the Communists, particularly by several advisers intimately linked to the intellectual circle which surrounds Vicente Loinbardo Toledano...
...It is Cardenas himself who has descended from his pedestal and allowed the public to see his human dimensions...
...During last year's Presidential campaign, he held conversations with the opposition candidate, General Henriquez Guzman...
...During the recent Guatemalan crisis, he sent a message of encouragement to pro-Communist President Jacobo Arbenz Guzman (while his son headed a student committee supporting Arbenz...
...It has also tried to restore a little dignity to Parliament and a modicum of independence to the labor unions...
...The issue was sharply drawn by President Ruiz Cortines in a speech delivered the same day that Cardenas announced his resignation from the Tepalcatepec post...
...In the past, whenever there were rumors of a military plot against the country's democratic liberties, the average citizen could say to himself: There is no danger so long as Cardenas is there...
...To the politically sophisticated Mexicans, it is apparent that Cardenas—like Arbenz before him—was led astray by his reliance on pro-Communist advisers...
...For the first time in his life, he wrote an article for the magazine Siempre defending the ejido system...
...The Government's prompt reaction in dismissing Iduarte was intended to scotch the pro-Communist story and serve as a warning to General Cardenas, whose presence was the major sensation of the Kahlo funeral...
...The crux of those policies—logi-cally enough in a primarily agricultural country which had passed through an agrarian revolution -was the land question...
...And, most recently, it has sought to eliminate Communists from high positions in the Government and has dismissed the noted CP member, Narciso Bassols, a former Cabinet minister under Cardenas, from his post as adviser to the President...
...For the past year or so, a controversy has raged over whether the ejido system should be modified...
...A few days earlier, following the dismissal of Iduarte, the Minister of Education had asserted: "In the present-day world, the choice is between liberty and non-liberty...
...Cardenas carried out various semi-colleetive experiments, and the so-called "ejidos" or cooperative settlements multiplied during his six years in office...
...It remained so—in a discreet way—under Presidents Manuel Avila Camaclio (1940-46) and Miguel Ale-man (1946-52), who continued Cardenas's policies, though at a slower, more conservative pace...
...Yet, despite the furnishing of ample credit and all possible official support, the ejido system was a failure...
...His was by no means a Communist regime, in spite of what the oil companies said...
...Now that the General has lost his standing as a man "above the battle," this is no longer true...
...At a time when Mexico is forced to import wheat and even corn, these figures indicate the extent of her agrarian tragedy...
...proCommunist labor leader...
...Earlier, on freeing himself from the tutelage of former President Calles (unquestionably the outstanding figure to emerge from the Mexican Revolution), he had reduced the callista Deputies in Parliament to silence...
...The reason was that he had permitted the Palace of Fine Arts to be used for what was not a funeral ceremony but a Communist propaganda stunt...
...However, the resulting tension with the oil companies and the British Government (Washington behaved more discreetly) made him feel that no domestic opposition of any sort could be tolerated...
...Mexico, he said, will not be "one of the countries which, having their liberty, choose to destroy it...
...The Cardenas Affair Once a powerful leader who almost mesmerized the Mexicans, Lazaro Cardenas is now being used by the Reds and no longer occupies an invincible position By Victor Alba Mexico City Frida Kahlo, wife of the Mexican Communist painter Diego Rivera, died on July 13...
...He has thus, in effect, barred any compromise with the Ruiz Cortines Government...
...On July 15, Andres Iduarte, director of the Institute of Fine Arts and a noted intellectual who formerly taught at Columbia University in New York, was abruptly dismissed by the Minister of Education...
...Opponents of the ejidos charge that the ejidatario has to support not only the Mexican working class but this parasitical bureaucracy, whose members have come to identify the ejido system with "the Revolution...
...With the Revolution made, the peasant has the land and yet he knows he really does not, for the ejido system prevents him from regarding himself as the legitimate owner...
...For Ruiz's government, in challenging the sanctity of the ejido system, has done something which would have been unthinkable two years ago...
...Cardenas's resignation destroys the unique role he had so long held in Mexican politics: that of a sort of arbiter in times of crisis and a guarantee against any attempted revival of militarism...
...This plan has been opposed not so much by the old revolutionaries as by the new bureaucracy of economists and technicians which has sprung up around the ejidos...
...For the first time since he nationalized the oil industry, people are looking at him with a critical eye...
...The Communists have tried to convince the public that Cardenas's resignation was the result of American diplomatic intrigues, but no one has been taken in...
...Now, in fostering the creation of the CTM (Confedera-tion of Mexican Workers) and CTAL (Confederation of Latin American Workers), he also brought the labor movement under his personal wing...
...Cardenas, of course, promptly came to the defense of the ejidos...
...Recently, a profound change has been noted in the public attitude toward Cardenas...
...The day after Andres Iduarte's dismissal, it has been belatedly revealed, Cardenas resigned from his only remaining administrative post, that of executive director of the Tepalcatepec (a kind of Mexican TVA...
...Some economists and sociologists, like Garcia Trevino and Palomo Valencia, have proposed that the ejidatarios be simply given the land which they cultivate...
...On the 14th, her body was laid out at the National Institute of Fine Arts, a Government institution, wrapped in a red flag bearing the hammer and sickle...
Vol. 37 • August 1954 • No. 32
