MEXICO in the MIDDLE

...How did we lose him...

...Agreeing with him from the left, however, was Carlo Coccioli, a regular contributor to the weekly magazine, Siempre, and hitherto an enthusiastic champion of the Cuban revolution...

...What they really want, liberals here believe, is to turn back the clock to 1910, when the Church all but ruled Mexico besides owning a large part of it...

...How can one explain to a Mexican, or to anyone else, U.S...

...The real reason for his absence was Mexico's abhorrence of intervention, of even the hint of meddling in the internal affairs of another nation...

...Ever since Castro began his histrionics about a year ago, following the exclusion of Cuban sugar from the U.S...

...But can Lopez Mateos and his political gradualists control the extremists of the left, who have tasted blood, and the extremists of the right, whom Castro's successes have terrified...

...Months before the Cuban invasion, Fidelismo and the spirit of the times had been nudging Mexico to the left...

...For the latter to oppose a serious wish of the president would be not merely unthinkable, it would be impossible...

...and in the middle was the administration, performing its eternal balancing act...

...Just as it is said that in Mexico even the atheists are Catholics, so the arch-conservatives are revolutionaries— to the extent that they pay lip-service to the revolution...

...Upon this comparatively tranquil scene of government-in-business-asusual descended the thunderbolt which the Communists had been predicting— American intervention in Cuba...

...During his presidency Cardenas distributed some forty-two million acres of expropriated estates to the landless and nationalized the petroleum industry by expropriating the properties of such international giants as Standard Oil and Shell...

...For the Mexican government is more centralized than ours, with state and even local governments pretty much under the thumb of the chief executive...

...Of late Cardenas seems to have squandered a good deal of his prestige in indiscreet association with Communist causes—the foremost of which is a violent anti-Americanism...

...Intervention again...

...His enemies thought they had him, only to have him declare later: "I am not a member of the PRI or any other political party...

...As soon as Castro had snuffed out the invasion with a few squirts of his people's militia, Mexican Communists and their hangers-on set up a shout of jubilation, not unmixed with anticipation of bigger things to come...

...This gaffe was pounced upon with glee by the Communists, of course, both as an indication of which way the wind was blowing and an example of American meddling in Mexican affairs...

...All present indications are that they can...

...An equally significant lapse was Mexico's failure to send her President as invited, to the conclave of "neutral" states recently convened in Cairo...

...Less wisely Stevenson did include Paraguay, where Latin America's most case-hardened dictator, General Stroessner, still rules...

...For one thing, the average income, though climbing, is little more than $250 a year...

...Or as former President Cardenas put it: "To defend the sovereignty of Cuba is to defend the sovereignty of Mexico...

...far from worrying about "creeping socialism," they take pride in their government's accomplishments, though there is justified grousing about the inefficiency and corruption of all too many bureaus...

...Aged politicians who once rode with such revolutionaries as Villa and Zapata, but who had since become addicted to Cadillacs, were again hitting the revolutionary trail —at least verbally...

...An unknown angel put flames to the fuel by paying to have the article reprinted in Mexico City's largest newspapers...

...Of course, no one ever attacks the Mexican president—it just isn't done...

...As Cardenas veered closer and closer to the Communist line, but without ever toeing it, people thought he would join the Communists, or form a leftist party of his own...

...Thus the "Mexicanization" of the national economy, as they prefer to call it, has proceeded briskly...

...With respect to the crucial Cuban question, they have managed to navigate the difficult middle course of sympathizing openly with the Cuban revolution, yet Without either helping Castro, as former President Cardenas and the Communists urge, or breaking off relations with him, as the United States would like...

...Mexico had to expand, industrially and agriculturally, or explode...

...On June 7 President Lopez Mateos decided that the time had come to put an end to the discord between right and left that was scaring off the vital tourist trade, drying up investments, and alarming the general public...

...In Cuba I saw European and Asiatic Communists, cold, cultivated men, and super-Marxists, who spoke of Mexico and Latin America as theirs, and of Mexico as the next step...

...Individuals and groups from all over Mexico buried the national palace with letters and telegrams of support...

...His friendship means a great deal, too, because of the great power, relatively, a Mexican president wields...

...Hence, for the Communists to charge that the revolution was being betrayed was sure-fire politics...

...necessity, rather than choice, has been the mother of Mexico's industrial development...

...Accordingly, President Kennedy's Alliance for Progress got a pretty tepid reception in Mexico when announced last March, and the reception has been getting even cooler with the march of events...

...government agencies, Mexico divided sharply three ways...

...Two—"My government will repress excesses attempting to disrupt the national life and violate the Constitution from either the right or the left...

...Cuban invasion, gave the jest a serious undertone...

...Railroads, like the petroleum industry, were taken over years ago...

...Nevertheless, in his book on Cuba, El Caso de Cuba, he referred to the "danger of a war between the free world and a Communism bent on dominating the five continents," and continued, "Needless to say, I am absolutely with the West"—which is precisely the Mexican position, obscure it as we will with our outrageous bungling in Cuba...

...Here is a great man who, during the Franklin D. Roosevelt era, was a firm friend of the United States...

...Trade agreements and long-term loans Mexico needs and wants, but alms, no...

...No political speech gets started without dipping its colors to the revolution...

...Furthermore, the population is on the increase at the thundering rate of nearly 3.5 per cent a year...

...It was also aimed at the feudalistic, land-holding few, including the Church, that, acting in concert with foreign capital, prevented Mexico from entering the industrial age...

...The public, as if longing to hear his words, reacted with overwhelming enthusiasm and relief...

...in no small measure their revolution was fought to get the Church out of politics...

...The fragmented left pulled itself together in a miracle of united indignation...

...Wisely Stevenson did not include Mexico iipf his itinerary, for nowhere has Castro more friends...

...In the center, and by far the most powerful of Mexico's three main political groupings, are Lopez Mateos and his supporters...

...Mexicans may be Catholics, but they are not clericalists...

...These systems and laws may need reforming...

...Shades of Guatemala—shades of more than thirty "police actions" in the Caribbean...

...They realize that the destinies of Mexico and the United States are inextricably entwined...

...One was the failure of Mexico as a member of the Organization of American States to take part in the recent investigation of the Dominican Republic...

...By his election the president automatically becomes de facto head of PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party), the party from which all successful presidential candidates come and the party which always has absolute control of both houses of the Mexican Congress...

...there was always the hope at least that the President's popular support could thus be chipped away, his program thrown into confusion...

...And it is probably so, for in one of those naive blunders to which American diplomacy seems to be prone, the U.S...

...It brought the Communists out of their caves cheering...

...The Mexican President, now midway through his third year of a sixyear term, has been a firm believer in Mexican-American friendship and cooperation, if only for reasons of Realpolitik...

...Revolution is not a dirty word here, but, on the contrary, a sacred symbol as well as a social blueprint through embodiment in the Mexican Constitution, to which all factions render obeisance...

...Yet the decisive reason for Mexico's absence from Cairo was the fact that Mexico is not a "neutral" nation like Yugoslavia or the United Arab Republic, however much the Communist left would like it to be...

...There are plenty of politicians in Latin America who could use U.S...

...His government may be resentful of U.S...

...Everybody had enjoyed sticking pins into Uncle Sam, but when suddenly he seemed to have been overthrown, even if it was only his prestige which was wounded, people were scared...

...But-with the attempted invasion of Cuba by rebels trained and financed by U.S...

...After the collapse of the abortive April invasion, Mexicans...

...A man as far to the right as Bernardo Ponce, a columnist with Mexico's leading daily, Excelsior, might be expected to write: "The next and ardently desired object of international Communism is Mexico...

...and only the cave-dwelling left, as the Communists are called, withheld comment...

...But it is one thing to effect one's own reforms, and quite another to have them imposed from abroad...

...Fortunately for Mexico, and fortunately for the United States, Lopez Mateos is both a strong leader and a realistic politician...

...Many Latin Americans, moreover, interpret the Alliance for Progress as a sort of subtle, arm-twisting operation: You reform your land tenure system and your tax laws and we'll reward you with dollars...

...foreign interests had a stranglehold on the national economy...

...They are varied in their political slants...

...it shocked and dismayed our friends, including the most important one, President Lopez Mateos...

...Fiercely pro-Castro are the Communists in Mexico, assorted leftists, and Cardenas, a figure of almost mystical reverence to millions of Mexicans, including many intellectuals...

...The Mexican representative on the team just did not go, explaining lamely that he had another engagement...

...In a speech to the press, the strongest and most decisive speech he has uttered, the President made two main points: One—"We will permit no backward steps that might harm the national dignity or heritage, its laws or its right, no matter what the pressure from foreign interests or domestic factions...

...Anti-Communist sodalities began breaking out all over Mexico, along with anti-Communist demonstrations, as if the conservatives, impressed by the leftist agitation inspired by the Cuban invasion, wanted to show that they, too, could agitate...

...This revolution, which broke out in 1910 with the ousting of dictator Porfirio Diaz, wrote its Constitution seven years later under the presidency of Venustiano Carranza, and finally achieved stability under President Lazaro Cardenas, who served the single term permitted under Mexican law from 1934 to 1940...

...the tax structure in Mexico, for instance, is loaded in favor of the rich to stimulate investment, it is said...

...Besides giving Castro a mighty boost in Cuba, restoring to full power a man who was obviously slipping, the invasion fiasco had a smashing impact on Mexico...

...The Mexican revolution of 19101917 was a struggle to end financial colonialism...

...money, but these are the ones least likely to disperse it to good purpose...

...Antiimperialism, meaning anti-Americanism, is this group's strongest bond...

...Since leaving office, Cardenas has spent the years going about the country, espousing noble causes...

...the President's smiling manner is the white glove on a fist of steel...

...It is with these backward-looking forces, unhappily, that the United States is said to be allied—for the threadbare reason that they are antiCommunist...

...The type of CIA-handled maneuver that failed in Cuba, succeeded seven years earlier in Guatemala— to the great indignation of Cardenas, who denounced the United States scathingly...

...Mexico's rightest elements, headed by such extremists as the fascist Sinarquistas and PAN, a reactionary church party, went into frantic activity...

...The great majority of Mexicans are, by our standards, leftists...

...Mexico, in short, is living under a mixed economy...

...No man would have a better chance of unifying the Mexican left, or of galvanizing the right into terrified solidarity...

...aid and friendship for these cruel tyrants...

...Latin America is rife with open animosity and repressed admiration for the United States...

...There is a scarcity of private capital in Latin America...

...his strength has become the tool of a political plan of enormous portent and incalculable consequences— the plan of Soviet imperialism...

...Siqueiros has since joined the rest of the Communist leadership in jail...

...Receiving prominent Mexican intellectuals who had come to applaud his non-intervention stand on Cuba, President Mateos said: "Three times my government has come out in defense of the sister republic of Cuba [against intervention] . . . This posture will not change...

...The Mexican revolution was neither a colonial revolution like ours— the country won its independence from Spain in 1821—nor a Marxian revolution like Russia's...

...In a country where "Mexicanization" is the thing, however, it is difficult to carry national socialism gracefully on one shoulder and international socialism on the other...

...America had dealt her friends in Latin America a blow from which some of them—Betancourt in Venezuela, for one—may never recover...

...He is as idealistic as Eleanor Roosevelt and as politically astute as Sam Rayburn...

...So to him first Adlai Stevenson sped, bearing help...

...Protests and demonstrations followed, with student uproar from Argentina to Mexico, and especially in Mexico, where our intervention and >, conquest in 1847 still rankles...

...embassy released a bulletin to the Mexican press in May announcing an anti-Communist, anti-Castro rally held by Catholic Action— thus, in effect, sponsoring it...

...some are card-carrying bankers and others far to the left, but they are Mexicans first—united in their desire for a strong government under the Constitution...

...Yet when an American invited the Mexican hero's son to New York, hoping to mollify Cardenas, the State Department would not give him a visa...

...Though far from perfect, his is a government run by shrewd and reasonable men who know that Mexico has progressed too far to risk all in a Castro-like convulsion...

...pressure, but it is equally hostile to Communist pressure...

...the frightened right reared itself up as it had not done in forty years...

...Two little-noted events that occurred at about the same time were of great significance in clarifying Mexico's attitude toward Cuba and toward Communism...

...But such faux pas are in step with our aid to the Somoza brothers, who Trujillo-ized Nicaragua...

...Once again the excuse was flimsy: a Mexican president cannot leave the country without the permission of Congress—as if that could not have been arranged—and because Mexico was furnished no advance list of the participating nations nor agenda...

...The national wealth was being mined, not developed...

...but the right seemed especially fulsome in its praise, as if pricked by a guilty conscience...

...In last spring's Peace Conference in Mexico City, which was organized by Cardenas and captured by the Communists, the delegates from twentyone Latin American countries howled down the very idea of United States aid, military or economic, solemnly resolving that "North American imperialism is the chief obstacle to Latin American progress...

...Because," as Lopez Mateos reiterated in his now famous speech, "intervention attacks at its very foundations the national sovereignty which is the inalienable right of independent states...

...Isidro Fabela, Mexico's great international jurist and an intimate of the President, has bitterly attacked American intervention in Cuba...

...From one angle, the Mexicans see it as just another handout, and handouts are not for the proud, touchy Mexicans...

...Mexicans from the political center to the extreme left were outraged by the support President Kennedy gave to the interventionists, and even the minority who would have cheered an outright take-over by the marines were disgusted with us for the invasion's ignominious flop...

...They knew he meant what he said...

...But beneath the jest there were slivers of history which, when magnified and distorted out of all proportion by the shock of the...

...To be brought up on tales of an omnipotent gringo goblin, a colossus of the north, and then to see him lying in the dust was a rude shock...

...On the one side, a small but revitalized and vocal Communist claque, headed by David Alfaro Siqueiros, the world-renowned painter, had been howling that the Mexican revolution was being betrayed...

...One of them boasted that he never had any trouble getting a suspect to talk: "Just give me a lighted match and the bare sole of his foot...

...Twice he was host to President Eisenhower in Mexico and on one occasion visited Washington...

...Meanwhile, with Castro's hot winds of oratory beating on their ears, church and business leaders had stepped up their complaints that the President's policies, such as the gathering of more and more industries into government hands, was throwing the country to the Communists...

...Wrote Coccioli, confounding his leftist colleagues: "Castro is, today, a tool...

...It was a blending of progressive tendencies strictly Mexican in character, more political than military—although there was plenty of fighting, more social than political...

...diet, the task of Mexico's President has been difficult enough...

...The distribution of wealth among the various sectors of the population is most uneven, with rural workers getting but a pitiful share...

...To date the government has acquired about 360 companies that produce perhaps twenty per cent of the gross national product—not because the government is hell-bent on socialization, its leaders say, but because private capital can not do the job...

...Meanwhile, Lopez Mateos, a leader as sensitive to the winds of change as Roosevelt, has nationalized petrochemicals, divided up more land holdings among the landless, and taken over the movie distribution monopoly and about ninety-five per cent of the electric power industry—all through legal, business-like operations...

...were asking each other, in jest, "Where are you going when the Communists come...

...Through a fatal McCarthyism, a McCarthyism toward individuals—after Roosevelt's death Cardenas and his followers went down in the State Department's blacklist—and McCarthyism in international relations, notably in Guatemala...

...When asked point-blank if he was a Communist, he replied: "Can one oppose a theory which tries to solve the problems of the masses...