Does Mexico Need a Fidel Castro?
NOTICE APPEARING in Guadalajara News Week, March 3, 1961: "Maids --- Full time who do all cleaning, purchasing, laundry, and sometimes cooking will cost from $7 to $12 per month depending on locality." Here is revealed the story of Mexico in a nut shell.
What can the Indian or mestizo (part Indian) house-maid buy with an income of 25 cents to 40 cents a day? A pound box of chocolates at Woolworth's that sells for $2.00? Or a 10 cent bar of American candy selling for 25 cents? There are hotels in Mexico City advertising rooms and meals for $100.00 a day, maybe she could work for a year and spend a day at the President or Conrad Hilton Hotel. That is, provided she could get away from work, because for the 25 cents to 40 cents a day she must work 16 hours a day, 7 days a week!
Now if she will not work the 16 hours, others must. For as the advertisement in English says: "On the lake shore directly below Chula Vista is the completely untouched native village of San Antonio de Manglar . . . 'Maids available,' senora? . . si. si."
The story is the same for the working class as a whole. Unskilled male labor about $20 to $25 a month; skilled union stonecutter, 20 to 25 cents an hour; general factory labor, a dollar a day; over-the-road bus driver, a highly skilled and dangerous occupation in mountainous Mexico, also in the union, often no salary at all, but a commission on fares. Thus, if nobody rides, the driver gets no pay! (This last under the Greyhound first class bus system, no less.) Average per capita income in Mexico is reported at $150 to $250 a year, lower even than in Cuba.
Any consideration of wages must keep in mind that in Mexico families are large. With babies coming one right after the other, the wife cannot hold a regular job though she will probably go out with one baby wrapped in her rebozo and others pulling at her skirts, trying to sell things on the street so as to add a few pesos to the daily income.
But if wages are low, consumer prices are not. The index of the cost of living rose from 100 in 1953 to 144 in 1957 and to 155 in 1958. A survey of prices of ready-made clothing as displayed in the shop windows of several stores in different cities brings one to the conclusion that suits, women's dresses, blouses, shoes, etc., cost as much, by and large as in the United States. Second-hand clothes are the solution of those who can afford to buy such and the rest must go about shabby, even ragged. In Mexico City we entered an American style lunchroom frequented only by Mexican youth. A plate of soup cost us 40 cents; a half cantalope, 30 cents. We could have done better in New York or in Chicago. These were not prices for Americans since there was not another foreigner in the place.
Or one can visit the famous Friday market at Toluca, capital of the State of Mexico, and see what kind of food is bought and sold. Very popular are the heads of chickens with all their feathers on, the entrails of animals, dirty looking unwashed tripe or dried fish, raw sugar cane stalks for sucking and chewing after they are stripped and outside strips spit out. On the floors heaps of filth and garbage left for people to wade in and for the babies and children of the vendors to play in. Everywhere women with children in their arms desperately trying to make one sale of a straw basket or some trinket so as to be able to eat. All this is called "quaint and colorful market place" in the tourist literature. It can be said that as a rule where there is nothing else to be said for a place except its unspeakable squalor and poverty the place is then described as "quaint and colorful."
In the working class quarters of Guadalajara water was being sold to the poor in old used oil tins because Guadalajara, fastest growing city in Mexico, now with a population of over 600,000 could not afford to have running water for all its inhabitants. Newspapers there have featured alarming articles on the lack of sanitation with accompanying grave dangers of disease epidemics.
Visit the suburbs around Mexico City, say on the road to Tula, and see the crowds of women washing their clothes in dirty open ditches. See the mass of miserable doghouses made of tin cans and boards that shelter these workers. Go to the outskirts of Manzanillo, second biggest port of Mexico, and see the wretched thatched hovels of the workers living in the vermin and insect infested steaming jungles around the city. In Guadalajara the rent for a tiny casita (the whole thing the size of an ordinary room) was 60 pesos or $4.80 a month, a sum small to us but looming large to impoverished Mexicans.
As you come out of one of the fine cinema palaces on Paseo de la Reforma in Mexico City no extra charge is made for you to look in on the newspaper stall and see some exhausted little child asleep. "There is none too young to work in Mexico." Often children begin work at 5 or 6 years, generally by selling things on the streets, in order to eke out the completely inadequate income of the family.
Everywhere are beggars --- ragged, dirty, ill. Especially noticeable are the large numbers of aged people forced to beg and to live in the street because their folks can not take care of them any longer. It tears at one's heart to see people 75 and 80 years of age sleeping in hallways and begging on the streets with the cry of Caridad, por amor de Dios until exhausted they lie in a corner. The daily papers published an item of rural communities fighting hunger by raiding cattle and food supplies.
II
IT IS SAID that in the dense forests of Brazil there are really three worlds located at three different altitudes in the same place, each having entirely different fauna and flora and so unmixed that the plants and animals living in one world, say at the bottom of the jungle, could not live or survive in the middle world, on the smaller trees, or in the upper levels of the huge trees that tower so high in the sky. These worlds, situated in the same place, live entirely apart one from the other and do not mix save at the borderlines.
So is it in a way with the people of Mexico. Here there are four worlds: the world of the Indian and rural mestizo, the world of the mestizo city worker and lower middle class; the world of the creole (white Mexican) professional, manager, and owner; and the world of the foreigner, whether investor, manager, or tourist.
Among the foreigners the leading element, indeed, more important than all the others put together, is the Norteamericano or Yanqui from the United States. U.S. big business has, within the limits allowed by the now defunct "revolution," completely dominated the economies and politics of the country. Branches of U.S. big business are to be found everywhere, similar to the situation extant in Cuba before the Castro revolution.
Foreign corporations with branches in Mexico are not satisfied with the average domestic rate of profit of, say, 10%; they want 30% or 40% return annually so that in two or three years they can get back the full amount of their investment. That such returns on their investments have been very satisfactory can be seen from the steady stream of foreign money in direct investments and in long term credits poured into Mexico from abroad. In 1956, $130 million was invested by foreign capital in Mexico and $115 million in long term credits (total $245 million); in 1957 this reached a sum of $140 million in direct investments and $143 million in long term credits (total $283 million); while in 1958 the quantities were $100 million in direct investments and $223 million in long term credits (total $323 million).
The sharp recession in the United States in the last half of 1957 and in the first half of 1958 forced a shift from direct investment to long term credits, as can be seen from the above figures. This recession also forced the amortization of long term credits to jump from $67 million in 1957 to $123 million in 1968, while the outflow of other capital increased from $21 million to $64 million during the same time. However, with the new rise of prosperity in the U.S. in 1959 and in the first part of 1960 these trends were corrected and foreign direct investments and long term credits boomed once again in Mexico.
While the annual rate of economic growth in the U.S. did not average more than 2.5% in the years 1950-1958 inclusive, in Mexico the average was about 6%. This heavy average annual growth also carried with it a great increase in gross domestic fixed capital formation reaching the level of 16% of the gross domestic product annually. But if the gross domestic product was not going to the worker, whose cost of living was rising sharply as we have seen, and was going heavily into reinvestments in industry with the rapid industrialization of the country it was also going into the pockets of the foreign investors who drew out of the country in 1956, $120 million; in 1957, $123 million; and in 1958, $133 million. Consider what a piker the Spanish Emperor was when all he could suck out of Mexico was an annual loot of $7 million (at one time representing 2/3rd of his income)!
The enormous and blanketing pressure of Yanqui imperialism has forced the Mexican "revolutionary" government to back down further and further from its previously vaunted principles of nationalization and socialization of the resources of the country for the benefit of all the people. In 1950 the public share of total investments, for example, amounted to 40%; by 1958 this share had shrunk to 25%. How heavily the government has gone in to help Mexican capitalists can be seen from the fact that in 1957 loans granted by official institutions in Mexico for capital formation amounted to no less than 30.6% of all central government expenses and about 25% of the total private gross fixed investment. This is how the "revolutionary" Mexican government is using its money! It has no time or money for the elimination of illiteracy, for adequate sanitation facilities for its working population, and such fandanglements.
III
THE RAPID capitalist industrialization of Mexico has brought with it drastic changes in both city and country. Mexico City with a population of over 5 million is now the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere. No longer can the slogan manana or the picture of a peon with a huge sombrero taking a never ending siesta in the sun be applied to Mexico. One must move fast to cross the streets; the pace of life has enormously hastened. Now hotel and business constructions can be seen on all sides.
In the countryside the new industrial undertaking is replacing the old hacienda. Often similar brickwalls surround the property but inside are now little houses for workers rather than huts for peons. These houses are often very much better than the worker can get outside of the industrial compound. Thus these modern corporations can count on a sort of especially privileged set of workers whose economic standards and home life are a bit better than the others.
Just as the Mexican creole is now taken into partnership with the American and other foreign investors, so the lighter mestizos have been offered the chance to become salesmen, lower managerial and office employees, technicians and mechanics, and even at times professional men. Thus they, too, together with the lower middle class. the mestizo shopkeeper and merchant, feel that Americanization is not so bad for them economically.
How these worlds keep apart can be observed via television. Television in Mexico is run Norteamericano style; that is it is subsidized by private advertisements the overwhelming part of which is paid for by Yanqui business firms such as Coca Cola, Pepsi Cola, Orange Crush, Squirt, Beer, U.S. Rubber companies, etc., etc. Looking at the television shows one could never guess that 85% of the Mexican people are either Indian or mestizo. The only time we saw Indians or mestizos on a television program was when they were brought on to be laughed and mocked at in a special "new talent" try-out.
With people hungry and desperate, all that the miserable television shows can deal with is love and sex with the actors constantly weeping over "mi broken heart." Practically all the actors and actresses are creoles who live in a world of their own. Television reflects the ideas and dreams of the ordinary person far less in Mexico than even in the United States. Mexican movies, in the main copying the worst of the American brand, show the same traits.
The American tourist, of course, sees nothing of the bitter tensions showing themselves in Mexico. He loves the 32 cent movies and shows, the 8 cent taxi fare, the 3 cent bus ride, etc. Allotting for his tourism at least $15 a day, he is blissfully unaware of the fact that what he spends in a day the Mexican laborer takes closer to a month to earn!
But there are other Yanquis who live in Mexico more permanently. They are, for one, veteran army and navy people and other retired persons living on pensions who come to the little villages such as Ajijic on Lake Chapala and with their $200 or so a month pensions put on the arrogant airs of a prince. They buy a string of horses and their children gallop up and down the streets of the village with little regard for the safety of others. These are the ones who hire the maids for $7 a month and complain how lazy and ignorant they are. Then there are other American pensioners who have come to Mexico to booze their life away. They stay in the cafes and bars drinking beer, tequila, or pulque and moaning about their lot, that they are too sick to return to the States to get work and have to wait another month before their next veteran allotment comes along. These are some of the specimens we send to Mexico.
We send others too. We send artists to live in cute little "colonies," say in San Miguel Allende, where they paint "picturesque and quaint" scenes wholly idealized so that the brutality and squalor of Mexican life are entirely covered up. We also send students to attend the special American College where they can get a cheap education and learn how to master the Mexican better. Finally, we have such "permanents" as the American managers and superintendents who have come to Mexico by the thousands to live in separate developments coming out from time to time to mingle with the creoles and to share their social life.
IV
EVERY POLITICIAN, loquacious greaseball or vain creole, is a "revolutionist" in Mexico. Each one claims to be the genu-wine article, the real autentico. It seems a good deal depends on what "revolution" the "revolutionist" is talking about and just what interpretation he is giving to that "revolution."
Maybe he is still talking about the 1810 revolution initiated by the Spanish priest Hidalgo. This one was really on behalf of the creoles against the gapuchines (spur-riding Spaniards) when in order to fight against the Spanish army Hidalgo found he would have to muster on his side the Indians under the leadership of the mestizo. Hidalgo really wanted to lead not a revolution against the Spanish monarchy but a counter-revolution against the influence of the French Revolution which at that time through Napoleon was dominating Spain and its ruling group. Willy-nilly, for the time being, the old Spanish ruling clique in Mexico had to support the monarchy. In the course of his revolt on behalf of the creole new ruling class Hidalgo, under the enormous pressure of the Indians and mestizos actually doing the fighting, had to come out for such reforms as the abolition of forced tribute from the Indians and the restoration of lands wrongfully taken away from the Indian villages (ejidos).
Hidalgo came to regret his actions. But not Morelos, a great mestizo leader who arose to carry out the revolution in far more determined fashion. Morelos believed in racial equality, in the abolition of the special courts and privileges for army officers and for the clergy, in the breaking up of the big hacienda estates into small holdings for the peasants, in the confiscation of the property of the rich for distribution to the poor, in the seizure of church lands, and in the separation of church and state. He was the first mass leader in Mexico to propose universal suffrage. In the end the creoles won the day and became equal to the gapuchines as they broke away from Spain under their own Mexican "Emperor." The Catholic Church, however, retained its enormous power, privileges, and properties. And the mass of Indians got nothing except that the mestizos now had to be recognized not as a pariah caste but as a power to be reckoned with militarily. Now all cliques fighting for power would have to use the mestizo as soldier and officer in the army.
Thus your autentico revolutionist might be simply a supporter of the ideas of the 1810-1822 revolution, the ideals of which have still not been realized. Such a person still thinks the creoles, not the foreigners or Indians should have the true power in Mexico.
Or your "revolutionist" might be of the 1857 variety follower of Benito Juarez. By the time of the mid-19th century the battle against slavery was reaching its height in North America. The whole continent was awakening to the call for rapid capitalist industrialization. The inefficient Mexican creole cliques could not possibly stay in front in such a struggle. Soon they were losing the greater part of Mexico to rapacious slave holders and capitalists from the United States. Losses, first of Texas, and then of California, New Mexico and other important territories, made the creole rulers look sick indeed. Here was the chance for the mestizo to show his hand and to lead the Indians into battle once again. And, paradoxically, just as it was the mestizo who pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the creole in 1810-1822, so it was the Indian that pulled the chestnuts out of the fire for the mestizo and gave him a place in the sun in 1857-1875.
Under the leadership of the great fighter and statesman, Benito Juarez, a full blooded Indian, the mestizo was able to defeat the combination of Spaniard and creole who were ready to turn the country over to French supported "Emperor" Maximilian rather than to a lower Mexican class. Juarez attempted to push the 1810-1822 revolution still further with a program of a democratic republic along the lines laid down by Morelos, calling for complete divorce of church and state, confiscation of church properties and special privileges, abolition of slavery and peonage, education for the Indian, etc., etc.
So your mestizo "revolutionist" politician might be invoking the shades of Bentio Juarez and the principles laid down by him in the mid-19th century when he is talking about keeping the government on the revolutionary track. In this case he means an independent sovereign Mexican democratic republic that gives the Mexican half-breed full share in the government and in business on a par with the Spaniard and the creole. If he ever got this the half-breed would be quite willing to forget the Indian source from whence be came and abandon it for the wealth and power he could get as part of the ruling groups.
While Benito Juarez could defeat the French Napoleon, he could not defeat the Paris Bourse and the flock of foreign investors that came pouring into Mexico not for its gold and silver but ardently seeking the raw materials and metals Mexico had and world industry needed. Juarez was succeeded by Porfirio Diaz who ruled as dictator for 35 years until he was overthrown by the revolution of 1910. And just as the long rule of Santa Anna between the first and second revolutions consolidated the rule of the creole and marked the supremacy of the hacienda over the encomienda given to the Spanish nobility in Mexico by the Spanish Crown, so did the rule of Porfirio Diaz mark the supremacy of large scale industry over the creole peonage-ridden self-sufficient agrarian hacienda.
Under Porfirio Diaz the leading position in Mexico's economic affairs was seized by the foreign investor whose word became law. The lead, zinc, iron, and other metal mines were all transferred to foreign owners. Public utilities, railway and municipal transportation facilities, basic natural resources, were all sold, leased, or mortgaged to owners abroad. Mexico became a veritable paradise for the foreign investor who soon put the old creole circles entirely in the shade. Mexican agrarians on a mass scale were transformed into mine and industry laborers under the distressing early capitalist exploitative conditions so well known to workers in Europe and in the United States.
Industrialization in Europe and in the United States, however, had led to revolutionary socialist, syndicalist and anarchist movements, to strikes and to revolutions. The situation was bound to culminate in similar movements in Mexico and Central America as well. Now it was the turn of the Mexican peon and peasant to raise the cry of Tierra y Libertad (land and liberty), the turn of the Mexican laborer to demand social protection and education and a chance to select his own representatives, and the turn of the creole to cry to the foreign investor that if he was not taken into junior partnership in the corporations he could make trouble.
And so a new revolution, led again by Indian and mestizo agrarian leaders such as Pancho Villa, Obregon, and Zapata came to the fore. In the city they were supported by ambitious "labor leaders" like Morones who wanted a share of the loot, and by machine politicians of creole and mestizo middle class elements such as Carranza, Calles, and their type. The Carranzas got the support of the Woodrow Wilsons; the Morones; the help of the Gompers of the A. F. of L. The creoles got a law passed that corporations operating in Mexico would have to have Mexican directors and managers and stock holders. The intellectuals and artists expressing the aspirations of this new "social revolution" were allowed to whoop it up for the Russian Revolution. Zapata was given his way and the division of the haciendas into small landholdings was begun (but by no means has been finished even to this day). Morones was made into a big trade union leader and a beginning was made in protective labor legislation. Thus on every side the Mexican ambitious were appeased by American capitalism and the way was paved for ever greater penetration and control of Mexico.
A great shock, however, occurred when the Great Depression hit the United States in the 1930's. At this time Lazaro Cardenas was President, a man of modest means coming from the little village of Jiquilpan in Michoacan. Cardenas as one close to the people could feel the result on the masses of the disastrous fall in prices of raw materials produced by Mexico and the resulting increased poverty and misery. He insisted that the great American mining and petroleum corporations pay the minimum wages that the law had decreed for workers. When these companies refused, the Mexican government then nationalized their properties laying down the principle that Mexico was an independent sovereign nation not subservient to the United States and would follow the socialistic principles of use of the land and its resources for the welfare of all the Mexican people.
The United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not strike back especially since America was mustering all her strength for the inevitable war against the Nazis and against Japan and knew that she had to rely on the alliance with Soviet Russia and with the common people throughout the world. Thus a most important proletarian twist was given to the tortuous path of the so-called "Mexican Revolution," and the 1910-1920 revolution was pushed ever farther to the Left. It was this leftward push that also impelled Mexico to declare war against the Nazis and to side with her traditional enemy, the Norteamericano Yanqui.
Partnership with American Big Business opened up tremendous industrial perspectives to Mexico during and after the war. With American funds and management pouring in on every side soon the Cardenas episode was entirely a matter of the past. Under the machine politicians so well represented by Calles the situation developed into a new golden era for foreign investors similar to that under Porfirio Diaz. Creole and mestizo middle classes became quite Americanized. Only the Indian toiler and mestizo laborer got nothing out of it. It is now their turn. It is time for a new revolutionary push.
V
THERE ARE SOME subterranean forces that erupt quite regularly in volcanoes or geysers. Such eruptions seem to mark the social forces in Mexico. First there was the revolution led by Morelos in 1810; then the one under Juarez in 1860; then the one under Villa and Zapata in 1910. And now it is the turn of the decade of the 60's once again.
Yanqui imperialism, world-wide, is no longer on the offensive, but on the defensive against the forces of Stalinist-communism. A new economic depression seems to be threatening in the U.S. Latin America is in great discontent. Social Revolution has broken out in Cuba under such circumstances that it must receive the warmest and greatest support from the submerged Mexican masses. In Cuba the revolutionary intellectuals pronounce the revolution as one for, by, and of the humble, the worker, the guajiro, the peon, the toiler, the oppressed, the Negro, the Indian. In Mexico this cry is also taken up by sections of the intellectuals and mestizos who are close to the worker and Indian agrarian. These people realize:
1. The Indians and poor mestizos making up the overwhelming majority of the Mexican nation have gained very little from the century and a half of phrase-mongering revolutions. They are still desperately poor, still mainly illiterate, still caught in a social and economic trap.
2. The Cuban Revolution has finally broken through the Monroe Doctrine steel wall. Supported by the Soviets and by the Chinese, Castro and his followers mean to make the breach wider and deeper so as to spread the revolution and make it permanent, that is make it represent the most oppressed classes of all.
3. The immediate future holds for the Indian and poor mestizos of Mexico either a great depression or a great war unless they themselves react in a revolution of their own. And in this respect they find themselves united with the other toilers in Central and South America.
The most dramatic and pressing matter is the fate of the Cuban Revolution. The poor Mexican toilers can not afford to see the Cuban Revolution crushed. Castro makes a tremendous appeal to them. Certain Mexican intellectuals even dream of becoming Castros themselves.
But it is too late for a Castro to appear in Mexico to do what the real Castro has done in Cuba. Perhaps Cardenas would like to groom himself for this post, but he seems too worn out and by now too compromised a politician. The student group in the University of Mexico might try to emulate the accomplishments of their brothers of the University of Havana but they do not have the same incentives. Economically growing Mexico can still bribe them, if need be, with good positions and lucrative political posts.
In short, Mexico may need a Castro but it can not have one; it may need a revolutionary intellectual who will overthrow the lackeys of American imperialism in the government calling themselves Mexican Revolutionists, but the job is too big for the weak shoulders of a wealthy creole intellectual and a band of conspiratorial students mouthing vague slogans of democracy, elections, down with dictatorship, etc.
After all, Mexico has six times the population of Cuba and has a border about 1500 miles long contiguous to the U.S. It has no gangster dictators, such as Machado or Batista, to be overthrown. Long ago it nationalized certain resources and made it clear that it was an independent sovereign republic. From the very beginning of the Russian Revolution Mexico supported the Soviets and most ardently aided the fight against Nazism, Fascism, and Spanish Franco Falangism. It gave generous refuge both to Leon Trotsky and to the defeated Spanish Left. Indeed, it was the haven and source of inspiration for Castro himself and the present Cuban revolutionary leaders.
The main point to understand is that the job of pushing forward the social revolution in Mexico is ever so much more difficult than in Cuba. In Cuba the social revolution could advance hidden under the nationalist slogan of an independent sovereign Cuba, free from U.S. physical and direct domination. No such nationalist cover can be used in Mexico. There are no U.S. marines in Mexico. Mexican sovereignty and its right to nationalize and expropriate property has long been recognized by a United States that has carefully masked its pressures so as not to offend Mexican national sensibilities.
Not only would the present subservient Mexican government have the full support of the Mexican army, the overwhelming portion of the creole 15% of the population, and a good part of the city mestizo group, including the trade union heads, now following the lead of A.F.L.'s Serafino Romualdi, a total weight equal to about 30-35%, of the total population, but, and what is decisive, the U.S. would not be deterred as in Cuba but would move in immediately with full force to aid a Mexican government, threatened by a Castro type insurrection.
It is no accident that there is no standing statue to Hernando Cortez in all of Mexico. The burning hatred of the Indian for the Spanish conquistador is kept alive in murals, in paintings, in monuments and in history books. Every creole knows what a social civil war in Mexico would mean and is well aware that only the better-off mestizo stands in the way of the Indian and mestizo worker and toiler. The key to the situation, then, is not a Castro, but the mestizo group. In the old days the Spaniards forbade the mestizo from returning to the Indian village for even in the earliest days the Spanish conquistador knew what to expect from his disinherited bastard son. Today, of course, the mestizo is everywhere.
Who will win the mestizo in Mexico depends primarily on whether the Mexican economy under U.S. domination can give him prosperity and opportunity. This is well understood by the Yanquis especially by the Kennedy government that is now making full efforts to aid the growth of a large mestizo middle class tied to capitalist policies.
At the same time there is even now in Mexico a considerable standing army of unemployed in the cities and a great mass of underemployed in the countryside. Should economic conditions grow worse with another great depression in the U.S. and should mestizo office workers, salesmen, technicians, and skilled workers find their security endangered, a great revolutionary movement could result.
We have already noted that on the countryside there have been cattle and food supplies raids to feed the hungry. In the cities there would be a demand for full unemployment insurance and relief. Everywhere there would be urged the passage of adequate minimum wage, maximum hour, anti-child labor, and full social security legislation similar to that in the U.S., the funds to be raised by heavy taxation on the big corporation.
In the international field, if the U.S. eggs on Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua to attack Cuba, what will prevent the Indian masses of Mexico from moving in to annex these lands and to unite again with their cousins in these colonial areas, thus extending revolutionary Mexican influence clear to Panama? What would the U.S. do then?
Here, and perhaps only here, could a patriotic nationalist Castro arise and with cries of "Hands Off Cuba" stir up the exploited agrarians to move against Yanqui imperialists and their lackeys with enormous, far reaching consequences.
A Cardenas who, it seems, is eager to go to Cuba to fight in its defense side by side with Castro, ought to be able to arouse mass sentiment in Mexico for an invasion of Guatemala to stamp out the nests of armed counter-revolution training in the U.S. supported camps there. These camps are flagrant manifestations of arrogant Yanqui imperialism, they are in outright violation of the principles both of the United Nations and of the Organization of American States. They have been used to crush the legitimate aspirations of the Guatemalan people for a truly free country and have helped the tiny clique of hated Guatemalan tyrants hold on to their power. They form a threat to all of Central America and to Mexico. They should be stamped out physically as nests of political bed-bugs and vermin.
The Mexican government in acting thus would be entirely within its rights. A Cardenas, if he really wanted to, could head a movement that could induce the Mexican government to act, or at least to allow the masses in Yucatan, Quintana Roo, Chiapas, and elsewhere to "volunteer" to act. And if a Cardenas can not do the job, another Mexican Castro can be found. We can be sure, however, that while such a Castro might start the revolutionary ball rolling, he will never be able to control it. For that the revolutionary disciplined party of the proletariat will be necessary, not a mere Jacobin outfit.
************************************************