Capricorn to Cancer

Last week it became public knowledge everywhere but in Mexico that the Mexican Government Petroleum Administration was swapping oil for newsprint with Nazi Germany. A very good reason for loudly proletarian President General Lazaro Cardenas' Government failing to broadcast this news for home consumption was that simultaneously in Mexico City was convening the first Latin-American Labor Conference, which opened with many a sharp cry against "Nazi and Fascist penetration of Latin America." Host to the conference was ascetic, sloe-eyed Vicente Lombardo Toledano, president of the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers). Only a few months ago in Manhattan, Laborite Lombardo had professed himself certain that the Government of which his 1,000,000 workers are a keystone would never dream of bartering its oil with dictatorships. However, none of the delegates from the 13 Central and South American States represented* rose to embarrass Host Lombardo on this point nor did any of the big three "fraternal delegates" present: French Trade Union Tsar Leon Jouhaux, whose dues-paying followers number 5,000,000; the Minister of Justice of Leftist Spain, famed Ramon Gonzalez Pena, who has personally fought fascism in the Asturias by lighting sticks of dynamite from the end of his cigar and hurling them where they would do the most good; and John L. Lewis of C.I.O.

Mr. Lewis, M. Jouhaux and Sr. Gonzalez Pena took no active part last week as Sr. Lombardo Toledano and the other Latin Americans proceeded to found a Federation of Latin American Workers, which adopted a constitution, made Mexico City its headquarters, provided that its president must reside there and then elected Vicente Lombardo Toledano first president. In flattering compliment to President Cardenas, who last week won for Mexican Federal employes the right to strike, the constitution borrowed almost the exact words of a recent Cardenas radioration as its charter: that "the principal task of the Latin American working class consists in winning full economic and political autonomy for Latin American nations. . . . Fascism is opposed to the objectives of the proletariat and must be combated in all its forms." The Congress asked a pardon for Tom Mooney, cabled exhortations of "courage" to Czechoslovak workers and demanded independence for Puerto Rico.

Leon Trotsky, cooped up in his Mexico City refuge and pledged to silence on matters affecting Mexico, almost burst with anxiety at all these developments last week. What the Great Exile was thinking was meanwhile mirrored by his landlord, Diego Rivera, who took time out from painting a mural for a Pittsburgh capitalist to issue awful warnings: "Lombardo Toledano has closely intertwined his fate with that of the Soviet oligarchy in the Kremlin. From there he receives instructions and all kinds of aid. For Moscow it is a question of transforming the workers' organizations of all America into an obedient instrument of Joseph Stalin."

Although President Lombardo Toledano journeyed recently to Moscow and conferred with leaders of the Third International, last week he carefully had his F. L. A. W. announce solidarity not with the Third (Communist) International but with the Second (Socialist) International, to which most European labor leaders outside of Russia belong. While making it very plain that his presence was "purely unofficial," John L. Lewis, no Communist and no Socialist, felicitated Mexico for having in President Cardenas a friend of Labor comparable to President Roosevelt, and declared of the F. L. A. W.: "I think the formation of this organization is one of the most significant events that has happened in a long time with respect to all countries from the Tropic of Capricorn to the Tropic of Cancer!"*

* Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Costa Rica, Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, Mexico, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela.

* The Tropic of Capricorn runs through the Chaco, the Tropic of Cancer just north of Cuba. The area between the Tropics includes Central America, the jungles of the Amazon, the West Indies, the least habitable parts of Africa, the East Indies and the deserts of northern Australia.

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