Cardenas & Almazan Out

The hopes of two revolutions were near death in Mexico last week. The U. S. had sounded the end of both, appointing Vice President-elect Henry Agard Wallace as "special representative with the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary" to the Presidential inauguration in Mexico City Dec. 1 (see p. 14). When President-elect General Manuel Avila Camacho takes office on that day with the blessing of the U. S., retiring President Lazaro Cardenas' revolutionary Six-Year Plan will be over, the promised revolt of President-reject General Juan Andreu Almazan will be left as flat as a tortilla.

Mexico's press reported Almazanismo dying in a flurry of blood and violence and trickery. Four Almazanistas said they had been arrested and tortured by Federal soldiers. More Almazan followers fled out of Rio Verde and San Luis Potosi to avoid persecutions of local caciques. Senora Higinia Cedillo Gonzales, who helped her brother, General Saturnino Cedillo, revolt and tried to do the same for Almazan, was reported kidnapped or murdered. Government men ransacked the house of Almazan's Provisional President General Hector F. Lopez.

Then the Government's PRM (Party of the Mexican Revolution) came out with a fantastic story, which Almazan denied, of a Nazi-backed Almazanista plot to overthrow the Government. From a pile of swastika-sprinkled documents it said it had decoded papers accounting for 12,000 cases of ammunition and eight knocked down planes, smuggled in off a Nazi freighter. Maps were produced showing Almazanista military centres and broadcasting stations. Almazan's strength was put at 250,000 men under onetime Labor Boss Luis M. Morones, backed by a Nazi warship and 14 more planes. Police uncovered plans to cut off the capital's power, light and communications as a signal for armed attacks on the Presidential Palace and key public buildings.

Next day Almazanistas ambushed five Federal agents investigating the plot, killed two of them. The Government countered by starting a roundup of Almazanista leaders, jailed 100 within 48 hours.

More peacefully, but as relentlessly as geometry, the closing circle of Mexican politics was choking off the revolution of Cardenas. In 1934 he had come into office to establish Mexico's first non-militaristic Government. He began putting his dreams of Utopia into effect by redistributing land to the peasants, nationalizing the railroads, expropriating foreign oil concessions. But his espousal of the little man brought the full power of the militaristic Right against him. As he fought off the Right the militant Left crept in behind him. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, secretary of the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers), began pumping Communism into the administration.

As the Left grew stronger with armed CTM and peasants' militias it became lefter still. Cardenas' fine dream began to tarnish. Workers started squabbling among themselves. The oil expropriations became a white elephant at home, upset Mexico's international relations. Chicanery as well as well-meaning incompetence shackled Cardenas' visionary plans.

In alarm the Right began organizing politically as well as militaristically, found two Presidential candidates in Almazan and Avila Camacho. With no Leftist candidate who might beat this movement, Cardenas got behind Avila Camacho as the more likely to salvage some of his liberal gains, and pushed him into victory at the polls.

The expression on Mexico's new political face began to appear as soon as Avila Camacho was elected. It was that of a soldier-politico again instead of a worker-proletarian. Camachista Mexico began to realign itself with an eye to the U. S., swung steadily to the Right.

But the problems Cardenas was leaving were tremendous. Most urgent on the home front was oil. The Government's Federal Conciliation and Arbitration Board reported last week that Mexico would find itself without oil within seven years unless sweeping economies were made. Of all the expropriated fields only that at Poza Rica is actively producing at the present time. Enormous quantities of natural gas are being wasted, refining and exportation have fallen off. Against this salaries in the industry have increased 43% in two years.

In a last-minute effort to remove this problem at least from his legacy to Avila Camacho, President Cardenas sent a bill to Congress last week. To bolster the oil industry's operating deficit he asked for 60,000,000 pesos ($12,000,000), suggested reduction in personnel and salary cuts. Though he promised to clear up the muddle before leaving office, it looked impossible to accomplish in a fortnight what he had been unable to do in two years.

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