First Wound

Mexico last week had its first lesson in the cost of abandoning neutrality. The 4,000-ton tanker Potrero del Llano, the former Italian Lucifero, which Mexico had grabbed a year ago, was nosing along off the Florida coast, her colors illuminated, when she was torpedoed with a loss of 14 of her 35-man crew. The very next day Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla sent a note, demanding "complete satisfaction, and a guarantee of damage reparations," not only to Germany and Italy, but even to Japan.

Meanwhile in Mexico City, student demonstrators were smashing windows in the German Club, and leftist radicals "stormed" the Deutsches Haus. The Stalinists hastened to make political hay: Vicente Lombardo Toledano, President of the shadowy "Confederation of Workers of Latin America," wrote President Manuel Avila Camacho demanding that Mexico instantly declare formal war on the Axis and seize all Axis citizens' property; the leaders of the Stalinist-controlled C.T.M., biggest Mexican labor federation, demanded war too.

The Government's note was an ultimatum, to expire this week. If satisfaction was not received, said Padilla, Mexico would "take a position in accordance with Mexican honor." Translated into cold fact, this threat would probably mean, not war, but the grabbing of all Axis property in Mexico--a juicy morsel estimated at just under one billion dollars. As for actual war, U.P. reported a Foreign Office authority as saying, "the ultimate effect will be a declaration of war, but that 'will take some time.' "

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