Lombardo for Alem

In Mexico City's garish Cine Metropolitan, some thousand delegates of the official Party of the Mexican Revolution (P.R.M.) gathered in orderly array: blue-shirted, white-trousered campesinos (farm workers) on the right, professional men in the center, obreros (industrial workers) on the left. Eleven non-voting delegates from Los Angeles' big Mexican colony sat with them.

Outside, in the pleasant, leafy Paseo de la Reforma, clusters of public address horns rasped out the proceedings. Dark-suited politicos and tan-jacketed pistoleros (gunmen) listened intently while the party changed its name to Institutional Revolutionary Party (P.R.I.). The delegates plumped for votes for women, and did not laugh out loud when the outgoing president called for a "crusade against corruption." The climax came when Vicente Lombardo Toledano, famed, currently anti-American, pro-leftist labor leader, gave the nominating speech for Miguel Aleman as the party's presidential candidate in the July 7 elections. Lombardo Toledano denounced the opposition candidate, idealistic Ezequiel Padilla, as a "pimp" for the U.S.

Lombardo Toledano's tribute to Conservative Aleman, ex-Minister of the Interior, was a piece of conspicuous hypocrisy. The two are no friends: Aleman had hoped to shake Lombardo Toledano. But because Lombardo Toledano liked to be with a winner, and because Aleman needed radical support, the hypocrisy would continue. Aleman would be boss and the party's trend to the right would continue.

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