Where Away?

Had Mexico's Labor Boss Vicente Lombardo Toledano broken with the Communists?

Tabasco-tongued Boss Lombardo insists that he has never been a party member, but he faithfully followed the Kremlin's wavy line from start to finish of World War II. Before and since the war, through his C.T.A.L. (Latin American Federation of Labor), Lombardo has worked hard spreading the Communist word through the Latin republics. But now Lombardo seems to be looking the other way.

Last January he rose in convention and nominated Miguel Aleman for the presidency. Convinced that Mexico would have to grow ripe industrially before its revolution could be realized, Lombardo also promoted an industry-labor pact barring strikes so that production could be increased.

At the recent C.T.A.L. conference in Costa Rica, he put over a program favoring protective tariffs for new national industries such as Mexico is developing. And in a speech at Tapachula in October he warned Guatemalan laborites against class warfare orators of the extreme left. "Our tactic is that of national unity," he proclaimed.

Diversionist? That was not the party line Communism laid down for the faithful after V-J day when the Kremlin decided to go back to the open doctrine of straight class struggle. After Lombardo's October speech, swarthy, handsome Communist Secretary General Dionisio Encinas wrote a gently reproving reply in the party paper, La Voz de Mexico. By going the way Lombardo advocated, he said, ". . . the Mexican working-class movement has lost its independence."

Lombardo, thus chided, only went farther. In a letter not reported in the U.S. until last week, he replied: "On the day when the unions act on instructions from a political party, union liberty will be ended. ... In Mexico we recognize the patriotic alliance with the industrial bourgeoisie in order to resist imperialism. The class struggle without quarter is an error."

Which Bandwagon? In the thunderous days of President Lazaro Cardenas, Lombardo had armed his workers, organized the Workers' Administration to run the railroads, bossed the left-wing majority in Congress. Under moderate President Avila Camacho he was stripped of most of his power, but he hung on by winning Latin American labor leadership. Within Mexico he now badly needs prestige. Both C.T.M. (the Mexican labor movement) and C.T.A.L. have lost strength because they have been so doggedly Stalinist. Possibly Lombardo may now be trying to recoup by walking away from the party line.

But there was an alternative theory: maybe the party line had changed again and Lombardo was shifting with it (as U.S. Communists would shift if the line changed from the Foster class-struggle position back to Earl Browder's let's-seem-to-go-along tactics). In any case, Mexico's Communist Party, with a bare 8,000 members, was one of Latin America's least formidable. "There'll be no Communist revolution in Mexico," Adolf Berle had said. "Mexicans have had their revolution--after their own fashion."

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