JCG-9 Londres 190, Depto. 109 Colonia Juarez Mexico 6, DF, Mexico
October 14, 1966
A series of trip-hammer blows has sent Mexican Communists scurrying for cover to avoid one of the government’s sharpest crackdowns on subversion here in a decade. In separate but indirectly related actions government security police and counter-subversive agents in recent weeks have:
- Broken up a guerrilla orientation school allegedly conducted In the very heart of Mexico Cit-y by Victor Rico Galan, Spanish-born leftist who until his arrest was an editor of Politica, the Communist bi-weekly newsmagazine,
- — Outlawed a so-called “study group” in Sinaloa State on the Pacific coast named after Francisco I. Madero, father of the Mexican Revolution, and jailed its leaders for plotting to overthrow the state government.
- — Used the army to end violence in a student strike at a university in Morelia, capital of the State of Michoacan, to the west of Mexico City, after it fell under the guidance of Communist agitators. A member of the Chamber of Deputies faces arrest for his role in angry street demonstrations. Two professors were deported to their native lands of Guatemala and Puerto Rico for supposedly advocating violence.
Despite the penchant for violence that permeates Mexican life, and an undeniable (and undirected) discontent among a sizable portion of the population, few discerning observers feel that Rico Galan’s group could actually have provoked a guerrilla action capable of overthrowing the government, even if it had attempted to do so. The government moves were preventive rather than an indication there is anything underway here that could cause serious trouble for the established order. The ingredients for violent revolution simply are not present in Mexico in sufficient quantities to support a violent attempt at a change in government. Too, the government has proved itself extremely capable of containing the occasional disorders that do occur. One quasi-army organized in Guerrero State in the 1950s for the avowed purpose of forcibly breaking up large estates quickly degenerated Into banditry, with a handful of survivors now eking out a day-to-day existence in isolated, unpopulated mountain areas, prevented by military pressures from coming into the lowlands. Another government tactic is to smother protests by removing their basic causes. In early September campesinos rioted in Merida, capital of Yucatan, to protest a bonus system inaugurated by the state-run henequen industry to reward more efficient workers. (Henequen is a plant, which yields fibers used in making rope.) The campesinos stormed the state palace and agricultural ministry, smashed storefronts, tore down light fixtures and overturned automobiles. The next day the government announced that everyone – efficient or not – would receive the same bonus, thus ending simultaneously both the riot and the attempt to achieve more production.
The army Intervention in Morelia is an indication that the administration of President Gustavo Diaz Ordaz has finally wearied of the wave of student strikes which has disrupted Mexico’s higher education system all year. The strikes began at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, in Mexico City, and spread in succession to universities in Puebla, Culiacan, Torreon, Durango, and a host of secondary schools. Morelia is not the first strike in which leftists and outsiders Initiated and/or gained control of student movements. It is the first ones however, in which the government declared a de facto revocation of university autonomy – the policy common in Latin America of erecting a legal barrier between campus and outside police forces. The strikes left the nation’s universities on the verge of collapse; upwards of 100,000 students have already lost enough class time in 1966 to delay their graduations. By sending the army to Morelia, the government gave notice that students have had enough strife for one year, and that similar uprisings will be crushed.
Nonetheless the suddenly strong stance towards subversion is surprising because of Mexico’s historically blasé attitude towards its citizens’ political beliefs. Communists are given froe rein to disseminate theorist propaganda, and to advocate changes in the structure of the Mexican government. The Communists’ mistake was in attempting to take a mile – violently – when they could have settled for a couple of feet.
The excesses are best illustrated by the case of Rico Galan, national affairs editor of Politica, a Time-sized and Time-styled journal (in format, not in content, I stress) which is generally conceded to be subsidized by the Cuban Embassy. Politica averages 70 to 80 pages per issue, carries no advertising, and sells for three pesos (24 cents), a price insufficient to cover printing costs. Politica readers may expect to find such things as the texts of all the resolutions adopted at the Tri-Continental Conference of Asian, African and Latin American Communists in Havana in January; Fidel Castro’s 26th of July speech; and the texts of addresses and major announcements by leaders of the Mexican Communist Party. Politica’s director general, Manuel Marcus Pardinas, is the capital’s ranking organizer of anti-U.S. demonstrations.
Rico Galan’s responsibility was to insure that the proper Marxist slant was inserted into articles on Mexican national life – politics, agrarian affairs, foreign investment, the deepening clash between the Industrial and farm sector. And he was skilled. A naive person lacking in political sophistication (a description fitting woefully many Mexicans) would believe, after perusing an issue of Politica, that every Mexican problem could be blamed on (a) “yankee imperialism” or (b) “greedy Mexican industrialists,” with a few licks on the side for “venal” politicians, a category which includes almost anyone in authority: in the republic.
During the two-hour Mexican lunch, Rico Galan frequently could be found sharing a table with journalist friends in La Habana Cafe in Calle Bucareli in the same block as the Politica editorial offices. La Habana is a clattery, airy place filled with the heavy burnt aroma from a coffee-roasting machine in the retail shop in the foyer. To the doctrinaire, argumentative Rico Galan, politics was a living subject, something to be chewed with relish along with La Habana’s paella. His Marx moustache quivering (Groucho, not Karl), his dark eyes unblinking behind horn-rimmed glasses, Rico Galan could talk for hours about his discontent with Mexican society, and his fears that the country was lapsing into the omnipotent statism or Spain, from which his had fled with his parents when Franco came to power in the 1960s.
Rico Galan’s plaints about Mexico and his Marxism by themselves were not enough to set him apart from any of hundreds of Mexican leftists, writers and intellectuals. Certain of his friends, knew, however, that there was another circle to Rico Galan’s life: That he had befriended Fidel Castro when the Cuban leader was training his invasion force In the State of Mexico in 1956; and that his association with representatives of the Communist insurgents in Guatemala went a step beyond the call or journalistic duty.
Whether these friends knew or, or participated in, yet another circle of Rico Galan’s life is a question which security police are still attempting to answer. For the lunch-table philosopher of La Habana Café, according to police, decided in late 1965 that Mexico was ripe for another period of armed revolution, and that violence was needed to jar the government “back onto the revolutionary road” it had abandoned after the presidency of General Lazaro Cardenas (1934-40).
Either from fear or lack or knowledge, Rico Galan’s friends now hesitate to talk about this third circle. According to police officials, however, this is how Rico Galan went about plotting a violent change In the course of Mexican government:
In late 1965 Rico Galan, his sister, Ana Maria Rico Galan, and a lawyer friend, Raul Ugalde Alvarez, rented town houses at Campeche 356 and Golfo de Tehuantepec 3, in Colonia Roma, a middle-class residential area about half a mile south of the Niza tourist district which entertains hundreds of American visitors daily. Ugalde has long been active in leftist circles: for awhile he served as chairman of the Frente Electoral Popular –People’s Electoral Front, or FER – an abortine amalgamation of leftist groups and individuals which collapsed under the weight of its own bickering. He also has been active in leadership of the Central CampesinaIndependiente – The Independent Farm Central, or CCI, farm wing of the Mexican Communist Party-and of the National Liberation Movement, a minute Marxist group.
According to a statement which police later attributed to Ugalde, persons attending the training schools composed the Movimiento Revolucionario del Pueblo – the People’s Revolutionary Movement, or MRP. According to police, Ugalde defined the MRP as a “free and clandestine organization (designed) to produce a popular and democratic revolution through peaceful or violent means.
MRP worked through the CCI to recruit peasants who lived in the houses while studying terrorism, Communist dogma, and techniques of setting up guerrilla bands in their home areas. As texts Ugalde and Rico Galan used the guerrilla warfare classics of Ernesto (Cha) Guevara, Castro s former military mentor, and Mao Tse-tung. Students got mimeographed copies of these books, as well as Cuban-printed Communist literature.
An engineer for the Federal Electrical Commission, Gumersindo Gonzalez Cuevas, is said to have taught the peasants how to manufacture and use high explosives, Molotov cocktails, time bombs, and plastic bombs concocted from readily available muriatic acid. He is also said to have pilfered diagrams of key electrical installations, hydraulic plants and petroleum refineries, and to have pointed out where bombs could be planted to cause maximum damage.
Security police hit Rico Galan’s group like a thunder clap at 10:30 A. M. on August 12. A flotilla of navy-blue police vans quietly converged on the neighborhood, sealing off the blocks containing the target houses. Officers with submachine guns, tear gas shotguns and nightsticks went into action. They seized a total of 33 persons, 25 of them in the Tehauntepec house alone. In the houses were found three high-frequency radio transmitters, a homemade time bomb containing nitro-glycerin, nine high-powered rifles, three .45caliber military pistols, a quantity of blasting powder, and stacks of Castro-produced publications. Thirteen other persons were arrested elsewhere in the city during the next few days.
Officers held the arrestees incommunicado in a military camp for three days. At least two of them were found to have been recent visitors to Cuba, taking advantage of the thrice-weekly flights between Havana and Mexico City, only direct link from any Latin American nation. Their initial Insistence was that the schools were nothing more than “discussion clubs” where Ugalde’s views on the necessity for economic and social changes were aired.
During this period the Mexico City press, at the government’s behests treated the affair gingerly. Excelsior, the leading morning daily, buried the story at the bottom of its front page. Novedades, another morning daily, and The News, its English language edition, more than 24 hours after the fact still spoke of “reported” arrests with no details. (I wondered what U. S. dailies would have done if a Journalist of the standing, say, of Emmet John Hughes or Roscoe Drummond had been caught running a similar school in Georgetown.) The only professorial explanation offered was that the government didn’t want foreign investors to develop fears that the stability Mexico has carefully nourished since 1938 is declining.
Because of the lack of specific information Mexican leftists argued emphatically that the arrests were a police frame-up. One man even claimed to have knowledge that the police had actually planted the arms cache in the houses and lugged them out for the benefit of photographers. A journalist friendly with Rico Galan spread the latest issues of Politica and Siempre, another magazine to which the jailed writer contributed, on the table one afternoon as we talked over coffee. “They (the government) wanted to silence Victor, and to serve a warning to all of us, and especially Marcue Pardinas,” he said. “This is what they are mad about.”
He gestured to the cover of Politica, which pictured Castro and his late lieutenant Camilio Cienfuegos, rifle between them, conferring In the Sierra Maestra. The caption read: “Latinoamericanos: El camino no as la revolucion Mexicana. El camino para los pueblos de la America Latina es la Revolucion Cubana.” – Latin Americans, the road is not the Mexican Revolution. The road for the people of Latin America is the Cuban Revolution.” The quotation came from a speech by Arnoldo Martinez Verdugo, first secretary of the Mexican Communist Party, at a “Cuban homage’ ceremony. By flaunting such words Politica indeed had violated two ground rules of Mexican politics: Don’t trifle with another country’s internal affairs, even in a theoretical sense, and don’t question publicly the magic of the Mexican Revolution.
The Siempre issue contained a Rico Galan heresy of another type: An attack on Fidel Velasquez and other leaders of the Confederacion Trabajadores Mexicanos (The Confederation of Mexican Labor, or CTM), largest and most powerful in the nation, and the labor wing of PRI, Rico Galan was mad about a luncheon Velasquez hosted for the PRI national chairman, Lauro Ortega, in the Torre Blanco penthouse restaurant of El Presidente Hotel, the tab for which reputedly was $70 per head. “There is plenty for all this,” Rico Galan wrote, “for ostentatious meals, for highballs at fabulous prices that even tourists loaded with dollars won’t buy. There is money for all of this, to guarantee that labor leaders will be tame and submissive. Without combative trade unions, with a minimum of honesty, what will the people do to demand their rights?” One faction of the waiters’ union was so disturbed at reports of this luncheon that it ordered members to refuse service to Velasquez or other members of the CTM hierarchy if they came into restaurants.
My acquaintance continued: “Victor’s arrest is a warning to all of us that attacks on the government and its cronies, if carried too far – to the point of truth – can send one to prison. Mexican public opinion will not allow this injustice.”
But Mexican public opinion has accepted the arrests, and Mexican public opinion does not share the conclusion that the arrests constituted an “injustice.” As more evidence on the operation of the schools leaked out, Mexico realized that Rico Galan and Ugalde were playing no child’s game; that carried to its conclusion their plan would have resulted in Mexican firing upon Mexican. According to a statement road in court, Rico Galan admitted advocating “an immediate transformation of the Mexican government, if not possible by democratic means, then through armed violence.” These words sobered leftists who talk a lot about the desirability of violence in other Latin countries but stop shy of a desire to revive the fratricidal bloodshed of the Mexican Revolution, which took an estimated two million lives between 1910 and 1917. A few days after this statement became public my journalist acquaintance wasn’t nearly so certain of his earlier assessment of the case.
A government official involved in the case was even more emphatic. “Had the arrest been because or his writings, we could have locked up Rico Galan at any time we chose in the lost ten years, and for articles even more insulting to the Mexican people than this one. No, our friend Victor chose to use weapons more formidable than his lying, vicious typewriter, he is a grown man, and he must take the responsibility.”
Rico Galan, his sister, and Ugalde and six other persons are now under indictment for conspiracy, accumulation of arms and indictment to rebellion, charges that would mean 18 years in prison. The rebellion count makes them ineligible for bail, and the government hasn’t let reporters talk with the accused leaders. Renato Leduc, leftist writer and member of the Politica-Siempre axis, was permitted to visit Rico Galan briefly as a representative of a journalists’ union, but only to relay moral support “on behalf of freedom of the press.” Rico Galan’s only public response to the charges, muttered during one of his court arraignments, was “This is ridiculous.”
The Mexican judicial system does not provide for trial via word-of-mouth testimony. Both sides periodically submit written statements to a judge who evaluates the evidence and asks more questions. Thus the merits of the government’s case won’t be formally decided for another year. In the meanwhile Rico Galan is sitting rather fitfully in a jail cell. Eighteen other persons charged with conspiracy were made eligible for bail and a number have been able to secure their release. The remainder of the total or 46 persons arrested went free because of lack of evidence. Investigators purportedly obtained incriminating statements from several of these persons, which are to be introduced into evidence as the trial progresses.
The Mexico City raids produced leads that sent other security agents to the Francisco I. Madero Group in Culiacan, the capital of Sinaloa States a turbulent sugar region on the Pacific coast opposite the Paja California peninsula. Sinaloa is dominated economically by Aaron Saenz, onetime agrarian political leader turned businessman who now controls more of the Mexican sugar industry than any other single person. Saenz’ mills in the flat, sultry coastal town of Los Mochis turn out about 20 percent of Mexico’s annual sugar production, and there are campesino union leaders who feel Saenz should be a bit more generous with the profits. There are also citizens who feel that Sinaloa Governor Leopoldo Sanchez Celia runs the toughest dictatorship of any politician in Mexico, replete with pistoleros who terrorize his enemies before, during and after elections. A typical Sanchez Celia ploy came last summer when he broke with a political ally of longtime standing. Almost immediately Sanchez Celia expropriated the man’s land, charging that his holdings were illegally large. The man protested futilely that nothing had ever been said about legality when he and the governor were friends. As an indication of Sanchez Celis’ strength, he was instrumental in late 1965 In forcing the resignation of Carlos A. Madrazo as national chairman of PRI in a dispute over whether local officials were to be chosen through party primaries (as advocated by Madrazo) or as the handpicked choice of state political jefes (the old system which Sanchez Celis wanted to continue) Sanchez Celis prevailed.
Unable to combat Sanchez Celia at the polls, dissidents in the state thus have formed a number of opposition groups – some centered in the sugar cans workers, others in the Autonomous University of Sinaloa. According to government security agents, the Francisco I. Madero Group made the same mistake as did Rico Galan: It was determined to remove Sanchez Celis by force if necessary. The governor’s shortcomings notwithstanding, Mexico City was not about to permit armed rebellion. So officers began rounding up members one Friday afternoon in mid-September and by Monday morning had 126 persons crammed into the Sinaloa state prison. The raid purportedly produced evidence of a guerrilla training school patterned after that in Mexico City. Most of the persons since have been released, but there is an official ban on meetings of the group. On October 9 police brought in from throughout the state descended on a rally at the prison gates and drove away the participants at machine gunpoint.
The Morelia strike is still in progress and at this point defies analysis. It began innocently enough in mid-September to protest increased bus fares. During a demonstration a policeman fired a shot that fatally wounded a student. At this point, states the government, outside agitators poured into Morelia, a city for years a focal point for Mexican Communist activity, When the students attacked electric power plants and tried to seize two radio stations the state government, called on the army for help. A paratrooper battalion made a two-day show of force at the university, effectively removing violence as an element of the strike, and then stopped aside.
The two professors, arrested the morning the troops arrived, by mid-afternoon were on airplanes out or the country, charged by the Interior Ministry with undue involvement in Mexican political affairs. Such short-order deportations are provided for in Article 33 of the Mexican Constitution, which gives the Federal Executive “the exclusive right to expel from the Republic forthwith, and without judicial process, any alien whose presence he may doom inexpedient. No alien may meddle in any way whatsoever in the political affairs of the country.”
Leftists are now cautiously assaying how far they can carry their opposition to government policies without being branded subversive. With understandable restraint they are toning down their public admiration for Castro, and their calls for revolutionary violence elsewhere in Latin America, A few diehards still mutter about “frame-up” and “persecution” but the majority dismiss as improbable any such shenanigans by the police when the person involved is as prominent as Rico Galan.
And to persons here who have often looked askance at Mexico’s casual, tolerant attitude towards subversive activities, the crackdown seems a welcome sign that the government is now aware that Latin Communists carry more than theory in their knapsacks.
Received in New York October 18, 1966.
©1966 Joseph C. Goulden, Jr.
Mr. Goulden is a 1965 Alicia Patterson Fund fellowship winner on leave from The Philadelphia Inquirer.Permission to publish this article may be sought from The Managing Editor, Philadelphia Inquirer.
