MEXICO: The Indian Returns

The postulates of the Atlantic Charter are not mere phrases written on paper. We have faith in the statesmen who signed them. And in support of these statesmen are the peoples who, like our own, thirst for a better order of things, a better democracy and a better world.”

Thus did President General Manuel Avila Camacho address last week’s opening session of the Mexican Congress. He was explaining to his people the reason why war reached across wide expanses of oceans and crossed high mountains of prejudice to disturb the siestas of even the humblest peon. He talked of a “new social, economic and international order.” He warned that peace, when it comes, “will not endure without a general modification of the methods of labor, without the humanization of the system of commerce, and without an efficient recognition of the rights which each nation has.”

It was a fine speech. But Juan Diego, the politically powerful Indian peasant to whom Mexican Governments invariably appeal when they are in trouble, has heard fine speeches before. Manuel Avila Camacho is not his man. He has accepted the President’s middle-of-the-road political philosophy (“not to make somebody poor to make somebody else rich”), but to the Indian there is still only one man whose voice is magic. He is another Indian, a man born to poverty who became a great revolutionist, a fireball reformist and an enduring popular hero—Lázaro Cárdenas y del Rio.

After backing Manuel Avila Camacho as the less conservative of two conservative candidates to succeed him in 1940, Cárdenas watched his successor struggle with the snarls left by his own six-year “Mexico-for-the-Mexicans” reform plan. Last December he returned to public life as commander of the Mexican forces guarding Lower California and Mexico’s west coast. Last week, on the same day that he spoke to Congress, President Avila Camacho invited ex-President Cárdenas back to the capital to become Minister of National Defense.

For a Mexican President to invite his greatest rival back to an office of great power is something as new as World War II’s close and friendly cooperation between Mexico and the U.S. One view was that Cárdenas was recalled because of pressure from labor and other groups opposing such politicos as the President’s brother Maximino, Minister of Communications and Public Works. Another was that only Cardenas could dispel the apathy toward the war effort among the peasants. A third and far sounder view was that, in sincerely seeking to unite all the political forces of his country, Manuel Avila Camacho meant what he said about “a better order of things, a better democracy and a better world.”