MEXICO: Impudent Imposition

Barricaded in their headquarters last week, dodging bullets and brickbats, campaign managers of the anti-re-electionist party of JoséVasconcelos typed a statement:

“There has been no election in Mexico. Mexico has failed in democracy. . . . Everywhere citizens have been kept from the polls. In this was furthered the most impudent imposition ever recorded in Mexican history.”

The anti-re-electionists were speaking figuratively, sarcastically. There was an election last week, in which 19 Mexicans were killed, 23 wounded, and Pascual Ortiz Rubio, government-supported candidate, was elected by a reputed majority of 700,000 to serve as President for the remaining four years, nine months and 23 days of the six-year term of assassinated president-elect Alvaro Obregon (TIME, July 9, 1928).

Gunfire commenced early. Mexico’s election law provides, apparently in an effort to improve the shooting, that the first nine citizens who succeed in registering at a voting booth are thereby constituted the election board for the day. By noon hundreds of Mexican voting booths were wrecked, most of the others triumphantly occupied by Ortiz Rubistas. In Mexico City an automobileful of machine gunners swept past a mass meeting of disconsolate Vasconcelistas, killed four, wounded eight. In Vera Cruz, Vasconcelistas took their revenge by lynching a man by the name of Lopez.

The Significance, to U. S. observers, of the election lay in the firmly entrenched position of the National Revolutionary Party, the party of ex-President Calles, “provisional” President-elect Ortiz Rubio, suave engineer. Prophets foresaw no major change in Mexican-U. S. official relations for at least four years, nine months, 23 days.