MEXICO: The Yen to Riot

In its three-phase process of nation building—revolution, industrial development, prosperity—Mexico is well into Phase 2, and President Adolfo Lopez Mateos is determined to keep going. To do the job, he needs political stability. Instead, Lopez Mateos is now bedeviled by leftist demonstrations and violence that resulted last week in the jailing of Mexico’s No. 1 artist and No. 1 Communist, David Alfaro Siqueiros.

The violence grows partly out of the fact that the memory of the Mexican revolution is so fresh and inspiring; the initials of the ruling party, P.R.I., stand for Party of Institutionalized Revolution. Although the revolution started in 1910, it did not reach its climax until the six-year period from 1934 through 1940, when President Lazaro Cardenas expropriated foreign oil companies. Since then, Mexican Presidents have turned to the right, encouraging domestic and foreign private enterprise. The government itself became big business, running rai roads and oil, sharing investments with private capital through its own development corporation, Nacional Financiera.

A Sign Mistaken. To keep everything going smoothly, Lopez Mateos last year asked leaders of government workers’ unions—including the railwaymen’s Redlining Demetrio Vallejo and the teachers’ Othón Salazar—to postpone wage demands for one year until Lopez Mateos could pay off some inherited government debts. Vallejo took the request as a sign of weakness and in March 1959 called a wildcat strike. Lopez Mateos cracked down hard, threw Vallejo and 2,600 other railwaymen into jail. Vallejo and about 500 strikers have been there ever since without trial. Ex-President Cardenas, still a hero to Mexico’s masses, demanded “justice and comprehension” for them. Then Cardenas traveled to Fidel Castro’s Cuba and returned so full of praise that leftist Mexican students, peasants and workers were roused to unruly recollections of the revolutionary days in Mexico.

Two months ago, Lopez Mateos found himself compelled to reassure the nation that he was no right-winger. He gave Castro’s touring Puppet President Osvaldo Dorticos a warm welcome to Mexico City. The leader of Lopez Mateos’ P.R.I. made a speech describing the government as “carefully leftist.” The President followed with a carefully meaningless statement that “within the constitution, my government is on the extreme left.” Still for domestic consumption, P.R.I.’s congressional leader greeted U.S. curtailment of the Cuban sugar quota (which benefited Mexico) with a pledge of “solidarity with the people of Cuba.”

A Spiral of Violence. When the U.S. demanded an official explanation of the Congressman’s statement, Lopez Mateos’ government was forced to humiliate itself at home by denying that the Congressman spoke for the government. Mexico’s latent anti-gringoism began to rise. Students and leftists marched past the U.S. embassy shouting “Cuba, yes! Yanquis, no!”, battled police who tried to keep them from demonstrating outside Lopez Mateos’ palace.

Since then, violence has fed on violence. Teachers and students staged demonstrations demanding the reinstatement of Union Chief Salazar, whom Lopez Mateos (even as he was protesting his leftism) fired for calling an illegal strike. A fortnight ago, a brutal battle broke out near the Mexico City Normal School between 6,000 demonstrators and 700 police and firemen; 70 students were injured, some severely. Last week, protesting police violence, several hundred students tried to battle their way through riot lines around Mexico City’s main plaza, the Zocalo. Two students were shot.

Rounding up agitators, the police hauled in Artist Siqueiros, who for the past three months has been head of Mexico’s Communist Party. The day after the Zocalo riot, Siqueiros promised Lopez Mateos’ regime “no peace until all political prisoners are freed.” He was booked on a charge of “social dissolution.” By going to the length of jailing Mexico’s foremost artist (who has lately been at work on a large mural for the government at Chapultepec Castle), Lopez Mateos’ government probably invited new trouble. An angry official promised at week’s end that future demonstrations and riots would be met with a “mailed fist.”