MEXICO: Border

Since the civil war began in Spain, lovers of far-fetched political analogy have cocked their eyes at Mexico, speculated on what would happen if Mexican Fascists started something. Nobody paid much attention to these surmises until U. S. Representative Jerry J. O’Connell of Montana observed to reporters in Los Angeles three weeks ago that “Mexico will undergo a Fascist revolt in 60 days.” Wild rumors started flying up & down the Mexican-U. S. line, and Texans contracted a fine case of border jitters. Soon in the Mexican expatriate hangouts in Laredo, Brownsville, El Paso appeared portly General Nicolas Rodríguez boasting: “I have 800,000 men ready to march on Mexico City!”

General Rodríguez is known on the border as the in & out leader of Mexico’s exiguous Los Dorados (“The Gold Shirts”). Four years ago he had a few thousand followers in Mexico City who sported gold-colored jackets and Texas hats, if they could afford them, attacked small Jewish shopowners. Then they made the mistake of trying to break up a workers’ parade and soon after General Rodriguez was flown to the border. On the U. S. side of the line he has gathered about him no 800,000 men but a handful of other disgruntled Mexican exiles, largely dispossessed landlords who revived the Gold Shirt cause.

But last week when shots cracked out from sun-caked Matamoros, just across the broad Rio Grande from Brownsville, jumpy small-town Texan editors scare-headlined it as the expected Fascist revolt. When competent U. S. correspondents investigated they found no major revolt but a few Gold Shirts taking pot shots at police and Federal troops. After a day of skirmishing three Gold Shirts, one policeman, lay dead, 25 Gold Shirts were jailed. At dusk, Tamaulipas’ Governor Marte R. Gómez took the Latin method of relieving tension. Alone, he strolled around the plaza at Matamoros. “It’s time for the evening promenade,” he purred to the cautious citizens. Soon eligible senoritas and the ardent young men joined in their usual strolls and the crisis was over. “Mexico is in a state of complete tranquillity,” assured Government officials.

U. S. winter-holiday trippers, who have been pouring into Mexico over the new Pan-American highway in increasing numbers, were inclined to regard this as a slight overstatement. Mexico is far from Sunday-afternoon quiet. Almost daily occurrences for the past few months have been bloody strikes, clashes between rival labor groups, bandit raids, ominous grumbles by the newly-enfranchised peons against the failure of President Lázaro Cárdenas’ agrarian program and revolts by disenfranchised landlords. Crux of the trouble is Cárdenas’ lack of money. With a failing credit he has had to curtail public works projects, throw thousands out of work. He has divided huge estates into small peasant holdings, but has been unable to advance the peons credit for stock farm equipment, seeds.

Typical was the condition last week of Tamaulipas State, where incipient outbreaks occurred. Thousands of peons found that bank credit for Mexico’s late cotton-planting season was nonexistent. Suddenly, the Government suspended irrigation public-work projects for lack of cash. Discontent was widespread and the Gold Shirts decided on their abortive attempt to stir the unrest into mass revolt. At week’s end the President ordered Government jobs provided for them on the Matamoros-Ciudad Victoria highway construction.

Informed Mexican observers believe that the greatest threat of a turn to the Right in Mexico comes not from the disorganized conservatives and dispossessed landlords but, paradoxically, from within the Cárdenas regime itself. President Cárdenas came in on a program of “social revolution” for Mexico’s proletariat which is now encountering rough weather. For three years of his six-year term he insisted he was still pointing Left. Suddenly, two months ago he pushed through measures which smack of a totalitarian state and make him virtual dictator of Mexico. In rapid succession he dissolved his and Mexico’s majority party, reorganized it to give the peasants and the army control, thus pulling labor’s teeth. Next he shook up his Cabinet to make it 100% Cárdenas, shifted army heads to tighten his hold on the military and cracked down on labor by deciding that “useless” strikes are outlawed and he personally will determine which strikes are “useless.”