You know, I was thinking about the PRI over the last few days. The days of an anti-clerical, truly revolutionary party were very well portrayed in the Graham Green novel, The Power and the Glory.
I remember seeing photos in a book of huge anti-Nazi street rallies in Mexico City during the late 1930s. They were real socialists, real anti-fascists - - when and where did they go wrong? Where did they lose their way? I figure that the U.S.A. was somehow behind it all, but I don't really know how they did it.
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This was the period of the term of Lazaro Cardenas, 1934-1940. When Cardenas nationalized the oil industry, many US interests wanted an invasion of Mexico. FDR sent a team of diplomats down and they agreed to allow the nationalization, because the US had a need for the oil and a war with Mexico would have been a disaster, as the 1846-1849 war had been.
The enemies of the PRI were financed by US oil interests and the RC Church. One important leader was a writer named Salvador Borrego, whose books preached the alliance of the Communists, the Masons and the Jews to overthrow the Holy Mother Church. They built a huge statue of Jesus in Michoacan on a mountain called El Cubilete, the Cristo de la Monta?a, and had groups of guerrillas called the Cristeros, who raged through small towns in the states of Jalisco and Michoacan, burning government schoolhouses and ejidos (colective village farms). When WWII came, their funds dried up.
Jose Vasconcelos, the author of a book called La raza cosmica (the cosmic race) ran for president in opposition to Cardenas and was basically run out of the country. His theory was that the Mexican mestizo (mixed European, Indian and perhaps African) was through the advantage of diversity a forerunner of the actual master race.
In 1941, the pro American Padilla was defeated as a candidate of the revolutionary party by Miguel Aleman, who was slightly more pro American. My ex-wife's father was Padilla's chauffeur. Born in 1900, he was the most super Catholic person I have ever known. He did, however, use his influence to buy five or six lots around the fringes of Mexico City which meant that he managed to raise his family of six girls and a boy in a middle-class environment. He was a poor Indian baker from a small pueblo in the Sierra of Oaxaca who had come to Mexico City in the 1920's because the various guerrilla armies in the mountains printed worthless money to buy bread with that could not be used to buy food or flour with. I should also add that a baker is a sort of middle class profession, as poor Mexicans do not eat bread: they eat tortillas. Bread is a middle class thing in Mexico, or at least it was in 1920'sa Oaxaca.
Salvador Borrego's books were still prominently displayed in bookstores all over Mexico City when I was there in the 1960's. I would be surprised if they are not still in print.
In Mexico in the 1960's there were four parties: the PRI, which won nearly all elections, the PAN, which is the Catholic Party, the PARM, or Partido Autentico de la Revolucion Mexicana, an assortment of elderly generals longing for the past, and the PPS, the Partido Popular Socialista.
The PRI was probably defeated by Lazaro Cardenas' son Cuauhtemoc Cardenas in 1993 as a candidate of the PRD, Partido de la Revolucion Democratica (formed from the PPS, PARM and another Socialist Party), but the PRI stole the election. Only when Vicente Fox managed to get enough support to look as though the PAN was a viable party, did the US allow someone not of the PRI to win.
Mexican politics is a pretty complicated affair, because the most important moves are invisible to the average citizen, as are the mechanations of the US government.
Capitalism doesn't really work in Latin America. The most wealthy Latin nation is Puerto Rico, which has half of its citizens living in the US for lack of jobs, and is far poorer than Mississippi, the very poorest US state. Spain is clearly the most equitable Latin nation, and it has a rather typical European mildly Socialist government, with huge amounts of local control alloted to the various regions.
