Neither Peace nor Freedom: The Cultural Cold War in Latin America by Iber Patrick

Author:Iber, Patrick [Iber, Patrick]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780674286047
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2015-10-13T05:00:00+00:00

Lázaro Cárdenas speaks at the closing session of the First National Conference of the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional on 6 October 1963. The background portraits of José María Morelos and Emiliano Zapata serve to situate the movement as part of a national, rather than international, political movement. From left to right, seated at the table, appear Ramón Danzós Palomino, Manuel Terrazas Guerrero, Marta Borquez, Manuel Marcué Pardiñas, Enrique González Pedrero, Víctor Flores Olea, Lázaro Cárdenas (standing), Alonso Aguilar Monteverde, Ignacio García Téllez, and Guillermo Montaño. Photo courtesy Archivo General de la Nación, Collection Hermanos Mayo, envelope 18,421.

The MLN, bringing together as it did several left-wing groups, inevitably suffered from internal tensions. Heriberto Jara, for example, thought that its young leaders had been seized by extremism and gave no credit for the good things that the PRI did. But its real threats to internal cohesion came from party leaders. Conflict with Vicente Lombardo Toledano arose almost immediately. He was apparently disappointed to learn that the Cuban embassy had given its delegates instructions to deal with Alonso Aguilar Monteverde on the recommendation of Lázaro Cárdenas, ignoring members of his own PPS, and began to complain publicly about the MLN. Lombardo Toledano was seen by many of the MLN’s young activists as politically compromised and opportunistic, and so tensions increased throughout 1962. In June the Mexican Pro-Peace Committee—whose work had been merged into the “peace” division within the MLN—called for a national congress of the MLN. Stating that he thought that the peace movement and the MLN should be separate undertakings, Lombardo Toledano took the PPS out of the MLN at midyear. The remaining leadership of the MLN described the departure of the PPS as an act directed against the “representative sectors of the Mexican Left”—placing Vicente Lombardo Toledano’s organization outside that category.45

In 1963 further conflicts arose regarding the 1964 presidential election. Some, especially in the PCM, wanted to use the MLN to launch a presidential candidate, but the internal line had always been that the organization was multiparty and that members would work within their own parties to have them adopt the principles for which the MLN advocated. Nonetheless, the PCM created the Frente Electoral del Pueblo and offered as a presidential candidate Ramón Danzós Palomino, a member of both the PCM and the MLN. While insisting that it did not want to damage the unity of the MLN, the PCM tried to recruit other members of the MLN to support the Frente Electoral, creating distrust and resentment. Some disillusioned members, such as Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas, distanced themselves from the MLN, and the elections of 1964 proved to be the beginning of a long decline because the organization ceased to be able to motivate the kind of unity and organizational drive that it had had for the eighteen months or so after its creation in late 1961. It had one concrete victory in 1964 when Siqueiros was released early from prison, freed by presidential decree on 13 July, but even that had to

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