In 1984, his epic indictment of Stalinism, George Orwell writes that totalitarian man exercises power over others by making them suffer. Arthur Koestler, another great analyst and foe of Soviet communism, has the interrogator in Darkness at Noon declare that previous tyrants erred in failing to sufficiently blacken the character of their victims, thus enabling […]
Continue ReadingAmong critics of the Roman Catholic Church in a country where a vast majority of the citizens are nominal Catholics, the charges most frequently heard are those of worldliness and hypocrisy. Anticlericals point to the Church’s wealth, its reluctance to use that wealth to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, and of priests counseling chastity […]
Continue ReadingIt is no more possible to discuss Marxism in Mexico without referring to Vicente Lombardo Toledano than it is to reminisce about Abbott without mentioning Costello. A teacher, writer, union leader and political activist, Lombardo was a force in Mexican political life for almost a half century. His career included such landmarks as being the […]
Continue ReadingOf the major figures in the 1910-20 phase of the Mexican Revolution, only Alvaro Obregón and Pancho Villa remained. In a strange twist of fate, the counterrevolutionaries –Porfirio Díaz and Victoriano Huerta– had died in bed while the revolutionaries Francisco Madero, Emiliano Zapata and Venustiano Carranza all perished violently. Violent death –at the hands of […]
Continue ReadingHis land reform policy reflected the same make-haste-slowly mentality. In his four years of power Obregón distributed three million acres among 624 villages — hardly a staggering amount but still seven times the total achieved by Carranza. Obregón was famous for his self-deprecating wit — a product, possibly, of an Irish strain in his ancestry. […]
Continue ReadingThe next step was to get rid of Calles, who had become increasingly critical of Cárdenas’s radicalism. To pre-empt a coup by the former strong man, Cárdenas sent a party of twenty soldiers and eight police to Calles’ hacienda on April 9, 1936. There they discovered Calles in bed with grippe, reading a Spanish translation […]
Continue Reading(This is an expanded version of an article that appeared in the October 18-24, 1997 issue of the COLONY REPORTER) In 19th century Mexico, most of the intellectuals were firmly on the liberal side. The scholar-scientist Melchor Ocampo, the law professor Santos Degollado, the historian- essayist Justo Sierra, the poet Guillermo Prieto, the towering Benito […]
Continue ReadingIn a curious irony of history, an epigone frequently becomes better known than his/her illustrious namesake and predecessor. Mention Harold Ickes and most people will think you’re talking about Clinton’s recent adviser rather than about his father, the “Old Curmudgeon,” who was one of FDR’s most dynamic cabinet members. For the sports-minded, the nickname “Sugar […]
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(Synopsis & Photo) Victoriano Huerta was a man almost too bad to be true. Described by one historian as an “Elizabethan villain,” he was a drunkard and repressive dictator who guaranteed himself a permanent spot in Mexico’s hall of infamy by overthrowing and then conniving at the murder of the liberator Francisco Madero. Yet one can go […]
Continue ReadingOn the surface, no two people ever appeared more dissimilar than John Stuart Mill and Juana Inés de la Cruz. One was a great rationalist, an apostle of individual liberty, an enemy of dogma and a believer in empiricism as the source of all knowledge; the other was a Mexican nun who lived her entire […]
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