It is an ancient principle of politics that a revolution devours its children. Danton and Robespierre began as rebel leaders against France’s ancien régime but Robespierre ended by cutting off Danton’s head — and then being separated from his own. Kerensky led the bourgeois revolution that overthrew the Tsar — only to be replaced by […]
Continue ReadingHistory has rarely furnished a more striking example of high-profile-low-profile than that of the first presidents of the United States and Mexico. George Washington was and is the quintessential household word — Father of his Country, leader of the Continental armies during the Revolutionary War and two-time president whose name is every bit as much […]
Continue ReadingCarlos Fuentes was an internationalist from birth. Though one of Mexico’s best-known citizens, he was born on November 11, 1928, in Panama, where his father represented the Mexican government. Mexico played only a minor role in his early childhood, most of which was spent in Washington, DC. He also lived in Chile and Argentina. In […]
Continue Reading1998 witnessed the passing of such diverse figures as Frank Sinatra, legendary boxer Archie Moore, two-term Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, cowboy star and entrepreneur Gene Autry, and Clayton (“Peg Leg”) Bates, the one-legged tap dancer who was so skilled with a wooden limb that he forged a career (including twenty appearances on the Ed Sullivan […]
Continue ReadingThe election that brought Miguel de la Madrid’s successor to power was clearly fraudulent. On July 6, 1988, when the first results began to arrive at the interior ministry’s office on Avenida Bucareli, a shockingly high proportion was marked for the main opposition candidate. He was Cuauhtemoc Cárdenas, son of former President Lázaro Cárdenas, the […]
Continue ReadingLázaro Cárdenas, the most left-wing president in Mexican history, became an international bogey man but a national hero by expropriating the foreign oil companies in 1938. Though even such political enemies as the Church and business conservatives applauded this nationalistic gesture, Mexico faced a grim period two-year period when the United States, Great Britain and […]
Continue ReadingBecause of the many fables he wrote, there are those who may wish to compare José Joaquin Fernández de Lizardi to La Fontaine. Such a comparison fails to do justice to both writers. Apart from the Contes, skillfully etched narratives of casual romance published in 1664, La Fontaine is chiefly known for his animal fables […]
Continue ReadingRevolution is the ultimate test for survival of the fittest. In times of stormy social change, intense competition is generated among leaders of forces seeking that change and, inevitably, one man emerges alone at the top. Sometimes this process is peaceful but that is the exception rather than the rule. By the time Napoleon assumed […]
Continue ReadingFrom Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz to Gerard Manley Hopkins, the Catholic cleric who is also a poet is an unending subject of interest. Given the poet’s traditional role as a free spirit and the Church’s tradition of rigid intellectual discipline, the term poet-priest (or poet-nun) may seem to some an oxymoron. And there […]
Continue ReadingIn 1958, the year Adolfo López Mateos became president of Mexico, the world was relatively tranquil. The Korean War was over and Vietnam was in a lull between the defeat of the French in 1954 and the formation of the National Liberation Front (Vietcong) at the end of 1960. In France, Charles de Gaulle had […]
Continue Reading