Managing Mexico's Cold War: Vicente Lombardo Toledano and the Uses of Political Intelligence

Abstract

This article examines prospects and problems with using Mexican secret police documents to assess Mexico's role in the Cold War. I approach the topic through the life of Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a Mexican labour leader who was once formally recruited as a Soviet intelligence asset. I analyse two documents in depth—an indictment of Lombardo that was likely based on faulty information, and a detailed record of Soviet subsidies to Lombardo's union activities. I argue that while secret police reports are disappointing substitutes for the nonexistent operational files of the Secretaría de Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior), they can—when supplemented with other sources, such as U.S. intelligence—paint a meaningful picture showing Mexican tolerance for foreign intelligence operations. This tolerance was a factor that led Cold War antagonists to wish for regime stability in Mexico, helping Mexico, unusually among Latin American countries, make foreign covert action into a stabilising force.

Keywords:

• Vicente Lombardo
• Toledano
• Cold War
• labour
• espionage
• subsidies

Notes

 1. The writer was none other than Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt. E. Howard Hunt and Greg Aunapu, American Spy: My Secret History in the CIA, Watergate, and Beyond, Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons, 2007, p. 58.

 2. Technically, the DFS responded directly to the President in the first years following its creation in December 1946 or January 1947, and was placed under the authority of Gobernación in the early 1950s. Sergio Aguayo Quezada, La charola: una historia de los servicios de inteligencia en México, Mexico City, Grijalbo, 2001, p. 62.

 3. Archivo General de la Nación, Mexico City, Dirección Federal de Seguridad (hereafter AGN, DFS), Vicente Lombardo Toledano public version (hereafter VLT PV), leg. 1/9, exp. 34-2-48, h. 26, ‘Complicidad del Doctor Quiroz Cuarón del Banco de México, en el asunto del Padre Jiménez’, 9 January 1948; AGN, DFS, VLT PV, leg. 4/9, exp. 30-3-55, h. 66–67, ‘Se informa en relación con el comunismo’, 19 September 1955. Translation of these documents is in Tanalís Padilla and Louise E. Walker (eds), ‘English Translations of Documents from Mexico's Secret Police Archive’, working paper 2013, available online at the Dartmouth College library website and Northeastern University digital repository: http://www.dartmouth.edu/∼ library/digital/publishing/padilla2013/ and http://hdl.handle.net/2047/d20002992.

 4. There are already many full or partial biographies of Lombardo; the definitive one is likely in the process of being written by Daniela Spenser with access to his personal papers. Biographical sources currently availabe include Héctor Ramírez Cuéllar, Lombardo, un hombre de México, México, D.F., El Nacional, 1992; Enrique Krauze, Caudillos culturales de la Revolución Mexicana, Mexico City, SEP Cultura / CONAFE, 1985; Lourdes Quintanilla Obregón, Lombardismo y sindicatos en América Latina, Mexico City, Distribuciones Fontamara / Ediciones Nueva Sociología, 1982; Robert Paul Millon, Vicente Lombardo Toledano, Mexican Marxist, Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1966. For the broader context of Lombardo on the Mexican left, the most useful text is Barry Carr, Marxism and Communism in Twentieth-century Mexico, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 1992.

 5. Daniela Spenser, Unidad a toda costa: la Tercera Internacional en México durante la presidencia de Lázaro Cárdenas, Mexico City, CIESAS, 2007, p. 260.

 6. Jorge Basurto, Cárdenas y el poder sindical, Mexico City, Era, 1983, pp. 99–104; Guadalupe Pacheco Méndez, Arturo Anguiano, and Rogelio Vizcaíno A., Cárdenas y la izquierda mexicana: ensayo, testimonios, documentos de Guadalupe Pacheco Méndez, Arturo Anguiano Orozco y Rogelio Vizcaíno A., Mexico City, J. Pablos Editor, 1975, p. 125.

 7. Friedrich Katz, Nuevos ensayos mexicanos, Mexico City, Ediciones Era, 2006, p. 350.

 8. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Maryland (hereafter NARA), OSS report 24797, ‘Activities and public utterances of Vicente Lombardo Toledano in Chile’, 30 October 1942.

 9. NARA 812.504/3-745, George S. Messersmith to James Clement Dunn, 7 March 1945, and 812.504/4-245, J. Edgar Hoover to Edward R. Stettinius, ‘Memorandum re: Vicente Lombardo (Toledano)’, 2 April 1945.

10. María Emilia Paz Salinas, Strategy, Security, and Spies: Mexico and the U.S. as Allies in World War II, University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State UP, 1997, pp. 146–208, 36–37.

11. Igor Damaskin and Geoffrey Elliott, Kitty Harris: The Spy with Seventeen Names, London, St Ermin's Press, 2001, pp. 210–18; John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, New Haven, Yale UP, 1999, pp. 283–85; Nigel West, Venona: The Greatest Secret of the Cold War, London, HarperCollins, 1999.

12. José Ramón Garmabella, El grito de Trotsky: Ramón Mercader, el asesino de un mito, Madrid, Debate, 2007, pp. 290–91.

13. The meeting was reportedly between President Alemán and Octavio Vejar Vázquez, a military leader who was acting president at the time of the PP while Lombardo was abroad. VLT FBI file, document 100-4326-843, Legal Attaché in Mexico to Director, FBI, 10 November 1949. Elsewhere, Vejar Vázquez has been described as personally honest; he used his platform at the PP to argue against the denial of political rights to members of the military. Aaron W. Navarro, Political Intelligence and the Creation of Modern Mexico, 1938–1954, University Park, Pa., Pennsylvania State UP, 2010, pp. 112–19.

14. Stephen R. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s: Modernity, Politics, and Corruption, Wilmington, Del., Scholarly Resources, 1999, p. 224.

15. Lombardo may have been involved with PEMEX in a corrupt scheme to sell oil at below-market prices and capture a share of the profits. Niblo, Mexico in the 1940s, pp. 278–79.

16. By contrast, the CTAL's anti-Communist rival had a projected budget in 1957 of $200,000 (about $1.5 million in 2010 dollars). NARA, 812.062/3-757, ‘ORIT Executive Committee meeting of February 9–11, 1957,’ 7 March 1957.

17. After the Cuban Revolution, Lázaro Peña assumed an important role in the reorganisation of labour under Castroist auspices; Víctor Manuel Gutiérrez was abducted, tortured, and killed by Guatemalan security forces in 1966.

18. VLT FBI file, document number illegible [100-4326-?], Legat, Mexico to Hoover, 19 March 1957.

19. Rafael Rodríguez Castañeda, Prensa vendida: los periodistas y los presidentes; 40 años de relaciones, Mexico City, Grijalbo, 1993, pp. 80–83. Dependence on government support was a permanent characteristic of El Día: Chappell Lawson, Building the Fourth Estate: Democratization and the Rise of a Free Press in Mexico, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002, p. 90.

20. AGN, DFS, VLT PV, leg. 9/9, exp. 25-IX-68, h. 84, “Partido Popular Socialista.”

21. Aguayo, La charola, pp. 106–07, Gregorio Ortega, ed., Fernando Gutiérrez Barrios: diálogos con el hombre, el poder y la política, Mexico City, Planeta, 1995, p. 21.