Disguised as Mexican policemen, 20 men armed with Tommy guns broke into the patio of an isolated Coyoacán villa one night last week. They overpowered five guards, threw an incendiary bomb into the patio, and in the light of its flare proceeded to shoot up all the rooms giving on the courtyard. Then they went inside the house and, standing outside the master's bedroom door, whaled 300 rounds through it. After five minutes of incessant firing, the attackers made off, and Mexico's most famous exile, Leon Trotsky, rose with his wife from the floor of his bedroom, unscathed except for scratches from flying glass. Other casualties: his 15-year-old grandson had been shot in the foot and one of his secretaries, a young and well-to-do Manhattanite named Robert Sheldon Harte, had been kidnapped.
"All in a day's work," said Exile Trotsky. It was the third attempt on his life since he reached Mexico three years ago.
The Mexican chief of police promptly arrested the five genuine policemen who were supposed to guard the U. S. S. R.'s ex-War Chief, launched an "investigation." According to Leon Trotsky there was no mystery to the assault. It was just one more attempt on the part of the agents of his onetime colleague, Joseph Stalin, to rub him out. To the world at large, and the U. S. in particular, it was just one more piece cf evidence that a lot of people who are not Mexicans are desperately interested in what goes on in Mexico.
A hemispheric hot spot ever since the collapse of Spanish rule, Mexico's internal weakness has always strongly tempted meddlesome outsiders. Until the U. S. became a "good neighbor" under Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the U. S. occasionally called the turn south of the Border. Since then the decade's two great political evangelists, Germany and Russia, have moved in, and Mexicans, familiar with only the weaknesses of democracy, were willing to heed Communist doctrine or to see the beauty of Nazi ideology and particularly Nazi financial favors. Today, while guns roar in Europe, both Nazis and Communists are solidly entrenched below the Rio Grande, and with a national election on July 7 at stake, Mexico faces a crisis.
Nazis. Employing all the tricks of propaganda and intrigue, Germany has set up a machine that functions like a well-oiled Messerschmitt plane. The Nazi Führer is Arthur Dietrich, brother of Dr. Goebbels' right-hand man and press chief. Officially listed as Press Attaché to the German Legation, he employs a large staff of writers, translators and agents, operates his own printing plant, subsidizes Mexican papers, sponsors magazines such as the blatantly pro-Nazi Timón, and finances local Nazi organizations such as the Vanguardia Nacional. A number of smooth young Nazis arrived from the U. S. and Latin America to augment his staff; secret radio stations operated by his experts blot out American broadcasts and fill the ether with Nazi propaganda; reports of huge caches of firearms smuggled from Germany are deliberately circulated by his agents. Independent of support from Germany, he finances his organization by forced contributions from Mexico's 6,500 Germans and by assessing German firms a percentage of their monthly revenue.