The hopes of two revolutions were near death in Mexico last week. The U. S. had sounded the end of both, appointing Vice President-elect Henry Agard Wallace as "special representative with the rank of Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary" to the Presidential inauguration in Mexico City Dec. 1 (see p. 14). When President-elect General Manuel Avila Camacho takes office on that day with the blessing of the U. S., retiring President Lazaro Cárdenas' revolutionary Six-Year Plan will be over, the promised revolt of President-reject General Juan Andreu Almazán will be left as flat as a tortilla.
Mexico's press reported Almazanismo dying in a flurry of blood and violence and trickery. Four Almazanistas said they had been arrested and tortured by Federal soldiers. More Almazán followers fled out of Rio Verde and San Luis Potosi to avoid persecutions of local caciques. Señora Higinia Cedillo Gonzales, who helped her brother, General Saturnino Cedillo, revolt and tried to do the same for Almazán, was reported kidnapped or murdered. Government men ransacked the house of Almazán's Provisional President General Hector F. Lopez.
Then the Government's PRM (Party of the Mexican Revolution) came out with a fantastic story, which Almazan denied, of a Nazi-backed Almazanista plot to overthrow the Government. From a pile of swastika-sprinkled documents it said it had decoded papers accounting for 12,000 cases of ammunition and eight knocked down planes, smuggled in off a Nazi freighter. Maps were produced showing Almazanista military centres and broadcasting stations. Almazan's strength was put at 250,000 men under onetime Labor Boss Luis M. Morones, backed by a Nazi warship and 14 more planes. Police uncovered plans to cut off the capital's power, light and communications as a signal for armed attacks on the Presidential Palace and key public buildings.
Next day Almazanistas ambushed five Federal agents investigating the plot, killed two of them. The Government countered by starting a roundup of Almazanista leaders, jailed 100 within 48 hours.
More peacefully, but as relentlessly as geometry, the closing circle of Mexican politics was choking off the revolution of Cárdenas. In 1934 he had come into office to establish Mexico's first non-militaristic Government. He began putting his dreams of Utopia into effect by redistributing land to the peasants, nationalizing the railroads, expropriating foreign oil concessions. But his espousal of the little man brought the full power of the militaristic Right against him. As he fought off the Right the militant Left crept in behind him. Vicente Lombardo Toledano, secretary of the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers), began pumping Communism into the administration.
As the Left grew stronger with armed CTM and peasants' militias it became lefter still. Cárdenas' fine dream began to tarnish. Workers started squabbling among themselves. The oil expropriations became a white elephant at home, upset Mexico's international relations. Chicanery as well as well-meaning incompetence shackled Cárdenas' visionary plans.