Wednesday, July 17, 2013

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

I have a short article in the Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research as part of a special dossier on the use of Mexican secret police archives for writing the contemporary history of Mexico, a project edited by Louise Walker and Tanalís Padilla. We were limited in our word count, and all of the authors were tasked with taking a document or two and explained their content for the audience. I was brought in to the project to talk about the ways that the documents shed light on international issues, and did my analysis on Vicente Lombardo Toledano, a Marxist labor leader with ties to multiple foreign intelligence agencies. I therefore tried to do my analysis in the context of a larger argument, namely, that,
Both before and after the creation of the [Dirección Federal de Seguridad], the Mexican government often tolerated the espionage games of rival foreign powers. Lombardo’s story alone has exhibited different forms of acceptance for the presence of U.S., Soviet, German, and British agents, operating with relative impunity. Someone like Lombardo could finance his political ambitions with dollars from the Mexican and Soviet governments, while at the same time the DFS could collaborate closely with its U.S. counterparts in pursuit of the neutralization of threats from the extreme left. In more general terms, the DFS could make itself valuable by sharing relevant information with U.S. agencies, at times even acting as a intelligence subcontractor reporting directly to them. But elsewhere, as with the Soviet Union, the DFS took a laissez faire attitude toward the actions of other intelligence services operating within the country. In later years, this was also true of Cuba:  the head of the DFS in the 1960s was a close associate of Fidel Castro’s. Like its subsidies to the domestic quasi-opposition that spanned the political spectrum from right to left without constituting endorsement, Mexican tolerance of foreign espionage constituted a kind of subsidy that left governments as diverse as the Soviet Union, the United States, and Cuba with an interest in the maintenance of Mexico’s government in power. Mexico’s secret police could be, without question, agents of repression for Mexico domestically. Yet in a different way, at the international level, they helped channel the nature of foreign intervention and manage the dangers of the Cold War to Mexico. Mexico ceded just enough sovereignty to foreign spies that it, in the end, lost very little.
The whole dossier is fully available online, for free, through the end of August 2013.

A Diplomatic History of Mexican Diplomacy

My review of Roberta Lajous Vargas's "Las relaciones exteriores de México (1821-2000)," is up at Letras Libres. I wrote in Spanish, so there's no English version to post here, but the basic argument is that this is a fine textbook but quite official. It doesn't get into cultural diplomacy, nor does it engage the ugly little compromises that made Mexican diplomacy possible. The section on the Porfiriato is very strong, but on the twentieth century:
[L]a narrativa de unidad y triunfo frente a los retos del siglo XX no ha dejado espacio para examinar las concesiones creativas que se requirieron. No es necesario poner en duda el antifascismo de Lázaro Cárdenas para admitir que su gobierno, al igual que el de su sucesor Manuel Ávila Camacho, mantuvieron canales de comunicación con el Eje después de la nacionalización del petróleo. Los pilotos del Escuadrón 201 podrían ser héroes nacionales, pero también fueron utilizados para que México asegurara que su influencia después de la segunda guerra fuera mayor que la que tuvo después de la primera, donde no luchó. Asimismo, durante la Guerra Fría más de un presidente mexicano fue señalado como agente de la CIA. (“Yo, hasta la fecha, no he podido sacarle un centavo a esa punta de cabrones”, le dijo Gustavo Díaz Ordaz a Ricardo Garibay, quien había aceptado dinero de alguien de quien sospechaba era un oficial de la agencia de inteligencia.) La lista es extensa en ironías y el punto no es que estas contradigan la historia oficial de la diplomacia mexicana. Al contrario, la nutren mostrando las sucias concesiones que permitían a México permanecer soberano ante la sombra del imperio del norte, la URSS –que tanto quiso a México como base de espionaje– o la Cuba revolucionaria. Que esos tres países quedaran contentos con el régimen del PRI es una hazaña casi única en el siglo XX, pero es algo que no se logra sin creatividad ni ironías. Como historia de las relaciones diplomáticas oficiales de México, este libro tiene un gran valor. Pero para profundizar nuestro conocimiento del tema, también se necesitará una historia menos diplomática de la diplomacia mexicana. Quizás cuando la autora deje el servicio diplomático tenga más historias para contar.

Playa Juan Dolio, 2013

At the Playa Juan Dolio, Dominican Republic, 2013.

Santo Domingo, 2013

My son ponders the wires and buildings of Santo Domingo, summer 2013.