Plows Plus Rifles

(See front cover) One night last week in Mexico City high Cabinet officials held clandestine conclave. Its object, according to the dispatches of correspondents, was to consider whether the Government's "Party of the Mexican Revolution"* should nominate General Lazaro Cardenas y del Rio for a second term as President.

If so, it was an extraordinary meeting. No one questions that powerful President Cardenas has been the most popular, most personally democratic, most politically radical of the 45 presidents whom Mexico has had in 114 years. But, whereas Franklin Roosevelt will have to break solemn precedents to run for a third term, Lazaro Cardenas to run for a second term would have to break not only the Mexican Constitution (for which there is plenty of precedent) but his own word. He has repeatedly pledged himself to retire in 1940 when his six-year term expires, and he has so strictly enforced the Constitution's one-term provision that no one has been allowed to run for Congress who has held any major Government office within a year prior to election day.

Even if in these circumstances President Cardenas' followers planned to rename him as President, their choice of a time to consider it was extraordinary, for Mexico faced a much more immediate crisis. The United Press wired from Mexico City: "One can very easily--with figures --prove that Mexico is insolvent. Quotations on the Paris Bourse show that some Tsarist Russian bonds are worth more than those of certain Mexican issues." The gold and silver reserves of the Bank of Mexico were used up last spring trying to keep the Mexican peso worth 28-c- . It has now crashed to 20-c- . Mexicans last week tried to find takers who would accept 210 paper pesos in exchange for one 50-peso silver coin.

Year ago the Mexican budget was nominally balanced, and the Treasury forecast an "anticipated surplus" for 1938. But when the President confiscated all foreign oil properties (TIME, March 28), Mexico lost her oil receipts, her third biggest single source of revenue, one out of every 15 pesos of Treasury income. The State Railways and numerous State-operated industries, notably sugar refining, are also doing badly. Shoes are a pet industry with President Cardenas, who hopes that some day everyone in Mexico will have shoes, and once at a public meeting gave away 300 pairs. Last week the output of the Mexican shoe industry was only 30% of normal. Reports from all parts of the Republic showed bank clearings declining, bankruptcies of small businesses increasing. Imports of agricultural machinery, greatly desired by President Cardenas, have had to be reduced to 20% of normal. Mexico had Depression. And President Cardenas was last week in greater need of Recovery than of a second term.

Mexico's Roosevelt-- The proud racial characteristics of a Tarascan Indian are a peanut-shaped head, thick lips and a compact physique of great physical endurance. All these belong to Lazaro Cardenas who is of Tarascan descent. He loves to visit the remote villages and scattered hovels of his own people, the "Indians" whom he is busy raising to the status of ''Mexicans,"likes to say: "We want fewer Indians and more Mexicans!" For them he has a Six-Year Plan or "Mexican New Deal."

Lazaro Cardenas makes frequent journeys to observe conditions among his people. As tireless a horseman as Roosevelt I, President Cardenas loves to beat the brush, sometimes leaves his $350,000 Olivo (olive-colored special train) at an obscure siding and gallops off to find the underprivileged. On such occasions local governors are under strict orders that the President is not to be guarded. They know he means it, and they try to keep their troops always just beyond the next hill. A tent is good enough to shelter the President at night, but if the hacienda of a rich Mexican is sighted toward dusk the Cardenas party of from ten to 50 horsemen may drop in on the local bigwig whom it is the business of the Six-Year Plan to turn into a smallwig owning not over 381 acres--the theoretical top to which all crop-producing private land holdings in Mexico are ultimately to be reduced.

After stopping the night on one of these trips with a young Mexican owner of some 50,000 acres, President Cardenas invited his host to accompany him in riding over the estates. Presently they clattered up to some still-smoking hovels and a group of dispossessed peons standing abjectly in the road. The peons explained to the President that they were squatters who had refused to be dispossessed until finally the landlord's men had burned them out of their shacks. Said Lazaro Cardenas in a cold rage to his host: "Don't you know that it is the duty of the rich and fortunate to help the poor? Are you not ashamed to burn the houses of a few poor peons because they want a little piece of land? Don't you know that it is the duty of the Government to help poor peons to. become citizens?"

"Si," answered the landlord, without enthusiasm. "Yes."

President Cardenas crooked his finger at the local head of the Agrarian Commission, ordered him to have the burned houses of the peons rebuilt at once, to supply them with farming tools, guns and ammunition.

"I want the rifles and the plows to be here together, and that not later than ten days from this date!" commanded the President, then turned to the bewildered peons, "The arms I have ordered for you are to make sure that your homes will not be burned again. But you have the responsibility to keep the peace in this neighborhood not only for yourselves but for all. You must protect everyone, including the owner of the plantation here. And I urge you not to permit the establishment of drinking places. If you do not stay sober you will not keep the peace!"

Such is the patriarchal quality of Lazaro Cardenas' radicalism. He is no more a Marxian Socialist than was King Arthur or Robin Hood. He is a purely Mexican radical and has no particularly high opinion of Leon Trotsky to whom he has given haven.

Six-Year Plan. "Land to the Peasants" was one slogan of the Russian Revolution of 1917. It was also the main point of the present Mexican Constitution and of the Mexican Agrarian Law adopted in the same year. In Russia, by the end of 1917 the peasants had already seized most of the land, and by 1934 the Stalin dictatorship had marshaled 90% of the peasantry on collective farms. In Mexico, the tempo has been much slower. Up to 1934, the year in which Lazaro Cardenas became President, land given to Mexican peons (the previous owners were paid in Mexican bonds which have steadily declined) totaled only 20,132,180 acres, about 1,200,000 acres per year. President Cardenas, during the first three years of his term, gave 24,117,425 more acres to the peon--raising the velocity of expropriations to 8,000,000 acres per year.

The Six-Year Plan, a specific program for putting the vague slogan "Land to the Peasants," into effect started out the 1934 campaign brochure of the National Revolutionary Party. No one took it seriously until President Cardenas had been several months in office. In Mexico City, politicians were as amazed as their prototypes in Washington when they first realized that Lazaro Cardenas, like Franklin Roosevelt, meant to fulfill his radical campaign pledges. The hitherto haphazard land division system passed into the hands of a nationwide Agrarian Administration whose officers, all pistol-toters, organized the peons into ejidols (collective farms), financed by the State's especially created National Bank for Ejidol Credit. Scarcity of water has always been the curse of Mexico, and the State began to erect numerous irrigation dams and supplementary public works which today sprout half-completed in all parts of Mexico. Education was stressed to teach peons, accustomed for centuries to kiss the hand of local Mexican bigwigs, to become upstanding armed collectivists.

President Cardenas once summed up his education program to a friendly Communist admirer from Manhattan thus : "The child must learn the secrets of Labor. . . . The child must be taught a sense of the collective. Reading and writing are sterile unless they are used socially. ... In most instances, the child's parents are both illiterate and individualistic. Our problem is to teach the child what he does not learn at home."

Although President Cardenas does not want to wipe out the priest or the Church as have some of his predecessors, the job of his village teachers is to combat the in fluence of those "propagators of superstition," the village priests. Individualists and pious Mexicans make things hot for the President's idealistic school teachers. Twenty-five have been murdered so far this year. The peasants have developed a fondness for cutting off the ears of teach ers they do not care to murder. So the President's teachers all tote guns, and frequently have to use them.

After three and a half years of the Six-Year Plan, more than 45% of Mexico's population is now officially listed as living on collective farms. The three largest centres for Cardenas Collectivism are the vast La Laguna cotton districts, the wheat lands of Sonora, and the henequen region in the Yucatan Peninsula which used to lead the world in producing the raw materials for binder twine and rope. Read adjustment after land distribution was so violent that production of henequen fell off by half. During the weeks in which the Peninsula was being collectivized nobody in Yucatan's capital felt wealthy and safe enough to buy an automobile. But many peons now have land, tools and weapons for the first time in their lives, although few of them are making interest payments to the ejidol banks. Since the land cannot legally be taken from the peasants, these land banks lend on the integrity of the peon and his crop--neither very secure. This month the ejidol banks finally exhausted the financial resources which President Cardenas had been able to put at their disposal. They have kept in business by issuing 12,000,000 pesos of fiat money, are authorized by the State to issue up to 30,000,000.

The only flaws in all this from the peons' standpoint are: 1) this kind of Government finance has been so hard on the peso that prices are rapidly rising, the cost of living soaring; 2) there are complaints that Government underlings, not imbued with Cardenas' high ideals, are behaving like unscrupulous landlords in the U. S., keeping the books so that illiterate peons still stay in debt even after their crops are harvested; 3) in some cases peons incapable of farming without a landlord's direction, are raising smaller crops than ever before on the same land.

Oil the Apple? To bulwark himself politically, President Cardenas recently reorganized his party from top to bottom, changed its name from National Revolutionary Party to Party of the Mexican Revolution, put in, as his Jim Farley, Luis Inocencio Rodriguez, his longtime personal favorite. If Cardenas does not run again he might choose Luis Rodriguez as his successor. Another politico who might try to grab the job is Mexico's loudmouthed, posturing, Moscow-visiting Vicente Lombardo Toledano. He claims to lead 1,000,000 organized proletarians in his Confederation of Mexican Workers--by far the most potent force of its kind in the country. It was the President's zeal to show the proletariat that he would do as much for it as he is doing for the peasantry which caused him last spring abruptly to pick the oil Apple in the Mexican Eden--i.e., confiscate the $400,000,000 oil properties when their owners, who had already yielded much to their Mexican workers, refused to make more concessions for which Lazaro Cardenas fought (TIME, March 28).

Last week Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell subsidiaries' gas stations all over Mexico were being renamed and repainted in the colors of PETRONAC, as the new worker-operated Mexican national oil combine is called. The gas sold, which had only been about 57 octane under the gringos, was already down several units last week, and Mexican motorists complained loudly. Still more loudly has Great Britain raged--breaking off diplomatic relations with Mexico last May. In the world market the British have had considerable success in organizing a boycott of "stolen Mexican oil."

But if no democratic country will buy Mexican oil for cash Japan, Italy and Germany may do so by barter. Up to last week William Rhodes Davis, an enigmatic international oil broker, one of whose offices is in Hamburg, has reputedly secured some 12,000,000 barrels of Mexican oil for the ultimate use of Germany.

Last week suddenly the German Minister in Mexico City, Baron Rudt von Collenberg-Bodigheim, announced after confer ring with aides of President Cardenas last week, that he was leaving at once for Berlin on orders to confer with Adolf Hitler -- perhaps about a huge barter deal.

Meanwhile, if President Roosevelt should back up the recent stern note of Secretary Hull which demanded compensation for Mexican lands seized from U. S. owners (TIME, Aug. 1), the Cardenas regime would be in serious difficulty. But Secretary Hull was in a quandary. Any effort to put pressure on President Cardenas--such as ceasing U. S. purchases of Mexican silver--might ultimately upset the Cardenas regime which is already facing a crisis. And the Roosevelt administration does not want Lazaro Cardenas overturned, for not only his personal integrity but his efforts to make Mexico a self-respecting nation are qualities that make him desirable as a neighbor.

Sphinx into Revolution. Lazaro Cardenas, 43, son of poor peasants, had from the first the gumption not to kiss the hand of men mightier than himself. A rugged character, which showed even in childhood, made him, at 14, a spindle-shanked but determined assistant village tax collector. He got the even tougher job of jail warden while still in his teens, and in 1913, when the hell-popping Mexican Revolution was in its third year.

Warden Cardenas left the jail in company with his only prisoner, whom he had armed, and with bandoleers over his shoulders went to join the revolution (see cuts}.

Seven years later, just one day before Lazaro Cardenas reached the age of 25, he was gazetted a General of Division.

This was quick promotion, even in Mexico, and remarkable because General Cardenas was never at any time in his career a sensationally victorious commander. In easy-going Mexico his administrative ability was recognized--that is, he tackled jobs his superiors were often too lazy to take on, always did exactly as he was told, made himself invaluable as an efficient stooge.

In the late 20's and early 30's, the Boss of Mexico was pudgy, greasy, General Plutarco Elias Calles--part of the time as President, part of the time as boss of Presidents. After having bossed several stooge Presidents, General Calles in 1934 ordered the National Revolutionary Party machine to elect General Cardenas. It did, with a big majority, and no difficulty.

For Stooge Cardenas--and that was all people thought he was--to smash the Calles machine within a year, send his Boss flying, and in four years reorganize the Party with his own henchmen in key posts has been a hard-fought triumph. "The Sphinx" used to be the army nickname of General Cardenas,' and with a grim, silent, unrelenting energy like that of Stalin he bored from within the Party and had captured it before his power was realized. "I never was really a soldier--just an armed citizen!" The President is fond of saying, and today he is neither Fascist nor Communist nor Socialist--just a Mexican who will naturally skin any gringos he can and who devotes his life to bettering, by fair means or foul, the lot of his own people, the Indians. Recently he boasted: "The great masses of the Mexican people are eating better than ever before. . . . The tendency in Mexico is toward general betterment. . . . President Roosevelt has labored to better the conditions of the farmers and industrial workers. We are trying to do the same."

* Like Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union, Mexico is officially a one-party nation; i.e., its party is an unofficial organ of the Government.

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