Communazi Columnists

Disguised as Mexican policemen, 20 men armed with Tommy guns broke into the patio of an isolated Coyoacan 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 Fuehrer is Arthur Dietrich, brother of Dr. Goebbels' right-hand man and press chief. Officially listed as Press Attache 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 Timon, 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.

In the campaign for the forthcoming election Fuehrer Dietrich does not openly support either President Cardenas' hand-picked candidate General Manuel Avila Camacho, or his more conservative opponent, General Juan Andreu Almazan. He is banking on a revolution and his man is believed to be General Joaquin Amaro, dark, chunky, glass-eyed ex-War Minister who is known as "the toughest hombre in Latin America." A pure-blooded Huichol Indian from Zacatecas, Amaro hates gringos but carries on affable intercourse with German agents who frequent his elegant villa at Calzada de la Exposicion. Uncommitted politically, he is regarded by the Nazis as a Putsch possibility and convenient dark horse that could be ridden to power after pistoleros had done their work in the two opposing camps.

Meanwhile the Nazi organization is Mexico's most vociferous exponent of "neutrality as in the days of Carranza."* Chief local firebrand working for Fuehrer Dietrich is the leader of the Vanguardia Nacional, militant Adolfo Leon Ossorio, who once led a mob assault on the American Embassy, and 200 police had to be called out to protect the premises. He repeats his master's assurances that the U. S. plans to throw Latin America into the European war and then to annex Mexico. Against this menace the only safeguard is close cooperation with Germany.

Reds. Working at cross-purposes until the Soviet-German Pact clarified the atmosphere, Communists and Nazis in Mexico now have a common aim: to smear the U. S., Great Britain and France. The aggressive Mexican Communist Party figures chiefly in its control of the all-powerful Confederacion de Trabajadores Mexicanos (CTM), whose organ El Popular lambasted Hitler and Mussolini until the day of the Pact, now reviles Roosevelt and the imperialists intent on "dragging Mexico into war." Vicente Lombardo Toledano, dynamic leader of the CTM, has organized and uniformed a formidable army of 200,000 storm troops, drilling them morning and night with broomsticks until more effective weapons are forthcoming. In an election revolution, his troops might fight for Candidate Camacho, or maybe just replace him with Lombardo.

With the caldron beginning to seethe last week and warning lights flashing across the border, strangest reaction was that of the Mexican Government leaders. They were singularly unperturbed. Conditions were "absolutely satisfactory" and "absolute neutrality" was assured, purred usually gruff President Cardenas. "There are no fifth-column activities in Mexico," snapped Ambassador Francisco Castillo Najera in Washington when Chairman Martin Dies of the Dies Committee said he had "incontrovertible information" that German experts had laid out and equipped 26 camouflaged airplane landing fields along the border. Mexicans from President Cardenas to the poorest peon knew that a fifth column was on the march south of the Rio Grande. They also knew that its immediate object was not to prepare Mexico for the advent of Adolf Hitler but to keep Uncle Sam out of Europe by keeping him busy in his own backyard.

* With Venustiano Carranza as President in 1915-17, Mexico was a famous centre of pro-German, anti-U. S. intrigue, even conspired with German agents to invade Texas.

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