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Stumbling Its Way through Mexico records the early attempts by the Moscow-based Communist International to organize and direct a revolutionary movement in Mexico. The period studied, from 1919 to 1929, was characterized at the beginning by a wave of revolutions in Europe that the Bolsheviks expected to grow into an international phenomenon. However, contrary to their expectations, the revolutionary tide ebbed, and the new age they had expected receded into an uncertain future. In response, Moscow sent agents and recruited local leaders worldwide to sustain and train local revolutionary movements and to foment what they saw as an inevitable seizure of power by Communist-led workers. Unlike the Soviet seizure of power in Russia, the Mexican Revolution of 1910–1920 had not changed the fundamental character of the nation-state. However, it did represent a sea change in the relationship between the state and society. When the Bolshevik Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, Mexican workers already had generations of experience in the struggle against oppression, in forming class solidarity, in organizing strikes, and had tasted both success and failure. For decades in their workplaces, Mexicans had debated how to end the exploitation of labor and practice international solidarity. Mexico had an indigenous labor movement acting with some success to establish a place in a new Mexico. The agents that Moscow chose to lead the Communist movement in Mexico lacked an understanding of the local situation and presumed a lack of indigenous confidence and experience that doomed to failure their efforts to impose external control over the labor movement. Based on documents found principally in the Soviet archives recently opened to the public, Stumbling Its Way through Mexico is an invitation to rethink the history of Communism in Mexico and Latin America. Copublication with the Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropologia Social.

America's Missionargues that the global strength and prestige of democracy today are due in large part to America's impact on international affairs. Tony Smith documents the extraordinary history of how American foreign policy has been used to try to promote democracy worldwide, an effort that enjoyed its greatest triumphs in the occupations of Japan and Germany but suffered huge setbacks in Latin America, Vietnam, and elsewhere. With new chapters and a new introduction and epilogue, this expanded edition also traces U.S. attempts to spread democracy more recently, under presidents Clinton, Bush, and Obama, and assesses America's role in the Arab Spring.

In the early hours of January 1, 1994 a guerrilla army of indigenous Mayan peasants emerged from the highlands and jungle in the far southeast of Mexico and declared \"¡Ya basta!\" - \"Enough!\" - to 500 years of colonialism, racism, exploitation, oppression, and genocide. As elites in Canada, the United States, and Mexico celebrated the coming into force of the North American Free Trade Agreement the Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional, EZLN) declared war against this 500 year old trajectory toward oblivion, one that they said was most recently reincarnated in the form of neoliberal capitalist globalization that NAFTA represented. While the Zapatista uprising would have a profound impact upon the socio-political fabric of Chiapas its effects would be felt far beyond the borders of Mexico. At a moment when state-sponsored socialism had all but vanished from the global political landscape and other familiar elements of the left appeared utterly demoralized and defeated in the face of neoliberal capitalism's global ascendance, the Zapatista uprising would spark an unexpected and powerful new wave of radical socio-political action transnationally. Through an exploration of the Zapatista movement's origins, history, structure, aims, political philosophy and practice, and future directions this book provides a critical, comprehensive, and accessible overview of one of the most important rebel groups in recent history.

This book explores the intersection between philosophical and literary universalism in Latin America, tracing its configuration within the twentieth-century Peruvian socialist indigenista tradition, following from the work of José Carlos Mariátegui and elaborated in the literary works of César Vallejo and José MaríaArguedas. Departing from conventional accounts that interpret indigenismo as part of a regionalist literature seeking to describe and vindicate the rural Indian in particular, I argue that Peruvian indigenista literature formed part of a historical sequence through which urban mestizo intellectuals sought to imagine a future for Peruvian society as a whole. Going beyond the destiny of acculturation imagined by liberal writers, such as Manuel González Prada, in the late nineteenth century, I show how the socialist indigenista tradition imagined a bilateral process of appropriation and mediation between the rural Indian and mestizo, integrating pre-Hispanic, as well as Western cultural and economic forms, so as to give shape to a process of alternative modernity apposite to the Andean world. In doing so, indigenista authors interrogated the foundations of European Marxism in light of the distinctiveness of Peruvian society and its history, expressing ever more nuanced figurations of the emancipatory process and the forms of its revolutionary agency.

This paper examines the public relations battles in the US media over Mexico's Unión Nacional Sinarquista (UNS), an explicitly Catholic social movement founded in 1937 that aimed to restore the Church to its traditional role in Mexican society and to reject the reforms of the revolutionary government. The sinarquistas shared many of the features of fascism and Nazism, the major global antidemocratic movements of the time, including a strident nationalism, authoritarian leanings, an emphasis on martial discipline and strict organizational structure, and a militant aesthetic. Both its ideological leanings and rapid growth (as many as 500,000 members by the early 1940s) led many US writers to suggest that the UNS represented a dangerous fifth-column threat to both Mexico and the United States. Others, particularly in the Catholic press, saw the UNS as an anticommunist organization that could actually help foster democracy in Mexico. For their part, UNS leaders defended themselves vociferously and sought to build relationships with influential US Catholics who could advocate for them in the press. By analyzing this debate, this paper both underscores the transnational characteristics of the UNS and highlights the crucial role of US public opinion in Mexican politics during the 1940s.

Abstract LEON TROTSKY WAS one of the founders of the Soviet Union and an obvious candidate to replace Lenin after his death. Unfortunately for him, it was Joseph Stalin who came to power, and Trotsky went into a long forced exile that eventually took him to Mexico, where he found asylum. On August 20, 1940, a Stalinist agent wounded Trotsky in the head with an ice axe in his house in Coyoacán, Mexico. Just a few hours later, Mexican neurosurgeons operated on him at the Cruz Verde Hospital in Mexico City. The axe had broken Trotsky's parietal bone and, after tearing the meninges, had damaged the encephalon. Despite the care provided by physicians and nurses, Trotsky passed away 25 hours after he was attacked, a victim of bleeding and shock. This article presents a review of Trotsky's last day, with special emphasis on the doctors who performed the surgery and who took care of the Russian revolutionary in his final moments. The results of Trotsky's autopsy are also discussed. The assassination of Leon Trotsky is one of the most dramatic events of the first half of the 20th century to have taken place on Mexican soil, and those final hours are an important moment in the history of Mexican neurosurgery and in the history of the world.

The Mexican expropriation of 1938 was the first large-scale non-Communist expropriation of foreign-owned natural resource assets. The literature makes three assertions: the United States did not fully back the companies, Mexico did not fully compensate them for the value of their assets, and the oil workers benefitted from the expropriation. This article finds that none of those assertions hold. The companies devised political strategies that maneuvered a reluctant President Roosevelt into supporting their interests, and the Mexican government more than fully compensated them as a result. Neither wages for oil workers nor Mexican government oil revenue rose after the expropriation.

La revista Política. Quince días de México y del Mundo (1960-1967) aglutinó a diversas corrientes de la izquierda junto con un grupo significativo de nacionalistas revolucionarios cercanos a Cárdenas. Unos y otros se adhirieron a las causas de la revolución cubana, el tercermundismo y la lucha en contra del imperialismo, generando el equívoco de que entre ellos no existían diferencias de fondo. Este ensayo plantea que los intelectuales que participaron en Política entablaron alianzas efímeras, buscando hacer coincidir elementos que eran difícilmente conciliables. Si bien en sus páginas es clara la denuncia de la falta de democracia que existía en México a través de una crítica innovadora hacia la revolución mexicana, la revista mantuvo posturas muy ortodoxas –e incluso retardatarias– frente a algunos de los acontecimientos más relevantes del periodo de la Guerra Fría. Por otra parte, a la manera del nacionalismo revolucionario, los colaboradores de la revista reivindicaron la figura de un “pueblo” abstracto fusionado al poder, considerado como el eje de la legitimidad revolucionaria. La revista mantuvo una posición acrítica frente a la ortodoxia comunista y dejó de lado la propuesta contracultural. En base a todos estos elementos, este ensayo plantea que Política no conformó una corriente de Nueva izquierda, y que ésta apareció hasta los años setenta y ochenta con la propuesta de una generación más joven de la izquierda mexicana. The magazine Política: Quince días de México y del Mundo (1960-1967) grouped together several leftist currents with an important group of revolutionary nationalists who were close to Cárdenas. Together they supported causes such as the Cuban Revolution, Third Worldism and the struggle against imperialism, giving rise to the error that there were no fundamental differences between their positions. This article argues that the intellectuals who participated in Política created ephemeral alliances, seeking to come to agreement on issues that were difficult to reconcile. While the magazine was clear on denouncing the lack of democracy in Mexico through an innovative critique of the Mexican Revolution, it maintained very orthodox – sometimes even backwards – positions on some of the most important events of the Cold War period. In the style of revolutionary nationalism, the magazine’s contributors also vindicated the figure of an abstract “people” fused with the state as an axis of revolutionary legitimacy. The magazine maintained an acritical position regarding communist orthodoxy and ignored countercultural developments. Due to these factors, the article argues that Política did not constitute a current of the New Left, which would not make its appearance in Mexico until the arrival of a younger generation of the left in the 1970s and 80s.

Historians all agree that the Cárdenas presidency was a crucial period in the development of twentieth-century Mexico. They would not agree as to the reasons for its importance. The range of interpretations is so wide and, at times, so nuanced, that it is risky to try to summarise the underlying disagreements. However, there are certain key differences which can be emphasised; and I shall begin this article with a quick review of what I consider those key differences to be.