Entre la histeria anticomunista y el rencor antiyanqui: Salvador Abascal y los escenarios de la guerra fría en México*

Francisco Alejandro García Naranjo[1]

Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo-México

Reception: 15/02/2014

Evaluation: 28/02/2014

Approval: 19/05/2014

Research and Innovation Article.

Resumen

El objetivo de este artículo es analizar el posicionamiento doctrinal de un exponente de la derecha mexicana del siglo XX respecto a la bipolaridad de la Guerra fría. Ese fue el caso del intelectual reaccionario Salvador Abascal Infante (1910-2000), quien en sendas obras analizó el siglo XX mexicano, al que juzgó una era de decadencia moral por influjo del descreimiento y el combate al catolicismo que, a su parecer, llevaron a cabo la Revolución mexicana y los gobiernos de la posrevolución, particularmente la Presidencia de Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). En ese sentido, Abascal Infante caracterizó al gobierno de Cárdenas como parte de la avanzada del “comunismo internacional”, a la vez que execró la influencia en México y en el mundo de los Estados Unidos como nación judía y protestante. Frente a los escenarios de la Guerra fría, dicho personaje descalificó tanto al comunismo como a los Estados Unidos por “atentar” por distintas vías contra la integridad católica en el país.

Palabras clave: guerra fría, derecha mexicana, anticomunismo, judaísmo internacional, catolicismo.

Between anti-communist hysteria and anti-yankee resentment. Salvador

Abascal and the Cold War scenarios in Mexico

Abstract

The goal of this article is to analyze the doctrinal position of a twentieth century Mexican right-wing representative regarding the bipolarity of the Cold War. This was the case of Salvador Abascal Infante (1910 – 2000), an intellectual and reactionary, who analyzed the Mexican twentieth century in each of his works, and judged it to be an era of moral decadence influenced by a lack of faith and the battle against Catholicism which, in his opinion, was carried out by the Mexican Revolution and the governments of the post-revolution, particularly the Presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas (1934 – 1940). In this sense, Abascal Infante typified the government of Cárdenas as part of the expansion of “international communism”, and, at the same time, condemned the influence of the United States, as a Jewish and protestant nation, over Mexico and the world. Confronted with Cold War scenarios, this public leader discredited both communism and the United States for “threatening” the catholic integrity of the country, in several ways.

Keywords: Cold War, Mexican right-wing, anticommunism, international Judaism, Catholicism.

Entre l’hystérie anticommuniste et la rancœur anti-yankee. Salvador Abascal et les décors de la guerre froide au Mexique

Résumé

L’objectif de cet article est d’analyser le positionnement doctrinal de Salvador Abascal Infante (1910-2000), membre éminent de la droite mexicaine du XX^e siècle en ce qui concerne la bipolarité de la Guerre froide. Cet intellectuel réactionnaire, analyse dans deux de ses œuvres le XX^e siècle mexicain, jugeant celui-ci comme une ère de décadence morale qui s’explique par la perte de la foi et les combats contre le catholicisme. A son avis, telle a été l’œuvre qu’ont mené à bien la Révolution mexicaine et les gouvernements de la post-révolution, particulièrement la Présidence de Lázaro Cárdenas (1934-1940). En ce sens, Abascal Infante caractérise le gouvernement de Cárdenas comme une partie de l’avant-garde du “communisme international”, en même temps qu’il répudie l’influence au Mexique et dans le monde des Etats-Unis, pays qu’il considérait comme une nation juive et protestante. Face aux enjeux de la Guerre froide, Abascal a responsabilisé aussi bien le communisme que les Etats-Unis de “menacer” par de différentes voies l’intégrité catholique de son pays.

Mots clés: Guerre froide, droite mexicaine, anticommunisme, judaïsme international, catholicisme.

1. Introduction

Looking at Mexican right-wing parties, the first half of the twentieth century has been (and still is) a fateful time, fraught with enormous threats and real social cataclysms, such as the Mexican Revolution and the presidency of Lázaro Cárdenas. First the revolution and then Cardenism generated not only resistance but fighting as processes of change that mobilized those who had much to lose, both real and symbolically. The responses to this were also many: from organized Catholicism, the intellectual world, the political arena and violence.

It is in this context that the National Catholic Party (1911), the "reactionaries" during the revolutionary period, the Cristero War (1926-1929), Sinarquism (1937), and the Party of National Action, (PAN, by its acronym in Spanish) (1939) are found. All these make up the faces of Catholicism and conservatism that opposed the regime of the Mexican Revolution^[2]. The postures of the right during the Cardenas presidency (1934-1940) were represented in the Church, in the traditionalism of the militant and organized laity, and in Catholics that fought against communism. Also, the conservative and reactionary positions linked Hispanists and supporters of fascism and Nazism (racism, anti-Semitism), as other ways of responding to the Cardenist challenge^[3]. Likewise, as a permanent (minority but persistent today) point of view, the idea of a Marxist-Masonic-Jewish conspiracy was present among writers of books and pamphlets, in that it explained (and still explains), the "catastrophic" historical development of Mexico and the world^[4]. All these were stances and reactions to a markedly popular government, with a socializing discourse and a socialist type of teaching. In short, it is the right-wing parties which, from traditionalism, Catholicism and the rejection of the social majorities, opposed modernity and change.

The different facets of the Mexican political right, as well as the conservative, traditionalist and Catholic mentality of the period, expressed in secular publications such as newspapers, magazines and books, were marked not only by the local scenario but also by the international context. In fact, both environments are linked together in a dialectic whose outcome was the "Revolutionary contagion". Thus, the Mexican Revolution was not explained by its national causes but, increasingly, as the process progressed, it was seen as a result of external, alien and exogenous influences. Indeed, since the early twentieth century, the Catholic Church and Catholics were mindful of the Western world and especially concerned about the expansion of "international communism" and how it "infiltrated" into unions, political parties and universities. So, the major threat to the traditional world that opposed this was double-sided: on one side was the Mexican Revolution and the other was Soviet communism.

But the international situation had its own logic, very often the Mexican right was subordinated to local factors (the post-revolutionary "monsters" and Cardenist "demons"), or became a perverse extension of a confused categorization, the product of an "international conspiracy". The Russian Revolution (1917), the socialist state in the Soviet Union, the rise of fascism in Italy in 1923, the establishment of Nazism in Germany in 1933, the Spanish Civil War in 1936 and the fascist dictatorship of Franco in Spain as from 1939 were the main European events that marked the interwar period (1919-1939), generating a global division between democracies and totalitarian regimes. For its part, the crisis of liberal democracies in the west, due to the economic debacle and the rise of totalitarianism, brought the growing fear that anarchist, socialist and communist movements led to revolutions. However, the alarm for the "revolutionary contagion" represented by these groups, as well as the movement of ideas and their rhetorical belligerence, sustained by the end of the multi-party system and the single-party hegemony, were understood by the Catholic and conservative mentality in Mexico (and the world) as a usurpation of the traditional way of life.

But not all the totalitarianisms of the first decades of the twentieth century brought hysteria, such as that known as "the red menace." In Mexico, Italian fascism, German Nazism and Franco's Spanish regime became alternatives that could well be added to imperishable values such as the Catholic faith, to try to "reverse" the Mexican nation’s growing "moral degradation" that the Mexican Revolution was "causing" through the 1917 Constitution, the Jacobin rhetoric and actions of the post-revolution governments regarding the agrarian issue, in education, in religion and in the organization and belligerence of the popular sectors.

In that way, fascism was embraced or at least, it was well-received. It was considered as a possible and valid option against the "threat" of socialist collectivism, the "standardization" of communism and fundamentally the "de-Catholicizing" of Mexican society that the Mexican Revolution and "international communism" were promoting in the nation^[5]; features that were seen expressed in the application of the provisions of the Constitution of 1917, in the anticlerical measures of President Calles, in the promotion of secular education, sex education and the implementation of the Cardenas regime’s socialist education.

For the Catholic and conservative mentality of the first half of the twentieth century, the presidency of Cardenas was the pinnacle of a long process of "degradation" which began with the Revolution of 1910 (or earlier if you consider the advancement of communism and Marxism at the end of the 19th century). Because of this, the war of Francoism, Fascism and Nazism against Communists, Freemasons and Jews, attracted the attention of the Mexican right, as they were fighting the same demons.

It is precisely the symbolic construction of post-revolutionary “monste,rs", Cardenist "demons", the perception of "moral degradation" in the Mexican nation, the "de-Catholicizing" of the country, as well as the fight against the "communist threat" and "international Judaism" represented by the United States, which broadly shaped the mentality of a Mexican twentieth-century witness, who navigated contrary to the country's modernity, change, and transformation. That is the case of Salvador Abascal Infante (1910-2000), a conservative intellectual who, as a Catholic extremist, condemned both the post-revolution period and a modernized Mexico that continued to grow in the second half of the twentieth century.

Such are the examples of the present essay, aiming to reconstruct Abascal’s doctrinal position, which made him socially and rhetorically fight against Lázaro Cárdenas’ government, as an outpost of "international communism", and to condemn the influence of the United States’, as a Jewish and Protestant nation, on Mexico and the world. Thus, in order to achieve the proposed goals, firstly a panorama of Mexico is presented during the cold war, in order to establish the ideological profile and Salvador Abascal’s trajectory. In the third section, Abascal’s historical discourse is characterized. This then leads to the analysis of Abascal’s thoughts in the following sections: The "Red Lázaro Cárdenas”, "Yankee Jewish", or Abascal’s anti-imperialism, all give an account of his perspective as well as recording the past -that of his youth - as if in the present which is happening before his eyes. But above all, they show how this reactionary intellectual took a stand against the platforms of the Cold War, disparaging both communism and the United States for attempting in various ways to subvert the country’s Catholic integrity. In the end, the conclusions are presented.

2. Mexico and the Cold War

As we all know, at the end of World War II (1939-1945) two hegemonic powers emerged, with wide spheres of influence, that would vie for the world, representing two opposing systems, capitalist and socialist. This bipolar world that the United States and the Soviet Union shaped through the Cold War was viewed with great suspicion and growing hatred by the Mexican right and its different factions. The fear of Soviet communism’s advance in the first half of the twentieth century has already been mentioned, especially from President Lázaro Cárdenas’ presidency and the measures he took for the blue collar workers (unions), the farmers (agrarianism), and the education field (socialist education). This outlook on "international communism’s” progress would continue to be a source of deep concern after the Second World War and in the context of the Cold War.

Cardenist reformism was seen as a terrible threat by the country’s middle and upper classes, prompting many oppositionist efforts among political opponents or dissidents of the Mexican Revolution in the business sector and the social field^[6]. This would give rise to political parties (short-lived), the formation of business organizations, the integration of civil organizations angered by government decisions in matters such as education, reproductive health, religion^[7], and the emergence of "ferociously anti-communist” ^[8] groups (lobbyists). Likewise, for many Catholics and Conservatives in Mexico, or those on the right at the time (parties, movements, associations, newspapers, magazines, intellectuals), along with the working class and farming industries amid social class hostility as well as the collectivization of land, the anti-clericalism of the state, struggled against religious fanaticism through secular and socialist teaching. These were all clear signs of those distinguishing marks shared by Soviet-inspired socialism and the Mexican Revolution. That is why the voices of tradition and Catholic fundamentalism in México accused the men in the Mexican Revolution of being avatars of "international communism".

In the name of the defense of freedom, the following governments from Lázaro Cárdenas’ presidency practiced a "discreet anti-communism”, according to Lorenzo Meyer, by suppressing popular movements, persecuting leftist radicalism, and moderating state social policies. However, the revolutionary rhetoric and the safeguarding of anti-clerical measures of the revolutionary governments continued, such as authoritarian secularism. In addition, it is precisely the banner of anti-communism, shared by the church and state, which would produce a policy of cooperation between the two powers from the era of Ávila Camacho’s presidency (1940-1946) well into the second half of the twentieth century^[9].

The Church then, under the protection of governments that were not anti-clerical, would strengthen its presence among Mexicans and deepen its involvement in teaching at all levels; among civil society, organized laity, vigilantes of public education curriculum, reproductive health, and, of course, the validity of the rites of worship and parish life. The Mexican church would also fight against the close ties that some church sectors had with progressive social movements, primarily by judging that through liberation theology a "communist infiltration” was being taught. Thus, as María Martha Pacheco^[10] explains, the Catholic Church in Mexico would foster an anti-Communist national campaign in the mid-twentieth century, extending into the eighties, aimed at "international communism" which was understood as a threat to the stability of Mexico and the country 's social and religious values^[11].

As mentioned, this task of combating communism was shared by the Mexican state and the Mexican Church. And after Cardenism, there was a shift to the right by the presidents that followed, adhering to the ideological postulates of anti-communism promoted by the United States, as was the rhetorical defense of democratic freedoms, capitalist development, and above all, the defense of freedom as a fundamental value. Likewise, any previous ties with the Soviet Union were broken, creating new ones only at the diplomatic level. The anti-communist discourse of the cold war was part of the official discourse of the governments of Manuel Avila Camacho (1940-1946), Miguel Alemán Valdés (1946-1952), Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (1952-1958), Adolfo López Mateos (1958-1964), and Gustavo Díaz Ordaz (1964-1970). Having governmental authoritarianism, independent trade union repression, and popular mobilizations as its main features, this was counterbalanced only by the rhetorical revolutionary nationalism that would allow presidents drawn from the ranks of the ruling party (PRI) to appear less anti-communist and less pro-American than they actually had been, says Meyer^[12].

This perception of "falling" into the abyss of the revolution (the "red menace") was maximized by the events happening in the immediate surroundings. And it is that Latin American context in the mid-twentieth century that showed a growing map of anti-imperialist, progressive, popular, socialist, nationalist, communist and Marxist movements that were linked to different spheres and strata of society, where university students, workers, peasants and left-wing politicians were critical of capitalist and bourgeois society and the ruling classes. The increasing social and economic inequalities were the center of their ideological struggle and great social upheaval, which made the monsters that the "anti-communist fever" ranted about real.

That is why the Guatemalan spring (1954), the Cuban Revolution (1959), the student rebellions (1968), the Chilean road to socialism (1970), the Sandinista revolution (1979), as well as the proliferation of the idea of the revolutionary armed struggle through guerrilla movements in Bolivia, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Colombia, Uruguay, Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Mexico during much of the second half of the 20th century in Latin America, fomented suspicion of the existence of "communist rebellions" on the continent, as part of the expansion of "international communism”. These were also other scenarios of the Latin American Cold War, where Marxism and armed revolution became the referents of change for the left and the young, while political systems, bourgeoisies, right-wing and center parties bet on freedom, plurality and democracy. This polarization brought about ideological and class hostility that reproduced real, fictitious or symbolic disputes between the "Bolshevik danger" and the defense of capitalist freedom and democracy in each of the Latin American countries.

In the ideological field, the Cold War also had great battles, with political and cultural life being their main arenas. This was where global bipolarity was expressed, confronting militant anti-communism with atheistic communism, starting not only with the conditions of international geopolitics but also the local way of thinking. That is, Mexican anti-communism did not see itself as such, but as a defender of freedom and the Catholic religion and in that sense, could coincide with the anti-communism promoted by the United States, except in the defense of liberal democracy (the gateway to all the evils that ravaged the West), let alone the continental and global hegemony of a Protestant nation.

While the Mexican left (Socialists, Communists, Progressives) did not particularly represent the advance of the Soviet red heroes who would at some point "assault" Mexican households to take women and children, it did, however, reject the obscurantism and fanaticism that it perceived the Catholic religion to sow in society. Of course, Marxists, Communists, Socialists and Cardenists promoted the social participation of the state and its leading role in the economy and social equality, while it criticized private property and protected social forms of it. All this was very close to the utopia of "international communism": abolition of private property, social leveling and an economy planned by the state.

The enunciation of ideas, such as debate and direct combat that sought to "alert" public opinion to "dangerous ideologies" was also carried out through the press and through an anti-communist campaign^[13]. It was in the mid-20th century Mexican press that, as Elisa Servin explains, publications like national newspapers ascribed to "the new principles arising from postwar US hegemony" and to "the doctrine of suppressing communism." As the author points out, the Mexican press in its anti-communist line found commonalities with the Catholic Church and business leaders and collaborated with the governmental authoritarianism that struck at the left. That was the case with Cardenism in national newspapers like El Universal and Excelsior, which exhibited anti-communist positions, as well as newspapers like El Hombre Libre with nazi-fascist attitudes, and Novedades, which was against the workers’ movement and agrarianism, among other things^[14].

The production of books, magazines, and even pamphlets, was a task also assumed by Mexican Catholic intellectuals, who carried out an anti-communist crusade against social egalitarianism, against threats to private property, against the widening of the state, and against "atheistic communism". The battle was against "international Bolshevism" which was represented in the postulates of the Mexican Revolution, which were other forms of "communist penetration^[15]."

3. The Case of Salvador Abascal

That was the case of the Mexican author Salvador Abascal, who, from Catholic extremism, fought the revolutionary anti-clericalism of the Mexican Revolution, as part of an international communist revolution. Salvador Abascal Infante (1910-2000) studied at the Morelia Seminary and in 1926 entered the Escuela Libre de Derecho (Free School of Law) to pursue a Law degree, graduating in 1931^[16]. He had two specific facets of his public life, one militant and the other intellectual. Thus, he distinguished himself by being part of different public and clandestine political-Catholic movements such as La Base (The Base) and La Legión (The Legion), born from the fires of the Cristero War and the National Synarchist Union (1937)^[17], founded to build a national order against Lázaro Cárdenas’ government. In 1942, he also led an attempt to create a utopian society based on the Catholic ideal in Baja California^[18].

Abascal had an important career as an editor, and from 1945 to 1972 he ran Editorial Jus^[19] and in 1973 he founded Editorial Tradición. Likewise, from 1972 (until his death), he edited Hoja de Combate (Combat Sheet), a monthly publication in which he devoted himself to assessing the daily events of his time from an anti-revolutionary perspective. On his intellectual side Abascal was a prolific writer and interested in Mexican history, which he viewed from a Catholic, anti-revolutionary, anti-freemason, anti-communist and anti-liberal perspective, dedicating works to Hidalgo, to the War of Reform, to Juarez, to the Mexican Revolution, to the Constitution of 1917, and to the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, among others.

Salvador Abascal was a conservative ideologist^[20] who represented the anti-communist hysteria of the most extreme sectors of Mexican Catholicism, which has always viewed the processes of change as a danger to family, society, state and the historical development of the country. From the radical Catholic culture, he constructed a view of Mexico’s past and present in which liberalism and the "communist threat" were processes and ideologies that had disrupted Christian civilization, that being the gateway for the latter, in a growing process of society’s "degradation", with its ideas of freedom, secularization, social leveling and the abolition of property, respectively. First, in the inter-war period and then in the context of the Cold War, the "red menace" of Soviet communism added to the idea of "Yankee Judaism”, embodied by the United States as the last part of an ancient liberal conspiracy, with revolutionary socialists, communists, Marxists and Jews seeking to de-Christianize the West. In other words, for him, Russian communism was a real danger but not the source of evil, which was comprised of the United States’ "great empire of International Judaism".

4. Abascal’s Historical Discourse

In mid-1988 Salvador Abascal published Lázaro Cárdenas, Presidente comunista, in two volumes. This work was part of his vision of the past, which he had initiated in the beginnings of independent Mexico, in an attempt to find the keys to the present havoc. The Mexican divide was the context in which Abascalga gave the national narrative he had created with works like El cura Hidalgo de Rodillas (1996), Juárez Marxista (1984), La revolución de la Reforma de 1883 a 1884, (1983) Madero, dictador infortunado (1983), La Constitución de 1917, destructora de la nación (1982) and the volumes devoted to Lázaro Cárdenas. His review of the past was shaped by this present misfortune, which his religious convictions absolutely lamented. To Abascal, the sense of national history was the moral degradation of Mexico, blaming the age-old "conspiracy" of freemasons, liberals, Jews and Marxists for being the cause of the national tragedy, propagators -in the eyes of the author - of a hatred for God.

Abascal’s way of writing history was shaped by these present facts: the tragedy of his Catholic homeland reviled by the "reds" of all eras and by the United States and its "hidden super-government, Judaism". So, his vision of the future could only be fatalistic, thinking about reality dichotomously: on one side God’s "enemies" and on the other, those few who in society practiced the Catholic faith and who were unmoved by "evil" influences.

This pessimism for the present was shared by other authors in Mexico, who, like Abascal, wrote what they thought was the "true" history of Mexico, different from that generated by the progressive vision or the "official" version. Thus, as Nora Pérez-Rayon and E. Mario Alejandro Carrillo explained, "The vision of the Mexican past assumes a Hispanist, anti-Indigenist, Catholic and anti-liberal perspective, which is nurtured by conservative sources (L. Alamán, J. Vasconcelos, M. Cuevas…). Of course, this version exalts Catholicism as the nation’s forger and essence"^[21].

Certainly, Salvador Abascal clearly fulfills the vocation for history that is attributed to intellectual conservatism and the Western right in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe, the United States and Latin America^[22]. From Edmund Burke in England to Lucas Alamán in Mexico, the conservative mentality of the past has sought the historical strength to prevent the "shattering" of society that ideologies of change have provoked. Likewise, when liberalism, socialism, communism or revolution have already become entrenched and normative institutions of reality, that same conservative mentality of the past will look to the present for clues to the "chaos", trying to pinpoint the moment in which the course was "lost". Thus, Abascal devoted himself to anti-revolutionary criticism and to the study of Mexican history, seeking explanations for the chaos, anarchy, and moral degradation of his time, blaming the ideologies of Mexican de-colonization. In this case, as an uncompromising Catholic, he experienced the anti-communist hysteria and anti-American resentment in the context of the Cold War, pointing to communism and capitalism as responsible for the weakening of spiritual values, along with the corruption of both morals and women.

5. The "Red Lázaro Cárdenas"

According to Abascal, President Cardenas undoubtedly represented "international communism". That is the conviction that intersects the two books he wrote about Cardenas. Looking at the personalities of the men of the revolution, like Plutarco Elías Calles, Emilio Portes Gil, or Pascual Ortiz Rubio, this is what Abascal has to say about Cardenas:

[...] the case of Lázaro Cárdenas proves the rule, having a naturally false and tortuous nature [...] and also being intelligent, although in reality he is awkward, for this reason he will be a tool of more lucid minds, especially [US Ambassador] Daniels and [the American President] Roosevelt. As for his personal position, he will know how to rise as a demigod of the revolution; but in regard to his national undertaking, which he wished to be for the material benefit of workers and peasants, he will only be known as the "blind and unleashed cyclone" who will only know how to destroy. Their eulogists have to admit their tremendous failures in social matters, without a single success, for the exclusive benefit, I clarify, of the US, who wants us to be apostates and in misery. Their socialism has not been or could be but for the greatest material and moral ruin of the underworld and benefit of the world revolution, whose intellect is not in Russia but in the US, our worst enemies. Believing himself to be anti-imperialist, being a truly pro-Soviet communist - though he never wanted to admit it - he turned out to be a docile robot of Yankee imperialism! ^[23]

The accusation that Abascal hurls at Cárdenas is remarkable because he not only appears in his imagination as a failed "pawn of communism", which harms those he wishes to benefit, like workers and peasants, but is also a simple tool of US imperialism. His interpretation of political reality was determined by the conspiratorial mentality that was so characteristic of him. Indeed, to this uncompromising representative of traditionalism, the US orchestrated international socialism as a pawn in its quest to de-Catholicize the West. And in that sense, the Mexican Revolution and revolutionaries were nothing but other tools - minor players - in the same mission. Here is the connection with that long-ago conspiracy that sees the conspiracy of Freemasons, Liberals, Jacobins and Marxists to fight against God and Catholicism in America and Europe. This is how he expressed it:

[...] the purpose of revolution has always been to steal from God, Christ, and the domain of souls. That same socialism intends just that, but using more resources than simple militant atheism. This, like classic liberal secularism, attempts to achieve its purpose without suppressing certain liberties: that of property, that of expression - up to a certain limit - that of ties to political parties. Socialism, on the other hand, in order to secure the rule of conscience as a substitute for God, suppresses private property to the maximum extent possible, since it is the greatest guarantee of individual, family and social freedom, and therefore of spiritual independence with respect to the revolutionary state^[24].

The “Judeo-Masonic conspiracy" as a conservative thesis of the nineteenth century is present in Abascal's discursive and, in many ways, he uses it in his works of a historical nature. Likewise, this idea of a nineteenth century conspiracy of radical ideologies, was updated in the nineteen seventies by Abascal himself, now classifying it as a global revolution that seeks the exact same thing; that being communism and capitalism, they are two enormous forces that seek to expel God from society and also to end Catholicism^[25].

On the other hand, the fear of the idea of the "Communist threat" that appeared in Mexico (and Latin America) from Europe at the end of the anti-clerical revolution in France in the late nineteenth century was well-known, and that in our country it was used in the ideological struggle between liberals and conservatives. Also, the Church itself was responsible for spreading this same perception of imminence, and then later prolonged it into the twentieth century in the context of the Mexican Revolution, the Cardenas Presidency, and the echo of the example of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. In other words, anti-communist hysteria spread among the most radical sectors of organized Mexican Catholicism. Nevertheless, as Salvador Abascal had emerged from these uncompromising sectors, he did not suffer this fear of communism but on the contrary, exercised a powerful anti-communist hatred of the "red menace." And, particularly in this case, Cardenas summoned all the furies of the Synarchist former leader (only overshadowed by his hatred of Juarez), and not only in his role as president but from his time as governor. Reviewing his trajectory, Abascal finds "evidence" of that masonic and communist faith.

According to Abascal, when Cardenas was ruler of Michoacan (1928-1932) he was devoted to "controlling" all the unions and agrarian communities, to strictly "managing" municipalities, to opening "all secular" and "all mixed" schools, to “forcefully radicalizing the anti-clerical Universidad de San Nicolás and stripping it of what might remain of a humanistic education”; to "hastily distributing several haciendas" in order to promote Freemasonry in "all municipalities" as a kind of "anti-Church" ( sic), "to annihilating" the "semi-independence" of the judiciary and the legislature, and "training leaders who are agrarian to the bone, with a red and black flag that has the sickle and hammer and ‘desfanatizadores^[26].’"

As a presidential candidate for the PNR (National Revolutionary Party), Cardenas toured Michoacan and "everywhere he spoke he was framed by red and black pavilions. No need to hide or disguise his Bolshevik creed^[27]", claimed Abascal. Those were his hallmarks, judging by the former Synarchist leader. In contrast to this ineffable world that Cardenas forged and in which Abascal himself saw the effects or products of changes to society, in the late eighties he wrote against the general, recalling the colonial era in Mexico, comparing it to the present disorder brought about by communism:

[...] for more than 3 centuries there was social peace brought about by the Church, by justice, and by the charity practiced by the rich, of Catholic truth, and by the organization of guilds, which was cooperative, of mutual organic aid, which the Revolution destroyed in order to first implement the unjust liberal capitalism and then socialism with its class struggle, which is unnatural and suicidal^[28].

The author of La hoja de combate claimed that the "enemies of Christ", that is, liberals, Freemasons, Jews, revolutionaries and communists, had not only destroyed the Catholic social structure, but had also worked together to first establish capitalism and then socialism. And in his view, there is a continuity between the secularism promoted by liberalism and the atheism posed by socialism, because for him the practice of both of these deepened the disbelief and hatred of the "true faith". That was the perception of Abascal, an impulsive criticism of the establishment of modernity and all its institutions, identified as the cause of the loss of meaning in Mexico and in the Catholic world.

The announced intention of the candidate Cardenas, that the state should intervene on behalf of workers, organizing them through union movements, represented more evidence of the "Bolshevik danger” to Abascal: "Everything is in state hands, this is the government, or the ‘octopus’ that is the bureaucracy that becomes the omnipotent and impersonal worker's employer, exactly as in Russia: the owner of lives, votes, consciences, and even the products of work^[29]." In addition, Abascal assured, there will be "no unions that are not red" with their "Bolshevik leaders" and everyone will be "handled by the Red State^[30]".

And not only that, he claimed that Cardenas "was determined to implement the Communist state totalitarianism not only in the economy but also in education and in all spheres of social life. ^[31]" Indeed, to demonstrate the "Bolshevik infiltration" in his book, Abascal resorted to using Cardenas’ own notes. Thus, he did so in relation to the issue of education, taking up Lazarus’ statement that teaching the ideology of the Mexican Revolution should begin in childhood. To Abascal, this translated as a "dogmatic atheist materialist approach to communism" (sic). And then he added:

And rightly Cardenas has become the greatest idol of the Revolution, perhaps more than Juarez or right beside him-: in 1934, an atheistic woman was a rare exception; currently there are thousands who have lost the faith, without missing it. And what is the result? The dissolution of the home, and therefore the country itself, and the enslavement of people for the benefit of the revolutionary government and its enslavement for the benefit of the United States, a motorized model of barbarism^[32].

The representative of the Mexican far right condemned the Mexico of his day, which he perceived as an era of moral decadence due to the "expulsion" of religious teaching and the lives of the people through the secularizing process and its deepening in the twentieth century. In his eyes, this had upset the country, society and family by "throwing" women into public life, by incorporating women into new areas previously closed to them because of their status of "servitude" and “inferiority". His condemnation of the secularized society that has replaced the social order based on Christian values is evident. And Abascal finds that the Cardenist era was a turning point in this "decline" of the social order due to its promotion of socialist education.

Later, in his work about Cardenas, he continues to show evidence of that conspiracy orchestrated from the United States to “de-Catholicize" Mexico, in this case, through education. In September of 1934, the president-elect made statements in favor of socialist education and pointed out the agitation of clerics and reactionaries, whose subversive attempts were minor. Abascal affirmed that this was because

[...] the people are unarmed against the revolutionary government held up by the black White House; but will demonstrate their just aversion to the socialist school through boycotts (sic) and with the cropping of the ears of many teachers, when it should be Cardenas’ ears being cropped, if only for aesthetic reasons. And despite the deception that the nation will suffer, fortunately only briefly, because of the oil expropriation, condemnation of all his policies and his school will be more obvious and violent every day, until it forces him to let Ávila Camacho change course, even if only verbally, for the evil done by Cardenism will have been too deep within his 6-year term and will continue producing 40 years after the social apostasy that we are witnessing^[33].

As we all know, the subject of the teaching and training of new citizens has been a historically crucial issue for the conservative Catholic mentality in Mexico in the nineteenth century and of course in the twentieth century against the Cardenist challenge. Abascal obviously judges from his present time in the nineteen eighties, when Mexico has entered cultural modernity in the propagation of education and state education systems that pay off in more secular and less gullible citizens. With the propagation of public and secular universities, with the growing incorporation of women into universities and professional careers, it is adding new ways of understanding reality and life beyond “what should be".

The condemnation of public education, the rejection of modernity, and the defense of Catholic tradition show the longevity of the old conflict between Catholicism and modernity in figures like Abascal, who in some ways, became representatives of an opinion which took force throughout the first half of the twentieth century in Mexico, across the social ladder, among the middle classes, popular sectors and the upper classes, due to an uneven, incomplete and contradictory combination of values like strong Catholicism, unalloyed conservatism and ignorance. Socialist education was then seen as a threat to beliefs, values and ways of living^[34]. What is unique is that in Mexico in the eighties, with the transfer of rural society to an urban society and the increasing modernization, is that characters with the mentality of Abascal even existed, holdovers of a past time and wistful of a society that no longer existed.

That distress, by this present time, finds its origin, or at least its deepening during the Cardenas presidential government. In his book, Abascal also points out that President Cardenas "clearly wants to supplant the Catholic religion with the Communist religion^[35]." This is how he stated it:

With his laws, Cardenas put a straitjacket on the child's, the adolescent’s, the worker’s, the peasant’s, the teacher’s and the authorities’ minds, and through all of these, he wanted to put a stranglehold on the entire nation. Everyone had to accept his materialist, Marxist, anti-Christian credo, the nation being still deeply Catholic^[36].

That which constitutes an advance for a liberal, secular, progressive or socialist mentality in building an equitable society, or the establishment of a state that took responsibility for the social majorities, was a setback and a catastrophe for Abascal, and palpable evidence of the spiritual death of Christian society by secularization and a rationalist vision driven by the post-revolutionary state. For this staunch conservative, the end of society was expressed in the “de-Christianization of the nation”, which the ideologies were promoting, particularly "international communism".   

6. "Yankee Judaism" or the Anti-Imperialism of Abascal

In Abascal’s imagination there is a society between communism and the "Judaizing" United States, where the former is an instrument of the latter, and to him both are "enemies" of the Catholic world, one by promoting atheism and other by being a Protestant nation that seeks to shatter the Catholic integrity of Mexico. And although the elements that shape this doctrinal position always appear unified in Abascal’s discourse, in this section they will be separated to precisely emphasize the roots of this figure’s nationalism and his criticism of US imperialism. That being the case, secularism, freemasonry and Judaism are defining notions of the nature of the United States. Remarkably, however, he never spoke out against capitalism as such, but upholds the principle of private property as a fundamental pillar of Catholic society. He also bitterly condemned the imitation of the bourgeois way of life in Mexico that, in his view, alienates society from its religiosity, but would not say a word against capitalism.

In that way, seeking to substantiate the pernicious influence of the United States in Mexico from the beginning, Abascal recalled the Porfirio aftermath in his work about Cardenas, where, in his opinion, secularism is extended to private schools, and he highlighted cases in Yucatan and Sonora and then immediately added: "But the White House and its tool, Mexican Masonry, want more than they have already achieved with official secular schools"^[37]. Mexico's decadence was the result of the influence of a foreign power. Likewise, in attacks aimed at Cárdenas, he seeks to discredit the great man of the revolution, to brand him a simple tool of the United States in its mission to “de-Catholicize" Mexico. Therefore, he says, that when Cardenas was governor, he was devoted to “making Freemasons out of the entire state.^[38]" Thus, in this perspective, the communist Cardenas appears to be part of an orchestrated plan by the United States government and Freemasonry:

[...] the most exact opportunism and Masonic obedience come into play in the treacherous assassination of 'reactionary' Carranza ... because of sectarian opportunism he persecutes the Church in Michoacan; because of an illiterate opportunism he becomes a socialist; opportunistically he will stir up all his malicious intention to his former patron and almost father Plutarco Elías Calles, to get rid of him and communize the Nation, unhampered, with the planning and timely protection of Roosevelt, who he will fervently worship as a redeemer ... Since December 1, 1934, his strength is not really in the army but in Freemasonry, in the union, in agrarian leaders and in the decisive support of Roosevelt. Most of the military leaders, almost all, are anti-communist; but they know that nothing can now be done against the will of the United States ... being a former President - at this point having to respect the new tactics of the revolution, he becomes friends with several priests and Méndez Arceo. Yes, it is very true, he was fond of anti-clerical clerks and anti-clerical Communists, anti-Christians, especially the heretic and Marxist Bishop of Cuernavaca^[39].

Reviewing Cardenas’ Notes, Abascal finds new evidence of his communist faith. Indeed, he cites the June 17, 1946 entry, referring to the explanation that Cardenas himself makes of the existence of communism as a result of the exploitation of the people by the oligarchies. Not only that, after said acknowledgement, this representative of the extreme right stated that his communist presidency was one more piece of the great machine that has been built by the Marxist and freemason conspiracy. Abascal says:

The remedy of communism is much worse than the disease. But it is even more palpable for Cardenas himself, he will always say that the progress of misery and ignorance is because even more communism is needed, more Marxist statism. By its total lack of culture, it was easily manageable by the international Masonic-Marxist forces^[40].

In a passage from his Memoirs, Abascal recalls his footsteps as a propagandist of clandestine Catholicism in the thirties. In said book, published in 1980, he recalled passing through Queretaro and the nineteenth century battles of Catholicism against forms of domination coming from outside. Another allusion to the Judeo-Masonic conspiracy by the United States as responsible for all the ills of Mexico:

The little Queretaro from back then, made of solid and high palaces and narrow innumerable meanderings of his own great strength, still kept, in my mind - the air of the citadel besieged and defended by the Catholic forces of Miramon, Mejia, Maximiliano and Mendez -the 4 Ms - against the liberal traitors serving Yankee Freemasonry and International Jewry^[41].

With this same vision Abascal explained the beginnings of the Mexican Revolution, not a civic deed headed by Madero, but Maderism as a gear of US imperialism. And that is to say that Abascal, and the national leaders of the Legions (founded in 1932), insisted in 1936 on the foundation of councils of a clandestine organization of Catholics on the northern border of Mexico with the idea of a "second Maderism" which he judged as a mistake:

The clearest intelligences make the mistake of judging the political present with the same rule of the appearance of the past, undiscovered in this deep mechanism of revolutions. There were infinitely more reasons for discontent in 1936 than in 1910; but it was not the people of Mexico who would ruin the Porfirism -to pass from liberalism to socialism- but the barbarian north launched by Freemasonry and the government of the United States, which will not fail to protect the revolutionary regime precisely because of its destructive efficiency^[42].

Communism as an instrument of imperialism, as it has been said - was another of the core premises of Abascal’s rhetoric. For him, the United States was the origin and headquarters of the revolution, but not of a socialist or Cardenist sign, but a world revolution, which in its demonology meant de-Catholicization:

It was necessary to protect the Revolution against private property, starting with a hasty and almost total distribution of land and the nationalization of major industries as the basis and principle of communication in Mexico, within the plans of the World Revolution, whose headquarters have never been in Moscow but, for many years, in the United States^[43].

In this scheme of reality, the "champion" of free democracies, the United States, will be viewed with resentment by the representative of the Mexican right, to be defined as nationalistic and anti-American. The reason lies beyond nationalistic impulses in the fact that Catholics, conservatives, Hispanists, rightists, sinarquistas and PAN supporters saw in the belligerence and hegemony of their northern neighbor a serious threat to the Catholic integrity of the country, since this was a Protestant nation. And since the late nineteenth century, Protestant immigrations were seen as real dangers, whose "contagion" would increasingly alienate social sectors of the Catholic Church, which was concerned about the presence of American missionaries who were seen during the Porfirio presidency that penetrated the north and some central regions of the country^[44].

Already during the interwar period and in the context of the Cold War, there will be voices like Abascal from the intellectual world who virulently judge the hegemony and interventionism of the United States, as another great enemy of the Catholic Church that seeks to de-Catholicize Mexico^[45]. Likewise, during subsequent governments after Cardenas, the clerical right, as Carlos Monsiváis^[46] calls it, will be intolerant of religious dissent, especially Protestant.

Therefore, the context of the Cold War, to Abascal’s reactionary mentality was a largely complex scenario, not only because of alignments that ideological polarization implied existed in the West, but because both contenders of the conflict constituted enemies and potential hazards to national Catholicism: Protestant imperialism that could affect the old project of the re-Christianization of Mexico and the "communist threat" that was already "operating" and causing the de-Catholicizing of the country through the post - revolution governments.

But Abascal was not alone in his faith or his anti-communist criticism of the secular republic, nor in his questioning of the liberal way the political system was organized. And for the Catholic Church, the Mexican Revolution and communism, or socialism, were considered one and the same^[47]. Similarly, after the time of the Cardenist belligerence, between the forties and eighties, the Catholic right, represented in heads of the church and landowners, social movements and universities, will combat the pernicious influence of capitalism in the country, judging that the system promotes values that keep society from Catholic zeal. It will be an extreme reaction, not to capitalist modernization but to the consequences of the imposition of the bourgeois lifestyle^[48].

7. Conclusions

Salvador Abascal was a participant of and witness to the Mexican twentieth century, so that, as recalled in his Memoirs, as a child he witnessed the whims and cruelty of the revolution and the instability of revolutionary struggles. He also lived far away from the Cristero war, but fought the anti-clericalism and socialist education of the post-revolution, leading sinarquismo, he then turned to the intellectual trench from which he would never leave, fighting discursively from books and magazines against those who, in his view, were promoting the de-Catholization of Mexico, or they opened the door to ungodliness, either by "fraternizing" with the enemies of religious truth or assimilating new customs or fashions that kept Mexican men and women away from the faith.

In that way, he was critical of ideologies of change and their driving forces, particularly communism, which he saw arise everywhere. He was critical of the approach that some of the men of the Church carried out with ideas that they were fighting social inequalities, such as censorship of the promoters of liberation theology in Mexico. He also accused the United States of seeking the de-Christianization of the country, not only as a Protestant nation, but because, as a defender of capitalism, it was damaging to Mexican society to promote hedonism, which pushed people away from religion. Likewise, he blamed the rulers of the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) for being puppets of international communism and the Judaizing United States, and in that same dichotomy he placed members of the church hierarchy, who were said to be "allies" of those great enemies of Mexico who were intentionally seeking the end of Catholic civilization.

Because of this, the great cultural changes experienced by Mexico in the second half of the twentieth century, as social beings through the influence of fashion, the entertainment industry and music, were for him because of Bolshevism and the hedonism of social life that American capitalism wanted. And for Abascal, both enemies were seeking the growth of godlessness and the de-Catholicizing of Mexico.

The Hispanic culture, in response to the Yankee expansion^[49], was precisely what Abascal raised against the bleak picture of Mexico in the eighties; that which to him had brought civilization to Mexico from Cortes, introducing the Catholic faith and organizing the nation. Therefore, his was a defense of Christian civilization and national traditions, and against the institutionalization of secular, liberal and individualistic culture he saw as a result of the advance of "godless communism" and afterwards by the expansion of "Yankee Judaism".

Mexican society changed for several reasons: industrialization and urbanization midway through the twentieth century brought other ways of living, the same as were taken to rural areas in an accelerated exchange; with non-religious education and secularization that generated a new mindset and built new, less credulous citizens^[50]; with forms of culture through literature, theater, cinema and art, they questioned atavism, customs and traditions; with the proliferation of the media through television, radio and newspapers promoting new patterns of consumption and entertainment (fashion, dance and music), and a type of social being based on the cult of body forms and modes of comfort and pleasure, whose immediacy as a reward became valid and ethically acceptable.

All of this was real, and not the fault of ideologies; nor Soviet infiltration. Nor was it Communism or Judaism, but rather it was the result of the hegemony of bourgeois ways of life and the triumph of capitalism, something Abascal got right. His, then, was an acrid disapproval of liberal and bourgeois modernity, against the free, plural and morally diverse society that already loomed, abandoning patterns or breaking social standards. His was a defense of old Mexico against the new ways of modernity.

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To cite this article:

Francisco Alejandro García Naranjo, “Between anti-communist hysteria and anti-yankee resentment. Salvador Abascal and the Cold War scenarios in Mexico”, Historia y Memoria N°10 (January-June, 2015): 165-198.

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* This article is the product of the research project titled: La derecha católica, la histeria anticomunista y el rencor antiyanqui. El caso de Salvador Abascal en el México del siglo XX (The Catholic right, anti-communist hysteria and anti-yankee resentment. The case of Salvador Abascal in 20^th century Mexico), financed by the Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo.

[1] Doctor of History, Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain. Professor-researcher, Instituto de Investigaciones Históricas (Institute of Historical Studies), Universidad Michoacana de San Nicolás de Hidalgo, Mexico. Research group: Academic body, Economics, culture and thought in Mexico and Latin America. Lines of investigation: History of the state, ideas and institutions in Mexico and Latin America. Email address: pacognaranjo@gmail.com

[2] See: Manuel Buendia, La ultraderecha en México (México: Editorial Océano/Excélsior, 1984); Hugh G. Campbell, La derecha radical en México, 1929-1949 (México: Sepsetentas, 1976); Octavio Rodríguez Araujo, Derechas y ultraderechas en el mundo (México: Siglo XXI Editores, 2004); Reneé De La Torre, Martha Eugenia Ugarte and Juan Manuel Ramírez Saiz (compilers), Los rostros del conservadurismo mexicano (México: Publicaciones de la Casa Chata, 2005); Roger Bartra, Fango sobre la democracia (México: Editorial Planeta, 2007); Erika Pani, (coordinator), Conservadurismos y derechas en México (México: FCE/CA, 2 tomos, 2009).

[3] See: Ricardo Pérez Monfort, Hispanismo y Falange. Los sueños imperiales de la derecha española (México: FCE, 1992) and Ricardo Pérez Monfort, Por la patria y por la raza. La derecha secular en el sexenio de Lázaro Cárdenas (México: UNAM, 1993).

[4] See: Salvador Abascal, Mis recuerdos. Sinarquismo y colonia María Auxiliadora (México: Tradición, 1980), and Salvador Abascal, Juárez marxista, 1848-1872 (México: Tradición, 1999). There are other authors that follow this line of explanation of the historical development of Mexico, such: Salvador Borrego, Siglo XXI. Revolución en marcha (México: s/e, 2009), and Rogelio González O., La conspiración contra Iberoamérica (México: s/e, 2008).

[5]Beatriz Urías Horcasitas, “una pasión antirrevolucionaria: el conservadurismo hispanófilo mexicano (1920-1960)”, Revista Mexicana de Sociología, N° 4, (October-December 2010): 599-628.

[6] Javier Garciadiego, “La oposición conservadora y de las clases medias al cardenismo”, Istor, Año VI, N° 25 (summer of 2006): 30-49.

[7] Martha B. Loyo, “Las oposiciones al cardenismo”, in: El cardenismo, 1932-1940 (México: FCE, 2010, 436-494).

[8] Soledad Loaeza, “Conservar es hacer patria. La derecha y el conservadurismo mexicano en el siglo XX”, Nexos, Año VI, Vol. 6, N° 64 (April of 1983): 29-39.

[9] Lorenzo Meyer, “La guerra fría en el mundo periférico: el caso del régimen autoritario mexicanoLa utilidad del anticomunismo discreto”, in: Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe (México: CIESAS/SER/MIGUEL ÁNGEL PORRÚA, 2004), 99.

[10] María Martha Pacheco, “¡Cristianismo sí, comunismo no! Anticomunismo eclesiástico en México”, Estudios de Historia Moderna y Contemporánea de México Vol. 24: (2002): 143-170.

[11] Valentina Torres Septién Torres, “El miedo de los católicos mexicanos a un demonio con cola y cuernos: el comunismo entre 1950-1980”, in: Una historia de los usos del miedo (México: El Colegio de México/Universidad Iberoamericana, 2009), 312-327.

[12] Lorenzo Meyer, “La utilidad del anticomunismo discreto”, 115.

[13] Elisa Servín, “Propaganda y guerra fría: la campaña anticomunista en la prensa mexicana del medio siglo”, Signos Históricos N° 11 (January- June, 2004): 9-39.

[14] Silvia González Marín, Prensa y poder político. La elección presidencial de 1940 en la prensa mexicana, (México: UNAM/Siglo XXI editores, 2006), 21-37.

[15] So were the cases of the traditionalist and reactionary Jesús Guisa y Acevedo (1899-1986), and of the conservative and supporter of Porfirio Díaz Alberto María Carreño (1875-1962). See: Felícitas López Portillo Tostado, Tres intelectuales de la derecha hispanoamericana: Alberto María Carreño, Nemesio García Naranjo y Jesús Guisa y Acevedo (Morelia: UMSNH/UNAM, 2012).

[16] James W. Wilkie and Edna Monzón Wilkie, Frente a la Revolución mexicana. 17 protagonistas de la etapa constructiva. Entrevistas de historia oral (México: UAM, 4 tomos, Vol., 3, 26.

[17] Mónica Uribe, “La ultraderecha en México: el conservadurismo moderno”, El Cotidiano, Año 23, Vol. 149 (May-June, 2008): 44.

[18] See: Salvador Abascal, Mis recuerdos...

[19] Hugo Vargas, “Nuevas vidas ejemplares: De Salvador Abascal a Luis Pazos: estampitas de la derecha mexicana”, Nexos, N° 64 (April, 1983).

[20] See: Edgar González Ruiz, Los Abascal. Conservadores a ultranza (México: Grijalbo, 2003).

[21] Nora Pérez-Rayón E., Carrillo, “De la derecha radical a la ultraderecha en el pensamiento social católico”, in: El pensamiento social de los católicos mexicanos (Mexico: FCE, 2012), 127.

[22] For a characterization of conservative historians in Mexico, see: Jaime Del Arenal Fenochio, “La otra historia: la historiografía conservadora”, en: Tendencias y corrientes de la historiografía mexicana del siglo XX, (México: El Colegio de Michoacán/UNAM, 2003), 63-90.

[23] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas Presidente comunista (México: Tradición, 1991, 2 Tomos, Vol., I), 55.

[24] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…25.

[25] See: Salvador Abascal, La revolución antimexicana (México: Tradición, 1978), and Salvador Abascal, La revolución mundial. De Herodes a Bush (México: Tradición, 1991).

[26] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…152.

[27] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…167.

[28] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…175.

[29] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…175.

[30] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…180.

[31] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…180.

[32] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas, Presidente comunista, Vol., I, 185.

[33] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas, Presidente comunista, Vol., I, 189.

[34] Engracia Loyo, “Los años que vivimos bajo amenaza. Miedo y violencia durante la etapa de la educación socialista (1924-1940”, in Una historia de los usos del miedo (Mexico: El Colegio de México/Universidad Iberoamericana), 309.

[35] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…23.

[36] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…28.

[37] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…12.

[38] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…194.

[39] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…200.

[40] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…243.

[41] Salvador Abascal, Mis recuerdos…127.

[42] Salvador Abascal, Mis recuerdos…136.

[43] Salvador Abascal, Lázaro Cárdenas…302.

[44] Cfr.: Jean Pierre-Bastian, Los disidentes: sociedades protestantes y revolución en México 1872-1811 (México: FCE, 1991).

[45] This is the case of the intellectual Jesús Guisa y Acevedo who always pronounced against the presence of North-American colonies in Mexico, due to their religión (protestantism). See: Felícitas López Portillo Tostado, Tres intelectuales de la derecha hispanoamericana.

[46] Carlos Monsiváis, “la ofensiva ideológica de la derecha”, in: México hoy (Mexico: Siglo XXI editores, 1979), 315.

[47] See: Roberto Blancarte, Historia de la Iglesia católica en México (México: FCE/El Colegio Mexiquense, 1992), in particular the chapter “El nacionalismo anticomunista”, 63-116.

[48] Enrique Guerra Manzo, “La salvación de las almas. Estado e Iglesia en pugna por las masas, 1920-1949”, Argumentos, Nueva época, Año 20, N° 55 (September- December 2007): 150.

[49] James W. Wilkie, Edna Monzón Wilkie, Frente a la Revolución mexicana, 4 Tomos, Vol., 3, 68.

[50] Héctor Aguilar Camín, “La invención de México”, Estudios Públicos, N° 55, (Winter of 1994) 19. Also see: Héctor Aguilar Camín, Después del milagro (México: Cal y Arena, 1994).