Beyond the Eagle's Shadow: New Histories of Latin America's Cold War

5: Don Lázaro Rises Again: Heated Rhetoric, Cold Warfare, and the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference

129 · Chapter Five · Don Lázaro Rises Again Heated Rhetoric, Cold Warfare, and the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference 5 Renata Keller General Lázaro Cárdenas looked out over the crowd of 10,000 people gathered at Mexico City’s Arena de México. The audience deliriously cheered his arrival; then, an eager silence fell as Cárdenas stepped to the microphone . He cleared his throat and began reading the declarations of the Latin American Conference for National Sovereignty, Economic Emancipation , and Peace, also known as the Latin American Peace Conference. “The Latin American people want peace,” Cárdenas stated. “But what interests them even more directly is that Latin America be free and sovereign to determine its own destiny,” he continued, and the crowd erupted in applause .1 When Cárdenas declared that the Cuban Revolution revealed the path to liberation from foreign domination, the audience shouted its agreement . The crowd stayed in the arena for the rest of the three-hour ceremony, as the 1961 Latin American Peace Conference came to a close. At the time of the conference, Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government controlled Cuba, an anticommunist crusade consumed U.S. policymakers, and Mexico’s Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) dominated Mexican politics. The Cuban Revolution of 1959 had reinvigorated the left throughout Latin America by exposing vulnerability in the United States’ hegemonic Renata Keller 130 control over the region. Lázaro Cárdenas, a former Mexican president who had joined his nation’s pantheon of revolutionary heroes through his land distribution policies and his nationalization of the petroleum industry, was among those most inspired by Castro’s success. Since leaving office in 1940, Cárdenas had become disillusioned with the increasingly political battlefield .2 However, he could not resist the urge to return to the national and international limelight in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution. Like others, Cárdenas wanted to capitalize on the popularity of the Cuban Revolution to call the world’s attention to devastating poverty in Latin America, denounce U.S. imperialism in the region, and express his solidarity with Castro’s government. Lázaro Cárdenas was a master of the art of geopolitical theater. He knew how to manipulate both international tensions and public opinion to pursue his own agendas. In his time as president in the late 1930s, he used the German threat to gain leverage with the United States and secure his nationalization of Mexico’s petroleum industry.3 During and after the Spanish Civil War, Cárdenas offered asylum and Mexican citizenship to thousands of Spanish republican refugees.4 He even posed for photographs with a shipload of Spanish refugee children upon their arrival to Mexican shores.5 Half a year after Castro and his fellow bearded guerrillas took power in Cuba, Cárdenas flew to the island to celebrate July 26th, the anniversary of the day in 1953 when Fidel began his revolutionary quest. In an interview on the way back to Mexico, Cárdenas explained his sympathy for the difficulties that the Cuban leaders were encountering and reminisced about how Mexican revolutionaries had faced the same animosity, criticism, and false accusations.6 The Latin American Peace Conference was one of the largest events in the hemisphere for leftist politics in 1961 and Lázaro Cárdenas was its producer , director, and star. In light of its importance, the peace conference has received insufficient attention in the historiography of the Cold War in Latin America. Scholars who have written about it discuss it briefly without fully examining the significance of the conference for its participants and its opponents .7 This chapter provides the first in-depth analysis of the Latin American Peace Conference. What was the Latin American Peace Conference and why was it important ? This analysis begins with a portrait of the gathering: the goals, the preparations, the participants, and the content. Using publications and texts of speeches produced by participants, it reveals the significance of the event for the Latin American Left—both new and old.8 The conference brought Don Lázaro Rises Again 131 together thousands of people from across the hemisphere, including such important personages as Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano and Vilma Espín, the president of the Federation of Cuban Women and Raúl Castro’s wife. It was one of the earliest and largest international efforts to harness the momentum of the Cuban Revolution and...