Topic category:  Other/General

The Mexican Revolution was a socialist revolution. In the 1920s, under the influence of an assortment of serious leftists like Obregon, Portes Gil, Calles, and Abelardo Rodriguez, socialism in Mexico grew to a point where, by the early 1930s, the PNR (Partido Nacional Revolucionario, forerunner of today's PRI, Partido Revolucionario Institucional ), openly adopted a governing program which the PNR itself characterized as: "a cooperative economic system tending toward socialism", at which time Mexico turned hard left, and, under the rule of Cardenas, became a full blown one-party socialist state, that is: state-controlled economy, social welfare programs, agrarian reform and land redistribution, massive public works projects, and nationalization of major industries.

By the late 1930s, Mexico had become so thoroughly socialist that, next to the Soviet Union, Mexico was the only country which, as a matter of public policy, supported the Bolshevik/anarchist alliance in the Spanish Civil War.

Thus, it also came as no surprise that, to escape the wrath of Stalin, Trotsky fled to Mexico, where he found lots of supporters for Trotsky's flavor of socialism.

Neither did it come as a surprise that Mexico held plenty of Stalinists, ready, willing, and able to whack Trotsky over the head with a Bolshevik pick axe, which one of them eventually did.

With socialism inevitably comes poverty and political repression - witness the Soviet Union, Communist China, and, closer to home, Castro’s Cuba and Venezuela, where the Marxist Chavez recently criminalized free speech, and then had himself declared dictator. And therein resides the source of Mexico's poverty. Socialism.

Thus, instead of marching in the streets of Chicago, shouldn't Mexicans be marching in the streets of Mexico City? After all, Mexico has an abundance of natural resources - oil, minerals, arable land - and Mexicans are more than intelligent and industrious enough to operate a modern industrial society. Given its basics, Mexico should be rich.

Yet, Mexico is poor, third-world poor, so poor that, to make a living, by the millions Mexicans pull up stakes, leave kith and kin, and sneak across the border in dark of night into the capitalist United States.

So, instead of allowing the Mexican government to dump its failures on the United States, why don't Mexicans stay in Mexico, march in Mexico, and demand that the Mexican government adopt capitalist economic policies that would allow Mexico to become rich, rich like Mexico ought to be?

Bernard Switalski

Biography - Bernard Switalski

Graduated high school, 1953. U.S. Army lab technician, Bell Telephone Labs guided missile R&D, White Sands Proving Ground, NM, 1954-1957. Railroad freight conductor, Chicago, 1958-1963. Petroleum products quality/quantity surveyor, mostly in Venezuela, 1964-1965. Blast furnace foreman, Chicago,1966-1968. After that damn blast furnace put me in the ER, got into the heavy industrial construction industry, 1969. First job, laborer. Last job, general construction superintendent, contracted by a Spanish consortium to oversee the construction of a 4 billion dollar grassroots petroleum refinery in Sumatra. Retired, 1986. Somewhere in there, picked up a BA in philosophy. Traveled a lot. As old Cap'n Bill Jensen used to say back there on the Orinoco, "Been round the world two dozen times, first time in a baby buggy, twice in a submarine." Jigged for cod from a dory off Newfoundland; ran like a sissy from an irate cobra in Brunei. Met lots of good people along the way. Switalski died, April 13, 2009 in Riverdale, Illinois.