In Mexico’s Cold War, Renata Keller writes, “Mexicans’ responses to the Cuban Revolution grew out of the international, national, and local political climates. They interpreted the events in Cuba through the lens of their own struggles, and vice versa.” As time wore on, “conservative groups, the media, and members of Mexico’s intelligence organizations immediately started blaming Mexican unrest on Cuban subversion.” This makes sense amid the paranoia of the Cold War. As Keller writes later, “Fear of communism went so deep among Mexico’s security agents that even a lack of evidence could be interpreted as a plot.” Summarizing the Mexican intelligence services’ thinking, she writes, “This sort of logic negated the value of evidence and rested purely on speculation: the communists were planning to agitate the public, and any evidence to the contrary was a trick.”
I admit to a lack of knowledge about Mexican history following the 1860s, so I cannot judge the validity of Keller’s argument against other sources. With that caveat in place, I believe that her evidence supports her argument when she writes, “Institutionalization, co-optation, manipulation, and repression – combined to create the appearance of a pax PRIista in Mexico in the early years of the Cold War…the nation’s leaders knew that their power was never absolute, their control over the country never complete. They had to negotiate and defend their authority in multiple arenas and on local, national, and international levels.” The fine line Keller describes the government walking between the public’s perceptions and expectations, the government’s international contacts, and its own aims demonstrates a quasi-democracy. While the Mexican government had a great deal of power, it also knew it had to appease its people and balance support to and from the United States and Cuba in order to maintain that power. By the time of the Cold War, the term “regime” seems mostly appropriate.
Keller writes, “The Mexican government’s inability to find a peaceful way to resolve conflicts like the student movement of 1968 heightened the Cold War into a dirty war. Thanks in part to unreliable information from their intelligence agents, Mexico’s leaders misinterpreted the causes of the new revolutionary movement.” The student’s ability to organize and draw support from revolutionary traditions throughout Latin America were their greatest strengths. As to why a government would relent, the conflicts of information and the insistence on an international communist conspiracy likely played a role. As Keller writes, “This theory allowed them to place the blame for Mexico’s problems outside the country and it enabled them to avoid taking a hard look at some of the ways that they were failing to live up to the legacy of the Mexican Revolution.” Perhaps a combination of an easy, if fictional, scapegoat and an awareness of the public perception problem they were causing led the Mexican government to eventually relent. ( )