Notas del Secretario del PC de EEUU Browder sobre la situación en México 1937 08 20 on every little thing he rushes to consult the Chief. And the Chief recent policies will bear a little study. The Chief gives the Fourth International, after admittanc e of Trotsky complete freedom for the most demagogic and extensive propaganda, some of it real provocation. The town is plastered with Fourth International posters calling for general strike, sabotage, occupation of the factories, etc. and condemning the CTM for not leading such movements. Some of the posters carry the slogan: Death to the Moscow Firing Squads. Toledano secretaries agreed to our proposal that the Council of the CTM should adopt a resolution against Trotsky, but the council doesn see to have done it.
And Toledano had a conference with the Chief on the very eve of the Council meeting. Moreover there were no slogans for the USSR carried on Toledano section of the May Day parade, nor, as far as we can find out, any greetings to the Soviet workers adopted at the council. If there were, they have not yet been made public. Toledano speeches to the council did not mention the USSR. This is in spite of the fact that earlier the Workers University had assailed Trotsky and Toledano himself had written in El Universal, a capitalist paper, three rather mild and theoretical articles against Trotskyism, attacking it as mistaken. and saying that it was objectively anti labor and had in its ranks enemies of labor. The Chief has recently sto pped and forbidden land distribution in Yucatan, where it is most needed. The land distribution in Lower California resulted in intense hardships for colonists and small landowners, and it took a sit down strike by 8, 000 of them all last week to force the Chief to promise to go there and investigate and settle the matter. There is no hint of new land distribution anywhere else. The would land distribution program seems to be in retreat. There is much violence against workers, peasants and all progressive elements, which is not adequately repressed by the Chief. Bands calling themselves white guards attack peasants, especially colonists on distributed land, kill their leaders, break up their organizations, burn their houses and the Chief is very patient with all this.
Teachers are being murdered in rural districts all over the country by right wing and Catholic armed bands, without punishment for the murderers.
Instead there was a recent governmental order forbidding teachers to go armed to school.
During the election campaign there were many mass murders of workers in one case machine guns were turned on truck loads of workers going to election meetings, with no punishment for the gangsters involved.