President who gave Trotsky in Mexico

GENERAL Lazaro Cardenas who died in Mexico City this week, aged 75, was the Mexican president who gave asylum to Leon Trotsky in 1937.

General Cardenas was one of the leading generals of the Mexican revolution from 1910 to 1920 and was elected president in 1934.

His land reform policies won wide support among the peasantry, though Cardenas himself occupied a Bonapartist position, balancing politically between the peasantry and workers and the great oil interests.

When Trotsky and his wife were ordered out of Norway in 1937 the Mexican painter Diego Riveira interceded with Cardenas and asked him to give Trotsky asylum.

• Pressure Cardenas agreed, despite the intense Stalinist diplomatic blackmail and pressure against this decision.

He declared that he had not only granted Trotsky asylum, but had invited him to be the government's guest.

Right up to Trotsky's assassination on August 20, 1940, Cardenas was faithful to his pledge.

His only condition was that Trotsky should not interfere in Mexico's internal affairs, a condition to which Trotsky adhered scrupulously.

Despite a virulent Stalinist campaign inside and outside Mexico against his actions in harbouring Trotsky, Cardenas defended his right to speak out against the Stalinist slanderers.

Cardenas was not a revolutionary, despite his offer of asylum to Trotsky. But by standing up • to the Stalinist slander campaign during those bleak years of reaction, he did an important service to the development of the Fourth International. NEW SUBSCRIPTION RATES FOR 6-DAY WORKERS PRESS The Workers Press is now being published on six days a week. The production of the extra Monday issue will be decisive at, this time when the Tories are planning an all-out onslaught against the working class with their anti-union laws and attacks on wages and living conditions. Only Workers Press has fought for revolutionary leadership inside the working class in arder to force the Tories to resign.

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