Word: l
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Where Are You Going? López Mateos climbed the slippery slopes of politics with the aid of a fine baritone speaking voice, a gift for oratory, a quick wit, and a knack for making close and lasting friendships. At college in Toluca, he was an ardent campus politician and belonged to the Socialist coalition, which at that time was the major opposition to the government's National Revolutionary Party, now the all-dominant Revolutionary Institutional Party (P.R.I.). In 1929 Colonel Carlos Riva Palacio, head of the government party, came to Toluca for a party convention, and L...
Mountain Meeting. Riding the bus to the office and the university from his home in the Mexico City district of Santa Maria, López Mateos kept running into a fellow rider from the same district named Miguel Alemán. Alemán was already practicing law, and when López Mateos set out to arrange a pension for his mother as a descendant of a national hero, Attorney Alemán saw the case successfully through the courts. "From that time on," says López Mateos, "we have been friends." (López Mateos' mother...
...mountain-climbing party in 1938, López Mateos met a pretty young schoolteacher named Eva Sámano. López Mateos married her in 1940. Señora López Mateos' grandfather was British, and she is ardently Anglophile and pro-U.S., but her affection for the U.S. never rubbed off on her husband. He compounds the Mexican's moody distrust of the Colossus of the North with an unshakable belief that the U.S. is run by and for a profit-hungry band of bankers. Told once that only 5% of all U.S. citizens...
Walking & Talking. In 1945 Miguel Alemán was nominated for the presidency by the P.R.I. Remembering López Mateos' gift of oratory, Alemán asked him to serve as one of his top campaigners. López Mateos handled the job with such brilliance that Alemán, with P.R.I, at his disposal, gratefully arranged his election as Senator from the state of Mexico...
Aleman sent López Mateos off to international conferences in Washington (where he developed a taste for U.S. cheesecake from Duke Zeibert's Restaurant), Argentina and Switzerland, and appointed him Ambassador to Costa Rica. Moving higher in government circles, he met a top bureaucrat named Adolfo Ruiz Cortines. Soon the two Adolfos were taking long and friendly walks through the city at night. When Ruiz Cortines was nominated as P.R.I.'s presidential candidate in 1951, he got López Mateos to manage his campaign. López Mateos did so well that on inauguration...