Word: padilla
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Down Mexico City's broad Paseo de la Reforma swept a noisy mob: partisans of Presidential Candidate Miguel Aleman. On their shoulders they bore a black coffin emblazoned in big white letters with the name of former Foreign Minister Ezequiel Padilla, new and rival entry in the Mexican Presidential campaign. Before Alemán's mansion headquarters the paraders stopped, lowered the coffin. Then they set it on fire. With elections still ten months away, the shouting had already begun. Said cynical observers of Mexico's politics: the shooting may be expected momentarily...
...smart Ezequiel Padilla still thought he had a chance to win: ("Nothing will make me desert, even to the ultimate sacrifice if necessary.") He was counting heavily on public reaction against the corruption of officials in power, on a growing wave of popular resentment against the fantastic mordida (bite) that Mexico's venal politicos were taking from a thousand-and-one large and petty rackets, from milk distribution to street paving...
These maneuvers were on the quiet. Far from quiet was the clamor against Padilla as a too obedient friend of the U.S. State Department. In the interest of Pan-American unity, he had favored admitting Argentina to the United Nations conference at San Francisco. Anti-U.S. feeling, always smoldering in Mexico, recently burst into flame with a series of speeches and newspaper articles against Padilla. His collaboration with the U.S., they charged, had turned into "entreguismo" (selling out). A damaging rumor went the rounds-that U.S. Ambassador George S. Messersmith was urging President Harry S. Truman...
...leading Padilla-baiter was Vicente Lombardo Toledano, loud-speaking leftist chief of the powerful Latin American Federation of Labor. At San Francisco, declared Lombardo, Padilla had stooged for the U.S. State Department. He had an "anti-Soviet phobia"; his attacks on the Russian delegation had followed the propaganda line of Generalissimo Francisco Franco, pet hate of Latin American labor...
Hurt and indignant, Padilla denounced his critics for "constant attacks and slander." The same day he resigned...