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Local Brawls and Global Confrontation

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Local Brawls and Global Confrontation Local Brawls and Global Confrontation: transnational political violence among the exiled Left in Mexico City during 1943 Aribert Reimann University of Cologne originally published in: JILAR – Journal for Iberian and Latin American Research 23/1, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1-17, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13260219. 2017.1296173 Abstract This article traces the local and global context of two incidents of political violence among the transnational community of left-wing political exiles in Mexico City during March and April 1943. On both occasions, violent clashes resulted from attempts to commemorate two Polish- Jewish socialists who had been convicted and executed in the Soviet Union as “fifth columnist spies”. A close reading of locations and chronological context relies on primary materials from Mexican, US-American, German, Austrian and Russian archives as well as the contemporary local press. The local logic of political practice (including violence) on the geographic and political periphery of world politics can be deciphered as an urban choreography of larger ideological conflicts among the Left and contributes to our understanding of the political meaning of the conflict as much as the overarching ideological debate that contributed to the global confrontation of the Cold War. Keywords: Exile, Mexico City, political violence, transnational history On Thursday, the 11th of March 1943, the anglophone section of the Mexican newspaper Novedades included a short notice of a violent incident that had occurred the evening before at Calle de República de Cuba no. 81 just three blocks north of the Zócalo, the central plaza of the city. The brief summary of events mentioned that a meeting of “alleged Trotskyists” had been organized to “protest against the execution of two Trotskyist spies by a Soviet firing- squad”. The police, however, had to intervene, the paper explained, “when a part of the audience, which had been brought in by handbills distributed among the local foreign colony, 2 Aribert Reimann: “Local Brawls and Global Confrontation: transnational violence among the exiled Left in Mexico City during 1943”, JILAR 23/1, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1-17. protested against alleged pro-Nazi remarks by those officiating”.1 The matter could have passed as an obscure brawl among foreigners, had it not been for the intervention of the oppositional newspaper Excelsior the following day which displayed a distinctly different attitude towards the confrontation of Wednesday night. The paper explained that the meeting had been organized by the Bund, a socialist association of mainly Polish Jews, to honour the memory of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, two leading Bund functionaries who after the combined German and Soviet attack on Poland in 1939 had found asylum in the USSR. 2 In February 1943, the Soviet ambassador to the United States, Maxim Litvinov, had confirmed that both Ehrlich and Alter had been convicted and executed as „spies“ and „fifth columnists“ traitors. Their Bund comrades immediately launched an international campaign of protest against what they perceived to be an act of Soviet terror against Polish socialists with anti- Semitic undertones.3 This campaign had originated in the U.S. and culminated in a number of commemorative meetings in New York, Chicago, Boston and Newark, as well as in London.4 In Mexico City, however, the meeting of 10th March had not proceeded as planned: Excelsior reported that prior to the opening of the meeting „an unusual number of people of diverse nationalities“ had gathered at the location and did not leave even after the Jewish organizers had advised them that „if they did not understand Yiddish their presence at the meeting would be pointless“. The paper concluded that among the crowd a small group attended the meeting intent on provoking disorder, and reported what followed: When Chopin’s funeral march was about to be performed, the president of the organizing committee asked everybody present to rise. The communists flatly denied to do this and responded with raised voices: “Down with the Nazi agents!”, “Death to the fifth column!”, “Long live the Red Army!”. And obscuring their 1This research forms part of the project “Left-wing Exile in Mexico, 1934-60” at the Institute for Iberian and Latin American History of the University of Cologne and is funded by the European Research Council (grant no. 312717). “Police break up anti-Soviet fest”, Novedades (México, D.F.), 11 Mar 1943, quoted after: Dokumentationsarchiv des Österreichischen Widerstands (DÖW, Vienna), Archiv no. 2903/4, diverse Materialien über Emigration in Mexiko, s. fol. 2 “Escándalo de los Comunistas en el Comité Israelita”, Excelsior (México, D.F.), 12 Mar 1943, 2nd ed., 1 & 4. 3 This campaign was later documented in a brochure: Homenaje a Tresca, Alter y Ehrlich. El asalto stalinista al Centro Cultural Ibero-Mexicano (México D.F.: Centro Cultural Ibero-Mexicano, 1943), 6-10. See also the simultaneous publications of the international campaign of commemoration and protest: The Case of Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter, forword by Camille Huysmans (London: Liberty Publishers, 1943); J. Hart, Henrik Erlich un Wiktor Alter: a lebn fun kempfer – a toit fun martirer (New York: Bund, 1943); Henrik Erlikh un Viktor Alter: Gedank-Bukh (Buenos Aires: Di Bundiše Grupe, 1943); The Living Record of two Leaders of Labor: Henryk Erlich, born 1892; Victor Alter, born 1890; executed – December 1942 (New York: Erlich-Alter Memorial Conference, 1943). 4 George Sirgiovanni, An Undercurrent of Suspicion: Anti-Communism in America during World War II (New Brunswick: Transaction, 1990), 179-85. 3 Aribert Reimann: “Local Brawls and Global Confrontation: transnational violence among the exiled Left in Mexico City during 1943”, JILAR 23/1, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1-17. intentions with “Vivas!” to Mexico they got involved in a brawl with the audience. The violent confrontation was reported to have lasted some time until the police arrived and arrested those suspected of being the authors of the violent disturbance. When, according to Excelsior, weapons such as batons, pistols, and knives emerged, the president of the event, José Zacarías, had closed the meeting „so that no victims would have to be lamented“.5 According to this version of events, the blame for this incident rested firmly with the communists which had gathered in Mexico City during the previous years as refugees from the rise of fascist dictatorships across Europe.6 The transnational community of communists in exile in Mexico gathered around the Sociedad de Amigos de la Unión de las Repúblicas Soviéticas Socialistas (SAURSS, Society of Friends of the Soviet Union), and unsurprisingly its secretary general, Fausto Pomar, contradicted the account of Excelsior. In his view, the meeting to commemorate Erlich and Alter had been used „by the Trotskyists and other groups of enemies of the United Nations as a pretext to cause a scandal thereby to further the propaganda of Goebbels in order to create discord among the allied powers.“ On the night of 10th of March, the meeting’s president José Zacarías had resorted to insults against the Red Army which produced indignation among the majority of those present who protested against the president’s statements with shouts of “Viva México!”, “Long live the allied forces!”, “Long live the Red Army!”, “Down with Hitler and Goebbels!”, “Down with the fifth column!”. The ensuing brawl had been broken up by the police, and Pomar regarded it as „significant that the organizers had kept their plans secret from the authorities, which is understandable since the Mexican authorities never would have permitted an anti-Allied meeting in this democratic country.“7 Evidently, both parties of this conflict engaged in a blame game which tends to obscure the historical record, but it may well be that what is more significant about 5 “Escándalo de los Comunistas”, 4 [trans. A.R.]. 6 From among the extensive literature on the general theme of left-wing political exile in Mexico since the late 1930s, see e.g.: Patricia W. Fagen, Exiles and Citizens. Spanish Republicans in Mexico (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1973) José Luis Abellán (ed.), El Exilio Español de 1939, 6 vols. (Madrid: Taurus, 1976-78); Francisco Caudet, El Exilio Republicano de 1939 (Madrid: Edición Cátedra, 2005); Abdón Mateos, La Batalla de México: final de la Guerra Civil y ayuda a los refugiados, 1939-1945 (Madrid: Alianza, 2009); Fritz Pohle, Das mexikanische Exil. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der politisch-kulturellen Emigration aus Deutschland (1937- 1946) (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986); from a politically more orthodox perspective: Wolfgang Kießling, Alemania Libre in Mexiko. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des antifaschistischen Exils (1941-1946), 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1974). 7 “Una provocación contra la Unidad de los Aliados“, Alemania Libre 2:7 (México, D.F.), 1 Apr 1943, 4, signed for the Society of Friends of the Soviet Union by Fausto Pomar and Dr Enrique Arreguín Jr., 12 Mar 1943, [trans. A.R.]. 4 Aribert Reimann: “Local Brawls and Global Confrontation: transnational violence among the exiled Left in Mexico City during 1943”, JILAR 23/1, no. 1 (2017), pp. 1-17. the night of the 10th March is its local position within the context of political culture and conflict among the transnational Left exiled in Mexico City at that time. The local context of global politics Recent historiography has approached the conflicts among the Left during the 1940s as a key ingredient to a more sophisticated understanding
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