Vicente Lombardo Toledano
Encyclopedia
Vicente Lombardo Toledano (July 16, 1894 – November 16, 1968) was one of the foremost Mexican
labor leaders of the 20th century. He founded the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the national labor federation most closely associated with the ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party
(PRI), for most of the last sixty-five years of that century. Purged from the union after World War II
, he co-founded, along with Narciso Bassols
, the political party, "Partido Popular", later known as the Partido Popular Socialista
.
, Puebla
, to middle-class parents. After obtaining his law degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico
(UNAM) in 1919, he pursued a master's degree in philosophy and letters there, and he began teaching at both the Popular University and at UNAM. He taught at UNAM until 1933 and it was there that he became a member of an informal group known as los siete sabios (the seven sages). It was while teaching there he helped organize a teachers' union. In 1921 he joined the Labor Party.
As leader of that teachers' union he entered the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana
(CROM), the largest and most powerful union confederation of the day and a key supporter of the regimes of Plutarco Elías Calles
and Álvaro Obregón
. Lombardo Toledano served as the house intellectual for CROM, not benefiting directly from its corruption, but acquiring access to power instead. Lombardo Toledano served as interim Governor of Puebla in 1923, was a councilman in the Federal District
in 1924 to 1925 and was a congressional
deputy
from 1926 to 1928.
CROM lost most of its influence in 1928, after a right-wing Roman Catholic associated with the Cristero movement
assassinated Obregón. Lombardo Toledano left CROM and the Labor Party in 1932. He had organized a faction called "Purified CROM" that left the CROM en masse in 1932, which left the CROM representing only a few unions in the textile industry. The Purified CROM became the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) in 1936, allying with the populist
President Lázaro Cárdenas
and the ruling Party of the Mexican Revoluion (PRM), a rival to the Labor Party associated with CROM. Lombardo Toledano was the secretary general of the CTM from 1936 to 1940.
was one of los cinco lobitos, or five wolf cubs, who led the CSTDF.
With Velázquez's group and the CGT Lombardo Toledano formed a new federation, the Confederación General de Obreros y Campesinos de México (CGOCM). That group subsequently transformed itself into the CTM in 1936.
The CTM had a strong relationship with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río
from its creation. While Lombardo Toledano had opposed Cárdenas' candidacy in 1934, the CTM was the chief beneficiary of Cárdenas' need for labor support for his government, after the employers of Monterrey, Nuevo León, called an employers' strike on February 5, 1936. Cárdenas led a demonstration in Monterrey in which he called for unification of the various labor organizations into one national body associated with the PRI, then named the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano.
The political crisis deepened when Calles launched a series of verbal attacks on Cárdenas that amounted to a call for his overthrow. The "Purified" CROM, the CSTDF, other labor bodies and the PCM rallied to defend Cárdenas. With their support Cárdenas had Calles and Morones arrested and deported that year.
The CTM was formed shortly thereafter, absorbing the major petroleum workers and railroad workers unions. It also had the support of the Mexican Communist Party
(PCM) and the industrial unions it had founded. Those unions nearly walked out of the CTM twice in its early years, however— the first time at the founding convention of the CTM in 1936, when Lombardo Toledano chose Velázquez, rather than the individual from their wing who had been promised the position, as organizational secretary of the new organization and a second time the following year. In both cases, however, the unions returned under orders to accept unity at any cost as part of the party's Popular Front
policy.
Lombardo Toledano was never, as far as it is possible to determine, a member of the PCM. He had, however, even stronger support from the Soviet Union
during the Popular Front
era than the nominal leaders of the PCM. Following the policy of that era, he and the CTM supported the Cárdenas administration enthusiastically, intervening to moderate union demands during the railroad and electrical workers' strikes in 1936 and the petroleum workers' strike in 1937. Lombardo Toledano and the CTM were vocal supporters for Cárdenas' nationalization of the oil industry in 1938.
Lombardo Toledano also formed the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina in 1938. John L. Lewis
from the Congress of Industrial Organizations
attended its founding; the U.S.
American Federation of Labor
boycotted it.
, had been a protégé of Cárdenas, but was more conservative. He engineered Velázquez's appointment as head of the CTM when Lombardo Toledano did not stand for reelection in 1941. Lombardo Toledano remained influential in CTM, pursuing a course of support for the war effort and opposition to strikes when Mexico entered the war against Hitler.
Lombardo Toledano soon fell out, however, with the CTM and the government. Although the CTM had (along with the CGT, CROM and the electrical workers union) formally aligned with the PRI in 1938, Lombardo Toledano concluded that the PRI, now led by Miguel Alemán Valdés
, was too conservative and formed his own party, the Partido Popular, to run against it. The Partido Popular never achieved more than fringe party status; it was renamed the Partido Popular Socialista
in 1960.
The CTM refused, however, to support Lombardo Toledano's new party. Velázquez formally expelled Lombardo Toledano from the CTM in 1948. Lombardo Toledano left the union, but only after delivering a bitter denunciation of those who had brought about his downfall. He also referred to himself in the first person ("yo") sixty-four times in that speech — a fact noted by some newspapers, which proceeded to nickname him the "Yo-yo Champion".
Lombardo Toledano launched two publications, a magazine called América Latina and a daily called El Popular, while continuing to publish books, pamphlets and newspaper articles. He also founded the Workers' University in 1936, which he headed until his death.
Mexico
The United Mexican States , commonly known as Mexico , is a federal constitutional republic in North America. It is bordered on the north by the United States; on the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; on the southeast by Guatemala, Belize, and the Caribbean Sea; and on the east by the Gulf of...
labor leaders of the 20th century. He founded the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the national labor federation most closely associated with the ruling party, the Institutional Revolutionary Party
Institutional Revolutionary Party
The Institutional Revolutionary Party is a Mexican political party that held power in the country—under a succession of names—for more than 70 years. The PRI is a member of the Socialist International, as is the rival Party of the Democratic Revolution , making Mexico one of the few...
(PRI), for most of the last sixty-five years of that century. Purged from the union after World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, he co-founded, along with Narciso Bassols
Narciso Bassols
Narciso Bassols García was a Mexican lawyer, socialist politician, ambassador to France, Russia, and the United Kingdom, and professor of law at the National University of Mexico. He co-founded the Popular Party , and the League of Political Action...
, the political party, "Partido Popular", later known as the Partido Popular Socialista
Popular Socialist Party (Mexico)
The Popular Socialist Party is a communist party in Mexico. It was founded in 1948 as the Popular Party by Vicente Lombardo Toledano....
.
Early career
Lombardo Toledano was born in TeziutlánTeziutlán
Teziutlán is a small city in the northeast of the Mexican state of Puebla. Its 2005 census population was 60,597. It also serves as the municipal seat for the surrounding municipality of the same name. The municipality has an area of 84.2 km² and a population of 88,970.Teziutlán is located at...
, Puebla
Puebla
Puebla officially Estado Libre y Soberano de Puebla is one of the 31 states which, with the Federal District, comprise the 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided in 217 municipalities and its capital city is Puebla....
, to middle-class parents. After obtaining his law degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico
National Autonomous University of Mexico
The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México is a university in Mexico. UNAM was founded on 22 September 1910 by Justo Sierra as a liberal alternative to the Roman Catholic-sponsored Royal and Pontifical University of Mexico The Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) (National Autonomous...
(UNAM) in 1919, he pursued a master's degree in philosophy and letters there, and he began teaching at both the Popular University and at UNAM. He taught at UNAM until 1933 and it was there that he became a member of an informal group known as los siete sabios (the seven sages). It was while teaching there he helped organize a teachers' union. In 1921 he joined the Labor Party.
As leader of that teachers' union he entered the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana
Regional Confederation of Mexican Workers
The Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana is a federation of labor unions in Mexico....
(CROM), the largest and most powerful union confederation of the day and a key supporter of the regimes of Plutarco Elías Calles
Plutarco Elías Calles
Plutarco Elías Calles was a Mexican general and politician. He was president of Mexico from 1924 to 1928, but he continued to be the de facto ruler from 1928–1935, a period known as the maximato...
and Álvaro Obregón
Álvaro Obregón
General Álvaro Obregón Salido was the President of Mexico from 1920 to 1924. He was assassinated in 1928, shortly after winning election to another presidential term....
. Lombardo Toledano served as the house intellectual for CROM, not benefiting directly from its corruption, but acquiring access to power instead. Lombardo Toledano served as interim Governor of Puebla in 1923, was a councilman in the Federal District
Mexico City
Mexico City is the Federal District , capital of Mexico and seat of the federal powers of the Mexican Union. It is a federal entity within Mexico which is not part of any one of the 31 Mexican states but belongs to the federation as a whole...
in 1924 to 1925 and was a congressional
Congress of Mexico
The Congress of the Union is the legislative branch of the Mexican government...
deputy
Chamber of Deputies of Mexico
The Chamber of Deputies is the lower house of the Congress of the Union, Mexico's bicameral legislature. The structure and responsibilities of both chambers of Congress are defined in Articles 50 to 70 of the current constitution.-Composition:The Chamber of Deputies is composed of one federal...
from 1926 to 1928.
CROM lost most of its influence in 1928, after a right-wing Roman Catholic associated with the Cristero movement
Cristero War
The Cristero War of 1926 to 1929 was an uprising and counter-revolution against the Mexican government in power at that time. The rebellion was set off by the strict enforcement of the anti-clerical provisions of the Mexican Constitution of 1917 and the expansion of further anti-clerical laws...
assassinated Obregón. Lombardo Toledano left CROM and the Labor Party in 1932. He had organized a faction called "Purified CROM" that left the CROM en masse in 1932, which left the CROM representing only a few unions in the textile industry. The Purified CROM became the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM) in 1936, allying with the populist
Populism
Populism can be defined as an ideology, political philosophy, or type of discourse. Generally, a common theme compares "the people" against "the elite", and urges social and political system changes. It can also be defined as a rhetorical style employed by members of various political or social...
President Lázaro Cárdenas
Lázaro Cárdenas
Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940.-Early life:Lázaro Cárdenas was born on May 21, 1895 in a lower-middle class family in the village of Jiquilpan, Michoacán. He supported his family from age 16 after the death of his father...
and the ruling Party of the Mexican Revoluion (PRM), a rival to the Labor Party associated with CROM. Lombardo Toledano was the secretary general of the CTM from 1936 to 1940.
Formation of the CTM and alliance with Cárdenas
Outside the CROM, Lombardo Toledano began to build a rival federation that combined his "purified" CROM with other labor groups, Among the first with whom he allied was the Confederación Sindical de Trabajadores del Distrito Federal, a union that included among its members not only low-wage workers, but professionals, strikebreakers, some street vendors and other members of the informal economy. Fidel Velázquez SánchezFidel Velázquez Sánchez
Fidel Velázquez Sánchez was the preeminent Mexican union leader of the 20th century. In 1936 he was one of the original founders, along with Vicente Lombardo Toledano, of the Confederation of Mexican Workers , the national labor federation most closely associated with the ruling party, the...
was one of los cinco lobitos, or five wolf cubs, who led the CSTDF.
With Velázquez's group and the CGT Lombardo Toledano formed a new federation, the Confederación General de Obreros y Campesinos de México (CGOCM). That group subsequently transformed itself into the CTM in 1936.
The CTM had a strong relationship with the government of Lázaro Cárdenas del Río
Lázaro Cárdenas
Lázaro Cárdenas del Río was President of Mexico from 1934 to 1940.-Early life:Lázaro Cárdenas was born on May 21, 1895 in a lower-middle class family in the village of Jiquilpan, Michoacán. He supported his family from age 16 after the death of his father...
from its creation. While Lombardo Toledano had opposed Cárdenas' candidacy in 1934, the CTM was the chief beneficiary of Cárdenas' need for labor support for his government, after the employers of Monterrey, Nuevo León, called an employers' strike on February 5, 1936. Cárdenas led a demonstration in Monterrey in which he called for unification of the various labor organizations into one national body associated with the PRI, then named the Partido Revolucionario Mexicano.
The political crisis deepened when Calles launched a series of verbal attacks on Cárdenas that amounted to a call for his overthrow. The "Purified" CROM, the CSTDF, other labor bodies and the PCM rallied to defend Cárdenas. With their support Cárdenas had Calles and Morones arrested and deported that year.
The CTM was formed shortly thereafter, absorbing the major petroleum workers and railroad workers unions. It also had the support of the Mexican Communist Party
Mexican Communist Party
The Mexican Communist Party was a communist party in Mexico. It was founded in 1911 as the Socialist Workers' Party by Manabendra Nath Roy, a left-wing Indian intellectual. The PSO changed its name to the Mexican Communist Party in November 1919 following the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia...
(PCM) and the industrial unions it had founded. Those unions nearly walked out of the CTM twice in its early years, however— the first time at the founding convention of the CTM in 1936, when Lombardo Toledano chose Velázquez, rather than the individual from their wing who had been promised the position, as organizational secretary of the new organization and a second time the following year. In both cases, however, the unions returned under orders to accept unity at any cost as part of the party's Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
policy.
Lombardo Toledano was never, as far as it is possible to determine, a member of the PCM. He had, however, even stronger support from the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
during the Popular Front
Popular front
A popular front is a broad coalition of different political groupings, often made up of leftists and centrists. Being very broad, they can sometimes include centrist and liberal forces as well as socialist and communist groups...
era than the nominal leaders of the PCM. Following the policy of that era, he and the CTM supported the Cárdenas administration enthusiastically, intervening to moderate union demands during the railroad and electrical workers' strikes in 1936 and the petroleum workers' strike in 1937. Lombardo Toledano and the CTM were vocal supporters for Cárdenas' nationalization of the oil industry in 1938.
Lombardo Toledano also formed the Confederación de Trabajadores de América Latina in 1938. John L. Lewis
John L. Lewis
John Llewellyn Lewis was an American leader of organized labor who served as president of the United Mine Workers of America from 1920 to 1960...
from the Congress of Industrial Organizations
Congress of Industrial Organizations
The Congress of Industrial Organizations, or CIO, proposed by John L. Lewis in 1932, was a federation of unions that organized workers in industrial unions in the United States and Canada from 1935 to 1955. The Taft-Hartley Act of 1947 required union leaders to swear that they were not...
attended its founding; the U.S.
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
boycotted it.
Fall from power
Cárdenas' successor, Manuel Ávila CamachoManuel Ávila Camacho
Manuel Ávila Camacho served as the President of Mexico from 1940 to 1946.Manuel Ávila was born in the city of Teziutlán, a small town in Puebla, to middle-class parents, Manuel Ávila Castillo and Eufrosina Camacho Bello. He had several siblings, among them sister María Jovita Ávila Camacho and...
, had been a protégé of Cárdenas, but was more conservative. He engineered Velázquez's appointment as head of the CTM when Lombardo Toledano did not stand for reelection in 1941. Lombardo Toledano remained influential in CTM, pursuing a course of support for the war effort and opposition to strikes when Mexico entered the war against Hitler.
Lombardo Toledano soon fell out, however, with the CTM and the government. Although the CTM had (along with the CGT, CROM and the electrical workers union) formally aligned with the PRI in 1938, Lombardo Toledano concluded that the PRI, now led by Miguel Alemán Valdés
Miguel Alemán Valdés
Miguel Alemán Valdés served as the President of Mexico from 1946 to 1952.-Life:Alemán was born in Sayula in the state of Veracruz as the son of General Miguel Alemán González and Tomasa Valdés Ledezma...
, was too conservative and formed his own party, the Partido Popular, to run against it. The Partido Popular never achieved more than fringe party status; it was renamed the Partido Popular Socialista
Popular Socialist Party (Mexico)
The Popular Socialist Party is a communist party in Mexico. It was founded in 1948 as the Popular Party by Vicente Lombardo Toledano....
in 1960.
The CTM refused, however, to support Lombardo Toledano's new party. Velázquez formally expelled Lombardo Toledano from the CTM in 1948. Lombardo Toledano left the union, but only after delivering a bitter denunciation of those who had brought about his downfall. He also referred to himself in the first person ("yo") sixty-four times in that speech — a fact noted by some newspapers, which proceeded to nickname him the "Yo-yo Champion".
Lombardo Toledano launched two publications, a magazine called América Latina and a daily called El Popular, while continuing to publish books, pamphlets and newspaper articles. He also founded the Workers' University in 1936, which he headed until his death.
External references
Further reading
- La Botz, Dan, The Crisis in Mexican Labor, New York: Praeger, 1988. ISBN 0-275-92600-1