3    Mexican-Soviet Encounters in the Early 1960s

Tractors of Discord

VANNI PETTINÀ

In November 1959, Anastas Mikoyan, vice premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev’s close ally, landed in Mexico City to inaugurate a major exhibition of Soviet technical and scientific products. Several meetings with the main political leaders of the country, including President Adolfo López Mateos, were also on the agenda. Life magazine, in its photographic coverage of the visit, under the witty title “Mik’s Mexican Mix,” showed Mikoyan drinking tequila and, later, wolfing down some tacos in a clumsy attempt to counterbalance the intoxicating effect of the agave-based liquor. In the background, one could observe attentive Mexican officials advising the vice premier of the USSR on the best way to enjoy the tequila and, of course, the tacos.

The comic and somewhat inappropriate image of Mikoyan proposed by Life in its report could not have been more misleading. The smiles and the ungainly gestures were the façade of the official visit of the most important Soviet politician that a Latin American country had ever received. Mikoyan’s presence in Mexico was a key move in the strategy of expansion of the Soviet influence in the Third World, launched by Khrushchev after the death of Stalin. Latin America was included in that plan as early as 1956.1 On the other hand, the careful attention shown by Mexican officials toward Mikoyan highlighted the importance of the Soviet guest for President Adolfo López Mateos and his strategy of economic and political development at a time when Mexican economic prospects were rather dull. In an analysis of the outcome of Mikoyan’s trip, Time magazine reported that “crisscrossing Mexico in President López Mateos’ twin-motor Fairchild Fokker last week, the Soviet Union’s first deputy Premier Anastas Mikoyan sold an image of Russia that was impressive and friendly.”2 Despite the tacos and the tequila, Mikoyan’s visit had been very serious business and, up to a point, a success for the bilateral diplomatic relations between the two countries, opening new possibilities driven by a promising expansion of economic and commercial relations between Mexico and the USSR. However, as we shall see, the hopes generated by the visit of the Soviet statesman were not fulfilled by the end of López Mateos’s term.

Based on primary sources from archives of the former Soviet Union, the United States and Mexico, this chapter aims to analyze how the climate of enthusiasm of November 1959 waned into much more limited results achieved by 1964.3 In particular, I will show that for the first time since the beginning of the Cold War in 1947, a number of factors created the conditions for a possible rapprochement between Mexico and the USSR between the late 1950s and the early 1960s. At the same time, I will demonstrate that Mexico’s heavy commercial dependence on the United States, as well as internal disagreements in the Mexican political establishment, hampered the process of rapprochement between the two countries. Finally, I will also stress how logistical difficulties and some Soviet naïveté in dealing with Mexican politicians came to limit the projection of Soviet influence in the region.

In order to illustrate the political and logistical problems of the rapprochement, this chapter will analyze the episode of the problematic sale of Soviet tractors to Mexico, one element in a possible economic convergence between the two countries. As we shall see, the economic and political difficulties related to the sale and delivery of tractors clearly show the limitations faced by the Mexican Ostpolitik toward the USSR and vice versa during the early 1960s.

It should also be noted that the late 1950s and early 1960s were crucial for the shaping of a new Mexican Third World identity, and Mexico’s relationship with the USSR was part of a broader attempt, carried out during the presidency of López Mateos, to question the country’s rigid allegiance to Washington in the context of the Cold War. Thus, López Mateos also sought to develop relationships with some of the most influential leaders of other Third World countries, such as Nehru of India, Sukarno of Indonesia and Tito of Yugoslavia, as well as to define the nature of its possible participation in Third World organizations and groups such as the Non-Aligned Movement.4 Mexico’s sentimental education during the early 1960s came to maturity By the 1970s, President Luis Echeverría Álvarez (1970–76) was a leading voice among Third World countries, and Mexico and the USSR signed a treaty of economic cooperation that strengthened their bilateral relations.5 Although Mexico never completely embraced a Third Wordlist narrative—nor did it break its alliance with the United States—its political relations became much more diversified between the 1960s and the 1970s and a Third World identity progressively became an important component of what could be defined as a hybrid international position—one that, without breaking with the United States, constantly tried to increase the country’s margin of autonomy and its convergence with other Third World countries.

The history of the relations between Mexico and the Soviet Union after the Second World War and particularly throughout the 1960s has received little attention from either Mexican or international scholars. Moreover, the scanty research that has been produced on this topic was unable to access Soviet primary sources or combine them with archival material from other countries.6 More broadly, though, the historiographical gap is a consequence of a general lack of interest in the international history of Mexico during the Cold War and especially in the 1960s.7 With the notable exception of studies of the relations between Mexico and the Cuban Revolution, this is an unfortunate vacuum, considering that, from 1958 onward, Mexican foreign policy experienced a significant expansion of its geographical radius.8

As this chapter will show, the globalization of the country’s foreign policy and its rapprochement with the USSR were part of an attempt to diversify Mexican political and commercial relations. The late 1950s were a particularly complex time for economic development in Third World countries. In Mexico, the lack of resources to pursue industrialization, the deficit of its balance of payments, and the volatility of primary commodity markets threatened to disrupt the industrialization process through import substitution (sustitución de importación) that the governing Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI, Institutional Revolutionary Party) systematically sought to develop after 1946. Mexican foreign policy tried to respond to this situation with a strategy of diversifying its political and commercial relations, which included, among other things, the unprecedented—if incomplete—attempt to raise the level of cooperation with the USSR. In spite of the difficulties involved, the attempt reveals that the political class did not lack a complex and imaginative strategic vision, one that transcended the bilateral relationship with the United States and even Inter-American relations to encompass a genuinely global scale.

Despite maintaining a close Cold War relationship with its northern neighbor, Mexico frequently sought to assert greater independence over its approaches to trade and foreign policy. Like other moderate nationalists, Mexican president Adolfo López Mateos therefore responded enthusiastically to growing Soviet interest in economic relations with Latin America during the late 1950s. Here López Mateos greets Soviet vice premier Anastas Mikoyan during the latter’s goodwill trip to Mexico City in late 1959. (Image courtesy of Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, México.)

The present research aims to reconstruct some crucial aspects of the process of interaction between Latin America, the USSR, and the socialist bloc in the late 1950s and the first half of the 1960s. In the last few years, especially since the publication of Odd Arne Westad’s work, historians have shown much greater interest in the relations between the USSR and the Third World. However, Latin American international history has persistently remained focused on the relations between the region and the United States. In spite of recent efforts by such authors as Michelle Getchell and Tobias Rupprecht, the reconstruction of the dynamics of interaction between Latin America and the socialist bloc still lags behind.9 Seeking to help fill this gap, this chapter documents a serious Mexican-Soviet interest in strengthening commercial and political bilateral relations, as well as the ideological and logistical challenges involved.

Mexico and the Opportunities for Diversification

On 18 November 1959, an Ilyushin-18 turboprop, the latest technological jewel of Soviet commercial aeronautics, landed in Mexico City. On board were Anastas I. Mikoyan and a group of twenty-nine persons that included the wife of the Soviet leader. A crowd of approximately four to five hundred people, headed by Mexico’s secretary of foreign affairs, Manuel Tello, received Mikoyan waving red carnations and shouting “¡Viva la Uníon Soviética!”10

Mikoyan’s Ilyushin landed in a Mexico that had considerably advanced in its process of socioeconomic transformation since the end of the Second World War. As Soledad Loaeza points out, the “Mexican miracle” had dramatically altered the “physiognomy” of the country: “Pipelines, industrial zones, hydroelectric systems, port works, residential areas, labor colonies had been built.”11 Thanks to a successful policy of “import substitution” by industrialization, implemented systematically from the mandate of Miguel Aleman (1946–52) onward, the country saw its gross domestic product (GDP) grow 6 percent per year between 1950 and 1962; the production of goods doubled compared to 1940, and industry came to represent 35 percent of the national product.12 During these years, the Mexican federal state expanded its regulatory functions and its active participation in industrial promotion, without disregarding the role of private investment. Despite high inequality levels generated by the characteristics of the Mexican development model—economic growth combined with the expansion of the bureaucratic apparatus of the state—the country registered sustained social mobility, evidenced by middle-class growth from 16 to 26 percent of the population between 1940 and the end of 1960s.13

However, by the end of the 1950s, the Mexican development model had begun to encounter significant problems. With the decline in export volumes and prices, of cotton and coffee in particular, the balance of payments had become negative, reducing the inflow of foreign exchange necessary for the acquisition of capital badly needed to nourish the industrialization process of the country. According to U.S. data, by 1961, annual GDP growth had fallen to 3.5 percent, an alarming figure for a country with an annual population growth of 3 percent.14 The López Mateos administration laid the blame for the country’s difficulties on the imbalances of the international economic system, which, as a consequence of the protectionism of the economic center of the world and the unfavorable terms of trade for primary goods, hampered the development processes of Third World countries.15 In fact, at the end of the 1950s, the problem of negative balances of payments caused by the instability of commodity markets or the lack of capital and foreign exchange threatened not only Latin American countries such as Mexico. Nehru’s India, for one, was in a similar situation at the beginning of its second five-year plan and, like Mexico, in search of alternative paths to foster its development plans.16 In the Mexican case, some of the distortions criticized by President López Mateos were inevitably attributable to the trade asymmetry with the United States, Mexico’s main trading partner, and called attention to the need to transform this situation of rigid dependency.17

As a result of this analysis of the international economic context, the beginning of the presidency of López Mateos was marked by a strategy that aimed to further the nationalization of the economy, in addition to the search for greater commercial diversification. In January 1959, the president issued a decree requiring all government offices, agencies, and state-owned enterprises to use only raw materials of Mexican origin rather than imports. The Mexican private sector had already been subject to a policy of restrictions on its imports, which the decree now extended to the public sector. As emphasized in a note from the U.S. embassy in Mexico, the decree itself was less important than the fact that it showed the zeal with which the new Mexican administration wanted to implement its announced policy of reducing imports to a minimum in support of the industrialization and development needs of the country.18 The nationalization law of the country’s power industry, issued in September 1960, and new legislation that required Mexican companies producing raw or strategic materials to be 51 percent Mexican-owned, completed the internal framework of measures aimed at a nationalization of the economy.19

At the international level, the new diversification strategy led Mexico to intensify its interaction with the countries of the region. In January and February 1959, López Mateos made his “grand tour” of Latin America. According to the U.S. embassy in Mexico, the Mexican president visited Venezuela, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, and Peru to promote trade relations between Mexico and Latin America. The entry of Mexico into the Latin American Free Trade Association, created by the Treaty of Montevideo in February 1960, completed the regional framework of the strategy of economic diversification.20

The activism of President López Mateos was not limited to the Inter-American sphere. He also sought to develop relations with countries such as Indonesia, India, the Philippines, and Japan. Moreover, the Mexican president, although cautious, drew closer to the Non-Aligned Movement, which sought to make international economic structures more favorable to Third World development processes. At the last minute, Mexico decided not to participate in the Conference of Non-Aligned Countries held in Belgrade during August and September 1961, but it did take part in the Conference on Economic Affairs held in Cairo in 1962 and, under observer status, in the 1964 Second Conference of Non-Aligned Countries.21

It was in the context of the Mexican economic downturn and within the framework of the diversification process launched by López Mateos that Mikoyan’s visit occurred. Mexican diplomatic documents show an increasing Mexican interest in Soviet engagement with other Latin American countries since at least 1958. Mexican diplomats, for example, closely monitored the process that led to the signing of various trade and credit agreements between Moscow and Buenos Aires in 1958–59. In January 1958, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked its diplomatic headquarters in Moscow to explain in detail the terms of the Soviet offer to Argentina of “abundant long-term loans at very low rates” mentioned in a Mexican telegram. Likewise, Mexican diplomats attentively reported the Soviet willingness to provide credit and machinery for the development of the Argentine oil industry, formalized in a commercial agreement in May 1959.22

In a long editorial in Comercio Exterior (Foreign Trade), a journal published by the state-owned Banco Nacional de Comercio Exterior (BANCOMEXT, National Exterior Commerce Bank), the reasons why Mexico followed the evolution of Argentine-Soviet relations were lucidly clarified. According to the editorialist, “the interest and motivations of several Latin American republics to increase trade volumes” with socialist countries were due to the fact that, after the end of the Korean War, “the traditional markets of some primary products had begun to weaken, and then, with the passage of time, the difficulties of Latin American export trade worsened.” The author went on to explain that “recent experience” had shown that the fall in demand for primary products was linked not simply “to the cyclical reduction of economic activity in the major industrial centers of the West, but also to longer-term trends.” The relationship with the socialist bloc offered the possibility of “placing part of the exportable goods in new markets” and also receiving “in return for their own sales … the fuels and capital goods that were badly needed for economic development.”23

While Mexico was thus interested in probing whether and to what extent the Soviet Union would support the Mexican diversification strategy, from Moscow’s point of view, expanding relations with a country traditionally close to the United States, and in a geographical position of great strategic interest, could represent a significant potential success for the strategy of expansion of Soviet influence in Latin America at the expense of Washington.

The Soviet Exhibition of 1959 and the Approach to Mexico

Soviet analysts had a very accurate reading of the the peculiar characteristics of Mexico’s political system and its international place in the world at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s. Thus, a report of the Academy of Sciences in 1960 acknowledged the existence of formally democratic institutions and political pluralism, but stated that the real power in the country was held by the president and the PRI. From an economic point of view, Moscow considered that Mexico was “a comparatively developed economy within Latin America” since it did not depend on the sale of a single primary product on the international market. According to Soviet Latin Americanists, its mineral reserves and its production of oil, copper, and silver contributed to a diversified economy. The document also noted the strong impulse given to industrialization, especially in the energy and metallurgical sectors. The high development of both consumer and export agriculture complemented the picture of an economy that the Soviets assessed as relatively diversified and endowed with a complex productive base. At the same time, Soviet Latin Americanists were aware of the extreme levels of poverty and high levels of illiteracy that characterized the country, as well as its heavy commercial and financial dependence on the United States.

At this time, the Mexican state controlled significant parts of the national economy, and López Mateos’s administration was determined to raise the levels of industrial and agricultural production by means of further state intervention, despite opposition coming from domestic economic and financial circles, particularly those connected to the United States, and from the American diplomatic establishment itself. According to Soviet diplomats, this domestic policy, coupled with López Mateos’s attempt to pursue a more autonomous foreign policy with respect to the United States, had generated “serious differences” between Mexico and Washington especially on issues related to trade and the economy.24 In one report, Vladimir Bazykin, the Soviet ambassador to Mexico, stressed the new emphasis placed by the López Mateos administration on the issue of state-led industrialization and the quest for greater independence from the United States:

Compared with the previous one, the current government of Mexico more consistently seeks the industrialization of the country, and first of all, the development of the oil, metallurgical, electrical, and chemical industries. They see it as a means of gradual liberation from the country’s economic dependence on the United States. At the same time, they aim to expand the foreign market by developing trade links with the countries of Europe, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. President López Mateos is in favor of establishing personal contacts with the leaders of other countries and to some extent aspires to leadership in Latin America. In relation to the United States, he takes a more courageous position compared to his predecessors.25

The exhibition and Mikoyan’s visit offered Moscow an opportunity to exploit U.S.-Mexican tensions and disagreements while potentially giving Mexico economic and trade tools to underpin its state-led economic development process, reduce its dependence on Washington and increase, incidentally, the Soviet influence in the region.

A long report from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) about Soviet strategies in the Third World included a whole section on Mikoyan’s visit to Mexico and highlighted how his presence there opened a new phase in the Soviet strategy of approaching Latin America. “The visit of the Vice Premier Mikoyan to Mexico in November in connection with the opening of the Soviet industrial exhibition,” the document stated, “marks a new phase in Soviet attempts to take advantage of Latin American economic difficulties in order to expand trade and other types of relations with the Bloc.” Moreover, the report emphasized that if Mikoyan had previously focused on promoting trade with the USSR, his interventions had become more political. “His private and public comments in Mexico were directed as much against political as economic aspects of ‘colonialism’—U.S. influence in Latin America.” For the CIA, the new phase of Soviet policy toward Latin America was directed against “the policies and activities of the United States and of U.S. firms in Latin America” and went hand in hand with “the reiteration of a Soviet interest in increased trade and a willingness to extend, ‘without strings,’ development credits to Mexico and other Latin American countries.”26

According to Soviet sources, Mikoyan’s visit and the exhibit he inaugurated helped Moscow edge its way into the midst of the political and economic tensions that marked the bilateral relationship between Mexico and the United States during the presidency of López Mateos. In his account of the results of the Soviet exhibition inaugurated in Mexico City in November 1959, the director of the show, A. Shelnov, boasted with great satisfaction that

the exhibition has been a great success among the business circles of Mexico. During a period of 25 days it has been visited by at least one million people. Among the visitors were politicians and the most important national figures of the country, delegations of union representatives, teachers, students, peasant communities, army and navy, etc., etc. It has received favorable comments in the Mexican press, radio and television, and in this way, has also influenced the mass of Mexicans who have had the opportunity to visit it in person. The attendees have left thousands of enthusiastic comments in the guest book.

The underlying purpose of the exhibition had been to show the advance, progress, and limitless future for which the USSR was destined as a consequence of the socialist revolution and the social and economic changes it had fostered in the country. For this purpose, the Soviet curators had organized the show in a comprehensive manner, complementing sections that displayed the latest advances in science and technology with others dedicated to the history of the USSR and its social, economic, and cultural advances after 1917. As Shelnov recalled, the USSR had organized three major exhibitions in Latin America before 1959—in 1946 in Mexico for the international book fair, and two in Argentina in 1955 and 1957. However, this was the “first Soviet exhibition in Latin American countries that offered wide coverage of different aspects of the life of the Soviet state.” Thus, the first section of the exhibition was devoted to a description of the Soviet political system, the geography of the country, the characteristics of the population, and the “huge growth of the economy and culture of the Soviet Union in contrast to prerevolutionary Russia.” Mechanical and illuminated maps, surrounded by scale models of commercial airplanes, showed the expansion of the country’s electrification and industry, while some photos recalled Khrushchev’s trip to the United States in September 1959.

The space dedicated to technology was particularly large, with more than six thousand exhibits. These included “machine tools for the cutting of metals, machinery for the construction of roads, tractors, transport trucks, a truck for oil drilling, motorcycles, mopeds, and other examples of national mechanical engineering, which were of commercial interest.” In order to facilitate the understanding of the use of machinery, the Soviet curators included film projections that showed them in action speakers—over 200 units—and headphones providing didactic contents in Spanish.

Of great interest to the public had been the pavilion dedicated to the achievements of Soviet space exploration, which presented natural-scale artificial satellites, scientific instruments launched toward the moon, and the latest advances in missiles. According to Shelnov, from early in the morning to closing time, “the stands with the satellites were surrounded by a large crowd who listened with great attention to the explanations issued through the microphone by a mechanically recorded voice. The Mexicans were simply amazed at the inventions of man.”

Another important part of the exhibition, and a great success in terms of audience, was the section devoted to the peaceful uses of nuclear energy, which showed nuclear reactors, particle accelerators, thermonuclear machines, and the nuclear icebreaker Lenin.27

It would be impossible to list here all the important sections of the exhibition and those that attracted the public. What must be emphasized is that the exhibition was a major effort on the part of the USSR to offer Mexico and Latin America a strong and convincing image of Soviet modernity. As the Soviet ambassador, Bazykin, wrote in a letter to A. Gromyko, the minister of foreign affairs, “The exhibition was very successful … and, to a large extent, managed to undermine years of anti-Soviet propaganda, showing what the USSR really is.” Bazykin’s report also underscored the importance of Mikoyan’s presence in Mexico, the warm reception given to him by the Mexican authorities, and López Mateos’s willingness to visit the USSR between April and May 1961:

The visit to Mexico of Comrade A. I. Mikoyan to inaugurate the exhibition on behalf of the Soviet government was of great political importance and helped strengthen our position in Mexico. Comrade Mikoyan was welcomed and bidden farewell at the airport by a larger number of cabinet members than the Japanese Prime Minister Kisi, on his recent state visit to Mexico. For his travels through the country, President López Mateos made the official plane available to A. I. Mikoyan. These gestures of friendship on the part of the president had not occurred during the visits of other distinguished guests, including heads of governments and states. In principle, President López Mateos accepted the invitation of the Soviet government to visit the USSR. He intends to visit the USSR in April–May 1961.

Additionally, Bazykin commented that the two countries had begun to discuss the possible signing of a bilateral trade agreement that would have made it possible to settle, on a firmer basis, the emerging trade relations between the two countries.28

For the USSR, from the second half of the 1950s, the expansion of trade ties represented a strategy aimed at increasing its influence in Third World contexts where Moscow’s projection was unstable and dependence on the West was strong. Indeed, Soviet credit lines, which were granted with favorable interest rates and the possibility of exchanging Third World countries’ primary goods for Soviet capital and technical assistance in order to accelerate industrialization, made trade relations with Moscow potentially very attractive for these countries. This approach had facilitated the expansion of Soviet influence in West Africa and even in some Latin American countries such as Argentina and Brazil, which had signed commercial treaties with Moscow after 1955.29

The optimism that can be seen in Bazykin’s analysis was also partly shared by some of the Mexican authorities. In a conversation held at the end of November 1959 with A. P. Malkov, the head of the department of Latin America of the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the USSR, Ricardo J. Zevada, general director of BANCOMEXT, who was a great advocate for the need to diversify Mexican trade, said that “with your exhibition you have achieved a lot to bring consumers closer to Soviet products, and to break the suspicious attitude of Mexican consumers regarding these products that had prevailed here in Mexico for years.” Notably, Zevada’s interpretation was more nuanced than that of the Soviets, and it was marked by the realism of a Mexican senior official who knew in depth the political and economic reality of his country. “Nothing significant can be changed in a week or two,” the director of the bank observed. “It takes time and struggle” to achieve it.30

Even more cautious was the Americans’ interpretation of the outcome of the exhibition and of how much Mikoyan had achieved through his meetings with the Mexican authorities. In a report sent to Roy Rubottom, an officer with the Latin American affairs bureau of the State Department, Harry Turkel, a specialist in Eurasian affairs, commented that during his meeting with the Mexican authorities Mikoyan had offered a credit line of $100 million for investments in the oil sector, which had been in the hands of the Mexican state since 1938. According to Turkel, this was not the first time the Soviets offered credit to Mexicans, adding that in the last “two years there have been two or three similar offers,” all rejected by Mexico. For Turkel then, “Mikoyan has not achieved much on the economic front in Mexico.” The State Department expert on Russia and Asia concluded that having open lines of credit with U.S. bilateral institutions, such as the Export/Import Bank, meant that was not in an emergency situation and that, unless the economic situation of Mexico deteriorated considerably, “a significant increase in Mexican trade relations with the USSR was improbable.”31

In just a few years, as we shall see, the optimism generated by the success of the Soviet exhibition would give way to the veiled pessimism suggested by Zevada and the doubts of the American diplomats.

Negotiating the Tractors

As Ambassador Bazykin pointed out in his August 1960 report, several official Mexican delegations had visited the USSR (and vice versa) after the end of the exhibition; even more importantly, the two countries had begun to discuss how to restructure bilateral trade by working on a commercial treaty. However, as Zevada had made it clear in his conversation with Soviet officials, it was not going to be an easy task to translate the optimism generated by the exhibition into more tangible bonds between the two countries.

During a meeting between President López Mateos, the Foreign Affairs Minister Manuel Tello, and the members of a Soviet goodwill delegation that visited Mexico in the summer of 1961, some optimism could still be perceived, although elements of concern on the Soviet side were already emerging. According to the Soviets, throughout a conversation described as “warm and friendly,” López Mateos had emphasized “the coincidence of Mexican and Soviet Union points of view on several important international affairs.” In the same conversation, the Mexican president had recalled that in his last speech in the United Nations, he had referred to “general and complete disarmament, détente, and the strengthening of mutual understanding between all the peoples of the world. The position of Mexico in these matters is firm and unshakeable.” In the summer of 1961, the USSR and Mexico probably had some converging points of view on the issues of decolonization, détente, and the construction of mechanisms of cooperation between the nations of the world. However, both President López Mateos and the secretary of foreign affairs had shown more reluctance about taking concrete steps to consolidate the bilateral approach. The Mexican president, citing the need to oversee the municipal and congressional elections, had made it clear that he would not travel, as previously speculated, to the USSR. Instead, he would send the secretary of industry and commerce, Raúl Salinas Lozano.

The conversation with Secretary Tello had been more concrete and indicative of the problems faced by the expansion of trade relations between the two countries. According to the Soviet delegation, “Manuel Tello stated that the Mexican government applauds the expansion of contacts between Mexican officials and those of the USSR.… M. Tello pointed out that in the future relations may not only develop in the field of culture, but also in that of commerce. However, he said that in Mexico almost all trade is concentrated in the hands of private companies and that the government has little chance of influencing trade policy.” The conclusion reached by the Soviet delegation after these two meetings was that

the Mexican government is generally interested in maintaining normal relations with the Soviet Union and, because of the positive influence of public opinion, it is willing to expand them to a certain extent, especially in the line of cultural and artistic exchange. With regard to economic and trade relations, taking into account the predominance of U.S. capital in the country’s economy, there are in fact no favorable prospects for appreciable development in the short term.32

The optimism generated by the exhibition and, more generally, the enthusiasm elicited by Khrushchev’s new policies had probably blinded the Soviets to the technical and political obstacles to progress in bilateral relations with Mexico. One indication of these hindrances was the difficulty of simply selling Soviet tractors to Mexico.

In October 1958, the state-owned Soviet company Autoexport, in charge of exporting different types of machinery, had signed an agreement for the sale of seventy-five DT-54 tractors and other agricultural machinery to Mexico.33 Newspaper reports, such as those published by the local newspaper El Porvenir and the national magazine Jueves de Excelsior, had speculated on the purchase of these tractors, attributing the initiative to the good offices of former president Lázaro Cárdenas, who, according to different sources, had negotiated the acquisition directly with Moscow.34 From what Soviet documentation lets us reconstruct and given the lack of Mexican sources, the tractors were originally destined for a group of ejidos of the Comarca Lagunera,35 and another possible sale was being negotiated with the Alianza de Sociedades Locales Colectivas Maximilano López of the Yaqui Valley, Sonora (Alliance of Collective Local Companies Maximiliano López, in the Russian documents the “Maximilian Alliance”). Ejidos were a particular kind of communal agricultural lands and had represented the backbone of Lazaro Cárdenas’s agrarian reform during the 1930s. The Maximilian Alliance and the ejidos of the Comarca Lagunera represented politically active groups, the first led by Ramón Danzós Palomino and the second by Arturo Orona, both of whom belonged to political and trade union groups rooted in the Mexican radical Left.36 At least since the mid-1950s, as shown in a study by Luis Aboites Aguilar, these groups had fought for the diversification of the cotton market, which the U.S. company Anderson and Clayton monopolized and thus managed to impose low purchase prices.37 To bypass the monopoly, ejidos from Comerca Lagunera and the Yaqui Valley had proposed to sell Mexican cotton on the markets of the socialist bloc, especially in Poland and Czechoslovakia, in exchange for Soviet machinery of various types.38 The Maximilian Alliance and the Orona group maintained a position of independent trade unionism and, by the end of the decade, left the official Confederación Nacional Campesina (CNC; National Confederation of Peasants). They became closer to the left-wing Movimiento de Liberación Nacional (MLN; National Liberation Movement), founded under the auspices of Lázaro Cárdenas and contributed to the foundation of the Central Campesina Independiente (CCI, Independent Peasant Center).39 Both the CCI and the MLN were created to challenge the plan of economic modernization launched by PRI governments after World War II. These organizations questioned the social inequality generated by the economic model and the abandonment of communal forms of agricultural production in favor of large tracts of lands devoted to commercial production. In Sonora and the Comarca Lagunera, where the Soviet tractors were headed, the process of land concentration for commercial purpose had been particularly intense, giving rise to strong resistance from local ejidos such as those led by Orona and Danzós Palomino.

Moscow, as provided by the contract signed on 25 October 1958, had sent 75 tractors and other agricultural machinery to Mexico. However, in July 1959, four and a half months after their arrival, they were still undelivered. Stored in the customs area of Tampico port facilities, they fed rumors echoed by the Mexican press. An article by Pedro Vazquez Cisneros in the Jueves de Excelsior, for example, reported on all kinds of legends about the Soviet machinery in Tampico. According to different accounts, Soviet tractors had turned into scrap metal because they were left out in the open, or they were obsolete old tractors, like those used in Mexican fields in the 1930s. Finally, the article raised the problem of Cárdenas’s role in the negotiation and acquisition of the machinery from Moscow.40

In February 1959, before the arrival of the tractors in Mexico, the commercial affairs officer of the Soviet embassy in Mexico, K. D. Tikhomirov, accompanied by two engineers from the USSR, held a not very encouraging meeting with all the actors whose interests were involved in the purchase of the tractors. At the meeting were present the Mexican company responsible for the import of the machinery, De Swaan, S. A, and Arturo Orona, described by Soviet documents as the representative of the ejidal union of the Province of Cuauhtémoc, together with V. Lopez, whom the documents identify as a representative of the Ejidal Bank.41 The meeting had evinced a long list of logistical problems for the purchase of Soviet agricultural machinery. In the document, Tikhomirov expressed concern to De Swaan’s representatives because the Ejidal Bank had not issued a certificate of payment commitment. However, in the letter delivered to the Soviet company Autoexport, the payout was made dependent on the results of the agricultural work that the ejidal units would be able to carry out with the Soviet machines. Moreover, despite the lack of an official payment commitment, the contract provided for a partial transfer of ownership of the tractors to the De Swaan Company. In short, the representatives of the Mexican import company sought to receive the machinery and partial ownership of the same without paying for it immediately and without offering a guarantee of future payment by the Ejidal Bank.

During the negotiation, De Swaan had offered to solve the problem of payment by means of a barter—Mexican cotton in exchange for Soviet machinery—an option successfully used by the USSR in other parts of the Third World to expand its commercial influence. For reasons that are not easy to understand, the Soviet diplomats present at that meeting rejected the proposal somewhat derisively, stating that “Autoexport had not registered at the moment any application for the acquisition of cotton for its customers.”42

In any case, after a long debate, in which Arturo Orona had largely supported Soviet positions and Lopez had remained silent, a compromise was reached on the basis of which Moscow, without a guarantee from the Ejidal Bank, maintained a reservation of ownership of the tractors that allowed it to recover the merchandise in case it was not paid for.43 Although the question of the letter of commitment was not resolved during that meeting, other Soviet documents indicate that, by the spring, the Soviet export company had secured the official commitment of the Ejidal Bank for the payment of the tractors to be delivered to the Comarca Lagunera. Different Soviet sources confirm that Autoexport actually exchanged the tractors and other agricultural machines, worth $2.3 million, for Mexican products, most likely cotton.44

This first meeting had shown several problems in the conduct of business transactions between the two countries. First of all, on the Mexican side, the lack of clear support from the Ejidal Bank, which in theory was the public institution responsible for providing the ejidal units with financial support for the purchase of tractors, became evident. In turn, on the Soviet side, there was a lack of financial mechanisms and institutions that could contribute to the expansion of trade with Mexico. It is true that the Soviets were willing to hand over the tractors in exchange for a simple payment commitment from the Ejidal Bank. However, a commercial offensive, part of a broader political strategy to get closer to Latin America, needed better planning and more financial instruments to help deal with problematic situations such as that created with the Mexican ejidatarios of the Comarca Lagunera or the Yaqui Valley.

The February meeting and the problems manifested in the bilateral negotiations foreshadowed even more difficulties. In fact, as I noted above, once they arrived in Tampico (toward the end of March), the tractors remained at the port facilities for months. In May 1959, in an attempt to understand the real problems of the ejidos and the reasons why Soviet machinery remained held in the Mexican port, Tikhomirov, accompanied by the engineer Streltsov, visited the cotton regions of Sonora. There, guided by Ramón Danzós Palomino, the Soviets witnessed the many problems faced by the ejidal productive units in the region.45 In his report, Tikhomirov emphasized the existence of eighty-five ejidos, defined by the Soviets as cooperatives, of which between eight and ten were collective farms and the remainder were exploited by individuals. The alliance, composed of an external president and the representatives of each cooperative, was, according to Soviet analysis, the institution in charge of obtaining credits and water supply for irrigation of the fields and, in general, of dealing with and solving all the logistical problems of the cooperatives. Tikhomirov’s report revealed that, regarding the purchase of tractors, collective cooperatives, defined by the commercial attaché as the “most progressive form of cooperation among Mexican peasants,” had to proceed individually. At the same time, the report emphasized that the ejidos, including the collectives, had scarce and outdated machinery and, with almost zero capitalization, were heavily dependent on the credit granted by the Ejidal Bank for the acquisition of new means of production. According to the data provided by ejidatarios to Soviet diplomats and specialists, only 20 percent of the land was worked by machinery directly owned by the ejidatarios, while the remaining 80 percent used machinery leased from U.S. and Mexican companies. The ejidos paid approximately eighty Mexican pesos per day to the companies for the rent, which included the driving and the gasoline of the tractors. Since they had little capital, these amounts were paid through loans granted by the Ejidal Bank at an annual interest rate of 7 to 8 percent. In addition, the Ejidal Bank was also in charge of buying fertilizers, charging a 5 percent commission to the ejidos. According to the ejidatarios, the purchases made by the Ejidal Bank had to do not with budgetary efficiency but with financial profit, a statement that the Soviets deemed correct.

Regarding the question of the tractors, Tikhomirov had been able to find out that in the state of Sonora they were sold exclusively by American and Canadian companies such as Case, Caterpillar, Ford, John Deere, Oliver, Massy Harry, and the like. There was not a single company from other countries. American companies had a representative office in many cities of the state, and the machinery was shown in well-equipped exhibition halls with all kinds of accessories and parts. These companies generally did not require payment guarantees for the first two or three tractors, whereas for larger purchases they demanded letters of commitment from the two state credit institutes, the Ejidal Bank and the Banco de Crédito Agrícola (the Bank of Agricultural Credit). Payment was usually spread over four years at a 4 percent interest rate. Finally, regarding the credit-granting issue, the Soviet envoys detected political factors that were bound to limit the expansion of Soviet trade with the state as well as the country in general. Sounded out by the Soviets about the possible purchase of tractors from the USSR, ejidal representatives admitted that they were not in a position to make a first payment of 20 percent or even 10 percent of the amount because the Ejidal Bank of the region refused to extend credit to the cooperatives to buy Soviet machinery.

In July of the same year, only a few months after the visit to Sonora, Tikhomirov and Ambassador Bazykin had a meeting with the secretary of agriculture and livestock of Mexico, Julián Rodríguez Adame, who confirmed what the ejidatarios had already explained about the factors that hindered the expansion of bilateral trade and the release of the tractors from Tampico to the Comarca Lagunera. At that meeting, the Soviets questioned Secretary Adame about why the Soviet machinery had been detained at the port for four and a half months, adding that they had a letter of commitment from the Ejidal Bank for the payment of the merchandise. The point was, Soviet diplomats added, that it was not possible to begin to request and execute payment without previous delivery of the machinery to the ejidos. The secretary replied that he would take care of the matter the next day. However, he said that it had been decided to deliver the tractors to areas other than those originally planned. Tikhomirov and Bazykin said they thought it would have been better to concentrate the tractors in adjacent areas to ensure a more efficient use of the machinery and facilitate its maintenance and the distribution of spare parts. Adame retorted sharply that the tractors would be sent to the areas that most needed them. He added that the delay in delivery was due to a political reason: the tractors had not been delivered to the ejidos of the Laguna because these were run by Communists and he recommended that, in the future, the Soviets should conduct their transactions on the basis of “purely commercial” reasons and not because they wanted the tractors to be used “by certain people in certain regions.”46

Soviet sources do not allow us to conclusively document that the delivery of tractors to the ejidos linked to the Partido Comunista de México (PCM, Communist Party of Mexico), the MLN, or more independent trade unions such as the CCI reflected a precise Soviet strategy, planned with the help of Cárdenas, to favor those sectors that the Soviets themselves defined as the most progressive in the country. Unfortunately, there are no Mexican sources on this topic available at present. However, the content of El Porvenir and the Jueves de Excelsior, which attributed Cárdenas a central role in the negotiation of the tractors sale, together with the aforementioned Soviet sources, seem to suggest indirectly that the operation was not without an ideological flavor. The delivery of the tractors to the peasants of the Comarca Lagunera and the Yaqui Valley would have showed that the Soviets were interested in the tractors being delivered to ejidos, productive units similar to the kolkhozes, governed by political forces ideologically close to Moscow. If we take seriously the words of Secretary Rodríguez Adame, the ideological and political nexus of the commercial operation was, in fact, among the causes of its near failure.

The tractor episode revealed a wide range of ideological and political issues that help to explain the difficulties faced by the process of Mexican-Soviet rapprochement. On the one hand, the retention of the Soviet tractors in Tampico for what turned out to be over eleven months suggests the existence of inner conflicts within the Mexican political establishment with regard to forming closer ties between the USSR and Mexico. A sector of the country’s political elite was clearly opposed to the Soviet tractors ending up in ejidos politically characterized as Communist or radical leftist or linked to the figure of Cárdenas. The unquestionable anti-Communism of some Mexican political and governmental sectors represented an obvious internal obstacle for the expansion of the relations between the two countries. On the other hand, the incident also betrayed some Soviet naïveté in conducting commercial operations in Mexico. In particular, Moscow underestimated the opposition that an excessively ideologically flavored commercial operation could provoke in a sector of the Mexican political establishment. If Moscow’s aim was to increase its influence in Mexico by means of more intense commercial relations, a less ideologically colored operation would have probably been more effective to achieve such an objective.

Beside these political and ideological difficulties, the episode, at a micro level, also points at the logistical problems that the high Mexican dependence on Washington created for the puposes of economic diversification. This dependence—epitomized in this case by the overwhelming presence of U.S. agricultural machinery companies, whose finances were also supported by Mexican credit institutions—obstructed the entry of Soviet equipment. Moscow’s own logistical problems, in addition, did not help to overcome what was already an uphill battle for the expansion of its economic influence in Mexico. The fact that, for example, in one of the meetings described above Soviet diplomats chose not use one of their main assets, the possibility of exchanging USSR machinery directly against Mexican primary goods, underlines some limitation on the Soviet side. It is true that, in the end, this particular kind of barter was finally put into practice, but the impression one gets from Soviet sources is that its use was not as straightforward as it should have been.

Another conversation that the magazine editor of BANCOMEXT (Arturo Perera Mena in the Soviet sources) maintained in July 1962 with the correspondent of the Soviet state information agency TASS (A. Pavlenko) provides an indication on a macro level of the dynamics of dependence that slowed down the development of stronger bilateral trade relations.Situations similar to the episode with the tractors continued to generate major difficulties in the process of commercial economic rapprochement between the two countries. Perera Mena confirmed the keen interest on the Mexican side in expanding the relations between the two countries, but he reminded his interlocutor that the main cause of the obstruction of this process was, according to him, “the United States.” According to the editor of BANCOMEXT, U.S. companies sold their products to Mexico by installments and on the basis of loans that placed the Latin American country in a position of dependency. Perera Mena clarified that credit lines could be discontinued at any time but that, on the macroeconomic level, the country depended on loans disbursed by the U.S. Treasury and the country’s private banks. The Mexican official explained that, for example, the signing of a trade agreement between Mexico and the USSR could cause a “malevolent reaction on the part of the United States,” and that a more cautious evolution of relations between Mexico and Moscow—one that would not arouse the neighbor’s anger—was therefore advisable.

The rapprochement was more successful when the two parties negotiated economic and trade exchanges involving Mexican public companies. At the end of the López Mateos’ term, Mexico and the USSR were able to conclude the sale of ten Soviet oil-well drilling turbines to Petróleos Mexicanos (PEMEX; Mexican Petroleum), the Mexican state-owned oil company. Even if it took time to get the drilling turbines installed and properly working, their sale showed that it was probably easier for the two countries to cooperate when the negotiations involved the public sector rather than the private sector of the Mexican economy. In the public sector, the Mexican government could at least try to diversify the providers of goods. Moreover, in the energy production area, Mexico had more freedom of maneuvering, considering that Washington had remained reluctant to support the development of PEMEX47 with taxpayers’ money ever since the 1938 nationalization of Mexican oil. Even in the public sector, however, Mexico’s margins of action were narrow. As we have seen, the López Mateos administration rejected a large Soviet credit line to develop the oil industry, probably out of concern for how the United States might react.

In any case, logistics, economic dependence, ideological polarization within the Mexican political establishment itself, and some degree of Soviet naïveté combine to explain the difficulties that even the sale of a small consignment of Soviet tractors to Mexico could meet. Mexican-Soviet relations had to wait until the 1970s, under the leadership of President Luis Echeverría, to finally gather new momentum.

Conclusion

Between 1959 and 1964, Mexico’s interest in developing political and economic relations with Moscow represented a component of a broader strategy aimed at reducing Mexican dependence on the United States. During those years, Mexico tried to modify its Cold War allegiance to the United States and assume a more independent position in terms of the economy as well as international relations. This quest for independence resembled the strategy followed by other Third World countries in those same years. As Jeffery Byrne has observed, by the time of the 1961 Belgrade Conference, the Third World was showing an internal divergence between an insurrectionary approach and a more moderate, development-based interpretation of the role Third Worldism should play as a political movement in the international arena.48 Countries such as India, for example, embraced the latter course, while nations such as Cuba and Algeria, among others, embraced the former. Mexico never completely cut its allegiance to Washington and, in this sense, the country’s Third World identity was closer to that of India, for one. For Mexico, belonging to the Third World meant diversifying trade, increasing economic opportunities, and trying to create a new economic international environment more favorable to economic development projects in the South. This approach would come fully into play during the 1970s, when Luis Echeverría’s proposal for a Charter of Economic Rights and Duties of States became Mexico’s flagship program for the Third World.

During the 1960s, however, the forging of a Mexican Third World international identity showed limits, which are well epitomized by the difficulties encountered by the López Mateos administration to build a more solid partnership with the USSR. The expectations generated by Mikoyan’s trip to Mexico in November 1959, as part of the inauguration of the Soviet scientific and technical exhibition, were never met. Despite his presence, contacts, and conversations, the signing of a trade agreement—the central objective of the Soviet strategy and a crucial instrument for improving economic relations—could not be completed. Even the sale of a few Soviet tractors to the Latin American country proved to be difficult.

The existing documentation does not allow us to assess whether the United States exerted direct pressure on Mexico in order to obstruct the rapprochement with the USSR. What we do know is that the political and economic configuration of the relations with the United States in the context of bipolar confrontation, together with Mexican internal polarization, represented the greatest obstacle to a more substantial level of engagement between Mexico and the USSR. In a way, the same bilateral economic and political structures that President López Mateos made efforts to alter precluded the possibility of implementing a strategy of diversification that would include the USSR. The strong economic and financial integration and interdependence that Mexico and Washington maintained in the mid-1960s made the process of commercial diversification arduous. As emphasized by Harry Turkel in his report to Rubottom, at the macro level, a strong Mexican stability depended on Washington’s support channeled through preferential credit lines, such as those granted to the country by the Export/Import Bank or the International Monetary Fund. As Perera Mena argued, developing relations with the main geopolitical competitor of the United States could jeopardize the access to these resources. On the other hand, at the micro level, the Mexican market was too used to the presence of U.S. products to allow an easy replacement of U.S. machinery with Soviet machinery.

This negative picture was made even worse by the rigidity shown by Soviet diplomats. As we have seen, the USSR proposed its products without offering advantageous financial mechanisms or conditions, all elements particularly necessary to seduce a potentially hostile market. Moreover, Soviet diplomats, on some occasions, even seemed to forget the advantages offered by their own commercial strategy, in particular, the use of barter as a mechanism for the trade of goods with Third World countries that had little hard currency. Finally, as we have seen, ideological and political differences that marked the national Mexican political context were coupled with a certain Soviet ingenuousness. In this sense, the political, economic, and logistic difficulties Moscow encountered in its interaction with Mexico, and which the tractors episode epitomizes, seem to confirm Sanchez-Sibony’s thesis on the secondary role the Soviet Union played in the Third World, even at the peak of its attempt to incrase its presence in this part of the globe.49

Despite the problems encountered at this stage, it can also be argued that without bilateral efforts and coming to terms with the limits and challenges of the late 1950s and the mid-1960s, the greater engagement of the 1970s would have been impossible. In the end, the issues that remained unresolved during the presidency of López Mateos, especially the trade agreement with the socialist bloc, had a better outcome during the 1970s. Thus the 1960s, although not widely researched, are nevertheless essential for the reconstruction of the historical evolution of contemporary Mexico. In particular, it is now clear that those years were crucial for the forging of a new Mexican Third Worldist identity, which with time became an important part of the country’s hybrid imaginary as an international player.

Notes

A Spanish version of this piece originally appeared as “¡Bienvenido Mr. Mikoyan! Tacos y tractores a la sombra del acercamiento soviético-mexicano, 1958–1964,” Historia Mexicana 66 (2016): 793–852.

  1. 1. Bevan Sewell, “A Perfect (Free-Market) World? Economics, the Eisenhower Administration, and the Soviet Economic Offensive in Latin America,” Diplomatic History 32, no. 5 (2008): 841.

  2. 2. “Mexico. Russian Headway,” Time, 7 December 1959, 36.

  3. 3. This chapter significantly develops and extends an article that constituted an introduction to previously unpublished Soviet documents: Vanni Pettinà, “Mexican-Soviet Relations, 1958–1964: The Limits of Engagement,” Cold War International History Project, e-Dossier 65 (August 2015), https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/mexican-soviet-relations-1958-1964-the-limits-engagement#_ftn3.

  4. 4. On the Mexican policies of approach to the Third World during the decade of 1960s, see Vanni Pettinà, “Global Horizons: Mexico, the Third World, and the Non-Aligned Movement at the Time of the 1961 Belgrade Conference,” International History Review 38, no. 4 (2016): 741–64, doi: 10.1080/07075332.2015.1124906.

  5. 5. Héctor Cárdenas, Historia de las relaciones entre México y Rusia (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1993), 227.

  6. 6. To this date, the historiography on the subject is substantially reduced to a few contributions, published between the 1970s and the 1990s and characterized by the scarce use of primary sources. It is composed of a volume published jointly by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Mexico and the Academy of Science of the former Soviet Union, which compiles official bilateral documents produced between 1917 and 1980, and a book by Héctor Cárdenas on the history of bilateral relations, which, however, paid little attention to the 1960s. Finally, an article published in the early 1970s by Blanca Torres analyzes the evolution of trade relations between Mexico and the socialist bloc between 1945 and the late 1960s. Héctor Cárdenas and Alexander Sizonenko, eds., Relaciones mexicano-soviéticas, 1917–1980 (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, Academia de la Ciencia de la URSS, 1981); Cárdenas, Historia de las relaciones; Blanca Torres, “México en la estructura del comercio y la cooperación internacional de los países socialistas,” Foro Internacional 13, no. 2 (1972): 178–210.

  7. 7. Notable exceptions to the lack of studies of international history over the period are, for example, Blanca Torres, México y el mundo: historia de sus relaciones exteriores, vol. 7, De la guerra al mundo bipolar (Mexico City: Senado de la República, 1991); Mario Ojeda, Alcances y límites de la política exterior de México (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2001); Lorenzo Meyer, “La guerra Fría en el mundo periférico: El caso del régimen autoritario mexicano. La utilidad del anticomunismo discreto,” in Espejos de la guerra fría: México, América Central y el Caribe, ed. Daniela Spenser (Mexico City: Porrúa, 2004), 95–118; and Eric Zolov, The Last Good Neighbor: Mexico in the Global Sixties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020).

  8. 8. On relations between Cuba and Mexico, see Renata Keller, Mexico’s Cold War: Cuba, the United States, and the Legacy of the Mexican Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), and “A Foreign Policy for Domestic Consumption: Mexico’s Lukewarm Defense of Castro, 1959–1969,” Latin American Research Review 47, no. 2 (2012): 100–119; Ana Covarrubias, “Las relaciones México-Cuba, 1959–2010,” in Historia de las relaciones internacionales de México, 1821–2010, vol. 3, Caribe, ed. Mercedes de Vega (Mexico City: Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, 2011); Ojeda, Alcances y límites; Olga Pellicer, México y la Revolución cubana (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1972).

  9. 9. Michelle Denise Getchell, “Revisiting the 1954 Coup in Guatemala: The Soviet Union, the United Nations and ‘Hemispheric Solidarity,’ ” Journal of Cold War Studies 17, no. 2 (2015): 73–102; Tobias Rupprecht, “Socialist High Modernity and Global Stagnation: A Shared History of Brazil and the Soviet Union during the Cold War,” Journal of Global History 6, no. 3 (2011): 505–28, and Soviet Internationalism after Stalin: Interaction and Exchange between the USSR and Latin America during the Cold War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

  10. 10. “Mikoyan Arrives in Mexico City,” Chicago Tribune, 19 November 1959, 3.

  11. 11. Soledad Loaeza, “Modernización autoritaria a la sombra de la superpotencia, 1944–1968,” in Nueva Historia General de México, ed. Erik Velásquez García (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2010), 675.

  12. 12. “Mexico and the Alliance for Progress,” 3 June 1962, Record Group (hereafter RG) 59, 712.00/6-1362, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD (hereafter NARA).

  13. 13. Louise E. Walker, Waking from the Dream: Mexico’s Middle Class after 1968 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2013), 3. See also Soledad Loaeza, Clases medias y política en México: La querella escolar, 1959–1963 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 1988).

  14. 14. “Mexico and the Alliance for Progress”; Raymond Vernon, The Dilemma of Mexico’s Development: The Roles of the Private and Public Sectors (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 117; Loaeza, “Modernización autoritaria,” 665 and 669; Enrique Cárdenas, “La economía en el dilatado siglo XX, 1929–2009,” in Historia económica general de México. De la colonia a nuestros días, ed. Sandra Kuntz Ficker (Mexico: El Colegio de México, 2010), 517.

  15. 15. Pettinà, “Global Horizons,” 6–7.

  16. 16. On the Indian exchange rate crisis at the beginning of its second five-year plan, see Oscar Sánchez-Sibony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 160.

  17. 17. In 1965, 64.2 percent of Mexican imports came from the United States, and 71.2 percent of its production was exported to the U.S. market. Pablo González Casanova, La democracia en México (Mexico City: Era, 1967), 179, n. 7.

  18. 18. “Monthly Economic Summary, January 1959,” 13 February 1959, 11, 712-00/2-1359, RG59, NARA.

  19. 19. Torres, México y el mundo, 138; Loaeza, “Modernización autoritaria,” 683–684; “Monthly Economic Summary, January 1959.”

  20. 20. “Joint Week no. 51–52,” 31 December, 1959, 712.00(W)/12-3159, RG59, NARA.

  21. 21. Pettinà, “Global Horizons.”

  22. 22. “Trade Relations between the USSR and Argentina,” 17 January, 1958; Mexican Embassy in Moscow, “Untitled,” No. 70, 11 January 1958; Political Reports, “Soviet Equipment and Machinery for the Development of the Argentine Oil Industry,” Mexican Embassy in Moscow, 6 June 1959; all in Archivo Histórico Genaro Estrada, Secreteria de Relaciones Exteriores, III/510 (47-0) 959/2-5, III 1933–6, Supplementary Political Reports, General Direction of the Diplomatic Service.

  23. 23. “El Comercio de América Latina con los Países Comunistas,” Comercio Exterior, November 1959, 630–32.

  24. 24. “Mexico (Informative Note),” ca. 1960, Fond 645, Opis’ 1, Delo 31, 445–50, Russian State Archive of the Economy (hereafter RGAE). See also “Mexico: Politics Ideology and the Economy,” 23 June 1964, RAS, Fond 1858, Opis’ 1, Delo 109, I, 1–32,; “Information materials on Mexico, (1) Mexico. A brief note,” 2 May 1965, Fond 110, Opis’ 25, Por, 700, Delo 54, Archives of Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation (hereafter AVP RF).

  25. 25. V. Bazykin, “Concerning Soviet-Mexican Relations. Comrade A. A. Gromyko about Mexican-Soviet Relations,” 3 August 1960, Fond 110, Informational materials, Item 1, No. 516/OCA, 22–27, AVP RF.

  26. 26. “Current Intelligence Staff Study. Soviet Policy toward the Underdeveloped Countries,” 28 April 1961, 90, CIA Records Search Tool, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/document/5077054e993247d4d82b6ae7.

  27. 27. A. Shelnov, “Report on the Work of the Soviet Exhibition in Mexico Year 1959,” n.d. [ca. January 1960], Fond 635, Opis’ 1, Delo 392, 1–12, RGAE.

  28. 28. V. Bazykin, “Concerning Soviet-Mexican Relations,” 23.

  29. 29. Alessandro Iandolo, “The Rise and Fall of the ‘Soviet Model of Development’ in West Africa, 1957–1964,” Cold War History 12, no. 4 (2012): 689–91.

  30. 30. “Memorandum of the Conversation of the Head of the department of Latin America of the Ministry of Foreign Trade of the USSR, Comrade A. P. Malkov, with the governor of the National Bank of Foreign Trade in Mexico, Mr. Ricardo Jose Zevada of November 23 of this year,” ca. November–December 1959, Fond 413, Opis’ 13, Delo 8510, 63–68, RGAE.

  31. 31. Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, Office of Inter-American Regional Economic Affairs, Country and Subject File, Box 1 Arc id2321376, “Your Request Re Information on German Trade Mission to Latin America and Mikoyan’s Visit to Mexico,” 15 December 1959, RG59, NARA.

  32. 32. “Reports on trip to Latin America,” Report on Soviet Delegation goodwill trip to Latin American counties,” n.d. [c. 1961-62], D. D. Degtyar (1904–1982), Personal Collection, Fond 645, Opis’ 1, Delo 31, RGAE.

  33. 33. “Report of Comrade K. D. Tikhomirov and B. M. Streltsov on Trip to Obregón City and the Port of Guaymas, State of Sonora, 14–17 May, 1959,” 21 May 1959, Fond 413, Opis’ 13, Delo 8510, 30–34, RGAE; “Memorandum of the Conversation with the Ministry of Agriculture, Engineer Julián Rodríguez Adame, 31 July 1959,” Ref. #368, 4 August 1959, Fond 413, Opis’ 13, Delo 8510, 49–51, RGAE; “Memorandum of the Conversation between Comrade K. D. Tikhomirov, Commercial Counselor of the Embassy of the USSR in Mexico, with the Managers (or Directors) of the company ‘de Swaan,’ S. A., Sheyman y de Swaan, Which Took Place on 7 and 9 February 1959,” 20 February 1959, Fond 413, Opis’ 13, Delo 8510, 4–5, RGAE.

  34. 34. “Poco Comercio con la URSS,” El Porvenir, April 4, 1959, 1; “Mirador,” Jueves de Excelsior, 21 May 1959, 6.

  35. 35. Comarca Lagunera is the ninth-largest metropolitan area in Mexico, located between two states, Coahuila and Durango.

  36. 36. Dolores Trevizo, Rural Protest and the Making of Democracy in Mexico, 1968–2000 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 106.

  37. 37. Luis Aboites Aguilar, El norte entre algodones: Población, trabajo agrícola y optimismo en México, 1930–1970 (Mexico City: El Colegio de México, 2013), 154–55.

  38. 38. Aguilar, El norte entre algodones, 154.

  39. 39. Rodolfo Stavenhagen, Between Underdevelopment and Revolution: A Latin American Perspective (New Delhi: Abhinav, 1981), 145; Trevizo, Rural Protest, 106.

  40. 40. “Mirador,” 6.

  41. 41. Stavenhagen, Between Underdevelopment, 145.

  42. 42. “Memorandum of the Conversation between Comrade K. D. Tikhomirov, Commercial Counselor of the Embassy of the USSR in Mexico, with the Managers (or Directors) of the Company ‘de Swaan,’ S. A., Sheyman y de Swaan,” 4–5.

  43. 43. “Memorandum of the Conversation between Comrade K. D. Tikhomirov, Commercial Counselor of the Embassy of the USSR in Mexico, with the Managers (or Directors) of the Company ‘de Swaan,’ S. A., Sheyman y de Swaan,” 4–5.

  44. 44. “Results of the sales of equipment,” 18 (19 sic), 1959, Fond 413, Opis’ 13, Delo 8329, RGAE.

  45. 45. The name is “Donsos” in Russian in the original Soviet document.“Report of Comrade K. D. Tikhomirov and B. M. Streltsov,” 30–34.

  46. 46. “Memorandum of the Conversation with the Ministry of Agriculture, Engineer Julián Rodríguez Adame, 31 July 1959.”

  47. 47. Zinaida Ivanovna Romanova, “Economic Cooperation between Latin America and the Countries of the Socialist Camp,” n.d. [ca. 1960], Fond 1798, Opis’. 1, Delo 88 ll: 124–36, RAS; “To Deputy Minister Comr. I. F. Semichastnov to Chief of the Protocol Division Comr. I. I. Dokuchaev,” 23 June 1964, Fond 413, Opis’ 31, Delo 287: 28–29, RGAE.

  48. 48. Jeffrey James Byrne, “Beyond Continents, Colours, and the Cold War: Yugoslavia, Algeria, and the Struggle for Non-Alignment,” International History Review 37, no. 5 (2015): 912–32.

  49. 49. Sánchez-Sibony, Red Globalization, 125–69.