MEXICO: Show Down

Into the mahogany-paneled office of Mexican Foreign Minister Francisco Castillo Nájera marched dry, gravel-voiced U.S. Ambassador George S. Messersmith. What, asked Messersmith, about the charges of Mexican labor leader Vicente Lombardo Toledano that "certain U.S. firms" were smuggling arms to the Sinarquistas, Mexico's clerical fascists? At week's end, the reply: "The Mexican Government does not . . . support the statements of Lombardo Toledano."

Ambitious, egocentric, leftist Lombardo Toledano had tried to make political hay for Government-sponsored presidential candidate Miguel Alemán by tossing up the ever-popular charge of "Yankee intervention." Oppositionist candidate Ezequiel Padilla, implied the labor chieftain, was a "pimp" and a "quisling" whom imperialistic U.S. companies were using, along with the Sinarquistas, as the basis for a budding rightist rebellion.

But this time Lombardo Toledano had gone too far. When he failed to back up his charges, Mexico's President Manuel Avila Camacho publicly disavowed him. There had been no "Yankee intervention."