Human rights and lefts: finding refuge

Although there are two Mexfiles… this one (mexfiles.net) meant for history and culture discussions and Mexfile.substack.com for political matters, its impossible especially in Mexico of not talking about political events without going into history. The “taking” of the Mexican Embassy in Quito — while unprecedented — calls up a history of Mexican diplomacy and foreign policy going back, if not just to the 1930s, then back to the earliest days of colonialism as well.

Our latest national hero, Roberto Canseco — a long serving diplomat (and, from all appearances not exactly either young, nor robust) — as chargé d’affairs of the Embassy made a futile attempt to physically prevent the Ecuadorian SWAT team from their mission to kidnap the former Eucadorian Vice-President, who had been given asylum in the embassy. It called to mind the (possibly apocraphal, but believable) story of Gilberto Bosques — the no-nonsense Mexican consul in Vichy France — who physically carried a skinny Spanish Republican under Mexican protection from his car and up the gangplank of a Mexican flagged ship right past a waiting phalanx of Vichy police and Gestapo thugs planning to whisk the Spaniard off to a concentration camp — trusting even Nazis would not date violate the inviolability of foreign diplomatic personnel. And, as has been pointed out in the Mexican media (and maybe elsewhere) during the Pinochet coup of 1973, 700 Chileans crowed into the Mexican embassy in Santiago, and the Chileans could do nothing but let them leave under Mexican protection.

Ah… but those few defending Quito claim that whatever it is the former Vice President was charged and convicted of mattered (legally, it doesn’t), or that given the “leftist” slant to the present Mexican adminstration, granting asylum to a wanted fugitive who’d been part of a left-wing administration in his country was “tainted” somehow.

Well, yes, it is true that Mexican asylum has traditionally favored leftists and democrats, just as the United States has been more favorable towards pro-Capitalist and anti-Communist asylum seekers (even including terrorists). As to Argentina in the later half of the 1940 … well.

But going back… while asylum seekers aren’t always in their country’s capital, and know where the embassies of friendly countries might be. it can hardly be said that Mexico’s asylum history is limited to “lefties”. In the early colony, if Skip Lenchek’s Jews in Mexico, A Stuggle for Survival (Mexconnect, 2000) is accurate (and recent scholarship seems to be on Lenchek’s side) the Inquistion of colonial Mexico turned a blind eye to their own “dissidents” … i.e secret Jews” .

While letting gringos settle in Tejas didn’t quite work out as intended, Mexico in the 19th and 20th centuries took in, and assisted, fundamentialist Mormons, displaced Boers, the “Milk Drinkers” (Russian Orthodox “heretics”), Mennonites and other groups one could hardly label as “leftist” in setting up colonies where they could pursue their very unMexican conservative cultural interests. I suppose, even Emperor Maxmilano’s grant of a colonia for Confederate leaders at the end of the US Civil War might be included in our list of not-left political refugees as well.

Add too, during the Second World War, Jews — regardless of their political affiliation or economic value — were assisted in obtaining Mexican refuge, even those that were turned away by that great champion of Democracy to the north. Likewise, Chinese in the 1880s and 90s, unwelcome north of the border. And, let’s remember Hacienda de la Rosa… resettling the (mostly conservative) Polish pre-war bureaucrats and their families — who’d been imprisoned by Stalin, and unwanted by the British who would only take militarily fit men — by train throuth Siberia, across the Caspian to Iran, down to the coast, sailing around the Cape of Good Hope into the Atlantic and via Brazil to Veracruz and onward to refuge in Mexico… all under Mexican diplomatic protection.

While we certainly remember Victor Serge, Leon Trotsky, Jacobo Árbenz, the Hollywood blacklisters, and other “leftists” who found refuge here, we should not forget that Mexico has always taken a proactive role in protecting dissenters, including those not in the favor of our putative allies. As it should.