Mexican Communist Party

According to the Spanish source, the formation of the Mexican Communist Party originated in the manoeuvres of Manabendra Nath Roy, an Indian independence activist who had taken refuge in Mexico from persecution by the US government. Roy led the founding of the Socialist Party of Mexico in December 1918 and became its secretary general, and the National Socialist Congress of August–September 1919 produced the National Socialist Party. After the arrival of the Soviet emissary Mikhail Borodin, Roy, José Allen and Charles Phillips decided on 24 November 1919 to create the Mexican Communist Party and affiliate it with the Comintern. When the Obregón government expelled the party’s foreign members in 1921, its first ordinary congress in December of that year fixed its name and resolved to broaden its rural and labour base.

In the 1920s the party won rural support through peasant leaders such as Úrsulo Galván, and in 1922 it elected state legislators as well as a senator and a federal deputy. The Cuban communist Julio Antonio Mella, exiled to Mexico in 1926, became a member of its Central Committee but was removed from it in July 1928 on charges of Trotskyism. Under Lázaro Cárdenas (1934–1940) the party, on the Comintern’s advice, cooperated with government policy and took part in founding the National Peasant Confederation and the Confederation of Mexican Workers; it regained legal registration in 1935 and had 30,125 members by early 1939.

In 1951 the Miguel Alemán government withdrew its registration. Amid the Stalinist–Trotskyist conflict Diego Rivera was expelled, while David Alfaro Siqueiros remained loyal to the communist movement. Underground in the 1950s, the party took part in movements such as the 1958–1959 railway workers’ movement led by Valentín Campa and Demetrio Vallejo. It began de-Stalinisation in 1956, openly condemned the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, and on the day after the Tlatelolco massacre of 2 October 1968 was the only party in the country to reject the government’s repression publicly.

In the 1976 presidential election the unregistered party ran Valentín Campa, who received about a million votes that were not officially valid. The political reform of 1977 restored its registration on 3 May 1978, and in the 1979 election it won 18 federal deputies. Its 20th Congress in 1981 approved a merger with other left-wing organisations; the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) was formed on 7 November 1981, and on 18 December the Communist Party ceded its registration to the new party. Its secretaries general included José Allen (1919–1921), Hernán Laborde (1929–1940) and Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo (1963–1981).