February 1980 Print

 

IN RETURNING to the Latin American scene for this and one or more follow-up articles, I must admit that it is not a "from Rome" subject but after some three years residence in Argentina, fourteen in Mexico and return trips in 1977 and 1978 I feel not unqualified to make observations of interest to traditional Catholics in the USA. Readers who would like to refer to my three related articles on the CELAM Conference in Puebla a year ago will find them in THE ANGELUS for March, April, and May. At this time I will consider several subjects mentioned in those articles in more detail.

Historically there has been little contact between English-speaking and Spanish-speaking Americans, settlers in both immense areas tending to shut themselves off from the other. Then, after an encounter 130 years ago the North of Mexico became the West of the United States. In modern times both North and South Americans have felt drawn to Europe when they had enough money for international travel. I was amazed to find, on my coast-to-coast lecture tour last year that scarcely anybody, even in the southwestern states, had bothered to explore nearby Mexico which is considered by Europeans to be the ultimate in travel excitement and certainly one of the most fascinating countries in the world.

But now the time has come when the Latin American presence has begun to impinge on the United States in a series of ways that are not pleasant and everything indicates that the pressure will grow.

On the surface the problems would seem to be entirely sociopolitical but in every case the Conciliar Church is deeply involved. I refer to the durable presence of a Soviet power base just off the Florida coast, of continuing tolerance for the Cuban base as a training center for guerilla warfare, of the uncalled-for surrender of the Panama Canal, of the Marxist conquest of Nicaragua, of continuous propaganda campaigns during the "liberation" of other anti-communist countries and finally, on a slightly different level but definitely part of the picture, the presence in the United States of some six million illegal Mexican immigrants.

The last problem is probably first in the minds of Americans in the West although in the long run it could be the least dangerous. Treated with realism and objectivity it need not be a problem at all. The trouble is the whole question is bathed in emotion, nearly all of it deliberately created to further the political ends of the Left.

Typical, the extravagant language with which Archbishop John Quinn addressed the Puebla Conference as chief United States Bishop and official observer. To him it was not a question of objecting to the fact that the U. S. Immigration Department had not seen fit to grant working permits to the hundreds of thousands of Mexicans who wandered into his Diocese of Los Angeles; it was a case of the authorities' "criminal violation" of the Mexicans' "rights." Obviously Msgr. Quinn has never lived in any country but the one he was born in. If he had he would know that immigration officers in virtually every country on earth, finding a foreigner without a visa, let alone a passport, order his immediate deportation. In Italy the term is five days and the foreigner may have no recourse to legal counsel.

The Archbishop goes further. He warns that these criminal violations could trigger revolution. "The Pope's Latin American tour must be the cause for great fear in Washington lest this consciousness [for human rights] that he is arousing will flare into violent reaction." Thus, through their president, the bishops of the United States prove themselves as adept at rabble-rousing as Latin America's famed "Red" bishops—Helder Camara and Mendez Arceo.

Charged with phony emotion was a crowded press conference held by a group of professional communist agitators from Los Angeles who were acting as a lobby for the "undocumented." Their wild allegations included the frequent rape of immigrating Mexican girls by U. S. border personnel. Under the TV lights and cameras I could not resist the fun of solemnly asking the chairman during the question period if he did not consider the Mexican way of dealing with foreigners found to be working without a permit fully justified—simply putting them on a train to the border sans wife, children, or furniture? Startled silence! Finally the chairman recovered, "Now we will go back to the subject under discussion."

The story they tell of the undocumented bracero is a pitiful one and it is full of holes. It begins in Mexico where a population explosion (the fault of benighted Catholic teaching) and the combined greed of the landowners and multinational companies make finding work impossible and life intolerable. The necessity to emigrate entitles the subject to a series of rights like the right to go to somebody else's country, obtain a job, the going wages and social benefits along with congenial surroundings including schools, neighborhoods, entertainment and churches all carrying on in his own language. Any difficulty he comes up against in instantly acquiring these things he must consider a violation of his rights, a criminal violation, in the words of the chief bishop of his host country.

To pick the story apart and help readers see through some of the sham let me begin by saying that Mexico is not over but under populated. Like the West of the United States it is still a country of great open spaces. Population density in any European country is ten times greater, in the Netherlands, fifteen times.

Secondly, the reason so many Mexicans have fled the countryside to make of their once lovely capital a monster city is not because they owned no land but because they owned some. Once the 1910 and subsequent revolutions devastated the haciendas—those prosperous agricultural units that were small worlds in themselves complete with schools, churches, frequent festivals and, often their own railway lines— the parcelling out of pieces of the estates to individual farm workers followed. Bits of land, except for advanced truck or poultry farming, are of little use. In regions that need irrigation, none at all. Successive revolutionary governments offered the alternative of collective farming and, to their credit, Mexicans by and large rejected it. Talking last year to government agricultural men and to small farmers in villages and on buses I found them all regretting the passing of the hacienda.

A third bubble worth pricking is the idea that all the undocumented are Mexicans. The majority of them are but increasingly easy entry is being used to infiltrate Leftist activists from a number of Central and South American countries into the United States.

As for the so-called multinationals, the injection of foreign capital was a godsend after the destruction of the 1920's and 1930's and under its impulse a small middle class has grown to substantial proportions. Under Mexican law foreign investments are excluded from such natural resources as oil and no company may set up with more than 49% foreign capital.

To detail a solution to the problem of the bracero, legal or illegal, would be out of place in this journal even if I dared attempt it at this distance. Suffice to say that two governments that were honestly interested in getting rid of the Marxist threat this problem poses would find it easy to cooperate in determining the amount of seasonal work to be done, the number of workers needed, then in drawing up fair contracts and seeing that the terms were observed. The long-term solution could rest in the channeling of Mexico's forthcoming oil profits into irrigating great tracts of empty land, encouraging families to leave the cities while providing supplementary small industries spread over the new farm areas. But is it reasonable to count on any honest anti-Marxist move on the part of either Carter or Lopez Portillo—of Carter who signed away the Panama Canal, of Portillo who welcomed Fidel Castro to Mexico shortly before joining Carter to betray the anti-communist government of Nicaragua?

Meanwhile, it can only work for the good if true Catholics in the southwestern states begin to look at the growing problem with new awareness, able to pick out the few truths from the mass of lies. One basic truth is that it is very hard to make communists out of Mexicans. The nearly successful attempt during the 1920's ended in bloody rejection. There were rousing anti-communist demonstrations during the CELAM weeks in Puebla. American citizens of Mexican origin are the first to resent the Leftist agitation and in Houston in 1978 a Mexican-American citizens' committee literally ran young Marxist activists out of town.

Having learned the bitter lesson that burning churches and shooting priests is counter-productive—the Mexican experience was repeated in Spain in the 1930's—the revolutionaries have joined the Church, the so willing Conciliar Church. Mexico City's Jesuit Center for Reflection put out a glossy Who's Who at Puebla which might better have been called Who's Red at Puebla since it was limited to biographies and photographs of 40 out of Latin America's 213 bishops, each one chosen for his strong record of achievement in the Leftist cause.

There was a separate page dedicated to what the Jesuits call "outstandingly committed" bishops—Archbishop Sanchez of Santa Fe and Auxiliary Bishops Flores and Pena of San Antonio, Arzupe of Los Angeles, and Chavez of San Diego. All but Bishop Pena had the honor, it says, to have been arrested along with twelve other American bishops for what Ecuadorean authorities took to be a subversive meeting in August 1976. Bishops with this kind of commitment are able, through cursillos, basic communities and the rest, to build up a resentful ethnic block on a false sense of persecution and a twisted sense of the Faith. Uprooted newcomers looking for work are putty in their hands and the older residents who, unpropagandized would surely prefer to melt in the great American melting pot as our forefathers did, are drawn into the block by the simple act of going to church.

After many years of residence in many countries I consider Mexicans among my favorite people and I am convinced that it is due to fine qualities they possess that Churchmen like Archbishop Quinn are still short of their revolution. The situation of the undocumented is certainly unfortunate but it is an artificial one created, built up and sustained by ruthless Marxist manipulators, aided and abetted directly by the Church and indirectly by the State on both sides of the border.

 

Mrs. Martinez' book From Rome Urgently is reviewed by Dr. Malcolm Brennan in this month's issue.