Since the 1930s, when he helped write legislation nationalizing the country’s petroleum resources, Jesús Silva Herzog has been looked upon as a bulwark of the political left in Mexico. Certainly, he has spoken out in defense of the dissident minority unhappy with the course of Mexican history from the advent of the 1940s until today. These essays, which Silva Herzog wrote for Cuadernos Americanos, a prestigious journal of opinion he edited for many years, record his observations on aspects of Mexican and world events. Ironically, however, what distinguishes them is not so much their supposedly leftist slant as their ambivalent, if not their conformist, bent.
If they testify to anything, the essays help to explain the peculiar path of Mexican politics since the celebrated upheaval of 1910. Essentially, Silva Herzog, despite his protestations on behalf of socialism, is a reformer, and a cautious one at that. Thus, if he speaks for a “revolutionary left”—a claim he does not disown— the left in Mexico has remarkably little in common with the ideology of radical messiahs who transformed the faces of Russia, China, and Cuba.
How self-evident this is can be seen in his famous essay, “La revolución mexicana es ya un hecho histórico,” which Silva Herzog published in the fall of 1949. At this juncture in history, after a decade of the governments of Manuel Avila Camacho and Miguel Alemán, the Mexican Revolution, he proclaimed, had come to an end. Revolutions were not “immortal,” and the Mexican phenomenon was no exception. Lázaro Cárdenas, who had done the most to back popular demands and the cause of Mexican nationalism, had presided over the last of the revolutionary regimes.
The Alemán administration, said Silva Herzog, marked a turning point in the life of Mexicans. As he put it: “dígase lo que se diga, ya no es ni puede ser continuación de los gobiernos anteriores” (p. 144). Unlike critics of a different stripe who saw Alemán and his businessmen allies as the betrayal of the Revolution, Silva Herzog concluded that it was much too early to judge them. They could be, he wrote, either “better or worse” than their predecessors. Further, in his opinion, the Alemán regime could not be conservative (derecha) because it was impossible to break with historical tradition, and in Mexico that tradition was the Revolution. Viewed from historical perspective, Silva Herzog, with these declarations, emerges as either naïve or, at best, of moderate to conservative political convictions.
Yet, Silva Herzog, by popular acclaim, spoke for the revolutionary “Left” in Mexico. His essays, therefore, which run the gamut from his 1943 article, “La revolución mexicana en crisis," to reflections on the United States and the Soviet Union, the character of dictatorship, Cárdenas, and Luis Echeverría and the “left and right wings,” testify to the ambiguities and ambivalences of much “leftist” political rhetoric in Mexico. They document not only four decades of the twists and turns in the thinking of one of Mexico’s major political oracles but, beyond that, the difficulty of pigeonholing Mexican political thought.
