This article is serialized in the July 9 and July 16, 2004 issues of Executive Intelligence Review.

The Nazi-Instigated National
Synarchist Union of Mexico:
What It Means for Today

by William F. Wertz, Jr.

When in July 2003, the leaders of the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA)—founded in 1992 as a Trojan horse within the LaRouche movement—resigned from association with LaRouche over the issue of synarchism. Lyndon LaRouche warned that the MSIA's controllers centered around Spain's leading Francoist, Blas Piñar, represent an Hispanic terrorist threat against the United States in behalf of the circles of Vice President Dick Cheney. The fact that Samuel Huntington, who promoted the Clash of Civilizations which has been the operative principle behind Cheney's war in Iraq, has since authored a book, Who Are We?, which promotes a clash of civilizations between what he describes as the "Anglo-Protestant" culture of the United States and the primarily Mexican Hispanization of the U.S. Southwest, underscores the danger of another Sept. 11, under Hispanic cover. The March 11, 2004 train bombing in Madrid, and former Spanish Prime Minister José María Aznar's warning that he is certain that there will be a terrorist incident in the United States before the U.S. elections, further point to the danger LaRouche identified last year, of a Reichstag Fire-type terrorist attack under Hispanic cover, as part of a desperate effort to keep the besieged Cheney-centered neo-cons in power.

The purpose of this article is to document the precedent for such a danger in the history of the Union Nacional Sinarquista (UNS—National Synarchist Union) in Mexico, an organization created in 1937 by the Nazis, operating through the Spanish Falange and in conjunction with the Japanese. Although vastly diminished in numbers today compared to then, this same organization continues to actively organize in Mexico and in the United States. Moreover, although initially created by the Nazis as a fifth column in Mexico directed at the United States, after Pearl Harbor and after the Nazi defeat at Stalingrad, the UNS was taken over by the same anti-Roosevelt, Anglo-American imperialist faction that is behind Dick Cheney and his allies in the Democratic National Committee today. This is the same faction, associated with the Dulles brothers, which after World War II protected the Nazi apparatus, with which they had worked before and, in some cases, during the war.

Especially in light of the defeat of the Nazis, the Italian Fascists, and the Axis-allied Imperial Japanese in World War II, the Synarchists and their apologists vociferously lie about their connection to the Axis powers and attempt to portray themselves as a militant Mexican Christian movement based on the social teaching of the Catholic Church, which they misconstrue in such a way as to continue to identify with the fascist Falange of Franco's Spain and the Romanian Legionaires of Cornelio Codreanu.

The thesis of Samuel Huntington's sophomoric book is warmed-over Nazi propaganda. Huntington argues that Mexican immigration into the U.S. Southwest is in effect la Reconquista, the reconquest of territory taken from Mexico by military aggression in the 1840s, and that Mexican Catholic Hispanic culture is in a fundamental clash with the underlying Anglo-American Protestant culture which he claims is the basis for the national identity of the United States. As we shall see, this is precisely the ideology of Hispanidad developed by the Nazis at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin under Gen. Wilhelm von Faupel, to try to sabotage Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy and to drive a wedge between all of Ibero-America and the United States in the period leading up to the outbreak of World War II.

Nazi and Japanese propaganda circulated by the UNS at the time, also suggested that an Axis victory over the United States would lead to the return of the U.S. Southwest to the Mexicans. For example, one declassified U.S. intelligence report dated Oct. 31, 1941 states that "Mexicans are told that their country, under Sinarquismo, will be the great nation of the Northern Hemisphere. The United States is doomed, say the organizers, and members are told that as soon as the United States gets into the war, the American nation will crack open due to isolationist antagonism, and Mexico, under Union dominance, will take over vast sections of the United States, such as the Pacific Coast, the Southwest and Central South." On this basis, the UNS organized "cells" thoughout California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, Colorado, Indiana, and even Chicago during the 1930s and '40s.

In his book Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington promotes the same Nazi-concocted, Synarchist-disseminated idea, in reporting that the time for la Reconquista has arrived. Although he says that the reunification of U.S. territory with Mexico seems unlikely, he goes on to report the prediction of a professor that the southwestern states of the United States and the northern states of Mexico will come together to form a new country, "La República del Norte."

Fueling the Huntington scenario, Marivilia Carrasco, the pathetic nominal leader of the MSIA, claims that the MSIA is being slandered when it is described as synarchist—yet, in a recent press release, the MSIA attacks "Pan-Americanism" and the United States as an imperialist Anglo-Saxon Protestant nation, the precise propaganda line developed by the Nazi Ibero-American Institute of Berlin for dissemination by the National Synarchist Union and other Nazi-Falange fronts throughout Ibero-America.

When one realizes that the UNS and Acción Nacional (National Action), which became the PAN party of current Mexican President Vicente Fox, were interlocked groups opposed to the movement which had established Mexican independence from Spain in 1810, and committed to reversing the republican Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Mexican Constitution of 1917, then the fact that the PAN currently controls the Presidency of the Republic of Mexico; that Carlos Abascal Carranza, one of two politically active sons of the most militant Chief of the UNS in the 1940s, Salvador Abascal, is Minister of Labor in the current government; and that a second son, Salvador Abascal Carranza, is a PAN Congressman from Mexico City, should make it clear that the forces that controlled the UNS and the PAN at their inception, are now in power in Mexico. The relationship between the UNS and the PAN historically is reflected in the comment of one UNS leader cited in a now declassified Oct. 31, 1941 report prepared by U.S. Naval Intelligence in Mexico City: "We shall be the soldiers of the coming struggle, and the Acción Nacional will supply the officers."

In 1955, the Base, the secret organization which controlled the UNS and the PAN, was reconstituted as the Organizacion Nacional del Yunque (ONY, National Organization of the Anvil). Today there are two factions of the UNS as a result of a split which occurred in 1945. The chief of the faction controlled by the Anvil, Clemente Gutiérrez Pérez, admitted in an interview given to the Spanish FalangeHoy on June 27, 2002, that his faction works closely with groups of radical Mexicans throughout the United States and with a group of exiled Cubans in Florida, in addition to the Falange and the Fuerza Nueva in Spain, Patria Argentina in Argentina, and the International Third Position in England. The Fuerza Nueva is the fascist party of Blas Piñar. The Third Position is the organization in London of Roberto Fiore, which was disbanded in Italy in the aftermath of the Aug. 2, 1980 bombing of the Bologna, Italy train station. Fiore has since founded a new organization in Italy, run from London, called Forza Nuova, which is close to Blas Piñar's Fuerza Nueva.[1]

Whether or not the official UNS itself would be employed in carrying out a terrorist incident, it should be recognized that historically, the UNS, despite a tactical commitment to non-violent action, was militarily trained and implicated in a number of coup d'état and assassination attempts in Mexico. Moreover, as one declassified U.S. Intelligence Report from Oct. 31, 1941 states: "With the German backing as an impetus, the Unión got going quickly. In 1938 it organized a secret military group within the Unión, to drill members and teach them to use arms in Nazi military fashion. It is today a powerful group but how well armed the members are cannot definitely be established. Members claim 150,000 rifles and from 2,000 to 3,000 machine guns. One of the most dangerous factors is that in the Mexican Army itself, several of these Unión military groups are reliably reported to exist.

"Immediate program includes planning for sabotage in Mexico and U.S.... The real danger of the moment is in the military units of the Unión. These units have 'hunting clubs' and marching clubs. They go on extensive cross-country hikes under supervision of persons with military experience.

"The Unión, as ordered by the Falange, wants to use Mexico as the nearest center of espionage against the United States. It seeks to organize efficient cells expressly for sabotage in Mexico and the U.S. It wants to build up Mexico as a convenient munitions center for totalitarian revolts whenever the United States might get involved in a war. It seeks constantly to irritate the U.S. and provoke undercover trouble in an effort to focus main American attention on South America in general and Mexico in particular, drawing attention away from Britain and Russia. It wants to cause disturbances in Mexico so that restrictive measures can be exploited to its advantage among the masses."

In the report that follows, we trace the origins and evolution of this fascist plot against the Americas.

1. Hitler's Assault on Ibero-America

As early as 1934, Hitler began to focus on Mexico as the key to his strategy for Ibero-America. According to Hermann Rauschning, a Nazi politician who became disillusioned with Hitler and fled in 1936 to Switzerland, Hitler was convinced that Mexico was "the best and richest country in the world with the laziest and most dissipated population under the sun.... Mexico is a country that cries for a capable master. It is being ruined by its government. With the treasure of Mexican soil, Germany could be rich and great! Why do we not tackle this task? ... You could get this Mexico for a couple of hundred million."

Hitler believed that Ibero-America could be taken over, not by invading armies, but rather through subversion. "We shall create a new Germany there [in South America]. We shall find everything we need there.... We shall not land troops like William the Conqueror and gain Brazil by force of arms. Our weapons are invisible ones."

There were significant German colonies in a number of Ibero-American nations and these were organized by the Nazis. However, as important as these colonies would be for Hitler's aims, he and Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring recognized early on that given the language and other cultural differences between Nazi Germany and Ibero-America, the Nazis could only be successful if they worked through Spain. As Göring wrote in his newspaper, the National-Zeitung of Essen: "Spain is the key of the two continents. Only Spain's final victory can preserve for the Spanish-American countries true Spanish culture and tradition."

In 1934, Hitler summoned Gen. Wilhelm von Faupel to the Chancellery in Berlin and appointed him as chief of the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin. Von Faupel was known as the "I.G. General," referring to the fact that he counted as his patrons, Georg von Schnitzler, member of the board of directors of the German chemical company I.G. Farben; Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who became the major finanical supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party; the pro-Hitler banker Baron Kurt von Schröder, and Franz von Papen. As ex-Reich's Chancellor, von Papen promoted Hitler's accession to power after a meeting between himself and Hitler at the home of von Schröder in Cologne.

Von Faupel already had significant experience in Ibero-America. In 1911, he joined the staff of the Argentine War College in Buenos Aires; in 1921, after World War I, he was the military counselor to the Inspector General of the Argentine Army; in 1926, he had a high military post in the Brazilian Army, and later in 1926 became Inspector General of the Peruvian Army.

The Nazis realized that in order to dominate Ibero-America through Spain, they had to crush the Spanish Republic. Therefore, the Third Reich conspired with officers of the Spanish Army to bring Gen. Francisco Franco to power in 1936, using the Falange of José Antonio Primo de Rivera as their base of operations in Spain, and as the vehicle for penetrating Ibero-America. The Falange Exterior—a Spanish-speaking division of the Foreign Organization of the German Nazi Party—was created for this purpose.

Under Nazi supervision, the Falange was created in Mexico, within weeks of the start of the Spanish Civil War. The official Falange in Mexico had 50,000 members. In July 1941, Eulogio Celorio Sordo was sent from Spain to become provincial Chief of the uniformed Falange in Mexico. Spanish military leaders of the Falange in Mexico were Maj. Carril Ontano, who was sent to Mexico by von Faupel nearly a year before Pearl Harbor; Maj. Francisco Garay Unzuenta; and Capt. Carlos Aravilla. Orders came from Gen. Mora Figueroa, chief of the Spanish Falange and Minister in the Spanish Cabinet.

According to a declassified U.S. Intelligence report dated March 9, 1942, the person who functioned as the military leader of the Falange prior to Ontano was Hans Hellerman. This report is significant because it concretely identifies the role of von Faupel, his Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, the way in which the Nazis and the Falange worked together in Mexico, as well as the military training given to Mexicans. According to the report, Hellerman

"has been reliably reported to be a director of the Gestapo in Mexico. His specialty is the training of assault troops and it is reported that he has been engaged in training shock troops for the Spanish Falange in Mexico.

"It has been reported that Hans Hellerman is employed not only as a Nazi espionage agent but also as a military instructor to Falangist youth, attends their meetings and lectures on subjects of political nature. It is stated that the possibility exists that Hellerman receives his orders from the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, which is directed by D. von Faupel. This organization was created for the express purpose of penetrating into Latin America.

"Prior to his arrival in the western hemisphere, it is reported that Hellerman was a chief of the Nazi party in Spain."

"A confidential informant has stated that Hellerman was head of the NSDAP [Nazi Party] in Spain in 1936 and prior to that time was head of the local Nazi group in Barcelona. His entry into the Nazi party in Spain was made in 1933...."

Cárdenas Fights Back:
The Battle for Mexico's Oil Patrimony

The crucial period in Mexican history during which the UNS flourished was during the Presidency of Gen. Lázaro Cárdenas (Nov. 30, 1934 until 1940). This was the period in which Hitler consolidated his power in Nazi Germany and then backed General Franco in the Spanish Civil war, with the objective of using the Spanish Falange to take over Ibero-America and the Philippines. Mexico under Cárdenas was the only nation in the Americas which supported the Spanish Republic against Franco's insurgency in Spain.

Cárdenas was committed to fulfilling the objectives of the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the Mexican Constitution of 1917, which were to establish Mexico as a sovereign nation-state in control of its own resources, including its oil, and free of domination by the feudal, ultramontane faction of the Catholic Church. During his regime he therefore continued the 20-year-long fight that had been going on with the foreign oil companies, based upon the principle embedded in the Mexican Constitution that the subsoil wealth of Mexico belonged to the Mexican people. Cárdenas also was committed to land reform. He therefore took over many large feudal estates (haciendas), divided the land, and gave it to the landless peasants. He was also thoroughly committed to providing public education to Mexico's rural poor.

Because of these policies, Cárdenas was falsely accused of being a communist, and anti-communist fascists began to organize against his regime.

On Nov. 18, 1936, an expropriation law was passed in Mexico "for reasons of national welfare." It was first applied to the National Railways; but then in 1937, Cárdenas created the General Administration of National Petroleum, to manage government properties. This was clearly a first step in the direction of the eventual expropriation of foreign oil holdings.

In early November 1937, a spokesman for foreign oil companies said that the decision by a government Arbitration Board, that the oil companies should pay 26 million pesos in wage increases to Mexican oil workers, would force them to suspend operations.

Cárdenas was not yet prepared to move, and perhaps still hoped that the foreign oil companies would abide by the decision, so on Nov. 14, Mexico gave Britain a major concession in the oil-rich Poza Rica zone. Before this, Britain already controlled 59% of Mexican oil.

Then on March 1, 1938 the Mexican Supreme Court upheld the Arbitration Board's findings. When the foreign oil companies balked at implementing the decision, the oil expropriation occurred on March 18, 1938. The old Spanish law, which held that all subsoil wealth belongs to the nation, had been in effect in Mexico until 1884. But then the Porfirio Díaz government passed laws linking subsoil and surface ownership, which allowed foreign oil companies to gain control over Mexican oil. The majority of oil concessions to foreigners in Mexico were granted between 1905 and 1917. But then the 1917 Constitution returned to the original Spanish concept. However, the Constitution of 1917 could not be enforced immediately, because of the power of the foreign oil companies, which worked in alliance with the reactionary element of the Mexican Catholic Church to incite the Cristero Rebellion in 1926-29, for the purpose of overthrowing the Mexican government.

Reaction to the oil expropriation was swift: Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil Company imposed a boycott on Mexico, and Gen. Saturnino Cedillo launched a military revolt against Cárdenas, which was backed by the foreign companies.

On May 13, 1938, Mexico broke relations with Britain and only resumed them in January 1942.

During his administration, which coincided with that of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States, Cárdenas was inspired by Roosevelt's New Deal and counted upon Roosevelt adhering to his Good Neighbor Policy (see box), which Roosevelt enunciated as early as December 1932. And although Roosevelt was not able to prevent certain measures taken under pressure from the oil companies against Mexico, nonetheless, there was no U.S. intervention. And as we shall see, in November 1941, after Cárdenas left office, Roosevelt delivered on his promise of a Good Neighbor Policy, when the United States and Mexico signed the Good Neighbor Agreement, which recognized Mexico's sovereignty over its subsoil wealth.

However, before this was achieved, one of the most dire consequences of the Royal Dutch Shell/Standard Oil Company boycott was that it forced Mexico to sell its oil to the Axis powers, including Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Japan, and thus exposed Mexico to an acceleration of Axis subversive activity. As Betty Kirk, an American journalist with close ties to the government of Lázaro Cárdenas, reported: "The biggest consumer of Mexican oil from the time of the expropriations until war broke out was Germany, which took 50 per cent. Italy took half of the remainder. Moreover, Germany had sent Dr. Joachim Herstlet, second-ranking man in Hitler's Foreign Economic Ministry, to Mexico to promote the deals here. Even the brother of Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, long-time chief of the Reichsbank, paid Mexico a visit during this Nazi heyday."

The irony is that both Standard Oil of New Jersey, controlled by the Rockefellers, and Royal Dutch Shell supplied oil to the Nazis as well, and worked closely with the same I.G. Farben, to which von Faupel owed his job at the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin. Standard Oil also supplied the Japanese with oil. Even after Pearl Harbor, Standard Oil shipped oil to fascist Spain, which then transferred it to the Nazis.

When Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell launched the boycott of Mexico, Mexican oil was sent to Germany through the Davis Oil Company of William Rhodes Davis, who had connections of his own to Göring and Himmler, and who, with the backing of I.G. Farben and Kurt von Schröder, received financial support from Hjalmar Schacht at the Reichsbank.

As Charles Higham writes in Trading with the Enemy, arrangements were made by such economists as Dr. Joachim Herstlet, "for Davis to fuel the German Navy, while Standard Oil fueled the Air Force."

On Feb. 12, 1940, the American Embassy in Mexico City reported that Texas Oil of Arizona was working in close collusion with affiliated oil groups, including the Davis Oil Company, to smuggle arms into Mexico to support a possible military coup by the Nazi-backed Mexican Presidential candidate, Juan Almazán, in the event of his defeat at the polls.

Mexico condemned every aggression committed by the Axis powers, refused to recognize any of the puppet governments imposed by them on occupied nations, and was the only American government to aid the Spanish Republic, but the oil boycott had made Mexico vulnerable to penetration by enemy operatives intent upon a counter-revolution against the Mexican Revolution, so that Mexico could be used against the United States, should it enter the war.

Nazi 'Spiritual Re-Conquest of Latin America'

As Betty Kirk wrote in 1941, General Franco had announced that Spain's foreign policy would be dedicated to "the spiritual re-Conquest of Latin America." What Franco meant by "spiritual," was in actuality Nazi world conquest. Franco's slogan was "One race, one language, one culture, one religion." Never mind that the Christian religion professes to be universal, and therefore not limited to one race, one language, or one culture.

On Oct. 8, 1938, Hitler and Franco signed a pact giving the Nazis the power to direct Spain's national and international policy.

The Spanish fascists were trained by the Gestapo to work for the Axis in Ibero-America. There were schools for Spaniards in Hamburg, Bremen, Hanover, and Vienna. Graduates were commissioned as officers in the Spanish Army's Intelligence Service, the SIM. Alberto Mercado Flores, a veteran Spanish Falangist official, was sent to Mexico to command the SIM operations there.

An article in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on Dec. 3, 1939, entitled "Bridges Across the Atlantic," revealed that the model for selling the anti-Christian Hitler and his Nazis to the Spanish-speaking world, was the Holy Roman Empire of Charles V, the Austrian Hapsburg grandson of Queen Isabela and King Ferdinand, who was also King of Spain. The article reported:

"History and culture have welded the bonds between Germany and the Ibero-American countries. These bonds are now being strengthened by the Ibero-American Institute at Berlin. This Institute furthers closer relationships between German and South American scientists, artists, educators, and architects....

"The U.S.A. if we may judge by their political attitude, seem closely tied to Anglo-Saxondom across the seas....

"Spain, South America, and Germany have, since the days of Charles V, gone their own and different ways. But they always found each other in the common task of civilization."

The article, complimenting General Franco on the occasion of his gift of Titian's portrait of Emperor Charles V to the Ibero-American Institute in Berlin, continued:

"The conquistadors and the missionaries who brought a high accomplished culture to South America have sown the seeds of that spiritual unity which, as General Franco puts it, unites—on an imperial plane—South America with Spain. General Franco's action of donating the painting of Charles V to the Ibero-American Institute was symbolic: this prince united under his scepter the Ibero-American community of nations."

Prior to Pearl Harbor, the Nazis even attempted to portray Hitler as the protector of Catholicism, in propaganda distributed or meant to be distributed in Ibero-America. On Dec. 12, 1940, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico, a leaflet was given out with a picture of the Virgin on one side, and on the other the statement that "Hitler is the protector of Catholicism." The leaflet continued in the anti-semitic tradition of the Spanish Inquisition, saying that Hitler persecuted the Jews because they had sacrificed Christ in Palestine.

Then in late January 1941, further coordination between Nazi and Falangist propaganda was revealed when a British cruiser stopped a ship in mid-Pacific and confiscated tons of propaganda printed in Spanish. Hitler was presented as "the new defender of the Catholic faith." The propaganda said the Nazis were really working to restore Catholicism, and correctly argued that Franco's victory was Hitler's handiwork. There were pictures of Hitler shaking hands with Spanish Catholic priests. England was portrayed as "a Protestant-Jewish country."

In 1941, the work of von Faupel and the Ibero-American Institute was further exposed, in a report submitted by the Argentine Congressional Committee Investigating Axis Activities in that nation. Called the Taborda Report, after the chairman of the committee, Deputy Raúl Damonte Taborda, the report said of the Ibero-American Institute:

"Its real objective: while, on the one hand the Germans build their 'aryan minorities' with German Nationals Abroad, on the other hand they attempt to stir up the nationalistic sentiments of the masses of Spanish origin.

"With Franco, the Spanish Falange triumphed in the Motherland. With the Spanish Falange, the Ibero-American Institute triumphed in Berlin. In exact terms—Nazism. The Falange is a copy of the Nazi Party—a blueprint to such a point that it made a literal translation of all the principles that fascism uses to plant the seeds of propaganda. Nazi technicians take part in their plans, directing them politically. Their work in the Latin American countries is oriented toward the forming in solid blocs of the great Spanish masses, an attempt to achieve what the Nazis achieved with the German 'blood comrades.' It is a strong Ibero-Americanism practiced from Berlin. The simplest reading of the program of the Falange tells us to beware of it.

"Do not believe that we are shouting in the dark [said the historic report, citing the Nazis' own estimate that] 22,000 perfectly disciplined men are ready, plus 8,000 Germans from the Nazi Party, 4,000 members of the German Workers Front, 3,000 Italian Fascists, 15,000 Falangistas, and many others from the Juventud Germano Argentina and many other thousands affiliated with the Alianza Nacionalista Argentina—all ready to strike."

The report also stated that in June 1939, during the Pan-American Conference in Lima, von Faupel delivered a lecture before the German Academy in Berlin, in which he said: "A victory for Fascist Spain will cement our relations with Latin America and will be a rude shock to the Good Neighbor Policy of President Roosevelt."

The code word for Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy was "Pan-Americanism," and to this the Nazi-Falange counterposed a Latin American bloc based on the ideology of Hispanidad. This strategy can be seen in the following quote from von Faupel cited in the report: "The Pan-American idea is an unsound invention, and it is necessary to oppose to it the idea of an Iberian America. The countries of South and Central America are nearer to Spain than to the United States."

The Taborda Report said that von Faupel's "stay in Spain served, among other things, to found in San Sebastian in May 1938, a Nazi college for Argentine citizens. From there would come the future directors of the Fascists of the Argentine Republic." The report also revealed that von Faupel maintained a school in Barcelona for Ibero-American Falangists.

Another document declassified in the United States is an Oct. 23, 1941 Canadian Army Intelligence Service report on Argentina. Citing the Taborda Commission, it stated:

"A good deal of evidence has already been forthcoming that the Nazis have been very active in the Argentine Army, which, being traditionally German-trained [a reference to von Faupel's military service in Argentina—wfw], has proved fertile ground for totalitarian doctrine.

"The basic aim of Axis propaganda is to prevent as far as possible any country from entering into closer relations (a) with Britain, and (b) with the United States. All other aims, even that of maintaining a friendly attitude towards Germany, have been subordinated to this goal, which of course is only a short-term one.

"The customary phases of Nazi press approach are clearly marked.

"1. to establish Germany and the other Axis powers as true friends, a strongly nationalist spirit is cultivated. This is done by advocating the development of all domestic resources which would tend to make the countries independent.

"Connected with this is a strong drive for the creation of a Latin-American bloc which, while allowing each country to retain its individuality, would unify the foreign policy of the Southern Continent and provide a sure protection against Yankee imperialism. This drive links up in turn with the Hispanidad movement, formally inaugurated by Spain and Portugal but obviously directed by Germany."

In 1942, both Mussolini and Franco affirmed the relationship among the Nazis, the Italian Fascists, and the Spanish Falange—in case anybody had any doubts. On Sept. 30, 1942, Benito Mussolini said: "The great unity of the Axis includes Nazis, Fascists, and Spanish Falangistas. There is no longer any distinction between Fascism, Nazism, and the Falangismo." On Dec. 7, 1942, one year after the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, Franco told Hitler: "Many thanks to you and the German peoples. May your arms triumph in the glorious undertaking of freeing Europe from the Bolshevik terror."

Nazi Creation of the National Synarchist Union

In 1999, a book appeared by Héctor Hernández entitled The Sinarquista Movement, With Special Reference to the Period 1934-1944. The primary purpose of this book, published just prior to the election of the PAN's candidate Vicente Fox as President of Mexico, was to counter the well-documented evidence that the UNS was created by the Nazis in conjunction with the Spanish Falange, and that the UNS was taken over after Pearl Harbor and the Mexican declaration of war against the Axis powers in 1942, by an anti-Roosevelt Anglo-American imperialist faction acting through the Dulles-Buckley networks associated with Cardinal Spellman and Bishop Fulton Sheen of the United States.

Hernández invokes the British Foreign Office, in attempting to refute the intelligence assessments of the Intelligence Division of the Office of Chief of U.S. Naval Operations and of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), as well as the work of the Mexican government and U.S. and Mexican investigative journalists. According to Hernández, the British Legation in Mexico had the following assessement:

"Early in the year a press campaign was begun in the U.S. against the Synarchist Movement in Mexico on the grounds that it was fascist-inspired and directed by the Roman Church. There were good reasons for thinking that these attacks were based on a supercharged but inaccurate report of the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, housed in the embassy." The British Foreign Office commented that American intelligence agencies, the OSS in particular, "too often believe what they want to believe and they see sinister forces everywhere."

In a recent press release, the MSIA parroted Hernández's British controllers, by claiming that that the intelligence on the UNS circulated by the LaRouche movement is based on "disinformation material produced by the Office of Naval Intelligence."

The evidence is, however, overwhelming, that the UNS was a continuation of the Cristero movement of the Mexican Cristero War (1926-29), but that its formal constitution was facilitated and its early direction was provided by known Nazis working with members of the Spanish Falange, who themselves later collaborated with the Japanese.

As Hernández is forced to admit, this was the official view not only of the United States, but also of the Mexican government.

From the Mexican side, a report submitted to Mexican President Cárdenas on Oct. 13, 1939 by Eduardo Villaseñor, who was the Undersecretary of Finance and Public Credit, entitled "Informe Confidencial A-3 sobre las actividades alemanas en México" ("Confidential Report A-3 on German Activities in Mexico") wrote the following in reference to the UNS:

"This fascist group is the instrument organized and directed by the German Nazis in order to dominate the states of Querétaro and Guanajuato. Their principal chiefs are naturalized Spanish Mexicans. Their connection to international fascism is through a Spaniard named Tuero, who resides in Ciudad Juárez. The Synarchists are abundantly provisioned with weapons. For the moment they are occupied above all with fighting against the ejidatarios [collective farmers]. In two years the Synarchists have assassinated around 600 in the state of Guanajuato and 400 in the state of Querétaro.

"The organizer of the Synarchists is a German, Schreiter, who has been until very recently a professor of modern languages at the University of Guanajuato."

Villaseñor stated that the strategy of the Synarchists was to control Guanajuato and Querétaro in order, by their strategic position, to encircle the Federal District, and also to permit or cut off access to the port of Veracruz, or south toward Guatemala or to the north of the country.

In another Mexican government document entitled "El Nazismo en Mexico" ("Nazism in Mexico"), dated May 23, 1940, under the title "Relations with the Synarchists," the following was reported:

"Still in 1939 the relations between the Nazis and the Synarchists are tight. The liaison was the 'professor of languages' Helmuth Schreiter of Guanajuato, leader and trusted right-hand man of the Nazis in the center of the Republic. In the sacking, which the Communists in Guanajuato did of the Synarchists' offices, they found in their archives a part of the personal correspondence of Schreiter, which we later obtained."

This same view was held by the United States. According to a declassified report submitted on Oct. 31, 1941 by Harold P. Braman, Assistant Naval Attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City:

"Mexican Sinarquistas are a dangerous totalitarian group controlled by Spanish Falangists and the Church, with Nazis pulling strings behind scenes.... Sinarquista program, designed by Falangists, aims to establish totalitarian state under control of Spain, with Mexico forming a part of a new Spanish empire which would be dominated by Germany."

As the result of "an extensive and thorough investigation of the Sinarquistas in the State of Guanajuato," the report documented the role of card-carrying Nazis in the creation of the UNS and its initial financing:

"A strong and dangerous Nazi affiliation with the Sinarquistas was found throughout the State of Guanajuato. The principal Germans connected with the movement, and who may be considered as powerful figures behind the scenes, are Oscar Hellmuth Schreiter and Otto Gilbert.

"As stated in reference (a), Schreiter was a witness at the formal legal organizational proceedings of the Sinarquista Union in León, Guanajuato, on 26 May 1937. This was again verified. It was also ascertained through a trusted informant, who posed as an insurance salesman and a prospective member of the Sinarquista Union, that every cent made available to the Sinarquistas for the first year or so came direct from Schreiter, who received it periodically from influential members of the German colony in Mexico City. These latter are understood (B-3) to have obtained the funds direct from the German Legation in Mexico City."

Braman reported that Schreiter arranged "for the Union's founding and its constitution" on orders from Berlin and appeared "in person to have it legally established as a group.... His wife is a relative of the Governor of the state. He issues German propaganda on occasion, and obtains his working funds by devious routes, some of them by mail from persons connected with the German firm of Beick-Felix in Mexico City.

"Schreiter was born in Dresden, Germany, on 18 March 1902. He came to Mexico through the port of Veracruz on 20 August 1923, aboard the SS Otto Hugo Stinnes, proceeding from Hamburg. Schreiter has Immigration Form 14, No. 66315.

"In August, 1943, Schreiter was ordered to Mexico City on the charge of being a dangerous alien, but he later was able to return to Guanajuato. For some reason, he came back to Mexico City and the authorities ordered him to remain in the capital indefinitely.

"Although Schreiter is active with the Sinarquistas in Mexico City, he is endeavoring to get back to Guanajuato, because he feels that his activities can be obscured more easily and he can work with more freedom there. The principal leaders of the Sinarquistas, including Manuel Torres Bueno, the present national leader of the Sinarquistas, are endeavoring to get permission for him to return to Guanajuato. Schreiter is a close personal friend of Torres Bueno, is said to exercise great influence over him, and is the inspiration for most of the anti-United Nations (the nations allied against the Axis powers) and pro-Nazi statements and actions of Torres Bueno.

"While Schreiter is away from Guanajuato, the acting chief Nazi agent within the Sinarquista organization is Otto Gilbert.... He was born in Berlin, Germany, on 16 February 1887, and entered Mexico by way of Veracruz in 1921.... Gilbert has Immigration Form 14, No. 74208, issued 9 May 1933.

"Gilbert took the informant to a Sinarquista leaders meeting at the home of a priest, Jesús García, in Guanajuato City. Among those attending were Alfonso Echeverria, Secretary of Education in Guanajuato State; and Alfonso Trueba Olivares, director of publicity and propaganda for the National Sinarquista Union.

"Other prominent figures in the movement in Guanajuato include Isaac Guzmán Valdivia, a lawyer who is now state leader, and Adolfo Maldonado, a prominent official of the state government when the Sinquarista Union was organized. Both were witnesses with Schreiter at the organization of the Sinarquistas in León in 1937."

Besides Schreiter and Gilbert, both of whom retained their German citizenship, Braman identified a number of other Nazis in Mexico who worked with the UNS. In Guanajuato, these included Otto Rosenhofer and Jacob Kilian and his two sons Heriberto and Ernesto; Alejandro Holste in Mexico City; Dr. Otto Ritter of the Farmacia Principal in Mexico City and a Juan Baumgarten of the Liberería Alemana in the capital, who distributed Nazi propaganda. Paul Reimers was said to be the contact man in Zacatecas; San Luis Potosí was covered by Fritz Shuarz. Others mentioned by various sources are Schwartz and Fritz in Mexico City; Schmol in Averítaro; Carlos Goerner in Mexico City; Paul Klennert, Mexico City; Wilhelm Pferdekamp, advisor to the Falangistas in Mexico.

In a report submitted on Feb. 2, 1944, Braman reconfirmed that Schreiter was a Nazi, and elaborated on the role of clerical fascism:

"Oscar Hellmuth Schreiter and Otto Gilbert are principal Nazi agents connected with Sinarquista organizations and have their headquarters in Guanajuato....

"It so happens ... that the Church and the Falangists have a joint council of strategy which, upon orders from Spain, pulls the Union's strings. Orders to Spain come from Berlin.... [T]he Church of Mexico is at this moment working in full cooperation with the Falangists whom they supported in the Spanish Civil War. The Falangists want an all-powerful Spanish world working alongside Germany, and Mexico is viewed by them as fertile ground for a change-over of the Spain of today, like the days of the Spain of old."

According to Braman, the following persons are reliably reported to be members of the Falange-Church secret council in Mexico, called the "Council of Hispanidad": Augusto Ibañez Serrano, assistant Chief and secret agent of General Franco of Spain; Alfonso Junco, editor of the Acción Nacional (PAN) weekly, Nacion, and Mexico's foremost apostle of Hispanidad; Manual Gómez Morín, founder of the PAN and editor of Nación, lieutenant of Serrano, Alejandro Quijano, lieutenant of Serrano, Salvador Abascal, leader of the UNS, José Vasconcelos, editor of pro-Nazi magazine Timón, and a probable sub-chief of the UNS.

José Vasconcelos's pro-Nazi views and his support for the UNS were further documented in another now declassified report by Josephus Daniels, Embassy of the U.S.A. in Mexico, June 18, 1941:

"José Vasconcelos's name does not appear on the editorial staff of Juventud Mexicana, but it will be noticed that the leading article is contributed by him. This very pro-Nazi article, entitled 'The Religious Situation in Germany' claims there is no religious persecution in that country and that the Nazi principles are not incompatible with religious freedom. Vasconcelos is the Mexican journalist who was the editor of Timón, suppressed by the Mexican Government in June of last year, on account of its strong Nazi tendencies, as the Department will recall, and who it had been rumored was about to start a new pro-Nazi publication."

José Vasconcelos had been minister of education in the early '20s, during which time he implemented educational policies which were attacked by the Church and the Cristeros. He ran for President against Ortiz Rubio in 1929. Timón was suspended following the expulsion of Arthur Dietrich, the director of Nazi propaganda, in June 1939.

This pro-Nazi, Vasconcelos, praised Synarchism saying: "The best banner that the Mexican youth can take in its hands is that of Synarchism."

Braman also reported that the principal advisors of the UNS were Salvador Trueba Olivares, José Trueba Olivares and Alfonso Trueba (the latter preferred to omit the name Olivares, although he is of the same family). Alfonso acted as the Chief of the State of Guanajuato and editor of the UNS's newspaper.

The Central Committee was composed of national delegates appointed by Abascal. Among them were René Capistrán for Guerrero, the former head of the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth, the League, and the Cristeros; and Feliciano Manrique for Guanajuato was another delegate.

Regional leaders as of Oct. 31, 1941 included Manuel Torres Bueno in Guanajuato. The news editor of El Sinarquista was Juan Ignacio Padilla.

The Mexican author Mario Gill's version of the formation of the UNS is almost identical with that of the U.S. Naval Attaché's report. Gill maintains that Schreiter formed a group called the Anti-Communist Center prior to the creation of the UNS. The registration was signed by the secretary general of the state government, Lic. Adolfo Maldonado, and by the lawyer Isaac Guzmán Valdivia. The registration took place in the notary office of Lic. Manuel Villaseñor in the city of Guanajuato on June 13, 1936.

However, because the masses associated anti-communism with opposition to Cárdenas, who was very popular in 1936, Schreiter understood that such an organization had no future. According to Gill, he discussed the situation with his disciples, the brothers José and Alfonso Trueba Olivares, Manuel Torres Bueno, Manuel Zermeño, José Antonio Urquiza, Jr. (who had just returned from Spain where he had fought on the side of Franco against the Spanish Republic) and others, to transform the Anti-Communist Center into a new organization.

On May 23, 1937, the National Synarchist Union was formally constituted in the city of León in a meeting of 137 persons in the house at 49 Calle de la Libertad. The 15 key people who founded the organization are: Lic. Manuel Zermeño Pérez, Herculano Hernández Delgado, Lic. Isaac G. Valdivia, Lic. Manuel Torres Bueno, Hellmuth Oskar Schreiter, Federico Heim, Juvencio Carmona, Luis Reyes, Luis Belmont, Feliciano Manrique, Antonio Martínez Aguayo, Javier Aguilera Bourroux, Rodrigo Moreno Zermeño, José Trueba Olivares, and Alfonso Trueba Olivares.

The other source which reports the role of the Nazi Helmuth Schreiter in the formation of the UNS is El Popular the newspaper of the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM).

The Role of Jesuits

According to journalist Kirk, one of the first moves made by General Franco after winning the Spanish Civil War, was to restore all the properties of the Spanish Jesuits, which had been confiscated by Carlos III in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767. Kirk further reports: "The Jesuit Order unofficially, but in fact, constitutes a separate power from the Church. Unfortunately most of the active members of the Mexican Jesuits are Franquistas and are active in spreading Falange influences among Catholic social organizations.... The greatest Falange influence is exerted over Mexican Catholic Action and the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth (ACJM)."[2]

The key Jesuit personality in this process was Bernard Bergoend, who was born in France in 1871 and entered the Society of Jesus at age 18. He first went to Mexico at age 20 in 1891. Afterwards he was sent to Spain to study "theology," and then was ordained a priest in St. Louis, Missouri, before returning to Mexico, where he was named a professor of philosophy at the Jesuit Institute in Guadalajara.

In 1906, Bergoend organized Spiritual Exercises among the workers in Guadalajara and came to know members of the Guadalupan Laborers, an organization created in 1905. In 1913, he created the Catholic Association of Mexican Youth (ACJM). René Capistrán Garza, the future leader of the Cristeros, became the president of the ACJM in 1917. In 1925, Bergoend drew up the plan for the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty. The leadership of the ACJM, including René Capistrán became the leadership of the League. The Popular Union, or the "U," led by the recently beatified Anacleto González Flores, also joined the League, which became the leadership of the Cristeros. The father of Salvador Abascal, the most militant chief of the UNS, was an important member of the Popular Union. According to Harold Braman's Oct. 31, 1941 report, Capistrán Garza later became a member of the central committee of the UNS.

After the Cristero War, Bergoend founded the League of the O, also known as the OCA (Organization, Cooperation, and Action), which then became the Base, a secret organization, later known as the Church-Falange Council, or the Council of Hispanidad. The UNS and the PAN were sections of the Base. The workers' section was made up of the Guadalupan Laborers controlled by Antonio Santacruz, who later became chief of the Base.

The ACJM would remain the primary pool from which the leadership of a variety of Base-controlled organizations would be recruited. According to the ACJM website, at the conclusion of the Cristero War in 1929, Bergoend made some modifications in the ACJM statutes in order to integrate it into the Acción Católica Mexicana on Dec. 25, 1929, so that it would not be disbanded as part of the settlement of the war. He continued as an advisor to the ACJM until 1940. According to Mario Gill, Bergoend was among the Jesuits who advised the UNS until his death in 1943.

The impact of the Jesuits is also seen directly in respect to their effect on the identity and sense of mission of Salvador Abascal. Abascal thought he was "the incarnation of Saint Ignatius of Loyola," founder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits). Moreover, he stated that he saw his effort to set up a Synarchist colony in Baja California as "a renewal of the work of the missionaries, interrupted by freemasonry, indeed by the revolution, with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767." For Abascal: "The true greatness of María Auxiliadora lies in the resumption of the missionary work banefully interrupted by freemasonry, that is to say, the revolution, with the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 ... , a date that marks the true origin of the Mexican Revolution, which is not more than a branch and a by-product of the global revolution."

The fact that synarchism was originally created following the Treaty of Paris in 1763 by the British freemasonry-created French Martinist cult, and given that the general who was recruited to lead the Cristero Rebellion, Enrique Corostieta y Velarde, was himself a freemason, the attack on freemasonry by Abascal and other Synarchists is exposed for the lying hypocrisy that it is. What Abascal and others were really opposed to was not freemasonry, since they were themselves a freemasonic cult; rather,they opposed the faction of freemasonry led by the founders of the American Revolution, such as Benjamin Franklin, who opposed the British faction which created synarchism. The U.S. Ambassador to Mexico, Joel Poinsett, who set up Masonic lodges in Mexico in 1822, represented this anti-British faction, as did Spain's Conde de Aranda, head of the Council of Castile, who supervised the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1767 as ordered by Carlos III.

According to Gill, the second most influential Jesuit in the history of the UNS was Father Eduardo Iglesias, who became the effective mentor of the National Committee of the UNS after Bergoend. Iglesias, who was the leader of the Jesuits in Mexico, met with the leaders of the UNS at least once a week in the house of the engineer Vazagoiti, and dictated the norms to follow.

By 1944, Gill reports, the policy of the Society of Jesus was to become the director of all the opposition to the revolutionary regime. Iglesias, already mentioned as the advisor to the Base, became the confessor of the lawyers Manuel Torres Bueno and Manuel Gómez Morín, the respective chiefs of the UNS and the Acción Nacional. He also edited a page of El Sinarquista, a political commentary titled "Successes of the Week."

Gill's conclusion is that in its first year, the UNS was 100% a fascist organization. However, the Nazi Schreiter, who had created the UNS, was eventually displaced by Father Iglesias, and the organization was converted, gradually, into an instrument in the service of clerical fascism.

Although the Jesuits were the most public religious order involved in directing the UNS and the PAN, one should take note of the fact that the Benedictines were also active behind the scenes, and have helped whitewash the Nazi connections of the UNS. Jean Meyer, who wrote Synarchism: a Mexican Fascism? in an effort to rehabilitate the UNS, was trained by the Benedictines. Another such book, published in February 1943 and entitled Synarchism: The Hope of Mexico's Poor, was written by Father Alcuin Heibel, a U.S.-based Benedictine priest.

One declassified U.S. intelligence document, dated Oct. 24, 1943, reported that U.S. Customs had intercepted a letter written to Heibel, which was being carried to him from Mexico by another Benedictine priest, Father Lambert Dehner. The letter contained a proposal that several Benedictine priests be sent to Mexico to "take over the Mexico City school entirely." The report continues in reference to Heibel: "It is reported that Heibel is a Rev. Father who formerly was at Mt. Angel College, St. Benedict, Oregon.... In August 1943, he is reported to have stated that he had made some talks in Kansas City on Sinarchism, and that St. Benedict's College in Atchison, Kansas was granting six complete and six partial scholarships intended for younger men who already are, or are going to be, leaders in Sinarchism."

The Cristero Rebellion and the UNS

Contrary to those, like Marivilia Carrasco of the MSIA, who argue that there is no connection between the Cristeros and the UNS, the reality is that the Cristeros were created by the same synarchists who then later created the UNS with Nazi aid. The leadership of the UNS stated explicitly that they drew their inspiration from the Cristiada. Juan Ignacio Padilla wrote as follows:

"The Cristero rebellion, notwithstanding all its faults and its failure, certainly is the most beautiful and brightest moment of Catholicism in Mexico, and the most stunning outburst of faith of our people. It defended strongly the banner of our defiance against the enemies of our liberties, and constitutes the shore and the glorious background of Synarchism."

Another UNS document states, "In style, in the way of being and living, the Unión Popular, the Cristero Revolution and Synarchism are one and the same thing."

Monsignor Placencia y Moreira, Bishop of Zacatecas, described Synarchism as "a political movement with the same tendencies as the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty; the only difference between the two is that Synarchism is not talking at the moment of armed movement, yet the tendencies are the same."

According to Hernández, the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty, which had formed the basis for the 1926-29 Cristero Rebellion, had broken up in 1932; however, some League members and ex-Cristeros renewed armed resistance in 1933-34. To replace the League, a secret organization, the Legión, was formed in 1934, the members of which were trained in the "Congregations of the Holy Virgin" under the direction of Antonio Santacruz. Hernández, who makes no mention of Bergoend, claims that Manuel Romo de Alba, a teacher at Guadalajara, founded the Legión in 1934. There were initially two factions, led respectively by Santacruz and Romo de Alba. The Legión originated in Jalisco, which was the center of the Cristero Rebellion, but the organization defined its principal characteristics in Querétaro. Several of its more active leaders came from Querétaro, including Gonzalo Campos and José Antonio Urquiza. Campos headed up the ACJM, which resumed its activities after the Cristero Rebellion under Bergoend's direction.

The Legión was given the blessing of the apostolic delegate, Archbishop Ruiz y Flores, and the episcopacy of the Catholic Church, led by Archbishop Díaz. The structure adopted was the cell, so that each local group remained secret to all others. The Legión had a national leader with nine subordinates, meeting in council every week. Initially it had ten sections. Later an 11th section was created—the National Synarchist Union.

Articles written in El Universal on behalf of the Legión appeared under the pen name Oscar Calderon Alvarez. (The initials, O.C.A., stood for Organization, Cooperation, Action.)

Monsignor Ruiz y Flores, the apostolic delegate, suggested that the Jesuits be entrusted with setting up the Legión. At the end of 1934, the organization called "The Base" appeared. It was essentially a restructured Legión, with the Legión as its core.

Luis María Martínez was appointed Archbishop of Mexico (Feb. 20 1937) and acting representative of the Vatican (Aug. 9, 1937), after the death of Díaz and the resignation of Ruiz y Flores. The UNS was born in 1937 in the city of León in Guanajuato, when he was in the key position of power.

According to Hernández, all the future leaders of the UNS joined the Legión in 1935, "but admitted that they had been in existence for a year." These include: José Trueba Olivares, Manuel Zermeño y Pérez, Salvador Abascal, and Juan Ignacio Padilla.

In 1934, three division chiefs stood out: Gonzalo Campos of Querétaro, José Antonio Urquiza of Guanajuato, and Antonio Santacruz of Mexico City. Manuel Romo, the founder, was replaced by Julián Malo Juvera in early 1935. Gonzalo Campos, leader of the Michoacán Division, took leadership from Juvera in September 1937. He came from a wealthy family of hacendados (owners of large feudal estates). He had been a diocesan agent of the ACJM, and was coordinator of the preparatory work for the synarchist movement. Salvador Abascal claimed that the UNS was the work of the secret leaders of the Legión, especially Juvera and Campos.

Urquiza of the Guanajuato Division, like many other leaders of the Base and later the UNS, was the son of a wealthy hacendado. In September 1937, he travelled to Washington, accompanied by his brother and by Abascal, to meet American bishops, especially Monsignor Burke, the secretary of the National Catholic Welfare Conference, to discuss the Legión and the synarchist movement. It was Monsignor Burke who had been involved in the negotiations to end the Cristero War in the 1920s. Although Burke's reaction is not known, the fact that leading synarchists met with him at the inception of the UNS, indicates the influence, for good or evil, that factions of the U.S. Catholic Church exercised over political developments in Mexico.

Antonio Santacruz also belonged to a wealthy family, which supported Mexican President Porfirio Díaz. He dominated the Base and the National Synarchist Union from 1939 to 1944. He was the power behind Felipe Coria, the head of the Base from 1939 to 1940, and then became head of the Base himself in 1940. He became president of the Congregations of the Holy Virgin, and knew the Church hierarchy, including Luis María Martínez, Archbishop of Mexico, and the Jesuits, especially Father Eduardo Iglesias, later spiritual counsellor of the Base.

There was a secret national meeting in May 1937, at which Urquiza requested that the UNS be founded in Guanajuato. He said there was already a group called the "Group of León," which had been active there for a few weeks.

Hernández said that the name was suggested by Ceferino Sánchez, leader of the San Luis Potosí Division. He said it should be called Synarchism, "from the Greek 'syn' (with) and 'arje' (authority, order), thus, 'with order,' the opposite of anarchy." The name National Synarchist Union was reportedly proposed by Abascal.

International Roots of Synarchism

This idea that synarchism was solely a Mexican phenomenon, originally suggested by a lowly regional leader, is a total cover story. Even Hernández is forced to report that "in 1915 an engineer called Tomás Rosales published a leaflet entitled El gobierno de manana—República Social Sinárquica [The Government of Tomorow—the Synarchist Social Republic], presented to the Mexican Society of Geography and Statistics." This indicates that even before the Cristero Rebellion, 22 years before the establishment of the UNS, the idea of synarchism was in circulation in Mexico.

This cover story was further exploded in Mexico when on April 17, 1942, as reported by Kirk, United Press ran a story from Vichy, France that Hitler's stooge, Pierre Laval, would choose as his minister of labor either Hubert La Gardelle or Leroy-Ladurie, chief of the synarchist group in France. Julio De Kook, former director of the Office of Economic and Social Studies of the Belgian Confederation of Labor, told El Popular that the first chief of the French synarchists was a reactionary named Coutrot, who committed suicide. Leroy-Ladurie had been head of the agrarian unions as well as of the synarchists. He said that French synarchism started in June 1940, in the Nazi-occupied zone, under the direct influence of the Nazis.

In a now declassified U.S. report dated April 22, 1942, Raleigh A. Gibson, First Secretary of the U.S. Embassy in Mexico, sent the U.S. Secretary of State an English translation of an editorial from El Popular, published on April 21, 1942. It reads in part as follows:

"The French sinarquistas rushed into furious strife against French and European democracy; those of Mexico organized to combat Mexican and continental democracy. The French sinarquistas were adopted by Abetz, the Ambassador of Hitler in France; the Mexican sinarquistas were recruited, were given a name, were educated and directed by Nazi agents in Mexico and by Falange directors who are working illegally among us. And this is so apparent, so conclusive, that it eliminates the need of concrete proofs of the organic connection between them. The fundamental proof is that sinarquism is not a unique and exclusive Mexican product, as its leaders untruthfully argue. That Sinarquism, even bearing the identical name, does exist in other parts of the world and is an international movement formed by those who are under the supreme orders of Hitler."

As explosive as this report was in Mexico at the time, the truth is that synarchism was created after the Treaty of Paris in 1763 by the Martinist faction of British freemasonry. The Nazis themselves were a synarchist cult and the Axis powers were a synarchist international.

According to Hernández, Urquiza demanded authorization to hold the first meeting to found the UNS on May 23, 1937 at León. Abascal claims that Malo Juvera wanted him to head the UNS. But when he met with the founders of the Group of León, Manuel Zermeño y Pérez, José Trueba Olivares, and Urquiza on the afternoon of the 23rd at the Hotel Condesa in León, his disagreements with them led Abascal to decline the leadership position. As a result, he did not attend the founding meeting. In his absence, an organizing committee was formed with Trueba Olivares as president, Rubén Mendoza as secretary, and Francisco Ornelas as treasurer.

But this is clearly a cover story, as quickly becomes evident by the fact that Hernández then tries to discredit the proof that "the UNS had been set up by the Nazis as part of a subversive conspiracy." He sets out to refute Mario Gill, who he says reports that Oscar Hellmut Schreiter, a professor of languages at the Colegio de Guanajuato, met with his disciples—Zermeño, the Trueba Olivares brothers, and Urquiza—to set up the UNS. Hernández reports that Gill alleges that Urquiza had just returned from Spain, "where he had fought on the nationalist side against the republic, and was able to furnish information about the organization of the Falange and of the Italian Fascist Party. Schreiter would have contributed information on the National Socialist Party."

Hernández alleges that

"The only link between the Synarchist Movement and Schreiter was Manuel Torres Bueno (future national leader of the UNS). He was a professor of Philosophy at the school where Schreiter gave German lessons. Later on, Torres Bueno, having become a lawyer, acted as his lawyer in a non-political action. This fortuitous and casual contact between the two men did not represent an ideological affinity; there was no evidence that Schreiter had any influence on the early stages of Synarchism."

In 1944, Torres Bueno wrote as follows:

"Regarding the proofs mentioned [a legal document, dated Sept. 25, 1938, in Guanajuato, signed by Schreiter and Torres Bueno, as his lawyer] to show the connection of Schreiter with Synarchism, ... in 1938, the war had not yet started nor was there any United Nations Organization, and our country had friendly relations with Germany.... Maldonado, Schreiter and [Isaac] Guzmán Valdivia had founded in the city of Guanajuato the Anti-Communist Center, something completely different from Synarchism, which was founded in Leon in 1937 by Catholic students."

It is worth noting that Hernández omits any reference to the formal registration of the UNS, to which Schreiter was an official witness. However, while denying the Nazi connection, Hernández protests too much and manages to give further proof. He reports that Torres Bueno admitted that Isaac Guzmán Valdivia, who, along with Schreiter and Adolfo Maldonado (who worked as general secretary of the state government of Guanajuato), founded the Anti-Communist Center in Guanajuato, was a frequent contributor to El Sinarquista—the official paper of the UNS. Hernández also reports that Abascal, who only died in the year 2000, confirmed the role of Valdivia as a contributor to El Sinarquista in an interview in August 1987.

Nazi-Communist Collaboration

During the period of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, which was signed on Aug. 23, 1939 and was only abrogated on June 22, 1941, when Germany invaded Russia, there was intensive collaboration between the Nazis and the Communists in Mexico. Kirk reports that a pact was signed at Barcelona late in 1940 between the Communists and the Falangists. The Naval Attaché's report of April 9, 1940 on the subject of Mexico-Germany-Russia says:

"Communist and Nazi agents are reported to be working actively in all labor groups side by side, to develop agitation against U.S., to promote civil disorders and to gain ideological control of Mexico.

"Alleged purposes of activities:

"1—Foment a civil war to

"a. insure political control of Mexico for Berlin-Moscow axis

"b. use Mexico as a base of operations against the Allies and the United States when the U.S. becomes involved in the European war, and

"c. use Mexico as a base for further ideological penetration of Latin America and for the dissemination of anti-United States propaganda.

"2. Seek through agitation and civil war to distract United States from Europe and prevent American entrance into the conflict. 1(b) would take effect if 2 should fail. That is, as far as the United States is concerned.

"Technique:

"The German agents have infiltrated into the various organizations supporting Almazán. (A declassified FBI report of Jan. 11, 1941 reports that J.A. Almazán, who ran against Avila Camacho for President of Mexico, gave a donation to the Nazi Party. 'His donation of 10,000 pesos on April 4, 1940 apparently was for Nazi activities in his campaign.')

"The Russian Agents have infiltrated into the various organizations supporting Avila Camacho, such as the PRM, CTM, CNC, Communist Party, etc.

"They are the cells of agitation, of violence, of urgers of strong action, etc. within the two camps.

"The Communist agents are said to be those responsible for organizing the anti-United States campaign now being organized throughout the nation by the pro-government groups as a result of the American note requesting arbitration of the petroleum controversy.

"Important:

"The Russian and German agents, though in opposed Mexican political camps, are not in opposition. They are acting in perfect collaboration and cooperation. Theirs is a single aim of armed revolution in Mexico, of action against the United States, of political control of Mexico.

"Their information, their resources and their personnel are pooled in this one effort.

"Comment: 'On several occasions I have reported that there is a very strong tendency in Mexican Government circles and various political groups such as the 'Acción Nacional' to develop Latin Americanism as opposed to Pan Americanism, as a weapon, to oppose the United States.... The Attaché again wishes to emphasize this point, as it will undoubtedly have a bearing on the future development of the Good Neighbor Policy.'"

Vicente Lombardo Toledano, one of the leading trade unionists in Mexico, who had visited the Soviet Union in 1935 and was influenced by the Communists, was replaced as general secretary of the CTM by Fidel Velázquez on Feb. 25, 1941. His replacement occurred because the Mexican government was in the process of coming to an agreement with the United States. On Nov. 19, 1941, just 17 days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Good Neighbor Agreement was signed, and a framework set up for the settlement of the oil question. The Nazi-Communist alliance to denounce the United States and Britain as "the imperialist gangsters," had been superseded.

After the Nazi invasion of Russia, there was a definite shift in the Communist policy. A declassified U.S. document authored by Assistant Naval Attaché Earl S. Piper on Sept. 11, 1941 reported the following:

"As stated in Naval Attaché Mexico Confidential Report Serial Number 360 of 17 July, 1941, it is believed that since the outbreak of war between Germany and Russia, the Communists as a group in Mexico have definitely broken with the Nazis as a group. It is probable of course that a few individual Communists are still working here for the Nazis."

For example, according to Alan Chase, Lombardo Toledano, the head of the "anti-Axis" Latin-American Confederation of Labor, summed up the Axis aims in Mexico in a speech delivered a month before Pearl Harbor—i.e., after the Nazi invasion of Russia—in which he identified the Axis war aims in Mexico:

"1. To use Mexico as the nearest base for Nazi espionage in the United States.

"2. To use our country as a source of raw materials for its war.

"3. To make Mexico a center for organized acts of sabotage against the United States, as well as against our own export trade, so that we may be prevented from sending help to the countries fighting the Axis.

"4. To establish a center of Fascist provocation against the United States, thus distracting that country's attention from the European and other theaters of war.

"5. To secure a center from which Fascist propaganda can be directed to all of Latin America.

"6. To instigate provocations against the government of Mexico from within our country itself, so that the government will be obliged to retaliate with restrictive measures. Afterward, these measures will be used to discredit the present regime in Mexico, and turned against democracy within and without our country."

In his Oct. 31, 1941 report, now declassified, Harold Braman wrote that "'Vicente Lombardo Toledano has been making effective speeches against the Sinarquistas and Acción Nacional. In fact, he seems to be the head of whatever counter-movement there may be." Having collaborated with fascists during the Hitler-Stalin Pact, Lombardo Toledano was clearly in a good position to know what the intentions of the Axis powers were.

2. Japan's Role: The Berlin-Madrid-Tokyo Axis

As the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Philippines approached, the Nazis arranged for the Spanish Falange to pave the way for the Japanese takeover of the Philippines, and to prepare for Japanese-orchestrated operations against the United States on its southern flank, from Mexico. Although the Japanese were not able to carry out their plans in Mexico in full after the U.S. victory at Midway Island on June 4-7, 1942, their plans included the establishment of a naval base in Baja California and an invasion of the United States from Mexico.

According to both Mario Gill and Alan Chase, at the end of 1940, von Faupel arranged a series of talks in Madrid between General Franco and Colonel Fugirito, a person in the confidence of Japan's General Tojo. The talks had the objective of establishing the basis for future collaboration between the Spanish and Japanese governments, for immediate action in the Philippines and in Mexico.

When Serrano Suner, Franco's brother-in-law, announced the formation of the Council of Hispanidad on Jan. 8, 1941, he said that the Spanish Consul General in the Philippines would be a member. The person selected to become the Consul General was José del Castaño, the chief of the National Delegation of the Falange Exterior.

In the case of Mexico, since it was the only nation in the Americas to recognize the Spanish Republic, it did not have consular relations with Franco's Spain. Therefore, Augusto Ibañez Serrano, a Spanish merchant, whose visiting card said "Franco's official representative in Mexico" and who was the nominal head of the Falange in Mexico, worked out of the offices of the Portuguese legation.

After the creation of the Council of Hispanidad in Madrid, the Falange's weekly magazine in Mexico, Hispanidad, said that "our sympathies are completely with the Axis," and clamored for the unity of Spanish-speaking countries "to throw off the yoke of Yankee imperialism."

Spain launched an effort to obtain recognition from Mexico, in which case the Spanish Consul General in Mexico would have been a member of the Council of Hispanidad as well. This effort bore no fruit. However, when the German, Italian, and Japanese embassies were shut down after Pearl Harbor, their interests as in the Philippines were represented by the Falange, in this case, operating out of the Portuguese Embassy.

What happened in the Philippines is instructive as to the nature of the Nazi-directed Falange-Japanese cooperation which simultaneously occurred in Mexico. On the day that the Council of Hispanidad was created, the Falange organizations in the Philippines were placed under direct control of the Japanese organization, controlled in turn by the Nazis. The secret treaty between Franco and the Japanese provided that the former would surrender all Spanish claims in the Philippines to the Japanese, for which he would be amply paid. Accordingly, at least a year before the Japanese attack on Hawaii and the Philippines, Franco and the Japanese had their plans fully developed and in operation.

In February 1941, Antonio Castillo Ornelas arrived in the Philippines and Commander Marcelino García Puerta in Tokyo, to direct Falangist activities in the Philippines. The operations occurred on three overlapping levels: 1) the Falange fostered the Hispanidad movement; 2) it promoted an ultra-nationalistic Filipino movement; and 3) it promoted the racist Saka de Ly movement to throw all Occidentals out of Asia.

On June 18, 1941, the United States gave the governments of Germany, Italy, and Japan until July to close their consulates on U.S. soil and territories, including the Philippines. The Falangist Castaño took over the consular duties of all three closing consulates in Manila. He was then appointed the top liaison agent of all Axis undercover work in the islands.

Every Falangist was told to join the ranks of the Philippine Civilian Emergency Administration (CEA). On Dec. 7, Spain's Japanese Axis partner bombed Pearl Harbor and the Philippines. On Dec. 29, the Japanese Air Force raided Manila, and on Jan. 2, 1942, the Japanese marched into the city. The CEA had spread disinformation and had functioned as a fifth column to facilitate the Japanese takeover.

On Jan. 5, 1942, in Granada, Spain, Pilar Primo de Rivera, the sister of José Antonio, who was chief of the feminine section of the Falange, accepted in the name of the Philippine Section of the Falange Española, a formal decoration from the Japanese government for its aid to the Imperial Japanese Government in the capture of Manila.

Japan's Fifth Column in Mexico

In this same time period, the Falange and the Japanese under Nazi direction had similar plans in Mexico involving the UNS. Franco's Military Intelligence Service (SIM) had worked with the Japanese since late 1941, and its operations in Mexico were directed through the SIM's headquarters in San Francisco by Franco agent, Amat.

In Mexico, which at the time of World War II had a population of 20 million, there were substantial colonies of citizens of the Axis powers, many of whom were sympathizers and supporters of the Axis war aims. There were 12,238 Germans, 5,646 Italians, 6,232 Japanese, and 15,000 Spaniards.

The Japanese plans for Mexico were extensive, although they depended in large part on a more successful prosecution of the war on the part of the Axis powers. Japan was very interested in Mexico from the standpoint of oil and other raw materials. For example, on Oct. 15, 1940, Dr. Kisso Tsuru obtained a concession to explore and exploit 250,000 acres of oil land in Veracruz. His company, Compañía Veracruzana, was a front for the House of Mitsui, which provided oil to the Japanese Navy.

Japan had a skeleton army in Mexico, called the Mexico Military Service Men's Association, which was directly under the command of Premier Hideki Tojo. It also had an intelligence division, which operated under the name of the Japanese Association of Lower California, with addresses in Mexicali, Mexico and in Calexico, California in the United States.

Depending on the progress in the war, the Japanese had two plans: 1) a direct invasion of the United States through the states of Sonora and Sinaloa; and 2) a rebellion of Mexican Indians against the whites. Sonora and Sinaloa were honeycombed with Japanese "farmers" and "fishermen," and the Japanese fishing fleet operated in Magdalena Bay in Baja California.

In June 1941, Kiyoshi Yamagata, Minister Without Portfolio, came to Mexico from Tokyo to coordinate operations. Then one month before Pearl Harbor, 300 Japanese met secretly in Mexicali. The meeting was called by Gen. Hideki Tojo, then Minister of War. A testimonial from Tojo was read to the meeting by Captain Hamanaka, the military attaché of the Japanese Legation in Mexico City and director of Japanese subversive activities in Mexico.

There is significant evidence to believe that this Japanese activity, which was coordinated with the Nazis and the Falange and involved the participation of the UNS, included the possibility of a coup d'état against the Mexican government.

On Nov. 26, 1941, less than two weeks before Pearl Harbor, Eugene T. Turley, American Vice Consulate in La Paz, state of Baja California, Mexico, reported the existence of "a group of Mexicans composed of the military, Sinarquistas, and other dissatisfied elements who are planning to overthrow President Avila Camacho and his administration on or later than January 1, 1942." Turley reported that "the proposed plan ... is to make General Francisco J. Múgica provisional president.... [T]hey are said to have twenty million pesos with which to finance the coup d'état. For further aid, this revolutionary group has asked Lombardo Toledano to remain in Mexico and continue his subversive activities in the labor unions. The Sinarquistas, who are also being included in the group, are said to be financed and supported by the Nazis and Japan. It would obviously be greatly to the advantage of these powers to have such a group favorable to them located in a strategic area. Because of these factors, the Sinarquistas are very anxious to establish the first colony near Magdalena Bay."

As referenced in this declassified report, the UNS under the leadership of Salvador Abascal had decided to establish a colony in Baja California in the vicinity of Magdalena Bay on the Pacific Coast. In Mexico, Synarchist propaganda said that Japan would avenge all the crimes that the United States had committed. One of the public rationalizations for this colonization project was that the UNS claimed to fear the U.S. might annex the peninsula on the alleged pretext that the Japanese might establish a naval base in the Bay of Magdalena. However, the reality was just the opposite. As Alfredo F. Díaz Escobar, a member of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies asserted, "the colonization of Lower California was a German and Japanese concern."

On Oct. 15, 1941, the Mexican Chamber of Deputies had voted unanimously against the UNS colonization project. However, the Japanese lobbied the government of Avila Camacho to give the UNS permission to set up the colony and Camacho agreed. Had the war gone the other way, this decision would have laid the basis for a post-Pearl Harbor Axis offensive against the U.S. from Mexico.

A declassified report issued by Earl S. Piper, Assistant Naval Attaché, Mexico City, on March 3, 1942, includes the following source report: "Portes Gil, together with General Abelardo Rodríguez, brought about the Presidential decree permitting the Sinarquistas to colonize in Lower California. On January 26, 1942, a General Félix Ireta, who had been paid 50,000 pesos by Dr. Tsuru [Japanese leader in Mexico], called on President Camacho and succeeded in having Japanese funds unfrozen and in placing a Japanese in charge of distributing money for the transportation of Sinarquistas to Lower California. The Japanese ex-minister, Yoshiaki Miura, revealed that the Sinarquistas would be used by the Japanese Government in an armed movement against some of the southwestern states of the United States. In Arizona and California there are approximately 45,000 Sinarquista sympathizers and followers. In November, 1941, a large fund was set aside in the Japanese Legation here to be used as 'expenses' in these two states. The Japanese Legation has paid large sums of money to the Sinarquistas in Mexico." Although this report was not substantiated at the time it was written, it should be noted that Harold Braman had identified the former Mexican President Lic. Emilio Portes Gil, as a sub-chief of the UNS.

The Japanese-Nazi cooperation in this project is indicated by two further reports. According to Mario Gill, Salvador Abascal was aided in setting up the colony by two individuals, one of whom was a Japanese and the other a German Nazi. The Japanese was José de Jesús Sam López, the son of a Japanese father, who was educated in Japan and who returned to Mexico only two months after the founding of the UNS, at which point he immediately joined the movement. He travelled with Abascal to the colony in Baja California.

Abascal also had a personal secretary with blond hair and blue eyes who they said was Antonio Sam López, the half brother of Jesús Sam López, the son of the same Japanese father and a German mother. In reality, Antonio Sam López was a member of the directorate of the Nazi Party in Mexico, a Mr. Hans Trotter.

In addition, Abascal was aided in setting up the colony by a German engineer by the name of Wiegman. A U.S. declassified document of Nov. 26, 1941 submitted by the above-mentioned American Vice Consul Turley, reports the following:

"On November 22, 1941 there arrived in this port one Pieter Theodore Wiegman, Ingenieur Agronome, a Dutch (or perhaps German) colonization and agricultural engineer. This man was accompanied by Pedro Varges Covarrubias, Felipe Vásquez Galvan, Priciliano Murillo, all Mexicans serving as guides and interpreters. Wiegman has an American wife, left Europe four to five months ago and has a visitor's visa from the American Consulate in Lisbon. He speaks German, Swiss, French and English.

"To obtain needed data and cooperation from local authorities, Wiegman had a photostatic copy of a letter from Governor Mújica to Lic. Biarent, Secretario General del Gobierno, dated Nov. 6, 1941 ... introducing him and requesting that all necessary assistance be given him. The governor stated that the engineer was recommended to him by Lic. Abascal, visible head of the Sinarquista movement, to carry out a mission in Baja California. The mission is said to be the survey and organization of the movement of the Sinarquistas to the area of Santo Domingo and the Llanos de Irai, both north of Magdalena Bay. Wiegman is an agriculture expert and is to classify the lands for the above mentioned project."

3. UNS Subversion of the United States

As documented above, the UNS was very active in the United States and represented a direct threat to U.S. national security and the war effort. According to Mario Gill and Betty Kirk, the Synarchist movement was officially registered with the U.S. Department of Justice as alien agents. According to Gill,

"Brigades of propagandists were deployed to the states of California, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Colorado, Indiana and Illinois. The Synarchist propaganda, prepared for export in the Ibero-American Institute of Berlin, began to be distributed profusely in the United States, but with preference in the states of the southwest, where there existed a Mexican population of more than one quarter million. This campaign culminated in the 'zoot suiters' disorders in Los Angeles in June 1943."

According to Kirk, at first Mexican citizenship was a requirement for membership, but after a few months this was changed to Mexican descent, so that the UNS could infiltrate into Mexican communities in the United States. The process began with the establishment of the Southern California Regional Committee at Los Angeles on Nov. 1, 1937. A year later a Regional Committee was organized at El Paso, Texas. According to Enrique Prado, in total there were four Regional Committees, the other two in Bakersfield, California and in McAllen, Texas. As many as 50 local committees were established.

As of August 1941 there were 3-4,000 hard-core Sinarquistas in the United States. Although some consider his estimate an exaggeration, in an article in The Nation on April 3, 1943, Díaz Escobar stated: "I assert, unreservedly, that the Sinarquistas have in California today—United States California—a powerful unit of 50,000 members, well organized and looking to the Sinarquista Central Committee in Mexico for orders."

The March 26, 1942 issue of El Sinarquista reports meetings in El Paso, Montoya, Borderline, and McAllen, Texas; Las Barrancas, New Mexico, Indiana Harbor, Indiana; and of donations from Fresno, Bakersfield, Fowler, and Richmond, California. The May 14 issue reported meetings at Antioch, Los Angeles, Fresno, Bellavista, Bakersfield, Stockton, La Verne and San Bernardino, California.

According to a declassified document submitted by Assistant Naval Attaché Harold P. Braman on March 30, 1942, the two most important Sinarquistas in the United States were S.G. Vásquez and R.B. Arnaiz, with offices in the Wilcox Building, 206 South Spring Street, Los Angeles, California. Braman also lists branches of the Sinarquistas in U.S. cities, which contributed funds to the UNS colonization scheme in Lower California. These include:

Dec. 26, 1941: San Diego, Azuza, Oxnard, Watts, Wilmington, Los Angeles, Claremont, La Verne, Pomona, San Fernando, Ontario, Pacoima, San Bernardino.

Dec. 30: Antioch, Calif.; McAllen, Tex.

Jan. 7, 1942: Indiana Harbor, Indiana, El Paso, Tex.; Santa Ana, Calif.

Jan. 26: Clint, Tex.; Pittsburg, Calif., Fresno, Calif., other places in California: Fowler, Richmond, Antioch, Bakersfield, San Bernardino, Wilmington, Pacoima, La Verne, San Fernando, Ontario, San Pedro, Oxnard, Watts, Los Angeles.

Jan. 30: El Paso, Tex.

Feb. 13: Bakersfield, Richmond, Calif.

Feb. 16: Oxnard, Calif.; and Chicago, Ill.

Feb. 21: Bakersfield, Fowler, and Pittsburg, Calif.

Feb. 26: Indiana Harbor, Ind.; Antioch, Calif.

Mar. 3: Chicago, Edinburg, Weslaco, and McAllen, Tex.; San Francisco, Calif.

In Los Angeles, the UNS published a special edition of El Sinarquista. They were aided by such figures as Jesús M. Jiménez, whom President Cárdenas exiled for Gold-Shirt and Nazi activities, and by members of German and Italian organizations dissolved after Pearl Harbor.

Gill also says that the Synarchists were supported by the National Union of Social Justice, the organization of Father Charles E. Coughlin of Royal Oak, Michigan, who was an opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. Coughlin's magazine, Social Justice, gave official backing to the UNS on Sept. 29, 1941:

"Advocates of Christian social justice in America, Christian Americans who once dreamed of a national union to effect a 16 point reform, and who have watched the progress of the Christian States headed by Salazar, De Valera, General Franco and Mussolini, will want to hear further from Mexico's Sinarchists with their '16 principles' of social justice."

Coughlin's Social Justice magazine, which expressed pro-Nazi and anti-Semitic views, was suspended in 1942 for violation of the Espionage Act, by U.S. Attorney General Biddle.

The UNS was also received favorably by several important pro-fascist clerical weeklies published in the Southwest. La Esperanza, published by the Claretian Fathers in Los Angeles, and Revista Católica, a Jesuit weekly put out in El Paso, both of which supported Franco, frequently covered the UNS favorably.

In April 1943 four Synarchist organizers, Roberto Carriedo, Efrain Pardo, Alfonso Trueba, and Juan Ignacio Padilla, toured the United States. Both Trueba and Padilla were founding members of the UNS, Trueba its chief of propaganda and an editor of El Sinarquista, Padilla was in charge of the Baja California colonization project and an editor of the paper. The tour was sponsored by the Inter-American Catholic Institute of Washington, D.C., an organization headed by Bishop Edwin V. O'Hara of Kansas City.

But the UNS's fascist activity in the United States was not received favorably by all. In November 1942, the CIO Union Council of Los Angeles conducted a study of UNS activity and then passed a resolution characterizing the Sinarquistas as an "evil influence among Mexican workers in the United States whose program coincides with that of Franco's Fascist Spanish regime." The resolution continued: "The Sinarquistas are telling the Mexican people in the United States not to enlist in war activities, such as Civilian Defense and the Red Cross, not to purchase war bonds, and in general not to support this country's war effort, because the 'Mexican people have nothing to gain from an Allied victory.'"

In Chicago, the offices of an anti-Synarchist Mexican organization were invaded and wrecked by an armed mob of Sinarquistas in late 1942. In places as far north as the Bronx, New York, Synarchist agents were arrested for inciting Mexican-Americans to treason.

4. Faction Fights Within Synarchism

The Pearl Harbor Effect

Just as there was an extraordinary paradigm shift in the United States immediately following the Dec. 7, 1941 bombing of Pearl Harbor by the Japanese, a similar sudden shift occurred in Mexico, and affected the future direction of the UNS. This shift was accentuated by the fact that on Nov. 19, 1941, just 17 days before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the Good Neighbor Agreement was signed with the United States, and a framework set up for the settlement of the oil question.

The Good Neighbor Agreement was the concrete realization of the Good Neighbor Policy of which President Franklin D. Roosevelt had spoken in December 1932, and then again in his Inaugural Address on March 1, 1933. The most important aspect of the agreement was that the United States officially recognized Mexico's sovereign ownership of its subsoil wealth. The agreement contained six points: 1) an evaluation of the expropriated oil properties; 2) Mexico agreed to satisfy all outstanding claims of U.S. citizens for revolutionary damage and expropriated properties, through the payment of $40 million over 14 years; 3) negotiation of a reciprocal trade agreement; 4) the U.S. Treasury would stabilize currency through the purchase of Mexican pesos, and would buy Mexican silver at the fixed rate of 35¢ an ounce, renewing the arrangement it had prior to the oil expropriations; and 6) the U.S. Export-Import Bank would open credits to the Mexican government. The first credits were to expand the network of highways from border to border and from coast to coast.

In this connection, there were also significant moves made in the Mexican Congress to counter the UNS. On Oct. 14, 1941, Alfredo Félix Díaz Escobar, in a congressional debate on Synarchism, called the UNS a fascist fifth column in Mexico. Then on Nov. 30, 1941, after the signing of the Good Neighbor Agreement and a little more than a week before Pearl Harbor, the Mexican Congress approved the constitution of a group to resist the "regressive tendencies represented by the UNS," the National Anti-Synarchist Committee for the Defense of Democracy (Comité Nacional Antisinarquista y en Defensa de la Democracia).

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in the wake of the U.S. recognition of Mexico's rights in the oil expropriations, the entire picture changed in Mexico. On Dec. 8, 1941, Mexico broke relations with Japan and on Dec. 12 with Germany and Italy, upon which Mexico had previously depended to sell its oil.

In May 1941, the UNS asserted that pan-Americanism concealed American imperialism and reasserted its intention to create an international bloc of Hispanic-American states to oppose the United States. However, after Pearl Harbor, Antonio Santacruz, the chief of the Base, which controlled the UNS, told the followers of UNS leader Salvador Abascal: "We must agree with the United States—because since Pearl Harbor it is a matter of life or death...."

On Dec. 12, 1941, the Base effectively overthrew Salvador Abascal and replaced him with Manuel Torres Bueno.

On May 14, 1942, the Nazis sank the Mexican tanker, the Potrero de Llano, off the coast of Florida, and on May 17, a second tanker, the Faja de Oro. On May 28, the Chamber of Deputies approved a declaration of war. On May 30, the Senate followed. And on June 1, President Avila Camacho signed the decrees declaring that Mexico had been at war since May 22. In November 1942, all members of Congress subscribed to the formation of the National Anti-Nazi, Anti-Fascist Committee, which was an enlargement of the National Anti-Synarchist Committee for the Defense of Democracy. The president of the committee was Díaz Escobar.

One article in the constitution of this Committee read as follows:

"Given the documentary proof which we possess, we consider Sinarquismo and other organizations affiliated with it a fifth column which follows in Mexico the lead of the Falange Española and uses Nazi-Fascist tactics."

After Pearl Harbor, although the Catholic Church was no less pro-Falange, it came under increasing pressure to at least publicly rein in the UNS, as is clear from Santacruz's statement. The leadership of the Church could see the handwriting on the wall. Therefore, under pressure from the United States and from political forces within Mexico, it attempted to give the impression that it was breaking from the Falange, and even lied that it had nothing to do with either the UNS or the National Action Party (PAN), both of which it controlled through the secret Church-Falange Council or the Base.

A now declassified U.S. intelligence document authored on March 30, 1942 by Naval Attaché Harold Braman shows how the Mexican Catholic Church used a Spanish Monarchist later exposed as a Falangist to give Washington this impression:

"The Catholic Church of Mexico which has had an important role in the building up of the Sinarquista movement in this country is about to throw aside its cooperation with the Falange in the direction of the group and will assume full control of the Sinarquistas as soon as 'convenient,' according to the Marqués de Castellón, representative here of the Spanish Monarchist-Catholic group.

"While this statement must be accepted with full reserve, the Marqués has excellent connections with the Church and is working here in close collaboration with the local representative of the National Catholic Welfare Conference of Washington, D.C. The Marqués states that the latter, whose name is Saavedra, is the 'inside man' on the matter and is waging a successful campaign to bring all Church dignitaries into line to agree on a detailed program for support of and direction of the Sinarquistas.

"The role of the Church in the Sinarquista Union has, to date, been a highly suspicious one. Local priests have long been known to supply lists of 'recommended' names for membership in the Union. The Falange, which directs the Axis propaganda work in the Union and its secret ally, the Acción Nacional, has had such a close connection with Archbishop of Mexico and various key Bishops that all Church activity in relation to the Sinarquistas has been suspected.

"It is the claim of the Spanish Monarchists, however, that the Archbishop has been 'using' the Sinarquistas for the advantage of the Church by 'playing along' with the Union and the Falange in order to ferret out the principal backers and leaders, obtain full information on the program, and gain control of the funds, to the end that full directional control of the union might be placed under the Church, either outwardly or secretly."

According to historian Alan Chase, in May 1942, this source was discredited when a dossier was presented which showed that he was not Spanish, but a Mexican named Luis Sevilla. In 1931 he sailed for Spain while out on bail pending charges of swindling a sum of money from General Limón. During the Spanish Civil War he worked in Marseilles, France as an agent of General Franco's Secret Service, posing as an agent of the Spanish Monarchist Party. He came to Mexico in 1939 and maintained relations with Serrano, Franco's official representative. When the dossier was presented, he disappeared.

The March 30, 1942 report continues: Abascal

"resigned recently after his arrest by the police on a charge of saying insulting things about the Mexican Army. Abascal denied the charge and was later released, but the incident embarrassed the Trueba Olivares brothers, who really run the Union and founded it for the Nazis, [and they] decided to send him to Lower California as Chief of the Colonization project there."

"One hundred thirty-two leftist deputies and forty senators of the National Congress have formed a 'National Anti-Sinarquista Committee for the Defense of Democracy' and have signed statements claiming the Union is against the democratic countries and liberalism. They charge that Sinarquismo is the 'real fifth Column of Mexico' and that it is working with the Spanish Falange.

"On March 3, 1942, this new Committee came out openly on the Church question by stating publicly that the Union is acting 'within' the 'Catholic Clergy,' that it is a political organization very similar to Spanish Fascism such as the Spanish Traditionalist Falangists, and that there was connection between all of these groups.

"In response, the Bishop of Guadalajara, Monsignor Garibi Rivero, issued a statement through the office of the Archbishop of Mexico, stating that the Church has nothing whatever to do with the Sinarquistas or the Acción Nacional...."

UNS Taken Over by Anti-Roosevelt
Anglo-American Faction

According to Mexican author Mario Gill, after the Nazi defeat at the Battle of Stalingrad on Feb. 2, 1943, it was clear that the synarchists' future did not lie with the Axis powers, but rather with an adaptation to a pro-Franco, fascist faction in the United States. Under these conditions, the UNS was steered away from its openly anti-Yankee, pro-Axis direction, by the intervention of an anti-Roosevelt, Anglo-American imperialist faction spearheaded by Cardinal Francis J. Spellman of New York and Bishop Fulton Sheen, both of whom are mentioned favorably by Harvard's Samuel "Clash of Civilizations" Huntington in his 2004 book Who Are We?.

These two U.S. Church leaders, both of whom were allies of CIA director Allen Dulles and his deputy James Jesus Angleton, worked with the Base in Mexico to reorient the UNS towards a universal form of fascism under the guise of a New Christian Social Order.

Mario Gill's thesis, which Héctor Hernández attempts to refute, was also the assessment of El Popular, the newspaper of the Confederation of Mexican Workers, which in its Dec. 14, 1943 issue wrote as follows:

"There is no doubt that the recent visit to Mexico of Msgr. Sheen, the pro-fascist 'black leader' of North American clericalism, contributed towards obtaining the conversion of the Mexican Synarchists to a new policy in tune with the demands of the situation of the new world."

According to Gill, "Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen came to Mexico to assist at the Eucharistic Congress in Tulancingo, Hg. During his stay in the country he lodged at the house of Father Iglesias and it is known that he celebrated a series of conferences with the political leadership of the church, the mentors and confessors of the leading Synarchists. Upon his return to the U.S. in Nov. 1943 he made some declarations to the press in Washington in which he affirmed the following: 'What Mexico needs is a revolution; no revolution has been less revolutionary than that of Mexico; the corruption in this country is scandalous and total.... [O]nly the religious faith of the people and their Catholic tradition can save Mexico.'" Sheen made this statement in the middle of World War II against the government of a wartime ally of the United States.

Gill stressed that Sheen's views coincided exactly with those of the UNS and the PAN. Gill pointed out that Sheen, Cardinal Francis J. Spellman, and the Rev. Jerome P. Holland represented a faction in the U.S. Catholic Church which wanted to establish a New Christian Order in America. Spellman was known as one of those who had fought on behalf of Franco, in the United States. Holland was the chief editor of the Catholic newspaper The Tablet in Brooklyn, N.Y. On May 8, 1943, fresh from his trip to Mexico with Sheen, Father Holland published the Sinarquistas' 16-point program. In the same issue, he defended the Franco regime.

This grouping in the U.S. Catholic Church is the old network of William F. Buckley, Sr. and the Morgan interests, who had been deeply involved in attacking the Mexican government and encouraging the Cristero Rebellion from the turn of the century. Since 1921, Buckley had worked with Thomas W. Lamont of J.P. Morgan to form the American Association of Mexico. In November 1921, he had been expelled from Mexico for "counterrevolutionary conspiracy" by President Alvaro Obregón. It was Buckley who had encouraged René Capistrán Garza, the military head of the National League, to meet Nicholas Brady, president of the New York Edison Company and the United Electric Light and Power Company, to obtain funding for the Cristeros.

Before Pearl Harbor, William F. Buckley, Sr. promoted Standard Oil executive Nelson Rockefeller, whose company sold oil to the Nazis, to head the Office of Coordination of Inter-American Affairs. His son, William F. Buckley, Jr. was assigned in 1952 by James Jesus Angleton, director of counterintelligence for the CIA under Allen Dulles, to set up the first CIA office in Mexico City.

Before the war, both Allen Dulles and his brother John Foster Dulles of the law firm Sullivan and Cromwell, had represented Schröder, Rockefeller and Company, an investment bank, whose partners included Avery Rockefeller, nephew of John D. Rockefeller, Baron Bruno von Schröder in London and Kurt von Schröder of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) and the Gestapo in Cologne, Germany. Alan Dulles was himself a board member.

The Spellman-Sheen operations in Mexico are totally coherent with the fact that after World War II, Alan Dulles, who had headed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) operations in Germany and who worked with Angleton, head of the OSS in Italy, protected his Nazi collaborators. Members of the Nazi SS leadership were spirited out of Germany via the "Rat Line," first to Italy and then to Franco's Spain, whence they escaped to Ibero-American countries. It is estimated that by 1950, about 16,000 Nazi immigrants were living in Spain.

Spellman and Sheen, both of whom supported Franco, were part of the corrupt elements in the Catholic Church, committed to imposing a form of "universal fascism" in the postwar period.

After ordination in 1919 and the receipt of two degrees from Catholic University of America in Washington in 1920, Sheen went to Louvain University in Belgium. He received a Ph.D. in philosophy and a "super-doctorate" in 1925. The University of Louvain was a center of support for the Cristeros. The Jesuit priest Alfredo Méndez Medina studied theology there, and was the ecclesiastical advisor to the National League for the Defense of Religious Liberty. The two main offices of the International Union of the Friends of the League were located in Rome and Louvain. Reportedly, Sheen won the respect of G.K. Chesterton, the nominally Catholic "Distributionist" who in the June 8, 1933 issue of his publication GK's Weekly, endorsed Hitler's Nazi state.[3] During World War II, Spellman took Sheen under his wing. Sheen was also a personal friend of J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, and was known for his anti-communism.

In 1941, Cardinal Spellman had become the "Grand Protector" and "Spiritual Advisor" to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta (SMOM), the American association of which was created in 1927. The treasurer of the SMOM was none other than John J. Raskob, the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), who opposed Franklin D. Roosevelt in his campaign to win the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1932, and who in 1934, inspired by the French fascist Croix de Feu, and working closely with Morgan Bank's John Davis, was the principal financier of the fascist coup plot against FDR. William F. Buckley, Sr. and Nicholas Brady were both members of the SMOM. William F. Buckley, Jr. is also a member, as was James Jesus Angleton.

After Sheen's visit, the Fifth National Assembly of the Chiefs of the UNS occurred, also known as the Conference or Junta de los Volcanes. There, according to Gill, the UNS

"corrected some tactical errors which were observed by Sheen including their rabid hispanism and anti-Yankee positions hostile to the U.S. and the democracies. Synarchism proclaimed that it did not admit an anti-Yankee hispanism, just as equally they could not admit an anti-Spanish Pan-Americanism. The thesis of Hispanidad as political theory which synarchists wielded initially against North America, as per their conviction and interest and according to the suggestion of the Nazi-Falangist fifth column (inspired by the policy of the Ibero-American Institute of von Faupel) was replaced by the following: Continental unity will never be attained if one attempts to de-hispanize the people who are found to the south of the United States, for which reason Pan-Americanism and Hispanidad ought not to be counterposed; but rather should be suitably harmonized. We consider that the Christian culture and origin of America are the better bases for attaining the unity of the Continent."

According to Gill, "The new fascist strategy for America was not the establishment of a new Hitlerian order, but rather a new type of fascism directed by the Church; a clerical-corporative regimen, that is, the New Christian Social Order."

Gill went on to say that the UNS began to look for help from the more reactionary sectors of Anglo-American imperialism. All of the initial financiers of the UNS came from the philosophical and political camp of Hispanidad, "the brilliant theory of those who dream of the reconstruction of the empire of Philip II, those enamored of the old viceregal order." This is also the wet-dream of the Ibero-American Solidarity Movement's (MSIA's) Fernando Quijano.[4]

"But at the end of 1943 the situation in the world had changed. The hope of a triumph of fascism in Europe had disappeared. To rely on a force which is collapsing is a tactical error, and the UNS expediently revised its line. In this strategic turn it had the important participation of Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, the pro-fascist Catholic prelate, one of the prophets in America of the New Christian Social Order. It is unquestionable that the intervention of Monsignor Sheen was not purely theoretical, he did not confine himself to giving the line and pointing out the new plans of action to the organization. It is indubitable that he also opened new sources to the economic advantage of the UNS. Unquestionably the result was that after the trip of Monsignor Sheen to Mexico, Torres Bueno, the national chief of the UNS, began to have funds in large amounts from anti-Rooseveltian imperialist sectors of the U.S."

Gill argues that the philosophical inspiration for the synarchist notion of the New Christian Social Order was the anti-Semitic fascist ideology of an Argentine priest, Julio Meinvielle (1905-73). Interestingly, Meinvielle's thinking has been promoted by Alejandro Peña, formerly associated with Lyndon LaRouche, but now a leader of the oppositon to President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, with connections into the exile Cuban community in Florida. Meinvielle's views were also advocated by the MSIA's Fernando Quijano.

5. Synarchism in the Post-War Period

The UNS from World War II to 1954

On Aug. 6, 1940 Salvador Abascal acceded to the leadership of the UNS. His father was a lawyer and a declassé landlord, who had been an important member of the Union Popular or the "U." Santacruz, the chief of the Base, had known Abascal since 1935, and nominated him as the new UNS leader. According to a now declassified report written by Harold Braman on March 30, 1942:

"The German agents had ... worked out a scheme for the Spanish Falangists in Spain to take over much of the active direction of the union, due to the desire to keep things on a Spanish language and culture basis, for public consumption. Abascal proved to be an ideal 'stooge' for leader, since he would take orders and he stood high with the Archbishop of Mexico.... [H]e was educated in the Seminario de Morelia at a time when the Rector was Luis María Martínez, now Archbishop of all Mexico. He formed a lasting friendship at the feet of this powerful church figure, and showed a fondness for aggressive church political work."

Abascal's pre-World War II predecessors included José Antonio Urquiza, who, although not an official chief of the UNS, became an icon of the group when he was assassinated on April 11, 1938. The UNS claimed that he was murdered under orders of President Cárdenas, although later it was disclosed that he was killed by one of his own peons. Nonetheless, he was treated by the UNS as a martyr, comparable to José Antonio Primo de Rivera, the founder of the Falange in Spain, who had the same first name.

José Trueba was officially the first chief of the UNS from its foundation until October 1938. He was followed by Manuel Zermeño Pérez until August 1940. He had been stabbed in the back following a Synarchist rally in Tepic on Jan. 12, 1939.

Abascal was an anti-Semitic fascist, thoroughly committed to overthrowing the Mexican Revolution, which he, like his fellow Synarchists, blamed on U.S. Ambassador Joel Poinsett's actions in 1822. Typical of his mentality are two books which he wrote long after he had left the leadership of the UNS, but while he continued to be a leader of the Base, La revolución antimexicana (The Anti-Mexican Revolution) (1978) and La constitución de 1917, destructora de la nación (The Constitution of 1917, the Destroyer of the Nation) (1984). Under his leadership, the UNS was rabidly anti-U.S. and pro-Falange.

While denying that he and the UNS were Nazis, Abascal spewed forth the anti-Semitic, anti-U.S. line concocted by the Nazi Wilhelm von Faupel's Ibero-American Institute in Berlin: "Only faithfulness to Hispanic culture, to Hispanidad, and to the political integration of all Hispanic America can free us from the hypocritical Judeo-Yankee imperialism, whose only objective is the destruction of our essence."

At the Third National Synarchist Meeting in October 1941, Abascal announced that he was going to head the colony in Baja California, and would hand over leadership of the UNS to Torres Bueno, who took over on Dec. 13, 1941. The colonization project, as we have demonstrated, was designed to serve the interests of the Axis powers. Torres Bueno was himself a close associate of the Nazi Helmuth Schreiter, and also of Abascal. However, after Pearl Harbor, Torres Bueno came under severe pressure from Santacruz and the Supreme Council of the Base, to change the line of the UNS and not to provide Abascal with the resources needed for the colonization project to succeed.

In December 1942, Abascal returned to Mexico City and began to speak publicly in opposition to the shift which was taking place in the UNS. In July 1943, he read some issues of El Sinarquista, in which the names of Hidalgo and Morelos, two Catholic priests who were the leaders of the Mexican Independence movement, whom he regarded as traitors, were placed at the same level as Emperor Iturbide, who was in his view, and the view of Jesuit operative Bernard Bergoend, one of Mexico's greatest heroes. Abascal also disagreed with the characterization in El Sinarquista of Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy as "absolutely sincere." Abascal saw the United States as the enemy of Mexico, and stated: "I have never believed in the Good Neighbor Policy, nor will I ever, until the United States converts to Catholicism."

In 1943, Alfonso Trueba, the editor of El Sinarquista, was replaced, because he refused to print pro-American articles. In December 1943, Torres Bueno declared that Synarchism would support Pan-Americanism and continental unity. Abascal objected.

In April 1944, Abascal wrote to Torres Bueno: "I was equally very upset to learn about the exoneration of Benito Juárez, at last year's León rally." Abascal considered Juárez, who forged an alliance with U.S. President Abraham Lincoln during the U.S. Civil War, and who became President of Mexico in 1867, to be a traitor. Torres Bueno broke with this commonly held Synarchist view as part of the UNS opportunist adaptation to the U.S.-led war effort.

Abascal also reproached Torres Bueno in a letter "for a most shameful act: putting on the same level the Christianity of the Mexican people with the 'Christianity' of the Protestant United States...." Abascal wrote that he thought "that our destiny was in our Hispanic culture and in the ideological battle against Yankee imperialism."

In 1944 Abascal was expelled from the UNS. José and Alfonso Trueba Olivares, among others, soon followed him.

However, due to the pressure of Abascal's criticism, the UNS was desperate to show that it had not sold out to the "imperialists" and abandoned its radical opposition to the Mexican Revolution. Therefore, Juan Ignacio Padilla, the deputy leader of the UNS, authored two articles in the June 22 issue of El Sinarquista: "This is no government" and "Synarchism appeals to the Army." The first declared that President Camacho was under the influence of forces bent on Sovietizing the government, and the second was a seditious appeal to the Army to prevent a communist coup. In the latter article, Padilla wrote:

"We have raised an army of five hundred thousand soldiers who are resolved to give Mexico a government with real authority. Can a regime be called a government when it is presided over by a man who prefers to abandon his people to the mercy of vultures in order not to annoy the vultures?"

This appeal to the Army was written in response to rumors of a general strike organized for July 5, in the event that a labor dispute at Puebla was not solved. Padilla declared that this strike was insurrectionary.

The government immediately imposed a ban on Synarchist meetings in the eight states which were its stronghold. The ban was extended within a week to all 28 states. El Sinarquista was suspended and its editor, Juan Ignacio Padilla, was indicted on charges of abuse of the President, breach of the peace, violation of the law of the press, and treason. On July 5, the public prosecutor denounced Synarchism as a mixture of "Spanish and Italian fascism," of the "Jonsismo" of Ramiro Ledesma, and the traditionalism of Vázquez de Mella, two factional leaders of the Spanish Falange.

The seriousness of the UNS call to arms is further underscored by the fact that on April 10, 1944, a young lieutenant, José Antonio de la Lama y Rojas, on guard at President Camacho's private elevator in the National Palace, used his revolver at close range, although he failed to kill the President. Two days later, the lieutenant died of bullet wounds received while trying to escape from prison. Lombardo Toledano publicly produced photos of de la Lama with Father Sáenz, who, according to Mario Gill, was one of the Jesuit advisors to the UNS. The weekly Tiempo published a report of a memorial for de la Lama held April 14 at the UNS headquarters. Subsequently a bomb plot was foiled against Camacho, a couple of ex-Presidents, and other officals. The 20 conspirators admitted they were Synarchists.

In response to Padilla's appeal to the Army, Capt. Castañeda Chevarría, a friend of de la Lama's, urged recruits in one training camp to mutiny.

In October 1944, the Base solicited Torres Bueno's resignation, but he refused. His proposed replacement, Gildardo González Sánchez, also refused to accept the position. The Base sent armed men to occupy the offices of the UNS, and accused Torres Bueno of embezzlement. At that point, Bueno, who had made the shift demanded of him by Santacruz, broke with his controllers.

In February 1945 the Supreme Council of the Base elected Carlos Athie Carrasco as the new national chief of the UNS, thus creating two organizations: the UNS-MTB and the UNS-CAC.

Bueno was replaced in his faction in May 1945 by his friend, Gildardo González Sánchez, who remained the chief of the UNS-MTB for two years.

According to Gill, the UNS-CAC group gained control of the newspaper El Sinarquista. The UNS-MTB group published a new newspaper, Orden. Athie had to abandon his position soon afterward, as a result of his being accused of robbing the Banco Internacional Inmobiliario. He was replaced by Hernán Leal Zetina.

In February 1946, the UNS-MTB faction entered electoral politics with the Partido Fuerza Popular (Popular Force Party), despite the fact that the UNS had always eschewed electoral politics. Enrique Morfín González was the first president of the party, which published its own newspaper, El Poder. In this first foray into electoral politics, only one candidate won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies, but this deputy resigned from the UNS-MTB before one year and became a high-ranking government employee. The UNS-MTB claimed electoral fraud.

Dissatisfaction with Bueno's subservience to the government resulted in the replacement of González Sánchez by Luis Martínez Narezo from April 1947 until 1949. This change was welcomed by Abascal and by José Vasconcelos.

Once again, the UNS-MTB returned to its militant anti-government ways. In December 1948, members of the Popular Force staged a rally before the statue of Benito Juárez in the Alameda Central of Mexico City, during which they put a black hood on the head of Juárez. The registration of the Popular Force Party was cancelled one month later, on Jan. 28, 1949. The decision read as follows:

"The unpatriotic activities of the Popular Force Party, its confessional nature, its campaign of proselytism based on stirring up religious feelings, its ardent desire to modify the political organization of the country by means of violence, longing for times that have definitvely gone, and the resemblance of its structure to fascism, have been undeniably established by the sad events of 19 December at the Juárez Hemiciclo, perpetrated by Popular Force and the UNS."

In 1950, Martínez Narezo was replaced by Juan Ignacio Padilla himself. Under Padilla's leadership, Orden continued to editorially attack "Yankee imperialism" and the materialist domination of the Anglo-Saxons.

The opposing faction continued to publish El Sinarquista, under the direction of Hernán Leal Zetina, who accused Padilla of having gone into the camp of the communists, for his attacks on the United States during the Cold War. According to Gill, it was evident that the faction in the United States which had previously been financing Torres Bueno, was now financing the group of Leal Zetina. El Sinarquista was the only newspaper in Mexico which dared to support the signing of the Mexican-North American Military Assistance Treaty.

In 1954, there was another attempt to form a political party—Partido de la Unidad Nacional (Party of National Unity)—but it was denied recognition on Oct. 28, 1954, because it did not have the number of members required by law. On May 23, 1954 the Synarchists celebrated their 17th anniversary. Padilla was succeeded as national chief of the UNS by Martínez Aguayo, who himself was followed by Ignacio González Gollaz, David Lomelí Contreras, and David Orozco Romo.

In 1954, according to Gill: "The UNS has been converted into an organization more dangerous than before." The UNS created a series of primary schools and initiated the following institutes: el Instituto Nacional de Capacitación y Adiestramiento Sinarquista (INCAS) Adrián Servín, in Mexico City; the Instituto Regional de Capacitación José Antonio Urquiza (IRCJAU), in the city of Querétaro; and the Instituto Regional de Capacitación Teresita Bustos (IRCTB) for women in Celaya, Guanajuato.

According to Gill, the synarchist institutes were military, confessional schools of the medieval type, and the purpose of the synarchist reorganization in 1954 was to take Mexico over from within, and to impose a form of clerical synarchist fascism.

The UNS Today

Today, the 1945 split in the UNS continues, as is reflected in the fact that there are two UNS websites. The first, http://sinarquismo.americas.tripod.com, is the website of the UNS-MTB faction, which was headed by Padilla in 1951. Their publication continues to be Orden. This faction provides the following brief history:

In 1971 they promoted the Partido Demócrata Mexicano. In 1982 its Presidential candidate, Ignacio González Gollaz received more than 500,000 votes. In 1988, Magaña Negrete received almost 700,000 votes, but "Salinas the Usurper" (Carlos Salinas de Gortari) threatened that if the UNS did not recognize him as the elected President, the party would lose its registration. When they refused to to so, they lost their registration.

In 1992-96, a group of leaders corrupted the internal life of the UNS and provoked a crisis. This resulted in the disappearance of the PDM. They renounced the UNS and formed a new party, the Party of Social Alliance (PAS), with ex-PANistas, and followers of ex-President José López Portillo.

In 1996, Leonardo Andraca Hernández became the national chief. Under his leadership, this faction of the UNS focussed on the reconstruction of the movement, with the aim of recovering the nationalist and popular vision of the movement.

In 2000, it was determined that the movement would end electoral participation and focus on internal reconstruction and on returning to its foundations. In 2002, they opened a new period of intense social action. Lic. Magdaleno Hernández Yáñez is the current national chief.

The other group, which is a continuation of the Base-controlled UNS-CAC faction and continues to publish El Sinarquista, has the following website: www.geocities.com/capitolHill/Senate/9136. [Editor's note: this website was inactive as of July 15, 2004.] In April 1996, Clemente Gutiérrez Pérez became national chief.

Gutiérrez Pérez gave an interview on June 27, 2002 to FalangeHoy (Falange Today). Virtually all of the views expressed in this interview are identical with those advocated by Fernando Quijano and Marvilia Carrasco of the MSIA. Gutiérrez Pérez said that the aim of the UNS is to restore the Christian Social Order, based on the social doctrine of the Church. The UNS rejects Liberation Theology and claims to reject the sede vacante ("empty chair") position that Pope John Paul II is not legitimate. They have inherited the ideals of the Cristeros and the ACJM, and regard the Mexican Revolution as Satanic and Jacobin.

Asked about the attitude of the UNS toward Mexican President Vicente Fox, he said that members of the UNS looked favorably on Fox, who is a member of the PAN, but Fox has not fulfilled any of his promises. Specifically, Fox has obeyed the dictates of internationalist groups and has not acted against the North American Free Trade Agreement, which Gutiérrez Pérez says only benefits the neighbor to the North. (Actually, as EIR has shown, NAFTA benefits neither the United States nor Mexico, but only the bankers and corporate looters that are preying on both nations.)

Like Abascal and the early Synarchists, he blames 19th-Century U.S. Ambassador Poinsett for establishing masonic lodges in Mexico, which imposed a republican system totally foreign to the Mexican form of corporative life, which derives from the colonial epoch.

Gutiérrez Pérez then reviewed the organizations in Mexico and internationally with which his faction of the UNS works. In Mexico, they have relations of solidarity, mutual support, and some activities in common with the Catholic Party and the National Catholic Movement of Christ the King.

In Spain, they work with an entire array of Falangist organizations: the Falange Española Tradicionalista de las JONS (Juntas Ofensivas Nacional-Sindicalista), Falange Española Independiente, la Comunidad Tradicionalista, Juventudes Tradicionalistas Españolas, and Fuerza Nueva.

In Argentina: Patria Argentina.

In the United States: groups of radical Mexicans and a group of exiled Cubans.

In England: the International Third Position and the Voice of St. George.

The significance of this network identified by Gutiérrez Pérez, is that it parallels the network of the MSIA. Of particular importance is the fact that the UNS collaborates with Fuerza Nueva, which is the pro-Franco fascist party of Blas Piñar, which he founded in 1966 with the idea of "keeping alive the ideals of July 18, 1936," the date on which Francisco Franco Bahamonde led a mutiny in Spanish Morocco against the Republic of Spain, which launched the Spanish Civil War. During Franco's lifetime, Piñar, who was a protégé of Adm. Carrero Blanco, second in command after Franco, headed the Hispanic Culture Institute.

As EIR has documented, after the Tlaxcala, Mexico conference in 1992 during which the MSIA was founded, Marivilia Carrasco travelled to Spain to meet Blas Piñar. Afterwards she returned to Mexico and, along with her controller in the United States, Fernando Quijano, steered the MSIA in the direction of an alliance with Blas Piñar and his network of European and Ibero-American synarchist fascists, who currently represent the terrorist threat to the U.S. identified by Lyndon LaRouche.

The International Third Position is the organization of Roberto Fiore, who fled to Great Britain after the 1980 train bombing in Bologna, Italy. Fiori has since founded a new organization in Italy called Forza Nuova, which is close to Blas Piñar's Fuerza Nueva, and in Italy is allied politically with Alessandra Mussolini, the granddaughter of Il Duce.

On Nov. 16-17, 2002, the Falange Española and Blas Piñar's Fuerza Neuva held a meeting in Madrid, attended by Roberto Fiori and also by former Argentine Army Capt. Gustavo Breide Obeid of the Popular Party for Reconstruction, whose brother had attended the Tlaxcala MSIA conference. Alejandro Peña of Venezuela sent a message of support to a follow-up meeting on Jan. 26, 2003.

The MSIA is also known to have been in contact with the director of Patria Argentina.

Moreover, it is now confirmed that during the 1990s, Marivilia Carrasco and the leadership of the MSIA were in direct contact with Salvador Abascal, who visited their office in Mexico City on several occasions before his death in the year 2000.

The MSIA also maintained direct contact with Salvador Borrego, the leading anti-Semitic synarchist ideologue in Mexico today, who was a close collaborator of Abascal. Borrego wrote for Abascal's bimonthly publication La Hoja del Combate (Combat Newsletter), which was established in 1968. The prologue to one of his most popular books, Derrota Mundial (World-wide Defeat), was written by José Vasconcelos, the pro-Nazi member of the secret Falangist Council of Hispanidad, which controlled the UNS.

To continue with the interview, Gutiérrez Pérez, as could be expected, expressed total opposition to the atheistic Marxist system and to liberal capitalism. His alternative is the Spanish Falange, whose founder, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, was also a favorite of Fernando Quijano, who used to have a photo of Gen. Francisco Franco on his office wall.

Although supportive of Spain's former Prime Minister, José María Aznar, Gutiérrez Pérez criticized Spain for working with Anglo-Saxons and Arab countries, rather than focussing on the relation of the Spanish motherland with its former colonies.

Like the MSIA leaders, he looks favorably to the period of the Spanish Reconquest against the Moors, and attacks the Bourbon Monarchs, i.e., Carlos III, for what he says was their purely mercantile emphasis.

Gutiérrez Pérez said that he cannot deny that Synarchism took some elements from the Nazis and Italian Fascists, such as militarized organization, the use of uniforms, flag, and salutes. But he claimed the Nazis and Italian Fascists were atheistic, nihilist, and Nietzschean, while the UNS is Social Christian. He argued that Synarchism has more things in common with the Spanish Falange and with the movement of the Romanian Legionaires of Cornelio Codreanu, than with the Nazis and Italian Fascists. Never mind that the Romanian Legion fought with the Nazis on the Eastern Front against the Soviet Union, and that Franco, whose Blue Legions also fought with the Nazis on the Eastern Front, was put in power by Hitler and Mussolini.

He gave a second interview, to "The Voice of St. George" in Britain, on May 18, 2003. He again emphasized that the UNS wants to transform the institutions of Mexico, which he otherwise refers to as liberal masonic, in accord with the social doctrine of the Church, in order to create a Christian Social Order. He insisted that since the execution of Agustín de Iturbide [the hero of Abascal and Bergoend], Mexico has not had a government which coheres with its origin as a Hispanic Catholic nation, which was born by the divine will of the Virgin Mary of Guadalupe. Espousing the same viewpoint as Samuel Huntington and the Nazis, he insisted that two Americas exist: Hispanic America and Anglo-Saxon America.

El Yunque—The Base Reorganized

Just as the UNS has continued to exist to the present day, so has the Base, which controls it and the PAN. In 2003, a book entitled, The Anvil, the Ultra-Right in Power, by Alvaro Delgado, was published in Mexico, which revealed that in 1955, three years after James Jesus Angleton assigned William F. Buckley, Jr. to set up the first CIA office in Mexico City, and one year after the 1954 reorganization of the UNS described above by Mario Gill, the Base was reorganized into the Organización Nacional del Yunque (National Organization of the Anvil, ONY). During the 1960s and '70s, the Anvil created three university-based organizations: the Frente Universitario Anticomunista (FUA) in Puebla in 1955, the Movimiento Universitario de Renovadora Orientación (MURO) in Mexico City in 1961, and the Tecos at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara (GUIA) in 1971.

After Vatican II in 1965, two factions emerged in Mexico. The faction in Guadalajara of the Tecos was opposed to the Popes who sponsored and carried out the reforms of Vatican II. This is the sede vacante faction. The son of the founder of the Popular Union, Anacleto González Flores, was identified by Abascal in 1971 as the head of the Tecos. This faction is controlled by the head of the richest family in Jalisco, Leaño Alvarez del Castillo, who owns the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. This Tecos faction, which is associated with the late schismatic Marcel Lefebvre, considers the Vatican II Popes to be "communists and Jews."

The Anvil faction, which is associated with the Falange and controls the UNS faction led by Gutiérrez Pérez, portrays itself as in favor of the Pope, based upon the concepts of the Church as ultramontane and the Pope as infallible. Abascal, who was a member of the Base and the chief of the UNS during the 1940s, was a leader of the Anvil until his death in 2000. Both of his sons, Carlos Abascal Carranza, the current Minister of Labor in the Cabinet of President Fox; and Salvador Abascal Carranza, a PAN Congressman from Mexico City, are members of the Anvil. As reported above, the leadership of the MSIA in Mexico City was in direct contact with Salvador Abascal during the 1990s. In 1972, the Anvil created a religious order called the Sociedad Cruzados de Cristo Rey (the Society of Crusaders for Christ the King), whose purpose was to infiltrate the Mexican Armed Forces, the bastion of the Mexican Revolution. Since 1985 they have been the official spiritual advisors to the Mexican Army.

6. Conclusion

Contrary to Samuel Huntington, and the Nazi/Falange-inspired National Synarchist Union and its pathetic imitators, such as Marivilia Carrasco and Fernando Quijano's MSIA, there is no inherent Clash of Civilizations between the United States of America and the nations of Ibero-America. The advocates of such a policy are no more Christian than Hitler, Franco, the Spanish Grand Inquisitor Tomás de Torquemada, or Dick Cheney. The new Christian Social Order advocated by the Synarchists, no matter how often they falsely cite papal encyclicals on behalf of their Nazi-racist agenda, is nothing other than the promotion of an anti-Christian New Dark Age.

The positive cultural identity of Ibero-America is not the synthetic concept of Hispanidad developed at Hitler's Ibero-American Institute in Berlin and promoted by Franco's Council of Hispanidad. Rather it is the republican identity Ibero-Americans have in common with the citizens of the United States of America, based on the legacy of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz as that was expressed both in the creation of the United States, and in the nation-building efforts of that great friend of the United States, the Bourbon King of Spain, Carlos III.

It was that legacy, as expressed by the collaboration between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Mexican President Lázaro Cárdenas and his successor President Avila Camacho, which ultimately defeated the synarchist threat in the Americas and contributed to defeating it globally during World War II.

Today, the only U.S. leader committed to continuing the perspective embodied in Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy is Democratic pre-candidate for the U.S. Presidency, Lyndon LaRouche. Without Roosevelt at the helm in the United States during the 1930s and '40s, the Berlin-Rome-Madrid-Tokyo Axis would have succeeded in its quest for world conquest. Now, the synarchists who reorganized after Roosevelt's death are on the offensive once again. Only if LaRouche receives your support, will the resurgent synarchist threat be defeated once and for all.

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[1] Claudio Celani, "Strategy of Tension: The Case of Italy" Parts 1-4, EIR, March 26, 2004, April 2, 2004, April 9, 2004, April 30, 2004.

[2] As documented in a 1985 book produced by the Lyndon LaRouche-allied Mexican Labor Party, entitled The PAN: Moscow's Terrorists in Mexico, and later in "Mexico's Cristero Rebellion: Synarchism, the Spanish Falange, and the Nazis" (EIR, July 25, 2003), the Cristero Rebellion was itself a synarchist creation run by Jesuits. Later, after the Nazis came to power and then launched the Spanish Civil War, it was the organizations created by the Jesuits at the beginning of the century which became the basis for the Nazi-instigated UNS.

[3] See Stanley Ezrol, "`Traditionalist' Cult Is Roman, Not Catholic," EIR, April 26, 2002.

[4] While EIR Founder and Contributing Editor Lyndon LaRouche was wrongfully imprisoned beginning Jan. 27, 1989, former LaRouche associate Fernando Quijano, who became an asset of the CIA's Nestor Sánchez, attempted to take over the LaRouche association. In September 1990 he made a speech published in the Oct. 19, 1990 issue of EIR, in which he defended the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 and defended the Spanish Inquisition. He advocated the theories of the founder of the Spanish Falange, José Antonio Primo de Rivera, and was a supporter of the Spanish fascist dictator, General Franco. He despised the memory of Mexican President Benito Juárez, defended Spain's Philip II, and hated the pro-American Bourbon King of Spain, Carlos III. In 1992 he helped found the synarchist Ibero-American Solidarity Movement (MSIA).