Next President

A year before the election, four months before nomination, observers last week considered as good as settled the question of who is to be Mexico's next President. To become President nowadays a Mexican must be 1) a member of Mexico's National Revolutionary Party, 2) Minister of War, 3) a good friend of Plutarco Elias Calles, Mexico's square-chinned onetime President, still its strong man and political boss. By promulgating last week a new constitutional amendment forbidding re-election of Presidents and Governors, Congress as it adjourned put President Abelardo Rodriguez out of the picture. Far forward in the picture came General Lazardo Cardenas, Minister of War and onetime President of the National Revolutionary Party. Last week Boss Calles set out on a Presidential train lent him by President Rodriguez to rest in a hacienda at Ensenada, also lent him "by President Rodriguez. The man he asked to go halfway with him was Cardenas.

Lazardo Cardenas, 39, is a Tarascan Indian from the southwest State of Michoacan. He left Michoacan's Governorship to help Boss Calles suppress the 1929 Escobar revolt. He took charge of the Government's troops in the State of Sonora, made a name as an efficient, hard-driving officer. In 1930 when onetime President Fortes Gil tried to make the National Revolutionary Party his personal machine, Cardenas was politically smart in lining up with Calles, was appointed Party president. He was one of four cabinet members to resign "patriotically" in 1931 when a certain "lack of tranquillity in the Capital" brought Boss Calles back temporarily as Minister of War. Of the four, whose "loyalty, disinterest and patriotism" Boss Calles praised, three have not been returned to cabinet rank, including Cardenas' good friend & fellow-Tarascan Joachim Amaro, "Father of the Mexican Army," unofficially suspected of plotting the 1931 untranquillity. When Abelardo Rodriguez was moved up from Minister of War to succeed Ortiz Rubio who had fallen out with Calles, Cardenas moved into the War Ministry.

Cardenas' political forte is silence. A medium-sized man with a neat mustache, he avoids spotlights. He has an Indian's natural physical assurance but never joins in Army sports, though he encourages them impersonally.

Few of Mexico's leaders are white men. Calles is the illegitimate son of an unknown and a peasant woman. Ortiz Rubio is reputedly three-quarter Spanish, one-quarter descendant of Michoacan Indian kings. President Rodriguez is a halfbreed, speaks Yaqui fluently. Both Cardenas and Amaro are pure Indian. Observers have long noted the virility of the Mexican Indian blood, the emergence of an Indian dynasty in Mexican politics.-

*Vide Writer David Herbert Lawrence's The Plumed Serpent.

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