CALLES' RETURN.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVII, Issue 22, 27 January 1936, Page 7

CALLES' RETURN.

MEXICO STIRRED, i I EXPULSION IS REFUSED. LABOUR DEMONSTRATIONS. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LOS ANGELES, January 7. General Phitarco Elias Calles, who lias been in virtual exile in Los Angeles for several months and has returned to embroil Mexico with hie presence, has stirred up the southern nation in a manner surpassing, its recent pyrotechnic history. In Mexico City, President Cardenas told 80,000 wildly-cheering workers that Mexico's Government, supported by its army and solid masses of workers and peasants, saw no threat to its programme or to the nation in the presence of General Calles. In unprecedented numbers the workers massed in front of the National Palace to demand Calles' expulsion from Mexico, but Cardenas told them that was unnecessary. "General Calles presents no problem to the Government," the President said. "He attempted, through a statement in the American Press, to gain the sympathy of that people and the intervention of that Government. But the American Government will not intervene in Mexico. It knows that Calles came back and is attempting to form a political party, solely to protect him and his own interests." While Calles played golf at the Mexican Country Club, Cardenas disclosed that the Government would confiscate one of the former President's haciendas and divide the proceeds among farmers. "Mexico," he said, "had put an end to the exploitation of the nation's wealth by Calles' friends." Before the President spoke, the workers had paraded through heavily-guarded streets carrying derisive banneis and cartoons of the one-time dictator. Four liundred soldiers guarded Calles' home, and police armed with bayonets and rifles patrolled the main streets. Cardenas addressed the throng with apparent sincerity after reviewing the demonstration from a balcony of tho palace, and frankly brought into the opev national political problems which previously had been discussed only in whispers. As the President finished the crowd joined in one unanimous, "Viva Cardenas!" Previously Labour leaders spoke and attacked Calles as a representative of American capital and of reactionary, clerical and Fascist interests. Lombardo Toledano, a Labour organiser who has been accused of planning a Communist coup, described the Mexican people, as "enslaved, illiterate, and sodden with alcohol." He denied that Comiminists were planning direct action, and praised Cardenas as "the first honest President in Mexico."