-Caveat Lector-
an excerpt from:
Inside The League
Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson©1986
Dodd, Mead & Company
79 Madison Avenue
New York, N.Y. 10016
ISBN 0-396-08517-2
322pps — out-of-print/one edition
[re-print/first edition available from:
W. Clement Stone, P M A Communications, Incorporated]
--[6]--
Six.
I suspected the Tecos were involved. If they're fighting the communists, they
must have links to the death squads. For fear of being caught, they've
compartmentalized their thing.
-Former League member
IN EARLY APRIL 1970, heavily armed police in the northern Mexico city of
Hermosillo sealed off a section of Calle 14 de Abril and, with guns drawn,
stormed one of its buildings. In its cluttered rooms, they discovered Nazi
magazines and leaflets, piles of Hitler's book, Mein Kampf and code books.
Most intriguing of all were a half-dozen grotesque papier-mache masks.
The masks were props used at initiation ceremonies for one of Mexico's most
violent and feared secret societies. The raid was a strike against the Tecos,
a network of some three or four hundred neo-Nazis whose members were divided
into cells and took oaths of blind obedience to their leaders. But the Tecos
were not young swastika-clad misfits who plastered their bedroom walls with
posters of Hitler; they were some of Mexico's most influential
leaders—industrialists, bankers, and college professors-and had been accused
of coordinating innumerable acts of violence, including dozens of political
assassinations, in previous years.
The Hermosillo raid did not result in a large government investigation or
dissolution of the Tecos. In Mexico, where corruption is rife and where the
institutionalized ruling political party has a long tradition of
tolerating-and playing off-extremist movements of both the left and right,
the Tecos were able to control the damage done by the 1970 raid and continue
their activities. They were still in place when the World Anti-Communist
League came looking for a Latin American affiliate in 1972.
Not only were the Tecos allowed to establish the Mexican League chapter, they
were given a mandate to form the entire South and Central American regional
organization of the League. Naturally, they chose kindred spirits, quickly
making the Latin American AntiCommunist Confederation (CAL) one of the
region's most powerful and deadly ultra-right federations. As "Lobo," the
Honduran doctor/ assassin, told one of the authors in 1983, it was a
federation that served as a coordinating body for death squads throughout the
region. In recent years, the slogan of the once-obscure Tecos, Contra la
guerrilla roja, la guerrilla blanca ("Against the red guerrilla, the white
guerrilla"), has been put into practice throughout the continent.
Ironically, this prestige and influence, this "miracle," to quote the Tecos,
would probably have never occurred if it hadn't been for the financial
assistance of the U. S. government and some of America's largest
philanthropic foundations.
The Tecos trace their historical roots to the Mexican Revolution of the
1910s. Mexico was in the grip of a violent civil war that was greatly
exacerbated by government anti-clerical campaigns. The Catholic Church, which
owned vast tracts of the country, bore the brunt of the revolutionary zeal of
a wide range of groups, ranging from impoverished and landless peasants to
leftist intellectuals. Priests were murdered and churches were bombed or
sacked.
To defend the Church and fight back, the Legion of Christ the King, or Los
Cristeros, was formed. The counterrevolutionary Cristeros were a secret army
that, like the Holy Crusaders they emulated, rode into battle with the
blessings of priests. For them, this wasn't a revolution but a holy war, and
they were fully prepared to die for their God and the Virgin against the
"Satanists." In the ensuing strife, which took tens of thousands of Mexican
lives, the Cristeros played their role.
Upon the success of the Mexican Revolution, the Cristeros were officially
disbanded. In the 1930s a French Jesuit priest, Bernardo Bergoend, sought to
unite the Mexican Catholic opposition to counter the anti-Church government
that had been installed.
Bergoend advanced a scheme for double organization; one group was to concern
itself with political mass action, the other was to be a section devoted to
social action. Bluntly, the mass organizations were to be directed from above
by a select leadership, i.e., a secret society.
Tecos ... represented the effective leadership of this entire complex.... The
members, especially the younger ones, were expected to fight, wherever and
whenever this was indicated, for the interests of the Church and the
country.[1]
In these early days, the Tecos were not strictly a fascist organization; they
were basically devout Catholics and traditionalists who took up arms to
defend the old, established order. That changed, however, after World War II.
Through the efforts of two men, a Mexican Nazi who had spent World War II in
Germany and an Argentine Jesuit priest who admired Hitler, the Tecos became
the spiritual mentors for many of the continent's neo-Nazi movements and,
eventually, the coordinators of death squads throughout Central America.
Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the creator of the modern-day Tecos, spent World War
II in Berlin. His exact role or function there is unknown. Some say he was a
secretary to Hitler- others say he was a confidant of Alfred Rosenberg, the
Nazi ideologue who formulated the German anti-Jewish policy and who was
executed at Nuremberg. Whatever his role, Cuesta Gallardo was almost
certainly used by the Germans in the hope of establishing a private Mexican
army that would be sympathetic to Nazi goals on the United States's southern
border. When Germany's plan for global conquest didn't work out, Cuesta
Gallardo returned to Mexico but remained an ardent fascist and anti-Semite.
Cuesta Gallardo settled in Guadalajara, the financial center of Mexico and
its second-largest city; it is as well the historical home of the Cristeros.
According to a report by an American League member in 1973, "Today he leads a
most secluded life in Guadalajara, never appearing in public. His house is a
disguised fortress, well-guarded all the time."
Cuesta Gallardo was not idle in his Guadalajara lair. He envisioned a
renaissance of the Tecos, this time committed not only to fighting the
anti-clerics in Mexico but also to battling all enemies wherever they existed
throughout the world. Those enemies included the United States, Jews,
Freemasons, and most of the hierarchy of the Vatican Church, for they were
all, according to Cuesta Gallardo, conspirators in the
Jewish-Freemason-Communist plot to take over the world.
When Cuesta Gallardo embarked on this mission in the late 1940s, he could
count among his allies the "Nazi priests" whom he had met while he was in
Germany. These Catholic clerics had collaborated with Germany and its allies
during the war- many were not priests but were regular war criminals who,
with Church assistance, had donned robes to facilitate their escape. They
were now scattered throughout Western Europe and Latin America. The Tecos'
present ties to the "religious leaders" of the Croatian Ustasha and the
Romanian Iron Guard most certainly date from their leader's tenure in Berlin.
[*] [*In particular, the Tecos have close ties with the Romanian Iron Guard
fascists of Horia Sima in Spain, and it could be more than coincidence that
Teco "cells" are composed of thirteen followers, the same number as in the
Iron Guard "nests."]
Cuesta recruited a young Mexican intellectual, Raimundo Guerrero, to his
cause. Guerrero succeeded in drawing other right-wing students and academics
into the Teco cabal and in time assumed its overt leadership. The real power,
however, would always remain with the shadowy Cuesta.
>From the old Mexican Nazi's standpoint, Guerrero was a good choice as
protege. In 1952, Guerrero was dispatched to Buenos Aires to represent Mexico
at a conference of the World University Organization. There he made contact
with other neo-Nazi student groups from around the world. In addition to
forging a lasting relationship with the anti-Israel Arab League, it was in
Buenos Aires that Guerrero came into contact with the Jesuit priest Julio
Meinveille.
Meinveille was an ultra-right Argentine ideologue who launched vitriolic
literary attacks on the world's "plagues": Jews, Freemasons, and liberal
elements of the Catholic Church. By 1952, Meinveille was already the
spiritual leader of the Tacuaras, an Argentine secret society of neo-Nazis,
and he would become the same for the Tecos. His hate books, including such
tracts as The Jew, The Cabal of Progressivism, and Among the Church and the
Reich, became the Tecos' Bibles. The Mexicans frequently distributed
Meinveille's books at World Anti-Communist League conferences, and the aging
priest was even invited to be the main speaker at the first CAL conference in
Mexico City in 1972.
Stefan Possony, a professor emeritus at the conservative Hoover Institute at
Stanford University and a longtime American League member, investigated the
Tecos in the early 1970s. Pointing out Meinveille's importance to the Mexican
neo-Nazis, he nonetheless portrayed the Argentine in a favorable light:
He is a theologian with knowledge in the social sciences, and he is far more
scholarly and also more moderate than the rest. He is knowl-edgable on many
aspects of Communism, about which he wrote with wisdom and insight. He
produced the overarching interpretation of history on which the reasoning of
the Tecos literature is based. But he has also been the victim of obsessive
ideas, especially anti-Semi-tism, in the pursuit of which he resorted to
questionable methods.[2]
Despite Possony's characterization of Meinveille as a scholarly moderate, the
"interpretation of history" that he gave the Tecos was one of violence,
hatred, and paranoia. To them, practically all established leaders, whether
in the religious, economic, or political fields, were traitors and tools of
international Zionism. Franklin Roosevelt, Harry S. ("Solomon," according to
the Tecos) Truman, and Nelson Rockefeller, they believe, were all Jews. So,
too, were several leaders of the Spanish Carlists, a movement best known for
its ardent Catholicism and unwavering support of Generalissimo Francisco
Franco, and so were conservative and Catholic politicians throughout South
and Central America. The Tecos saw, and continue to see, all their enemies as
performing assigned roles toward the secret Jewish plan of global domination.
And their "enemies" quickly became an even larger bloc upon the inclusion of
the Vatican Church under Pope John XXIII. Although many conservative
Catholics were disturbed by what they saw as the liberal bent of the Pope and
by the decrees that emerged from Vatican Council II in 1962, none reacted as
bitterly or as blasphemously as the Mexican Tecos did in authoring the
Complot contra la Iglesia ("Conspiracy Against the Church").
The Complot remains one of the most scathingly anti-Semitic and unabashedly
pro-Nazi tracts ever written. Translated into a half-dozen languages, it was
supposedly the work of one "Maurice Pinay," a fictitious name. The Italian
edition was distributed at Vatican Council II, causing a minor uproar.
We must join forces against Jewish imperialism and liberate our own peoples,
all who are being kept captive by Jews, so that after victory over the worst
imperialism the world has ever seen ... all countries can form a world
organization.
That world organization was clearly not to be the United Nations, for the UN
is "controlled by the secret power of Jewry and Freemasonry and used for the
purpose of securing the triumph of the imperialist schemes hatched by the
Synagogue."[3]
The Complot went a step further than other apologists had in lamenting Nazi
Germany's failure: "If they had confined themselves to saving their nation
and Europe from the deadly threat [Judaism] they could not be blamed, and
perhaps their commendable enterprise might have succeeded."
Many journalists and shocked Church leaders attempted to discover the true
identity of the author of the Complot; they came to the conclusion that it
was a collaborative effort of European neo-Nazis and Latin American fascists.
Actual responsibility, however, belonged to the Tecos, specifically Cuesta
Gallardo and Garibi Velasco, another Teco leader, they were its major authors.
The Tecos' front man for the hate campaign at Vatican Council II was their
theologian, Father Saenz y Arriaga, a Jesuit priest. At the close of the
council, he issued a press release "signed" by twentyeight conservative
Catholic leaders that attacked the council for having "yielded to the
pressures or to the money of Judaism." Most of the signatures were forgeries,
and Saenz y Arriaga was later excommunicated.
Some of the more moderate Tecos, disgusted at the group's actions, broke away
to form the Group of Puebla in 1964. The parting was not amicable. To the
Tecos, the Pueblas had now proven themselves to be part of the Jewish
conspiracy. According to a South American rightist who has followed the
Puebla-Teco split, "They've been killing each other ever since. Neither group
is composed of saints."[4]
The rift between the Tecos and the Group of Puebla helped to bring some
aspects of the secret society into the open. Mexican Church leadership, even
some of its extremely conservative members, criticized the Tecos. The
cardinal of Guadalajara, Garibi y Rivera, issued a letter in 1964 warning
"students so that they would not go astray by those who, with the pretext of
fighting errors like Communism, built secret organizations in which it is
demanded under oath of strict secrecy and obedience to unknown leaders and
even with clear menaces to those who would break the orders given."[5]
Such denunciations did not destroy the secret society. Rather, the Tecos
launched a public relations campaign, created political front groups, and
established links with other neo-Nazis throughout Latin America, the United
States, and Europe. One of their most successful operations, probably
inspired by Raimundo Guerreroys involvement in the World University
Organization in the early 1950s, was in gaining influence and funding through
the academic world.
Throughout Latin America, there is a tradition of "autonomous universities."
Theoretically at least, autonomous schools are legally allowed complete
academic freedom, including immunity from repercussions for teaching subjects
like Marxism that could never safely be discussed outside the campus. Neither
the army nor the police are allowed onto university grounds- security details
are handled by university-selected personnel. This system has led to a
dramatic irony: liberal or Marxist professors teach classes under the
protection of campus autonomy in nations where liberals and Marxists are
routinely arrested, tortured, and/or murdered.
The Tecos saw the Latin American autonomous university system, which was
traditionally the domain of leftists, as a potential tool for themselves that
could be used to propagate their views of communism and the international
Jewish conspiracy- it could also be a funding source for their secret
operations. The springboard for this goal of continental influence was the
Teco-controlled Autonomous University of Guadalajara (UAG).
Founded in 1935 by Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the Guadalajara school had always
been an understaffed and underfinanced institution. In 1960, the school had a
budget of fifty thousand dollars and consisted of a few disheveled buildings
and a dusty campus. Then things changed: by 1962, when the Tecos turned their
attention to this latent weapon at their disposal, they had already endeared
themselves to American officials whom they could count on for support.
"After years of financial starvation, Guadalajara [UAG] received money from
the Rockefeller, Ford and Carnegie Foundations as well as from the Agency for
International Development (AID). This happy change was accomplished by Luis
Garibay, rector of the university and Guerrero's compadre."[6]
According to a confidential report prepared by Tradition, Family and Property
(TFP), an ultra-conservative Catholic organization based in Brazil that has
long been at odds with the Tecos, the man most responsible for putting the
Tecos' university on the map was Oscar Wiegand, the U.S. consul in
Guadalajara. "He was so interested in the development of the small
university, that he moved to Guadalajara to follow up the process. Dr.
Wiegand himself took Dean Garibay to visit 12 American universities to
introduce him and his plans and to solicit 'donations.'"[7]
By 1975, the Autonomous University of Guadalajara had a budget of ten million
dollars, in what Vice-Dean Antonio Leano, a high-ranking Teco, called a
"miracle" of American and Mexican philanthropy. That miracle was the result
of the funds provided by the U.S. government through the Agency for
International Development (AID) and American philanthropic foundations.
Between 1964 and 1974, they had bestowed nearly twenty million dollars in
grants to the Tecos' university.
In all probability, some of the foundation and government officials
responsible for clearing the grants to the university were not aware that it
was dominated by the Tecos. Yet it is a rather glaring oversight. Within the
various university departments could be found most of the Tecos' top leaders,
men responsible for previously delivering scathing attacks on the Vatican
Church, Judaism, and, in fact, the United States. Further, "American money
flowed only after Tecos, or related group, already had spent considerable
amounts on the preparation, publication, translation and distribution of
costly books, notably Complot."[8]
With the influx of American financial assistance, the Tecos at the
Guadalajara campus were able to finance their nonacademic programs. According
to a Mexican political analyst who infiltrated the Tecos and attended their
secret meetings, the grants and scholarship funds received from the United
States were laundered through the university for Teco use. "Much of this
money went to support the Teco 'political' activities," he said.
Their political activities were many. In addition to furthering their ties
with neo-Nazis in Europe and South America and subsidizing the publication of
their anti-Semitic magazine, Replica, the Tecos also now had the funds to
establish political front groups, such as FEMACO (Mexican Anti-Communist
Federation) and the IACCD (Inter-American Confederation of Continental
Defense), to serve as liaisons to right-wing death squads they became part of
the World Anti-Communist League in 1972.
Operating under the front group FEMACO, the Tecos' power within the League
became enormous. Not only was Raimundo Guerrero made an executive board
member but the Mexicans proceeded to draw in their violent brethren from
throughout Latin America with little or no review by the League's Asian
godfathers. Since they had created the entire Latin network, the Tecos
naturally assumed leadership of the Latin American Anti-Communist
Confederation (CAL).[9]
Helped by their League credentials, the Tecos intensified their Replica hate
campaigns. In freely reprinting articles from other League-affiliated
magazines, such as the Canadian Intelligence Service and the Taiwan-based
Asian Outlook, Replica remains today a forum wherein conspiracy theorists and
neo-Nazis can rail against the Jewish-Freemason conspiracy. At the 1978 World
Anti-Communist League conference, the Tecos handed out reprints of an article
attacking the television miniseries Holocaust as "Jewish propaganda."[10]
Their inclusion in the World Anti-Communist League also gave the Tecos a
platform for airing their philosophy internationally and winning the notice
and support of neo-Nazis everywhere. When Aktion Neue Recht ("New Right
Action"), a German Nazi group, held a congress in Munich, Guerrero sent them
a congratulatory telegram. The fascist Norwegian Norsk Rikt party heaped
praise on the Mexican League chapter. In the late 1970s, when the chairman of
the American chapter of the League tried to fill the European delegations
with neo-Nazis and former SS officers, the Tecos under Guerrero were among
his principal supporters.
Today, the Autonomous University of Guadalajara is a thriving institution of
higher learning. It confers nearly sixty professional degrees, and its
president, Dr. Luis Garibay Gutierrez, was president of the International
Association of University Presidents in 1985. Still, many of its professors
and students have secret memberships in the Tecos. Raimundo Guerrero is now a
department dean. The Tecos so dominate the university that they have lent
their name to its soccer team. Rallies are held in which, according to former
students, swastika armbands are worn and allegiance to Nazism sworn. The
Tecos operate their own armed university security police, and students are
fed a heavy and steady diet of anti-communism and anti-Semitism. Visitors are
required to have a special pass and are led about the campus by a "companion."
An American former professor at the university and a Teco loyalist
inadvertently revealed much of its inner workings. In an anonymous phone call
to Dale Van Atta, an associate of syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, he
defended the university but went on to explain the required loyalty pledges,
the pressure on professors of all nationalities to join the secret society,
and the divisions of the Tecos' labors.
There's basically three branches, the school administrators and professors,
the prefects, students who watch over other ones and analyze their political
orientation, and the tecos de choque [shock Tecos]. And could the shock Tecos
be involved in death squads? I don't know. It—it wouldn't surprise me.[11]
He then hung up.
When one of the authors exposed the Teco control of the Autonomous University
of Guadalajara and its links to Central American death squads in January and
February 1984 in a series of articles with Jack Anderson, the school and its
allies reacted heatedly. In addition to running a defending advertisement in
The Washington Post, they denounced the Anderson columns in Mexico and
Guatemala. One of the most amusing counterclaims made by the university was
that the word Teco, or "owl," referred to "the students' devotion to
latenight academic studies."
The daughter of a Teco laughed at the explanation. "Yes, it does mean owl.
Los Tecos are owls whose eyes are red. The members of the group are called
Los Tecos because they are up all night doing their thing."
"In CAL we are not pluralistic- we cannot be," Teco emissary Rafael Rodriguez
declared to the World Anti-Communist League conference in 1980. "The values
of our faith, of our culture, of our civilization and of our nationalism are
the only truth for which we live our anti-communism. Communists, Marxists of
any label, can only be situated in the enemy trenches. Our real mission is
not to talk about communism but to fight communists."
pps.71-81
--[notes]--
Six
1. Stefan Possony, The 1972-73 Leadership of WACL (memorandum to American
Council for World Freedom, 1973).
2. Ibid.
3. "Maurice Pinay," Complotto contro la Chiesa (Rome: N.P. 1962), p. 697.
4. Interview with coauthor, Washington, D.C., February 1985.
5. Politica (Mexico: February 15, 1964), p. 28,
6. Possony, WACL.
7. Jose Lucio de Araujo Correa, Some Data and Observations about the
Mexican Orga-nization of the Tecos (Sao Paulo, Brazil: Tradition, Family and
Property, 1975).
8. Possony, WACL.
9. In their campaign to be the pre-eminent voice of fascism in South
America, the Tecos ran into a confrontation with another right-wing political
movement, Tradition, Family and Property (TFP). Based in Brazil and dating
back to the 1930s, TFP is a Catholic order that represents the wealthiest
classes and seeks to defend private ownership and the supreme sanctity of the
family unit, and to resist liberal influences within the Church. "We simply
do not feel," a TFP official told one of the authors, "that the twentieth
century is necessarily the best time in which to live. "
"The organization is an object of controversy in Sao Paulo," Joseph Becelia,
first secretary of the American Embassy in Brazil, wrote about TFP in a
letter of March 1979, "and has been featured in several television and
newspaper reports that focused on its allegedly extremist nature. There have
also been allegations of TFP involvement in acts of right-wing terrorism,
though they are unproven. The group does, on the other hand, reportedly have
a paramilitary unit whose members receive weapons and 'anti-guerrilla'
training."
While the charges against TFP to which Becelia alluded have been proven to be
exaggerations, they illustrate the point that it was hardly an organization
that could be considered leftist or "Jewish-inspired" in any way.
But not to the Tecos. In 1974, Replica launched a scathing attack on TFP,
including carrying a cover showing a pig bearing the name of TFPs chairman
and calling him a Jew.
10. Among the correspondents of Replica are Jorge Prieto Laurens, Rafael
Rodriguez, Raimundo Guerrero, and Rene Capistran Garza, all Tecos who have
attended League conferences. Among its international periodical affiliates
were WACL Bulletin (Korea), Aginter Press (Portugal), and Fuerza Nueva
(Spain), the last being the newspaper of the Spanish neo-fascist party of the
same name.
A Mexican academic expert on his nation's extreme right claims that Replica
receives much of its funding from the so-called historical revisionists in
the United States, who claim that the Holocaust is a Jewish-perpetrated myth.
Thomas Serpico, for example, owner of the Christian Book Club in Hawthorne,
California, an outlet for historical revisionist writings, was reportedly the
English translator and a financier of the Complot.
11.Telephone interview by Dale Van Atta, Washington, D.C., October 1984;
quoted in Jack Anderson, Washington Merry-Go-Round, November 26, 1984.
--[cont]--
Aloha, He'Ping,
Om, Shalom, Salaam.
Em Hotep, Peace Be,
Omnia Bona Bonis,
All My Relations.
Adieu, Adios, Aloha.
Amen.
Roads End
Kris
DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER
==========
CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic
screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters
and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright
frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects
spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL
gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers;
be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and
nazi's need not apply.
Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector.
========================================================================
Archives Available at:
http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html
http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/
========================================================================
To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email:
SIGNOFF CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Om
