Mexico’s Participation in the 1966 Tricontinental Conference: Crossroads of a New Left

In late 1965, from the highlands of Bolivia, “Che” Guevara sent a message to the fifth meeting of the “Afro-Asian-Latin American Peoples' Solidarity Conference,” better known as the Tricontinental Conference, held for the first time in Cuba that January, 1966. “What a luminous, near future would be visible to us if two, three, or many Viet Nams flourished throughout the world with their share of death and their immense tragedies, their everyday heroism and their repeated blows against imperialism obliging it to disperse its forces under the attack and the increasing hatred of all the peoples of the earth!” In his explicit celebration of violence as a means to the end of realizing a revolutionary utopia, Che's words marked a shift in tone from earlier missives and thus reflected the frustrated pace of revolutionary successes in Latin America at a time when right-wing military governments were everywhere triumphant. This paper examines the Tricontinental Conferences, with special attention to the 1966 conference in Havana, and the particular relationship of Mexico and the Mexican left to these conferences. Che's “Message to the Tricontinental” encapsulated a discourse of the heroic guerrilla that achieved a universal embrace on the left in 1968, yet little has been written on the original context in which the message was disseminated. While Mexico was amply represented at the 1966 conference, the pretense of revolutionary unity was belied by internal fractiousness. More importantly, Mexico's presence at the Tricontinental embodied an “Old Left” tethered to the figure of the aging revolutionary figure, Lázaro Cárdenas, already destined to become irrelevant to a burgeoning “New Left” that would soon leave its mark during the 1968 student movement.