The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  While agents of the magic group went about producing the required paper, others at Camp X created a typewriter whose every imprinted letter, comma, and space would mimic those that came from the typewriter of General Liotta’s secretary because, as Sherlock Holmes once said, “A typewriter has really quite as much individuality as a man’s handwriting.” Stephenson’s experts examined the purloined letter and determined the secretary used an ancient Olivetti with quirks they incorporated into the duplicate machine. General Liotta’s letterhead was reproduced and embossed onto the newly fabricated paper so accurately that the experts reckoned it could withstand microscopic inspection; the fateful missive was composed, typed, and photographed. A copy of the letter was sent as a microfilm to Stephenson’s chief agent in Rio, a trick within the trick that would help persuade those about to read the letter of its authenticity.

  On the morning of November 14, 1941, a small item appeared on inside pages of Rio de Janeiro newspapers reporting a burglary at the home of Comandante Giovanni Coppola, the local director of LATI. A bedside clock and other small items had gone missing, according to the police report. The next day a Brazilian operative of the British intelligence service, posing as one of the thieves, approached the Rio office of the Associated Press with a microfilm photograph he claimed to have found among the comandante’s things. Was it of interest? The AP reporter recognized the letter’s explosive content and surmised it had been sent as microfilm to avoid interception. He carried the tiny photo to the U.S. Embassy to gauge its authenticity.

  When Ambassador Caffery examined enlargements and determined the letter was genuine, he might have been excused for thinking the long-sought way to eliminate LATI had fallen into his lap. Caffery delivered the microfilm and enlargement to President Vargas, who broke into a rage.

  Not only did the letter call the president a bloated buffoon, it suggested a fascist conspiracy was afoot. The letter said the Italians were planning to deal with Vargas’s domestic enemy, the Integralist Party, a far-right political movement commonly called “Greens” for their uniform; Vargas had already beaten down one coup attempt by the Greens. The president forbade publication of the letter, but it soon made its way into diplomatic circles and beyond.

  “There can be no doubt that the fat little man is falling into the pocket of the Americans and that only violent action on the part of our green friends can save the country,” the phony letter said. “Our Berlin collaborators … have decided to intervene as soon as possible.”

  Intervention from Germany meant Luft Hansa might compete in Brazil, said the letter. The local LATI director was encouraged to befriend “the green gentlemen” to assure that LATI’s privileges would continue under a new regime, and to discover whom “the green gentlemen” might name the next air minister, all plausible exhortations in the face of a supposed coup. To ice the cake, Stephenson ended the letter with an insult that could not be ignored. “The Brazilians may be, as you have said, a nation of monkeys, but they are monkeys who will dance for anyone who will pull the string.”

  Furious, President Vargas canceled LATI’s landing rights. Events happened so fast that protest from Italy was useless. Brazilian soldiers took over the line’s aircraft, landing fields, and maintenance equipment, and they interned flight crews. Comandante Coppola, the local director, withdrew a million dollars from a bank and tried to flee to Argentina, but authorities captured him just short of the border and threw him in jail.

  U.S. ambassador Caffery took full credit for the culminating affair. He had a copy of the letter shown quietly to a member of British intelligence working at the British Embassy, saying U.S. intelligence had “pinched” the damning evidence that tore LATI from the landscape. Later, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover would also take credit for bringing down LATI. The British agent, secretly cognizant of the letter’s true backstory, made sure to compliment the U.S. ambassador’s work effusively.

  With LATI’s demise in 1941, the domination of South American airways by German and Italian lines, a presence so strong in the 1930s, came to an end.

  SOARING AZTECS, FORGOTTEN FLIERS

  In pre-Columbian times, Mexico City’s Chapultepec Park was a verdant space reserved for the rest and recreation of Aztec rulers. Today it is a fifteen-hundred-acre oasis in the middle of the largest Spanish-speaking city in the world. In the park stands a castle where six “Boy Heroes” fell, military cadets defending a hill against U.S. troops in 1847 during the Mexican-American War.

  Ironically, another monument stands nearby, this one commemorating a Mexican air unit that flew under U.S. command in World War II. The Mexican Air Force Squadron 201, nicknamed the “Aztec Eagles” by its members, consisted of three hundred pilots and crew trained in the United States who made bombing runs over Luzon and Formosa in 1945 and ferried aircraft from Papua New Guinea to Pacific theater airfields for Allies fighting Japan. Eight of the Aztec Eagles were killed in the line of duty.

  But don’t expect to find the monument to the World War II fliers by asking directions from Mexicans enjoying the park.

  “There is a Metro station named for them, I know that,” said one person I asked, the first to show a spark of recognition about the squad.

  I approached two indigenous-looking men before a giant ahuehuete, a Montezuma cypress. They said they had been praying at the tree, a species sacred to native people. We stood no more than a hundred feet from the flying Aztecs’ monument, a massive stepped semicircle standing at least a story high, but they said they had not heard of the squadron. “We do not concern ourselves with war,” said one, Tenoch, who identified himself as a Nahuatl priest.

  The big monument to the Aztec Eagles and the little excitement their name arouses is a contrast that symbolizes Mexico’s split attitude toward participation in the war. Both Washington and Mexico City knew some military participation was necessary to ensure that Mexico would have a seat at the table in the new postwar world order. But for historical reasons, supporting Washington was not a popular cause among the Mexican people. The United States was the Big Brother to the north who had taken away a large chunk of Mexican territory and threw a long shadow over the country.

  Toward the war’s end, however, Mexican president Manuel Ávila Camacho found a way to support the Allies militarily with a pretext that played upon Mexican pride. In May 1942, two Mexican tankers supplying oil to the United States had been sunk by U-boats, one on the way to New York, the other returning from Pennsylvania. Mexico declared war on the Axis. In 1944, President Ávila Camacho sent the aerial fighter squadron to fight with the Allies and “to clean the national honor” for Mexico’s sunken ships.

  As they trained in Texas and Idaho, the Aztec Eagles sometimes faced discrimination.

  “The Americans looked down on us at least a little bit,” Captain Reynaldo Gallardo recalled in 2003 in an interview for a San Diego, California, newspaper. “They didn’t say so, but I noticed it. We made up our minds that we wouldn’t say anything, but instead would show these people what we had.”

  On a combined U.S.-Mexican sortie in the Philippines, Gallardo, attached to the 58th U.S. Fighter Group, completed his mission of strafing a line of Japanese troops and vehicles. As he pulled up, he “got a little crazy” and maneuvered his plane into a celebratory roll, a move that earned him a scolding over the intercom as a “crazy Mexican.” Gallardo found this offensive and blindly challenged the offender. On the ground, he saw that the American was “three times as big and four times as heavy,” wearing a big grin on his face. They fought anyway, fortunately for Gallardo a mere tussle, but the Mexican’s spunk earned him respect among the pilots. The gladiators became fast friends, breaking the ice between the Mexican and American airmen.

  After the war, the Aztec Eagles were welcomed back home with a grand parade in Mexico City before being promptly shuttled into the background of the national landscape. The Mexicans received new fighter aircraft and other war matériel through the U.S. Lend-Lease program that aided U.S. allies. But t
he image of a fighting partnership with Washington did not fit the Mexican profile of independence from the United States. Ávila Camacho’s successor, Miguel Alemán Valdés, turned his back on much of what his predecessor had done—and besides, no one in the ruling party wanted to entertain the prospect of war heroes competing with its handpicked, old-boy network candidates for political offices. The flying veterans faded into history, despite some ceremonial appearances over the years.

  Mexico City’s American Legion post in a charming old house in the leafy Condessa district is one of the few places the fliers are remembered. The post is a comfortable relic of another time, with a bar that opens at 2:00 p.m., a used bookstore, and memorabilia adorning the walls, including a photo of poet Alan Seeger—uncle of American folk singer Pete Seeger—who died at the Battle of the Somme in World War I. A secretary named Margarita dug out photos of the handsome young men of the Aztec Eagles for me. In some they posed with the propeller aircraft they flew, Thunderbolt single-seat fighters. In the past, Margarita said, the post hosted celebrations on Veterans Day—11/11 at 11:00 a.m.—“for those who came back alive.” On Memorial Day, the Aztec Eagles joined American Legionnaires and U.S. Marines from the embassy at a cemetery to honor the dead. Mostly, however, the fliers were forgotten warriors in a country where the man on the street had little interest in the Second World War—even though Mexico had played an important part in supplying manpower to replace U.S. agricultural workers gone to fight, and providing oil and other natural resources.

  “We fought in defense of sovereignty and independence of the nation,” said former sergeant Héctor Tello Pineda of Xalapa, Veracruz, in a televised interview before his death in 2017. Tello, who entered the Mexican forces at age twenty, said the experience “shaped” him for the rest of his life.

  “We did our duty as soldiers, and we did it with valor and discipline for the liberty of Mexico,” he said. “For the whole world. Because in reality, it was a world war. That’s what it was called.”

  2.

  BLACK GOLD, OIL TO FUEL THE WAR

  For centuries before the Europeans arrived, warriors in northeast Brazil covered their arrows with oil pitch and resin and sent them flaming through the air to destroy the huts of their enemies. In 1500 when the Portuguese came, the Indians launched the arrows against the houses of the first European settlers.

  Almost five thousand miles to the north, on the rainy Gulf Coast of Mexico, natives were burning chapopote—petroleum tar—to honor their gods. They gathered small quantities of seeping oil for dye and glue, or smeared it over their skin as medicine. When the Spanish landed in 1519, the conquistadores used the pitch to caulk their boats.

  Otherwise, Latin oil remained undisturbed until the turn of the twentieth century, when explorers from Europe and the United States began drilling wells in Brazil, Peru, Venezuela, Bolivia, Colombia, and Mexico. Petroleum had become a new kind of gold: all over the world oil powered electricity, asphalt made from it covered roads, and crude was refined into gasoline to fuel automobiles, buses, and, increasingly, trains. Early in World War I, Great Britain’s First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill turned oil into an indispensable wartime resource by overseeing the British fleet’s conversion from coal power. By the 1930s, countries preparing for the next war coveted petroleum wherever they could find it.

  Of thirty-three countries in Latin America, Mexico possessed the largest known reserves. The struggle for its prize involved international bankers, spies, manipulation in high places, and, sometimes, mayhem, with grave consequences for the beginning of the war. Mexican oil sold to Germany, Italy, and Japan gave the fascists a head start. Oil shook Mexico’s relationship with other countries, especially the United States. European and U.S. companies produced oil in Venezuela, Colombia, Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina, but in the lead-up to the war, when industrialized nations the world over were stockpiling arms and resources, Mexico stood at the center of the drama in Latin America.

  Poor Mexico, so far from God, so close to the United States.

  —ATTRIBUTED TO PRESIDENT PORFIRIO DÍAZ, 1830–1915

  Unfortunately for the Allies, Washington’s history of relations with its neighbor was ugly. Since Mexico declared independence from Spain in 1821, the U.S. military had attacked and occupied its territory or made cross-border raids at least a dozen times. Mexicans believed that many of their woes, and lack of true independence, derived from their location next door to the giant of the north. During the nineteenth century, the United States absorbed more than half of Mexican national territory, annexing present-day Texas in 1845 and, after the Mexican-American War ended in 1848, almost all of present-day California, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, and New Mexico.

  A new wave of tension crested in 1914. Mexico jailed nine U.S. sailors who went off-limits into a fuel-loading facility at the port of Tampico, a major oil-exporting site. In retaliation, President Wilson ordered the U.S. Navy to seize the port of Veracruz, about three hundred miles south. The sailors were immediately released, but the U.S. commander demanded an apology and a twenty-one-gun salute for what has come to be known as the Tampico Incident. Mexico refused to humble itself by complying. When word reached Washington that a German boat was preparing to offload weapons for one of the contenders in a violent fight for the Mexican presidency—the side Wilson didn’t like—Wilson ordered the city of Veracruz taken too. A characteristic Big Stick operation, the U.S. occupation lasted for seven months. The Mexican government was so outraged that it refused to support the United States in the First World War, remaining neutral and continuing to trade with Germany for the duration.

  In the early 1920s Mexico ranked second in world oil output, outdone only by the United States. The producers generally came from abroad with capital or experience or both. Skilled local employees were paid a fraction of what the foreign managers and workmen made. Every attempt by Mexican authorities to increase taxes on production or otherwise gain some profit from the country’s major natural resource was thwarted by the companies and the governments who backed them. Not only did Mexico lose significant territory to the United States in the nineteenth century, it also saw portions of its most valuable land in Big Oil’s international grip as the twentieth century began.

  Formula for success: rise early, work hard, strike oil.

  —J. PAUL GETTY

  The unequal relationship between foreign companies and their Mexican hosts began in 1901, when the California oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny sank his first Mexican well at El Ebano, a lonely spot on the railroad line about thirty-five miles southwest of Tampico. Doheny already had productive wells around Los Angeles; he cobbled together investments from the California operation, and from railroad entrepreneurs interested in replacing coal fuel with oil, and headed south. He announced that he would pay five pesos to anyone who could lead him to tar pits, those bubbling brown nuisances where cattle might wander and become stuck. But for the prospector in Doheny, the pits were a sign of oil. He wrote:

  We found a small conical-shaped hill—where bubbled a spring of oil, the sight of which caused us to forget all about the dreaded climate—its hot, humid atmosphere, its apparently incessant rains … the dense forest jungle which seems to grow up as fast as cut down.

  Doheny struck gushers, and the word spread. Others seeking a windfall arrived by boat and rail, men from companies with plans and maps but individual wildcatters too, often leaving behind the strikes they had been working in Ohio, Illinois, Kansas, and East Texas. From the United Kingdom came another moneyed entrepreneur, Weetman Dickinson Pearson, a Scottish contractor already well known for feats of construction: the first Aswan dam, a tunnel under the Thames, and two subway tunnels under the Hudson River.

  Pearson’s engineers in Mexico, who were building a railroad across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, told him about the oil finds. His friend Porfirio Díaz, the Mexican president, gave the Scotsman concessions in five states, partly to prevent Standard Oil and the Americans from cornering production
. In 1908 Pearson set up El Aguila, which would soon be Mexico’s largest oil company, becoming part of Royal Dutch Shell.

  By the end of the decade, more than 155 separate enterprises, including Doheny’s and Pearson’s, the Southern Pacific Railroad, Gulf Oil from Texas, and the Rockefeller Standard Oil companies, and 345 individuals and partnerships were operating in fields from El Ebano south to the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

  * * *

  In 1910 came the Mexican Revolution, the first great social upheaval of the twentieth century. Since he took office in 1876, Porfirio Díaz had built railroads and improved the economy, but he did so by taking land from those who were working it, especially the indigenous, and dividing it up for private enterprises. The wealth they produced went to a tiny few. There was also deep resentment of seemingly unbridled foreign investment, such as in oil, whose profits failed to improve lives.

  The revolution did not stop oil production, which generally took place on the Gulf Coast away from most of the fighting. Besides, the foreign companies had their own militias, strong and well equipped, so belligerents were unlikely to venture into the fields.

  Americans, Brits, and Dutch as well as some Frenchmen lived in comfortable enclaves while Mexican employees ate separately and inhabited inferior, sometimes squalid housing. The outsiders seemed to care not a whit for local peasants who lived around the petroleum installations, a condition noted by a young cavalry officer who commanded troops in the Tampico region for three years in the 1920s, the future Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas del Río. One oil company refused to install a spigot on its waterline that crossed a village, forcing residents to continue trekking to a river for water; the same company offered Cárdenas a sleek new Packard in a typical gesture of currying favor with the military. Cárdenas turned it down and continued to drive his Hudson clunker.