DYNAMITE UNDER MEXICO
55
both Escobar and Ovidio Pedfero Valenzuela, President of the
Action Civica Nationalists The "distinguished comrades" to
whom she presented the letter were the Nazi honorary consul
in Puebla, Carl Petersen, Avenida 2, Oriente 15, and a Japanese
agent
named
L. Yuzinratsa with
whom
the consul has been in
repeated conferences.
Six weeks after the secret meeting of the Japanese, German
and Italian ministers, and one week after she went to Puebla,
Dr.
it
Carmen Calero
in a house at 39
sister,
got twenty-two kilos of dynamite and stored
Juan de la Mateos, in Mexico City. She, her
Colonel Valenzuela, and four others, met at her
laid plans to assassinate President Cdrdenas by
train when he left on a proposed trip to Sonora.
On November
18,
1937, the secret police
home and
blowing up his
made a
series of
simultaneous raids upon Dr. Calero s and Valenzuela s homes and
the house where the dynamite was cached. They arrested every
one in the houses. But once the arrests had been made, the
Mexican Government found itself in a quandary. To bring the
prisoners to trial would involve foreign governments and create
an international scandal; so Cardenas personally ordered the
secret police to release them.
The
however, scared the wits out of the ministers, and
was not lessened when they discovered that the
letters from the fascist organizations had vanished from their
files. They wouldn t even answer the
telephone when o