With Walesa and Solidarity, it was the internal clock of the people of Poland that struck the morning hour.

So it has always been: with the people of my country during our revolutionary experience; with the people of Central America in the hour we are all living, and with the people of Massachusetts in 1776.

The dawn of a revolution reveals the total history of a community.

This is a self-knowledge that a society cannot be deprived of without grave consequences.

The Experience of Mexico

The Mexican Revolution was the object of constant harassment, pressures, menaces, boycotts and even a couple of armed interventions between 1910 and 1932.

It was extremely difficult for the United States Administrations of the time to deal with violent and rapid change on the southern border of your country.

Calvin Coolidge convened both Houses of Congress in 1927 and--talkative for once--denounced Mexico as the source of "Bolshevik" subversion in Central America.

We were the first domino.

But precisely because of its revolutionary policies (favoring agrarian reform, secular education collective bargaining and recovery of natural resources)--all of them opposed by the successive government in Washington, from Taft to Hoover--Mexico became a modern, contradictory self-knowing and self-questioning nation... A great statesman is a pragmatic idealist Franklin D. Roosevelt had the political imagination and the diplomatic will to respect Mexico when President Lazaro Cardenas, (in the culminating act of the Mexican Revolution,) expropriated the nation's oil resources in 1938.

Instead of menacing, sanctioning or invading, Roosevelt negotiated.

He did not try to beat history. He joined it.

Will no one in this country imitate him today?

The lessons applicable to the current situation in Latin America are inscribed in the history--the very difficult history--of Mexican-American relations.

Why have they not been learnt?