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Not even during the Spanish Civil War had Paz's poetry realized his revolutionary aspirations so fully as in the reading of
El cántaro roto
in Lecumberri prison.

Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, in a television interview, had denigrated Paz as a poet. Revueltas alludes to this assault in his concluding paragraph:

 

There came the night that you made your announcement, there came the dogs, the knives, “the broken pitcher fallen in the dust.” And . . . now that you take your place in the plaza with yourself and with us, for the trembling chieftain of Cempoala you have stopped being a poet. Now, at my side, in the same cell of Lecumberri, Martín Dozal is reading your poetry.

 

Poetry had turned into action.

 

ON DECEMBER
1, 1970, a new president took office, Luis Echeverría Álvarez. Although Díaz Ordaz had taken personal responsibility for Tlatelolco, few doubted that Echeverría—Díaz Ordaz's right-hand man and the anointed to succeed him—shared that responsibility. Months before, during the presidential “campaign,” Echeverría had expressed his intention to impose a drastic shift in Mexican politics. He had begun to speak of “autocriticism” and coined the term “democratic opening.” University students who had sympathized with the movement of '68 were invited to accompany him on his campaign tours. The composition of his cabinet marked a change of generations and a turn to the left, while Salvador Allende and his Unidad Popular were rising to elected power in Chile. Echeverría wanted to be a “new Cárdenas” (Lázaro Cárdenas himself had died a few months earlier, in October 1970) and preached a return to the Mexican Revolution: the division of large estates, support for an independent labor movement, confrontation with the “big business right,” a sharpened tone of anti-imperialist rhetoric, an increase in support for education and in university budgets (especially the National University) and, to complete the circle, establishing a direct and positive contact with Mexican intellectuals, notably those of his own generation, but also with others of great public influence, like Daniel Cosío Villegas and Octavio Paz.

For some months things seemed to be working out well. Paz returned to Mexico (he had briefly visited in 1967, to give his acceptance speech on being inducted into the Colegio Nacional, the highest Mexican cultural honor). He praised the proposals for self-criticism by the new government as well as the decision to liberate the prisoners of '68 still in custody, including his friend Revueltas, with whom he began discussions about founding a political party. Within the cultural and political world, mostly concentrated around three publications (the weekly supplement “Culture in Mexico” to the journal
Siempre!
, the Sunday supplement to the newspaper
Excélsior,
and the
Revista de la Universidad
). Paz was expected to become editor of “Culture in Mexico” and so take his place as the high priest of literature.

But an unexpected happening dimmed the prospects for reconciliation. On June 10, 1971, the political prisoners of '68, recently released by the government, organized a demonstration and were brutally repressed. Their attackers were a mysterious paramilitary group known as “The Falcons” (
los halcones
), who, it was later discovered, were acting for the government. It was a small-scale but very bloody encore to the Tlatelolco massacre. The Falcons entered hospitals and Red Cross aid stations and riddled wounded students with gunfire. Dozens were killed. That very night Echeverría appeared on television and spoke to the press, promising a rapid investigation to find and punish those responsible. On the following day, Paz came out in support of the president, affirming that Echeverría had “restored transparency to words.” But in part as a direct result of this new mortal insult to the young people of Mexico, it was one of Paz's earlier, private statements, in a letter to Charles Tomlinson, that would prove truer to the moment: his fear that the next decade in Mexico could be “violent.” Many angry and impatient university students of the Generation of '68 (men and women born between the years of 1935 and 1950) opted for more radical positions, a good number of them for urban and rural guerrilla warfare in emulation of Che Guevara and to accelerate the social revolution “here and now.” On the other hand, the most representative figures of the preceding generation (the Mid-Century—Medio Siglo
—
Generation) decided to support the Echeverría government, declaring themselves convinced that “obscure forces of the right” had orchestrated the repression in order to intimidate a progressive administration. One slogan, coined by the influential journalist and editor Fernando Benítez, became famous: “Not to support Echeverría is a major historic crime.” Carlos Fuentes produced another, no less memorable formulation: “Echeverría or fascism.”

The investigation Echeverría had promised never happened, though the appointed Regent of Mexico City, accused of overseeing the slaughter, was removed from office. Years later he would testify that he was acting on orders from superiors. The generational divisions were now supremely clear. The young left—in the halls of the universities, in cafés and newspapers and publishing houses and often in guerrilla actions—had become revolutionary while the older intellectuals (of Echeverría's own generation) closed ranks with the regime, supported it unconditionally, and eventually were incorporated into it. An elder among Mexican intellectuals, Daniel Cosío Villegas, accepted the National Prize for Literature in the autumn of 1971 from the hands of the president, but soon put distance between himself and the government, criticizing it for inflationary politics, ill-conceived populist gestures, and what he called “the personal style of Echeverría.” His books would sell in the tens of thousands, a very high number for Mexico. What would Octavio Paz do?

 

XIII

Still of great importance to Paz was his desire to start another journal for intellectuals, to continue the family vocation and add one more masthead to the sequence of
Barandal
,
Taller
, and
El hijo pródigo
. The prospects were difficult. No literary journal could support itself in Mexico through sales alone and advertisers were—to say the least—diffident toward culture. There came an invitation from the highly respected journalist Julio Scherer—director of
Excélsior
—to accommodate and finance, within his newspaper, a journal that would reach subscribers and be sold at newspaper kiosks. Paz accepted the offer with enthusiasm.
Excélsior
was run as a cooperative and its workers were not particularly pleased with the prospect of what they saw as an elitist journal, but Scherer persuaded them. He promised Paz complete freedom of expression and never wavered in his commitment.

Reflecting the mind-set Paz was now calling for in the public and intellectual life of Mexico, he chose a simple but inspired name for the journal:
Plural
. It would appear monthly from October 1971 to July 1976. It would publish numerous important American, European, and Latin American writers, mostly very well-established figures. The majority of contributors were of course Mexican. And the writers of the Mid-Century Generation (a long list that included Carlos Fuentes, Alejandro Rossi, Ramón Xirau, Luis Villoro, Julieta Campos, and Elena Poniatowska) would be given great prominence in
Plural
. The voices of the angry young—the Generation of '68—were almost entirely absent from its pages.

The journal ranged over a spectrum of literary genres, social sciences, and criticism of the visual arts. Paz sought to make
Plural
not an intellectual monopoly, nor an organ aspiring to hegemony, but rather a voice of dissidence. Dissidence, of course, toward the orthodoxies of the PRI (its bureaucratic culture, its ideological lies, its exalted vision of itself, and its official History) but also dissidence toward the predominant Mexican culture of the left. Paz considered himself a man of the left and felt that his journal spoke for the left, but he also insisted that the history of socialism (and most especially the effects of Stalinism) in the twentieth century called for an intellectual and moral reform of the left. Other Mexican journals, literary supplements, and various publications disagreed.
Plural
had the merit of breaking with a long tradition of cultural unanimity in Mexico.

 

PAZ'S WRITINGS
in
Plural
(and the viewpoint of the journal) form an important step in the progressive transformation of his political ideas. This movement can clearly be discerned in his “Letter to Adolfo Gilly,” published in the February 1972 issue of
Plural
in response to Gilly's book
La Revolución traicionada
(The Revolution Betrayed). Gilly, an Argentine Trotskyist who had participated in the student movement of 1968, was still imprisoned in a Mexican jail. Paz wrote that he was in accord with Gilly on more issues than not: on the need for socialism, on the necessary return to the programs of Cárdenas, on preserving the system of the
ejido
(communally owned agricultural communities), and the need to form an independent popular movement including workers, peasants, sectors of the middle class, and dissident intellectuals. Where he and Gilly differed, wrote Paz, was on the theme of political freedom.

Paz could not call the Soviet Union and its satellites “workers' states” and he invites Gilly to consider alternative approaches, which might well be found in traditions critical of capitalist society but anterior to Marx. In this instance, Paz meant the utopian thinker Fourier, whose life straddled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Fourier was a predecessor of the ecological movement, supported women's rights, and gave considerable value to love and pleasure as well as calling for a more organic connection between production and consumption. They were qualities that appealed to Paz's poetic vision of himself and the world. He would write in an issue of
Plural
dedicated to Fourier:

 

The tradition of “utopian socialism” is immediately contemporary because it sees in man not only the producer and the worker but also the being who desires and dreams: passion is one of the axes of every society because it is a force of attraction and repulsion. Starting from this conception of man as a passional being we can conceive of societies directed by a sort of rationality that is not the merely technological form reigning in the 20th Century.

 

Paz in general was writing for readers on the left. They were the only ones that mattered to him and, intellectually at least, he saw them as almost the only audience that existed. “The right has no ideas, only interests,” he repeated more than once. He almost never wrote about the Church but he showed his disdain for the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional), which had been formed by conservative Catholic intellectuals—most of whom had favored Franco in the Spanish Civil War—but, since its founding in 1939, had struggled to democratize the Mexican electoral process. Paz would not even give them credit for these democratic aspirations. And he continued to criticize the “national bourgeoisie,” whom he considered capable of conniving with the army and paramilitaries in order to take full power (not merely dominate) within the PRI. Toward the United States he showed a tendency toward acceptance of the turn-of-the-century ideas of Rodó and Darío about the essential incompatibility between “us,” modest but “spiritual,” and them, powerful but empty. His notion of New York or any other great American city, expressed in June 1971, was derived from the opinions of a somewhat outmoded American cultural elite: “[the cities] demonstrate that this development ends in vast social infernos.”

His dialogue then was with the Mexican left, and above all with the young left. The Generation of '68 had grown up reading
El laberinto de la soledad
and may have accompanied their first loves by reading or reciting lines like these from Paz's poem “Sun Stone”:

 

to love is to do battle, when two people kiss

the world changes, desires take on flesh

thought takes on flesh, wings sprout

on the shoulders of the slave, the world

is real and tangible, wine is wine

the bread tastes good again, water is water . . .

 

But in August 1972, something unexpected happened. A group of young writers who had collected around the prestigious critic Carlos Monsiváis at the Culture in Mexico supplement of
Siempre!
joined together to produce an issue critical of Paz and
Plural
. Their curious commitment was to
darle en la madre a Paz
, an idiom that might be translated as “hit Paz damn hard!” What disturbed these writers? On the one hand, Paz's cadenza in the final chapter of
Posdata
, where he brought in the old gods and myths to explain the slaughter of Tlatelolco. The group considered the connection to be false as well as politically irresponsible, attenuating the guilt of the assassins. Why hadn't Paz written a poem instead of an essay? The young critics were beginning to perceive, in Paz's prose, an aestheticization of history and a tendency toward abstraction and generalization. They were also bothered by his political “reformism,” his sudden and to them inexplicable abandonment of the revolutionary path. None of them were armed revolutionaries but they looked, with hope and sympathy, on the guerrilla action in the southern state of Guerrero and they were trying to document, in strikes and other demonstrations of discontent, the signs of an imminent popular insurrection. The periodical's “anti-Paz” issue was titled “About Mexican liberalism in the '70s.” (By “liberalism” they were drawing on the Latin American use of the word, closer in part to the European historical meaning: non-Marxist, linked to nineteenth-century values of anticlericalism and a free market, stressing constitutional and republican principles and gradual social progress; while in Mexico, certainly when connected with the historical figures of Juárez and Madero, liberalism also involved a strong emphasis on electoral democracy and complete freedom of expression.)