Franco investigated Diego Rivera

In mid-December 1936, Francisco Franco's intelligence services in Paris were searching for clues about alleged arms orders arriving in France, commissioned by the Mexican artist Diego Rivera. This is reflected in the police reports that La Vanguardia has located in the French National Archives. Franco, now supreme commander in the Burgos government, led the rebel army that had risen against the Second Republic since July. The Spanish Civil War was in its early stages.

The renowned Mexican muralist was fifty years old at the time and already an established painter. In 1927, he had traveled to the USSR, invited to the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution that had ushered in Soviet power. Two years later, Rivera had married Frida Kahlo and was expelled from the Mexican Communist Party. By the early 1930s, he had completed numerous projects in the United States. However, his communist, social, and indigenous themes generated much controversy with the American press, his paymasters, and public opinion. The most notorious was the Rockefeller Center mural, an emblem of capitalism on Fifth Avenue in New York. The inclusion of an effigy of Lenin in " Man, Controller of the Universe" was viewed by the magnate as an insult, and he ordered its destruction.

At the end of 1936, Franco's intelligence services in Paris searched for clues about weapons ordered by Rivera.

Back in Mexico, in the fall of 1936, Rivera arranged for the Lázaro Cárdenas government to welcome a distinguished revolutionary: Lev Trotsky. The man who had once seemed destined to succeed Vladimir Lenin as leader of the Soviet Union had been ousted by Joseph Stalin amid a fierce power struggle and a clash of ideas over the need to center communism solely in the Soviet Union or promote revolutions worldwide, as Trotsky had intended. His opposition to the Georgian led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and the country. In 1929, he went into exile on the Turkish island of Büyükada.

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At the beginning of May 1931, Trotsky asked Francesc Macià to welcome him to Barcelona. He had been president of the Generalitat of Catalonia for less than a month, and he replied that political asylum and visas were the responsibility of the government of the Republic. This newspaper has located in the Trotsky collection at the Houghton Library at Harvard University in Boston the telegram sent by Macià, which completes the Russian's request, held in the National Archive of Catalonia. In December 1925, Macià had waited in vain for him in Moscow when he was looking for money and weapons to launch an insurrection against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera. Then, Trotsky had not appeared. Now Macià was paying him back in kind: indifference.

Rivera arranged for the Cárdenas government to welcome the illustrious revolutionary, Trotsky, whom Macià had ignored.

After the Second Republic failed, Trotsky traveled to France and Norway. Persecuted by fascists and Stalinists, he was forced to flee. Only Cárdenas granted him the status of "political refugee." Thus, at the beginning of January 1937, the revolutionary arrived in Mexico City. Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo welcomed him into the now famous Casa Azul (Blue House) in Coyoacán. During this period, the painter sympathized with Trotsky. This was the connection that linked him to the Spanish Civil War. And, specifically, to the movement that, while not strictly speaking, was close to Trotskyism: the Workers' Party for Marxist Unification (POUM) of Andreu Nin and Joaquín Maurín.

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Around 1934, as a result of his stay in the United States, Rivera had become involved with Jay Lovestone's communist group. This is an Americanized name for Jacob Liebstein, the son of a Lithuanian Jewish émigré family. A member of the Communist Party, he had also been purged by Stalin at the time. And he was, like Trotsky, a communist in opposition.

During his stay in the United States, the painter became involved with Jay Lovestone's communist group, to whom he would send funds for weapons.

In 1935, Rivera had considered going to London to oversee an exhibition of his paintings that an admirer was planning to organize. This fact confused Franco's intelligence agents, who were searching for the Mexican artist as if he were temporarily residing in England. This also initially confounded the information on the "notorious communist" available to the Sûreté Nationale, which went further than the Francoists in its investigations. It would take months to unravel the case, though.

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According to French police, in the fall of 1936, Rivera sent money to Lovestone, which he allegedly used to buy weapons for the POUM. From the United States, Lovestone forwarded the funds to August Thalheimer in Paris. The German was one of the leading Trotskyist militants in France. A Marxist philosopher and theorist, he contributed to numerous American newspapers. He had been a member of the German Communist Party until his expulsion in 1931 for his opposition to Stalin. In Berlin, he edited communist publications. With Hitler's rise to power in 1933, he took refuge in France, escaping reprisals from the National Socialists.

From the United States, Lovestone, who later embraced anti-communism, sent the funds to Paris to the Trotskyist Thalheimer.

Rivera, then, channeled his financial support to the POUM through the Trotskyists. Within a few years, their fortunes changed. Nin's party was marginalized and persecuted following the events of May 1937. Rivera argued with Trotsky and, along with Kahlo—the latter's lover—aligned with Stalin. In 1940, Lev was assassinated. During World War II, Thalheimer went into exile in Cuba, where he died. Lovestone, on the other hand, embraced anti-communism and collaborated with the CIA. Francisco Franco never fully uncovered the Mexican's connections, but he didn't need to.