Friedrich E Schuler - Böcker

Admiral Paul von Hintze arrived in Mexico in the spring of 1911 to serve as Germany's ambassador to a country in a state of revolution. Germany's emperor Wilhelm II had selected Hintze as his personal eyes and ears in Mexico (and concomitantly the neighboring United States) during the portentous years leading up to the First World War. The ambassador benefited from a network of informers throughout Mexico and was closely involved in the country's political and diplomatic machinations as the violent revolution played out. Murder and Counterrevolution in Mexico presents Hintze's eyewitness accounts of these turbulent years. Hintze's diary, telegrams, letters, and other records, translated, edited, and annotated by Friedrich E. Schuler, offer detailed insight into Victoriano Huerta's overthrow and assassination of Francisco Madero and Huerta's ensuing dictatorship and chronicle the U.S.-supported resistance. Showcasing the political relationship between Germany and Mexico, Hintze's suspenseful, often daily diary entries provide new insight into the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution, including U.S. diplomatic maneuvers and subterfuge, as well as an intriguing backstory to the infamous 1917 Zimmermann Telegram, which precipitated U.S. entry into World War I.

This is the first book to analyse the link between Mexico's foreign and domestic relations in the 1930s. By studying the regime of President Lazaro Cardenas (1934-1940), Professor Schuler substantially revises our understanding of how Cardenas asserted Mexico's economic and political sovereignty and also consolidated one-party rule and state-directed capitalism. Amid a deteriorating international climate and world-wide depression, a cadre of technocrats and ministers under Cardenas consistently advanced domestic goals in their foreign policy initiatives, particularly the centralisation of the economy and the industrialisation of Mexico. Drawing on impressive research in Mexico, the United States, Germany, and Great Britain, Professor Schuler shows that Cardenas was far less of a doctrinaire leftist at home and abroad than previously assumed, especially in his ongoing economic contacts with Nazi Germany before and after Mexico's expropriation of oil in March 1938.

The conflicts that culminated in the First and Second World Wars had their origins in the rise of imperial powers in North America, Europe, and Asia in the late nineteenth century and the imperialist quests for the resources of colonies and former colonies. American expansionists, encouraged by a growing U.S. Navy, nurtured U.S. policies with illusions of easy access to South America. Policy makers in the fledgling empires of Germany, Japan, Spain, and Italy relied on clandestine means to rival U.S. ambitions. In this original and thoroughly researched book, based on new sources from previously unused collections in Germany and Spain, Friedrich E. Schuler details their attempts to suborn ethnic groups within Latin America but also the United States to establish ethnic ""beachheads"" that would serve to undermine U.S. interests. These deeply disturbing lessons became central historical reference points for U.S. policy makers during World War II.Not surprisingly, though rarely covered in Latin American historiography, Latin American nations, but also Spain, developed their own plans to exploit these imperialist rivalries after World War I. The resulting intrigue and subterfuge revealed in this revisionist study add a fascinating new dimension to our understanding of transpacific and transatlantic politics during this critical period of world history.