Los TECOS is a Mexican secret society associated with integrism and national Catholicism. Founded in Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico in the early 1930s, it traditionally operated a major degree of influence over the staff faculty and student youth of the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara. An outgrowth of the aftermath of the Cristero War and the disputes in Mexico over the introduction of Marxism into the state-run education system, the organisation developed along staunch anti-communist lines, as well as positioning itself as opposed to what it claimed was a "Judeo-Masonic conspiracy."
The organisation grew further during the 1950s and played a leading role in the World Anti-Communist League, essentially leading the Latin America branch of the operation. Like the communists who they opposed, Los TECOS developed a number of front groups, with mass membership (not bound by the oaths of the secret society), which it sought to control and direct from behind the scenes. These groups were typically student, rightist Catholic and anti-communist groups, some engaged in violence with the far-left militants, while others were concerned with propaganda and more subtle lobbying.
Los TECOS spawned a number of branches in different states of Mexico. One of these, in Puebla, was known as El Yunque. This organisation, while sharing the same Catholic ultra-conservative worldview, split with Los TECOS in the early 1960s in a bitter feud over the religious question of the Second Vatican Council. Los TECOS and a number of their spiritual advisors, including the Jesuit priest, Fr. Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga, were pioneers in forming the sedevacantism thesis, while El Yunque upheld the post-Concillar Vatican City-based claimants to the Papacy from Pope Paul VI onward as legitimate.
Etymology There are different opinions as to the origin of the name TECOS and its meaning. According to some sources, it is an acronym for Tarea Educativa y Cultural hacia el Orden y la Síntesis ('Educational and Cultural Work towards Order and Synthesis'). A second layer of meaning to the name is that teco (or in full tecolote) in Mexican Spanish signifies 'owl'; in a defence of the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara printed in The Washington Post, they claimed that the name was in reference to "the student's devotion to late night academic studies". A daughter of a Los TECOS member claimed "Yes, it does mean owl. Los Tecos are owls whose eyes are red. The members of the group are called Los Tecos because they are up all night doing their thing." Their influence at the university was such that, the association football team associated with it was named Tecos Fútbol Club.
History Background: Mexican politics in the 1920s
The origins of Los TECOS finds its roots most directly in the conservative and Catholic pushback to political developments in Mexico in the 1920s, which came to the fore in the Mexican Revolution, in the aftermath of the fall of the moderate liberal-regime of the Porfiriato period. Although General Porfirio Díaz was a Freemason himself and adhered to Liberal Party positions, he did not actively enforce anticlericalism (even though this technically remained on the books), so as a compromise, his reign had been relatively tolerated by Mexican conservative elements. After radicals launched a coup known as the Plan of San Luis Potosí, which overthrew the moderate Díaz, some conservative opponents of the revolutionaries and politically active Catholics backed the rise of General Victoriano Huerta (who had been supported in this venture by the German Empire), but his reign was only short lived. In the aftermath of this, the Carrancistas and other radicals engaged in a general backlash against Mexican Catholics (whether or not they had backed Huerta) and developed anti-Catholic additions to the 1917 Mexican Constitution. At the same time, the Bolshevik October Revolution in Russia took place, which inculcated in Mexican conservative elements the idea that there was a global conspiracy to overthrow Christianity.
Against this "Masonic", secularist bourgeoisie vision of a society, Mexican Catholics founded a number of organisations to resist anticlericalism and coordinate together for the purpose of "Christian order in Mexico". This included the Asociación Católica de la Juventud Mexicana (ACJM), a mostly lay association sponsored by the Society of Jesus, which had been created in 1913 by Fr. Bernardo Bergöend, a French-born Jesuit, with the approval of José Mora y del Río, the Archbishop of Mexico. After the increasingly radical anticlerical additions to the Mexican Constitution of 1917 which enforced secular education as mandatory, saw the state take control of Church property and made it a requirements for priests to register with local government authorities to operate, a Catholic backlash grew, which was centered on the ACJM. They created a political party, the Partido Católico Nacional (PCN) which participated in the political process and in the 1920 election, backing the National Republicans, but lost out to the radically anticlerical Álvaro Obregón of the Partido Laborista Mexicano.
With the rise to power of Obregón's handpicked successor, Plutarco Elías Calles, also a Laborista, the so-called Calles Law in 1926 was enacted, which more closely enforced the 1917 Constitution and added in provisions of his own, such as seeking to exclude Catholic priests from participating in political life, a rebellion took place known as the Cristero War. As well as the ACJM which played a leading role on the Cristero side, the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, which had been founded in 1925, would also play a central role. The Cristeros, though in many ways traditionalist, were not purely reactionary, endorsing a social Catholicism based on Rerum novarum, which saw them gain support from some of the peasantry and indigenous communities in their revolt against the liberal and radical "masonic" ruling-class. Ultimately, the institutional Church was persuaded to remove their support, as part of a United States-negotiated peace and militarily the rebellion drew to an end, though explicit violent state persecution continued until Calles was forced into exile by his successor, Lázaro Cárdenas, who had taken over the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI) which Calles had founded.
Foundation and the struggle over education During the years of the Maximato, when Calles continued to control affairs behind the scenes, the PRI began to take a more socialist direction; in 1931, Narciso Bassols, an atheistic materialist, became the first Marxist to hold office in Mexico as the Secretary of Public Education. With an anticlerical and anti-conservative speech entitled the Grito de Guadalajara, Calles openly announced a plan to enter a "psychological revolutionary period", where the state would take control of all education in Mexico to "seize the conscience of childhood" for the Revolution. After the rise of Cárdenas, Bassols continued on and developed the next phase of this revolutionary education program, known as "socialist education", whereby all schools would teach children according to the principles of Marxist materialism and atheism. In addition to this, Marxists had other roles in the Cárdenas regime: created from CROM, the labour union CTM was a major player at this time, under the control of Vicente Lombardo Toledano. Although never a member of the Mexican Communist Party, Lombardo Toledano was nevertheless, strongly pro-Soviet and his Jewish ancestry was used by elements of the ultra-right as evidence of the Cárdenas regime being a "Judeo-Masonic-Communist" conspiracy and the Bolshevisation of Mexico as taking place.
In the aftermath of the Cristeros War, with the rise of the PRI and ongoing revolutionary persecution of varying manifestations, politically active Catholics in Mexico began to develop "reserved" or secret societies to resist. The organisations had a pyramidal structure, divided into small cells which had no contact with each other; ironically, this structure was similar to the paramasonic revolutionary organisations that they so vehemently fought against. Some of these groups include La Legión or Los Legiones (founded in 1932 by Manuel Romo de Alba and close to the Jesuits and synarchism), its successor La Base (founded in 1934, which would eventually create the Unión Nacional Sinarquista), and Los Conejos (founded in 1935 in Mexico City). Los TECOS, founded at Guadalajara, Jalisco in 1934, was one of these rightist Mexican Catholic "reserved" societies. The founding members of the organisation were 23-year-old lawyer Carlos Cuesta Gallardo (1911–1985) and Antonio Leaño Alvarez del Castillo (1911—2010). Although support within the order was not total, various priests from the Society of Jesus, also known as the Jesuits, supported Los TECOS and the move toward the foundation of Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara, this included; Fr. José de Jesús Martínez Aguirre, Fr. Manuel Cordero, Fr. Joaquín Figueroa de Luna, Fr. Ramiro Camacho and Fr. Joaquín Sáenz y Arriaga.
Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson have claimed that Carlos Cuesta Gallardo visited the Third Reich in Germany during the Second World War. What he did there is clouded in mystery, but the Andersons and others have speculated that he was there, in contact with German agents, to potentially organise setting up a formation sympathetic to the Axis powers on the Rio Grande as an insurance policy against the United States. This was part of a pattern in Germany–Mexico relations as the Germans had already intervened in the Mexican Revolution previously and the controversy surrounding the Zimmermann telegram during World War I (part of a plan to aid a Mexican Reconquista of Texas, Arizona and New Mexico). In the early 1930s, the young Cuesta Gallardo had already been obsessed with the concept of a Judeo-Masonic conspiracy and was a fan of literature to this effect from outside of Mexico, such as the International Jew by Henry Ford and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, likely by the Russian Okhrana, according to a contemporary Luis Calderón. Cuesta Gallardo has been accused of later writing under several different pseudonyms, his own books of the same genre, including under the name of “Traian Romanescu” (a supposed Romanian exile), with the most popular work of this kind being La Gran Conspiración Judía ("The Great Jewish Conspiracy"), published in Mexico in 1961. As well as La Complot contra la Iglesia ("The Plot Against the Church"), as a collaborative effort, under the name of “Maurice Pinay”, released at the start of the Second Vatican Council. Many of these works were released as part of the Biblioteca de secretos políticos ("Library of Political Secrets") series.