Letter to El Nacional, June 6, 1940

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

Editor, El National

Mexico City

Dear Sir:

Carefully following the May 24 attack’s reverberations in the capitalist press, I found in your worthy newspaper, in the issue dated May 27, a note under the heading “Trotsky Contradicts Himself.” The note attributes to me differing versions concerning how I was saved from the gunfire and concerning the room in which I spent the night. This dispatch represents a poor fabrication from beginning to end. In my statements there was not, and there could not have been, the shadow of a contradiction. Your editorial staff was simply the victim of tendentious, not to say criminal, reporting, whose source should be sought very close to the source of the attack.

The note begins with the words, “The observers make various comments on the statements made by the former Soviet war commissar” (El National, May 27, section 2, page 2). You could undoubtedly have done a very large service for the investigation and for public opinion by more accurately indicating who these “observers” are that gave you false information. These observers cannot be members of my household, nor can they be the investigators, nor can they be distant observers. Isn’t this just some journalist who observed nothing, but rather carried out an order from the GPU? The ill-intentioned character of the information is dictated by two objectives: to mislead the investigation and to prepare the groundwork for the hypothesis of a self-assault

No doubt you will understand the importance of these circumstances and will hasten to make the necessary clarification.

Very sincerely,

Leon Trotsky