SIQUEIROS SAYS ATTEMPT ON TROTSKY'S LIFE WAS PLANNED IN SPAIN
By Joseph Hansen
The November issue of La Batalla, the monthly organ of the POUM [Partido Obrero de Unificacién Marxista -- Workers Party of Marxist Unification], calls attention to an interview which the Mexican painter David Alfaro Siqueiros granted to the journalist and designer Luis Camnitzer while he was in Uruguay last summer. Siqueiros, it will be recalled, headed a contingent of agents of Stalin's secret police in a machine-gun raid on Trotsky's home in Coyoacan on May 24, 1940. Trotsky escaped this attempted assassin-— ation only to fall victim to another Stalinist agent a few months later on August 20.
Camnitzer asked Siqueiros, "How did Trotsky die?"
"Well, he was killed by a man of Belgian origin, some say Spanish."
After an embarrassed pause, Siqueiros added: "I had nothing to do with the death of Trotsky; with the assault on the house, yes. Trotsky's house was a fanatic anti- Communist center, guarded by the Mexican police and with hired gangsters in the basement. In reality, a group of us military men had already planned it in Spain and, finally, we did it in 1940 to destroy the archives."
In the interview, Siqueiros then attacked the Spanish anarchists. By way of "excuse" for his activities, according to the interviewer, Siqueiros concluded: "But I was only a cog in the machine. The orders came from above. I had no voice."
Siqueiros' reference to "hired gangsters in the basement" is not without interest. Immediately following the May 24 assault, the Stalinist press in Mexico advanced the "theory" that the assault had been planned by Trotsky himself as a publicity stunt. At the same time their agents sought to discover how Trotsky and his wife Natalia had managed to survive bursts of machine-gun fire directed at their cots. They refused to believe that the two had survived by rolling out of bed and lying on the floor.
When the Mexican authorities finally unraveled the plot against Trotsky and arrested most of the participants, who proved to be members of the Mexican Communist party, Siqueiros went into hiding.
During the court investigation of the affair, Pavon Flores, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist party and an attorney for the arrested Stalinists, persistently questioned Trotsky about his escape, demanding to know if he had not really been hiding all the time in the "basement." Evidently Stalin's secret police agents wanted the information to better prepare the next attempt on Trotsky's’ life.
Trotsky's home, however, had no basement. There was a very small cellar in which back issues of newspapers were kept although they soon suffered from mold due to the dampness of the earth.
"Hired gangsters" is Siqueiros' term for the devoted and self-sacrificing youths who served as Trotsky's guards and secretaries. One of them, Robert Sheldon Harte, was kidnapped by the gang headed by Siqueiros.
Harte's body was later found by the Mexican police. One bullet had been fired into the base of his brain, another into his temple.
Siqueiros was eventually captured but disclaimed that he personally had shot Harte. Released on bail, Siqueiros skipped the country, remaining abroad a few years before quietly returning to the streets of the capital of Mexico. Apparently he commanded a sufficient source of funds to allay any eagerness in official circles to follow up the case; and he was never tried for the murder of Robert Sheldon Harte or his role in the plot that finally succeeded in placing one of his Stalinist cothinkers in position to-bring a pick hammer crashing into Trotsky's brain.