Businessman Salinas Price, currently 93 years old, is a self-confessed tax evader—that’s why he created Elektra—and strikebreaker, but also a rabid anti-communist who boasts of having financed the University Movement of Renewal Orientation (MURO), one of the shock groups of the secret organization of Los Tecos and El Yunque, as he confesses in his memoir My Years with Elektra, in which he boasts of all the far-right initiatives, some Nazi, that he created and sponsored against the left in Mexico.
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MURO & The CIA
Salinas Price doesn’t say so in his book, but his adventures were associated with the CIA, because his friend Navarro Vázquez was a prominent agent of the agency, just when he was the director of the Institute of Social and Economic Research (IISE), a private organization that he himself founded in 1953, and which came to gather 300 members, including Salinas Price, whose steering committee included representatives of the upper banking and industrial bourgeoisie of Mexico linked to foreign capital.
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A CIA report dated June 7, 1964, signed by the head of the “Station” in Mexico, Winston Scott, details the background, funding and objectives of “Project LIHUFF”, with the agency headed by Navarro Vázquez.
“(The IIES) was founded in 1953 by a group of Mexican businessmen to promote the principles of free enterprise. Since then, it has established numerous contacts and relationships of influence, and has been involved in various anti-communist and other activities. It organized meetings and various types of congresses where it focused on the dangers of communism; it published books, pamphlets, and brochures on communism, as well as the dangers of economic socialism. It organized a student group (MURO), established and maintained contacts in the university, economic, and business fields in Latin America; it significantly boosted the coverage in the press of topics related to private enterprise and the communist threat, and it amassed an archive of basic data on events and individuals linked to communism and socialism that would be difficult for any other private group in Mexico to match.”
In that same document, when referring to the “background” of LIHUFF, it points out that this project “and its sponsors are considered, in the Mexican scenario, as far-right conservatives, however, in the PBPRIME forum (United States cryptometer) they would be considered more as centrists.”
The LIHUFF Project by Rudolph Wichtrich and Navarro Vázquez was highly valued by the CIA in the United States, “Headquarters”, in the context of the anti-communism of the early sixties, in the midst of the Cold War, and especially to exert influence on the government of López Mateos:
“The importance of a group like this, noisy and combative, existing in Mexico is not valued in absolute terms, but in relative terms. As Headquarters is aware, the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) in power is essentially a delicate reflector of the many political currents and pressures that exist in Mexico. During elections, as well as in appointments and decisions, the PRI weighs its political actions very carefully. When radical leftists are hesitant and active, then decisions tend to be weighted in their favor and oriented according to their viewpoints. In other words, to have some counterweight, even between extremes, the right must be as noisy and active as the left. This is essentially where the Station sees the value of the LIHUFF mechanism. It does not intend for Mexico to embrace LIHUFF’s philosophy or objectives in whole, or even in large part: It seeks for LIHUFF to exert an influence and restrain Mexico from succumbing to the pressures and demands of the radical left. If it weren’t for a few like LIHUFF-2 (Navarro Vázquez’s IISE) and Miguel Alemán Valdés are mobilized through organizations of this type; the political center of gravity would shift unchecked toward the radical left, beyond what the policies of ODYOKE (the United States government) could oversee. This is the only specific value that the Station has seen, and continues to see, in LIHUFF’s activity.”