| Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo | |
|---|---|
| Secretary-General of the Mexican Communist Party | |
| In office 1963–1981 |
|
| Personal details | |
| Born | 12 January 1925 [1] Mocorito, Sinaloa |
| Nationality | Mexican |
| Political party | Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD)[2] |
| Other political affiliations |
Mexican Communist Party (1946–81) and Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (1981–88)[1] |
| Domestic partner | Martha Recasens Díaz de León[nb 1] |
Arnoldo Martínez Verdugo (born 12 January 1925) is a Mexican socialist politician and democracy activist. A long-standing leader of the Mexican Communist Party and the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM), Martínez promoted political self-criticism, refused to support regional guerrilla movements, condemned the Soviet invasion to Czechoslovakia and promoted the unification of the political left.[3]
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Martínez was born in Pericos, a small town in Mocorito, Sinaloa, into a family of farmers composed by Yssac Martínez Ortega and Silvina Verdugo Verdugo.[1] He started working in his teens and in 1943 he decided to move to Mexico City to take up a job at the San Rafael Paper Co. and undertake some studies in painting at La Esmeralda National School of Painting and Sculpture (1944–46).[1]
In 1946 he joined Mexican Communist Party and soon started directing its Communist Youth's organizing committee (1948–50).[1] After some years rising through its hierarchy, spending some time in the Soviet Union studying Communism,[4] and joining a faction that succeeded in overthrowing the long-lasting leadership of Stalinist Dionisio Encina (1940–60),[3] he was chosen as Secretary-General of its Central Committee (1963) and was ratified successively in the post until 1981.[1]
He was one of the protagonists of the political negotiations that in 1978 they flowed into in the first electoral reform of the state that permitted that the PCM obtained registration conditioned, could participate in the 1979 election, where obtained 18 deputies of which was performed as Parliamentary Coordinator.
In 1981, he directed the dissolution of the Mexican Communist Party and its fusion with other leftist forces that constituted the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico, which advanced it to the presidency in the 1982 elections; before this, he was abducted and freed after the payment of a rescue.
He served twice in the Chamber of Deputies as a plurinominal legislator; first representing the Communist Party of Mexico (1979–82) and later representing the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (1985–88).[1] Subsequently, he joined with the forces of Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas Solórzano to the Presidency in the 1988 elections.[5]
Martínez is presently a member of the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD); a political institution he helped to found and finance in its early years.[2] He was elected its emeritus advisor but his distinction was recalled on 29 November 2009 on strategic grounds, as political forces inside the party were struggling for control. The maneuver was called "an act of moral amnesia, of disloyalty to its origins, of shabbiness" by Mexico's National Journalism Prize laureate Miguel Ángel Granados Chapa.[nb 2]