Vicente Lombardo Toledano

Vicente Lombardo Toledano (July 16, 1894 – November 16, 1968) was one of the foremost Mexican labor leaders of the 20th century, and called "the dean of Mexican Marxism [and] the best-known link between Mexico and the international world of Marxism and socialism," In 1936 he founded the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), the national labor federation most closely associated with the ruling party founded by President Lázaro Cárdenas, the Party of the Mexican Revolution (PRM). Purged from the union after World War II, Lombardo Toledano co-founded, along with Narciso Bassols, the political party, "Partido Popular", later known as the Partido Popular Socialista.

Lombardo Toledano was born in Teziutlán, Puebla, to middle-class parents of Italian and Spanish Jewish descent. After obtaining his law degree from the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) in 1919, he pursued a master's degree in philosophy and letters there, and he began teaching at both the Popular University and at UNAM. He taught at UNAM until 1933 and it was there that he became a member of an informal group known as los siete sabios (the seven sages). It was while teaching there he helped organize a teachers' union. In 1921 he joined the Labor Party.

As leader of that teachers' union he entered the Confederación Regional Obrera Mexicana (CROM), the largest and most powerful union confederation of the day and a key supporter of the regimes of Plutarco Elías Calles and Álvaro Obregón. Lombardo Toledano served as the house intellectual for CROM, not benefiting directly from its corruption, but acquiring access to power instead. Lombardo Toledano served as interim Governor of Puebla in 1923, was a councilman in the Federal District in 1924 to 1925 and was a congressional deputy from 1926 to 1928.

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