The phrase "legal methods" is frequently employed by those who suggest illegal activity. The German Minister knew that the _Union Nacionalista Mexicana_, one of the signers of the letter, was run by Escobar, and that Carmen Calero, 12 Place de la Concepcion, Mexico City, an elderly woman physician active in many fascist organizations, was a member of the _Partido Anti-reelectionista Accion_, another of the signers.
One month later the various fascist groups got enough money to launch an intensive pro-fascist drive under the usual guise of fighting Communism. José Luis Noriega, Secretary of the Nationalist Youth of Mexico, which also signed the letters to the ministers, left for the United States to organize an anti-Cardenas drive. At the same time, Carmen Calero left on a mysterious mission to Puebla on November 12, 1937, with a letter from Escobar to J. Trinidad Mata, publisher of the local paper _Avance_. She carried still another letter addressed to their "distinguished comrades," without mentioning names, and signed by both Escobar and Ovidio Pedrero Valenzuela, President of the _Accion Civica Nacionalista_. The "distinguished comrades" to whom she presented the letter were the Nazi honorary consul in Puebla, Carl Petersen, Avenida 2, Oriente 15, and a Japanese agent named L. Yuzinratsa with whom the consul has been in repeated conferences.
Six weeks after the secret meeting of the Japanese, German and Italian ministers, and one week after she went to Puebla, Dr. Carmen Calero got twenty-two kilos of dynamite and stored it in a house at 39 Juan de la Mateos, in Mexico City. She, her sister, Colonel Valenzuela, and four others, met at her home and laid plans to assassinate President Cárdenas by blowing up his train when he left on a proposed trip to Sonora.
On November 18, 1937, the secret police made a series of simultaneous raids upon Dr. Calero's and Valenzuela's homes and the house where the dynamite was cached. They arrested everyone in the houses. But once the arrests had been made, the Mexican Government found itself in a quandary. To bring the prisoners to trial would involve foreign governments and create an international scandal; so Cárdenas personally ordered the secret police to release them.