On June 30, 1937, the S.S. "Panuco" of the New York and Cuba Mail Steamship Co. steamed into Tampico, Mexico, from New York with a mysterious cargo consigned to one Armeria Estrada. As soon as she docked, the cargo was quickly transferred to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad freight car No. 45169, which was awaiting it. A gentleman known around the freight yards as A.M. Cabezut, arranged for the car to leave immediately for the state of San Luis Potosi in the heart of Mexico. There was no record on the bill of lading to show that the shipper was the Winchester Repeating Arms Company of New Haven, Conn., and that the cargo, ordered on January 23 and February 23, 1937, by an Italian named Benito Estrada, was a large quantity of rifles, pistols and one hundred and forty cases of cartridges for various caliber guns. When the car arrived in San Luis Potosi, it was met by an elderly, mustached German named Baron Ernst von Merck, who took the shipment to General Saturnino Cedillo, former governor of the state[4] and a well-known advocate of fascism. One week later the elderly German met a carload shipment of "farm implements." When it was unloaded in San Luis Potosi, the farm implements turned out to be dynamite. Von Merck, who has been Cedillo's right-hand man, was during the World War a German spy stationed in Brussels. A member of Cedillo's staff[5] he traveled constantly between San Luis Potosi, where the arms were cached, and the Nazi Legation in Mexico City. On December 21, 1937, Baron von Merck flew to Guatemala--the same day that a cargo of arms from Germany was to be landed off the wild jungle coast of Campeche in Southern Mexico. Guatemala, just south of Mexico, is the most thoroughly organized fascist country in Central or South America. Its chief industries, coffee and bananas, are virtually controlled by Germans, whose enormous plantations overlap into the state of Chiapas, Mexico. But President Jorge Ubico, who is not much of an Aryan, prefers Mussolini's brand of fascism because the Nazi theory of Nordic supremacy does not strike a sympathetic chord in the President's heart. As a result, the Italian Minister to Guatemala is Ubico's adviser on almost all matters of state. Guiseppe Sotanis, a mysterious Italian officer who sits in the Gran Hotel in San Jose, Costa Rica, collecting stamps and studying his immaculate fingernails, arranges for shipments of Italian arms into Guatemala. A few months ago Sotanis, the Italian minister to Guatemala, and Ubico met in Guatemala City. Shortly thereafter the Italian arms manufacturing company, Bredda, sent Ubico two hundred eighty portable machine guns, sixty anti-aircraft machine guns and seventy small caliber cannon.