Mexico City

Where the Dewey Commission sat in 1937, hearing Trotsky's defence against the Moscow show trials in the house Diego Rivera had lent him.

Trotsky was living in exile in Coyoacan when Stalin's prosecutors condemned him to death in absentia. Dewey, then seventy-seven and warned that the trip would ruin his reputation, chaired an unofficial commission of inquiry that travelled to Mexico and took thirteen sessions of testimony. It concluded that the Moscow trials were frauds and that Trotsky was not guilty. Dewey added that this did not make him an admirer, and he was attacked from both directions for the rest of the decade.