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JOHN KENNETH TURNER
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BARBAROUS MEXICO
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BARBAROUS MEXICO
BY JOHN KENNETH TURNER
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CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
CO-OPERATIVE
Copyright 1910 By Charles H. Kerr & Company
JOHN F. HIGGINS
PRINTER AND BINDER
376-382 MONROE STREET CHICAGO. ILLINOIS
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PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.
Since the publication of the first edition of this book less than four months ago both the prophecies which it embodies have been fulfilled. On page 10 I say that Mexico *'is on the verge of a revolution in favor of democracy ;" and on page 267, that ''The United States will intervene with an army, if necessary, to maintain Diaz or a successor zvho would continue the special part- nership with American capital,"
As this is written, nearly 30,000 American soldiers are patrolHng the Mexican border and American warships are cruising in the neighborhood of Mexican ports. Though not a soldier may cross the line, though not a vessel may fire a shot, this is effective intervention all the same. The confessed purpose is to crush the revolution by cutting off its source of supplies and by preventing patriotic Mexicans residing in the United States from going home to fight for the freedom of their country.
The action of President Taft in mobilizing the troops was taken without regard for the wishes of the American people and without due explanation to them. The action of the troops in seizing revolutionist supplies and arrest- ing revolutionist recruits is not only against every tradi- tion of political liberty upon which this nation is supposed to be based, but it is unlawful and criminal and punish- able under the laws of the States by fine and imprison- ment. It is not a crime against any federal or state law to ship food, or even arms and ammunition, into Mexico with the open intention of selling them to the revolution- ists. It is not a crime against any federal or state law to go from the United States into Mexico with the open intention of joining the revolution there. Without a formal proclamation of martial law the military author- ities have no right to exceed the civil laws and when they do so they are liable to fine and imprisonment for unlawful detention.
Martial law has not been proclaimed on the border. Every day the military authorities there are violating
6 PREFACE.
the laws. But the civil authorities are cowed, the people are cowed, and the victims, Mexican or American, seem to have no redress. By fiat of the executive law and civil authority have been subverted and, as far as the Mexican situation is concerned, the United States has been turned into a military dictatorship as sinister and irresponsible as that of Diaz himself.
And why has this thing been done? To maintain a chattel slavery more cruel than ever existed in our Southern states. To uphold a political tyranny a hundred times more unjust than the one against which our men of Seventy-Six revolted. If the policy of the Taft ad- ministration be permitted to continue these purposes will be attained. Already the revolution has received such a set-back that, though it win in the end, many good and brave men must die who otherwise might have lived. The purpose of this book was to inform the American people as to the facts about Mexico in order that they might be prepared to prevent American intervention against a revolution the justice of which there can be no question.
So far "Barbarous Mexico" has failed in this purpose. Will it fail in the end? Are the American people as en- slaved in spirit as the Mexicans are in body ? In Mexico the only protest possible is a protest of arms. In the United States there is still a degree of freedom of press and speech. Though by tricks and deceits innumerable the rulers of America succeed in evading the will of the majority, the majority yet may protest, and if the protest be long enough and loud enough, it is still capable of making those rulers tremble. Protest against the Crime of Intervention. And should it become necessary, in order to make the rulers heed, to raise that protest to a threat of revolution here, so be it; the cause will be worth while.
JOHN KENNETH TURNER.
Los Angeles, Calif., April 8, 1911.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Slaves of Yucatan 9
II. The Extermination of the Yaquis 37
III. Over the Exile Road 49
IV. The Contract Slaves of Valle Nacional. 67
V. In the Valley of Death 82
VI. The Country Peons and the City Poor. 109
VII. The Diaz System 120
VIII. Repressive Elements of the Diaz Ma- chine 138
IX. The Crushing of Opposition Parties 160
X. The Eighth Unanimous Election of
Diaz 174
XL Four Mexican Strikes 197
XII. Critics and Corroboration 220
XIII. The Diaz-American Press Conspiracy... 237
XIV. The American Partners of Diaz 253
XV. American Persecution of the Enemies
OF Diaz 270
XVI. Diaz Himself 299
XVII. The Mexican People 324
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
facing page
Slave Mother and Child^ also Henequen Plant 20
Women Are Cheaper than Grist-Mills 20
Calling the Roll at Sunrise on a Slave Plantation 26
Scene in a Yaqui Bull Pen on the Exile Road 49
Band of Yaquis on the Exile Road 52
Type of "Enganchado/' or Plantation Slave 70
Boy Slaves on a Sugar Plantation in the Hot Lands 96
Cargadores with Baskets, Seen Everyw^here on the Mexican Plateau 110
Midnight in Mexico City "Meson," Cheap Lodging House 116
Tv^o Groups of Waifs Sleeping in a "Meson" 118
Ready for the Execution 140
Mexican Cavalry and Mexican County Jail 144
Yaquis Hanged in Sonora, Mexican Rurales 148
A Typical Mexican Military Execution, Before and After 164
Diaz ane Taft Photographed Together at El Paso, Texas 254
Portraits of Five American Revolutionists 272
Primitive Plow; Mexico Is Backward in Modern Ma- chinery, Not Because the Mexican Laborer Is Stupid, but Because He Is Cheap 328
Wood Carriers, City of Mexico 334
BARBAROUS MEXICO
CHAPTER I
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN
What is Mexico?
Americans commonly characterize Mexico as "Our Sister Republic." Most of us picture her vaguely as a republic in reality much like our own, inhabited by people a little different in temperament, a little poorer and a little less advanced, but still enjoying the protec- tion of republican laws — a free people in the sense that we are free.
Others of us, who have seen the country through a car window, or speculated a little in Mexican mines or Mexican plantations, paint that country beyond the Rio Grande as a benevolent paternalism in which a great and good man orders all things well for his fool- ish but adoring people.
I found Mexico to be neither of these things. The real Mexico I found to be a country with a written constitution and written laws in general almost as fair and democratic as our own, but with neither constitution nor laws in operation. Mexico is a country without political freedom, without freedom of speech, without a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury sys- tem, without political parties, without any of our cher- ished guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is a land where there has been no contest
9
10 BARBAROUS MEXICO
for the office of president for more than a generation, where the executive rules all things by means of a standing army, where political offices are sold for a fixed price. I found Mexico to be a land where the people are poor because they have no rights, where peonage is the rule for the great mass, and where actual chattel slavery obtains for hundreds of thousands. Finally, I found that the people do not idolize their president, that the tide of opposition, dammed and held back as it has been by army and secret police, is rising to a height where it must shortly overflow that dam. Mexicans of all classes and affiliations agree that their country IS on the verge of a revolution in favor of democracy; if not a revolution in the time of Diaz, for Diaz is old and is expected soon to pass, then a revolution after Diaz.
My special interest in political Mexico was first awak- ened early in 1908, when I came in contact with four Mexican revolutionists who were at that time incar- cerated in the county jail at Los Angeles, California. Here were four educated, intelligent Mexicans, college men, all of them, who were being held by the United States authorities on a charge of planning to invade a friendly nation — Mexico— with an armed force from American soil.
Why should intelligent men take up arms against a republic? Why should they come to the United States to prepare for their military maneuvers? I talked with those Mexican prisoners. They assured me that at one time they had peacefully agitated in their own coun- try for a peaceful and constitutional overthrow of the persons in control of their government.
But for that very thing, they declared, they had been imprisoned and their property had been destroyed. Secret
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 11]
police had dogged their steps, their lives had been threat- ened, and countless methods had been used to prevent them from carrying on their work. Finally, hunted as outlaws beyond the national boundaries, denied the rights of free speech, press and assembly, denied the right peaceably to organize to bring about political changes, they had resorted to the only alternative — arms. Why had they wished to overturn their govern- ment? Because it had set aside the constitution, because it had abolished those civic rights which all enlightened men agree are necessary for the unfolding of a nation, because it had dispossessed the common people of their lands, because it had converted free laborers into serfs, peons, and some of them even into — slaves.
"Slavery? Do you mean to tell me that there is any real slavery left in the western hemisphere?" I scoffed. "Bah ! You are talking like an American socialist. You mean 'wage slavery,' or slavery to miserable conditions of livelihood. You don't mean chattel slavery."
But those four Mexican exiles refused to give ground. "Yes, slavery," they said, "chattel slavery. Men, women and children bought and sold like mules — just like mules — and like mules they belong to their masters. They are slaves."
"Human beings bought and sold like mules in America! And in the twentieth century. Well," I told myself, "if it's true, I'm going to see it."
So it was that early in September, 1908, I crossed the Rio Grande bound for my first trip through the back yards of Old Mexico.
Upon this first trip I was accompanied by L. Gutier- rez De Lara, a Mexican of distinguished family, whose acquaintance I had made also in Los Angeles. De Lara was opposed to the existing government in Mexico,
12 BARBAROUS MEXICO
which fact my critics have pointed out as evidence of bias in my investigations. On the contrary, I did not depend on De Lara or any other biassed source for my information, but took every precaution to arrive at the exact truth, and by as many different avenues as practicable. Every essential fact which I put down here in regard to the slavery of Mexico I saw with my own eyes or heard with my own ears, and heard usually from those individuals who would be most likely to minimize their cruelties — the slave-drivers themselves.
Nevertheless, to the credit of De Lara I must say that he gave me most important aid in gathering my material. By his knowledge of the country and the people, by his genius as a "mixer," and, above all, through his personal acquaintance with valuable sources of information all over the country — men on the inside — I was enabled to see and hear things which are prac- tically inaccessible to the ordinary investigator.
Slavery in Mexico! Yes, I found it. I found it first in Yucatan. The peninsula of Yucatan is an elbow of Central America, which shoots off in a northeasterly direction almost half way to Florida. It belongs to Mexico, and its area of some 80,000 square miles is almost equally divided among the states of Yucatan and Campeche and the territory of Quintana Roo.
The coast of Yucatan, which comprises the north- central part of the peninsula, is about a thousand miles directly south of New Orleans. The surface of the state is almost solid rock, so nearly solid that it is usually impossible to plant a tree without first blasting a hole to receive the shoot and make a place for the roots. Yet this naturally barren land is more densely populated than is our own United States. More than that, within one-fourth of the territory three- fourths of the people
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 13
live, and the density of the population runs to nearly seventy-five per square mile.
The secret of these peculiar conditions is that the soil and the climate of northern Yucatan happen to be perfectly adapted to the production of that hardy species of century plant which produces henequen, or sisal hemp. Hence we find the city of Merida, a beautiful modern city claiming a population of 60,000 people, and surrounding it, supporting it, vast henequen plantations on which the rows of gigantic green plants extend for miles and miles. The farms are so large that each has a little city of its own, inhabited by from 500 to 2,500 people, according to the size of the farm. The owners of these great farms are the chief slave- holders of Yucatan; the inhabitants of the little cities are the slaves. The annual export of henequen from Yucatan approximates 250,000,000 pounds. The popu- lation of Yucatan is about three hundred thousand. The slave-holders' club numbers 250 members, but the vast majority of the lands and the slaves are concentrated in the hands of fifty henequen kings. The slaves num- ber more than one hundred thousand.
In order to secure the truth in its greatest purity from the lips of the masters of the slaves I went among them playing a part. Long before I put my feet upon the white sands of Progreso, the port of Yucatan, I had heard how visiting investigators are bought or blinded, how, if they cannot be bought, they are wined and dined and filled with falsehood, then taken over a route previously prepared — fooled, in short, so completely that they go away half believing that the slaves are not slaves, that the hundred thousand half-starving, over- worked, degraded bondsmen are perfectly happy and so contented with their lot that it would be a shame indeed
14 BARBAROUS MEXICO
to yield to them the freedom and security which, in all humanity, is the rightful share of every human being born upon the earth.
The part which I played in Yucatan was that of an investor with much money to sink in henequen prop- erties, and as such I was warmly welcomed by the henequen kings. I was rather fortunate in going to Yucatan when I did. Until the panic of 1907 it was a well-understood and unanimously approved policy of the "Camara de Agricola," the planters' organization, that foreigners should not be allowed to invade the henequen business. This was partly because the profits of the business were huge and the rich Yucatecos wanted to "hog it all" for themselves, but more especially be- cause they feared that through foreigners the story of their misdeeds might become known to the world.
But the panic of 1907 wiped out the world's henequen market for a time. The planters were a company of little Rockefellers, but they needed ready cash, and they were willing to take it from anyone who came. Hence my imaginary money was the open sesame to their club, and to their farms. I not only discussed every phase of henequen production with the kings themselves, and while they were off their guard, but I observed thousands of slaves under their normal conditions.
Chief among the henequen kings of Yucatan is Olegario Molina, former governor of the state and Sec- retary of Fomento (Public Promotion) of Mexico. Molina's holdings of lands in Yucatan and Quintana Roo aggregate 15,000,000 acres, or 23,000 square miles — a small kingdom in itself. The fifty kings live in costly palaces in Merida and many of them have homes abroad. They travel a great deal, usually they speak several different languages, and they and their families
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 15
are a most cultivated class of people. All Merida and all Yucatan, even all the peninsula of Yucatan, are dependent on the fifty henequen kings. Naturally these men are in control of the political machinery of their state, and naturally they operate that machinery for their own benefit. The slaves are 8,000 Yaqui Indians im- ported from Sonora, 3,000 Chinese (Koreans), and be- tween 100,000 and 125,000 native Mayas, who formerly owned the lands that the henequen kings now own.
The Maya people, indeed, form about ninety-five per cent of the population of Yucatan. Even the majority of the fifty henequen kings are Mayas crossed with the blood of Spain. The Mayas are Indians — and yet they are not Indians. They are not like the Indians of the United States, and they are called Indians only because their homes were in the western hemisphere when the Europeans came. The Mayas had a civilization of their own when the Europeans "discovered" them, and it was a civilization admittedly as high as that of the most advanced Aztecs or the Incas of Peru.
The Mayas are a peculiar people. They look like no other people on the face of the earth. They are not like other Mexicans; they are not like Americans; they are not like Chinamen; they are not like East Indians; they are not like Turks. Yet one might very easily imagine that fusion of all these five widely different peoples might produce a people much like the Mayas. They are not large in stature, but their features are remarkably finely chiselled and their bodies give a strong impression of elegance and grace. Their skins are olive, their foreheads high, their faces slightly aquiline. The women of all classes in Merida wear long, flowing white gowns, unbound at the waist and embroidered about the hem and perhaps also about the bust in some
16 BARBAROUS MEXICO
bright color — green, blue or purple. In the warm even- ings a military band plays and hundreds of comely women and girls thus alluringly attired mingle among the fragrant flowers, the art statues and the tropical greenery of the city plaza.
The planters do not call their chattels slaves. They call them "people," or "laborers," especially when speaking to strangers. But when speaking confidentially they have said to me : "Yes, they are slaves."
But I did not accept the word slavery from the people of Yucatan, though they were the holders of the slaves themselves. The proof of a fact is to be found, not in the name, but in the conditions thereof. Slavery is the ownership of the body of a man, an ownership so absolute that the body can be transferred to another, an ownership that gives to the owner a right to take the products of that body, to starve it, to chastise it at will, to kill it with impunity. Such is slavery in the extreme sense. Such is slavery as I found it in Yucatan.
The masters of Yucatan do not call their system slavery; they call it enforced service for debt. "We do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider that they are in debt to us. And we do not consider that we buy and sell them ; we consider that we transfer the debt, and the man goes with the debt." This is the way Don Enrique Camara Zavala, president of the "Camara de Agricola de Yucatan," explained the atti- tude of the henequen kings in the matter. "Slavery is against the law ; we do not call it slavery," various plant- ers assured me again and again.
But the fact that it is not service for debt is proven by the habit of transferring the slaves from one master to another, not on any basis of debt, but on the basis of the market price of a man. In figuring on the purchase
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 17
of a plantation I always had to figure on paying cash for the slaves, exactly the same as for the land, the machinery and the cattle. Four hundred Mexican dollars apiece was the prevailing price, and that is what the planters usually asked me. "If you buy now you buy at a very good time," I was told again and again. "The panic has put the price down. One year ago the price of each man was $1,000."
The Yaquis are transferred on exactly the same basis as the Mayas — the market price of a slave — and yet all people of Yucatan know that the planters pay only $65 apiece to the government for each Yaqui. I was offered for $400 each Yaquis who had not been in the country a month and consequently had had no opportunity of rolling up a debt that would account for the difference in price. Moreover, one of the planters told me: "We don't allow the Yaquis to get in debt to us."
It would be absurd to suppose that the reason the price was uniform was because all the slaves were equally in debt. I probed this matter a little by inquiring into the details of the selling transaction. "You get the photograph and identification papers with the man," said one, "and that's all." "You get the identification papers and the account of the debt," said another. "We don't keep much account of the debt," said a third, "because it doesn't matter after you've got possession of the man." "The man and the identification papers are enough," said another; "if your man runs away, the papers are all the authorities require for you to get him back again." "Whatever the debt, it takes the market price to get him free again," a fifth told me.
Conflicting as some of these answers are, they all tend to show one thing, that the debt counts for nothing after the debtor passes into the hands of the planter.
18 BARBAROUS MEXICO
Whatever the debt, it takes the market price to get the debtor free again!
Even then, I thought, it would not be so bad if the servant had an opportunity of working out the price and buying back his freedom. Even some of our negro slaves before the Civil War were permitted — by excep- tionally lenient masters — to do that.
But I found that such was not the custom. "You need have no fear in purchasing this plantation," said one planter to me, "of the laborers being able to buy their freedom and leave you. They can never do that."
The only man in the country whom I heard of as having ever permitted a slave to buy his freedom was a professional man of Merida, an architect. "I bought a laborer for $1,000," he explained to me. "He was a good man and helped me a lot about my office. After I got to liking him I credited him with so much wages per week. After eight years I owed him the full $1,000, so I let him go. But they never do that on the planta- tions— ^never."
Thus I learned that the debt feature of the enforced service does not alleviate the hardships of the slave by making it easier for him to free himself, neither does it aifect the conditions of his sale or his complete sub- jection to his master. On the other hand, I found that the one particular in which this debt element does play an actual part in the destiny of the unfortunate of Yucatan militates against him instead of operating in his favor. For it is by means of debt that the Yucatan slave-driver gets possession of the free laborers of his realm to replenish the overworked and underfed, the overbeaten, the dying slaves of his plantation.
How are the slaves recruited? Don Joaquin Peon informed me that the Maya slaves die oflf faster than
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 19
they are born, and Don Enrique Camara Zavala told me that two-thirds of the Yaquis die during the first year of their residence in the country. Hence the problem of recruiting the slaves seemed to me a very serious one. Of course, the Yaquis were coming in at the rate of 500 per month, yet I hardly thought that influx would be sufficient to equal the tide of life that was going out by death. I was right in that surmise, so I was informed, but I was also informed that the problem of recruits was not so difficult, after all.
"It is very easy," one planter told me. "All that is necessary is that you get some free laborer in debt to you, and then you have him. Yes, we are always get- ting new laborers in that way."
The amount of the debt does not matter, so long as It IS a debt, and the little transaction is arranged by men who combine the functions of money lender and slave broker. Some of them have offices in Merida and they get the free laborers, clerks and the poorer class of people generally into debt just as professional loan sharks of America get clerks, mechanics and office men into debt — by playing on their needs and tempting them. Were these American clerks, mechanics and office men residents of Yucatan, instead of being merely hounded by a loan shark, they would be sold into slavery for all time, they and their children and their children's chil- dren, on to the third and fourth generation, and even farther, on to such a time as some political change puts a stop to the conditions of slavery altogether in Mexico.
These money-lending slave brokers of Merida do not hang out signs and announce to the world that they have slaves to sell. They do their business quietly, as people who are comparatively safe in their occupation, but as people who do not wish to endanger their business by
20 BARBAROUS MEXICO
too great publicity — like police-protected gambling houses in an American city, for example. These slave sharks were mentioned to me by the henequen kings themselves, cautiously by them, as a rule. Other old residents of Yucatan explained their methods in detail. I was curious to visit one of these brokers and talk with him about purchasing a lot of slaves, but I was advised against it and was told that they would not talk to a foreigner until the latter had established himself in the community and otherwise proved his good faith.
These men buy and sell slaves. And the planters buy and sell slaves. I was offered slaves in lots of one up by the planters. I was told that I could buy a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, or a thousand of any of them, to do with them exactly as I wished, that the police would protect me in my possession of those, my fellow beings. Slaves are not only used on the henequen plan- tations, but in the city, as personal servants, as laborers, as household drudges, as prostitutes. How many of these persons there are in the city of Merida I do not know, though I heard many stories of the absolute power exercised over them. Certainly the number is several thousand.
So we see that the debt element in Yucatan not only does not palliate the condition of the slave, but rather makes it harder. It increases his extremity, for while it does not help him to climb out of his pit, it reaches out its tentacles and drags down his brother, too. The portion of the people of Yucatan who are born free possess no "inalienable right" to their freedom. They are free only by virtue of their being prosperous. Let a family, however virtuous, however worthy, however cultivated, fall into misfortune, let the parents fall into debt and be unable to pay the debt, and the whole family
SLAVE MOTIIKK AND CUILU; ALSO IIENEQUEN PLANT
WOMEN ARE CHEAPER THAN GRIST-MILLS
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 21
is liable to pass into the hands of a henequen planter. Through debt, the dying slaves of the farms are replaced by the unsuccessful wage-workers of the cities.
Why do the henequen kings call their system enforced service for debt instead of by its right name? Prob- ably for two reasons — because the system is the out- growth of a milder system of actual service for debt, and because of the prejudice against the word slavery, both among Mexicans and foreigners. Service for debt in a milder form than is found in Yucatan exists all over Mexico and is called peonage. Under this system, police authorities everywhere recognize the right of an em- ployer to take the body of a laborer who is in debt to him, and to compel the laborer to work out the debt. Of course, once the employer can compel the laborer to work, he can compel him to work at his own terms, and that means that he can work him on such terms as will never permit the laborer to extricate himself from his debt.
Such is peonage as it exists throughout all Mexico. In the last analysis it is slavery, but the employers con- trol the police, and the fictional distinction is kept up all the same. Slavery is peonage carried to its greatest possible extreme, and the reason we find the extreme in Yucatan is that, while in some other sections of Mex- ico a fraction of the ruling interests are opposed to peonage and consequently exert a modifying influence upon it, in Yucatan all the ruling interests are in hene- quen. The cheaper the worker the higher the profits for all. The peon becomes a chattel slave.
The henequen kings of Yucatan seek to excuse their system of slavery by denominating it enforced service for debt. "Slavery is against the law," they say. "It is against the constitution." When a thing is abolished
22 BARBAROUS MEXICO
by your constitution it works more smoothly if called by another name, but the fact is, service for debt is just as unconstitutional in Mexico as chattel slavery. The plea of the henequen king of keeping within the law is entirely without foundation. A comparison of the following two clauses from the Mexican constitu- tion will show that the two systems are in the same class.
"Article I, Section 1. In the Republic all are born free. Slaves who set foot upon the national territory recover, by that act alone, their liberty, and have a right to the protection of the laws."
"Article V, Section 1 (Amendment). No one shall be compelled to do personal work without just compen- sation and without his full consent. The state shall not permit any contract, covenant or agreement to be carried out having for its object the abridgment, loss or irrevocable sacrifice of the liberty of a man, whether by reason of labor, education or religious vows. * ♦ ♦ Nor shall any compact be tolerated in which a man agrees to his proscription or exile."
So the slave business in Yucatan, whatever name may be applied to it, is still unconstitutional. On the other hand, if the policy of the present government is to be taken as the law of the land, the slave business of Mexico is legal. In that sense the henequen kings "obey the law." Whether they are righteous in doing so I will leave to hair-splitters in morality. Whatever the decision may be, right or wrong, it does not change, for better or for worse, the pitiful misery in which I found the hemp laborers of Yucatan.
The slaves of Yucatan get no money. They are half starved. They are worked almost to death. They are beaten. A large percentage of them are locked up every
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 23
night in a house resembHng a jail. If they are sick they must still work, and if they are so sick that it is impossible for them to work, they are seldom permitted the services of a physician. The women are compelled to marry, compelled to marry men of their own planta- tion only, and sometimes are compelled to marry certain men not of their choice. There are no schools for the children. Indeed, the entire lives of these people are ordered at the whim of a master, and if the master wishes to kill them, he may do so with impunity. I heard numerous stories of slaves being beaten to death, but I never heard of an instance in which the murderer was punished, or even arrested. The police, the public prosecutors and the judges know exactly what is ex- pected of them, for the men who appoint them are the planters themselves. The jefes politicos, the rulers of the political districts corresponding to our counties, who are as truly czars of the districts as Diaz is the Czar of all Mexico, are invariably either henequen planters or employes of henequen planters.
The first mention of corporal punishment for the slaves was made to me by one of the members of the Camara, a large, portly fellow with the bearing of an opera singer and a white diamond shining at me like a sun from his slab-like shirt front. He told a story, and as he told it he laughed. I laughed, too, but in a little different way. I could not help feeling that the story was made to order to fit strangers.
"Oh, yes, we have to punish them," said the fat king of henequen. "We even are compelled to whip the house servants of the city. It is their nature; they de- mand it. A friend of mine, a very mild man, had a woman servant who was always wishing to serve some- body else. My friend finally sold the woman, and some
24 BARBAROUS MEXICO
months later he met her on the street and asked her how she liked her new master. 'Finely/ she answered, 'finely. You see, my master is a very rough man and he beats me nearly every day !' "
The philosophy of beating was made very clear to me by Don Felipe G. Canton, secretary of the Camara.
*'It is necessary to whip them — oh, yes, very neces- sary," he told me, with a smile, "for there is no other way to make them do what you wish. What other means is there of enforcing the discipline of the farm? If we did not whip them they would do nothing."
I could make no reply. I could think of no ground upon which to assail Don Felipe^s logic. For what, pray, can be done to a chattel slave to make him work but to beat him? With the wage worker you have the fear of discharge or the reduction of wages to hold over his head and make him toe the mark, but the chattel slave would welcome discharge, and as to reducing his food supply, you don't dare to do that or you kill him outright. At least, that is the case in Yucatan.
One of the first sights we saw on a henequen planta- tion was the beating of a slave — a formal beating before the assembled toilers of the ranch early in the morning just after the daily roll call. The slave was taken on the back of a huge Chinaman and given fifteen lashes across the bare back with a heavy, wet rope, lashes so lustily delivered that the blood ran down the victim's body. This method of beating is an ancient one in Yucatan and is the customary one on all the plantations for boys and all except the heaviest men. Women are required to kneel to be beaten, as sometimes are men of great weight. Men and women are beaten in the fields as well as at the morning roll call. Each foreman, or capataz, carries a heavy cane with which he punches
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 25
and prods and whacks the slaves at will. I do not remember visiting a single field in which I did not see some of this punching and prodding and whacking going on.
I saw no punishments worse than beating in Yucatan, but I heard of them. I was told of men being strung up by their fingers or toes to be beaten, of their being thrust into black dungeon-like holes, of water being dropped on the hand until the victim screamed, of the extremity of female punishment being found in some outrage to the sense of the modesty in the woman. I saw black holes and everywhere I saw the jail dormi- tories, armed guards and night guards who patrolled the outskirts of the farm settlements while the slaves slept. I heard also of planters who took special delight in personally superintending the beating of their chat- tels. For example, speaking of one of the richest plant- ers in Yucatan, a professional man of Merida said to me:
"A favorite pastime of was to sit on his,
horse and watch the 'cleaning up* (the punishment) of., his slaves. He would strike a match to light his cigar. At the first puff of smoke the first stroke of the wet rope would fall on the bare back of the victim. He would smoke on, leisurely, contentedly, as the blows fell, one after another. When the entertainment finally palled on him he would throw away his cigar and the man with the rope would stop, for the end of the cigar was the signal for the end of the beating."
The great plantations of Yucatan are reached by pri- vate mule car lines built and operated specially for the business of the henequen kings. The first plantation that we visited was typical. Situated fifteen miles west of Merida, it contains thirty-six square miles of land,
26 BARBAROUS MEXICO
one-fourth of it in henequen, part of the rest in pasture and a part unreclaimed. In the center of the plantation is the farm settlement, consisting of a grass-grown patio, or yard, surrounding which are the main farm buildings, the store, the factory, the house of the administrador, or general manager; the house of the mayordomo primero, or superintendent; the houses of the mayordomos sec- undos, or overseers, and the little chapel. Behind these are the corrals, the drying yard, the stable, the jail dormitory. Finally, surrounding all are the rows of one-room huts set in little patches of ground, in which reside the married slaves and their families.
Here we found fifteen hundred slaves and about thirty bosses of various degrees. Thirty of the slaves were Koreans, about two hundred were Yaquis and the rest were Mayas. The Maya slaves, to my eyes, differed from the free Mayas I had seen in the city principally in their clothing and their general unkempt and over- worked appearance. Certainly they were of the same clay. Their clothing was poor and ragged, yet generally clean. The women wore calico, the men the thin, un- bleached cotton shirt and trousers of the tropics, the trousers being often rolled to the knees. Their hats were of coarse straw or grass, their feet always bare.
Seven hundred of the slaves are able-bodied men, the rest women and children. Three hundred and eighty of the men are married and live with their families in the one-room huts. These huts are set in little patches of ground 144 feet square, which, rocky and barren as they are, are cultivated to some small purpose by the women and children. In addition to the product of their barren garden patch each family receives daily credit at the plantation store for twenty-five centavos, or twelve and one-half cents' worth of merchandise.
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 27
No money is paid; it is all in credit, and this same sys- tem prevails on about one-half the plantations. The other half merely deal out rations. It amounts to the same thing, but some of the planters stick to the money credit system merely in order to keep up the pretense of paying wages. I priced some of the goods at the store — corn, beans, salt, peppers, clothing and blankets was about all there was — and found that the prices were high. I could not understand how a family could live on twelve and one-half cents* worth of it each day, a hard-working family, especially.
The slaves rise from their beds when the big bell in the patio rings at 3:45 o'clock in the morning, and their work begins as soon thereafter as they can get to it. Their work in the fields ends when it is too dark to see, and about the yards it sometimes extends until long into the night.
The principal labor of the plantation is harvesting the henequen leaves and cleaning the weeds from be- tween the plants. Each slave is given a certain number of leaves to cut or plants to clean, and it is the policy of the planter to make the stint so hard that the slave is compelled to call out his wife and children to help him. Thus nearly all the women and children of the plantation spend a part of the day in the field. The unmarried women spend all the day in the field, and when a boy reaches the age of twelve he is considered to be a man and is given a stint of his own to do. Sun- days the slaves do not work for the master. They spend their time in their patches, rest or visit. Sunday is the day on which the youths and maidens meet and plan to marry. Sometimes they are even permitted to go off the farm and meet the slaves of their neighbor, but never are they permitted to marry the people of other planta-
28 BARBAROUS MEXICO
tions, for this would necessitate the purchase of either the wife or the husband by one or the other of the two owners, and that would involve too much trouble.
Such are the conditions in general that prevail on all the plantations of Yucatan.
We spent two days and two nights on the plantation called San Antonio Yaxche and became thoroughly acquainted with its system and its people.
Not only do not the owners of the great henequen farms of Yucatan live on their farms, but neither do the managers. Like the owners, the managers have their homes and their offices in Merida, and visit the plantations only from two to half a dozen times a month. The mayordomo primero is ordinarily the supreme ruler of the plantation, but when the manager, or admin- istrador, heaves in sight, the mayordomo primero be- comes a very insignificant personage indeed.
At least that was the case on San Antonio Yaxche. The big mayordomo was compelled to bow and scrape before the boss just as were the lesser foremen, and at meal time Manuel Rios, the administrador, I and my companion — the latter, much to the disgust of Rios, who looked upon him as an underling — dined alone in state while the mayordomo hovered in the background, ready to fly away instantly to do our bidding. At the first meal — and it was the best I had in all Mexico — I felt strongly impelled to invite Mister Mayordomo to sit down and have something. I did not do it, and after- wards I was glad that I did not, for before I left the ranch I realized what an awful breach of etiquette I would have been guilty of.
In the fields we found gangs of men and boys, some gangs hoeing the weeds from between the gigantic plants and some sawing off the big leaves with machetes.
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 29
The harvest of the leaves goes on unceasing all the twelve months of the year, and during the cycle every plant on the farm is gone over four times. Twelve leaves are usually clipped, the twelve largest, the thirty smallest being left to mature for another three months. The workman chops off the leaf at its root, trims the sharp briars off the two edges, trims the spear-like tip, counts the leaves 1-eft on the plant, counts the leaves he is cutting, piles his leaves into bundles, and finally carries the bundles to the end of his row, where they are carted away on a movable-track mule-car line.
I found the ground uneven and rocky, a punishment for the feet, the henequen leaves thorny and treach- erous and the air thick, hot and choking, though the season was considered a cool one. The ragged, bare- footed harvesters worked steadily, carefully and with the speed of better paid laborers who work "by the piece." They were working *'by the piece," too, the reward being immunity from the lash. Here and there among them I saw tired-looking women and children, sometimes little girls as young as eight or ten. Two thousand leaves a day is the usual stint on San Antonio Yaxche. On other plantations I was told that it is sometimes as high as three thousand.
The henequen leaves, once cut, are carted to a large building in the midst of the farm settlement, where they are hoisted in an elevator and sent tumbling down a long chute and into the stripping machine. Here hungry steel teeth tear the tough, thick leaves to pieces, and the result is two products — a green powder, which is refuse, and long strands of greenish, hair-like fibre, which is henequen. The fibre is sent on a tramway to the drying yard, where it turns the color of the sun. Then it is trammed back, pressed into bales, and a few
30 BARBAROUS MEXICO
days or weeks later the observer will see it at Progreso, the port of Yucatan, twenty-five miles north of Merida, being loaded into a steamship flying the British flag. The United States buys nearly all the henequen of Yucatan, our cordage trust, an alleged concern of Stand- ard Oil, absorbing more than half of the entire product.
Eight centavos per pound was the 1908 price received for sisal hemp in the bale. One slave dealer told me that the production cost no more than one.
About the machinery we found many small boys working. In the drying yard we found boys and men. All of the latter impressed me with their listless move- ments and their haggard, feverish faces. This was ex- plained by the foreman in charge. "When the men are sick we let them work here," he said — "on half pay!"
Such was the men's hospital. The hospital for the women we discovered in a basement of one of the main buildings. It was simply a row of windowless, earthen- floor rooms, half-dungeons, in each of which lay one woman on a bare board, without a blanket to soften it.
More than three hundred of the able-bodied slaves spend the nights in a large structure of stone and mortar, surrounded by a solid wall twelve feet high, which is topped with the sharp edges of thousands of broken glass bottles. To this inclosure there is but one door, and at it stands a guard armed with a club, a sword and a pistol. These are the quarters of the unmarried men of the plantation, Mayas, Yaquis and Chinese; also of the "half-timers," slaves whom the plantation uses only about half of the year, married men, some of them, whose families live in little settlements border- ing on the farm.
These "half-timers" are found on only about one- third of the plantations, and they are a class which has
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 31
been created entirely for the convenience of the masters. They become "full-timers" at the option of the masters, and are then permitted to keep their families on the plantations. They are compelled to work longer than half the year if they are wanted, and during the time when they are not working they are not permitted to go away on a hunt for other work. Generally their year's labor is divided into two sections, three months in the spring and three in the fall, and during that period they cannot go to visit their families. They are always kept in jail at night, they are fed by the farm, and their credit of twelve and one-half cents per day is kept back and doled out to their families a little at a time to pre- vent starvation.
A moment's figuring will show that the yearly credit for a half-timer who works six months is $22.50, and this is all — absolutely all — that the family of the half- time slave has to live on each year.
Inside the large, one-room building within the stone wall at San Antonio Yaxche we found, swinging so close that they touched one another, more than three hundred rope hammocks. This was the sleeping place of the half-timers and the unmarried full-timers. We entered the enclosure just at dusk, as the toilers, wiping the sweat from their foreheads, came filing in. Behind the dormitory we found half a dozen women working over some crude, open-air stoves. Like half-starved wolves the ragged workers ringed about the simple kitchen, grimy hands went out to receive their meed of supper, and standing there the miserable creatures ate.
I sampled the supper of the slaves. That is, I sam- pled a part of it with my tongue, and the rest, which my nostrils warned me not to sample with my tongue, I sampled with my nostrils. The meal consisted of two
32 BARBAROUS MEXICO
large corn tortillas, the bread of the poor of Mexico, a cup of boiled beans, unflavored, and a bowl of fish — putrid, stinking fish, fish that reeked with an odor that stuck in my system for days. How could they ever eat it? Ah, well, to vary a weary, unending row of meals consisting of only beans and tortillas a time must come when the most refined palate will water to the touch of something different, though that something is fish which offends the heavens with its rottenness.
"Beans, tortillas, fish!" I suppose that they can at least keep alive on it," I told myself, "provided they do no worse at the other two meals." "By the way," I turned to the adminstrador, who was showing us about, "what do they get at the other two meals?"
"The other two meals?" The administrador was puzzled. "The other two meals ? Why, there aren't any others. This is the only meal they have!"
Beans, tortillas, fish, once a day, and a dozen hours under the hottest sun that ever shone!
"But, no," the administrador corrected himself. "They do get something else, something very fine, too, some- thing that they can carry to the field with them and eat when they wish. Here is one now."
At this he picked up from one of the tables of the women a something about the size of his two small fists, and handed it to me, triumphantly. I took the round, soggy mass in my fingers, pinched, smelled and tasted it. It proved to be corn dough, half fermented and patted into a ball. This, then, was the other two meals, the rest^ of the substance besides beans, tortillas and decayed fish which sustained the toilers throughout the long day. I turned to a young Maya who was carefully picking a fish bone.
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 33
"Which would you rather be," I asked of him, "a half-timer or a full-timer?"
"A full-timer," he replied, promptly, and then in a lower tone: "They work us until we are ready to fall, then they throw us away to get strong again. If they worked the full-timers like they work us they would die."
"We come to work gladly," said another young Maya, "because we're starved to it. But before the end of the first week we want to run away. That is why they lock us up at night."
"Why don't you run away when you're free to do it ?" I asked. "When they turn you out, I mean?"
The administrador had stepped away to scold a wom- an. "It's no use," answered the man earnestly. "They always get us. Everybody is against us and there is no place to hide."
"They keep our faces on photographs," said another. "They always get us and give us a cleaning-up (beat- ing) besides. When we're here we want to run away, but when they turn us out we know that it's no use."
I was afterwards to learn how admirably the Yucatan country is adapted to preventing the escape of run- aways. No fruits or eatable herbs grow wild in that rocky land. There are no springs and no place where a person can dig a well without a rock drill and dyna- mite. So every runaway in time finds his way to a plantation or to the city, and at either place he is caught and held for identification. A free laborer who does not carry papers to prove that he is free is always liable to be locked up and put to much trouble to prove that he is not a runaway slave.
Yucatan has been compared to Russians Siberia. "Si- beria," Mexican political refugees have told me, "is hell
34 BARBAROUS MEXICO
frozen over; Yucatan is hell aflame." But I did not see many points in common between the two countries. True, the Yaquis are exiles in a sense, and political exiles at that, but they are also slaves. The political exiles of Russia are not slaves. According to Kennan, they are permitted to take their families with them, to choose their own abode, to live their own life, and are often given a small monthly stipend on which to live. I could not imagine Siberia as being as bad as Yucatan.
The Yucatan slave gets no hour for lunch, as does the American ranch hand. He goes to the field in the morning twilight, eating his lump of sour dough on the way. He picks up his machete and attacks the first thorny leaf as soon as it is light enough to see the thorns and he never lays down that machete until the twilight of the evening. Two thousand of the big green leaves a day is his "stint," and besides cutting, trimming and piling them, he must count them, and he must count the number of leaves on each plant and be sure that he does not count too many nor too few. Each plant is sup- posed to grow just 36 new leaves a year. Twelve of these, the 12 largest, are cut every four months, but whatever the number cut just 30 leaves must be left after the clipping. If the slave leaves 31 or 29 he is beaten, if he fails to cut his 2,000 he is beaten, if he trims his leaves raggedly he is beaten, if he is late at roll-call he is beaten. And he is beaten for any other little shortcoming that any of the bosses may imagine that he detects in his character or in his make-up. Si- beria? To my mind Siberia is a foundling asylum com- pared to Yucatan.
Over and over again I have compared in my mind the condition of the slaves of Yucatan with what I have read of the slaves of our southern states before
THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN 35
the Civil War. And always the result has been in favor of the black man. Our slaves of the South were almost always well fed, as a rule they were not overworked, on many plantations they were rarely beaten, it was usual to give them a little spending money now and then and to allow them to leave the plantation at least once a week. Like the slaves of Yucatan they were cattle of the ranch, but, unlike the former, they were treated as well as cat- tle. In the South before the War there were not so many plantations where the negroes died faster than they were born. The lives of our black slaves were not so hard but that they could laugh, sometimes — and sing. But the slaves of Yucatan do not sing !
I shall never forget my last day in Merida. Merida is probably the cleanest and most beautiful little city in all Mexico. It might even challenge comparison in its white prettiness with any other in the world. The municipality has expended vast sums on paving, on parks and on public buildings, and over and above this the henequen kings not long since made up a rich purse for improve- ments extraordinary. My last afternoon and evening in Yucatan I spent riding and walking about the wealthy residence section of Merida. Americans might expect to find nothing of art and architecture down on this rocky Central American peninsula, but Merida has its million dollar palaces like New York, and it has miles of them set in miraculous gardens.
Wonderful Mexican palaces! Wonderful Mexican gardens! A wonderful fairyland conjured out of slavery — slavery of Mayas, and of Yaquis. Among the Yucatan slaves there are ten Mayas to one Yaqui, but of the two the story of the Yaquis appealed to me the more. The Mayas are dying in their own land and with their own people. The Yaquis are exiles. They
36 BARBAROUS MEXICO
are dying in a strange land, they are dying faster, and they are dying alone, away from their families, for every Yaqui family sent to Yucatan is broken up on the way. Husbands and wives are torn apart and babes are taken from their mothers' breasts.
CHAPTER 11
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS
My real purpose in journeying to Yucatan was to find out what became of the Yaqui Indians of Sonora. In common with thousands of other Americans who have lived for years in our Southwest and near the border line of Mexico, I knew something of the sufferings of the Yaquis in their native state, of the means which had been taken to stir them to revolt, of the confiscation of their lands, of the methods of extermination employed by the army, of the indignation voiced by the decent ele- ment of Sonora, finally of President Diaz's sweeping order of deportation.
I knew that the order of deportation was being car- ried out, that hundreds of families were being gathered up monthly and sent away into exile. But what fate was awaiting them there at the end of that exile road? The answer was always vague, indefinite, unsatisfactory. Even well-informed Mexicans of their country's metrop- olis could not tell me. After the Yaqui exiles sailed from the port of Veracruz the curtain dropped upon them. I went to Yucatan in order to witness, if possi- ble, the final act in the life drama of the Yaqui nation. And I witnessed it.
The Yaquis are being exterminated and exterminated fast. There is no room for controversy as to that; the only controversy relates to whether or not the Yaquis deserve to be exterminated. It is undoubtedly true that a portion of their number have persistently refused to accept the destiny that the government has marked out for them. On the other hand, there are those who
Z1
38 BARBAROUS MEXICO
assert that the Yaquis are as worthy as other Mexicans and deserve as much consideration at the hands of their rulers.
The extermination of the Yaquis began in war; its finish is being accomplished in deportation and slavery.
The Yaquis are called Indians. Like the Mayas of Yucatan, they are Indians and yet they are not Indians. In the United States we would not call them Indians, for they are workers. As far back as their history can be traced they have never been savages. They have been an agricultural people. They tilled the soil, dis- covered and developed mines, constructed systems of irrigation, built adobe towns, maintained public schools, had an organized government and their own mint. When the Spanish missionaries came among them they were in possession of practically the whole of that vast ter- ritory south of Arizona which today comprises the state of Sonora.
"They are the best workers in Sonora," Colonel Fran- cisco B. Cruz, the very man who has charge of their deportation to Yucatan, and of whom I will have more to say later, told me. *'One Yaqui laborer is worth two ordinary Americans and three ordinary Mexicans," E. F. Trout, a Sonora mine foreman told me. "They are the strongest, soberest and most reliable people in Mexico," another one told me. "The government is taking our best workmen away from us and destroying the prosperity of the state," said another. "The govern- ment says it wants to open up the Yaqui country for settlers," S. R. DeLong, secretary of the Arizona His- torical Society and an old resident of Sonora, told me, "but it is my opinion that the Yaquis themselves are the best settlers that can possible be found."
Such expressions are heard very frequently in Sonora,
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS 39
in the border states and in border publications. The Yaqui certainly has an admirable physical development. During my journeys in Mexico I learned to pick him out at a glance, by his broad shoulders, his deep chest, his sinewy legs, his rugged face. The typical Yaqui is al- most a giant, the race a race of athletes. Perhaps that is just the reason why he has not bent his head in sub- mission to the will of the masters of Mexico.
American mine-owners and railroad men of Sonora are repeatedly complaining against the deportation of the Yaquis, and it is because they are such good work- men. Another matter which I have heard much re- marked about by border Americans is the regard of the so-called renegade, or fighting Yaquis, for the property of Americans and other foreigners. When the Yaquis first took up arms against the present government some twenty-five years ago they did so because of a definite grievance. Usually they fought on the defensive. Driven to the mountains, they have been compelled at times to sally forth and plunder for their stomachs* sake. But for many years it was known to all men that they seldom attacked Americans or any people but Mexicans. And for a long time they never committed any depredations on railroads or railroad property, which in Sonora has always been American.
The origin of the Yaqui troubles is generally attrib- uted to a plot on the part of a number of politicians, the purpose being to get possession of the rich lands in Southern Sonora which the Yaquis had held for hun- dreds of years. For twenty-four years past the only governors Sonora has had have been Ramon Corral, now Diaz*s vice-president, Rafael Yzabal and Luis Torres. These three have rotated in office, as it were, for more than a generation. As no popular elections
40 BARBAROUS MEXICO
were held at all, these three friends had absolutely no one to answer to except President Diaz, and their au- thority in Sonora has been practically absolute.
The Yaquis seem to have had a pretty good title to their lands when Corral, Yzabal and Torres came upon the scene. At the time of the Spanish conquest they were a nation of from one to two hundred thousand peo- ple, supposed by some authorities to have been offshoots from the Aztecs. The Spanish were never able to sub- due them completely, and after two hundred and fifty troublous years a peace was entered into whereby the Yaquis gave up a part of their territory and, as ac- knowledgment of their rightful ownership of the rest of it, the King of Spain gave them a patent signed by his own hand. This was nearly one hundred and fifty years ago, but the royal patent was honored by every ruler and chief executive of Mexico down to Diaz. Dur- ing all that time the Yaquis were at peace with the world. Their reputation as a naturally peaceful nation was established. It remained for the government of Diaz to stir them into war.
During these years of peace the Yaquis became part and parcel of the Mexican nation. They lived like other Mexicans. They had their own personal farms, their own homes, and they paid taxes on their property like other Mexicans. During the war against Maximilian they sent soldiers to help Mexico, and many of them distinguished themselves by brilliant service.
But the Yaquis were goaded into war. The men at the head of the government of Sonora wanted the Yaqui lands. Moreover, they saw an opportunity for graft in bringing a large body of soldiers into the state. So they harassed the Yaquis. They sent bogus surveyors through the Yaqui valley to mark out the land and tell the peo-
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS 41
pie that the government had decided to give it to for- eigners. They confiscated $80,000 in a bank belonging to Chief Cajeme. Finally, they sent armed men to arrest Cajeme, and when the latter could not find him they set fire to his house and to those of his neighbors, and assaulted the women of the village, even Cajeme's wife not being respected. Finally, the victims were goaded into war.
Since that day twenty-five years ago the Mexican gov- ernment has maintained an army almost perpetually in the field against the Yaquis, an army ranging in num- bers from 2,000 to 6,000 men. Thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of Yaquis have been killed in bat- tle and many hundreds of the latter have been executed after being taken prisoners. After a few years Chief Cajeme was captured and publicly executed in the pres- ence of a large body of his people who had been taken prisoner with him. Tetabiate, another Yaqui, was promptly elected to Cajeme's place, and the fight went on. Finally, in 1894, at one fell swoop, as it were, the ground was literally taken from under the feet of the rebels. By act of the federal government the best of their lands were taken from them and handed over to one man, General Lorenzo Torres, who is at this writing chief of the army in Sonora, then second in command.
The government is credited with having been guilty of the most horrible atrocities. Two examples are cited by Santa de Cabora, a Mexican writer, as follows:
"On May 17, 1892, General Otero, of the Mexican army, ordered the imprisonment of the Yaquis, men, women and children, in the town of Navajoa, and hung so many of these people that the supply of rope in the town was exhausted, it being necessary to use each rope five or six times."
"A colonel in the army, Antonio Rincon, in July, of 1892, took two hundred Yaauis» men* women and children, pcisoneis.
42 BARBAROUS MEXICO
and carried them in the gunboat El Democrata and dropped them in the ocean between the mouth of the Yaqui river and the seaport of Guaymas, all of them perishing."
A report was circulated along our Mexican border that an incident similar to the last mentioned happened in February, 1908. Colonel Francisco B. Cruz, who was in charge of the exiles and who claims to have been on board of the gunboat and witnessed the incident, de- clared to me, however, that this report was not true. The Yaquis were drowned, he declared, but not by the authorities, and, since at that time the government was not killing any Yaquis whom it could catch and sell, I accept the version of Colonel Cruz as the correct one.
"Suicide — nothing but suicide," asseverated the Colo- nel. "Those Indians wanted to cheat me out of my com- mission money and so they threw their children into the sea and jumped in after them. I was on board myself and saw it all. I heard a loud cry, and looking, saw some of the crew running to the starboard side of the vessel. I saw the Yaquis in the water. Then there was a cry from the port side and I saw the Yaquis jumping overboard on that side. We lowered boats, but it was no use ; they all went down before we got to them."
"Every soldier who kills a Yaqui," an army physician who served two years with the troops against the Yaquis and whom I met in Mexico City, told me, "is paid a re- ward of one hundred dollars. To prove his feat the soldier must show the ears of his victim. 'Bring in the ears/ is the standing order of the officers. Often I have seen a company of soldiers drawn up in a square and one of their number receiving one hundred dollars for a pair of ears.
"Sometimes small squads of the Indians are cap- tured, and when I was with the army it was customary
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS 43
to offer the men freedom and money to lead the troops over the secret mountain trails to the fastnesses of their friends. The alternative was the rope, yet I never knew of one of these captives turning traitor. *Give me the rope,' they would cry, and I have seen such a man run, put the rope round his own neck and demand that it be tightened quickly, that he might not again be subjected to so base an insult.'*
I have before me a letter signed by G. G. Lelevier, a former member of the Mexican Liberal Party and editor of one of their papers in the United States. Lelevier is said to have afterwards gone over to the cause of the government. Commenting on a photograph showing a lot of Yaquis hanging from a tree in Sonora, the let- ter says:
"This picture resembles very much another one that was taken at the Yaqui river when General Angel Mar- tinez was in command of the Mexican army of occu- pation. It was the custom of this general to hang men be- cause they could not tell him where the insurrecto Yaquis were at the time, and he went so far as to lasso the women of the Yaquis and to hang them also. It went on so until the chief of the geographical commission re- ported the facts to the City of Mexico and threatened to resign if the practice continued. Then this monster of a general was removed.
"But later on Governor Rafael Ysabal — it must have been in 1902 — made a raid on Tiburon Island where some peaceful Yaquis had taken refuge, and then and there ordered the Seri Indians to bring to him the right hand of every Yaqui there, with the alternative of the Seris themselves being exterminated. Doctor Boido took a snapshot with a kodak, and you could see in it the governor laughing at the sight of a bunch of hands
44 BARBAROUS MEXICO
that had been brought to him and that were dangling from the end of a cane. This picture was even pub- lished in derision of the exploits of Governor Ysabal in the newspaper El Imparcial, of Mexico City."
In 1898 the government troops were armed for the first time with the improved Mauser rifle, and in that year they met and wiped out an army of Yaquis at Mazacoba, the killed numbering more than 1,000. This ended warfare on anything like an equal footing. There were no more large battles; the Yaqui warriors were merely hunted. Thousands of the Indians surrendered. Their leaders were executed, and they and their fami- lies were granted a new territory to the north, to which they journeyed as to a promised land. But it proved to be a barren desert, entirely waterless and one of the most uninhabitable spots in all America. Hence the peaceful Yaquis moved to other sections of the state, some of them becoming wage-workers in the mines, others finding employment on the railroads, and still others becoming peons on the farms. Then and there this portion of the Yaqui nation lost its identity and became merged with the peoples about it. But it is these Yaquis, the peaceful ones, who are sought out and deported to Yucatan.
A few Yaquis, perhaps four or five thousand, refused to give up the battle for their lands. The found inac- cessible peaks and established a stronghold high up in the Bacetete mountains, which border upon their former home. Here flow never-ceasing springs of cold water. Here, on the almost perpendicular cliffs, they built their little homes, planted their corn, raised their families and sang, sometimes, of the fertile valleys which once were theirs. The army of several thousand soldiers still hunted them. The soldiers could not reach those moun-
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS 45
tain heights, but they could wait for the Indians in the gorges and shoot them as they came down in search of meat, of clothes, and of other comforts which they yearned to add to their existence.
Many small bands of these so-called renegades have been killed. Others have been captured and executed. Rumors of peace have traveled the rounds only to prove untrue a little later. Peace conferences with the gov- ernment have been held, but have failed because the "renegades" could secure no guarantee that they would not be either executed or deported after they laid down their arms. In January, 1909, the report was officially sent out by Governor Torres that Chief Bule and sev- eral hundred of his warriors had surrendered on con- ditions. But later troubles showed this announcement to have been premature. There are at least a few hun- dred Yaquis among those Bacetete crags. They refuse to surrender. They are outlaws. They are cut off from the world. They have no connection with the peaceful element of their nation that is scattered all over the state of Sonora. Yet the existence of this handful of "rene- gades" is the only excuse the Mexican government has for gathering up peaceful Mexican families and deport- ing them — at the rate of 500 per month !
Why should a lot of women and children and old men be made to suffer because some of their fourth cousins are fighting away off there in the hills ? The army physi- cian with whom I talked in Mexico City answered the question in very energetic terms.
"The reason?" he said. "There is no reason. It is only an excuse. The excuse is that the workers con- tribute to the support of the fighters. If it is true, it is true only in an infinitesimal minority of cases, for the vast majority of the Yaquis are entirely out of touch
46 BARBAROUS MEXICO
with the fighters. There may be a few guilty parties, but absolutely no attempt is made to find them out. For what a handful of patriotic Yaquis may possibly be doing tens of thousand are made to suffer and die. It is as if a whole town were put to the torch because one of its inhabitants had stolen a horse.'*
The deportation of Yaquis to Yucatan and other slave sections of Mexico began to assume noticeable propor- tions about 1905. It was carried out on a small scale at first, then on a larger one.
Finally, in the spring of 1908, a despatch was pub- lished in American and Mexican newspapers saying that President Diaz had issued a sweeping order decreeing that every Yaqui, wherever found, men women and chil- dren, should be gathered up by the War Department and deported to Yucatan.
During my journeys in Mexico I inquired many times as to the authenticity of this despatch, and the story was confirmed. It was confirmed by men in the public de- partments of Mexico City. It was confirmed by Colo- nel Cruz, chief deporter of Yaquis. And it is certain that such an order, wherever it may have come from, was carried out. Yaqui workingmen were taken daily from mines, railroads and farms, old workingmen who never owned a rifle in their lives, women, children, babes, the old and the young, the weak and the strong. Guarded by soldiers and rurales they traveled together over the exile road. And there are others besides Yaquis who traveled over that road. Pimas and Opatas, other In- dians, Mexicans, and any dark people found who were poor and unable to protect themselves were taken, tagged as Yaquis, and sent away to the land of henequen. What becomes of them there? That is what I went to Yuca- tan to find out.
THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS 47
The secret that lies at the roots of the whole Yaqui affair was revealed to me and the whole matter summed up in a few words by Colonel Francisco B. Cruz of the Mexican army, in one of the most remarkable interviews which I obtained during my entire trip to Mexico.
For the past four years this officer has been in immedi- ate charge of transporting all the Yaqui exiles to Yuca- tan. I was fortunate enough to take passage on the same steamer with him returning from Progreso to Veracruz. He is a stout, comfortable, talkative old cam- paigner of about sixty years. The steamship people put us in the same stateroom, and, as the colonel had some government passes which he hoped to sell me, we were soon on the most confidential terms.
'Tn the past three and one-half years," he told me, *T have delivered just fifteen thousand seven hundred Ya- quis in Yucatan — delivered, mind you, for you must re- member that the government never allows me enough ex- pense money to feed them properly, and from ten to twenty per cent die on the journey.
"These Yaquis," he said, "sell in Yucatan for $65 apiece — men, women and children. Who gets the money ? Well, $10 goes to me for my services. The rest is turned over to the Secretary of War. This, however, is only a drop in the bucket, for I know this to be a fact, that every foot of land, every building, every cow, every burro, everything left behind by the Yaquis when they are carried away by the soldiers, is appropriated for the private use of authorities of the state of Sonora."
So according to this man, who has himself made at least $157,000 out of the business, the Yaquis are de- ported for the money there is in it — first, the money from the appropriation of their property, second, the money from the sale of their bodies. He declared to me
48 BARBAROUS MEXICO
that the deportations would never stop until the last possible dollar had been squeezed out of the business. The company of officials who have rotated in office in Sonora for the past twenty-five years would see to that, he said.
These little confidences of the colonel were given me merely as bits of interesting gossip to a harmless for- eigner. He had no notion of exposing the officials and citizens whose names he mentioned. He expressed no objection whatever to the system, rather gloried in it.
"In the past six months," the fat colonel told me, "I have handled three thousand Yaquis — five hundred a month. That's the capacity of the government boats between Guaymas and San Bias, but I hope to see it in- creased before the end of the year. I have just been given orders to hurry 1,500 more to Yucatan as quickly as I can get them there. Ah, yes, I ought to have a com- fortable little fortune for myself before this thing is over, for there are at least 100,000 more Yaquis to come !
"One hundred thousand more to come!" he repeated at my exclamation. "Yes, one hundred thousand, if one. Of course, theyVe not all really Yaquis, but — "
And President Diaz's chief deporter of Sonora work- ing-people lolling there upon the deck of the freight steamer passed me a smile which was illuminating, ex- ceedingly illuminating — ^yes, terribly illuminating!
CHAPTER III
OVER THE EXILE ROAD
Yaquis traveling to Yucatan, after arriving at the port of Guaymas, Sonora, embark on a government war ves- sel for the port of San Bias. After a journey of four or five days they are disembarked and are driven by foot over some of the roughest mountains in Mexico, from San Bias to Tepic and from Tepic to San Marcos. As the crow flies the distance is little more than one hun- dred miles; as the road winds it is twice as far, and re- quires from fifteen to twenty days to travel. "Bull pens," or concentration camps, are provided all along the route, and stops are made at the principal cities. All families are broken up on the way, the chief points at which this is done being Guaymas, San Marcos, Guadalajara and Mexico City. From San Marcos the unfortunates are carried by train over the Mexican Central Railway to Mexico City and from Mexico City over the Interna- tional Railway to Veracruz. Here they are bundled into one of the freight steamers of the "National" company, and in from two to five days are disembarked at Pro- greso and turned over to the waiting consignees.
On the road to Yucatan the companion of my jour- neys, L. Gutierrez DeLara, and I, saw gangs of Yaqui exiles, saw them in the "bull pen" in the midst of the army barracks in Mexico City ; finally we joined a party of them at Veracruz and traveled with them on ship from Veracruz to Progreso.
There were 104 of them shoved into the unclean hole astern of the freight steamer Sinaloa, on which we em- barked. We thought it might be difficult to obtain the
50 BARBAROUS MEXICO
Opportunity to visit this unclean hole, but, luckily, we were mistaken. The guard bent readily to friendly words, and before the ship was well under way my companion and I were seated on boxes in the hold with a group of exiles gathered about us, some of them, to- bacco-famished, pulling furiously at the cigarettes which we had passed among them, others silently munching the bananas, apples and oranges which we had brought.
There were two old men past fifty, one of them small, active, sharp-featured, talkative, dressed in American overalls, jumper, shoes and slouch hat, with the face and manner of a man bred to civilization ; the other, tall, silent, impassive, wrapped to the chin in a gay colored blanket, the one comfort he had snatched from his few belongings as the soldiers were leading him away. There was a magnificent specimen of an athlete under thirty, with a wizened baby girl of two held in the crook of one arm, an aggressive-faced woman of forty against whom was closely pressed a girl of ten shivering and shaking in the grasp of a malarial attack, two overgrown boys who squatted together in the background and grinned half foolishly at our questions, bedraggled women, nearly half of them with babies, and an astonishingly large number of little chubby-faced, bare-legged boys and girls who played uncomprehendingly about the floor or stared at us from a distance out of their big solemn black eyes.
"Revolutionists?" I asked of the man in overalls and jumper.
"No; workingmen."
"Yaquis?"
"Yes, one Yaqui," pointing to his friend in the blanket. "The rest are Pimas and Opatas."
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 51
"Then why are you here?"
"Ah, we are all Yaquis to General Torres. It makes no difference to him. You are dark. You dress in my clothes and you will be a Yaqui — to him. He makes no investigation, asks no questions — only takes you."
"Where are you from ?" I asked of the old man.
"Most of us are from Ures. They took us in the night and carried us away without allowing us to make up bundles of our belongings."
"I am from Horcasitas," spoke up the young athlete with the babe on his arm. "I was plowing in the field when they came, and they did not give me time to un- hitch my oxen."
"Where is the mother of your baby?" I inquired cu- riously of the young father.
"Dead in San Marcos," he replied, closing his teeth tight. "That three weeks' tramp over the mountains killed her. They have allowed me to keep the little one — so far."
"Did any of you make resistance when the soldiers came to take you?" I asked.
"No," snswered the old man from Ures. "We went quietly; we did not try to run away." Then with a smile : "The officers found more trouble in looking after their men, their privates, to prevent them from running away, from deserting, than they did with us.
"We were one hundred and fifty- three at the start, we of Ures," went on the old man. "Farm laborers, all of us. We worked for small farmers, poor men, men with not more than half a dozen families each in their em- ploy. One day a government agent visited the neighbor- hood and ordered the bosses to give an account of all their laborers. The bosses obeyed, but they did not know what it meant until a few days later, when the
52 BARBAROUS MEXICO
soldiers came. Then they knew, and they saw ruin coming to them as well as to us. They begged the offi- cers, saying: 'This is my peon. He is a good man. He has been with me for twenty years. I need him for the harvest.' "
"It is true," broke in the woman with the ague- stricken child. "We were with Carlos Romo for twenty- two years. The night we were taken we were seven; now we are two."
"And we were with Eugenio Morales for sixteen years," spoke another woman.
"Yes," went on the spokesman, "our bosses followed us, begging, but it was no use. Some of them followed us all the way to Hermosillo. There was Manuel Gan- dara, and Jose Juan Lopez, and Franco Tallez, and Eu- genio Morales and the Romo brothers, Jose and Carlos. You will find them there now and they will tell you that what we say is true. They followed us, but it was no use. They had to go back and call vainly at our empty houses for laborers. We were stolen — and they were robbed !
"They died on the way like starving cattle," went on the old man from Ures. "When one fell ill he never got well again. One woman was deathly sick at the start. She begged to be left behind, but they wouldn't leave her. She was the first to fall — it happened on the train between Hermosillo and Guaymas.
"But the crudest part of the trail was between San Bias and San Marcos. Those women with babies! It was awful! They dropped down in the dust again and again.^ Two never got up again, and we buried them ourselves there beside the road."
"There were burros in San Bias," interrupted a woman, "and mules and horses. Oh, why didn't they
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 53
let US ride? But our men were good. When the little legs of the ninos were weary our men carried them on their backs. And when the three women who were far gone in pregnancy could walk no more our men made stretchers of twigs and carried them, taking turns. Yes, our men were good, but now they are gone. We do not see them any more!"
"The soldiers had to tear me away from my husband/* said another, "and when I cried out they only laughed. The next night a soldier came and tried to take hold of me, but I pulled off my shoes and beat him with them. Yes, the soldiers bothered the women often, especially that week we starved in Mexico City, but always the women fought them back."
"I have a sister in Yucatan," said a young woman un- der twenty. "Two years ago they carried her away. As soon as we arrive I shall try to find her. We will keep each other company, now that they have taken my husband from me. Tell me, is it so terribly hot in Yucatan as they say it is? I do not like hot weather, yet if they will only let me live with my sister I will not mind."
"To whom do all these bright little tads, these mu- chachos, all of the same size, belong?" I inquired.
"Quien sahef' answered an old woman. "Their parents are gone, just as are our babes. They take our children from us and give us the children of strangers. And when we begin to love the new ones, they take them away, too. Do you see that woman huddled over there with her face in her hands? They took her four little boys at Guadalajara and left her nothing. Myself? Yes, they took my husband. For more than thirty years we had never been parted for a single night. But that made no difference ; he is gone. Yet perhaps I am lucky ;
54 BARBAROUS MEXICO
I still have my daughter. Do you think, though, that we may meet our husbands again in Yucatan?"
As we breasted the Veracruz lighthouse, the shoulder of a Norther heaved itself against the side of the vessel, the ocean streamed in at the lower portholes and the quarters of the unhappy exiles were flooded with water. They fled for the deck, but here were met by flying sheets of rain, which drove them back again. Between the flooded hold and the flooded poop the exiles spent the night, and when, early the next morning, as we drove into the Coatzacoalcos river, I strolled aft again, I saw them lying about the deck, all of them drenched and shivering, some of them writhing in the throes of acute seasickness.
We steamed thirty miles up the Coatzacoalcos river, then anchored to the shore and spent a day loading jun- gle bulls for the tough beef market of New Orleans. Two hundred ordinary cattle may be coaxed through a hole in the side of a ship in the space of two hours, but these bulls were as wild as wolves, and each had to be half butchered before he would consent to walk in the straight and narrow way. Once inside, and ranged along the two sides of the vessel, they fought, trampled each other, bawled as loud as steam whistles, and in a num- ber of instances broke their head ropes and smashed through the flimsy railing which had been erected to prevent them from over-running other portions of the lower deck. In a bare space at the stern of the vessel, surrounded on three sides by plunging, bawling bulls, were the quarters of the "Yaquis." It was stay there and run the risk of being trampled, or choose the un- sheltered deck. For the remaining four days of the journey, one of which we spent waiting for the Norther to pass, the "Yaquis" chose the deck.
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 55
At last we arrived at Progreso. As we entered the train for Merida we saw our friends being herded into the second class coaches. They left us at the little sta- tion of San Ignacio, on their way to a plantation belong- ing to Governor Olegario Molina, and we saw them no more.
In Yucatan I soon learned what becomes of the Yaqui exiles. They are sent to the henequen plantations as slaves, slaves on almost exactly the same basis as are the 100,000 Mayas whom I found on the plantations. They are held as chattels, they are bought and sold, they receive no wages, but are fed on beans, tortillas and putrid fish. They are beaten, sometimes beaten to death. They are worked from dawn until night in the hot sun beside the Mayas. The men are locked up at night. The women are required to marry Chinamen or Mayas. They are hunted when they run away, and are brought back by the police if they reach a settlement. Families, broken up in Sonora or on the way, are never permitted to re- unite. After they once pass into the hands of the planter the government cares no more for them, takes no more account of them. The government has received its money, and the fate of the Yaquis is in the hands of the planter.
I saw many Yaquis in Yucatan. I talked with them. I saw them beaten. One of the first things that I saw on a Yucatan plantation was the beating of a Yaqui. His name was Rosanta Bajeca.
The act, though not intentionally so, perhaps, was the- atrically staged. It was at 3 :45 o'clock in the morning, just after roll-call of the slaves. The slave gang was drawn up in front of the plantation store, the fitful rays of the lanterns sputtering high on the store front play- ing uncertainly over their dusky faces and dirty white
56 BARBAROUS MEXICO
forms. There were seven hundred of them. Now and then a brighter lantern beam shot all the way to the tow- ering tropical trees, which, standing shoulder to shoulder, walled in the grass-grown patio. Under the hanging lanterns and facing the ragged band stood the adminis- trador, or general manager, the mayordomo primero, or superintendent, and the lesser bosses, the mayordomos secundos, the majacol and the capataces.
**Rosanta Bajeca!'*
The name, squeaked out by the voice of the adminis- trador, brought from the crowd a young Yaqui, medium- sized, sinewy-bodied, clean-featured, with well-formed head erect on square shoulders, bony jaw fixed, dark, deep set eyes darting rapidly from one side to another of the circle which surrounded him, like a tiger forced out of the jungle and into the midst of the huntsmen.
"Off with your shirt!" rasped the administrador, and at the words superintendent and foremen rmged closer about him. One reached for the garment, but the Yaqui fended the hand, then with the quickness of a cat, dodged a cane which swished at his bare head from the opposite direction. For one instant — no more — with the hate of his eyes he held the circle at bay, then with a movement of consent he waved them back, and with a single jerk drew the shirt over his head and bared his muscular bronze body, scarred and discolored from pre- vious beatings, for the whip. Submissive but dignified he stood there, for all the world like a captive Indian chief of a hundred years ago, contemptuously awaiting the torture of his enemies.
Listlessly the waiting slaves looked on. A regiment of toil, they stood half a dozen deep, with soiled calico trousers reaching half way to the ankles or rolled to the knees, shirts of the same material with many gaping
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 57
mouths showing the bare bronze skin beneath, bare legs, bare feet, battered grass hats held deferentially in the hands — a tatterdemalion lot, shaking the sleep from their eyes, blinking at the flickering lanterns. Three races there were, the sharp-visaged, lofty-browed Maya, abo- rigine of Yucatan, the tall, arrow-backed Chinaman and the swarthy, broad-fisted Yaqui from Sonora.
At a third command of the administrador there stepped from the host of waiting slaves a giant Chinese. Crouching, he grasped the wrists of the silent Yaqui. The next moment he was standing straight with the Yaqui on his back in the manner of a tired child being carried by one of its elders.
Not one of that throng who did not know what was coming, yet not until a capatas reached for a bucket hanging high on the store front did there come a ten- sion of nerves among those seven hundred men. The whipper extraordinary, known as a majocol, a deep- chested, hairy brute, bent over the bucket and soused his hands deep into the water within. Withdrawing them, he held high for inspection four dripping ropes, each three feet long. The thick writhing things in the dim lamplight seemed like four bloated snakes, and at sight of them the tired backs of the ragged seven hun- dred straightened with a jerk and an involuntary gasp rippled over the assemblage. Laggard slumber, though unsated, dropped from their eyes. At last all were awake, wide awake.
The ropes were of native henequen braided tight and thick and heavy for the particular purpose in hand Water-soaked, to give them more weight and cutting power, they were admirably fitted for the work of "cleaning up," the term whereby corporal punishment is known on the plantations of Yucatan.
58 BARBAROUS MEXICO
The hairy majocol selected one of the four, tossed back the remaining three, the pail was carried away and the giant Chinaman squared off with the naked body of the victim to the gaze of his fellow bondsmen. The drama was an old one to them, so old that their eyes must have ached many times at the sight, yet for them it could never lose its fascination. Each knew that his own time was coming, if it had not already come, and not one possessed the physical power to turn his back upon the spectacle.
Deliberately the majocol measured his distance, then as deliberately raised his arm high and brought it swiftly down again; the bloated snake swished through the air and fell with a spat across the glistening bronze shoul- ders of the Yaqui !
The administrador, a small, nervous man of many ges- tures, nodded his approval and glanced at his watch, the mayordomo, big, stolid, grinned slowly, the half dozen capataces leaned forward a little more obliquely in their eagerness, the regiment of slaves swayed bodily as by some invisible force, and a second gasp, painful and sharp like the bursting air from a severed windpipe, escaped them.
Every eye was riveted tight upon that scene in the uncertain dimness of the early morning — the giant Chi- naman, bending slightly forward now, the naked body upon his shoulders, the long, uneven, livid welt that marked the visit of the wet rope, the deliberate, the ago- nizingly deliberate majocol, the administrador, watch in hand, nodding endorsement, the grinning mayordomo, the absorbed capataces.
All held their breath for the second blow. I held my breath with the rest, held it for ages, until I thought the rope would never fall. Not until I saw the finger
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 59
signal of the administrador did I know that the blows were delivered by the watch and not until it was all over did I know that, in order to multiply the torture, six seconds were allowed to intervene between each stroke.
The second blow fell, and the third, and the fourth. I counted the blows as they fell, ages apart. At the fourth the strong brown skin broke and little pin-heads of crimson pushed themselves out, burst, and started downward in thin tricklets. At the sixth the glistening back lost its rigidity and fell to quivering like a jelly- fish. At the ninth a low whine somewhere in the depths of that Yaqui, found its devious way outward and into the open. Oh, that whine! I hear it now, a hard, hard whine, as if indurated to diamond hardness by drilling its way to the air through a soul of adamant.
At last the spats ceased — there were fifteen — the ad- ministrador, with a final nod, put away his watch, the giant Chinaman released his grip on the brown wrists and the Yaqui tumbled in a limp heap to the ground. He lay there for a moment, his face in his arms, his quivering, bleeding flesh to the sky, then a foreman stepped forward and put a foot roughly against his hip.
The Yaqui lifted his head, disclosing to the light a pair of glazed eyes and a face twisted with pain. A mo- ment later he rose to his feet and staggered forward to join his fellow bondsmen. In that moment the spell of breathless silence on the seven hundred snapped, the ranks moved in agitation and there rose a hum of low speech from every section of the crowd. The special "cleaning up" of the morning was over. Five minutes later the day's work on the farm had begun.
Naturally I made inquiries about Rosanta Bajeca to find out what crime he had committed to merit fifteen
60 BARBAROUS MEXICO
lashes of the wet rope. I ascertained that he had been only a month in Yucatan, and but three days before had been put in the field with a harvesting gang to cut and trim the great leaves of the henequen plant. Two thou- sand a day was the regular stint for each slave, and Bajeca had been given three days in which to acquire the dexterity necessary to harvest the required number of leaves. He had failed. Hence the flogging. There had been no other fault.
"It's a wonder," I remarked to a capatas, "that this Yaqui did not tear himself from the back of the China- man. It's a wonder he did not fight. He seems like a brave man ; he has the look of a fighter.'*
The capataz chuckled.
"One month ago he was a fighter," was the reply, "but a Yaqui learns many things in a month in Yucatan. Still, there was a time when we thought this dog would never learn. Now and then they come to us that way; they never learn; they're never worth the money that's paid for them."
"Tell me about this one," I urged.
"He fought; that's all. The day he came he was put to work loading bundles of leaves onto the elevator which leads to the cleaning machine. The mayordomo — yes, the mayordomo primero — happened along and punched the fellow in the stomach with his cane. A half minute later a dozen of us were struggling to pull that Yaqui wolf away from the throat of the mayordomo. We starved him for a day and then dragged him out for a cleaning up. But he fought with his fingers and with his teeth until a capatas laid him out with the blunt edge of a machete. After that he tasted the rope daily for a while, but every day for no less than a week the fool fought crazily on until he kissed the earth under
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 61
the weight of a club. But our majocol never faltered. That majocol is a genius. He conquered the wolf. He wielded the rope until the stubborn one surrendered, un- til that same Yaqui came crawling, whimpering, on hands and knees and licked with his naked tongue the hand of the man who had beaten him!"
During my travels in Yucatan I was repeatedly struck with the extremely human character of the peo- ple whom the Mexican government calls Yaquis. The Yaquis are Indians, they are not white, yet when one converses with them in a language mutually understood one is struck with the likenesses of the mental processes of White and Brown. I was early convinced that the Yaqui and I were more alike in mind than in color. I became convinced, too, that the family attachments of the Yaqui mean quite as much to the Yaqui as the fam- ily attachments of the American mean to the American. Conjugal fidelity is the cardinal virtue of the Yaqui home and it seems to be so not because of any tribal superstition of past times or because of any teachings of priests, but because of a constitutional tenderness sweetened more and more with the passing of the years, for the one with whom he had shared the meat and the shelter and the labor of life, the joys and sorrows of existence.
Over and over again I saw this exemplified on the ex- ile road and in Yucatan. The Yaqui woman feels as keenly the brutal snatching away of her babe as would the cultivated American woman. The heart-strings of the Yaqui wife are no more proof against a violent and unwished- for separation from her husband than would be the heart-strings of the refined mistress of a beauti- ful American home.
The Mexican government forbids divorce and re-
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marriage within its domain, but for the henequen plant- ers of Yucatan all things are possible. To a Yaqui woman a native of Asia is no less repugnant than he is to an American woman, yet one of the first barbarities the henequen planter imposes upon the Yaqui slave woman, freshly robbed of the lawful husband of her bosom, is to compel her to marry a Chinaman and live with him!
"We do that," explained one of the planters to me, "in order to make the Chinamen better satisfied and less inclined to run away. And besides we know that every new babe born on the place will some day be worth any- where from $500 to $1,000 cashT
The cultivated white woman, you say, would die of the shame and the horror of such conditions. But so does the brown woman of Sonora. No less a personage than Don Enrique Camara Zavala, president of the "Camara de Agricola de Yucatan," and a millionaire planter himself, told me:
"If the Yaquis last out the first year they generally get along all right and make good workers, but the trouble is, at least two-thirds of them die off in the first tzvelve months!"
On the ranch of one of the most famous henequen kings we found about two hundred Yaquis. One-third of these were men, who were quartered with a large body of Mayas and Chinamen. Entirely apart from these, and housed in a row of new one-room huts, each set in a tiny patch of uncultivated land, we discovered the Yaqui women and children.
We found them squatting around on their bare floors or nursing an open-air fire and a kettle just outside the back door. We found no men among them, Yaquis or
OVER THE EXILE ROAD 63
Chinamen, for they had arrived only one month before — all of them — f rom Sonora.
In one house we found as many as fourteen inmates. There was a woman past fifty with the strength of an Indian chief in her face and with words which went to the mark like an arrow to a target. There was a com- fortable, home-like woman with a broad, pock-marked face, pleasant words and eyes which kindled with friendliness despite her troubles. There were two woman who watched their fire and listened only. There was a girl of fifteen, a bride of four months, but now alone, a wonderfully comely girl with big eyes and soft mouth, who sat with her back against the wall and smiled and smiled — until she cried. There was a sick woman who lay on the floor and groaned feebly but never looked up, and there were eight children.
*'Last week we were fifteen," said the home-like woman, "but one has already gone. They never get well." She reached over and gently stroked the hair of the sister who lay on the floor.
"Were you all married?" I asked.
"All," nodded the old woman with the face of a chief.
"And where are they now ?"
"Quien sahef" And she searched our eyes deep for the motive of our questions.
"I am a Papago," reassured De Lara. "We are friends."
"You are not working," I remarked. "What are you doing?"
"Starving," said the old woman.
"We get that once a week — for all of us," explained the home-like one, nodding at three small chunks of raw beef — less than a five-cent stew in the United States — which had just been brought from the plantation store.
64 BARBAROUS MEXICO
"Besides that we get only corn and black beans and not half enough of either of them."
"We are like hogs; we are fed on corn," put in the old woman. "In Sonora we made our tortillas of wheat."
"How long will they starve you?" I asked.
"Until we marry Chinamen," flashed the old woman, unexpectedly.
"Yes," confirmed the home-like one. "Twice they have brought the Chinamen before us, lined them up, and said: 'Choose a man.' Twice."
"And why didn't you choose?"
This question several of the women answered in cho- rus. In words and wry faces they expressed their ab- horrence of the Chinamen, and with tremulous earnest- ness assured us that they had not yet forgotten their own husbands.
"I begged them," said the old woman, "to let me off. I told them I was too old, that it was no use, that I was a woman no longer, but they said I must choose, too. They will not let me off; they say I will have to choose with the rest."
"Twice they have lined us up," reiterated the home- like one, "and said we must choose. But we wouldn't choose. One woman chose, but when she saw the rest hang back she pushed the man away from her. They threatened us with the rope, but still we hung back. They will give us but one more chance, they say. Then if we do not choose, they will choose for us. And if we do not consent we will be put in the field and worked and whipped like the men."
"And get twelve centavos a day (six cents American) to live on," said the old woman. "Twelve centavos a day with food at the store twice as dear as in Sonora!"
"Next Sunday morning they will make us choose," re-
OVER THE EXILE ROAO 65
peated the home-like woman. "And if we don't choose — "
''Last Sunday they beat that sister there," said the old woman. "She swore she'd never choose, and they beat her just like they beat the men. Come, Refugio, show them your back."
But the woman at the fire shrank away and hung her head in mortification.
"No, no," she protested, then after a moment she mut- tered: "When the Yaqui men are beaten they die of shame, but the women can stand to be beaten ; they can- not die."
"It's true," nodded the old woman, "the men die of shame sometimes — and sometimes they die of their own will."
When we turned the talk to Sonora and to the long journey the voices of the women began to falter. They were from Pilares de Teras, where are situated the mines of Colonel Garcia. The soldiers had come in the day- time while the people were in the field picking the ripe corn from the stalks. They had been taken from their harvest labor and compelled to walk all the way to Her- mosillo, a three weeks' tramp.
The Yaqui love for the one who suckled them is strong, and several of the younger women recounted the details of the parting from the mother. Then we spoke of their husbands again, but they held their tears until I asked the question : "How would you like to go back with me to your homes in Sonora?"
That opened the flood-gates. The tears started first down the plump cheeks of the cheery, home-like woman, then the others broke in, one at a time, and at last the listening children on the floor were blubbering dolefully with their elders. Weeping, the unhappy exiles lost their last modicum of reserve. They begged us please to take
^ BARBAROUS MEXICO
them back to Sonora or to find their husbands for them. The old woman implored us to get word to her boss, Leonardo Aguirre, and would not be content until I had penned his name in my note-book. The bashful woman at the fire, aching for some comforting, hopeful words, parted her dress at the top and gave us a glimpse of the red marks of the lash upon her back.
I looked into the face of my companion; the tears were trickling down his cheeks. As for me, I did not cry. I am ashamed now that I did not cry !
Such is the life of the Yaqui nation in its last chapter. When I looked upon those miserable creatures there I said:. "There can be nothing worse than this." But when I saw Valle Nacional I said: "This is worse than Yucatan."
CHAPTER IV
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL
Valle Nacional is undoubtedly the worst slave hole in Mexico. Probably it is the worst in the world. When I visited Valle Nacional I expected to find it milder than Yucatan. I found it more pitiless.
In Yucatan the Maya slaves die off faster than they are born and two-thirds of the Yaqui slaves are killed during the first year after their importation into the country. In Valle Nacional all of the slaves, all but a very few — perhaps five per cent — pass back to earth within a space of seven or eight months.
This statement is almost unbelievable. I would not have believed it; possibly not even after I had seen the whole process of working them and beating them and starving them to death, were it not the fact that the masters themselves told me that it was true. And there are fifteen thousand of these Valle Nacional slaves — fifteen thousand new ones every year!
"By the sixth or seventh month they begin to die off like flies at the first winter frost, and after that they're not worth keeping. The cheapest thing to do is to let them die ; there are plenty more where they came from."
Word for word, this is a statement made to me by Antonio Pla, general manager of one-third the tobacco lands in Valle Nacional.
"1 have been here for more than five years and every month I see hundreds and sometimes thousands of men, women and children start over the road to the valley, but I never see them come back. Of every hundred who go over the road not more than one ever sees this town
67
68 BARBAROUS MEXICO
again." This assertion was made to me by a station agent of the Veracruz al Pacifico railroad.
"There are no survivors of Valle Nacional — no real ones/' a government engineer who has charge of the improvement of certain harbors told me. "Now and then one gets out of the valley and gets beyond El Hule. He staggers and begs his way along the weary road to- ward Cordoba, but he never gets back where he came from. Those people come out of the valley walking corpses, they travel on a little way and then they fall."
This man's work has carried him much into Valle Niacional and he knows more of the country, probably, than does any Mexican not directly interested in the slave trade.
"They die ; they all die. The bosses never let them go until they're dying."
Thus declared one of the police officers of the town of Valle Nacional, which is situated in the center of the valley and is supported by it.
And everywhere over and over again I was told the same thing. Even Manuel Lagunas, president e (mayor) of Valle Nacional, protector of the planters and a slave owner himself, said it. Miguel Vidal, secretary of the municipality, said it. The bosses themselves said it. The Indian dwellers of the mountain sides said it. The slaves said it. And when I had seen, as well as heard, I was convinced that it was the truth.
The slaves of Valle Nacional are not Indians, as are the slaves of Yucatan. They are Mexicans. Some are skilled artizans. Others are artists. The majority of them are common laborers. As a whole, except for their rags, their bruises, their squalor and their despair, they are a very fair representation of the Mexican people. They are not criminals. Not more than ten per cent were
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 69
even charged with any crime. The rest of them are peaceful, law-abiding citizens. Yet not one came to the valley of his own free will, not one would not leave the valley on an instant's notice if he or she could get away.
Do not entertain the idea that Mexican slavery is con- fined to Yucatan and Valle Nacional. Conditions simi- lar to those of Valle Nacional are the rule in many sec- tions of Diaz-land, and especially in the states south of the capital. I cite Valle Nacional because it is most no- torious as a region of slaves, and because, as I have al- ready suggested, it presents just a little bit the worst ex- ample of chattel slavery that I know of.
The secret of the extreme conditions of Valle Nacional is mainly geographical. Valle Nacional is a deep gorge from two to five miles wide and twenty miles long tucked away among almost impassable mountains in the extreme northwestern corner of the state of Oaxaca. Its mouth is fifty miles up the Papaloapan river from El Hule, the nearest railroad station, yet it is through El Hule that every human being passes in going to or com- ing from the valley. There is no other practical route in, no other one out. The magnificent tropical moun- tains which wall in the valley are covered with an im- penetrable jungle made still more impassable by jaguars, pumas and gigantic snakes. Moreover, there is no wagon road to Valle Nacional ; only a river and a bridle path — a bridle path which carries one now through the jungle, now along precipitous cliffs where the rider must dis- mount and crawl, leading his horse behind him, now across the deep, swirling current of the river. It takes a strong swimmer to cross this river at high water, yet a pedestrian must swim it more than once in order to get out of Valle Nacional.
The equestrian must cross it five times— four times in
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a canoe alongside which his mount swims laboriously, once by fording, a long and difficult route over which large rocks must be avoided and deep holes kept away from. The valley itself is as flat as a floor, clear of all rank growth, and down its gentle slope winds the Papa- loapan river. The valley, the river and its rim form one of the most beautiful sights it has ever been my lot to look upon.
Valle Kacional is three days' journey from Cordoba, two from El Hule. Stray travelers sometimes get as far as Tuztepec, the chief city of the political district, but no one goes on to Valle Nacional who has not business there. It is a tobacco country, the most noted in Mex- ico, and the production is carried on by about thirty large plantations owned and operated almost exclusively by Spaniards. Between El Hule and the head of the valley- are four towns, Tuztepec, Chiltepec, Jacatepec and Valle Nacional, all situated on the banks of the river, all pro- vided with policemen to hunt runaway slaves, not one of whom can get out of the valley without passing the towns. Tuztepec, the largest, is provided with ten po- licemen and eleven rurales (mounted country police). Besides, every runaway slave brings a reward of $10 to the man or policeman who catches and returns him to his owner.
Thus it will be understood how much the geograph- ical isolation of Valle Nacional accounts for its being just a little worse than most other slave districts of Mexico. Combined with this may be mentioned the complete understanding that is had with the government and the nearness to a practically inexhaustible labor market.
Just as in Yucatan, the slavery of Valle Nacional is merely peonage, or labor for debt, carried to the extreme,
TYPE OF ENGANCHADO OR PLANTATION SLAVE
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 71
although outwardly it takes a slightly different form — that of contract labor.
The origin of the conditions of Valle Nacional was undoubtedly contract labor. The planters needed la- borers. They went to the expense of importing labor- ers with the understanding that the laborers would stay with their jobs for a given time. Some laborers tried to jump their contracts and the planters used force to compel them to stay. The advance money and the cost of transportation was looked upon as a debt which the laborer could be compelled to work out. From this it was only a step to so ordering the conditions of labor that the laborer could under no circumstances ever hope to get free. In time Valle Nacional became a word of horror with the working people of all Mexico. They re- fused to go there for any price. So the planters felt compelled to tell them they were going to take them somewhere else. From this it was only a step to play- ing the workman false all round, to formulating a con- tract not to be carried out, but to help get the laborer into the toils. Finally, from this it was only a step to forming a business partnership with the government, whereby the police power should be put into the hands of the planters to help them carry on a traffic in slaves.
The planters do not call their slaves slaves. They call them contract laborers. I call them slaves because the moment they enter Valle Nacional they become the personal property of the planter and there is no law or government to protect them.
In the first place the planter buys his slave for a given sum. Then he works him at will, feeds or starves him to suit himself, places armed guards over him day and night, beats him, pays him no money, kills him, and the laborer has no recourse. Call it by another name if it
72 BARBAROUS MEXICO
pleases you. I call it slavery only because I do not know of a name that will fit the conditions better.
I have said that no laborer sent to Valle Nacional to become a slave travels the road of his own free will. There are just two ways employed to get them there. They are sent over the road either by a jefe politico or by a "labor agent" working in conjunction with a jefe politico or other officials of the government.
A jefe politico is a civil officer who rules political districts corresponding to our counties. He is appointed by the president or by the governor of his state and is also mayor, or presidente, of the principal town or city in his district. In turn he usually appoints the mayors of the towns under him, as well as all other officers of im- portance. He has no one to answer to except his gov- ernor— ^unless the national president feels like interfering — and altogether is quite a little Czar in his domain.
The methods employed by the jefe politico working alone are very simple. Instead of sending petty prison- ers to terms in jail he sells them into slavery in Valle Nacional. And as he pockets the money himself, he naturally arrests as many persons as he can. This method is followed more or less by the jefes politicos of all the leading cities of southern Mexico.
The jefe politico of each of the four largest cities in southern Mexico, so I was told by Manuel La- gunas, by "labor agents," as well as by others whose veracity in the matter I have no reason to question — pays an annual rental of $10,000 per year for his office. The office would be worth no such amount were it not for the spoils of the slave trade and other lit- tle grafts which are indulged in by the holder. Lesser jefes pay their governors lesser amounts. They send their victims over the road in gangs of from ten to one
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 73
hundred or even more. They get a special government rate from the railroads, send along government-salaried rurales to guard them; hence the selling price of $45 to $50 per slave is nearly all clear profit.
But only ten per cent, of the slaves are sent directly to Valle Nacional by the jefes politicos. There is no basis in law whatsoever for the proceeding, and the jefes politi- cos prefer to work in conjunction with "labor agents." There is also no basis in law for the methods employed by the "labor agents," but the partnership is profitable. The officials are enabled to hide behind the *'labor agents" and the "labor agents" are enabled to work under the protection of the officials and absolutely without fear of criminal prosecution.
In this partnership of the government and the labor agent — ^popularly known as an enganchador (snarer) — the function of the labor agent is to snare the laborer, the function of the government to stand behind him, help him, protect him, give him low transportation rates and free guard service, and finally, to take a share of the profits.
The methods employed by the labor agent in snaring the laborer are many and various. One is to open an em- ployment office and advertise for workers who are to be given high wages, a comfortable home and plenty of freedom somewhere in the south of Mexico. Free trans- portation is offered. These inducements always cause a certain number to take the bait, especially men with families who want to move with their families to a more prosperous clime. The husband and father is given an advance fee of $5 and the whole family is locked up in a room as securely barred as a jail.
After a day or two, as they are joined by others, they come to have misgivings. Perhaps they ask to be let
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out, and then they find that they are indeed prisoners. They are told that they are in debt and will be held until they work out their debt. A few days later the door opens and they file out. They find that rurales are all about them. They are marched through a back street to a railroad station, where they are put upon the train. They try to get away, but it is no use ; they are prisoners. In a few days they are in Valle Nacional.
Usually the laborer caught in this way is taken through the formality of signing a contract. He is told that he is to get a good home, good food, and one, two or three dollars a day wages for a period of six months or a year. A printed paper is shoved under his nose and the engan- chandor rapidly points out several alluring sentences written thereon. A pen is put quickly into his hand and he is told to sign in a hurry. The five dollars advance fee is given him to clinch the bargain and put him in debt to the agent. He is usually given a chance to spend this, or a part of it, usually for clothing or other necessaries in order that he may be unable to pay it back when he discovers that he has been trapped. The blanks on the printed contract — fixing the wages, etc. — are usually filled out afterwards by the labor agent or the consignee.
In Mexico City and other large centers of population there are permanently maintained places called casas de los enganchadores (houses of the snarers). They are regularly known to the police and to large slave buyers of the hot lands. Yet they are nothing more nor less than private jails into which are enticed laborers, who are held there against their will until such time as they are sent away in gangs guarded by the police powers of the government.
A third method employed by the labor agent is out- right kidnapping. I have heard of many cases of the
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 75
kidnapping of women and of men. Hundreds of half- drunken men are picked up about the pulque shops of Mexico City every season, put under lock and key, and later hurried off to Valle Nacional. Children, also, are regularly kidnapped for the Valle Nacional trade. The official records of Mexico City say that during the year ending September 1, 1908, 360 little boys between the ages of six and twelve disappeared on the streets. Some of these have later been located in Valle Nacional.
During my first Mexican trip El Imparcial, a leading daily newspaper of Mexico, printed a story of a boy of seven who had disappeared while his mother was looking into the windows of a pawn shop. A frantic search failed to locate him; he was an only child, and as a result of sorrow the father drank himself to death in a few days* time, while the mother went insane and also died. Three months later, the boy, ragged and footsore, struggled up the steps and knocked at the door that had been his parents'. He had been kidnapped and sold to a tobacco planter. But he had attained the well-nigh impossible. With a boy of nine, he had eluded the plantation guards, and, by reason of their small size, the two had escaped observation, and, by stealing a canoe, had reached El Hule. By slow stages, begging their food on the way, the baby tramps had reached home.
The typical life story of a labor agent I heard in Cordoba on my way to the valley. It was told me first by a negro contractor from New Orleans, who had been in the country for about fifteen years. It was told me again by the landlord of my hotel. Later, it was confirmed by several tobacco planters in the valley. The story is this:
Four years ago Daniel T , an unsuccessful Span- ish adventurer, arrived, penniless, in Cordoba. In a few
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days he was having trouble with his landlord over the non-payment of rent. But he had learned a thing or two in those few days, and he set about to take advan- tage of his knowledge. He went for a stroll about the streets and, coming upon a farm laborer, thus addressed him:
"Would you care to earn dos reales (25 centavos) very easily, my man?"
Of course the man cared, and in a few minutes he was on his way to the Spaniard's room carrying a "mes- sage." The wily fellow took another route, arrived first, met the messenger at the door, took him by the neck, and, dragging him inside, gagged and bound him and left him on the floor while he went out to hunt up a labor agent. That night the adventurer sold his prisoner for $20, paid his rent, and immediately began laying plans for repeating the operation on a larger scale.
The incident marked the entrance of this man into the business of "labor contracting." In a few months he had made his bargain with the political powers of Mexico City, of Veracruz, of Oaxaca, of Tuztepec and
other places. Today he is El Senor Daniel T . I
saw his home, a palatial mansion with the sign of three cocks above the door. He uses a private seal and is said to be worth $100,000, all acquired as a "labor agent."
The prevailing price in 1908 for men was $45 each, women and children half price. In 1907, before the panic, it was $60 per man. All slaves entering the valley must wait over at Tuztepec, where Rodolpho Pardo, the jefe politico of the district, counts them and exacts a toll of ten per cent of the purchase price, which he puts into his own pocket.
The open partnership of the government in the slave traffic must necessarily have some excuse. The excuse
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 17
is the debt, the $5 advance fee usually paid by the labor agent to the laborer. It is unconstitutional, but it serves. The presidente of Valle Nacional told me, "There is not a police official in all southern Mexico who will not recognize that advance fee as a debt Mid acknowledge your right to take the body of the laborer where you will.''
When the victim arrives in the valley of tobacco he learns that the promises of the labor agent were made merely to entrap him. Moreover, he learns also that the contract — if he has been lucky enough to get a peep at that instrument — was made exactly for the same pur- pose. As the promises of the labor agent belie the provisions of the contract, so the contract belies the actual facts. The contract usually states that the laborer agrees to sell himself for a period of six months, but no laborer with energy left in his body is by any chance set free in six months. The contract usually states that the employer is bound to furnish medical treatment for the laborers; the fact is that there is not a single physician for all the slaves of Valle Nacional. Finally, the con- tract usually binds the employer to pay the men fifty centavos (25 cents American) per day as wages, and the women three pesos a month ($1.50 American), but I was never able to find one who ever received one copper centavo from his master — never anything beyond the advance fee paid by the labor agent.
The bosses themselves boasted to me — several of them — that they never paid any money to their slaves. Yet they never called their system slavery. They claimed to "keep books" on their slaves and juggle the accounts in such a way as to keep them always in debt. "Yes, the wages are fifty centavos a day," they would say, "but they must pay us back what we give to bring them
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here. And they must give us interest on it, too. And they must pay for the clothing that we give them — and the tobacco, and anything else."
This is exactly the attitude of every one of the to- bacco planters of Valle Nacional. For clothing, and tobacco, and "anything else," they charge ten prices. It is no exaggeration. Senor Rodriguez, proprietor of the farm "Santa Fe," for example, showed me a pair of unbleached cotton pa jama-like things that the slaves use for pantaloons. His price, he said, was three dollars a pair. A few days later I found the same thing in Veracruz at thirty cents.
Trousers at $3, shirts the same price — suits of clothes so flimsy that they wear out and drop off in three weeks' time. Eight suits in six months at $6 is $48. Add $45, the price of the slave; add $5, the advance fee; add $2 for discounts, and there's the $90 wages of the six months gone.
Such is keeping books to keep the slave a slave. On the other hand, when you figure up the cost of the slave to yourself, it is quite different. "Purchase price, food, clothes, wages — everything," Senor Rodriguez told me, "costs from $60 to $70 per man for the first six months of service."
Add your purchase price, advance fee and suits at cost, 60 cents each, and we discover that between $5 and $15 are left for both food and wages for each six months. It all goes for food — beans and tortillas.
Yes, there is another constant item of expense that the masters must pay — the burial fee in the Valle Nacional cemetery. It is $1.50. I say this is a constant item of expense because practically all the slaves die and are supposed to be buried. The only exception to the rule occurs when, in order to save the $1.50, the
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 79
masters bury their slaves themselves or throw them to the alligators of the neighboring swamps.
Every slave is guarded night and day. At night he is locked up in a dormitory resembling a jail. In addi- tion to its slaves, each and every plantation has its mandador, or superintendent, its cabos, who combine the function of overseer and guard; and several free laborers to run the errands of the ranch and help round up the runaways in case of a slave stampede.
The jails are large barn-like buildings, constructed strongly of young trees set upright and wired together with many strands of barbed wire fencing. The win- dows are iron barred, the floors dirt. There is no fur- niture except sometimes long, rude benches which serve as beds. The mattresses are thin grass mats. In such a hole sleep all the slaves, men, women and children, the number ranging, according to the size of the planta- tion, from seventy to four hundred.
They are packed in like sardines in a box, crowded together like cattle in a freight car. You can figure it out for yourself. On the ranch "Santa Fe" the dormi- tory measures 75 by 18 feet, and it accommodates 150. On the ranch "La Sepultura," the dormitory is 40 by 15 feet, and it accommodates 70. On the ranch "San Cristobal," the dormitory is 100 by 50 feet, and it accommodates 350. On the ranch "San Juan del Rio," the dormitory is 80 by 90, and it accommodates 400. From nine to eighteen square feet for each person to lie down in — so runs the space. And on not a single ranch did I find a separate dormitory for the women or the chil- dren. Women of modesty and virtue are sent to Valle Nacional every week and are shoved into a sleeping room with scores and even hundreds of others, most
80 BARBAROUS MEXICO
of them men, the door is locked on them and they ar* left to the mercy of the men.
Often honest, hard-working Mexicans are taken into Valle Nacional with their wives and children. If the wife is attractive in appearance she goes to the planter or to one or more of the bosses. The children see theil mother being taken away and they know what is to become of her. The husband knows it, but if he makes objection he is answered with a club. Time and time again I have been told that this was so, by masters, by slaves, by officials. And the women who are thrust into the sardine box must take care of themselves.
One-fifth of the slave^ of Valle Nacional are women ; one-third are boys under fifteen. The boys work in the fields with the men. They cost less, they last well, and at some parts of the work, such as planting the tobacco, they are more active and hence more useful. Boys as young as six sometimes are seen in the field planting tobacco. Women are worked in the field, too, especially during the harvest time, but their chief work is as household drudges. They serve the master and the mistress, if there is a mistress, and they grind the corn and cook the food of the male slaves. In every slave house I visited I found from three to a dozen women grinding corn. It is all done by hand with two pieces of stone called a metate. The flat stone is placed on the floor, the woman kneels beside it, bends almost double and works the stone roller up and down. The movement is something like that of a woman washing clothes, but it is much harder. I asked the presidente of Valle Nacional why the planters did not purchase cheap mills for grinding the corn, or why they did not combine and buy a mill among them, instead of breaking
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL 81
several hundred backs yearly in the work. "Women are cheaper than machines," was the reply.
In Valle Nacional the slaves seemed to me to work all the time. I saw them working in the morning twi- light. I saw them working in the evening twilight. I saw them working far into the night. "If we could use the water power of the Papaloapan to light our farms we could work our farms all night," Manuel Lagunas told me, and I believe he would have done it. The rising hour on the farms is generally 4 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes it is earlier. On all but three or four of the thirty farms the slaves work every day in the year — until they fall. At San Juan del Rio, one of the largest, they have a half holiday every Sunday. I happened to be at San Juan del Rio on a Sunday afternoon. That half holiday! What a grim joke! The slaves spent it in jail, locked up to keep them from running away ! . And they fall very fast. They are beaten, and that helps. They are starved, and that helps. They are given no hope, and that helps. They die in anywhere from one month to a year, the time of greatest mortality being between the sixth and eighth month. Like the cotton planters of our South before the war, the tobacco planters seem to have their business figured down to a fine point. It was a well-established business maxim of our cotton planters that the greatest amount of profit could be wrung from the body of a negro slave by working him to death in seven years and then buying another one. The Valle Nacional slave holder has dis- covered that it is cheaper to buy a slave for $45 and work and starve him to death in seven months, and then spend $45 for a fresh slave, than it is to give the first slave better food, work him less sorely and stretch out his life and his toiling hours over a longer period of time.
CHAPTER V
IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH
I visited Valle Nacional in the latter part of 1908, spending a week in the region and stopping at all the larger plantations. I passed three nights at various plan- tation houses and four more at one or another of the towns. As in Yucatan, I visited the country in the guise of a probable purchaser of plantations.
As in Yucatan, I succeeded in convincing authorities and planters that I had several million dollars behind me just aching to be invested. Consequently, I put them as completely off their guard as it would be possible to do. As in Yucatan, I was able to secure my informa- tion, not only from what I saw of and heard from the slaves, but from the mouths of the masters themselves. Indeed, I was more fortunate than I was in Yucatan. I chummed with bosses and police so successfully that they never once became suspicious, and for months some of them were doubtless looking for me to drop in any fine day with a few million in my pocket, prepared to buy them out at double the value of their property.
The nearer we approached Valle Nacional the greater horror of the place we found among the people. None had been there, but all had heard rumors, some had seen survivors, and the sight of those walking corpses had confirmed the rumors. As we got off the train at Cordoba, we saw crossing the platform a procession of fourteen men, two in front and two behind with rifles, ten with their arms bound behind them with ropes, their
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IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH 83
heads down. Some were ragged, some well dressed, and several had small bundles on their shoulders.
"On their way to the valley !" I whispered. My com- panion nodded, and the next moment the procession disappeared through a narrow gateway on the opposite side of the street, the entrance to a most conveniently situated "bull pen" for the accommodation over night of the exiles.
After supper I mingled with the crowds in the lead- ing hotels of the town, and was aggressive enough in my role of investor to secure letters of introduction from a wealthy Spaniard to several slave holders of the valley.
"You'd better call on the jefe politico at Tuztepec as soon as you get there," advised the Spaniard. "He's a friend of mine. Just show him my signature and he'll pass you along, all right."
When I arrived at Tuztepec I took the advice of the Senor and to my good fortune, for the jefe politico, Rodolpho Pardo, not only passed me along, but gave me a personal letter to each of his subordinates along the road, the presidentes of Chiltepec, Jacatepec and Valle Nacional, instructing them to neglect their official business, if necessary, but to attend to my wants. Thus it was during my first days in the Valley of Death I was the guest of the presidente, and on the nights which I spent in the town a special police escort was appointed to see that I came to no harm.
In Cordoba, a negro building contractor, an intelligent fellow, who had sojourned in Mexico for fifteen years, said to me:
"The days of slavery ain't over yet. No, sir, they ain't over. I've been here a long time and I've got a little property. I know I'm pretty safe, but sometimes I get scared myself — ^yes, sir, I get scared, you bet!"
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Early next morning as I was dressing I glanced out of my window and saw a man walking down the middle of the street with one end of a riata around his neck and a horseman riding behind at the other end of the riata.
"Where's that man going?" I inquired of the servant. "Going to be hanged?"
"Oh, no, only going to jail," answered the servant. "It's the easiest way to take them, you know. In a day or two," he added, "that man will be on his way to Valle Nacional. Everybody arrested here goes to Valle Nacional — everybody except the rich."
"I wonder if that same gang we saw last night will be going down on the train today," my companion, De Lara, said, as we made for the depot.
He did not wonder long, for we had hardly found seats when we saw the ten slaves and their rurale guards filing into the second-class coach adjoining. Three of the prisoners were well dressed and had unusually intel- ligent faces; the others were of the ordinary type of city or farm laborers. Two of the former were bright boys under twenty, one of whom burst into tears as the train pulled slowly out of Cordoba toward the dreaded valley.
Down into the tropics we slid, into the jungle, into the dampness and perfume of the lowlands, known as the hot country. We flew down a mountain, then skirted the rim of a gash-like gorge, looking down upon coffee plantations, upon groves of bananas, rubber and sugar cane, then into a land where it rains every day except in mid- winter. It was not hot — not real hot, like Yuma — ^but the passengers perspired with the sky.
We watched the exiles curiously, and at the first opportunity we made advances to the chief of the rurale
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squad. At Tierra Blanca we stopped for dinner and, as the meal the rurales purchased for their charges con- sisted only of tortillas and chili, we bought a few extras for them, then sat and watched them eat. Gradually we drew the exiles into conversation, carefully nursing the good will of their guards at the same time, and pres- ently we had the story of each.
The prisoners were all from Pachuca, capital of the state of Hidalgo, and, unlike the vast majority of Valle Nacional slaves, they were being sent over the road directly by the jefe politico of that district. The par- ticular system of this particular jefe was explained to us two days later by Espiridion Sanchez, a corporal of rurales, as follows:
"The jefe poUtico of Pachuca has a contract with Candido Fernandez, owner of the tobacco plantation 'San Cristobal la Vega,' whereby he agrees to deliver 500 able-bodied laborers a year for fifty pesos each. The jefe gets special nominal government rates on the rail- roads, his guards are paid for by the government, so the four days' trip from Pachuca costs him only three pesos and a half per man. This leaves him forty-six and one-half pesos. Out of it he must pay something to his governor, Pedro L. Rodriguez, and something to the jefe politico at Tuztepec. But even then his profits are very large.
"How does he get his men? He picks them up on the street and puts them in jail. Sometimes he charges them with some crime, real or imaginary, but in either case the man is never tried. He is held in jail until there are enough others to make up a gang, and then all are sent here. Why, men who may be safely sent to Valle Nacional are getting so scarce in Pachuca that the jefe has even been known to take young boys out of
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school and send them here just for the sake of the fifty pesos'/'
Of our ten friends from Pachuca, all had been arrested and put in jail, but not one had been taken before a judge. Two had been charged with owing money that they could not pay, one had been arrested when drunk, another had been drunk and had discharged a firearm into the air, the fifth had shouted too loudly on Inde- pendence Day, September 16th, another had attempted rape, the seventh had had a mild-mannered quarrel with another boy over the sale of a five-cent ring, two had been musicians in the army and had left one company and joined another without permission, and the tenth had been a clerk of rurales and had been sold for pay- ing a friendly visit to the previous two while they were in jail serving out their sentence for desertion.
When we smiled our incredulity at the tale of the tenth prisoner and asked the chief rurale pointblank if it was true, he astonished us with his reply. Nodding his grizzled head he said in a low voice :
"It is true. Tomorrow may be my time. It is always the poor that suffer."
We would have looked upon the stories of these men as "fairy tales," but all of them were confirmed by one or the other of the guards. The case of the musicians interested us most. The older carried the forehead of a university professor. He was a cornet player and his name was Amado Godaniz. The younger was a boy of but eighteen, the boy who cried, a basso player named Felipe Gomez.
"They are sending us to our death — to our death," muttered Godaniz. "We will never get out of that hole alive." And all along the route, wherever we met him, he said the same thing, repeating over and over again:
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"They are sending us to our death — to our death !" And always at the words the soft-faced, cringing boy of eight- een at his side would cry silently.
At El Hule, The Gateway to the Mexican Hell, we parted from our unfortunate friends for a time. As we left the railroad depot to board our launch in the river, we saw the ten, strung out in single file, one mounted rurale in front and one behind, disappear in the jungle toward Tuztepec. Four hours later, as we approached the district metropolis in the thickening twilight, we saw them again. They had beaten the launch in the journey up the river, had crossed in a canoe, and now stood rest- ing for a moment on a sandy bank, silhouetted against the sky.
Rodolpho Pardo, the jefe politico, whom we visited after supper, proved to be a slender, polished man of forty, smooth-shaven, with eyes which searched our bodies like steel probes at first. But the thought of fresh millions to be invested where he might levy his toll upon them sweetened him as we became acquainted, and when we shook his cold, moist hand good-bye, we had won all that we had asked for. Don Rodolpho even called in the chief of police and instructed him to find us good horses for our journey.
Early the following morning found us on the jungle trail. During the forenoon we encountered several other travelers, and we lost no opportunity to question them.
"Run away? Yes; they try to — sometimes," said one native, a Mexican cattleman. "But too many are against them. The only escape is down river. They must cross many times and they must pass Jacatepec, Chiltepec, Tuzetpec and El Hule. And they must hide from every one on the road, for a reward of ten pesos is paid for every runaway captured. We don't love the system,
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but ten pesos is a lot of money, and no one would let it go by. Besides, if one doesn't get it another will, and even though the runaway should get out of the valley, when he reaches Cordoba he finds the enganchador Tresgallo, waiting there to send him back/*
"One time," another native told us, "I saw a man leaning against a tree beside the trail. As I rode up I spoke to him, but he did not move. His arm was doubled against the tree trunk and his eyes seemed to be studying the ground. I touched his shoulder and found that he was stiff — dead. He had been turned out to die and had walked so far. How do I know he was not a runaway ? Ah, Senor, I knew. You would have known, too, had you seen his swollen feet and the bones of his face — almost bare. No man who looks like that could run away!"
Just at nightfall we rode into Jacatepec, and there we found the slave gang ahead of us. They had started first and had kept ahead, walking the twenty-four miles of muddy trail, though some of them were soft from jail confinement. They were sprawled out on a patch of green beside the detention house.
The white linen collar of Amado Godaniz was gone now. The pair of fine shoes, nearly new, which he wore on the train, were on the ground beside him, heavy with mud and water. His bare feet were small, as white as a woman's and as tender, and both showed bruises and scratches. Since that evening at Jacatepec I have often thought of Amado Godaniz and have wondered — ^with a shiver — how those tender white feet fared among the tropical flies of Valle Nacional. "They are sending us to our death — to our death!" The news that Amado Godaniz were alive today would surprise me. That night he seemed to realize that he would never need those fine
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shoes again, and before I went to bed I heard him trying to sell them to a passer-by for twenty-five cents.
Wherever we stopped we induced people, by careless questions, to talk about the valley. I wanted to make no mistake. I wanted to hear the opinion of everybody. I did not know what might be denied us farther on. And always the story was the same — slavery and men and women beaten to death.
We arose at five the next morning and missed our breakfast in order to follow the slave gang over the road to Valle Nacional. At first the chief of the two riirales, a clean, handsome young Mexican, looked askance at our presence, but before we were half way there he was talking pleasantly. He was a Tuztepec rurale and was making his living out of the system, yet he was against it.
"It*s the Spanish who beat our people to death," He said bitterly. "All the tobacco planters are Spanish, all but one or two."
The rurale chief gave us the names of two Spaniards, partners, Juan Pereda and Juan Robles, who had become rich on Valle Nacional tobacco and had sold out and gone back to spend the rest of their days in Spain. After they were gone, said he, the new owner, in looking over the place, ran upon a swamp in which he found hundreds of human skeletons. The toilers whom Pereda and Robles had starved and beaten to death they had been too miserly to bury.
Nobody ever thought of having a planter arrested for murdering his slaves, the rurale told us. To this rule he mentioned two exceptions; one, the case of a foreman who had shot three slaves ; the other, a case in which an American figured and in which the American ambassador took action. In the first case the planter had disapproved
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the killing because he needed the slaves, so he himself had secured the arrest of the foreman. As to the other case:
"In past years they used to pick up a derelict Ameri- can once in awhile and ship him down here," said my informant, "but the trouble this particular one kicked up has resulted in Americans being barred altogether. This American was sent to 'San Cristobal,' the farm of Can- dido Fernandez. At this plantation it was the custom to kill a steer every two weeks to provide meat for the family and the foremen; the only meat the slaves ever got was the head and entrails. One Sunday, while help- ing butcher a steer, the hunger of the American slave got the better of him, and he seized some of the entrails and ate them raw. The next day he died and a few weeks later an escaped slave called on the American ambassador in Mexico City, gave him the name and home address of the American, and told him the man had been beaten to death. The ambassador secured the arrest of the planter Fernandez and it cost him a lot of money to get out of jail."
Our trip was a very beautiful one, if very rough. At one point we climbed along the precipitous side of a magnificent mountain, allowing our horses to pick their way over the rocks behind us. At another we waited while the slaves took off their clothing, piled them in bundles on their heads and waded across a creek; then we followed on our horses. At many points I yearned mightily for a camera, yet I knew if I had it that it would get me into trouble.
Picture merely that procession as it wound in single file around the side of a hill, the tropical green above broken now and then by a ridge of gigantic grey rocks, below a level meadow and a little farther on the curving,
IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH 91
feminine lines of that lovely river, the Papaloapan. Pic- ture those ten slaves, six with the regulation high straw hat of the plebeian Mexican, four with felts, all bare- footed now except the boy musician, who is sure to throw away his shoes before the end of the journey, half of them bare-handed, imagining that the masters will fur- nish them blankets or extra clothing, the other half with small bundles of bright-colored blankets on their backs; finally, the mounted and uniformed rurales, one in front and one behind; and the American travelers at the extreme rear.
Soon we began to see gangs of men, from twenty to one hundred, at work in the fields preparing the ground for the tobacco planting. The men were the color of the ground, and it struck me as strange that they moved incessantly while the ground was still. Here and there among the moving shapes stood others — ^these seemed different; they really looked like men — with long, lithe canes in their hands and sometimes swords and pistols in their belts. We knew then that we had reached Valle Nacional.
The first farm at which we stopped was "San Juan del Rio.'' Crouching beside the porch of the main building was a sick slave. One foot was swollen to twice its nat- ural size and a dirty bandage was wrapped clumsily about it. "What's the matter with your foot?" I asked. "Blood poisoning from insect bites," replied the slave. "He'll have maggots in another day or two," a boss told us with a grin.
As we rode away we caught our first glimpse of a Valle Nacional slave-house, a mere jail with barred win- dows, a group of women bending over metates, and a guard at the door with a key.
I have said that our rurale corporal was opposed to the
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system, yet how perfectly he was a part of it he soon showed. Rounding a bluff suddenly we caught sight of a man crouching half hidden behind a tree. Our rurale called him and he came, trembling, and trying to hide the green oranges that he had been eating. The ensuing con- versation went something like this :
Rurale — Where are you going?
Man — To Oaxaca.
Rurale — Where are you from?
Man — From the port of Manzanillo.
Rurale — You've come a hundred miles out of your way. Nobody ever comes this way who doesn't have business here. What farm did you run away from, any- how?
Man — I didn't run away.
Rurale — Well, you fall in here.
So we took the man along. Later it was ascertained that he had run away from "San Juan del Rio." The rurale got the ten pesos reward.
At the plantation "San Cristobal" we left the slave gang behind, first having the temerity to shake the hands of the two musicians, whom we never saw again. Alone on the road we found that the attitude of those we met was widely different from what it had been when we were traveling in the company of the rurales, the agents of the state. The Spanish horsemen whom we encoun- tered did not deign to speak to us, they stared at us suspiciously through half closed eyes and one or two even spoke offensively of us in our hearing. Had it not been for the letter to the presidente in my pocket it would doubtless have been a difficult matter to secuie admission to the tobacco plantations of Valle Nacional.
Everywhere we saw the same thing — gangs of emaci- ated men and boys at work clearing the ground with
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machetes or ploughing the broad fields with oxen. And everywhere we saw guards, armed with long, lithe canes, with swords and pistols. Just before we crossed the river for the last time to ride into the town of Valle ||'J Nacional we spoke to an old man with a stump of a p§y
<i
wrist who was working alone near the fence.
"How did you lose your hand ?" I asked.
"A cabo (foreman) cut it off with a sword," was the R.j^ reply. j^--;
Manuel Lagunas, presidente of Valle Nacional, proved fev; to be a very amiable fellow, and I almost liked him — until I saw his slaves. His secretary, Miguel Vidal, was even more amiable, and we four sat for two hours over our late dinner, thoroughly enjoying ourselves — and talk- ing about the country. During the entire meal a little half-negro boy of perhaps eight years stood silent behind the door, emerging only when his master, needing to be waited upon, called "Negro!"
"I bought him cheap," said Vidal. "He cost me only twenty-five pesos"
Because of its great beauty Valle Nacional was orig- inally called "Royal Valley" by the Spaniards, but after the Independence of Mexico it was rechristened Valle Nacional. Thirty-five years ago the land belonged to the Chinanteco Indians, a peaceable tribe among whom it was divided by President Juarez. When Diaz came into power he failed to make provision for protecting the Chinantecos against scheming Spaniards, so in a few years the Indians had drunk a few bottles of mescal and the Spaniards had gobbled up every foot of their land. The Valle Nacional Indians now secure their food from rented patches high up on the mountain sides which are unfit for tobacco cultivation.
Though the planters raise corn and beans, and some-
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times bananas or other tropical fruits, tobacco is the only considerable product of the valley. The plantations are usually large, there being only about thirty in the entire district. Of this number twelve are owned by Balsa Her- manos (Brothers), who operate a large cigar factory in Veracruz and another in the city of Oaxaca.
After dinner we went for a stroll about town and for a bodyguard the presidente assigned us a policeman, Juan Hernandez. We proceeded to question the policeman.
"All the slaves are kept until they die — all," said Hernandez. "And when they are dead the bosses do not always take the trouble to bury them. They throw them in the swamps where the alligators eat them. On the plantation 'Hondura de Nanche' so many are given to the alligators that an expression has arisen among the slaves : Throw me to The Hungry!' There is a terrible fear among those slaves that they will be thrown to 'The Hungry' before they are dead and while they are yet con- scious, as this has been done !"
Slaves who are worn out and good for nothing more, declared the policeman, and yet who are strong enough to cry out against being thrown to "The Hungry," are turned out on the road without a cent, and in their rags many of them crawl to the town to die. The Indians give them some food and on the edge of the town there is an old house in which the miserable creatures are permitted to pass their last hours. This place is known as "The House of Pity." We visited it with the policeman and found an old woman lying on her face on the bare floor. She did not move when we came in, nor when we spoke to each other and finally to her, and for some time we were not sure that she was alive. At last she groaned feebly. It can be imagined how we felt, but we could do nothing, so we tip-toed to the door and hurried away.
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"You will find this a healthy country," the municipal secretary told us a little later in the evening. "Don't you notice how fat we all are ? The laborers of the plan- tations ? Ah, yes, they die — die of malaria and consump- tion— but it is only because they are under-fed. Tor- tillas and beans — sour beans at that, usually, is all they get, and besides they are beaten too much. Yes, they die, but nobody else here ever has any sickness."
Notwithstanding the accounts of Juan Hernandez, the policeman, the secretary assured us that most of the dead slaves were buried. The burying is done in the town and it costs the bosses one and one-half pesos for each burial. By charity the town puts a little bamboo cross over each grave. We strolled out in the moonlight and took a look at the graveyard. And we gasped at the acres and acres of crosses! Yes, the planters bury their dead. One would guess by those crosses that Valle Nacional were not a village of one thousand souls, but a city of one hundred thousand!
On our way to our beds in the house of the Presidente we hesitated at the sound of a weak voice hailing us. A fit of heart-breaking coughing followed and then we saw a human skeleton squatting beside the path. He wanted a penny. We gave him several, then questioned him and learned that he was one who had come to die in "The House of Pity." It "was cruel to make him talk, but we did it, and in his ghastly whispering voice he managed to piece out his story between paroxysms of coughing.
His name was Angelo Echavarria, he was twenty years old and a native of Tampico. Six months previ- ously he had been offered wages on a farm at two pesos 2L day, and had accepted, but only to be sold as a slave to Andres M. Rodriguez, proprietor of the plantation "Santa Fe." At the end of three months he began to
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break down under the inhuman treatment he received and at four months a foreman named Augustin broke a sword over his back. When he regained consciousness after the beating he had coughed up a part of a lung. After that he was beaten more frequently because he was unable to work as well, and several times he fell in a faint in the field. At last he was set free, but when he asked for the wages that he thought were his, he was told that he was $1.50 in debt to the ranch! He came to the town and complained to the Presidente, but was given no satisfaction. Now too weak to start to walk home, he was coughing his life away and begging for subsistence at the same time. In all my life I have never seen another living creature so emaciated as Angelo Echavarria, yet only three days previously he had been working all day in the hot sun !
We visited the plantation "Santa Fe" the following day, as well as a half a dozen others. We found the system of housing, feeding, working and guarding the slaves alike on all.
The main dormitory at "Santa Fe" consisted of one windowless, dirt-floor room, built of upright poles set in the ground an inch apart and held firmly together by strands of barbed wire fencing. It was as impregnable as an American jail. The beds consisted of a single grass mat each laid crosswise on a wooden bench. There were four benches, two on each side, one above another, run- ning lengthwise of the room. The beds were laid so close together that they touched. The dimensions of the room were 75 by 18 feet and in these cramped quarters 150 men, women and children slept every night. The Valle Nacional tobacco planters have not the decency of slave-holders of fifty years ago, for on not one of the plantations did I find a separate dormitory for the women.
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And I was repeatedly told that the women who enter- that foul hole all become common to the men, not because they wish to become so, but because the overseers do not protect them from the unwelcome advances of the men !
On the "Santa Fe" ranch the mandadoVy or superin- tendent, sleeps in a room at one end of the slave dormi- tory and the cahos, or overseers, sleep in a room at the other end. The single door is padlocked, but a watch- man paces all night up and down the passageway between the rows of shelves. Every half hour he strikes a clam- orous gong. In answer to a question Senor Rodriguez assured me that the gong did not disturb the sleeping slaves, but even if it had that the rule was necessary to prevent the watchman from going to sleep and permitting a jail-break.
Observing the field gangs at close range, I was aston- ished to see so many children among the laborers. At least half were under twenty and at least one-fourth under fourteen.
"The boys are just as good in the planting as the men," remarked the Presidente, who escorted us about. "They last longer, too, and they cost only half as much. Yes, all the planters prefer boys to men."
During my ride through fields and along the roads that day I often wondered why some of those blood- less, toiling creatures did not cry out to us and say: "Help us ! For God's sake help us ! We are being mur- dered !" Then I remembered that all men who pass this way are like their own bosses, and in answer to a cry they could expect nothing better than a mocking laugh, and perhaps a blow besides.
Our second night in Valle Nacional we spent on the Presidente's plantation. As we approached the place we lagged behind the Presidente to observe a gang of 150
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men and boys planting tobacco on the adjoining farm, "El Mirador." There were half a dozen overseers among them and as we came near we saw them jumping here and there among the slaves, yelling, cursing and striking this way and that with their long, lithe canes. Whack! Whack ! went the sticks on back, shoulders, legs and even heads. The slaves weren't being beaten. They were only being urged a little, possibly for our benefit.
We stopped, and the head foreman, a big black Span- iard, stepped over to the fence and greeted us.
"Do they ever fight back?" he repeated, at my ques- tion. "Not if they're wise. They can get all the fight they want from me. The men that fight me don't come to work next day. Yes, they need the stick. Better to kill a lazy man than to feed him. Run away? Some- times the new ones try it, but we soon tame it out of them. And when we get 'em tamed we keep 'em here. There never was one of these dogs who got out of here and didn't go telling lies about us."
Should I live a thousand years I would never forget the faces of dull despair I saw everywhere ; and I would never forget the first night I spent on a Valle Nacional slave farm, the farm of the Presidente. The place was well named, "La Sepultura," though its name was given by the Indians long before it became the sepulchre of Mexican slaves.
"La Sepultura'* is one of the smallest farms in the valley. The dormitory is only 40 by 15 feet and it accom- modates 70 men and women nightly. Inside there are no benches — nothing but the bare ground and a thin grass mat for each sleeper. In it we found an old woman lying sick and shivering alone. Later that night we saw it crammed full of the miserables shivering with the cold, for the wind was blowing a hurricane and the rain was
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coming down in torrents. In a few hours the tempera- ture must have dropped forty degrees.
One-third of the laborers here were women, one of them a girl of twelve. That night the buildings rocked so fearfully that the horses were taken out of the barn. But, though a building had blown down a few weeks previously, the slaves were not taken out of their jail. Their jail was built just off the dining-room of the dwelling and that night my companion and I slept in the dining-room. I heard the jail door open and shut for a late worker to enter and then I heard the voice of the twelve-year-old girl pleading in terror: "Please don't lock the door tonight — only tonight ! Please leave it so we can be saved if the house falls !" The answer that I heard was only a brutal laugh.
When I went to bed that night at 9:30 a gang of slaves was still working about the barn. When I awoke at four the slaves were receiving their beans and tortillas in the slave kitchen. When I went to bed two of the Presidente's kitchen drudges were hard at work. Through the chinks in the poles which divided the two rooms I watched them, for I could not sleep. At eleven o'clock by my watch one disappeared. It was 12:05 before the other was gone, but in less than four hours more I saw her again, working, working, working, working !
Yet perhaps she fared better than did the grinders of corn and the drawers of water, for when, with the son of the Presidente, I visited the slave kitchen at five and remarked on the exhausted faces of the women there, he informed me that their rising hour was two o'clock and that they never had time to rest during the day !
Oh, it was awful ! This boy of sixteen, manager of the farm in his father's absence, told me with much gusto of
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how fiercely the women sometimes fought against the assaults of the men and how he had at times enjoyed peering through a crack and watching those tragic encounters of the night ! All night we were disturbed — mostly by the hacking, tearing coughs that came to us through the chinks, sometimes by heart-breaking sobs.
De Lara and I did not speak about these things until the morning, when I remarked upon his haggard face.
"I heard the sobs and the coughs and the groans," said De Lara. "I heard the women cry, and I cried, too — three times I cried. I do not know how I can ever laugh and be happy again !"
While we waited for breakfast the Presidente told us many things about the slavery and showed us a number of knives and files which had been taken from the slaves at various times. Like penitentiary convicts, the slaves had somehow got possession of the tools in the hope of cutting a way out of their prison at night and escaping the sentries.
The Presidente told us frankly that the authorities of Mexico City, of Veracruz, of Oaxaca, of Pachuca and of Jalapa regularly engage in the slave traffic, usually in combination with one or more "labor agents." He espe- cially named the mayor of a certain well known seaport, who was mentioned in the American newspapers as an honored guest of President Roosevelt in 1908 and a prominent visitor to the Republican convention at Chi- cago. This mayor, said our Presidente, regularly employed his city detective force as a dragnet for slaves. He arrested all sorts of people on all sorts of pretexts merely for the sake of the forty-five pesos apiece that they would bring from the tobacco planters.
Our conversation that morning was interrupted by a Spanish foreman who rode up and had a talk with the
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Presidente, They spoke in low tones, but we caught most of what they said. The foreman had killed a woman the previous day and had come to make his peace about it. After a consultation of ten minutes the Presidente shook the hand of his visitor and we heard him tell the murderer to go home and attend to his business and think no more about the matter.
It was Sunday and we spent the entire day in the company of Antonio Pla, probably the most remarkable human monster in Valle Nacional. Pla is general man- ager for Balsa Hermanos in Valle Nacional and as such he oversees the business of twelve large plantations. He resides on the ranch ''Hondura de Nanche," the one of special alligator fame, where the term "Throw me to The Hungry" originated. Pla calls his slaves ''Los Tigres" (the tigers) and he took the greatest of pleasure in showing us the "dens of the tigers," as well as in explain- ing his entire system of purchase, punishment and burial.
Pla estimated that the annual movement of slaves to Valle Nacional is 15,000 and he assured me that if the planters killed every last one of them the authorities would not interfere.
"Why should they?" he asked. "Don't we support them?"
Pla, like many of the other planters, raised tobacco in Cuba before he came to Valle Nacional, and he declared that on account of the slave system in the latter place the same quality of tobacco was raised in Valle Nacional for half the price that it cost to raise it in Cuba. It was not practical, said he, to keep the slaves more than seven or eight months, as they became "all dried out." He explained the various methods of whipping, the informal slugging in the field with a cane of bejuco wood, and the lining-up of the gangs in the morning and the admin-
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istration of "a, few stripes to the lazy ones as medicine for the day.'*
' "But after awhile," declared Pla, "even the cane doesn't do any good. There comes a time when they just can't work any longer."
Pla told us that an agent of the government had three months before tried to sell him 500 Yaquis for twenty thousand pesos, but he had rejected the offer, as, though the Yaquis last like iron, they will persist in taking long chances in a break for liberty.
"I bought a bunch of Yaquis several years ago,'* he said, "but most of them got away after a few months. No, Yucatan is the only place for the Yaquis."
We found two Yaquis, however, on the farm, "Los Mangos." They said they had been there for two years and were the only ones left out of an original lot of two hundred. One had been out of commission for a few days, one of his feet being half gone— eaten off by insects.
"I expect I'll have to kill that tiger," said Pla, in tfie man's hearing. "He'll never be worth anything to mc any more."
The second Yaqui we found in the field working witK a gang. I stepped up to him and felt of his arms. They were still muscular. He was really a magnificent speci- men and reminded me of the story of Ben Hur. As 1 inspected him he stood erect, staring straight ahead bul trembling slightly in every limb. The mere attitude ol that Yaqui was to me the most conclusive evidence of the beastliness of the system under which he was enslaved.
At "Los Mangos" a foreman let us inspect his long, lithe cane, the beating cane, the cane of bejuco wood. II bent like a rawhide buggy whip, but it would not break.
"The bejuco tree grows on the mountain side," ex*
IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH 103
plained the foreman. "See! The wood is Hke leather. With this cane I can beat twenty men to death and yet it will be good for twenty morel"
In the slave kitchen of the same ranch we found two girls of seventeen, both with refined and really beautiful faces, grinding corn. Though their boss, Pla, stood menacingly by, each dared to tell her story briefly. One, from Leon, State of Guanajuato, declared that the "labor agent" had promised her fifty pesos per month and a good home as cook in a small family, and when she discovered that all was not right it was too late; the rurales compelled her to come along. The other girl was from San Luis Potosi. She had been promised a good home and forty pesos a month for taking care of two small children!
Wherever we went we found the houses full of fine furniture made by the slaves.
"Yes," explained Antonio Pla, "some of the best arti- sans in the country come right here — in one way or another. We get carpenters and cabinet-makers and upholsterers and everything. Why, on my ranches I've had teachers and actresses and artists and one time I even had an ex-priest. I had one of the most beautiful actresses in the country one time, right here on *Hon- dura de Nanche.* She was noted, too. How did she get here? Simple enough. A son of a millionaire in Mexico City wanted to marry her and, to get her out of the way, the millionaire paid the authorities a good price to kidnap her and give her to a labor agent. Yes, sir, that woman was a beauty !"
"And what became of her?" I asked.
"Oh," was the evasive reply. "That was two years ago!"
Truly, two years is a long time in Valle Nacional,
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longer, than a life-time, usually. The story of the actress reminded me of a story told me by a newly- married runaway Mexican couple in Los Angeles just before I started on my trip. The young husband was a member of the middle class of Mexico City and his wife was the daughter of a millionaire. Because the boy was considered to be "below" the girl, the girl's father went to extremes in his efforts to prevent the marriage.
"George went through many dangers for me," is the way the young bride told the story. "One time my father tried to shoot him and another time my father offered the authorities five thousand pesos to kidnap him and send him to Valle Nacional. But I warned George and he was able to save himself !"
Pla also told of eleven girls who had come to him in a single shipment from Oaxaca.
"They were at a public dance," said he. "Some men got into a fight and the police jailed everybody in the hall. Those girls didn't have anything to do with the trouble, but the jefe politico needed the money and so he sent them all here."
"Well," I asked, "what sort of women were they ? Pub- lic women?"
Pla shot me a glance full of meaning.
"No, Senor!" he said, with contempt in his voice, "do you suppose that I need to have that kind of women sent in here to mef"
The close attendance of owners and superintendents as well as the ubiquity of overseers, prevented us from obtaining many long interviews with the slaves. One of the most notable of our slave talks occurred the day following our visit to the Balsa Hermanos farm. Return- ing from a long day's visit to numerous plantations, we hailed a ploughman working near the road on "Hondura
IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH 105
de Nanche." The nearest overseer happened to be half way across the field and the slave, at our inquiry, will- ingly pointed out the slough of the alligators and con- firmed the story of dying men being thrown to "The Hungry."
*T have been here for six years and I believe I hold the record for the valley," he told us. "Other strong men come and turn to skeletons in a single season, but it seems that I cannot die. They come and fall, and come and fall, yet I stay on and live. But you ought to have seen me when I came ! I was a man then — a man ! I had shoulders and arms — I was a giant then. But now — "
Tears gathered in the fellow's eyes and rolled down his cheeks, but he went on:
"I was a carpenter and a good one — six years ago. I lived with my brother and sister in Mexico City. My brother was a student — he was only in his teens — my sister tended the little house that I paid for out of my wages. We were not poor — no. We were happy. Then work in my trade fell slack and one evening I met a friend who told me of employment to be had in the State of Veracruz at three pesos a day — a long job. I jumped at the chance and we came together, came here — here! I told my brother and sister that I would send them money regularly, and when I learned that I could send them nothing and wrote to let them know, they would not let me send the letter! For months I kept that letter, watching, waiting, trying to get an oppor- tunity to speak to the carrier as he rode along the high- way. At last I saw him, but when I handed him the letter, he only laughed in my face and handed it back. Nobody is allowed to send a letter out of here.
"Escape?" went on the ploughman. "Yes, I tried it many times. Once, only eight months ago, I got as far as
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Tuztepec. I was writing a letter. I wanted to get word to my people, but they caught me before the letter was finished. They don't know where I am. They must think I am dead. My brother must have had to leave school. My—"
"Better stop/' I said. "A cabo is coming!'*
"No, not yet," he answered. "Quick ! I will give you their address. Tell them that I never read the contract. Tell them that I never saw it until I came here. My brother's name is Juan "
"Look out!" I cried, but too late. "Whack!" The long cane struck the ploughman across the back. He winced, started to open his mouth again, but at a second whack he changed his mind and turned sullenly to his oxen.
The rains of our last two days in Valle Nacional made the trail to Tuztepec impassable, so we left our horses and traveled down river in a balsa, a raft of logs on which was erected a tiny shelter house roofed with banana leaves. Two Indians, one at each end, poled and paddled the strange craft down the rushing stream, and from them we learned that the Indians themselves have had their day as slaves in Valle Nacional. The Spaniards tried to enslave them, but they fought to the death. They em- ployed their tribal solidarity and fought in droves like wolves and in that way they regained and kept their freedom. Such a common understanding and such mass movements cannot, of course, be developed by the hetero- geneous elements that today are brought together on the slave plantations.
At Tuztepec on our way we met Senor P , poli- tician, "labor agent," and relative of Felix Diaz, nephew of President Diaz and Chief of Police of Mexico City.
IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH 107
Senor P , who dressed like a prince, made himself
agreeable and answered our questions freely because he hoped to secure the contract for furnishing slaves for my company.
"You can't help but make money in Valle Nacional," said he. "They all do. Why, after every harvest there's an exodus of planters to Mexico City, where some of them stay for months, spending their money in the most riotous living!"
Senor P was kind enough to tell us what became
of the fifty pesos he received for each of his slaves. Five pesos, he said went to Rodolpho Pardo, jefe politico of Tuztepec, ten to Felix Diaz for every slave taken out of Mexico City, and ten to the mayor of the city or jefe politico of the district from whence came the other slaves.
"The fact that I am a brother-in-law of Felix Diaz,"
said Senor P , "as well as a personal friend of the
governors of the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, and of the mayors of the cities of the same name, puts me in a position to supply your wants better than anyone else. I am prepared to furnish you any number of laborers up to forty thousand a year, men, women and children, and my price is fifty pesos each. Children workers last better than adults and I advise you to use them in preference to others. / can furnish you 1,000 children a month under fourteen years of age, and I am prepared to secure their legal adoption as sons and daughters of the company, so that they can be legally kept until they reach the age of twenty-two !**
"But how," I gasped, "is my company going to adopt 12,000 children a year as sons and daughters? Do you mean to tell me that the government would permit such a thing?"
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"Leave that to me," replied Senor P , signifi- cantly. "I'm doing it every day. You don't pay your fifty pesos until you get the children and the adoption papers too !"
CHAPTER VI
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR
A whole book, and a large one, could very profitably be written upon the slavery of Mexico. But important as the subject is, it is not important enough to fill a greater fraction of space in this work than I have allotted to it. Most necessary is it that I dig beneath the surface and reveal the hideous causes which have made and are per- petuating that barbarous institution.
I trust that my exposition of the previous chapters has been lucid enough to leave no question as to the com- plete partnership of the government in the slavery.
In some quarters this slavery has been admitted, but the guilt of the government has been denied. But it is absurd to suppose that the government could be kept in ignorance of a situation in which one-third the entire population of a great state are held as chattels. More- over, it is well known that hundreds of state and national officials are constantly engaged in rounding up, trans- porting, selling, guarding and hunting slaves. As I pre- viously pointed out, every gang of enganchados leaving Mexico City or any other city for Valle Nacional or any other slave district are guarded by government rurales, or rural guards, in uniform. These rurales do not act on their own initiative ; they are as completely under orders as are the soldiers of the regular army. Without the coercion of their guns and their authority the enganchados would refuse to travel a mile of the journey. A moment's thought is sufficient to convince any unprejudiced mind
109
110 BARBAROUS MEXICO
that without the partnership of the government the whole system of slavery would be an impossibility.
Slavery similar to that of Yucatan and Valle Nacional is to be found in nearly every state of Mexico, but especially in the coast states south of the great plateau. The labor on the henequen plantations of Campeche, in the lumber and fruit industries of Chiapas and Tabasco, on the rubber, coffee, sugar-cane, tobacco and fruit plan- tations of Veracruz, Oaxaca and Morelos, is all done by slaves. In at least ten of the thirty-two states and terri- tories of Mexico the proportion of labor is over- whelmingly of slaves.
While the minor conditions vary somewhat in different places, the general system is everywhere the same — service against the will of the laborer, no pay, semi- starvation, and the whip. Into this arrangement of things are impressed not only the natives of the various slave states, but others — 100,000 others every year, to speak in round numbers — who, either enticed by the false promises of labor agents, kidnapped by labor agents or shipped by political authorities in partnership with labor agents, leave their homes in other parts of the country to jour- ney to their death in the hot lands.
Debt and contract slavery is the prevailing system of production all over the south of Mexico. Probably three-quarters of a million souls may properly be classed as human chattels. In all the rest of Mexico a system of peonage, differing from slavery principally in degree, and similar in many respects to the serfdom of Europe in the Middle Ages, prevails in the rural districts. Under this system the laborer is compelled to give service to the farmer, or hacendado, to accept what he wishes to pay, and even to receive such beatings as he cares to deliver. Debt, real or imaginary, is the nexus that binds
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 111
the peon to his master. Debts are handed from father to son and on down through the generations. Though the constitution does not recognize the right of the creditor to take and hold the body of the debtor, the rural authorities everywhere recognize such a right and the result is that probably 5,000,000 people, or one-third the entire popula- tion, are today living in a state of helpless peonage.
Farm peons are often credited with receiving wages, which nominally range from twelve and one-half cents a day to twenty-five cents a day, American money — seldom higher. Often they never receive a cent of this, but are paid only in credit checks at the hacienda store, at which they are compelled to trade in spite of the exorbitant prices. As a result their food consists solely of corn and beans, they live in hovels often made of no more substantial material than corn-stalks, and they wear their pitiful clothing, not merely until the garments are all rags and patches and ready to drop off, but until they actually do attain the vanishing act.
Probably not fewer than eighty per cent of all the farm and plantation laborers in Mexico are either slaves or are bound to the land as peons. The other twenty per cent are denominated as free laborers and live a precarious existence trying to dodge the net of those who would drag them down. I remember particularly a family of such whom I met in the State of Chihuahua. They were typical, though my memory of them is most vivid because I saw them on the first night I ever spent in Mexico. It was in a second-class car on the Mexican Central, trav- eling south.
They were six, that family, and of three generations. From the callow, raven-haired boy to the white-chinned grandfather, all six seemed to have the last ray of mirth ground out of their systems. We were a lively
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crowd sitting there near them — four were happy Mexi- cans returning home for a vacation after a season at wage labor in the United States. We sang a little and we made some music on a violin and a harmonica. But not one of that family of six behind us ever smiled or showed the slightest interest. They reminded me of a herd of cattle standing in a blizzard, their heads between their front legs, their backs to the storm.
The face of the old patriarch told a story of burdens and of a patient, ox-like bearing of them such as no words could possibly suggest. He had a ragged, griz- zled beard and moustache, but his head was still covered with dark brown hair. He was probably seventy, but was evidently still an active worker. His clothing con- sisted of American jumper and overalls of ordinary denim washed and patched and washed and patched — a one-dollar suit patched until it was nothing but patches !
Beside the patriarch sat the old lady, his wife, with head bowed and a facial expression so like that of her husband that it might have been a copy by a great painter. Yes, the expression differed in one detail. The old woman's upper lip was compressed tight against her teeth, giving her an effect of perpetually biting her lip to keep back the tears. Perhaps her original stock of courage had not been equal to that of the man and it had been necessary to fortify it by an everlasting com- pression of the mouth.
Then there was a young couple half the age of the two. The man sat with head nodding and granulated lids blinking slowly, now and then turning his eyes to stare with far distant interest upon the merrymakers around him. His wife, a flat-breasted, drooping woman, sat
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 113
always in one position with her head bent forward and her right hand fingering her face about the bridge of the nose.
Finally, there were two boys, one of eighteen, second son of the old man, and one of sixteen, son of the second couple. In all that night's journey the only smile I saw from any of the six was a smile of the youngest boy. A passing news-agent offered the boy a book for seventy-five centavos. With slightly widening eyes of momentary interest the boy looked upon the gaily deco- rated paper cover, then turned toward his uncle and smiled a half startled smile. To think that anyone might imagine that he could afford to purchase one of those magical things, a book!
''We are from Chihuahua," the old man told us, when we had gained his confidence. **We work in the fields — all of us. All our lives we have been farm laborers in the corn and the beans and the melons of Chihuahua. But now we are running away from it. If the bosses would pay us the money they agree to pay, we could get along, but they never pay all — never. This time the boss paid us only two-thirds the agreed price, yet I am very thankful for that much, for he might have given us only one-third, as others have done in the past. What can I do? Nothing. I cannot hire a lawyer, for the lawyer would steal the other two-thirds, and the boss would put me in jail besides. Many times I and my sons have gone to jail for asking the boss to pay us the full amount of our agreement. My sons become angry more and more and sometimes I fear one may strike the boss or kill him. That would be the end of us.
"No, the best thing to do, I decided at last, was to
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get away. So we put our wages together and used our last dollar to pay for tickets to Torreon, where we hope to find work in the cotton fields. I hear we can get one peso a day in busy times. Is it so? Or will it be the same story over again there ? Perhaps it will. But what else can I do but try ? Work ! work ! work ! That's all there is for us — and nothing in return for the work! We do not drink; we are not lazy; every day we pray to God. Yet debt is always following us, begging to be taken in. Many times I have wanted to borrow just a little from my boss, but my wife has always pleaded with me. 'No,' she would say, 'better die than to owe, for owing once means owing forever — and slavery.*
"But sometimes," continued the old man, "I think it might be better to owe, better to fall in debt, better to give up our liberty than to go on like this to the end. True, I am getting old and I would love to die free, but it is hard — too hard !"
The three-quarters of a million of chattel slaves and the five million peons do not monopolize the economic misery of Mexico. It extends to every class of men that toils. There are 150,000 mine and smelter workers who receive less money for a week's labor than an American miner of the same class gets for a day's wages. There are 30,000 cotton mill operatives whose wages average less than thirty cents a day in American money. There are a quarter of a million domestic servants whose wages range from one to five dollars a month. There are 40,000 impressed soldiers who get less than two dollars a month above the scantiest rations. The common police- men of Mexico City, 2,000 of them, are paid but fifty cents a day in our money. Fifty cents a day is a high average for street-car conductors in the metropolis, where wages are higher than in any other section of the coun-
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 115
try except close to the American border. And this pro- portion is constant throughout the industries. An offer of fifty cents a day without found, would, without the slightest doubt, bring in Mexico City an army of 50,000 able-bodied laborers inside of twenty-four hours.
From such miserable wages it must not be guessed that the cost of the necessities of life are less than they are here, as in the case of other low wage countries, such as India and China. On the contrary, the cost of corn and beans, upon which the mass of the Mexican people eke out their existence, is actually higher, as a rule, than it is in the United States. At this writing it costs nearly twice as much money to buy a hundred pounds of corn in Mexico City as it does in Chicago, and that in the same money, American gold or Mexican silver, take it as you like it. And this is the cheapest staple that the poverty-stricken Mexican is able to lay his hands upon.
As to clothing and shelter, the common Mexican has about as little of either as can be imagined. The tene- ments of New York City are palatial homes compared to the tenements of Mexico City. A quarter of a mile in almost any direction off Diaz's grand Paseo de la Reforma, the magnificent driveway over which tourists are always taken and by which they usually judge Mexi- co, will carry the investigator into conditions that are not seen in any city worthy the name of civilized. If in all Mexico there exists a city with a really modem sewer system I am ignorant of its name.
Travelers who have stopped at the best hotels of the metropolis may raise their eyebrows at this last state- ment, but a little investigation will show that not more than one-fifth of the houses within the limits of that metropolis are regularly supplied with water with which to flush the sewers, while there are many densely popu-
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lated blocks which have no public water whatsoever, neither for sewer flushing nor for drinking.
It will take a few minutes' reflection to realize what this really means. As a result of such unsanitary con- ditions the death rate in that city ranges always between 5 and 6 per cent, usually nearer the latter figure, which places that percentage at more than double the death rate of well-regulated cities of Europe, the United States and even of South America. Which proves that half the people who die in Diaz's metropolis die of causes which modern cities have abolished.
A life-long resident once estimated to me that 200,000 people of the country's metropolis, or two-fifths the entire population, spend every night on the stones. "On the stones" means not on the streets, for sleeping is not pernlitted on the streets or in the parks, but on the floors of cheap tenements or lodging houses.
Possibly this is an exaggeration. From my own ob- servations, however, I know that 100,000 would be a very conservative estimate. And at least 25,000 pass the nights in mesones — the name commonly applied to the cheapest class of transient lodging houses.
A meson is a pit of such misery as is surpassed only by the galeras, the sleeping jails, of the contract slaves of the hot lands — and the dormitories of the Mexican prisons. The chief difference between the mesones and the galeras is that into the latter the slaves are driven, tottering from overwork, semi-starvation and fever — driven with whips and locked in when they are there; while to the mesones the ragged, ill-nourished wretches from the city's streets come to buy with three precious copper centavos a brief and scanty shelter — a bare spot to lie down in, a grass mat, company with the vermin that squalor breeds, rest in a sickening room with hundreds
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 117
of Others— snoring, tossing, groaning brothers and sisters in woe.
During my most recent visit to Mexico— in the winter and spring of 1909 — I visited many of these mesones and took a number of flashlight photos oi the inmates. The conditions in all I found to be the same. The buildings are ancient ones — often hundreds of years old — which have been abandoned as unfit for any other purposes than as sleeping places for the country's poor. For three centavos the pilgrim gets a grass mat and the privilege of hunting for a bare spot large enough to lie down in. On cold nights the floor and yards are so thick with bodies that it is very difficult to find footing between the sleepers. In one room I have counted as high as two hundred.
Poor women and girls must sleep, as well as poor men and boys, and if they cannot afford more than three cents for a bed they must go to the mesones with the men. In not one of the mesones that I visited was there a separate room for the women and girls, though there were many women and girls among the inmates. Like a man, a girl pays her three cents and gets a grass mat. She may come early and find a comparatively secluded nook in which to rest her weary body. But there is nothing to prevent a man from coming along, lying down beside her and annoying her throughout the night.
And this thing is done. More than once, in my visits to mesones, I saw a young and unprotected girl awakened from her sleep and solicited by a strange man whose roving eye had lighted upon her as he came into the place. The mesones breed immorality as appallingly as they breed vermin. Homeless girls do not go to mesones because they are bad, but because they are poor. These places are licensed by the authorities and it would be a
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simple matter to require the proprietors to set apart a portion of the space exclusively for women. But this the authorities have not the decency to do.
Miserable as are the mesones, the 25,000 homeless Mexicans who spend their nights there are fortunate com- pared to the thousands of others who, when the shadows fall upon them, find that they cannot produce the three centavos to pay for a grass mat and a spot on a bare floor. Every night there is a hegira of these thousands from the city's streets. Carrying what pitiful belongings they have, if they have any belongings, moving along hand in hand, if they are a family together, husband and wife, or merely friends drawn closer together by their poverty ; they travel for miles, out of the city to the open roads and fields, the great stock farms belonging to men high up in the councils of the government. Here they hud- dle about on the ground, shivering in the cold, for few nights in that altitude are not so cold that covering is not sorely needed. In the morning they travel back to the heart of the city, there to pit their feeble strength against the Powers that are conspiring to prevent them from earning a living; there, after vain and discouraging strug- gles, at last to fall into the net of the "labor agent," who is on the lookout for slaves for his wealthy clients, the planters of the lowland states.
Mexico contains 767,000 square miles. Acre for acre, it is as rich as, if not richer than the United States. It has fine harbors on both coasts. It is approximately as near the world's markets as are we. There is no natural or geographical reason why its people should not be as prosperous and happy as any in the world. In point of years it is an older country than ours. It is not over- populated. With a population of 15,000,000, it has eighteen souls to the square mile, which is slightly less
WAIFS, MOTHER AND SON, IN A MESON . TWENTY THOUSAND
SLEEP THIS WAY EVERY NIGHT IN DIAZ's CAPITAL ALONE.
FLASHLIGHT BY THE AUTHOR
GROUP OF HOMELESS CHILDREN IN A CORNER OF A " MESON", MID- NIGHT. THOUGH THESE PLACES ARE LICENSED BY THE AU- THORITIES, THERE IS NO SEGREGATION OF THE SEXES
THE COUNTRY PEONS AND THE CITY POOR 119
than we have here. Yet, seeing the heart of Mexico, it is inconceivable that there could be more extreme pov- erty in all the world. India or China could not be worse off, for if they were, acute starvation would depopulate them. Mexico is a people starved — a nation prostrate. What is the reason ? Who is to blame ?
CHAPTER VII
THE DIAZ SYSTEM
The slavery and peonage of Mexico, the poverty and illiteracy, the general prostration of the people, are due, in my humble judgment, to the financial and political organization that at present rules that country — in a word, to what I shall call the **system" of General Porfirio Diaz.
That these conditions can be traced in a measure to the history of Mexico during past generations, is true. I do not wish to be unfair to General Diaz in the least degree. The Spanish Dons made slaves and peons of the Mexican people. Yet never did they grind the people as they are ground today. In Spanish times the peon at least had his own little patch of ground, his own hum- ble shelter ; today he has nothing. Moreover, the Declara- tion of Independence, proclaimed just one hundred years ago, in 1810, proclaimed also the abolition of chat- tel slavery. Slavery was abolished, though not entirely. Succeeding Mexican governments of class and of church and of the individual held the people in bondage little less severe. But finally came a democratic movement which broke the back of the church, which overthrew the