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BARBAROUS MEXICO

HMex

BARBAROUS MEXICO

JOHN KENNETH TURNER

^X A; A

CHICAGO

CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY

CO-OPERATIVE

By Charles H. Kerr & Company

JOHN F. HIGGINS

PRINTER AND BINDER

376-382

MONROE STREET

CHICAGO. ILLINOIS

PREFACE TO THE THIRD EDITION.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book

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 partnership 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

less

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 arresting revolutionist recruits is not only against every tradition of political liberty upon which this nation is supposed

to be based, but it is unlawful and criminal and punishable under the laws of the States by fine and imprisonment. 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 revolutionists.

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 authorities 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

PREFACE.

the laws. But the civil authorities are cowed, the people

are cowed, and the victims, Mexican or American, seem

By fiat of the executive law and

to have no redress.

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 administration 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 enslaved in spirit as the Mexicans are in body ? In Mexico

In the

the only protest possible is a protest of arms.

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

The Slaves of Yucatan

The Extermination of the Yaquis

III.

Over the Exile Road

IV.

The Contract Slaves of Valle Nacional.

In the Valley of Death

VI.

The Country Peons and the City Poor. 109

120

The Diaz System

Repressive Elements of the Diaz Ma-

II.

VII.

VIII.

chine

IX.

The Crushing of Opposition Parties

The Eighth Unanimous Election

Diaz

138

160

174

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

XVI. Diaz Himself

XVII.

The Mexican People

270

299

324

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

facing page

Slave Mother and Child^ also Henequen Plant

Women Are Cheaper than Grist-Mills

Calling the Roll at Sunrise on a Slave Plantation

Scene in a Yaqui Bull Pen on the Exile Road

Band of Yaquis on the Exile Road

Type of "Enganchado/' or Plantation Slave

Boy Slaves on a Sugar Plantation in the Hot Lands

Cargadores with Baskets, Seen Everyw^here on the

110

Mexican Plateau

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 Machinery, 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

people a

little

much like our own, inhabited by

different in temperament, a

little

poorer

and a little less advanced, but still enjoying the protection 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

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 foolish but adoring people.

real

found Mexico to be neither of these things. The

Mexico I found to be a country with a written

and written laws in general almost as fair

and democratic as our own, but with neither constitution

Mexico is a country without

nor laws in operation.

political freedom, without freedom of speech, without

constitution

a free press, without a free ballot, without a jury system, without political parties, without any of our cherished guarantees of life, liberty and the pursuit of

happiness.

It is

a land where there has been no contest

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;

not a revolution in the time of Diaz, for Diaz

and

old

expected soon to pass, then a revolution after

Diaz.

My special interest in political Mexico was first awakened early in 1908, when

Mexican

revolutionists

cerated in the county

came in contact with four

who were

jail

that

time incar-

Los Angeles, California.

Here were four educated, intelligent Mexicans, college

all of them, who were being held by the United

men,

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

Why should they come to the United States

republic?

to prepare for their military maneuvers?

I talked

with

Mexican prisoners. They assured me that at

one time they had peacefully agitated in their own country for a peaceful and constitutional overthrow of the

those

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

peaceably

right

changes,

organize

they had resorted

bring

the

about

political

only alternative

arms. Why had they wished to overturn their government? 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

"Slavery?

—

slaves.

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

like mules they belong to their masters. They are

—and

slaves."

"Human

America!

beings

bought

and

sold

And in the twentieth century.

mules

Well," I told

myself, "if it's true, I'm going to see it."

So it was that early

the Rio Grande bound for

September, 1908,

crossed

my first trip through the

back yards of Old Mexico.

Upon this first trip I was accompanied by L. Gutierrez De Lara, a

Mexican of distinguished family, whose

De Lara

was opposed to the existing government in Mexico,

acquaintance I had made also in Los Angeles.

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

and by as many different avenues

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

at the exact truth,

as practicable.

minimize their cruelties

—the slave-drivers themselves.

De Lara I must say

me most important aid in gathering my

Nevertheless, to the credit of

that he gave

By his knowledge of the country and the

by his genius as a "mixer," and, above all,

material.

people,

through his personal acquaintance with valuable sources

—

men on the inside

and hear things which are prac-

of information all over the country

— was enabled

to see

tically inaccessible to the

Slavery in Mexico!

Yucatan.

ordinary investigator.

Yes, I found it.

The peninsula of Yucatan

found it first

is an elbow of

Central America, which shoots off in a northeasterly

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 northcentral part of the peninsula, is about a thousand miles

direction

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

to receive the shoot

first

blasting a hole

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

live,

and the density of the population runs to nearly

seventy-five per square mile.

The

secret of these peculiar conditions

that the

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

soil

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 slaveholders of Yucatan; the inhabitants of the

little

cities

The annual export of henequen from

Yucatan approximates 250,000,000 pounds. The population of Yucatan is about three hundred thousand. The

are the slaves.

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,

they cannot be bought, they are wined and

dined and filled with falsehood, then taken over a route

previously prepared

they go

away

— fooled,

in short, so completely that

half believing that

the slaves

are not

hundred thousand half-starving, overworked, degraded bondsmen are perfectly happy and so

contented with their lot that it would be a shame indeed

slaves, that the

BARBAROUS MEXICO

to yield to them the

humanity,

freedom and security which, in all

the rightful share of every

human being

born upon the earth.

The part which I played in Yucatan was that of an

much money to sink in henequen properties, 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

investor with

a well-understood and unanimously approved policy of

the

"Camara de Agricola,"

that

foreigners

the planters' organization,

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

"hog it all" for themselves, but more especially be-

cause they feared that through foreigners the story of

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 Secretary of Fomento (Public Promotion) of Mexico.

Molina's holdings of lands in Yucatan and Quintana

their misdeeds

Roo aggregate 15,000,000 acres, or 23,000 square miles

The fifty kings live in

in itself.

costly palaces in Merida and many of them have homes

—a small kingdom

abroad.

They travel a great deal, usually they speak

several different languages,

and they and their families

THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN

are a most cultivated class of people.

all

Yucatan, even

all

the peninsula

dependent on the fifty henequen kings.

All Merida and

Yucatan, are

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

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.

their

The Mayas

are a peculiar people.

They look

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

but their features are

stature,

remarkably finely chiselled and their bodies give a strong

impression of

olive, their

elegance

and grace.

Their

skins

are

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

BARBAROUS MEXICO

bright color

ings

—green, blue or purple. In the warm even-

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

But when speaking confidentially they

to strangers.

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 name,

The proof of a fact is to be found, not in

but in the conditions thereof.

Slavery

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

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

will,

to kill

with impunity.

slavery; they call

enforced service for debt.

"We

do not consider that we own our laborers; we consider

And we do not consider

that they are in debt to us.

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 attitude of the henequen kings in the matter.

against the law

;

"Slavery is

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

of a plantation

always had to figure on paying cash

same as for the land, the

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

for the slaves, exactly the

machinery and the cattle.

—

don't allow the Yaquis to get in debt to us."

would be absurd

suppose that the reason the

price was uniform was because all the slaves were equally

in debt.

the

details

probed this matter a little by inquiring into

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

doesn't matter after you've got possession of the man."

"The man and the

said another; "if

identification papers are enough,"

your man runs away, the papers are

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

all the authorities require

after the debtor passes into the hands of the planter.

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 exceptionally 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

aifect the conditions of his sale or his complete sub-

On the other hand, I found that

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

jection to his master.

the

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

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

I was right in that surmise, so I was informed,

by death.

but I was also informed that the problem of recruits

was not so difficult, after all.

"It

very easy," one planter told me.

"All that

you get some free laborer in debt to

you, and then you have him. Yes, we are always getnecessary

that

ting new laborers in that way."

The amount of the debt does not matter, so long as

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

It IS

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

debt

office

men into

—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

BARBAROUS MEXICO

—

gambling

These slave

sharks were mentioned to me by the henequen kings

Other old

themselves, cautiously by them, as a rule.

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,

too

great

publicity

police-protected

houses in an American city, for example.

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 planto

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.

increases his extremity, for while

it does not help him to climb out of his pit,

reaches

out its tentacles and drags down his brother, too. The

portion of the people of Yucatan who are born free

They

possess no "inalienable right" to their freedom.

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

hands of a henequen planter.

Through debt, the dying slaves of the farms are replaced

liable to pass into the

by the unsuccessful wage-workers of the cities.

Why do the henequen kings call their system enforced

Probservice for debt instead of by its right name?

—

two reasons because the system is the outgrowth 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 emably for

ployer to take the body of a laborer

him, and to compel the laborer to

who is in debt 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

exists throughout all Mexico.

In the last analysis it is slavery, but the employers control the police,

all

the same.

and the

fictional distinction is

kept up

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 Mexico 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.

for all.

The cheaper the worker the higher the profits

The peon becomes a chattel slave.

The henequen kings of Yucatan seek to excuse their

system of slavery by denominating

for debt.

it enforced service

"Slavery is against the law," they say. "It

against the constitution."

When a thing is abolished

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

entirely without foundation.

A comparison of

from the Mexican constituthe following two

tion will show that the two systems are in the same

clauses

class.

"Article

free.

Slaves

Section

In the Republic

all

are born

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 compensation

and without

his

full

The

consent.

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

which a man

agrees to his proscription or exile."

So the slave business in Yucatan, whatever name may

be applied to it,

hand,

still

unconstitutional.

On the other

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

will leave to hair-splitters

righteous in doing so I

in morality.

decision may be, right or wrong,

Whatever the

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

They are worked almost to death. They are

beaten. A large percentage of them are locked up every

starved.

THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN

night in a house resembHng a

they must

still

work, and

jail.

they are sick

they are so sick that

impossible for them to work, they are seldom permitted

The women are compelled

the services of a physician.

to marry, compelled to marry men of their own planta-

tion only, and sometimes are compelled to marry certain

men not of their choice.

children.

ordered at the

wishes to

There are no schools for the

Indeed, the entire lives of these people are

kill

whim of a master, and if the master

may do so with impunity. I

them, he

heard numerous stories of slaves being beaten to death,

but I never heard of an instance in which the murderer

The police, the public

know exactly what is expected 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

was punished, or even arrested.

prosecutors and the judges

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

slaves

first

mention of corporal punishment for the

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.

little different way. I

I laughed, too,

but in a

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 somebody else.

My friend finally sold the woman, and some

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

necessary to whip them

—

oh, yes, very neces-

sary," he told me, with a smile, "for there

way

no other

other

is there of enforcing the discipline of the

farm?

means

What

make them do what you wish.

If we did not

whip them they would do nothing."

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

I could

make no reply.

At least, that is the case in Yucatan.

One of the first sights we saw on a henequen planta-

outright.

tion was the beating of a slave

—a formal beating before

the assembled toilers of the ranch early in the morning

call.

The slave was taken on

back

huge

Chinaman

the

and given fifteen lashes

across the bare back with a heavy, wet rope, lashes so

just after the daily roll

lustily

delivered that the blood ran

This method of beating

down the victim's

an ancient one in

Yucatan and is the customary one on all the plantations

for boys and all except the heaviest men. Women are

body.

required to kneel to be beaten, as sometimes are

of great weight.

men

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

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.

saw no punishments worse than beating in Yucatan,

I was told of men being strung

but I heard of them.

up by their fingers or toes to be beaten, of their being

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 dormithrust into black

tories,

armed guards and night guards who patrolled

farm settlements while the slaves

the outskirts of the

slept.

heard also of planters who took special delight

in personally superintending the beating of their chattels.

For example, speaking of one of the richest plantman of Merida said to

ers in Yucatan, a professional

me:

"A favorite pastime of

was

his,

horse and watch the 'cleaning up* (the punishment)

of.,

his slaves.

sit

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.

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 private mule car lines built and operated specially for the

business of the henequen kings.

that we visited was typical.

of Merida,

The

first

plantation

Situated fifteen miles west

contains thirty-six square miles of land,

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 secundos, or overseers, and the little chapel.

are the corrals, the drying yard,

dormitory.

Finally,

surrounding

Behind these

the stable, the jail

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

Thirty of the slaves were

bosses of various degrees.

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 overworked appearance. Certainly they were of the same

clay. Their clothing was poor and ragged, yet generally

The women wore calico, the men the thin, unclean.

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

Three hundred and eighty

rest women and children.

married

live with their families in

men

are

and

the

huts.

These

huts

one-room

are set in little patches

the

square,

feet

which,

rocky and barren as

of ground 144

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

No money is paid; it is all in credit, and this same system 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

work begins as soon thereafter as they can get

to it. Their work in the fields ends when it is too dark

their

to see,

and about the yards it sometimes extends until

long into the night.

The principal

labor of the plantation

harvesting

the henequen leaves and cleaning the weeds

from beEach 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. Sundays 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

tween the plants.

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-

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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

tions, for this

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 administrador, 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

down and have something.

I did

Mayordomo

sit

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

The harvest of

the leaves goes on unceasing

all

the

twelve months of the year, and during the cycle every

plant on the

farm

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

and finally

end of his row, where they

cutting, piles his leaves into bundles,

carries the bundles to the

are carted away on a movable-track mule-car line.

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

The ragged, bare-

season was considered a cool one.

footed harvesters worked steadily, carefully and with

the speed of better paid laborers

piece."

They were working

*'by

who work "by the

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

Here

a long chute and into the stripping machine.

hungry steel teeth tear the tough, thick leaves to pieces,

and the result is two products a green powder, which

—

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

refuse,

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

The United

States buys nearly

all

the

flag.

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

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 movements and their haggard, feverish faces. This was explained 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

that the production cost

—

buildings.

was simply a row of windowless, earthen-

rooms, half-dungeons, in each of which lay one

woman on a bare board, without a blanket to soften it.

floor

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

topped with the sharp edges of thousands of broken

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;

glass bottles.

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 bordering on the farm.

These "half-timers" are found on only about onethird of the plantations, and they are a class which has

THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN

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

They are compelled to work longer than

plantations.

half the year

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

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

this is all

who works six months is $22.50, and

—absolutely —that the family of the

all

half-

time slave has to live on each year.

Inside the large, one-room building within the stone

Yaxche we found, swinging so

one another, more than three

hundred rope hammocks. This was the sleeping place

wall at San Antonio

close that they touched

of the half-timers and the unmarried full-timers.

entered the enclosure just at dusk, as the toilers, wiping

the sweat from their foreheads, came filing in.

the dormitory

Behind

we found half a dozen women working

over some crude, open-air stoves.

wolves the ragged workers ringed

Like half-starved

about the

simple

kitchen, grimy hands went out to receive their meed of

supper, and standing there the miserable creatures ate.

sampled the supper of the slaves. That is, I samit 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

pled a part of

—

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

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

it?

offends the heavens with

"Beans,

tortillas,

fish!"

its

rottenness.

suppose that they can at

"provided they do

least keep alive on it," I told myself,

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.

Beans,

This is the only meal they have!"

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, something 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

"Which would you rather

be," I asked

him, "a

half-timer or a full-timer?"

"A full-timer," he replied, promptly, and then in a

"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

lower tone:

die."

"We come to work gladly," said another young Maya,

But before the end of the

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 woman. "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 (beating) 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

"because we're starved to it.

first

country

aways.

No fruits or eatable herbs grow wild in that

adapted to preventing the escape of run-

rocky land. There are no springs and no place where

a person can dig a well without a rock drill and dynamite.

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

up and put to much trouble to prove that

he is not a runaway slave.

to be locked

Yucatan has been compared to Russians Siberia.

"Si-

beria," Mexican political refugees have told me, "is hell

BARBAROUS MEXICO

frozen over; Yucatan is hell aflame."

many

points

But I did not see

two countries.

a sense, and political

common between

True, the Yaquis are exiles in

the

exiles at that, but they are also slaves.

exiles of

Russia are not slaves.

The political

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.

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 supposed to grow just 36 new leaves a year. Twelve of

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

fails

beaten,

to cut his 2,000 he is beaten, if he

trims his leaves raggedly he is beaten, if he is late at

And he is beaten for any other

roll-call he is beaten.

little shortcoming that any of the bosses may imagine

Sithat he detects in his character or in his make-up.

these, the

beria?

To my mind Siberia is a foundling asylum com-

pared to Yucatan.

Over and over again I have compared in my mind

condition of the slaves of Yucatan with what I

the

have read of the slaves of our southern

states before

THE SLAVES OF YUCATAN

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 cattle.

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!

gardens!

slavery

—

Wonderful Mexican

wonderful fairyland conjured out of

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

The Mayas are dying in their own land and

with their own people. The Yaquis are exiles. They

more.

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.

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 element of Sonora, finally of President Diaz's sweeping

order of deportation.

knew that the order of deportation was being car-

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 metropAfter the Yaqui exiles sailed

olis could not tell me.

from the port of Veracruz the curtain dropped upon

them. I went to Yucatan in order to witness, if possible, the final act in the life drama of the Yaqui nation.

ried out, that hundreds of families

And I witnessed it.

The Yaquis are being exterminated and exterminated

There is no room for controversy as to that; the

fast.

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

for them.

marked out

On the other hand, there are those who

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.

we would not call them Indians,

As far back as their history can

be traced they have never been savages. They have

In the United States

for they are workers.

been an agricultural people. They tilled the soil, discovered 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 territory south of Arizona which today comprises the state

of Sonora.

"They are the best workers in Sonora," Colonel Francisco 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

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

taking our best workmen away from us and destroying

"The government says it wants to open up the Yaqui country for

settlers," S. R. DeLong, secretary of the Arizona Historical Society and an old resident of Sonora, told me,

the prosperity of the state," said another.

"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

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 almost a giant, the race a race of athletes. Perhaps that

is just the reason why he has not bent his head in submission to the will of the masters of Mexico.

American mine-owners and railroad men of Sonora

in the

are repeatedly complaining against the deportation of

it is because they are such good workAnother matter which I have heard much remarked about by border Americans is the regard of the

the Yaquis, and

men.

so-called renegade, or fighting Yaquis, for the property

of Americans and other foreigners.

first

When the Yaquis

took up arms against the present government some

twenty-five years ago they did so because of a definite

Usually they fought on the defensive.

Driven to the mountains, they have been compelled at

times to sally forth and plunder for their stomachs*

grievance.

But for many years it was known to all men that

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 attributed to a plot on the part of a number of politicians, the

sake.

they seldom attacked Americans

purpose being to get possession of the rich lands in

Southern Sonora which the Yaquis had held for hun-

For twenty-four years past the only

has had have been Ramon Corral,

Sonora

governors

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

dreds of years.

BARBAROUS MEXICO

were held at all, these three friends had absolutely no

one to answer to except President Diaz, and their authority 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 people, supposed by some authorities to have been offshoots

from the Aztecs. The Spanish were never able to subdue 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 acknowledgment 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. During all that time the Yaquis were at peace with the world.

Their reputation as a naturally peaceful nation was

It remained for the government of Diaz to

established.

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 peostir

THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS

government had decided to give it to forThey confiscated $80,000 in a bank belonging

pie that the

eigners.

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 government has maintained an army almost perpetually in

the field against the Yaquis, an army ranging in numThousands of soldiers

bers from 2,000 to 6,000 men.

and tens of thousands of Yaquis have been killed in battle and many hundreds of the latter have been executed

After a few years Chief

after being taken prisoners.

Cajeme was captured and publicly executed in the presence of a large body of his people who had been taken

was

promptly elected to Cajeme's place, and the fight went

prisoner

on.

with

him.

Tetabiate,

another

Finally, in 1894, at one fell swoop, as

Yaqui,

were, the

ground was literally taken from under the feet of the

By act of the federal government the best of

rebels.

their lands were taken from them and handed over to

one man, General Lorenzo Torres, who is at this writing

army in Sonora, then second in command.

The government is credited with having been guilty

chief of the

of the most horrible atrocities. Two examples are cited

by Santa de Cabora, a Mexican writer, as follows:

"On May

ordered the

children, in

1892, General Otero, of the Mexican army,

imprisonment of the Yaquis, men, women and

the town of Navajoa, and hung so many of these

17,

people that the supply of rope in the town was exhausted,

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.

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

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, declared 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-

"Those Indians wanted to cheat me out of my commission 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 reward 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

nel.

;

for a pair of ears.

"Sometimes small squads of the Indians are capwas with the army it was customary

tured, and when I

THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS

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

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 letrope,' they would cry,

ter says:

"This picture resembles very much another one that

was taken at the Yaqui river when General Angel Martinez was in command of the Mexican army of occupation. It was the custom of this general to hang men because 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 reported 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

the governor laughing at the sight of a bunch of hands

BARBAROUS MEXICO

had been brought to him and that were dangling

from the end of a cane. This picture was even published 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 families 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

that

deported to Yucatan.

A few Yaquis, perhaps four or five thousand, refused

up the battle for their lands. The found inacand 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

to give

cessible peaks

The army of several thousand soldiers still

hunted them. The soldiers could not reach those moun-

theirs.

THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS

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

Others have been captured and executed.

Rumors of peace have traveled the rounds only to prove

been killed.

untrue a little

later.

ernment have been

Peace conferences with the govheld, but

have failed because the

"renegades" could secure no guarantee that they would

not be either executed or deported after they laid down

In January, 1909, the report was

their arms.

officially

sent out by Governor Torres that Chief Bule and sev-

hundred of his warriors had surrendered on conBut later troubles showed this announcement

to have been premature. There are at least a few hundred Yaquis among those Bacetete crags. They refuse

eral

ditions.

They are outlaws. They are cut off from

They have no connection with the peaceful

to surrender.

the world.

element of their nation that is scattered all over the state

Yet the existence of this handful of "renegades"

Mexican government has

for gathering up peaceful Mexican families and deporting 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

of Sonora.

the only excuse the

—

are fighting away off there in the hills ?

cian with whom I talked in

The army physiMexico City answered the

question in very energetic terms.

"The reason?" he said. "There is no reason. It is

The excuse is that the workers con-

only an excuse.

tribute to the support of the fighters.

true,

true only in an infinitesimal minority of cases, for the

vast majority of the Yaquis are entirely out of touch

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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

with the fighters.

its

inhabitants had stolen a horse.'*

The deportation of Yaquis to Yucatan and other slave

Mexico began to assume noticeable proporIt was carried out on a small scale

at first, then on a larger one.

Finally, in the spring of 1908, a despatch was published in American and Mexican newspapers saying that

President Diaz had issued a sweeping order decreeing

that every Yaqui, wherever found, men women and children, should be gathered up by the War Department

sections of

tions about 1905.

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 departments of Mexico City. It was confirmed by Colo-

And it is certain

may have come from,

nel Cruz, chief deporter of Yaquis.

that such an order, wherever

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

And there are others besides Yaquis who

exile road.

Pimas and Opatas, other Inand 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-

traveled over that road.

dians, Mexicans,

tan to find out.

THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS

The secret that lies at the roots of the whole Yaqui

summed

affair was revealed to me and the whole matter

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 immediate charge of transporting all the Yaqui exiles to Yucatan.

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 campaigner 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 Yaquis in Yucatan delivered, mind you, for you must remember that the government never allows me enough expense 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.

over to the Secretary of War.

The rest is turned

This, however,

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

—

first,

the

money

from the appropriation of their property, second, the

money from the sale of their bodies. He declared to me

BARBAROUS MEXICO

would never stop until the last

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,

that the deportations

possible dollar

he said.

These little confidences of the colonel were given me

merely as bits of interesting gossip to a harmless foreigner.

citizens

He had no notion of exposing the officials and

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 increased before the end of the year. I have just been

—

given orders to hurry 1,500 more to Yucatan as quickly

Ah, yes, I ought to have a com-

as I can get them there.

fortable

little

fortune for myself before this thing

over, for there are at least 100,000 more Yaquis to come

"One hundred thousand more to come!" he repeated

my exclamation.

"Yes, one hundred thousand,

—

Of course, theyVe not all really Yaquis, but

And President Diaz's chief deporter of Sonora work-

one.

upon the deck of the

ing-people lolling there

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 vessel 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

crow flies the distance is little more than one hundred miles; as the road winds it is twice as far, and requires from fifteen to twenty days to travel. "Bull pens,"

the

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

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 International 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 Progreso and turned over to the waiting consignees.

On the road to Yucatan the companion of my journeys, 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

might be difficult to obtain the

BARBAROUS MEXICO

Opportunity to

visit this

unclean hole, but, luckily,

The guard bent readily to friendly

were mistaken.

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, tobacco-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

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

overalls, jumper,

;

arm, an aggressive-faced woman of forty against whom

was closely pressed a girl of ten shivering and shaking

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

in the grasp of a malarial attack,

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

"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 cuyoung father.

"Dead in San Marcos," he replied, closing his teeth

riously of the

tight.

killed

one

"That three weeks' tramp over the mountains

They have allowed me to keep the little

her.

—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 employ. One day a government agent visited the neighborhood and ordered the bosses to give an account of all

The bosses obeyed, but they did not

know what it meant until a few days later, when the

their laborers.

BARBAROUS MEXICO

Then they knew, and they saw ruin

soldiers came.

coming to them as well as to us. They begged the offiHe is a good man. He

cers, saying: 'This is my peon.

has been with me for twenty years.

need him for the

harvest.'

"It

woman

true," broke in the

stricken child.

two years.

with

the

ague-

"We were with Carlos Romo for twenty-

The night we were taken we were seven;

now we are two."

"And we were

with Eugenio Morales

years," spoke another

for

sixteen

woman.

"Yes," went on the spokesman, "our bosses followed

us, begging, but it was no use.

Some of them followed

the way to Hermosillo.

There was Manuel Gandara, and Jose Juan Lopez, and Franco Tallez, and Eugenio 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

all

—

robbed

"They died on the way like starving cattle," went on

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

Two never got up again, and we buried them

again.^

the old

—

ourselves there beside the road."

"There were burros

San

woman, "and mules and horses.

Bias,"

interrupted a

Oh, why didn't they

;

OVER THE EXILE ROAD

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.

let

US ride?

Yes, the soldiers bothered the

women often, especially

week we starved in Mexico City, but always the

women fought them back."

"I have a sister in Yucatan," said a young woman unthat

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,

Yucatan as they say it is?

is it

so terribly hot in

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 muchachos, 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

They took her four

boys at Guadalajara and left her nothing. Myself?

there with her face in her hands?

little

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

;

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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

met by flying

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

for the deck, but here were

sheets of rain, which drove

seasickness.

We steamed thirty miles up the Coatzacoalcos river,

then anchored to the shore and spent a day loading jun-

market of New Orleans.

Two hundred ordinary cattle may be coaxed through a

gle bulls for the tough beef

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

straight and narrow way.

the

would consent to walk in the

Once inside, and ranged along

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-

For the remaining four days of the

sheltered deck.

journey, one of which we spent waiting for the Norther

to pass, the "Yaquis" chose the deck.

OVER THE EXILE ROAD

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 station of San Ignacio, on their way to a plantation belonging 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

they reach a settlement.

Families, broken

up in Sonora or on the way, are never permitted to reunite. 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 talked with them.

I saw many Yaquis in Yucatan.

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 theIt was at 3 :45 o'clock in the morning,

atrically staged.

The slave gang was

just after roll-call of the slaves.

drawn up in front of the plantation store, the fitful rays

of the lanterns sputtering high on the store front playing uncertainly over their dusky faces and dirty white

forms.

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There were seven hundred of them.

Now and

then a brighter lantern beam shot all the way to the towering tropical trees, which, standing shoulder to shoulder,

walled in the grass-grown patio.

Under

the hanging

lanterns and facing the ragged band stood the administrador, or general manager, the

mayordomo primero, or

mayordomos

superintendent, and the lesser bosses, the

secundos, the majacol and the capataces.

**Rosanta Bajeca!'*

The name, squeaked out by the voice of the administrador, brought from the crowd a young Yaqui, mediumsized,

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-

—

Submissive but dignified

he stood there, for all the world like a captive Indian

chief of a hundred years ago, contemptuously awaiting

vious beatings, for the whip.

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

mouths showing the bare bronze skin beneath, bare legs,

bare

feet, battered

hands

grass hats held deferentially in the

—a tatterdemalion

lot,

shaking the sleep from their

Three races

Maya, aborigine of Yucatan, the tall, arrow-backed Chinaman and

the swarthy, broad-fisted Yaqui from Sonora.

eyes, blinking at the flickering lanterns.

there were, the sharp-visaged, lofty-browed

At a

third

command

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 tenThe

sion of nerves among those seven hundred men.

whipper extraordinary, known as a majocol, a deepchested, hairy brute, bent over the bucket and soused

Withdrawing

his hands deep into the water within.

them, he held high for inspection four dripping ropes,

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 hundred straightened with a jerk and an involuntary gasp

Laggard slumber, though

rippled over the assemblage.

At last all were

unsated, dropped from their eyes.

each three feet long.

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

known on the plantations of Yucatan.

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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

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.

the victim to the gaze of his fellow bondsmen.

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 shoulders of the Yaqui

The administrador, a small, nervous man of many gestures, 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

—the giant Chi-

uncertain dimness of the early morning

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 agonizingly deliberate majocol, the administrador, watch in

hand, nodding endorsement, the grinning mayordomo,

the absorbed capataces.

All held their breath for the second blow.

rest,

held

the rope would never

fall.

breath with the

I held

for ages, until I thought

Not until I saw the finger

—

OVER THE EXILE ROAD

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.

fell, ages apart.

At the

fourth the strong brown skin broke and little pin-heads

I counted the blows as they

of crimson pushed themselves out, burst, and started

downward in thin tricklets.

back lost its

rigidity

and

At the sixth the glistening

fell

to quivering like a jelly-

At the ninth a low whine somewhere in the depths

of that Yaqui, found its devious way outward and into

fish.

the open.

Oh, that whine!

hear it now, a hard, hard

whine, as if indurated to diamond hardness by drilling

way to the air through a soul of adamant.

At last the spats ceased there were fifteen the administrador, with a final nod, put away his watch, the

giant Chinaman released his grip on the brown wrists

its

—

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

A moment later he rose to his feet and staggered forward to

join his fellow bondsmen. In that moment the spell of

pair of glazed eyes and a face twisted with pain.

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

work on the farm had begun.

Naturally I made inquiries about Rosanta Bajeca to

find out what crime he had committed to merit fifteen

later the day's

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lashes of the wet rope.

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

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 Chinaman. It's a wonder he did not fight. He seems like a

brave man he has the look of a fighter.'*

of leaves.

;

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

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

But our majocol never faltered.

That majocol is a genius. He conquered the wolf. He

wielded the rope until the stubborn one surrendered, until 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

the weight of a club.

human character of the peoThe

Yaquis are Indians, they are not white, yet when one

struck with the extremely

ple

whom the Mexican government calls Yaquis.

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 family 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 exroad and in Yucatan. The Yaqui woman feels as

keenly the brutal snatching away of her babe as would

The heart-strings of

the cultivated American woman.

Yaqui

are

proof

against

the

wife

a violent and

unwished- for separation from her husband than would

ile

be the heart-strings of the refined mistress of a beautiful American home.

The Mexican government

forbids

divorce

and

re-

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marriage within its domain, but for the henequen planters of

Yucatan

all

things

are possible.

Yaqui

woman a native of Asia is no less repugnant than he is

American woman, yet one of the first barbarities

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 anywhere 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

to an

the

does the brown woman of Sonora.

than

Don Enrique Camara

No less a personage

Zavala,

president

"Camara de Agricola de Yucatan," and a

planter himself, told me:

"If the Yaquis last out the

first

the

millionaire

year they generally

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

get along

set in

all

right

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

Chinamen, for they had arrived only one month before

f rom Sonora.

all of them

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 comfortable, 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

—

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

girl

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

—

less than a five-cent stew in the United States

which had just been brought from the plantation store.

beef

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

said:

us,

lined

them up, and

'Choose a man.' Twice."

"And why didn't you choose?"

This question several of the women answered in chorus.

In words and wry faces they expressed their ab-

horrence of the Chinamen, and with tremulous earnestness 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

I must choose, too.

a woman no longer, but they said

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"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," relike one,

OVER THE EXILE ROAO

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

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 muttered: "When the Yaqui men are beaten they die of

her just like they beat the men.

shame, but the women can stand to be beaten ; they cannot 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 daytime 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 Hermosillo, 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

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

But

said:. "There can be nothing worse than this."

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.

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

—pass back

per cent

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

thousand new ones every year!

"By the sixth or seventh month they begin to die off

fifteen

like flies at the first winter frost,

and after that they're

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

not worth keeping.

;

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

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again."

This assertion was made to

me by a station

agent of the Veracruz al Pacifico railroad.

"There are no survivors of Valle Nacional

ones/' a government engineer

—no

real

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 toward 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

and he knows more of the country, probably,

than does any Mexican not directly interested in the

Niacional

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

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

municipality, said it.

—

THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL

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 confined to Yucatan

and Valle Nacional.

lar to those of Valle

Conditions simi-

Nacional are the rule in many sec-

and especially in the states south of

Nacional because it is most notorious as a region of slaves, and because, as I have al-

tions of Diaz-land,

the capital.

I cite Valle

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

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

through El

Hule that every human being passes in going to or coming from the valley. There is no other practical route

in, no other one out.

The magnificent tropical mountains which wall in the valley are covered with an impenetrable 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 dismount 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

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

large rocks

from.

difficult route over which

must be avoided and deep holes kept away

The valley itself is as flat as a floor, clear of all

rank growth, and down its gentle slope winds the Papaloapan 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

two from El Hule.

three days' journey

from Cordoba,

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 Mexico, 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 valleyare four towns, Tuztepec, Chiltepec, Jacatepec and Valle

Nacional, all situated on the banks of the river, all provided with policemen to hunt runaway slaves, not one

of whom can get out of the valley without passing the

towns.

Tuztepec, the largest,

provided with ten po-

(mounted country police).

Besides, every runaway slave brings a reward of $10

to the man or policeman who catches and returns him

licemen and eleven rurales

to his owner.

Thus it will be understood how much the geographof Valle Nacional accounts for its being

worse than most other slave districts of

Combined with this may be mentioned the

Mexico.

complete understanding that is had with the government

and the nearness to a practically inexhaustible labor

ical isolation

just a

little

market.

Just as in Yucatan, the slavery of Valle Nacional

merely peonage, or labor for debt, carried to the extreme,

TYPE OF

ENGANCHADO

OR PLANTATION SLAVE

—

THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL

although outwardly it takes a slightly different form

that of contract labor.

The origin of the conditions of Valle Nacional was

The planters needed lacontract labor.

They went to the expense of importing laborborers.

undoubtedly

ers with the understanding that the laborers

with their jobs for a given time.

would stay

Some laborers tried

jump their contracts and the planters used force to

The advance money and the cost

transportation

looked

upon as a debt which the

was

laborer could be compelled to work out. From this it

was only a step to so ordering the conditions of labor

compel them to stay.

that the laborer could under no circumstances ever hope

to get free.

In time Valle Nacional became a word of

They reSo the planters felt

compelled to tell them they were going to take them

somewhere else. From this it was only a step to play-

horror with the working people of all Mexico.

fused to go there for any price.

ing the workman false all round, to formulating a contract not to be carried out, but to help get the laborer

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

into the toils.

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

Then he works him at will, feeds or starves him

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

sum.

to suit himself, places

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pleases you.

call

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

He is appointed

districts corresponding to our counties.

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 importance. He has no one to answer to except his gov-

ernor—

the national president

—and altogether quite a

Czar

feels like interfering

^unless

little

in his domain.

The methods employed by the jefe politico working

alone are very simple.

ers to terms in jail

Nacional.

Instead of sending petty prison-

he sells them into slavery in Valle

And as he pockets the money himself, he

naturally arrests as many persons as he can. This method

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

southern Mexico, so I was

told

Manuel La-

gunas, by "labor agents," as well as by others whose

veracity in

the

matter

—pays an annual

his office.

rental

have no reason to question

$10,000

per

year

for

The office would be worth no such amount

were it not for the spoils of the slave trade and other litLesser

tle grafts which are indulged in by the holder.

send

lesser

amounts.

They

governors

their

pay

jefes

gangs

from

ten

road

to one

their victims over the

—

THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL

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 politicos 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

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

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

One is to open an em-

the laborer are many and various.

ployment office and advertise for workers who are to be

home and plenty of

freedom somewhere in the south of Mexico. Free transportation is offered.

These inducements always cause

given high wages, a comfortable

a certain number to take the

bait, especially

men with

families who want to move with their families to a more

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

prosperous clime.

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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

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 enganchandor rapidly points out several alluring sentences

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

written thereon.

to the agent.

He is usually given a chance to spend this,

or a part of it, usually for clothing or other necessaries

order that he may be unable to pay it back when he

discovers that he has been trapped.

printed

contract

—fixing the wages,

filled out afterwards by

The blanks on the

etc.

—are usually

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.

than private

Yet they are nothing more nor less

which are enticed laborers, who

jails into

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 outright kidnapping.

have heard of many cases of the

THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL

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.

official

The

records of Mexico City say that during the year

ending September

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

A frantic search failed

into the windows of a pawn shop.

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

But he had attained the well-nigh impossible.

planter.

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

to locate

story is this:

Four years ago Daniel T

an unsuccessful Span-

ish adventurer, arrived, penniless, in Cordoba.

In a few

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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 advantage 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

my man?"

centavos)

very easily,

Of course the man cared, and in a few minutes he

was on his way to the Spaniard's room carrying a "message." 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

Today he is El Senor Daniel T

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

other places.

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

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

were made

Moreover, he learns also that

if he has been lucky enough to get a peep

learns that the promises of the labor agent

merely to entrap him.

—

the contract

at that instrument

pose.

—was made exactly for the same pur-

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

himself for a period of six months, but

sell

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-

employer to pay the men fifty

centavos (25 cents American) per day as wages, and the

tract usually binds 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

—that they never paid any money to

—several of them

Yet

They claimed

their slaves.

they never called their system slavery.

to "keep books" on their slaves and juggle the accounts

in such a

way as to keep them always in debt.

the wages are fifty centavos a day," they

"Yes,

would

say,

"but they must pay us back what we give to bring them

BARBAROUS MEXICO

And they must give us interest on it, too. And

here.

—and

they must pay for the clothing that we give them

the tobacco, and anything else."

This

exactly the attitude of every one of the to-

bacco planters of Valle Nacional.

For

and

clothing,

tobacco, and "anything else," they charge ten prices.

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.

the other hand, when you figure up the cost of the slave

it is quite different.

"Purchase price, food,

wages everything," Senor Rodriguez told me,

"costs from $60 to $70 per man for the first six months

to yourself,

clothes,

—

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.

beans and tortillas.

It all goes for food

—

Yes, there

the

masters

another constant item of expense that

must pay

—the burial fee

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

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

locked up in a dormitory resembling a jail. In addition 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

strongly of

are

large barn-like buildings,

constructed

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 furniture except sometimes long, rude benches which serve

as beds.

The mattresses are thin grass mats.

a hole sleep

all

the slaves, men,

In such

women and children,

the number ranging, according to the size of the plantation, from seventy to four hundred.

They are packed in like sardines in a box, crowded

together like cattle in a freight car.

out for yourself.

You can figure it

On the ranch "Santa Fe" the dormi-

tory measures 75 by 18 feet, and

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

—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

;

BARBAROUS MEXICO

of them men, the door is locked on them and they ar*

mercy of the men.

Often honest, hard-working Mexicans are taken into

If the

Valle Nacional with their wives and children.

left to the

wife is attractive in appearance she goes to the planter

The children see theil

or to one or more of the bosses.

mother being taken away and they know what is to

become of her. The husband knows it, but if he makes

Time and time

objection he is answered with a club.

again I have been told that this was so, by masters, by

And the women who are thrust into

slaves, by officials.

the sardine box must take care of themselves.

One-fifth of the slave^ of Valle Nacional are women

The boys work in

They cost less, they last well,

one-third are boys under fifteen.

the fields with the men.

some parts of the work, such as planting the

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

They serve the master and

is as household drudges.

and

tobacco, they are

the mistress,

there

a mistress, and they grind the

corn and cook the food of the male slaves.

slave house I visited I

women grinding corn.

In every

found from three to a dozen

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

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

clothes, but

THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL

—

"Women are

several hundred backs yearly in the work.

cheaper than machines," was the reply.

In Valle Nacional the slaves seemed to me to work

I saw them working in the morning twisaw 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

all

the time.

light.

hour on the farms is generally 4 o'clock in the morning.

Sometimes

earlier.

On all but three or four of

the thirty farms the slaves work every day in the year

At San Juan del Rio, one of the largest,

until they fall.

they have a half holiday every Sunday.

happened to

That

be at San Juan del Rio on a Sunday afternoon.

What a grim joke!

half holiday!

The slaves spent it

in jail, locked up to keep them from running away

And they fall very fast.

They are beaten, and that

They are

given no hope, and that helps. They die in anywhere

from one month to a year, the time of greatest mortality

helps.

They

are starved, and that helps.

being between the sixth and eighth month.

Like the

cotton planters of our South before the war, the tobacco

seem to have their business figured down to a

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

planters

fine point.

another one.

covered that

The Valle Nacional slave holder has disit

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.

tation houses

towns.

passed three nights at various plan-

and four more at one or another of the

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

to do.

would be possible

As in Yucatan, I was able to secure my informa-

I saw of and heard from the

from the mouths of the masters themselves.

Indeed, I was more fortunate than I was in Yucatan.

tion,

not only from what

slaves, but

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

of the place we found among the people.

None had been there, but all had heard rumors, some

horror

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

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

Some were ragged, some well dressed, and

had small bundles on their shoulders.

"On their way to the valley !" I whispered. My companion 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

heads down.

several

of the exiles.

After supper I mingled with the crowds in the leading 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

Just show him my signature and he'll

friend of mine.

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

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.

ain't over.

I've been here a long time

know I'm pretty safe, but sometimes

little

property.

I get

scared myself

No, sir, they

and I've got a

—

^yes, sir, I

get scared, you bet!"

BARBAROUS MEXICO

Early next morning as

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-

were of the ordinary type of

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

ligent faces; the others

city or

valley.

Down into the tropics we slid, into the jungle, into

the dampness and perfume of the lowlands,

the hot country.

known as

We flew down a mountain, then skirted

the rim of a gash-like gorge, looking down

upon coffee

upon groves of bananas, rubber and sugar

cane, then into a land where it rains every day except

It was not hot

in mid- winter.

not real hot, like Yuma

plantations,

—

^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

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

squad. At Tierra Blanca we stopped for dinner and, as

the meal the rurales purchased for their charges consisted 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-

we had the story of each.

The prisoners were all from Pachuca, capital of the

ently

state of Hidalgo, and, unlike the vast majority of Valle

Nacional slaves, they were being sent over the road

The pardirectly by the jefe politico of that district.

explained

was

particular

ticular system of this

jefe

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 railroads, his guards are paid for by the government, so

from Pachuca costs him only three

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

the four days' trip

pesos and a half per man.

are very large.

"How does he get his men? He picks them up on

the street and puts them in jail.

them with some

case the

Sometimes he charges

crime, real or imaginary, but in either

man is never tried.

He is held in jail until

make up a gang, and then

Why, men who may be safely sent

there are enough others to

all

are sent here.

to Valle Nacional are getting so scarce in

Pachuca that

the jefe has even been known to take young boys out of

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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 Independence 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 paying 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

The case of the musicians

The older carried the forehead of

or the other of the guards.

interested us most.

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:

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

—

"They are sending us to our death to our death !" And

always at the words the soft-faced, cringing boy of eighteen 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

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 resting for a moment on a sandy bank, silhouetted against

toward Tuztepec.

the sky.

Rodolpho Pardo, the jefe politico,

whom we visited

after supper, proved to be a slender, polished

man of

our

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

During the forenoon we encountered several other

trail.

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,

And they must hide from

Tuzetpec and El Hule.

every one on the road, for a reward of ten pesos is paid

for every runaway captured. We don't love the system,

forty,

smooth-shaven,

with eyes which

bodies like steel probes at first.

—

searched

BARBAROUS MEXICO

but ten pesos is a lot of money, and no one would let

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/*

man

As I rode up

His arm was

I spoke to him, but he did not move.

"One time," another native told us,

leaning against a tree beside the

"I saw a

trail.

doubled against the tree trunk and his eyes seemed to be

studying the ground.

that he was stiff

touched his shoulder and found

—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!"

we rode into Jacatepec, and there

ahead of us. They had started

found

the

slave

gang

ahead,

walking the twenty-four miles

kept

first and had

of muddy trail, though some of them were soft from

They were sprawled out on a patch

jail confinement.

Just at nightfall

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

—

—how those tender white

fared among the

of Valle Nacional. "They are sending us

our death!" The news that Amado

our death —

shiver

feet

tropical flies

Godaniz were alive today would surprise me. That night

he seemed to realize that he would never need those fine

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

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

At first the chief of the two

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.

road to Valle Nacional.

riirales,

"It*s the

clean,

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

;

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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 Candido 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 helping 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

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 furnish them blankets or extra clothing, the other half with

small bundles of bright-colored blankets on their backs;

mounted and uniformed rurales, one in front

and one behind; and the American travelers at the

finally, the

extreme rear.

Soon we began to see gangs of men, from twenty to

one hundred, at work in the fields preparing the ground

The men were the color of the

me as strange that they moved

for the tobacco planting.

ground, and

struck

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

Crouching beside the porch of the main building

was a sick slave. One foot was swollen to twice its natural size and a dirty bandage was wrapped clumsily about

Rio.''

"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.

it.

As we rode away we caught our first glimpse of a

Valle Nacional slave-house, a mere jail with barred windows, 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

BARBAROUS MEXICO

how perfectly he was a part of it he soon

Rounding a bluff suddenly we caught sight of

system, yet

showed.

a man crouching half hidden behind a tree.

Our rurale

called him and he came, trembling, and trying to hide the

The ensuing con-

green oranges that he had been eating.

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

Nobody ever comes this way who doesn't have

What farm did you run away from, any-

way.

business here.

how?

—

run away.

—Well, you

Man

Rurale

I didn't

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 encountered 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 emacimen and boys at work clearing the ground with

ated

—

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

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

town of Valle

||'J

we spoke to an old man with a stump of a

p§y

river for the last time to ride into the

Nacional

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

reply.

j^--;

Manuel Lagunas, presidente of Valle Nacional, proved

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 talking 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 originally called "Royal Valley"

the Independence of

Nacional.

R.j^

by the Spaniards, but after

Mexico it was rechristened Valle

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-

fev;

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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

Hernandez.

they

die

—

all,"

said

"And when they are dead the bosses do not

They throw them

swamps where the alligators eat them. On the

always take the trouble to bury them.

in 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.

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

"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 plandie of malaria and consumptations ? Ah, yes, they die

tion

—but

—

only because they are under-fed.

—

Tor-

they

and beans

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 previously 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

tillas

sour beans at that, usually,

is all

BARBAROUS MEXICO

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

break

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

was $1.50 in debt to the ranch! He came

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

told that he

to the

seen another living creature

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

We found the

day, as well as a half a dozen others.

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.

was as impregnable

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, running 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

as an American jail.

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.

IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH

And I was repeatedly told that the women who enterthat 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 superintendent, sleeps in a room at one end of the slave dormi-

tory and the cahos, or overseers, sleep in a room at the

The single door is padlocked, but a watch-

other end.

man paces all night up and down the p

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