# Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 12

CHAPTER XII
CRITICS AND CORROBORATION
The first five chapters of this book, which, in a little less extended form, were published serially in The American Magazine in the fall of 1909, called forth a considerable measure of comment both in the United States and Mexico. Both the magazine and myself were deluged with letters, many of which asserted that the writers themselves had witnessed conditions similar to those which I described. On the other hand, there were many who flatly averred that I was a fabricator and a slanderer, declaring, variously, that nothing akin to slavery or even to peonage existed in Mexico, that, if it did, it was the only practical way to civilize Mexico, anyhow, that the Mexican working people were the happiest and most fortunate on the face of the earth, that President Diaz was the most benign ruler of the age, that a long enough hunt would discover cases of barbarities even in the United States, and we would better clean our own house first, that there were $900,000,000 of American capital invested in Mexico—and so on and so on.
The remarkable thing, indeed, about the discussion was the headlong manner in which certain magazines, newspapers, book publishers and private individuals in this country rushed to the defense of President Diaz. These individuals evidently acted on the theory that a charge of slavery in his domain was an aspersion on the rule of President Diaz, and quite correctly so. Wherefore, they proceeded to denounce me in the most vigorous terms, on the one hand, and to let loose a flood of adulatory literature concerning President Diaz, on the ​other. I imagine that it would require a very long freight train to carry all the flattering literature that was circulated in this country by the friends of Diaz in the six months following the first appearance of my articles upon the news stands.
The perusal of those articles and this other literature also would drive anyone inevitably to the conclusion that somebody was deliberately distorting the truth. Who was distorting the truth? Who — and why? Since the who as well as the why are peculiarly a part of this story I may be pardoned for pausing for a few pages to reply, first, to the question, "Who?"
It would give me pleasure to present here some hundreds of letters which, among them, corroborate many times all the essential features of my account of Mexican slavery. But did I do so there would be little room left in the book for anything else. I can merely say that in most cases the writers claimed to have spent various numbers of years in Mexico. The letters were unsolicited, the writers were paid by no one; in many cases they were endangering their own interests in writing. If I am the liar, all of these persons must be liars, also, a proposition which I doubt if anyone could believe were they to read the letters.
But I am not printing these letters and I do not ask the reader to consider them in my favor. Samples of them, and a large enough number to be convincing, are to be found, however, in the November, December and January numbers of The American Magazine.
I shall pass over, also, the published testimony of other writers, well-known investigators, who have corroborated my story in more or less detail. For example, the account of the slavery of the American rubber plantations, written by Herman Whitaker and printed in ​The American Magazine for February, 1910; the accounts of the slavery of Yucatan by the English writers, Arnold and Frost, in the book, "An American Egypt," which was quoted at length in The American Magazine of April, 1910. The corroboration which I shall present here is taken almost entirely from my critics themselves persons who started out to deny the slavery or to palliate it, and who ended by admitting the existence of the essential features of that institution.
To begin with the least important class of witnesses, I shall take up first the statements of several American planters who rushed into print to defend the system of their friend Diaz. There is George S. Gould, manager of the San Gabriel rubber plantation, on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. In various newspapers Mr. Gould was quoted extensively, especially in the San Francisco Bulletin, where he speaks of the "absolute inaccuracy" of my writings. Here are some of his explanations taken from that paper:
"As general manager of the San Gabriel, I send $2,500 at a certain season to my agent in the City of Oaxaca. He opens an employment office and calls for a quota of seventy-five men. ***
"The laborer is given an average of fifty cents (Mexican) a week until the debt he owes the company is liquidated. The company is not obliged to pay him this amount, but does so to keep him contented. He is usually contracted for for periods ranging from six months to three years. In three years, if he is reasonably industrious and saving, he will not only have paid off his debt money, but he will draw his liquidation with money in his pocket. ***
Mr. Edward H. Thompson was for many years the American consul in Yucatan. Mr. Thompson owns a henequen plantation, and, though I did not visit it, I was informed that he held slaves under exactly the same conditions as do the henequen kings. Immediately following the publication of my first article Mr. Thompson issued a long statement that was published in so many papers that I imagine a news syndicate was employed to circulate it. Mr. Thompson began by denouncing my article as "outrageous in its statements and absolutely false in many details." But read what Mr. Thompson himself says are the facts:
"Reduced to its lowest terms and looking at the matter without the desire to produce a sensational magazine article, the so-called slavery becomes one of simple contract convenience to both parties. The native needs the money, or thinks he does, while the planter needs the labor of the native servant.
"The indebted servant is held more or less strictly to the terms of the verbal and implied contract, according to the personal equation of the planter or his representative. This general fact is equally true in all of the great industries of our country as well as in Yucatan.
Reading those lines with discrimination, you will observe that Mr. Thompson admits that debt slavery is prevalent in Yucatan, admits that a similar system exists all over Mexico, and admits that it is a system that cannot be defended. They why does he defend it? ​Mr. C. V. Cooper, an American land promoter, writing in the Portland Oregonian, says that he read my articles with "amusement mixed with indignation," and decided that they were "grossly exaggerated." But he made some admissions. Said he:
But, Mr. Cooper, if the employe must remain, how can he have any say as to how much the wage which you declare is "agreed upon" shall be?
Very naively Mr. Cooper explains the freedom of the peon. Says he:
From whom else, Mr. Cooper? Oh, the sweet, sweet liberty of Mexico!
It is too bad that Mr. Cooper should have marred such a rosy picture as he paints by admitting the man-hunting part of the system. But he does:
Yet Mr. Cooper finally avers:
Mr. Cooper thought so well of his defense of the Diaz system that he—or someone else—went to the expense of having it printed in pamphlet form and circulated about the country. There were other ​pamphleteers besides Mr. Cooper, too, who rushed to the defense of Mexico. One was Mr. E. S. Smith of Tippecanoe, Iowa, the man who wired President Taft begging him to deny The American Magazine the mails, and that before my first article went to press. Mr. Smith wrote "The Truth About Mexico," which The Bankers' Magazine printed, and the same matter was afterwards put into a pamphlet. Mr. Smith was so extravagant in his denials of imperfections in Mexican institutions and so glowing in his descriptions of Mexico's "ideal" government that one of that government's warmest defenders. The Mexican Herald, was revolted by the production and printed a long editorial in which it prayed that Mexico might be delivered of such friends as Mr. Smith.
Mr. Guillermo Hall, another American who is interested in Mexican properites, considers my articles a "great injustice," inasmuch as, since the poor Mexican knows nothing of freedom, he must be perfectly well off as a slave. The Tucson, Arizona, Citizen quoted Mr. Hall as follows:
Mr. Dwight E. Woodbridge, a planter and writer, wrote at length in defense of Mexican slavery in the Mining World, the organ of the American Mine Owners organization. Here are some excerpts:
taken from confinement to haciendas and on the Yaquis. *** I am interested in a large plantation in southern Mexico, where we have some 300 Yaqui laborers.
"Throughout the Yaqui country I have seen such things as are pictured in the magazine, passed the bodies of men hanging to trees, sometimes mutilated; have seen hundreds of tame Yaquis herded in jails to be sent to the plantations of Yucatan, or Tabasco, or Veracruz; have heard of worse things.
Of course none of the defenders of Mexico admit all of my assertions, and all of them, naturally, seek to minimize the horrors of the slave system—otherwise they could not be defending it. But you will see that one admits one thing and another another until the whole story is confessed as true.
Among the American publishers who rushed to the defense of Diaz was Mr. William Randolph Hearst. Mr. Hearst sent a writer, Otheman Stevens, to Mexico to gather material to prove that Mexico is not barbarous. Valiantly did Mr. Stevens attempt to carry out his trust, but in dealing with the contract slavery system he succeeded in admitting most of the essential points, and was able to defend only on the plea of capitalistic "necessity." Some of his admissions, as they appeared in the Cosmopolitan Magazine of March, 1910, are:
"To offset these prospects of early industrial advances is the contract labor system, and the contract labor system in Mexico is a bad institution.
Mr. Stevens' defense of this system, as published in the same number of the same magazine, is:
This is exactly the logic the slave-driving cotton planters of our southern states used before the Civil War. It will hardly "go" with anyone who has not money invested in Mexican plantations which use enganchados.
I do not wish to tire the reader, but, aside from the fact that I have been most violently attacked, I have a reason for wishing to go a little deeper into this matter of critics and corroboration. Let us get right down into Mexico itself, down to the very newspapers that are paid a specified sum each week in exchange for manufacturing public opinion favorable to President Diaz and his system. In Mexico City there are two daily newspapers printed in English, the Herald and the Record. Both are prosperous and well edited, and both are open defenders of the Mexican government. The Herald, especially, repeatedly denounced my articles. ​I believe that I can show as many as fifty clippings from this paper alone which, in one way or another, attempted to cast doubt upon my statements. Nevertheless, in the course of the daily publication of the news, or in the very campaign of defense, both of these papers have, since the first appearance of "Barbarous Mexico," printed matter which convincingly confirmed my charges.
October 23, 1909, the Daily Record dared to print an article from the pen of Dr. Luis Lara y Pardo, one of the best-known of Mexican writers, in which he admitted that my indictment was true. A few lines from the article will suffice. Said Dr. Pardo:
"The regime of slavery continues under the cloak of the loan laws. Peons are sold by one hacendado to another under the pretext that the money that has been advanced must be paid. In the capital of the Republic itself traffic in human flesh has been engaged in.
A widespread fear among the common people of being ensnared as enganchados would argue not only that the system is extensive, but that it is fraught with great hardship. January 6, 1910, the Mexican Daily Record published a news item which indicated that this is true, and also suggested one way in which the government plays into the hands of the labor snarers. Shorn of its headlines, the item is:
"Five hundred contract laborers intended to work at construction camps on the Veracruz and Pacific railroad, are encamped near Buenavista station as a result of their unwillingness to sign a formal contract, and the law prohibiting their being taken into another state without such contract.
grant the request of R. P. Davis and F. Villademoros, signers of a petition to him to allow the laborers to be shipped out. With their wives, children, and all their worldly possessions they form a motley camp near the station.
"In their petition, Davis and Villademoros claim that the railroad company is suffering large losses by the detention of the laborers and that many of the latter fear if they sign contracts they will be shipped to sugar and coffee plantations and held until the expiration of the specified terms.
The Mexican Herald furnishes more corroboration than the Mexican Record. Commenting editorially upon the announcements of "Barbarous Mexico," it said, August 27, 1909:
About the same time Paul Hudson, general manager of the paper, was quoted in a New York interview as saying that my exposures "do not admit of categorical denial." And in the Mexican Herald of May 9, 1910, J. Torrey Conner, writing in praise of General Diaz, says: "Slavery, doubtless, is known to exist in Mexico—that is generally understood." In February, 1909, in an editorial item upon the political situation in the state of Morelos, the Mexican Herald went so far as to admit the killing of debt laborers by their masters. To quote it exactly:
August 27, 1909, in an article on "The Enganchado," the Herald said, in part:
"The enganchados are guarded most carefully, for there is the ever present danger of their running away on the slightest opportunity. Often the cabos are cruel in their treatment, a fact which is to be condemned. *** It is not in keeping here to mention the abuses which are alleged to have been practiced against the enganchados, the treatment of men so shamelessly that they die, the raping of the women, the deprivation of the laborers of any means of bathing, and the unsanitary condition of their houses, leading on to noxious diseases. *** No planter who knows the real history of the system, or the inside facts of the neighboring plantations, will deny for a moment the worst stories of the enganchado are true,
Such corroboration from a subsidized supporter of the system itself would seem rather embarrassing to those individuals who were so zealous as publicly to announce that my portrayal of Mexican slavery was a fabrication. It will be seen that my exposures of Mexican slavery were not the first to be circulated in print; they were merely the first to be circulated widely, and they went into considerably more detail than anything that had gone before. The little item that I have just quoted admits practically all the worst features which I dealt with in my articles. ​Here is an ordinary news item clipped from the Mexican Herald of May 30, 1909:
This is the first information I have had that men are beaten to death in the sugar mills of Mexico.
I present a news item from the Mexican Herald which describes better than I did in my fourth chapter one of the methods pursued by labor snarers to get their fish into the net. The newspaper prints the story as if the occurrence were unusual; I reprint it in full because it is typical. The only difference is that in this particular case the victim was rescued and the labor agent was jailed for a day or two only because it chanced that the victim had been an employe of the national Department of Foreign Relations. Had the authorities wished to stop this sort of man-stealing, as the Herald would have us believe, why did they not arrest the keepers of the other "casas de enganchadores" which they found, and liberate the prisoners? But here is the item, headlines and all:
   "BOY OF 16 TRAPPED HERE.
   "ALAMEDA SCENE OF BOLD KIDNAPPING BY SPANIARD.
   "TO GO TO OAXAQUENA.
   "CONTRACTORS PLANNED TO SEND BOY TO AMERICAN PLANTATION.
met sixteen-year-old Benito Juarez in the Alameda on Wednesday afternoon and induced him by brilliant promises of work and wages to accompany him to a house on la Calle de Violeta, he (Hernandez) made one of the serious mistakes of his life. By refusing to allow young Benito to go out of the house after he had once entered it, Hernandez violated one of the federal statutes and he is now being held in the fifth comisaria to answer a charge of illegal detention.
"Hernandez claims that he is the employe of one Leandro Lopez, who is securing laborers for the Oaxaquena Plantation Company, an American concern operating an extensive hacienda on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, on the state boundary of Veracruz, not far from Santa Lucrecia. Both men are Spaniards. The whereabouts of the boy, Benito Juarez, was not definitely ascertained until yesterday afternoon, when his release was secured upon the demand of Subcomisario Bustamante of the fifth comisaria, who subsequently arrested Hernandez after the lad's statement had been placed on record at the comisaria.
the boy’s seduction
"On Wednesday afternoon, at about 2 o'clock, young Benito, who had been working with his mother, a bread vendor, was sitting on one of the benches in the Alameda when, according to his account, Hernandez happened along and in a benevolent way asked him if he wanted a job at $1.50 a day. The man explained that the work was at an alcohol factory near the city and that the position was something in the character of timekeeping or other clerical work. The lad agreed and was induced to accompany his new-found friend to Calle Violeta, where the details of his engagement were to be arranged.
"On the way they stopped at a cheap clothing store, where Hernandez purchased a twenty-cent straw hat, a fifty-cent blouse, a pair of sandals and a pair of trousers. Arrived at the house on Calle Violeta young Juarez received orders to put on the peon clothing and to relinquish his own suit of good apparel. In the house where he found himself he encountered three or four other men in the same situation with himself who apprized him of the fact that he was now a contract laborer destined for a plantation in the hot country.
his friends trace him.
in the office of the department of foreign relations on the Paseo de la Reforma and it was a fairly good suit of clothing that he had worn while working there that he exchanged for the peon's outfit. It was also through the charity of his former employer in the government office that he was released from his unwilling detention in Calle Violeta.
"The boy's mother, Angela Ramos, who lives at No. 4 Calle Zanja, had expected to meet him at the Alameda, where he was waiting when Hernandez came along. Not seeing him, she started inquiry, which elicited the information that he had been seen going away with a man who was supposed to be a labor contractor, and she forthwith hunted up Ignacio Arellano, who is employed in the foreign relations building, and explained to him her trouble.
police appealed to.
"Mr. Arellano, accompanied by Alfredo Marquez, an employe of the department of fomento, secured the addresses of three establishments commonly known as 'casas de enganchadores,' located variously at Calle de Moctezuma, 7a Calle de Magnolia, and la de Violeta. Their experience as related yesterday to a representative of The Herald was much the same at each place and was about as follows:
"At each of the labor contractors 'offices' where they sought admission they were refused, being told that they had no such individual as the boy in question in their charge. At each place the assertion was made that they never contracted persons under age. Finding their efforts fruitless, Arellano and Marquez took the matter to the fifth comisaria, where it was explained to Subcomisario Bustamante, who detailed an officer and two secret service men to the places in question with orders to search them thoroughly.
searching the house
"At Calle Violeta, however, the door-keeper at first refused the officers admission, only submitting when threatened with the arrest of every person in the house. Here young Juarez was found and was taken to the fifth comisaria for examination. As soon as his statement had been taken the arrest of Hernandez was ordered, and after his identification by the boy, the latter was set at liberty.
the boy's account.
"Recounting his own adventure last night, young Juarez described the meeting in the Alameda and the exchange of clothing, and continued:
" 'After I entered the house I learned from one of the men who was already there that I had been fooled in the promise of pay at $1.50 as time-keeper in an alcohol factory, and when I asked the man with whom I had come if his promises were not correct he said that of course they were not and that I was to go to work as a peon on the Oaxaquena plantation at fifty cents per day. Then I asked him to let me go, as I did not want to do such work, but he would not let me leave the house, saying that I owed him five pesos for the clothes he had given me.
" 'Before that I had told him that I would have to ask my mother's permission before I could go. He told me he was in a great hurry, so I wrote her a note and gave it to him to be delivered. Later he told me my mother had read the note and had given her permission, but I have found out since that she never received it and was hunting for me at the time.
" 'I was given a peso and five cents as an advance on my pay and the next morning I was given twenty-five cents with which to buy food, which was sold in the house. All this money was charged up against me, to be paid after I went to work, as I learned before I left the place. Breakfast, which cost thirteen cents, consisted of chile and chicharrones (the crisp residue of dried-out pork fat), while dinner, a bowl of soup, cost twelve cents. There was no supper.
contracts or not. They all said they had been refused permission to leave the house unless they paid back the money which they were told they owed.'
good work of the police
"From the time that the first notice of the infraction of the labor law was received by the police officials at the fifth comisaria until the prosecution of Hernandez was put under way their activity has demonstrated beyond any question how far the government authorities are from connivance in labor abuses with which this country has been charged.
I doubt if I could do better than to end this chapter with quotations from official reports of the United States government itself. Cold-bloodedly as were the succeeding paragraphs written, the statements that they contain are yet exceedingly corroborative. They are from Bulletin No. 38 of the United States Department of Labor, published in January, 1902. I should like to quote more extensively, but I take only a few paragraphs from pages 42, 43 and 44.
"In a great many (Mexican) states where tropical products are raised the native residents are employed under a contract which is compulsory on their part, owing to their being in debt to the planter. ***
These criados are bound to the soil by indebtedness, for although a mere contract to perform certain services does not impose specific performance, it is held in Yucatan that where an advance payment has been made either the repayment of the money or, in default thereof, the specific performance may be exacted.
"The system of labor enforced by indebtedness seems to work in Yucatan to the satisfaction of the planter. The peon is compelled to work unless he is able to pay off his constantly increasing debt, and any attempt at flight or evasion is followed by penal retribution. The peon rarely, if ever, achieves independence, and a transference of a workman from one employer to another is only effected by means of the new employer paying to the former one the amount of the debt contracted. The system thus resembles slavery, not only in the compulsion under which the peon works, but in the large initial expense required of the planter when making his first investment in labor.
Is it necessary to ask again, who has been distorting the truth, myself or the other fellow? Is there slavery in Mexico, and is it widespread? Are men bought and sold like mules, locked up at night, hunted down when they try to run away, starved, beaten, killed? Surely these questions have been answered to the satisfaction of every honest reader. But I have not yet answered that other question, why—why are so many Americans so ready to distort the truth about Mexico?