Chapter II: Conditions in Mexico During Diaz’ Régime

It would appear after all that has been written in the United States and Europe concerning Mexico, that the people ought to possess a clearer conception of the conditions which brought about the Madero and the Constitutionalist revolutions, especially when the latter is nothing more than a continuation of the former. But the words of the late Joseph Pulitzer, when he said that to instil facts into the minds of the people there must be constant repetition, seem undeniably true. It is not sufficient to reiterate certain facts; the correlation of these facts must be understood and explained.

People heard about the peonage system in Mexico, about the great power of Porfirio Diaz, about the abuses of this power, but it was not realized how vital, how deep, how intimate the solution of the political problems was to the Mexicans themselves. To foreigners the Mexican problem was only interesting in so far as it affected their interests,--no more.

After all the cruelties perpetrated by the Diaz-Huerta régimes, I have heard intelligent Americans exclaim that the Mexicans needed a strong man like Huerta, and that Diaz after all had brought railroads, schools, higher wages, money, improvements and progress. It makes one almost despair of human intelligence to hear such superficial prattle, but it proves the axiom of Joseph Pulitzer to be very profound and that Porfirio Diaz had used it to its fullest extent.

Known by few people, Porfirio Diaz used for years a secret fund amounting to millions solely for the purpose of advertising to the world that Diaz was the creator of modern Mexico, that “peace” and “progress” were his two watchwords, with which he had put Mexico on a permanent basis of greatness. Many small newspapers near the border as far as San Antonio were paid as much as $5,000 a year to speak in good terms about Diaz and never to mention any trouble or agitation which might be started along the border by anarchists who might call themselves Mexican revolutionists.

Great newspaper proprietors in the United States were given concessions, others were offered special inducements to publish special Mexican numbers, which brought from $25,000 to $30,000 worth of advertising; well-known individuals, such as judges, congressmen and senators, were invited in an indirect way to visit Mexico, were received like princes, fêted, dined and were offered mining or other concessions as one gives cigars to a guest after dinner. When the concessions were not needed or available, Don Porfirio took particular care to impress his famous visitor with a set of well chosen phrases most apt to impress him favorably as to his greatness, his patriotism and his democracy.

One incident, which was related to me, illustrates the Machiavellian talent of Diaz. A nationally famous librarian paid his visit to General Diaz, who received him very graciously. No concessions were asked or wanted and the President did not mention the great battles he had fought, which were unknown to the gentle librarian, but he spoke at great length of the extensive school system in vogue since his ascension to the presidency, and ended the conversation by declaring: “It is my greatest ambition to be known as the great schoolmaster of Mexico.” The phrase impressed the scholar and many people heard the phrase, and many newspapers repeated it until everybody believed it.

_Pearson’s Magazine_ printed six years ago a fulsome life of Diaz. What General Diaz thought of it is told in an interview between Ireneo Paz, a Mexican newspaperman and the President who were friends for more than sixty years. Don Ireneo Paz asked the President: “I have been wanting to ask you if that interview which the papers published a few months ago was authentic; that one which is said to have taken place between yourself and one Creelman, an American journalist?”

“What surprises me is that sagacious men like you should have been capable of giving credit to such folly (à semejante paparrucha),” replied Diaz.

“Because I did not believe it, I asked you if it was authentic.”

“It’s as true as a dead child. You know me too well to believe that I could stroll for hours upon the terrace of Chapultepec, exhibiting the white of my eyes and opening my nostrils excessively in order that the Yankee reporter may be able to give wings to his fancy. What happened was this: A friend of mine, a member of my cabinet, came to read me the article which was already manufactured (confeccionado) for an American publication. It didn’t seem bad to me, or rather it seemed very good, because without compromising me much it lent a lustre to my antecedents, and put me on a good footing for the future, so that it gave me all the facilities which I desired, whether to continue sacrificing myself for the Fatherland, or to shake off the dust thereof (zafarme) in time if things should blow into a whirlwind (à ponerse turbias). I acknowledge to you that I thought the writing was so well dressed up, so much in conformity with what are not but should be my profoundest thoughts, so seemly for our luckless proletariat, that I accepted it unhesitatingly as if it had been inspired by myself, not making more than a very few modifications on some entirely Yankee points of view which would have put me in a very ridiculous position, and I gave my consent to two things:--that it should be published in English and Spanish, and that it should be amply paid for.”

“About how much was the cost of this work?”

“Some fifty thousand pesos.” (Como unos cincuenta mil pesos.)[3]

Toward the end of the Diaz régime and in an effort to refute the attacks made in a book by the present writer called, “Diaz, Czar of Mexico,” the cientificos inspired James Creelman to write “Diaz, Master of Mexico”; whole chapters were also dedicated in an effort to discredit the exposé by J. K. Turner in his “Barbarous Mexico.” Several books published in the United States and England were bought by Diaz. One was “Porfirio Diaz,” by R. de Zayas Enriquez, and the other “Yucatan, the American Egypt,” by Tabor and Frost. The Mexican government inspired their consul in Cuba, J. F. Godoy, to write a book, “Porfirio Diaz,” which had “seventy pages of endorsements of Diaz written by prominent Americans.” Here we have the case of a man, Mr. Godoy, who actually went about--or sent about--among senators, congressmen, diplomats and cabinet officers, soliciting kind words for President Diaz.[4] Porfirio Diaz and his cientifico supporters thought that they could keep the Mexicans, peons, and the middle class workingmen down if public opinion in Europe and in the United States was misinformed about the real conditions in Mexico.

The great reputation of General Diaz in America and Europe was essentially manufactured through laudatory articles in the press, magazines, weeklies and daily papers, by the publication of books, interviews of prominent Americans who came back from a visit to the “Great Old Man” in Chapultepec, who could have said as Macbeth, “And I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people.” Judges, congressmen, senators, governors, members of cabinets, even presidents, princes and kings spoke in reverence and admiration of Don Porfirio Diaz.

What chance had any patriotic, democratic, and free loving Mexican against the avalanche of lies, deliberate and unconscious falsehoods? Whoever heard in the United States of the Massacre of Papantla where 20,000 Mexican peasants, men, women and children were shot down in cold blood, and as a result half a dozen villages wiped off the map of Mexico?

What newspaper in America published the story of the revolution of Tomochic, when 15,000 mountaineer peasants in Chihuahua were destroyed and only forty old men and women were left to tell the tale? And the murder of 15,000 men, the whole male population of Juchitan, State of Oaxaca, in revenge for the death of Diaz’s brother, and the assassination of 750 workingmen of the Orizaba cotton mills?

Workingmen in Mexico were killed if they attempted to unionize or to strike, the peasants were slaughtered to take away from them their rights under the law; the Yaqui Indians were deported and sold into slavery in Yucatan to permit the great landowners in Sonora to sell their land to American syndicates. Anybody who protested orally or in writing was thrown into jail, where imprisonment was worse than death. We reproduce the description by a Mexican of a night passed in the prison of Belem, Mexico City.

May 16.

I dare not credit the testimony of my senses. I cannot yet believe all that I have suffered in that horrible night which has just passed; a night of horrible dreams, a succession of repugnant nightmares, terrific, phantastic, demoniacal, impossible, inconceivable and nevertheless perfectly and completely real. I thought the night would be endless. I fancied myself in the infernal regions, in a hell as the heated phantasy of the poet of maniacal brain never conceived it.

The prison is a sort of a room of 50 yards in length by 6 broad and 5 in height, that is to say 1500 cubic yards. Within its walls sleep 800 individuals according to my calculation. The hygienists claim that 12 by 14 cubic yards of air are necessary in a dwelling for each person: in that space we did not even have 2 cubic yards each.

All the ventilation consists in an iron grating at the entrance at one extremity and a window at the other end.

How could 800 persons stay in that small space? It is a mystery to me; I have seen it and still I cannot explain it, and I am almost willing to admit the penetrability of the bodies.

The men lie down in two rows, feet to feet and the head against the wall. Those who arrive first or the strongest lie on the ground, those who follow do as best they can by lying between two bodies cradle-wise. Everybody must perforce sleep sideways. For this reason quarrels and fights are frequent and occasionally they end in wounds and sometimes in death.

In this prison there are some revolting W. C.’s. They are cleaned in the morning, but as the night advances they are used constantly and as there is no running water, the fecal matter and the urine run over onto the ground soaking those who sleep near them. Some wretches even sleep seated on those barrels, and bitter fights take place when somebody wants to use them and for that purpose they are forced to disturb the sleepers on top of the barrels. Others prefer to commit nuisance where they happen to be, against the companions who happen to be near them and that occasions new fights.

The atmosphere is so fetid that it almost chokes and asphyxiates you. It is so dense that you can almost cut it with a knife.

This dungeon is lighted by some electric lamps whose rays can barely penetrate the atmosphere. Eight hundred men habitually dirty, clad in pestilential rags, the respiration of all those lungs, the emanations of all these bodies, the filth of those barrels.... I am horrified at the remembrance of it all and I am wondering that I am still alive.

Soon after the prisoners have settled to sleep, from the different walls there starts a downward immigration of myriads of parasitical insects. One cannot possibly conceive the innumerable number of bed-bugs, some of enormous size, lice of all classes, fleas, mosquitoes and cock-roaches. They assure me that the prisoners become accustomed to all these parasites and they do not heed them. The truth is that besides myself I did not notice anybody paying any attention to them.

Only three persons were privileged to use cots; the head keeper and two head men. I could not find a place to lie down. The head keeper saw me standing and understood the reason of my perplexity and authorized me to sleep under his cot. At first I took this offer as an insult; later I understood the full value of that concession which was not gratis but cost me 25 cents.

It had just struck nine at the prison clock when suddenly and accidentally all the electric lights went out. The darkness was absolute. Immediately a formidable roar arose from that mob and a fearful struggle began. There were heard shouts of hatred, fearsome lamentations, blasphemies, the voices of the head men trying to impose order and shouting to the prisoners to keep silent, but without avail. It was undescribable uproar.

Soon afterwards footsteps of soldiers were heard nearing the door. An employé arrived with the escort bringing a lantern along. He opened the grated door with a great deal of noise and gave order to the soldiers to fire in case of further disorder. Then everything was silent as if by incantation. The turnkey asked for the oil lamps hanging on the walls, lighted them and distributed them to the head men to place them in their corresponding places. From time to time the silence was interrupted by some stifled groans.

The turnkey ordered the formation of rows to make ready for the roll call. They brought the register and the prisoners going into the corridor after their names being called. Some did not appear, others answered in a dying voice. All the prisoners able to do so went back to rest. There were three dead and seventeen wounded. Who are the authors of these crimes? They have so far not discovered them, and those who know the way of the prison claim that they never will be found. The prisoners no matter how strict the vigilance and how often they search them succeed in hiding pieces of bones which form part of the meat rations, and these bones they sharpen against the stones of the floor until they become as sharp and pointed as daggers. Those are the weapons used in their fights. They also employ scissors, and spoons and other instruments which are used in their different trades and which they manage to steal.

Every time that there is a riot as happens when the lights go out then some of the most hardened prisoners take advantage of this fact to revenge themselves or to wound those nearest to them, without any provocation, and it is very difficult to discover the author of the crime as many are spattered with blood owing to the crowded conditions of the dormitory.

Many of the wounds result from the indiscriminate use of the stick in the confusion and darkness by the head men, who do so in self-defence or in fear.

After the dead and wounded had been taken to the hospital they locked us up again calling the names anew and leaving two guards at the gate to fire at the first sign of disorder. I went back to my place under the cot of the head keeper thinking to myself that the solitary cell in spite of the “incommunicacion” was preferable to this dangerous and filthy galley. I did not sleep a wink all night long. At 6 o’clock in the morning they opened the gate and all this sickening lee contained was vomited forth.

I was one of the first ones to go out and I nearly fainted when I felt the fresh air of the morning. Mr. H.... was waiting for me and he invited me to breakfast with him in the department of distinction. Later he asked to see the warden so as to get me a permit to go over to his department.

Meanwhile I jotted down those notes although I did not know how I managed to do so as my head seems to be a vacuum. I think I have a beginning of fever.

Not only were Mexicans persecuted in their own country, but when Mexican liberals fled across the border into the United States, thinking that they could tell the truth and publish it in the American press, they were persecuted and imprisoned through the orders of the Mexican Ambassador in Washington to the Attorney Generals under Theodore Roosevelt, and William H. Taft. Some of the liberals were even kidnapped across the Mexican border and sent to rot in the fortress of San Juan de Ulloa in Vera Cruz. Manuel Sarabia, F. Flores Magon, L. Rivera and Antonio I. Villareal were the pioneers of Mexican agitation against Diaz. “Mother” Jones by suggestion of the writer before his imprisonment for libel against a Diaz official, induced Congressman W. B. Wilson of Pennsylvania (Secretary of Labor in the Cabinet of Wilson), to investigate the persecution of Mexican liberals in the United States by American officials in 1910. The result was a cessation of these persecutions and a renewal of agitation in the southwest and along the border.

The agitation against the blood and iron rule of Porfirio Diaz was begun over six years before the Madero revolution; it was the preliminary work of untold numbers of martyrs who died unknown, crushed by the ruthless hand of the half-breed Czar.

In every State governors, jefes politicos, and cientificos robbed the Indians of the land in their possession. By the year 1892 all the great bodies of agricultural land had passed from the possession of more than a million small farmers into the hands of less than fifty rich families and corporations of the Diaz clique.

The State of Morelos (2,734 square miles) and a population of 179,614 inhabitants, became practically the property of half a dozen families. In the State of Chihuahua one family alone, the Terrazas, owned as much land as the combined territory of Switzerland, Belgium and Holland. Towards the end of the Diaz régime nearly 3,000,000 Indians had been despoiled of their native land and General Diaz had sold over 83,000,000 acres for the paltry sum of $3,000,000.

The policy of General Diaz was to eliminate the Mexican Indian peons from valuable land and from an independent economic life into peonage in great haciendas, in great mines and factories where they could be more easily controlled by the rurales and the soldiers. At the height of Diaz’s rule, in 1908, when all the world was singing the pæans to the glory of Porfirio Diaz, the writer found out by personal investigation that the average salary for unskilled labor in the mines near the city of Pachuca (inh. 40,000) was three cents gold a day, and in the haciendas six cents gold.

What was the result of this policy of despoliation and oppression? Simply that wages in the great haciendas, mines, and factories were kept as low as possible, while prices of food stuffs and necessities went up by the help of a rigid system of high tariff. The great haciendados, the foreign owners of mines and industrial concerns, the same ones who were reaping a golden harvest and singing the praise of Diaz’s rule were buying labor in Mexico at a very low Mexican silver rate and were selling the result of this labor at a gold rate.

The press agents of Diaz spoke of the perfect school system inaugurated at the beginning of his rule. General Diaz never could have crushed Mexico in the iron grip of his hand if education had been as general as was claimed. The percentage of illiteracy in the thirty-five years of the czar’s rule was lowered from ninety to eighty-six per cent. but only in the cities. The rural school system was almost completely neglected, or was turned over to the care of priests and nuns.

It was this fourteen per cent. of the people who could read and write, which organized the agitation in Mexico under tremendous difficulties and by unheard-of sacrifices.

The political advisers of Diaz never dreamed that every Indian who was expatriated, every workingman who saw the murders of his companions, every Mexican who suffered from an unjust imprisonment, became an incipient rebel, only awaiting the time that a leader would show them their strength and the way to break the chains of their economic and political slavery.

It could never be imagined by the rich foreign investors in Mexico who had observed the patient and ignorant peons, that no matter how pacific, how miserable and subdued a race, the day would come when they must rebel and evolve into a daring and independent race.

The same happened in France through the revolution. Read the description written by Mirabeau’s father of the savage-looking, long-haired, barefoot peasants who came down from the mountains, and the older Mirabeau’s prophetic reflections on the subject.

The worst offenders and the greatest enemies to Mexican political and economic freedom were the foreigners; they always stood by the oppressors with their financial and moral influence in Mexico, in the United States and in Europe. Without this powerful help Diaz would never have lasted thirty-five years. Foreigners in Mexico were treated with a deference and were allowed privileges unknown to the average Mexican. Porfirio Diaz always raised the spectre of American intervention when he wanted to frighten restless Mexicans.

The only friends of liberal Mexico were the Socialists and the organized workingmen in Europe and especially in the United States who understood from the beginning the danger of an enslaved, ill-paid proletariat across the border. The great agitation which exposed the iron rule of Diaz was helped by Socialists and the proletariat in the United States, and made it easy for Madero and his friends to plot and organize a revolution across the border.

The foreign bankers, concessionaires, “friends of the friends” of General Diaz, wanted a continuation of peace at any price, even at the price of subjugation of all Mexican liberties, or if that failed, by American intervention, and as a result of it either American conquest or of American police rule as in Cuba.

The successor of Diaz had been chosen by the invisible rulers of Diaz, everything about it was cut and dried, and even the list of members of the Cabinet of the successor had been drawn up. When a foreigner was asked about the economic and political rights of the Mexicans, he shrugged his shoulders and answered that Indians and niggers were not fit to rule themselves. The self-same Americans who would have started a revolution in their own country if political conditions had been as oppressive as in Mexico, spoke contemptuously of the valiant struggle of the middle class Mexicans. To my utter amazement I heard an American clergyman inform me after he had listened to a lecture of mine in favor of the Constitutionalists and the prophecy of a speedy downfall of Huerta, that he nevertheless believed Mexico needed strong men like Huerta and Diaz.

Americans who invest money in Mexico cannot be blamed for being ignorant of Mexican conditions, but how about foreigners who live years in Mexico and come in daily contact with the people? Is it a wonder that Mexicans are suspicious of foreigners?

Porfirio Diaz sold out his country to foreigners for a pittance, he made them rich and prosperous, and he used Mexican labor, freedom, and their suffering to raise himself on a pinnacle of fame unheard of to any other man of his times. Mexico was only Mexico, but Diaz was its prophet, its savior, its creator, its superman, and demi-god. The Mexicans were an unknown, negligible quantity and quality, and the fatal pseudo-greatness of Diaz was trumpeted across the world by an army corps of foreign concessionaries, exploiters and grafters. But the great Diaz myth like a monstrous Frankenstein destroyed itself in time.