Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 11
CHAPTER XI
FOUR MEXICAN STRIKES
On the line of the Mexican Railway, which climbs, in one hundred odd miles of travel, from the port of Veracruz 10,000 feet to the rim of the valley of Mexico, are situated a number of mill towns. Nearing the summit, after that wonderful ascent from the tropics to the snows, the passenger looks back from his car window through dizzying reaches of empty air, sheer a full mile, as the crow might dare to fly a score of them, down to the uppermost of these mill towns, Santa Rosa, a gray checkerboard upon a map of green. Just below Santa Rosa, but out of sight behind the titanic shoulder of a mountain, nestles Rio Blanco, largest of the mill towns, scene of the bloodiest strike in the labor history of Mexico.
In altitude half way between the shark-infested waters of Veracruz harbor and the plateau of the Montezumas, Rio Blanco, which in Spanish means White River, is not only a paradise in climate and scenery, but it is also perfectly situated for water-power manufactories. A bountiful supply of water, provided by the copious rains and the snows of the heights, gathers in the Rio Blanco and with the speed of Niagara rushes down the mountain gorges and into the town.
It is said to be a favorite boast of Manager Hartington, the steel-eyed, middle-aged Englishman who oversees the work of the 6,000 men, women and children, that the mill at Rio Blanco is not only the largest and most modern cotton manufactory in the world, but that it pays the richest profits on the investment.
Certainly the factory is a big one. We saw it—De Lara and I—from A to Z, following the raw cotton from the cleaner through all its various processes and treatments until it finally came out neatly folded in fancy prints or specially colored weaves. We even descended five iron ladders down into the bowels of the earth, saw the great pin and caught a glimpse of the swirling black waters which turn every wheel in the mill. And we observed the workers, too, men, women and children. They were Mexicans with hardly an exception. The men, in the mass, are paid thirty-seven and one half cents a day in our money, the women from one dollar and a half to two dollars a week, the children, who range down to seven and eight, from ten to twenty-five cents a day. These figures were given us by an officer of the mill who showed us about, and they were confirmed in talks with the workers themselves.
Thirteen hours a day—from 6 until 8—are long for labor in the open air and sunshine, but thirteen hours in that roar of machinery, in that lint-laden air, in those poisonous dye rooms—how very long that must be! The terrible smell of the dye rooms nauseated me and I had to hurry on. The dye rooms are a suicide hole for the men who work there, for it is said that they survive, on an average, only a twelve-month. Yet the company finds that plenty of them are willing to commit the suicide for the additional inducement of seven and one-half cents a day over the regular wage.
The Rio Blanco mill was established sixteen years ago—sixteen years, but in their history the mill and the town have just two epochs—before the strike and after the strike. Wherever we went about Rio Blanco and Orizaba, the latter being the chief town in that political district, we heard echoes of the strike, although its bloody story had been written nearly two years before our visit.
In Mexico there are no labor laws in-operation to protect the workers—no provision for factory inspection, no practical statutes against infant labor, no processes through which workmen may recover, damages for injuries sustained or death met in the mine or at the machine. Wage workers. literally have no-rights that the employers are bound to respect. Policy only determine, the degree of exploitation, and in Mexico that policy is such as might prevail in the driving of horses in a locality where horses are dirt cheap, where profits from their use are high, and where there exists no Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
Over against this absence of protection on the part of the governmental powers stands oppression on the part of the governmental powers, for the machinery of the Diaz state is wholly at the command of the employer to whip the worker into accepting his terms.
The six thousand laborers in the Rio Blanco mill were not content with thirteen hours daily in the company of that roaring machinery and in that choking atmosphere, especially since it brought to them only from twenty-five to thirty-seven and one-half cents. Nor were they content with paying out of such a sum the one American dollar a week that the company charged for the rental of the two-room, dirt floor hovels which they call their homes. Least of all were they content with the coin in which they were paid. This consisted of credit checks upon the company store, which finished the exploitation—took back for the company the final centavo that the company had paid out in wages. A few miles away, at Orizaba, the same goods could be purchased for from twenty-five to seventy-five per cent less, but the operatives were unable to buy their goods at these stores.
The operatives were not content. The might of the company towered like a mountain above them, and behind and above the company towered the government. "Behind the company stood Diaz himself, for Diaz was not only the government, he was also a heavy stockholder in the company. Yet the operatives prepared to fight. Secretly they organized a union, El Circulo de Obreros," which means "The Circle of Workers," holding their meetings not en masse, but in small groups in their homes, in order that the authorities might not learn of their purposes.
Immediately upon the company learning that the workers were discussing their troubles it took action against them. Through the police authorities it issued a general order forbidding any of the operatives from receiving any visitors whatsoever, even their own relatives being barred, the penalty for violation being the city jail. Persons who were suspected of having signed the roll of the union were put in prison at once, and a weekly newspaper which was known to be friendly to the workers was swooped down upon, suppressed and the printing plant confiscated.
At this juncture a strike was called in the cotton-mills in the city of Puebla, in an adjoining state. The mills of Puebla were owned by the same company as owned the Rio Blanco mills, and the operatives thereof were living under similar conditions to those at Rio Blanco. The Puebla workers went on strike and the company knowing that they had no resources behind them, decided, as one of its agents told me, "to let nature take its course;" that is, to starve out the workers, as they believed this process could be accomplished inside of a fortnight.
The strikers turned for aid to those of their fellow-craftsmen who were at work in other localities. The Rio Blanco workers themselves were already preparing to strike, but thereupon they decided to wait for a time longer, in order that they might collect from their meager earnings a fund to support their brothers in the city of Puebla. Thus were the ends of the company defeated for the moment, for by living on half rations both workers and strikers were able to eke out their existence. But no sooner had the company learned the source of strength of the Puebla strikers than the mills at Rio Blanco were shut down and the workers there locked out. Other mills in other localities were shut down and other means taken to prevent any help reaching the Puebla strikers.
Locked out, the Rio Blanco workers promptly assumed the offensive, declared they were on strike and formulated a series of demands calculated in some measure to alleviate the conditions of their lives.
But the demands were unheard, the machinery of the mill roared no more, the mill slept in the sun, the waters of the Rio Blanco dashed unharnessed through the town, the manager of the company laughed in the faces of the striking men and women.
The six thousand starved. For two months they starved. They scoured the surrounding hills for berries, and when the berries were gone they deceived their gnawing stomachs with indigestible roots and herbs gleaned from the mountain sides. In utter despair, they looked to the highest power they knew, Porfirio Diaz, and begged him to have mercy. They begged him to investigate their cause, and for their part they promised to abide by his decision.
President Diaz pretended to investigate. He rendered a decision, but his decision was that the mills should reopen and the workers go back to their thirteen hours of dust and machinery on the same terms as they had left them.
True to their promise, the strikers at Rio Blanco prepared to comply. But they were weak from starvation. In order to work they must have sustenance. Consequently on the day of their surrender they gathered in a body in front of the company store opposite the big mill and asked that each of their number be given a certain quantity of corn and beans so that they, might be able to live through the first week and until they should be paid their wages.
The storekeeper jeered at the request. "To these dogs we will not even give water!" is the answer he is credited with giving them.
It was then that a woman, Margarita Martinez, exhorted the people to take by force the provisions that had been denied them. This they did. They looted the store, then set fire to it, and finally to the mill across the way.
The people had not expected to riot, but the government had expected it. Unknown to the strikers, battalions of regular soldiers were waiting just outside the town, under command of Genera! Rosalio Martinez himself, sub-secretary of war. The strikers had no arms. They were not prepared for revolution. They had intended no mischief, and their outburst was a spontaneous and doubtless a natural one, and one which an officer of the company afterwards confided to me could easily have been taken care of by the local police force, which was strong.
Nevertheless, the soldiers appeared, leaping upon the scene as if out of the ground. Volley after volley was discharged into the crowd at close range. There was no resistance whatsoever. The people were shot down in the streets with no regard for age or sex, many women and children being among the slain. They were pursued to their homes, dragged from their hiding places and shot to death. Some fled to the hills, where they were hunted for days and shot on sight. A company of rural guards which refused to fire on the crowd when the soldiers first arrived were exterminated on the spot.
There are no official figures of the number killed in the Rio Blanco massacre, and if there were any, of course they would be false. Estimates run from two hundred to eight hundred. My information for the t Rio Blanco strike was obtained from numerous widely different sources—from an officer of the company itself, from a friend of the governor who rode with the rurales as they chased the fleeing strikers through the hills, from a labor editor who escaped after being hotly pursued for days, from survivors of the strike, from others who had heard the story from eye witnesses.
"I don't know how many were killed," the man who rode with the rurales told me, "but on the first night after the soldiers came I saw two flat cars piled high with dead and mangled bodies, and there were a good many killed after the first night."
"Those flat cars," the same informant told me, "were hauled away by special train that night, hurried to Veracruz, where the bodies were dumped in the harbor as food for the sharks."
Strikers who were not punished by death were punished in other ways scarcely less terrible. It seems that for the first few hours death was dealt out indiscriminately, but after that some of those who were caught were not killed. Fugitives who were captured after the first two or three days were rounded up in a bull pen, and some five hundred of them were impressed into the army and sent to Quintana Roo, The vice-president and the secretary of the "Circulo de Obreros" were hanged, while the woman orator, Margarita Martinez, was among those sent to the prison of San Juan de Ulua.
Among the newspaper men who suffered as a result of the Rio Blanco strike are Jose Neira, Justino Fernandez, Juan Olivares and Paulino Martinez. Neira and Fernandez were imprisoned for long terms, the latter being tortured until he lost his reason. Olivares was pursued for many days, but escaped capture and found his way to the United States. None of the three had any connection with the riot. The fourth, Paulino Martinez, committed no crime more heinous than to comment mildly in his newspaper in favor of the strikers. He published his paper at Mexico City, a day's ride on the train to Rio Blanco. Personally he had been no nearer the scene of the trouble than that city, yet he was arrested, carried over the mountains to the mill town, imprisoned and held incommunicado for five months without even a charge being preferred against him.
The government made every effort to conceal the facts of the Rio Blanco massacre, but murder will out, and when the newspapers did not speak the news flew from mouth to mouth until the nation was shuddering at the story. It was a waste of blood, indeed, yet, even from the viewpoint of the workers, it was not wholly in vain. For in the story the company store held a prominent place, and so great a protest was raised against it that President Diaz decided to make one concession to the decimated band of operatives and to abolish the company store at Rio Blanco.
Thus where before the strike there was but one store in Rio Blanco, today there are many; the workers buy where they choose. Thus it would seem that by their starvation and their blood the strikers had won a slight victory, but it is a question whether this is so, since in some ways the screws have been put down harder than ever before. Provision has been made against a repetition of the strike, provision that, for a country that claims to be a republic, is, to speak mildly, astounding.
The provision consists, first, of eight hundred Mexican troops—six hundred regular soldiers and two hundred rurales—who are encamped upon the company property; second, of a jefe politico clothed with the powers of a cannibal chief.
When we visited the barracks, De Lara and I, the little captain who showed us about informed us that the quarters were furnished, ground, house, light and water, by the company, and that in return the army was placed directly and unequivocally at the call of the company.
"As to the jefe politico, his name is Miguel Gomez, and he was promoted to Rio Blanco from Cordoba, where his readiness to kill is said to have provoked the admiration of the man who appointed him. President Diaz. Regarding the powers of Miguel Gomez, I can hardly do better than to quote the words of an officer of the company, with whom De Lara and I took dinner one day:
"Miguel Gomez has orders direct from President Diaz to censor the reading of the mill workers and to allow no radical newspapers or Liberal literature to get into their hands. More than that, he has orders to kill anyone whom he suspects of having evil intentions. Yes, I said kill. It is carte blanche with Gomez, and no questions asked. He asks no one's advice and no court sits on his action, either before or after. And he does kill. If he sees a man on the street and gets any whimsical suspicion of him, dislikes his dress or his face, it is enough. That man disappears. I remember a laborer in the dye-mixing room who spoke some words friendly to Liberalism; I remember a spool tender who mentioned the strike; there have been others—many others. They have disappeared suddenly, have been swallowed up and nothing heard of them but the whispers of their friends!"
Of course, it is impossible in the nature of things to verify this statement, but it is worth noting that it does not come from a revolutionist.
The trade unionists of Mexico are, of course, by far the best paid workers in the country. Because of the opposition of both employers and government, as well as the deep degradation out of which it is necessary for the Mexican to climb before he is able to pluck the fruits of organization, unionism is still in its infancy in Mexico. It is still in its swaddling clothes and, under the circumstances as they exist today, its growth is slow and fraught with great hardship. So far, there is no Mexican Federation of Labor.
The principal Mexican unions in 1908, as set forth to me by Felix Vera, president of the Grand League of Railroad Workers, and other organizers, were as follows:
The Grand League of Railroad Workers, 10,000 members; the Mechanics' Union, 500 members; Boilermakers' Union, 800 members; Cigarmakers' Union, 1,500 members; Carpenters' Union, 1,500 members; the Shop Blacksmiths' Union, with headquarters at Ciudad Porfirio Diaz, 800 members; Steel and Smelter Workers' Union, of Chihuahua, 500 members.
These are the only permanent Mexican unions, and an addition of their membership shows that they total under 16,000. Other unions have sprung up, as at Rio Blanco, at Cananea, at Tizapan and other places in response to a pressing need, but they have been crushed either by the employers or by the government—usually by both working in conjunction, the latter acting as the servant of the former. In the two years since 1908 there has been practically no advance in organization. Indeed, for a time the largest union, the railroad workers, having been beaten in a strike, all but went out of existence. But recently it has revived to almost its former strength.
All the unions mentioned are Mexican unions exclusively. The only branch of American organization which extends to Mexico consists of railroad men, who exclude Mexicans from membership. Hence the Grand League itself is a purely Mexican union.
As to pay, the boilermakers received a minimum of 27½ cents an hour in American money; the carpenters, who are organized only in the capital and have as yet no scale, from 75 cents to $1.75; the cigarmakers, from $1.75 to $2; the shop blacksmiths, 22½ cents an hour, and the steel and smelter workers, 25 cents an hour.
Among these trades there have been several strikes.
In 1905 the cigarmakers enforced their own shop rules. A little later the union mechanics in the railroad shops at Aguascalientes struck because they were being gradually replaced by Hungarian unorganized men at lower wages. The strikers not only won their point, but secured a five-cent per day raise of wages besides, which so encouraged the boilermakers that the latter craftsmen made a demand all over the country for a five-cent raise and got it.
Besides several short strikes of less importance still, this is the extent of the labor victories in Mexico. Victory has been the exception. Intervention by the government, with blood and prison for the strikers, has been the rule.
The strike of the Grand League of Railway Workers occurred in the spring of 1908. The league consists principally of brakemen, who received $37.50 per month in American money, and shop mechanics, who received twenty-five cents an hour. Early in 1908 the bosses at San Luis Potosi began discriminating against union men, both in the shops and on the trains. The unions protested to General Manager Clark, and the latter promised to make reparation within two months. At the end of two months nothing had been done. The union then gave the manager twenty-four hours in which to act. At the end of twenty-four hours still nothing had been done. So the entire membership on the road, consisting of 3,000 men, walked out.
The strike tied up every foot of the Mexican National Railway, consisting of nearly one thousand miles of road running from Laredo. Texas, to Mexico City. For six days traffic was at a standstill. Recognition of the union, which is the necessary prerequisite for successful peace in any struggle along union lines, seemed assured. The great corporation seemed beaten, but—the men had not reckoned with the government.
No sooner did Manager Clark discover that he was beaten on the economic field of battle than he called to his aid the police power of Diaz.
President Vera of the Grand League was waited upon by the governor of the state of San Luis Potosi and informed that if the men did not return to work forthwith they would all be rounded up and thrown in jail and prosecuted for conspiracy against the government. He showed Vera a telegram from President Diaz which in significant terms reminded Vera of the massacre at Rio Blanco, which had occurred but a year previously.
Vera hurried to the national capital, where he interviewed Vice-President Corral and attempted to secure an audience with Diaz. Corral confirmed the threats of the governor of San Luis Potosi. Vera pleaded that the strikers were keeping perfect order; he begged that they be fairly treated. But it was no use. He knew that the government was not bluffing, for in such matters the Mexican government does not bluff. After a conference with the executive board of the union the strike was called off. and the men went back to work.
Of course that demoralized the union, for what, pray, is the use of organization if you are not permitted to pluck the fruits of organization? The strikers were taken back to work, as agreed, but they were discharged one after another at convenient times. The membership of the league fell off, those remaining upon the roll remaining only in the hope of a less tyrannical government soon replacing the one that had foiled them. Vera resigned the presidency. His resignation was refused, he still remained the nominal head of the organization, but there was nothing that he could do. It was at this juncture that I met and talked with him about the railroad strike and the general outlook for Mexican unionism. "The oppression of the government," said Vera, in his last few words to me, "is terrible—terrible! There is no chance for bettering the condition of labor in Mexico until there is a change in the administration. Every free laborer in Mexico knows that!"
Vera organized the Grand League of Railway Workers of Mexico in 1904, and since that time he has passed many months in prison for no other reason than his union activities. Not until early in 1909 did he engage in anything that smacked of political agitation. The hardships imposed by the government upon union organization, however, inevitably drove him into opposition to it. He became a newspaper correspondent, and it was because he dared to criticize the despot that he again found his way into that awful pit, Belem.
August 3, 1909, Vera was arrested at Guadalajara and carried to Mexico City. He was not taken before a judge. Nor was any formal charge lodged against him. He was merely told that the federal government had decided that he must spend the next two years in prison, serving out a sentence which had four years previously been meted out to him for his union activities, but under which he had been pardoned after serving one year and seven months.
Though a permanent cripple, Vera is a brave and honest man and a fervent organizer. Mexican liberty will lose much by his imprisonment.
Strikes in Mexico so far have usually been more the result of a spontaneous unwillingness on the part of the workers to go on with their miserable lives than of an organization of labor behind them or an appeal by agitators. Such a strike was that of Tizapan.
I mention the strike of Tizapan because I happened to visit the spot while the strikers were starving. For a month the strike had been going on, and though 600 cotton mill operatives were involved and Tizapan was only a score of miles from the palace of Chapultepec, not a daily newspaper in the capital, as far as I have learned, mentioned the fact that there was a strike.
I first heard of the Tizapan strike from Paulino Martinez, the editor, who is now a political refugee in the United States. Martinez cautioned me against saying that he told me, since, though he had not heard of the strike himself until after it had been called, he thought the telling might result in his arrest. The next day I took a run out to Tizapan, viewed the silent mill, visited the strikers in their squalid homes, and finally had a talk with the strike committee.
Except for Valle Nacional, I never saw so many people—men, women and children—with the mark of acute starvation on their faces, as at Tizapan. True, there was no fever among them, their eyes were not glazing with complete exhaustion from overwork and insufficient sleep, but their cheeks were pale, they breathed feebly and they walked unsteadily from lack of food.
These people had been working eleven hours a day for wages running from fifty cents to three dollars a week in our money. Doubtless they would have continued to work for it if they were really paid it, but the bosses were always devising new means to rob them of what little they were entitled to. Dirt spots on the calico meant a loss of one, two and sometimes even three pesos. Petty fines were innumerable. Finally, each worker was taxed three centavos per week to pay for the food of the dogs belonging to the factory. That was the last straw. The toilers refused to accept partial wages, the mill was closed and the period of starvation began. When I visited Tizapan three-fourths of the men had gone away seeking work and food in other parts. Being wholly without means, it is quite likely that a large percentage of them fell into the hands of labor agents and were sold into slavery in the hot lands. A few men and the women and children were staying and starving. The strike committee had begged the national government to redress their wrongs, but without avail. They had asked President Diaz to reserve for them a little land out of the millions of acres which he was constantly signing away to foreigners, but they had received from him no reply. When I asked them if they hoped to win the strike, they told me no, that they had no hope, but they did not care; they preferred to die at once and in the open air than to go back to such miserable treatment as had been accorded them in the factory. Here is a translation of a pitiful appeal which these Tizapan strikers sent out to mill centers in other sections of the country:
Fellow Countrymen:
By this circular we make known to all the workers of the Mexican Republic that none of the factories which exist in our unfortunate country have exhibited men so avaricious as the manufacturers of "La Hormiga," Tizapan, since they are worse than highway robbers; not only are they robbers, but they are tyrants and hangmen.
Let us make it plain to you. Here are we robbed in weights and measures. Here are we exploited without mercy. Here are we fined two and three pesos and down to the very last of our wages, and we are dismissed from our work with kicks and blows. But what is the most disgusting, ridiculous and vile part of it all is the discount that is made on the workers of three cents weekly for the maintenance of the lazy dogs of the factory. What a disgrace!
Who can live such a sad and degraded life? Whereupon it does not appear that we live in a republic conquered by theblood of our forefathers, but rather that we inhabit a land of savage and brutal slave-drivers. Who can subsist on wages of three and four pesos weekly and discounted from that fines, house rent, and robbery in weights and measures? No, a thousand times, no! Because of such circumstances we petition our dear country for a fragment of land to cultivate, so that we may not continue to enrich the foreigner, trader and exploiter, who piles up gold at the cost of the devoted toil of the poor and unfortunate worker!
We protest against this order of things and we will not work until we are guaranteed that the fines will be abolished and also the maintenance of dogs, for which we ought not to pay, and that we shall be treated as workers and not as the unhappy slaves of a foreigner.
We hope that our fellow workers will aid us in this fight.
The Committee.
The Tizapan strike was lost. When it was ready to do so, the company reopened the mill without difficulty, for, as corporation prospectuses of the country say, there is labor aplenty in Mexico and it is very, very cheap.
The Cananea strike, occurring as it did, very close to the border of the United States, is perhaps the one Mexican strike of which Americans generally have heard. Not having been a witness, nor even having ever been upon the ground, I cannot speak with personal authority, and yet I have talked with so many persons who were in one way or another connected with the affair, several of whom were in the very thick of the flying bullets, that I cannot but believe that I have a fairly clear idea of what occurred.
Cananea is a copper city of Sonora, situated several score of miles from the Arizona border. It was established by W. C. Greene, who secured several million acres along the border from the Mexican government at little or no cost, and who succeeded in forming such intimate relations with Ramon Corral and other high Mexican officials that the municipal government established upon his property was entirely under his control, while the government of the Mexican town close beside it was exceedingly friendly to him and practically under his orders. The American consul at Cananea, a man named Galbraith, was also an employe of Greene, so that both the Mexican and United States governments, as far as Cananea and its vicinity was concerned, were—W. C. Greene.
Greene, having since fallen into disrepute with the powers that be in Mexico, has lost most of his holdings and the Greene-Cananea Copper Company is now the property of the Cole-Ryan mining combination, one of the parties in the Morgan-Guggenheim copper merger.
In the copper mines of Cananea were employed six thousand Mexican miners and about six hundred American miners. Greene paid the Mexican miners just half as much as he paid the American miners, not because they performed only half as much labor, but because he was able to secure them for that price. The Mexicans were getting big pay, for Mexicans—three pesos a day, most of them. But naturally they were dissatisfied and formed an organization for the purpose of forcing a better bargain out of Greene
As to what precipitated the strike there is some dispute. Some say that it was due to an announcement by a mine boss that the company had decided to supersede the system of wage labor with the system of contract labor. Others say it was precipitated by Greene's telegraphing to Diaz for troops, following a demand of the miners for five pesos a day.
But whatever the immediate cause, the walkout was started by a night shift May 31, 1906. The strikers marched about the company's property, calling out the men in the different departments. They met with success at all points, and trouble began only at the last place of call, the company lumber yard, where the parade arrived early in the forenoon. Here the manager, a man named Metcalfe, drenched the front ranks with water from a large hose. The strikers replied with stones, and Metcalfe and his brother came back with rifles. Some strikers fell, and in the ensuing battle the two Metcalfes were killed.
During the parade, the head of the Greene detective squad, a man named Rowan, handed out rifles and ammunition to the heads of departments of the company, and as soon as the fight started at the lumber yard the company detective force embarked in automobiles and drove about town, shooting right and left. The miners, unarmed, dispersed, but they were shot as they ran. One of the leaders, applying to the chief of police for arms with which the miners might protect themselves, was terribly beaten by the latter, who put his entire force at the service of the company. During the first few hours after the trouble some of the Greene men were put in jail, but very soon they were released and hundreds of the miners were locked up. Finding that no justice was to be given them, the bulk of the miners retired to a point on the company's property, where they barricaded themselves and, with what weapons they could secure, defied the Greene police.
From Greene's telegraph office were sent out reports that the Mexicans had started a race war and were massacring the Americans of Cananea, including the women and children. Consul Galbraith sent out such inflammatory stories to Washington that there was a flurry in our War Department; these stories were so misleading that Galbraith was removed as soon as the real facts became known.
The agent of the Department of Fomento of Mexico, on the other hand, reported the facts as they were, and through the influence of the company he was discharged at once.
Colonel Greene hurried away on his private car to Arizona, where he called for volunteers to go to Cananea and save the American women and children, offering one hundred dollars for each volunteer, whether he fought or not. Which action was wholly without valid excuse, since the strikers not only never assumed the aggressive in the violent acts of Cananea, but the affair was also in no sense an anti-foreign demonstration. It was a labor strike, pure and simple, a strike in which the one demand was for a raise of wages to five pesos a day.
While the false tales sent out from Greene's town were furnishing a sensation for the United States, Greene's Pinkertons were sent about the streets for another shoot-up of the Mexicans. Americans had been warned to stay indoors, in order that the assassins might take pot shots at anything in sight, which they did. The total list of killed by the Greene men—which was published at the time—was twenty-seven, among whom were several who were not miners at all. Among these, it is said, was a boy of six and an aged man over ninety, who was tending a cow when the bullet struck him.
By grossly misrepresenting the situation, Greene succeeded in getting a force of three hundred Americans, rangers, miners, stockmen, cowboys and others, together in Bisbee, Douglas and other towns. Governor Yzabal of Sonora, playing directly into the hands of Greene at every point, met this force of men at Naco and led them across the line. The crossing was disputed by the Mexican customs official, who swore that the invaders might pass only over his dead body. With leveled rifle this man faced the governor of his state and the three hundred foreigners, and refused to yield until Yzabal showed an order signed by General Diaz permitting the invasion.
Thus three hundred American citizens, some of them government employes, on June 2, 1906 violated the laws of the United States, the same laws that Magon and his friends are accused of merely conspiring to violate, and yet not one of them, not even Greene, the man who knew the situation, and was extremely culpable, was ever prosecuted. Moreover, Ranger Captain Rhynning who accepted an appointment of Governor Yzabal to command this force of Americans, instead of being deposed from his position, was afterwards promoted. At this writing he holds the fat job of warden of the territorial penitentiary at Florence, Arizona.
The rank and file of those three hundred men were hardly to be blamed for their act, for Greene completely fooled them. They thought they were invading Mexico to save some American women and children. When they arrived in Cananea on the evening of the second day, they discovered that they had been tricked, and the following day they returned without having taken part in the massacres of these early days of June.
But with the Mexican soldiers and rurale forces which poured into Cananea that same night it was different. They were under the orders of Yzabal, Greene and Corral, and they killed, as they were told to do. There was a company of cavalry under Colonel Barron. There were one thousand infantrymen under General Luis Torres, who hurried all the way from the Yaqui river to serve the purposes of Greene. There were some two hundred rurales. There were the Greene private detectives. There was a company of the acordada.
And all of them took part in the killing. Miners were taken from the jail and hanged. Miners were taken to the cemetery, made to dig their own graves and were shot. Several hundred of them were marched away to Hermosillo, where they were impressed into the Mexican army. Others were sent away to the penal colony on the islands of Tres Marias. Finally, others were sentenced to long terms in prison. When Torres' army arrived, the strikers who had barricaded themselves in the hills surrendered without any attempt at resistance. First, however, there was a parley, in which the leaders were assured that they would not be shot. But in spite of the fact that they persuaded the strikers not to resist the authorities, Manuel M. Dieguez, Esteban E. Calderon and Manuel Ibarre, the members of the executive board of the union, were sentenced to four years in prison, where they remain to this day—unless they are dead.
Among those who were jailed and ordered shot was L. Gutierrez De Lara, who had committed no crime except to address a meeting of the miners. The order for the shooting of De Lara, as well as for the others, came direct from Mexico City on representations from Governor Yzabal. De Lara had influential friends in Mexico, and these, getting word through the friendship of the telegraph operator and the postmaster of Cananea, succeeded in securing De Lara's reprieve.
The end of the whole affair was that the strikers, literally hacked to pieces by the murderous violence of the government, were unable to rally their forces The strike was broken, and in time the surviving miners went back to work on more unsatisfactory conditions than before.
Such is the fate the Czar of Mexico metes out to workingmen who dare demand a larger share of the products of their labor in his country. One thing more remains to be said. Colonel Greene refused to grant the demand of the miners for more wages, and he claimed to have a good excuse for it.
"President Diaz," said Greene, "has ordered me not to raise wages, and I dare not disobey him.”
It is an excuse that is being offered by employers of labor all over Mexico. Doubtless President Diaz did issue some such an order, and employers of Mexican labor, Americans with the rest of them, are glad to take advantage of it. American capitalists support Diaz with a great deal more unanimity than they support Taft. American capitalists support Diaz because they are looking to Diaz to keep Mexican labor always cheap. And they are looking to Mexican cheap labor to help them break the back of organized labor in the United States, both by transferring a part of their capital to Mexico and by importing a part of Mexico's laborers into this country.