Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 4
CHAPTER IV
THE CONTRACT SLAVES OF VALLE NACIONAL
Valle Nacional is undoubtedly the worst slave hole in Mexico. Probably it is the worst in the world. When I visited Valle Nacional I expected to find it milder than Yucatan. I found it more pitiless.
In Yucatan the Maya slaves die off faster than they are born and two-thirds of the Yaqui slaves are killed during the first year after their importation into the country. In Valle Nacional all of the slaves, all but a very few—perhaps five per cent—pass back to earth within a space of seven or eight months.
This statement is almost unbelievable. I would not have believed it; possibly not even after I had seen the whole process of working them and beating them and starving them to death, were it not the fact that the masters themselves told me that it was true. And there are fifteen thousand of these Valle Nacional slaves—fifteen thousand new ones every year!
"By the sixth or seventh month they begin to die off like flies at the first winter frost, and after that they're not worth keeping. The cheapest thing to do is to let them die; there are plenty more where they came from." Word for word, this is a statement made to me by Antonio Pla, general manager of one-third the tobacco lands in Valle Nacional.
"I 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 again." This assertion was made to me by a station agent of the Veracruz al Pacifico railroad.
"There are no survivors of Valle Nacional—no real ones," a government engineer who has charge of the improvement of certain harbors told me. "Now and then one gets out of the valley and gets beyond El Hule. He staggers and begs his way along the weary road 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 Niacional and he knows more of the country, probably, than does any Mexican not directly interested in the slave trade.
"They die; they all die. The bosses never let them go until they're dying."
Thus declared one of the police officers of the town of Valle Nacional, which is situated in the center of the valley and is supported by it.
And everywhere over and over again I was told the same thing. Even Manuel Lagunas, presidente (mayor) of Valle Nacional, protector of the planters and a slave owner himself, said it. Miguel Vidal, secretary of the municipality, said it. The bosses themselves said it. The Indian dwellers of the mountain sides said it. The slaves said it. And when I had seen, as well as heard, I was convinced that it was the truth.
The slaves of Valle Nacional are not Indians, as are the slaves of Yucatan. They are Mexicans. Some are skilled artizans. Others are artists. The majority of them are common laborers. As a whole, except for their rags, their bruises, their squalor and their despair, they are a very fair representation of the Mexican people. They are not criminals. Not more than ten per cent were 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. Conditions similar to those of Valle Nacional are the rule in many sections of Diaz-land, and especially in the states south of the capital. I cite Valle Nacional because it is most notorious as a region of slaves, and because, as I have already suggested, it presents just a little bit the worst example of chattel slavery that I know of.
The secret of the extreme conditions of Valle Nacional is mainly geographical. Valle Nacional is a deep gorge from two to five miles wide and twenty miles long tucked away among almost impassable mountains in the extreme northwestern corner of the state of Oaxaca. Its mouth is fifty miles up the Papaloapan river from El Hule, the nearest railroad station, yet it is through El Hule that every human being passes in going to or 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 it more than once in order to get out of Valle Nacional.
The equestrian must cross it five times—four times in a canoe alongside which his mount swims laboriously, once by fording, a long and difficult route over which large rocks must be avoided and deep holes kept away from. The valley itself is as flat as a floor, clear of all rank growth, and down its gentle slope winds the 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 Nacional is three days' journey from Cordoba, two from El Hule. Stray travelers sometimes get as far as Tuztepec, the chief city of the political district, but no one goes on to Valle Nacional who has not business there. It is a tobacco country, the most noted in 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 valley are 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, is provided with ten policemen and eleven rurales (mounted country police). Besides, every runaway slave brings a reward of $10 to the man or policeman who catches and returns him to his owner.
Thus it will be understood how much the geographical isolation of Valle Nacional accounts for its being just a little worse than most other slave districts of Mexico. Combined with this may be mentioned the complete understanding that is had with the government and the nearness to a practically inexhaustible labor market.
Just as in Yucatan, the slavery of Valle Nacional is merely peonage, or labor for debt, carried to the extreme,
The origin of the conditions of Valle Nacional was undoubtedly contract labor. The planters needed laborers. They went to the expense of importing laborers with the understanding that the laborers would stay with their jobs for a given time. Some laborers tried to jump their contracts and the planters used force to compel them to stay. The advance money and the cost of transportation was looked upon as a debt which the laborer could be compelled to work out. From this it was only a step to so ordering the conditions of labor that the laborer could under no circumstances ever hope to get free. In time Valle Nacional became a word of horror with the working people of all Mexico. They refused to go there for any price. So the planters felt compelled to tell them they were going to take them somewhere else. From this it was only a step to playing the workman false all round, to formulating a contract not to be carried out, but to help get the laborer into the toils. Finally, from this it was only a step to forming a business partnership with the government, whereby the police power should be put into the hands of the planters to help them carry on a traffic in slaves.
The planters do not call their slaves slaves. They call them contract laborers. I call them slaves because the moment they enter Valle Nacional they become the personal property of the planter and there is no law or government to protect them.
In the first place the planter buys his slave for a given sum. Then he works him at will, feeds or starves him to suit himself, places armed guards over him day and night, beats him, pays him no money, kills him, and the laborer has no recourse. Call it by another name if it pleases you. I call it slavery only because I do not know of a name that will fit the conditions better.
I have said that no laborer sent to Valle Nacional to become a slave travels the road of his own free will. There are just two ways employed to get them there. They are sent over the road either by a jefe politico or by a "labor agent" working in conjunction with a jefe politico or other officials of the government.
A jefe politico is a civil officer who rules political districts corresponding to our counties. He is appointed by the president or by the governor of his state and is also mayor, or presidente, of the principal town or city in his district. In turn he usually appoints the mayors of the towns under him, as well as all other officers of importance. He has no one to answer to except his governor—unless the national president feels like interfering—and altogether is quite a little Czar in his domain.
The methods employed by the jefe politico working alone are very simple. Instead of sending petty prisoners to terms in jail he sells them into slavery in Valle Nacional. And as he pockets the money himself, he naturally arrests as many persons as he can. This method is followed more or less by the jefes politicos of all the leading cities of southern Mexico.
The jefe politico of each of the four largest cities in southern Mexico, so I was told by Manuel Lagunas, by "labor agents," as well as by others whose veracity in the matter I have no reason to question—pays an annual rental of $10,000 per year for his office. The office would be worth no such amount were it not for the spoils of the slave trade and other little grafts which are indulged in by the holder. Lesser jefes pay their governors lesser amounts. They send their victims over the road in gangs of from ten to one 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 to hide behind the "labor agents" and the "labor agents" are enabled to work under the protection of the officials and absolutely without fear of criminal prosecution.
In this partnership of the government and the labor agent—popularly known as an enganchador (snarer)—the function of the labor agent is to snare the laborer, the function of the government to stand behind him, help him, protect him, give him low transportation rates and free guard service, and finally, to take a share of the profits.
The methods employed by the labor agent in snaring the laborer are many and various. One is to open an employment office and advertise for workers who are to be given high wages, a comfortable home and plenty of freedom somewhere in the south of Mexico. Free transportation is offered. These inducements always cause a certain number to take the bait, especially men with families who want to move with their families to a more prosperous clime. The husband and father is given an advance fee of $5 and the whole family is locked up in a room as securely barred as a jail.
After a day or two, as they are joined by others, they come to have misgivings. Perhaps they ask to be let out, and then they find that they are indeed prisoners. They are told that they are in debt and will be held until they work out their debt. A few days later the door opens and they file out. They find that rurales are all about them. They are marched through a back street to a railroad station, where they are put upon the train. They try to get away, but it is no use; they are prisoners. In a few days they are in Valle Nacional.
Usually the laborer caught in this way is taken through the formality of signing a contract. He is told that he is to get a good home, good food, and one, two or three dollars a day wages for a period of six months or a year. A printed paper is shoved under his nose and the enganchandor rapidly points out several alluring sentences written thereon. A pen is put quickly into his hand and he is told to sign in a hurry. The five dollars advance fee is given him to clinch the bargain and put him in debt to the agent. He is usually given a chance to spend this, or a part of it, usually for clothing or other necessaries in order that he may be unable to pay it back when he discovers that he has been trapped. The blanks on the printed contract—fixing the wages, etc.—are usually filled out afterwards by the labor agent or the consignee.
In Mexico City and other large centers of population there are permanently maintained places called casas de los enganchadores (houses of the snarers). They are regularly known to the police and to large slave buyers of the hot lands. Yet they are nothing more nor less than private jails into which are enticed laborers, who are held there against their will until such time as they are sent away in gangs guarded by the police powers of the government.
A third method employed by the labor agent is outright kidnapping. I have heard of many cases of the kidnapping of women and of men. Hundreds of half drunken men are picked up about the pulque shops of Mexico City every season, put under lock and key, and later hurried off to Valle Nacional. Children, also, are regularly kidnapped for the Valle Nacional trade. The official records of Mexico City say that during the year ending September 1, 1908, 360 little boys between the ages of six and twelve disappeared on the streets. Some of these have later been located in Valle Nacional.
During my first Mexican trip El Imparcial, a leading daily newspaper of Mexico, printed a story of a boy of seven who had disappeared while his mother was looking into the windows of a pawn shop. A frantic search failed to locate him; he was an only child, and as a result of sorrow the father drank himself to death in a few days' time, while the mother went insane and also died. Three months later, the boy, ragged and footsore, struggled up the steps and knocked at the door that had been his parents'. He had been kidnapped and sold to a tobacco planter. But he had attained the well-nigh impossible. With a boy of nine, he had eluded the plantation guards, and, by reason of their small size, the two had escaped observation, and, by stealing a canoe, had reached EI Hule. By slow stages, begging their food on the way, the baby tramps had reached home.
The typical life story of a labor agent I heard in Cordoba on my way to the valley. It was told me first by a negro contractor from New Orleans, who had been in the country for about fifteen years. It was told me again by the landlord of my hotel. Later, it was confirmed by several tobacco planters in the valley. The story is this:
Four years ago Daniel T———, an unsuccessful Spanish adventurer, arrived, penniless, in Cordoba. In a few 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 centavos) very easily, my man?"
Of course the man cared, and in a few minutes he was on his way to the Spaniard's room carrying a "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 other places. Today he is El Senor Daniel T———. I saw his home, a palatial mansion with the sign of three cocks above the door. He uses a private seal and is said to be worth $100,000, all acquired as a "labor agent."
The prevailing price in 1908 for men was $45 each, women and children half price. In 1907, before the panic, it was $60 per man. All slaves entering the valley must wait over at Tuztepec, where Rodolpho Pardo, the jefe politico of the district, counts them and exacts a toll of ten per cent of the purchase price, which he puts into his own pocket.
The open partnership of the government in the slave traffic must necessarily have some excuse. The excuse is the debt, the $5 advance fee usually paid by the labor agent to the laborer. It is unconstitutional, but it serves. The presidente of Valle Nacional told me, "There is not a police official in all southern Mexico who will not recognize that advance fee as a debt and acknowledge your right to take the body of the laborer where you will."
When the victim arrives in the valley of tobacco he learns that the promises of the labor agent were made merely to entrap him. Moreover, he learns also that the contract—if he has been lucky enough to get a peep at that instrument—was made exactly for the same purpose. As the promises of the labor agent belie the provisions of the contract, so the contract belies the actual facts. The contract usually states that the laborer agrees to sell himself for a period of six months, but no laborer with energy left in his body is by any chance set free in six months. The contract usually states that the employer is bound to furnish medical treatment for the laborers; the fact is that there is not a single physician for all the slaves of Valle Nacional. Finally, the contract usually binds the employer to pay the men fifty centavos (25 cents American) per day as wages, and the women three pesos a month ($1.50 American), but I was never able to find one who ever received one copper centavo from his master—never anything beyond the advance fee paid by the labor agent.
The bosses themselves boasted to me—several of them—that they never paid any money to their slaves. Yet they never called their system slavery. They claimed to "keep books" on their slaves and juggle the accounts in such a way as to keep them always in debt. "Yes, the wages are fifty centavos a day," they would say, "but they must pay us back what we give to bring them here. And they must give us interest on it, too. And they must pay for the clothing that we give them—and the tobacco, and anything else."
This is exactly the attitude of every one of the tobacco planters of Valle Nacional. For clothing, and tobacco, and "anything else," they charge ten prices. It is no exaggeration. Senor Rodriguez, proprietor of the farm "Santa Fe," for example, showed me a pair of unbleached cotton pajama-like things that the slaves use for pantaloons. His price, he said, was three dollars a pair. A few days later I found the same thing in Veracruz at thirty cents.
Trousers at $3, shirts the same price—suits of clothes so flimsy that they wear out and drop off in three weeks' time. Eight suits in six months at $6 is $48. Add $45, the price of the slave; add $5, the advance fee; add $2 for discounts, and there's the $90 wages of the six months gone.
Such is keeping books to keep the slave a slave. On the other hand, when you figure up the cost of the slave to yourself, it is quite different. "Purchase price, food, clothes, wages—everything," Senor Rodriguez told me, "costs from $60 to $70 per man for the first six months of service."
Add your purchase price, advance fee and suits at cost, 60 cents each, and we discover that between $5 and $15 are left for both food and wages for each six months. It all goes for food—beans and tortillas.
Yes, there is another constant item of expense that the masters must pay—the burial fee in the Valle Nacional cemetery. It is $1.50. I say this is a constant item of expense because practically all the slaves die and are supposed to be buried. The only exception to the rule occurs when, in order to save the $1.50, the masters bury their slaves themselves or throw them to the alligators of the neighboring swamps.
Every slave is guarded night and day. At night he is locked up in a dormitory resembling a jail. In 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 are large barn-like buildings, constructed strongly of young trees set upright and wired together with many strands of barbed wire fencing. The windows 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. In such a hole sleep all the slaves, men, 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. You can figure it out for yourself. On the ranch "Santa Fe" the dormitory measures 75 by 18 feet, and it accommodates 150. On the ranch "La Sepultura," the dormitory is 40 by 15 feet, and it accommodates 70. On the ranch "San Cristobal," the dormitory is 100 by 50 feet, and it accommodates 350. On the ranch "San Juan del Rio," the dormitory is 80 by 90, and it accommodates 400. From nine to eighteen square feet for each person to lie down in—so runs the space. And on not a single ranch did I find a separate dormitory for the women or the children. 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 of them men, the door is locked on them and they are left to the mercy of the men.
Often honest, hard-working Mexicans are taken into Valle Nacional with their wives and children. If the wife is attractive in appearance she goes to the planter or to one or more of the bosses. The children see their mother being taken away and they know what is to become of her. The husband knows it, but if he makes objection he is answered with a club. Time and time again I have been told that this was so, by masters, by slaves, by officials. And the women who are thrust into the sardine box must take care of themselves.
One-fifth of the slaves of Valle Nacional are women; one-third are boys under fifteen. The boys work in the fields with the men. They cost less, they last well, and at some parts of the work, such as planting the tobacco, they are more active and hence more useful. Boys as young as six sometimes are seen in the field planting tobacco. Women are worked in the field, too, especially during the harvest time, but their chief work is as household drudges. They serve the master and the mistress, if there is a mistress, and they grind the corn and cook the food of the male slaves. In every slave house I visited I found from three to a dozen women grinding corn. It is all done by hand with two pieces of stone called a metate. The flat stone is placed on the floor, the woman kneels beside it, bends almost double and works the stone roller up and down. The movement is something like that of a woman washing clothes, but it is much harder. I asked the presidente of Valle Nacional why the planters did not purchase cheap mills for grinding the corn, or why they did not combine and buy a mill among them, instead of breaking several hundred backs yearly in the work. "Women are cheaper than machines," was the reply.
In Valle Nacional the slaves seemed to me to work all the time. I saw them working in the morning twilight. I saw them working in the evening twilight. I saw them working far into the night. "If we could use the water power of the Papaloapan to light our farms we could work our farms all night," Manuel Lagunas told me, and I believe he would have done it. The rising hour on the farms is generally 4 o'clock in the morning. Sometimes it is earlier. On all but three or four of the thirty farms the slaves work every day in the year—until they fall. At San Juan del Rio, one of the largest, they have a half holiday every Sunday. I happened to be at San Juan del Rio on a Sunday afternoon. That half holiday! What a grim joke! The slaves spent it in jail, locked up to keep them from running away!
And they fall very fast. They are beaten, and that helps. They are starved, and that helps. They are given no hope, and that helps. They die in anywhere from one month to a year, the time of greatest mortality being between the sixth and eighth month. Like the cotton planters of our South before the war, the tobacco planters seem to have their business figured down to a fine point. It was a well-established business maxim of our cotton planters that the greatest amount of profit could be wrung from the body of a negro slave by working him to death in seven years and then buying another one. The Valle Nacional slave holder has discovered that it is cheaper to buy a slave for $45 and work and starve him to death in seven months, and then spend $45 for a fresh slave, than it is to give the first slave better food, work him less sorely and stretch out his life and his toiling hours over a longer period of time.