Barbarous Mexico/Chapter 5
CHAPTER V
IN THE VALLEY OF DEATH
I visited Valle Nacional in the latter part of 1908, spending a week in the region and stopping at all the larger plantations. I passed three nights at various plantation houses and four more at one or another of the towns. As in Yucatan, I visited the country in the guise of a probable purchaser of plantations.
As in Yucatan, I succeeded in convincing authorities and planters that I had several million dollars behind me just aching to be invested. Consequently, I put them as completely off their guard as it would be possible to do. As in Yucatan, I was able to secure my information, not only from what I saw of and heard from the slaves, but from the mouths of the masters themselves. Indeed, I was more fortunate than I was in Yucatan. I chummed with bosses and police so successfully that they never once became suspicious, and for months some of them were doubtless looking for me to drop in any fine day with a few million in my pocket, prepared to buy them out at double the value of their property.
The nearer we approached Valle Nacional the greater horror of the place we found among the people. None had been there, but all had heard rumors, some had seen survivors, and the sight of those walking corpses had confirmed the rumors. As we got off the train at Cordoba, we saw crossing the platform a procession of fourteen men, two in front and two behind with rifles, ten with their arms bound behind them with ropes, their heads down. Some were ragged, some well dressed, and several had small bundles on their shoulders.
"On their way to the valley!" I whispered. My companion nodded, and the next moment the procession disappeared through a narrow gateway on the opposite side of the street, the entrance to a most conveniently situated "bull pen" for the accommodation over night of the exiles.
After supper I mingled with the crowds in the leading hotels of the town, and was aggressive enough in my role of investor to secure letters of introduction from a wealthy Spaniard to several slave holders of the valley.
"You'd better call on the jefe politico at Tuztepec as soon as you get there," advised the Spaniard. "He's a friend of mine. Just show him my signature and he'll pass you along, all right."
When I arrived at Tuztepec I took the advice of the Senor and to my good fortune, for the jefe politico, Rodolpho Pardo, not only passed me along, but gave me a personal letter to each of his subordinates along the road, the presidentes of Chiltepec, Jacatepec and Valle Nacional, instructing them to neglect their official business, if necessary, but to attend to my wants. Thus it was during my first days in the Valley of Death I was the guest of the presidente, and on the nights which I spent in the town a special police escort was appointed to see that I came to no harm.
In Cordoba, a negro building contractor, an intelligent fellow, who had sojourned in Mexico for fifteen years, said to me:
"The days of slavery ain't over yet. No, sir, they ain't over. I've been here a long time and I've got a little property. I know I'm pretty safe, but sometimes I get scared myself—yes, sir, I get scared, you bet!" Early next morning as I was dressing I glanced out of my window and saw a man walking down the middle of the street with one end of a riata around his neck and a horseman riding behind at the other end of the riata.
"Where's that man going?" I inquired of the servant. "Going to be hanged?"
"Oh, no, only going to jail," answered the servant. "It's the easiest way to take them, you know. In a day or two," he added, "that man will be on his way to Valle Nacional. Everybody arrested here goes to Valle Nacional—everybody except the rich."
"I wonder if that same gang we saw last night will be going down on the train today," my companion, De Lara, said, as we made for the depot.
He did not wonder long, for we had hardly found seats when we saw the ten slaves and their rurale guards filing into the second-class coach adjoining. Three of the prisoners were well dressed and had unusually intelligent faces; the others were of the ordinary type of city or farm laborers. Two of the former were bright boys under twenty, one of whom burst into tears as the train pulled slowly out of Cordoba toward the dreaded valley.
Down into the tropics we slid, into the jungle, into the dampness and perfume of the lowlands, known as the hot country. We flew down a mountain, then skirted the rim of a gash-like gorge, looking down upon coffee plantations, upon groves of bananas, rubber and sugar cane, then into a land where it rains every day except in mid-winter. It was not hot—not real hot, like Yuma—but the passengers perspired with the sky.
We watched the exiles curiously, and at the first opportunity we made advances to the chief of the rurale squad. At Tierra Blanca we stopped for dinner and, as the meal the rurales purchased for their charges consisted only of tortillas and chili, we bought a few extras for them, then sat and watched them eat. Gradually we drew the exiles into conversation, carefully nursing the good will of their guards at the same time, and presently we had the story of each.
The prisoners were all from Pachuca, capital of the state of Hidalgo, and, unlike the vast majority of Valle Nacional slaves, they were being sent over the road directly by the jefe politico of that district. The particular system of this particular jefe was explained to us two days later by Espiridion Sanchez, a corporal of rurales, as follows:
“The jefe politico of Pachuca has a contract with Candido Fernandez, owner of the tobacco plantation 'San Cristobal la Vega,' whereby he agrees to deliver 500 able-bodied laborers a year for fifty pesos each. The jefe gets special nominal government rates on the railroads, his guards are paid for by the government, so the four days' trip from Pachuca costs him only three pesos and a half per man. This leaves him forty-six and one-half pesos. Out of it he must pay something to his governor, Pedro L. Rodriguez, and something to the jefe politico at Tuztepec. But even then his profits are very large.
"How does he get his men? He picks them up on the street and puts them in jail. Sometimes he charges them with some crime, real or imaginary, but in either case the man is never tried. He is held in jail until there are enough others to make up a gang, and then all are sent here. Why, men who may be safely sent to Valle Nacional are getting so scarce in Pachuca that the jefe has even been known to take young boys out of school and send them here just for the sake of the fifty pesos!"
Of our ten friends from Pachuca, all had been arrested and put in jail, but not one had been taken before a judge. Two had been charged with owing money that they could not pay, one had been arrested when drunk, another had been drunk and had discharged a firearm into the air, the fifth had shouted too loudly on Independence Day, September 16th, another had attempted rape, the seventh had had a mild-mannered quarrel with another boy over the sale of a five-cent ring, two had been musicians in the army and had left one company and joined another without permission, and the tenth had been a clerk of rurales and had been sold for paying a friendly visit to the previous two while they were in jail serving out their sentence for desertion.
When we smiled our incredulity at the tale of the tenth prisoner and asked the chief rurale pointblank if it was true, he astonished us with his reply. Nodding his grizzled head he said in a low voice:
"It is true. Tomorrow may be my time. It is always the poor that suffer."
We would have looked upon the stories of these men as "fairy tales," but all of them were confirmed by one or the other of the guards. The case of the musicians interested us most. The older carried the forehead of a university professor. He was a cornet player and his name was Amado Godaniz. The younger was a boy of but eighteen, the boy who cried, a basso player named Felipe Gomez.
"They are sending us to our 'death—to our death," muttered Godaniz. "We will never get out of that hole alive." And all along the route, wherever we met him, he said the same thing, repeating over and over again: "They are sending us to our death—to our death!" And always at the words the soft-faced, cringing boy of eighteen at his side would cry silently.
At El Hule, The Gateway to the Mexican Hell, we parted from our unfortunate friends for a time. As we left the railroad depot to board our launch in the river, we saw the ten, strung out in single file, one mounted rurale in front and one behind, disappear in the jungle toward Tuztepec. Four hours later, as we approached the district metropolis in the thickening twilight, we saw them again. They had beaten the launch in the journey up the river, had crossed in a canoe, and now stood resting for a moment on a sandy bank, silhouetted against the sky.
Rodolpho Pardo, the ‘‘jefe’’ politico’’, whom we visited after supper, proved to be a slender, polished man of forty, smooth-shaven, with eyes which searched our bodies like steel probes at first. But the thought of fresh millions to be invested where he might levy his toll upon them sweetened him as we became acquainted, and when we shook his cold, moist hand good-bye, we had won all that we had asked for. Don Rodolpho even called in the chief of police and instructed him to find us good horses for our journey.
Early the following morning found us on the jungle trail. During the forenoon we encountered several other travelers, and we lost no opportunity to question them.
"Run away? Yes; they try to—sometimes," said one native, a Mexican cattleman. "But too many are against them. The only escape is down river. They must cross many times and they must pass Jacatepec, Chiltepec, Tuzetpec and El Hule. And they must hide from every one on the road, for a reward of ten pesos is paid for every runaway captured. We don't love the system, but ten pesos is a lot of money, and no one would let it go by. Besides, if one doesn't get it another will, and even though the runaway should get out of the valley, when he reaches Cordoba he finds the enganchador Tresgallo, waiting there to send him back."
"One time," another native told us, "I saw a man leaning against a tree beside the trail. As I rode up I spoke to him, but he did not move. His arm was doubled against the tree trunk and his eyes seemed to be studying the ground. I touched his shoulder and found that he was stiff—dead. He had been turned out to die and had walked so far. How do I know he was not a runaway? Ah, Senor, I knew. You would have known, too, had you seen his swollen feet and the bones of his face—almost bare. No man who looks like that could run away!"
Just at nightfall we rode into Jacatepec, and there we found the slave gang ahead of us. They had started first and had kept ahead, walking the twenty-four miles of muddy trail, though some of them were soft from jail confinement. They were sprawled out on a patch of green beside the detention house.
The white linen collar of Amado Godaniz was gone now. The pair of fine shoes, nearly new, which he wore on the train, were on the ground beside him, heavy with mud and water. His bare feet were small, as white as a woman's and as tender, and both showed bruises and scratches. Since that evening at Jacatepec I have often thought of Amado Godaniz and have wondered—with a shiver—how those tender white feet fared among the tropical flies of Valle Nacional. "They are sending us to our death—to our death!" The news that Amado Godaniz were alive today would surprise me. That night he seemed to realize that he would never need those fine shoes again, and before I went to bed I heard him trying to sell them to a passer-by for twenty-five cents.
Wherever we stopped we induced people, by careless questions, to talk about the valley. I wanted to make no mistake. I wanted to hear the opinion of everybody. I did not know what might be denied us farther on. And always the story was the same—slavery and men and women beaten to death.
We arose at five the next morning and missed our breakfast in order to follow the slave gang over the road to Valle Nacional. At first the chief of the two rurales, a clean, handsome young Mexican, looked askance at our presence, but before we were half way there he was talking pleasantly. He was a Tuztepec rurale and was making his living out of the system, yet he was against it.
"It's the Spanish who beat our people to death," he said bitterly. "All the tobacco planters are Spanish, all but one or two."
The rurale chief gave us the names of two Spaniards, partners, Juan Pereda and Juan Robles, who had become rich on Valle Nacional tobacco and had sold out and gone back to spend the rest of their days in Spain. After they were gone, said he, the new owner, in looking over the place, ran upon a swamp in which he found hundreds of human skeletons. The toilers whom Pereda and Robles had starved and beaten to death they had been too miserly to bury.
Nobody ever thought of having a planter arrested for murdering his slaves, the ‘‘rurale’’ told us. To this rule he mentioned two exceptions; one. the case of a foreman who had shot three slaves; the other, a case in which an American figured and in which the American ambassador took action. In the first case the planter had disapproved the killing because he needed the slaves, so he himself had secured the arrest of the foreman. As to the other case:
"In past years they used to pick up a derelict American once in awhile and ship him down here," said my informant, "but the trouble this particular one kicked up has resulted in Americans being barred altogether. This American was sent to 'San Cristobal,' the farm of Candido Fernandez. At this plantation it was the custom to kill a steer every two weeks to provide meat for the family and the foremen; the only meat the slaves ever got was the head and entrails. One Sunday, while helping butcher a steer, the hunger of the American slave got the better of him, and he seized some of the entrails and ate them raw. The next day he died and a few weeks later an escaped slave called on the American ambassador in Mexico City, gave him the name and home address of the American, and told him the man had been beaten to death. The ambassador secured the arrest of the planter Fernandez and it cost him a lot of money to get out of jail,"
Our trip was a very beautiful one, if very rough. At one point we climbed along the precipitous side of a magnificent mountain, allowing our horses to pick their way over the rocks behind us. At another we waited while the slaves took off their clothing, piled them in bundles on their heads and waded across a creek; then we followed on our horses. At many points I yearned mightily for a camera, yet I knew if I had it that it would get me into trouble.
Picture merely that procession as it wound in single file around the side of a hill, the tropical green above broken now and then by a ridge of gigantic grey rocks, below a level meadow and a little farther on the curving, feminine lines of that lovely river, the Papaloapan. Picture those ten slaves, six with the regulation high straw hat of the plebeian Mexican, four with felts, all barefooted now except the boy musician, who is sure to throw away his shoes before the end of the journey, half of them bare-handed, imagining that the masters will furnish them blankets or extra clothing, the other half with small bundles of bright-colored blankets on their backs; finally, the mounted and uniformed rurales, one in front and one behind; and the American travelers at the extreme rear.
Soon we began to see gangs of men, from twenty to one hundred, at work in the fields preparing the ground for the tobacco planting. The men were the color of the ground, and it struck me as strange that they moved incessantly while the ground was still. Here and there among the moving shapes stood others—these seemed different; they really looked like men—with long, lithe canes in their hands and sometimes swords and pistols in their belts. We knew then that we had reached Valle Nacional.
The first farm at which we stopped was "San Juan del Rio." Crouching beside the porch of the main building was a sick slave. One foot was swollen to twice its natural size and a dirty bandage was wrapped clumsily about it. "What's the matter with your foot?" I asked. "Blood poisoning from insect bites," replied the slave. "He'll have maggots in another day or two," a boss told us with a grin.
As we rode away we caught our first glimpse of a Valle Nacional slave-house, a mere jail with barred windows, a group of women bending over metates, and a guard at the door with a key.
I have said that our rurale corporal was opposed to the system, yet how perfectly he was a part of it he soon showed. Rounding a bluff suddenly we caught sight of a man crouching half hidden behind a tree. Our rurale called him and he came, trembling, and trying to hide the green oranges that he had been eating. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
Rurale—Where are you going?
Man—To Oaxaca.
Rurale—Where are you from?
Man—From the port of Manzanillo.
Rurale—You've come a hundred miles out of your way. Nobody ever comes this way who doesn't have business here. What farm did you run away from, anyhow?
Man—I didn't run away.
Rurale—Well, you fall in here.
So we took the man along. Later it was ascertained that he had run away from "San Juan del Rio." The rurale got the ten pesos reward.
At the plantation "San Cristobal" we left the slave gang behind, first having the temerity to shake the hands of the two musicians, whom we never saw again. Alone on the road we found that the attitude of those we met was widely different from what it had been when we were traveling in the company of the ‘‘rurales’’, the agents of the state. The Spanish horsemen whom we encountered did not deign to speak to us, they stared at us suspiciously through half closed eyes and one or two even spoke offensively of us in our hearing. Had it not been for the letter to the presidente in my pocket it would doubtless have been a difficult matter to secure admission to the tobacco plantations of Valle Nacional.
Everywhere we saw the same thing—gangs of emaciated men and boys at work clearing the ground with machetes or ploughing the broad fields with oxen. And everywhere we saw guards, armed with long, lithe canes, with swords and pistols. Just before we crossed the river for the last time to ride into the town of Valle Nacional we spoke to an old man with a stump of a wrist who was working alone near the fence.
"How did you lose your hand?" I asked.
"A cabo (foreman) cut it off with a sword," was the reply,
Manuel Lagunas, presidente of Valle Nacional, proved to be a very amiable fellow, and I almost liked him—until I saw his slaves. His secretary, Miguel Vidal, was even more amiable, and we four sat for two hours over our late dinner, thoroughly enjoying ourselves—and talking about the country. During the entire meal a little half-negro boy of perhaps eight years stood silent behind the door, emerging only when his master, needing to be waited upon, called "Negro!"
"I bought him cheap," said Vidal. "He cost me only twenty-five pesos."
Because of its great beauty Valle Nacional was originally called "Royal Valley" by the Spaniards, but after the Independence of Mexico it was rechristened Valle Nacional. Thirty-five years ago the land belonged to the Chinanteco Indians, a peaceable tribe among whom it was divided by President Juarez. When Diaz came into power he failed to make provision for protecting the Chinantecos against scheming Spaniards, so in a few years the Indians had drunk a few bottles of mescal and the Spaniards had gobbled up every foot of their land. The Valle Nacional Indians now secure their food from rented patches high up on the mountain sides which are unfit for tobacco cultivation.
Though the planters raise corn and beans, and sometimes bananas or other tropical fruits, tobacco is the only considerable product of the valley. The plantations are usually large, there being only about thirty in the entire district. Of this number twelve are owned by Balsa Hermanos (Brothers), who operate a large cigar factory in Veracruz and another in the city of Oaxaca.
After dinner we went for a stroll about town and for a bodyguard the presidente assigned us a policeman, Juan Hernandez. We proceeded to question the policeman.
"All the slaves are kept until they die—all," said Hernandez. "And when they are dead the bosses do not always take the trouble to bury them. They throw them in the swamps where the alligators eat them. On the plantation 'Hondura de Nanche' so many are given to the alligators that an expression has arisen among the slaves: 'Throw me to The Hungry!' There is a terrible fear among those slaves that they will be thrown to 'The Hungry' before they are dead and while they are yet conscious, as this has been done!"
Slaves who are worn out and good for nothing more, declared the policeman, and yet who are strong enough to cry out against being thrown to "The Hungry," are turned out on the road without a cent, and in their rags many of them crawl to the town to die. The Indians give them some food and on the edge of the town there is an old house in which the miserable creatures are permitted to pass their last hours. This place is known as "The House of Pity." We visited it with the policeman and found an old woman lying on her face on the bare floor. She did not move when we came in, nor when we spoke to each other and finally to her, and for some time we were not sure that she was alive. At last she groaned feebly. It can be imagined how we felt, but we could do nothing, so we tip-toed to the door and hurried away. "You will find this a healthy country," the municipal secretary told us a little later in the evening. "Don't you notice how fat we all are? The laborers of the plantations? Ah, yes, they die—die of malaria and consumption—but it is only because they are under-fed. Tortillas and beans—sour beans at that, usually, is all they get, and besides they are beaten too much. Yes, they die, but nobody else here ever has any sickness."
Notwithstanding the accounts of Juan Hernandez, the policeman, the secretary assured us that most of the dead slaves were buried. The burying is done in the town and it costs the bosses one and one-half pesos for each burial. By charity the town puts a little bamboo cross over each grave. We strolled out in the moonlight and took a look at the graveyard. And we gasped at the acres and acres of crosses! Yes, the planters bury their dead. One would guess by those crosses that Valle Nacional were not a village of one thousand souls, but a city of one hundred thousand!
On our way to our beds in the house of the Presidente we hesitated at the sound of a weak voice hailing us. A fit of heart-breaking coughing followed and then we saw a human skeleton squatting beside the path. He wanted a penny. We gave him several, then questioned him and learned that he was one who had come to die in "The House of Pity." It was cruel to make him talk, but we did it, and in his ghastly whispering voice he managed to piece out his story between paroxysms of coughing.
His name was Angelo Echavarria, he was twenty years old and a native of Tampico. Six months previously he had been offered wages on a farm at two pesos a day, and had accepted, but only to be sold as a slave to Andres M. Rodriguez, proprietor of the plantation "Santa Fe." At the end of three months he began to break down under the inhuman treatment he received and at four months a foreman named Augustin broke a sword over his back. When he regained consciousness after the beating he had coughed up a part of a lung. After that he was beaten more frequently because he was unable to work as well, and several times he fell in a faint in the field. At last he was set free, but when he asked for the wages that he thought were his, he was told that he was $1.50 in debt to the ranch! He came to the town and complained to the Presidente, but was given no satisfaction. Now too weak to start to walk home, he was coughing his life away and begging for subsistence at the same time. In all my life I have never seen another living creature so emaciated as Angelo Echavarria, yet only three days previously he had been working all day in the hot sun!
We visited the plantation "Santa Fe" the following day, as well as a half a dozen others. We found the system of housing, feeding, working and guarding the slaves alike on all.
The main dormitory at "Santa Fe" consisted of one windowless, dirt-floor room, built of upright poles set in the ground an inch apart and held firmly together by strands of barbed wire fencing. It was as impregnable as an American jail. The beds consisted of a single grass mat each laid crosswise on a wooden bench. There were four benches, two on each side, one above another, running lengthwise of the room. The beds were laid so close together that they touched. The dimensions of the room were 75 by 18 feet and in these cramped quarters 150 men, women and children slept every night. The Valle Nacional tobacco planters have not the decency of slave-holders of fifty years ago, for on not one of the plantations did I find a separate dormitory for the women.
On the "Santa Fe" ranch the mandador, or superintendent, sleeps in a room at one end of the slave dormitory and the cabos, or overseers, sleep in a room at the other end. The single door is padlocked, but a watchman paces all night up and down the passageway between the rows of shelves. Every half hour he strikes a clamorous gong. In answer to a question Senor Rodriguez assured me that the gong did not disturb the sleeping slaves, but even if it had that the rule was necessary to prevent the watchman from going to sleep and permitting a jail-break.
Observing the field gangs at close range, I was astonished to see so many children among the laborers. At least half were under twenty and at least one-fourth under fourteen.
"The boys are just as good in the planting as the men," remarked the Presidente, who escorted us about. "They last longer, too, and they cost only half as much. Yes, all the planters prefer boys to men."
During my ride through fields and along the roads that day I often wondered why some of those bloodless, toiling creatures did not cry out to us and say: "Help us! For God's sake help us! We are being murdered!" Then I remembered that all men who pass this way are like their own bosses, and in answer to a cry they could expect nothing better than a mocking laugh, and perhaps a blow besides.
Our second night in Valle Nacional we spent on the Presidente’s plantation. As we approached the place we lagged behind the Presidente to observe a gang of 150 men and boys planting tobacco on the adjoining farm, "El Mirador." There were half a dozen overseers among them and as we came near we saw them jumping here and there among the slaves, yelling, cursing and striking this way and that with their long, lithe canes. Whack! Whack! went the sticks on back, shoulders, legs and even heads. The slaves weren't being beaten. They were only being urged a little, possibly for our benefit.
We stopped, and the head foreman, a big black Spaniard, stepped over to the fence and greeted us.
"Do they ever fight back?" he repeated, at my question. "Not if they're wise. They can get all the fight they want from me. The men that fight me don't come to work next day. Yes, they need the stick. Better to kill a lazy man than to feed him. Run away? Sometimes the new ones try it, but we soon tame it out of them. And when we get 'em tamed we keep 'em here. There never was one of these dogs who got out of here and didn't go telling lies about us."
Should I live a thousand years I would never forget the faces of dull despair I saw everywhere; and I would never forget the first night I spent on a Valle Nacional slave farm, the farm of the Presidente. The place was well named, "La Sepultura," though its name was given by the Indians long before it became the sepulchre of Mexican slaves.
"La Sepultura" is one of the smallest farms in the valley. The dormitory is only 40 by 15 feet and it accommodates 70 men and women nightly. Inside there are no benches—nothing but the bare ground and a thin grass mat for each sleeper. In it we found an old woman lying sick and shivering alone. Later that night we saw it crammed full of the miserables shivering with the cold, for the wind was blowing a hurricane and the rain was coming down in torrents. In a few hours the temperature must have dropped forty degrees.
One-third of the laborers here were women, one of them a girl of twelve. That night the buildings rocked so fearfully that the horses were taken out of the barn. But, though a building had blown down a few weeks previously, the slaves were not taken out of their jail. Their jail was built just off the dining-room of the dwelling and that night my companion and I slept in the dining-room. I heard the jail door open and shut for a late worker to enter and then I heard the voice of the twelve-year-old girl pleading in terror: "Please don't lock the door tonight—only tonight! Please leave it so we can be saved if the house falls!" The answer that I heard was only a brutal laugh.
When I went to bed that night at 9:30 a gang of slaves was still working about the barn. When I awoke at four the slaves were receiving their beans and tortillas in the slave kitchen. When I went to bed two of the Presidente's kitchen drudges were hard at work. Through the chinks in the poles which divided the two rooms I watched them, for I could not sleep. At eleven o'clock by my watch one disappeared. It was 12:05 before the other was gone, but in less than four hours more I saw her again, working, working, working, working!
Yet perhaps she fared better than did the grinders of corn and the drawers of water, for when, with the son of the Presidente, I visited the slave kitchen at five and remarked on the exhausted faces of the women there, he informed me that their rising hour was two o'clock and that they never had time to rest during the day!
Oh, it was awful! This boy of sixteen, manager of the farm in his father's absence, told me with much gusto of how fiercely the women sometimes fought against the assaults of the men and how he had at times enjoyed peering through a crack and watching those tragic encounters of the night! All night we were disturbed—mostly by the hacking, tearing coughs that came to us through the chinks, sometimes by heart-breaking sobs.
De Lara and I did not speak about these things until the morning, when I remarked upon his haggard face.
"I heard the sobs and the coughs and the groans," said De Lara. "I heard the women cry, and I cried, too—three times I cried. I do not know how I can ever laugh and be happy again!"
While we waited for breakfast the Presidente told us many things about the slavery and showed us a number of knives and files which had been taken from the slaves at various times. Like penitentiary convicts, the slaves had somehow got possession of the tools in the hope of cutting a way out of their prison at night and escaping the sentries.
The Presidente told us frankly that the authorities of Mexico City, of Veracruz, of Oaxaca, of Pachuca and of Jalapa regularly engage in the slave traffic, usually in combination with one or more "labor agents." He especially named the mayor of a certain well known seaport, who was mentioned in the American newspapers as an honored guest of President Roosevelt in 1908 and a prominent visitor to the Republican convention at Chicago. This mayor, said our Presidente, regularly employed his city detective force as a dragnet for slaves. He arrested all sorts of people on all sorts of pretexts merely for the sake of the forty-five pesos apiece that they would bring from the tobacco planters.
Our conversation that morning was interrupted by a Spanish foreman who rode up and had a talk with the Presidente. They spoke in low tones, but we caught most of what they said. The foreman had killed a woman the previous day and had come to make his peace about it. After a consultation of ten minutes the Presidente shook the hand of his visitor and we heard him tell the murderer to go home and attend to his business and think no more about the matter.
It was Sunday and we spent the entire day in the company of Antonio Pla, probably the most remarkable human monster in Valle Nacional. Pla is general manager for Balsa Hermanos in Valle Nacional and as such he oversees the business of twelve large plantations. He resides on the ranch "Hondura de Nanche," the one of special alligator fame, where the term "Throw me to The Hungry" originated. Pla calls his slaves "Los Tigres" (the tigers) and he took the greatest of pleasure in showing us the "dens of the tigers," as well as in explaining his entire system of purchase, punishment and burial.
Pla estimated that the annual movement of slaves to Valle Nacional is 15,000 and he assured me that if the planters killed every last one of them the authorities would not interfere.
"Why should they?" he asked. "Don't we support them?"
Pla, like many of the other planters, raised tobacco in Cuba before he came to Valle Nacional, and he declared that on account of the slave system in the latter place the same quality of tobacco was raised in Valle Nacional for half the price that it cost to raise it in Cuba. It was not practical, said he, to keep the slaves more than seven or eight months, as they became "all dried out." He explained the various methods of whipping, the informal slugging in the field with a cane of bejuco wood, and the lining-up of the gangs in the morning and the administration of "a few stripes to the lazy ones as medicine for the day."
"But after awhile," declared Pla, "even the cane doesn't do any good. There comes a time when they just can't work any longer."
Pla told us that an agent of the government had three months before tried to sell him 500 Yaquis for twenty thousand pesos, but he had rejected the offer, as, though the Yaquis last like iron, they will persist in taking long chances in a break for liberty.
"I bought a bunch of Yaquis several years ago," he said, "but most of them got away after a few months. No, Yucatan is the only place for the Yaquis."
We found two Yaquis, however, on the farm, "Los Mangos." They said they had been there for two years and were the only ones left out of an original lot of two hundred. One had been out of commission for a few days, one of his feet being half gone—eaten off by insects.
"I expect I'll have to kill that tiger," said Pla, in the man's hearing. "He'll never be worth anything to me any more."
The second Yaqui we found in the field working with a gang. I stepped up to him and felt of his arms. They were still muscular. He was really a magnificent specimen and reminded me of the story of Ben Hur. As I inspected him he stood erect, staring straight ahead but trembling slightly in every limb. The mere attitude of that Yaqui was to me the most conclusive evidence of the beastliness of the system under which he was enslaved.
At "Los Mangos" a foreman let us inspect his long, lithe cane, the beating cane, the cane of bejuco wood. It bent like a rawhide buggy whip, but it would not break.
"The bejuco tree grows on the mountain side," explained the foreman. "See! The wood is like leather. With this cane I can beat twenty men to death and yet it will be good for twenty more!"
In the slave kitchen of the same ranch we found two girls of seventeen, both with refined and really beautiful faces, grinding corn. Though their boss, Pla, stood menacingly by, each dared to tell her story briefly. One, from Leon, State of Guanajuato, declared that the "labor agent" had promised her fifty pesos per month and a good home as cook in a small family, and when she discovered that all was not right it was too late; the rurales compelled her to come along. The other girl was from San Luis Potosi. She had been promised a good home and forty pesos a month for taking care of two small children!
Wherever we went we found the houses full of fine furniture made by the slaves.
"Yes," explained Antonio Pla, "some of the best artisans in the country come right here—in one way or another. We get carpenters and cabinet-makers and upholsterers and everything. Why, on my ranches I've had teachers and actresses and artists and one time I even had an ex-priest. I had one of the most beautiful actresses in the country one time, right here on 'Hondura de Nanche.' She was noted, too. How did she get here? Simple enough. A son of a millionaire in Mexico City wanted to marry her and, to get her out of the way, the millionaire paid the authorities a good price to kidnap her and give her to a labor agent. Yes, sir, that woman was a beauty!"
"And what became of her?" I asked.
"Oh." was the evasive reply. "That was two years ago!"
Truly, two years is a long time in Valle Nacional, longer than a life-time, usually. The story of the actress reminded me of a story told me by a newly married runaway Mexican couple in Los Angeles just before I started on my trip. The young husband was a member of the middle class of Mexico City and his wife was the daughter of a millionaire. Because the boy was considered to be "below" the girl, the girl's father went to extremes in his efforts to prevent the marriage.
"George went through many dangers for me," is the way the young bride told the story. "One time my father tried to shoot him and another time my father offered the authorities five thousand pesos to kidnap him and send him to Valle Nacional. But I warned George and he was able to save himself!"
Pla also told of eleven girls who had come to him in a single shipment from Oaxaca,
"They were at a public dance," said he. "Some men got into a fight and the police jailed everybody in the hall. Those girls didn't have anything to do with the trouble, but the jefe politico needed the money and so he sent them all here."
"Well," I asked, "what sort of women were they? Public women?"
Pla shot me a glance full of meaning.
"No, Senor!" he said, with contempt in his voice, "do you suppose that I need to have that kind of women sent in here to me?"
The close attendance of owners and superintendents as well as the ubiquity of overseers, prevented us from obtaining many long interviews with the slaves. One of the most notable of our slave talks occurred the day following our visit to the Balsa Hermanos farm. Returning from a long day's visit to numerous plantations, we hailed a ploughman working near the road on "Hondura de Nanche." The nearest overseer happened to be half way across the field and the slave, at our inquiry, willingly pointed out the slough of the alligators and confirmed the story of dying men being thrown to "The Hungry."
"I have been here for six years and I believe I hold the record for the valley," he told us. "Other strong men come and turn to skeletons in a single season, but it seems that I cannot die. They come and fall, and come and fall, yet I stay on and live. But you ought to have seen me when I came! I was a man then—a man! I had shoulders and arms—I was a giant then. But now—"
Tears gathered in the fellow's eyes and rolled down his cheeks, but he went on:
"I was a carpenter and a good one—six years ago. I lived with my brother and sister in Mexico City. My brother was a student—he was only in his teens—my sister tended the little house that I paid for out of my wages. We were not poor—no. We were happy. Then work in my trade fell slack and one evening I met a friend who told me of employment to be had in the State of Veracruz at three pesos a day—a long job. I jumped at the chance and we came together, came here—here! I told my brother and sister that I would send them money regularly, and when I learned that I could send them nothing and wrote to let them know, they would not let me send the letter! For months I kept that letter, watching, waiting, trying to get an opportunity to speak to the carrier as he rode along the highway. At last I saw him, but when I handed him the letter, he only laughed in my face and handed it back. Nobody is allowed to send a letter out of here.
"Escape?" went on the ploughman. "Yes, I tried it many times. Once, only eight months ago. I got as far as Tuztepec. I was writing a letter. I wanted to get word to my people, but they caught me before the letter was finished. They don't know where I am. They must think I am dead. My brother must have had to leave school. My—"
"Better stop," I said. "A cabo is coming!"
"No, not yet," he answered. "Quick! I will give you their address. Tell them that I never read the contract. Tell them that I never saw it until I came here. My brother's name is Juan ——"
"Look out!" I cried, but too late. "Whack!" The long cane struck the ploughman across the back. He winced, started to open his mouth again, but at a second whack he changed his mind and turned sullenly to his oxen.
The rains of our last two days in Valle Nacional made the trail to Tuztepec impassable, so we left our horses and traveled down river in a "balsa", a raft of logs on which was erected a tiny shelter house roofed with banana leaves. Two Indians, one at each end, poled and paddled the strange craft down the rushing stream, and from them we learned that the Indians themselves have had their day as slaves in Valle Nacional. The Spaniards tried to enslave them, but they fought to the death. They employed their tribal solidarity and fought in droves like wolves and in that way they regained and kept their freedom. Such a common understanding and such mass movements cannot, of course, be developed by the heterogeneous elements that today are brought together on the slave plantations.
At Tuztepec on our way we met Senor P——, politician, "labor agent," and relative of Felix Diaz, nephew of President Diaz and Chief of Police of Mexico City. Senor P——, who dressed like a prince, made himself agreeable and answered our questions freely because he hoped to secure the contract for furnishing slaves for my company.
"You can't help but make money in Valle Nacional," said he. "They all do. Why, after every harvest there's an exodus of planters to Mexico City, where some of them stay for months, spending their money in the most riotous living!"
Senor P—— was kind enough to tell us what became of the fifty pesos he received for each of his slaves. Five pesos, he said went to Rodolpho Pardo, jefe politico of Tuztepec, ten to Felix Diaz for every slave taken out of Mexico City, and ten to the mayor of the city or jefe politico of the district from whence came the other slaves.
"The fact that I am a brother-in-law of Felix Diaz," said Senor P——, "as well as a personal friend of the governors of the states of Oaxaca and Veracruz, and of the mayors of the cities of the same name, puts me in a position to supply your wants better than anyone else. I am prepared to furnish you any number of laborers up to forty thousand a year, men, women and children, and my price is fifty pesos each. Children workers last better than adults and I advise you to use them in preference to others. I can furnish you 1,000 children a month under fourteen years of age, and I am prepared to secure their legal adoption as sons and daughters of the company, so that they can be legally kept until they reach the age of twenty-two!"
"But how," I gasped, "is my company going to adopt 12,000 children a year as sons and daughters? Do you mean to tell me that the government would permit such a thing?" "Leave that to me," replied Senor P——, significantly. "I'm doing it every day. You don't pay your fifty pesos until you get the children and the adoption papers too!"