that without the partnership of the government the whole system of slavery would be an impossibility.
Slavery similar to that of Yucatan and Valle Nacional is to be found in nearly every state of Mexico, but especially in the coast states south of the great plateau. The labor on the henequen plantations of Campeche, in the lumber and fruit industries of Chiapas and Tabasco, on the rubber, coffee, sugar-cane, tobacco and fruit plantations of Veracruz, Oaxaca and Morelos, is all done by slaves. In at least ten of the thirty-two states and territories of Mexico the proportion of labor is overwhelmingly of slaves.
While the minor conditions vary somewhat in different places, the general system is everywhere the same—service against the will of the laborer, no pay, semi-starvation, and the whip. Into this arrangement of things are impressed not only the natives of the various slave states, but others—100,000 others every year, to speak in round numbers—who, either enticed by the false promises of labor agents, kidnapped by labor agents or shipped by political authorities in partnership with labor agents, leave their homes in other parts of the country to journey to their death in the hot lands.
Debt and contract slavery is the prevailing system of production all over the south of Mexico. Probably three-quarters of a million souls may properly be classed as human chattels. In all the rest of Mexico a system of peonage, differing from slavery principally in degree, and similar in many respects to the serfdom of Europe in the Middle Ages, prevails in the rural districts. Under this system the laborer is compelled to give service to the farmer, or hacendado, to accept what he wishes to pay, and even to receive such beatings as he cares to deliver. Debt, real or imaginary, is the nexus that binds
