getter, since the jefe is never willing unless the victim buys the jefe as well as the substitute. Usually it is not necessary to buy the substitute, but only the ‘‘jefe politico’’. In some districts it is said to be a regular practice to keep tab on the higher-paid class of wage-laborers and when they are paid after a long job, to drag them to jail and tell them that they have been drafted, then, a day or two later, to send word that $100, more or less, has been fixed as the price of their liberty. I was told of an instance in which a carpenter was drafted in this way five times in the space of three years. Four times he parted with his money, sums ranging from $50 to $100, but the fifth time he lost courage and permitted himself to be led away to the barracks.
The rurales are mounted police usually selected from the criminal classes, well equipped and comparatively well paid, whose energies have been turned to robbing and killing for the government. There are federal rurales and state rurales, the total of the two running somewhere between 7,000 and 9,000. They are divided among the various states in about an equal proportion to the population, but are utilized most in the rural districts. The rurales are the special rough riders of the jefe politicos and they are given almost unlimited powers to kill at their own discretion. Investigation of wanton killings by rurales working singly or in squads is almost never made and the victim must stand well indeed with the government before punishment is meted out to the murderer.
In Mexico it is a small town that has no soldiers or rurales and a smaller town that has no regular gendarmes. The City of Mexico has over 2,000, or twice as many as New York in comparison to its size, and the other municipalities are equipped in proportion. At
