more or less into the Mexican papers. I remember that during my first visit to Mexico, in the fall of 1908, the papers reported an epidemic of typhus. For the first three days the number of new cases were daily recorded, but after that the news was suppressed. The condition threatened to become too great a scandal, for on the third day there were 176 new cases!
According to an old prison director whom I interviewed, at least twenty per cent of the prisoners at Belem contract tuberculosis. This prison director spent many years in the prison at Puebla. There, he says, seventy-five per cent of the men who go into the place come out, if they ever come out, with tuberculosis.
Torture such as was employed in the Middle Ages is used in Belem to secure confessions. When a man is taken to the police station, if he is suspected of a felony he is strung up by the thumbs until he tells. Another method used is that of refusing the prisoner drink. He is given food but no water until he chokes. Ofter prisoners declare before the judge that they have been tortured into confession, but no investigation is made. There are—inevitably—records of innocent men who have confessed to murder in order to escape the torture of the thumbs or of the thirst. While I was in Mexico two Americans suspected of robbery were reported in the newspapers as having been arrested, their wrists strapped to the bars of their cells, and their finger nails jerked out with steel pincers. This incident was reported to our State Department, but no action was taken.
San Juan de Ulua is an old military fortress situated in the harbor of Veracruz—a fortress which has been turned into a prison. Officially San Juan de Ulua is known as a military prison, but in fact it is a political
