the arch fiend. The jefe politico commands the local police and rurales, directs the acordada and frequently gives orders to the regular troops. While, because of government control of the press, comparatively few crimes of the jefes politicos become public, yet during my most recent visit to Mexico—during the winter and spring of 1909—two wholesale killings which were prompted by jefes politicos were widely reported in the newspapers of that country. One was that of Tehuitzingo, where sixteen citizens were executed without trial, and the other was that of Velardena, where, for holding a street parade in defiance of the jefe politico, several were shot down in the streets and a number variously estimated as from twelve to thirty-two were arrested, lined up and shot, and buried in trenches which they had been compelled to dig previously with their own hands.
A comment of El Pais, a conservative Catholic daily of the capital on the Tehuitzingo affair, published in April, was as follows:
"Terrible accounts have reached this capital as to what is taking place at Tehuitzingo, District of Acatlan, State of Puebla. It is insistently reported that sixteen citizens have been executed without trial and that many others will be condemned to twenty years' confinement in the fortress of San Juan de Ulua.
"What are the causes that have given rise to this barbarous persecution, which has dyed our soil anew with the people's blood?
"It is the fierce, infamous caciquismo which oppresses the people with a heavy yoke and which has deprived them of all the benefits of peace.
"We ask, in the name of law and of humanity that this hecatomb cease; we ask that the guilty parties be tried fairly and calmly according to the law. But among those guilty parties should be included those who provoked the disturbance, those who drove the people to frenzy by trampling their rights.