have been taken care of by the local police force, which was strong.
Nevertheless, the soldiers appeared, leaping upon the scene as if out of the ground. Volley after volley was discharged into the crowd at close range. There was no resistance whatsoever. The people were shot down in the streets with no regard for age or sex, many women and children being among the slain. They were pursued to their homes, dragged from their hiding places and shot to death. Some fled to the hills, where they were hunted for days and shot on sight. A company of rural guards which refused to fire on the crowd when the soldiers first arrived were exterminated on the spot.
There are no official figures of the number killed in the Rio Blanco massacre, and if there were any, of course they would be false. Estimates run from two hundred to eight hundred. My information for the t Rio Blanco strike was obtained from numerous widely different sources—from an officer of the company itself, from a friend of the governor who rode with the rurales as they chased the fleeing strikers through the hills, from a labor editor who escaped after being hotly pursued for days, from survivors of the strike, from others who had heard the story from eye witnesses.
"I don't know how many were killed," the man who rode with the rurales told me, "but on the first night after the soldiers came I saw two flat cars piled high with dead and mangled bodies, and there were a good many killed after the first night."
"Those flat cars," the same informant told me, "were hauled away by special train that night, hurried to Veracruz, where the bodies were dumped in the harbor as food for the sharks."
Strikers who were not punished by death were pun-
