Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/263

Here is an ordinary news item clipped from the Mexican Herald of May 30, 1909:

"Angel Contreras, an enganchado, belonging to a good family, is reported to have been brutally killed by being beaten to death with staves at the nearby San Francisco sugar mills in the El Naranjal municipality. Local newspapers state that other similar crimes have been committed at that place."

This is the first information I have had that men are beaten to death in the sugar mills of Mexico.

I present a news item from the Mexican Herald which describes better than I did in my fourth chapter one of the methods pursued by labor snarers to get their fish into the net. The newspaper prints the story as if the occurrence were unusual; I reprint it in full because it is typical. The only difference is that in this particular case the victim was rescued and the labor agent was jailed for a day or two only because it chanced that the victim had been an employe of the national Department of Foreign Relations. Had the authorities wished to stop this sort of man-stealing, as the Herald would have us believe, why did they not arrest the keepers of the other "casas de enganchadores" which they found, and liberate the prisoners? But here is the item, headlines and all:

"BOY OF 16 TRAPPED HERE.

"ALAMEDA SCENE OF BOLD KIDNAPPING BY SPANIARD.

"TO GO TO OAXAQUENA.

"CONTRACTORS PLANNED TO SEND BOY TO AMERICAN PLANTATION.

"When Felipe Hernandez, agent of a company of labor contractors, commonly referred to in Mexico as 'enganchadores,'