Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/293

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THE AMERICAN PARTNERS OF DIAZ
259

cause Americans are the only intelligent people in the world and because God made Mexicans a stupid people and intended that they should be governed by their superiors. One very good reason why Diaz delivered his country into the hands of Americans was that Americans had more money to pay for special privileges. And Americans had more money because, while all Mexicans were becoming impoverished by the war for the overthrow of the foreigner, Maximilian, thousands of Americans were making fortunes by means of grafting army contracts involved in our Civil War.

Let me present an instance or two of the way in which Americans are contributing to the extension of slavery.

Take the Yaqui atrocities, for example. Vice-president Corral, who was then in control of the government of the state of Sonora, stirred up a Yaqui war because he saw an opportunity to get the Yaqui lands and sell them at a good price to American capitalists. The Yaqui country is rich in both mining and agricultural possibilities. American capitalists bought the lands while the Yaquis were still on them, then stimulated the war of extermination and finally instigated the scheme to deport them into slavery in Yucatan.

But American capital did not stop even there. It followed the Yaqui women and children away from their homes. It saw families dismembered, women forced into wifehood with Chinamen, men beaten to death. It saw these things, encouraged them and covered them up from the eyes of the world because of its interest in the price of sisal hemp, because it feared that with the passing of slave labor the price of sisal hemp would rise. The American Cordage Trust, a ramification of Standard Oil, absorbs over half the henequen export of Yu-