catan. The Standard Oil press declares there is no slavery in Mexico. Governor Fred N. Warner, of Michigan, publicly denied my expose of slavery in Yucatan. Governor Warner is interested in contracts involving the purchase annually of half a million dollars worth of sisal hemp from the slave kings of Yucatan.
Also, Americans work the slaves—buy them, drive them, lock them up at night, beat them, kill them, exactly as do other employers of labor in Mexico. And they admit that they do these things. In my possession are scores of admissions by American planters that they employ labor which is essentially slave labor. All over the tropical section of Mexico, on the plantations of rubber, sugar-cane, tropical fruits—everywhere—you will find Americans buying, beating, imprisoning, killing slaves.
Let me quote you just one interview I had with a well known and popular American of Diaz's metropolis, a man who for five years ran a large plantation near Santa Lucrecia
"When we needed a lot of enganchados," he told me, "all we had to do was to wire to one of the numerous enganchadores in Mexico, saying: 'We want so many men and so many women on such and such a day.' Sometimes we'd call for three or four hundred, but the enganchadores would never fail to deliver the full number on the dot. We paid fifty pesos apiece for them, rejecting those that didn't look good to us, and that was all there was to it. We always kept them as long as they lasted.
"It's healthier down there than it is right here in the city of Mexico," he told me. "If you have the means to take care of yourself you can keep as well there as you can anywhere on earth."
