Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/312

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276
BARBAROUS MEXICO

ping he finds no trouble in securing the criminal assistance of American officials.

The most notable case of refugee kidnapping on record is that of Manuel Sarabia. The case is notable not because it is the only one of its kind, but because it is the one which was most successfully exposed.

Manuel Sarabia was second speaker of the Liberal junta. He was hounded about from place to place by Diaz detectives, finally bringing up in Douglas, Arizona, where he went to work quietly at his trade of printer

On June 30, 1907, Antonio Maza, the Mexican consul at Douglas, saw Sarabia on the street and recognized him. That evening U. S. Ranger Sam Hayhurst held up Sarabia at the point of a pistol and, without a warrant, put him in the city jail. At eleven o'clock that night Sarabia's door swung open, he was led outside, forced into an automobile, carried across the international boundary line and there turned over to Colonel Kosterlitzsky, an officer of Mexican rurales. The rurales tied Sarabia on the back of a mule, and telling him that he was to be shot on the road, made a hurried trip with him through the mountains, finally bringing up, after five days, at the penitentiary at Hermosillo, Sonora.

What saved Sarabia? Just one thing. As he was forced into the automobile he cried out his name and shouted that he was being kidnapped. The ruffians guarding him choked him into silence and then gagged him, but some one had heard and the story spread.

Even then Consul Maza had the audacity to try to hush up the matter and carry his plot to a successful conclusion. By some means he succeeded in muzzling the string of Arizona newspapers run by George H. Kelly, as Kelly afterwards admitted in court. But in Douglas at that time there was a newspaper man whom