Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/51

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THE EXTERMINATION OF THE YAQUIS
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ple that the government had decided to give it to foreigners. They confiscated $80,000 in a bank belonging to Chief Cajeme. Finally, they sent armed men to arrest Cajeme, and when the latter could not find him they set fire to his house and to those of his neighbors, and assaulted the women of the village, even Cajeme's wife not being respected. Finally, the victims were goaded into war.

Since that day twenty-five years ago the Mexican government has maintained an army almost perpetually in the field against the Yaquis, an army ranging in numbers from 2,000 to 6,000 men. Thousands of soldiers and tens of thousands of Yaquis have been killed in battle and many hundreds of the latter have been executed after being taken prisoners. After a few years Chief Cajeme was captured and publicly executed in the presence of a large body of his people who had been taken prisoner with him. Tetabiate, another Yaqui, was promptly elected to Cajeme's place, and the fight went on. Finally, in 1894, at one fell swoop, as it were, the ground was literally taken from under the feet of the rebels. By act of the federal government the best of their lands were taken from them and handed over to one man. General Lorenzo Torres, who is at this writing chief of the army in Sonora, then second in command.

The government is credited with having been guilty of the most horrible atrocities. Two examples are cited by Santa de Cabora, a Mexican writer, as follows:

"On May 17, 1892, General Otero, of the Mexican army, ordered the imprisonment of the Yaquis, men, women and children, in the town of Navajoa, and hung so many of these people that the supply of rope in the town was exhausted, it being necessary to use each rope five or six times." "A colonel in the army, Antonio Rincon, in July, of 1892, took two hundred Yaquis men. women and children, prisoners,