and export them through the regular channels, while the agents of Carranza, when caught trying to export arms, were thrown into jail and their shipments confiscated.
At the end of 176 days the President placed an embargo also against Huerta, but the policy was still a discrimination against Carranza, since Huerta, holding the seaports, was able to procure arms from Europe.
Not until February 3, 1914, eleven months after his inauguration, did the President place Carranza on an equal footing with Huerta, by lifting the embargo entirely. The President's explanation of his reasons for lifting the embargo, issued on that date, amount to a confession that, for eleven months, while conducting a sham battle against Huerta, he had assisted Huerta against Carranza by "a departure from the accepted practices of neutrality."
From which it must be evident that the "blood-stained governments" pose was an after-thought.
In any event, that pose could not have been sincere, since the President proceeded to recognize blood-stained governments set up in other parts of the Western Hemisphere, to employ our armed forces to maintain a blood-stained government set up by a previous administration in Nicaragua, and himself set up bloodstained governments in Haiti and Santo Domingo.
The President did turn definitely against Huerta in the latter part of August. Why? Owing to secret diplomacy, it is impossible to state the full conditions demanded of Huerta. Subsequent events, added to current reports, justify the inference that what Wilson sought was, literally, to "maintain the dignity and authority of the United States," as he told Congress when he took Vera Cruz—particularly to IMPOSE THE AUTHORITY of the United States upon Mexico; to procure from Mexico acceptance of the principle of American intervention in Mexican affairs.
Subsequent events began to happen at Nogales, Sonora, at the end of November. Carranza was at Nogales. On August 27, Wilson had placed an embargo on arms against Huerta. But he had omitted to lift the embargo in favor of Carranza. Carranza was asking nothing of the Government of the United States except freedom to purchase arms. Carranza was anxious to dispose of the "blood-stained government" of Huerta, but Wilson was not in a hurry to allow him to do so. Wilson held the screws
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