It is asserted that the payments to Pelaez began because of threats to destroy property by Pelaez, and the continuationof the payments is defended on the assumption that, otherwise, Pelaez would destroy property. But another object of the payments appears from these words:
"'King' Pelaez's troops are operating in the oil fields only, far from any railroad, for the reason that the government is attempting to confiscate their oil values."
That is to say, the oil men are employing a bandit army to defy the Mexican Government, as part of a scheme to prevent the application of Mexican laws to the Mexican oil industry.
Confirming this well known fact, Mr. LaGuardia, of New York, in a speech in the House of Representatives, July 10, 1919, said:
I call your attention to this small strip in red. . . . This is under the control of the Pelaez faction. . . . These forces protect the oil industries from being robbed by the Carranza faction. It is supported and paid for by the oil companies."
This armed defiance of the Mexican Government, to which American oil men make confession, is the result of a controversy with the Mexican Government over various purely internal questions, involving the imposition of taxes, the question of prior rights to the products of the sub-soil, and the question of the foreigner's privilege to appeal to his home government for intervention on behalf of what he considers to be his property rights. One of the assertions sent out officially by the National Association for the Protection of American Rights in Mexico and widely circulated in the press, reads as follows:
"No foreign corporation or individual can legally acquire or hold any mines, oil wells, land, or other real property in Mexico unless he renounces his citizenship."
This purports to be a textual translation of a clause in Article 27 of the Mexican Constitution. It is a typical example of interventionist falsehood. The Mexican Constitution does not require any foreigner to renounce his citizenship, as a condition to acquiring Mexican property. It requires foreigners only to agree "to be considered Mexicans in respect to such property, and accordingly not to invoke the protection of their governments in respect to the same."
We require the same thing of foreigners in this country, although it is not in the Constitution. The purpose of the clause
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