one reason being that there was "some doubt" whether his government "possessed the ability and the disposition to check the raids and depredations upon American property in the vicinity of the Rio Grande." In the first years of the Diaz régime the clashes continued frequent. Settlement was spreading into the southwest and the plunderable property was increasing in value, making the temptation to the lawless greater and the demand for redress more insistent. For several years conditions seemed to be growing steadily worse.[1]
The border was a "free for all" region in these years. It is impossible to make distinction between American and Mexican outrages. They were frequent on both sides of the line, and it was often difficult to tell whether the guilty were Mexicans or Americans. The population of Texas exaggerated Mexican faults to emphasize their claims for damages and to induce the government to place more troops on the border, from the provisioning of which the local population might prosper. That this was true was admitted by the American Secretary of State.[2] State and national control of the border later stiffened and wrongs committed against Mexicans north of the border decreased in number.
The Diaz administration, then striving to establish itself within the country and among the family of
- ↑ A gloomy review by Minister J. W. Foster of the condition of Americans in Mexico and of border relations covering a period of more than five years is found in Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, 1879, p. 755 et seq.
- ↑ House Document 13, 45th Congress, 1st Session, Foster to Evarts, July 24, 1877, in a Memorandum of the Mexican Minister of Foreign Affairs, p. 88.
