Mexico on the verge, by E. J. Dillon...

Front matter

BY

E. J. DILLON

AutTior of " The Eclipse of Russia," " Ourselves and Qermany," "Busaian Characteristics," etc.

Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

I INTRODUCTORY II

II Mexico's transformation 14

CHAPTER I Introductory

The following pages offer a brief presentment of the main factors of the Mexican situation which is now entering upon a critical stage. The subject is tabooed by the average student of contemporary politics on the ground that it is purely regional, devoid of interest and without noteworthy bearings on the principal currents of the world's history. As a matter of demonstrable fact, it is the reverse of all that. Mexico to-day is the subject of an experiment which, whatever the upshot, bids fair to link it for all time with one of the most fateful and far-ranging changes in the basic relations of political communities with one another. In sooth it is no exaggeration to say that the first deciding move in the work of transfiguring those relations and setting the State-systems of the world upon wholly new foundations is now being made in that Republic. And this essay is scarcely noticed by statesmen or politicians while its trend is not realised even by the races and peoples to the course of whose life-history it is about to impart a new and chartless direction. Thus the tide of cosmic innovations which some observers are anxiously watching in Eastern Europe is in reality rolling away from that quarter of the globe to the shores of the Mexican Gulf and the southern banks of the Rio Grande where new precedents are being forged and strange doctrines promulgated which the near future may see eagerly adopted in the older Continents with results which it would be idle to forecast. It is the little beginnings that call for the closest attention but unhappily the statesmen who could and

should scrutinise those which are certain to lead to the most momentous consummations are at present absorbed by futile wrangling and barren enterprises.

In attempting to determine the forces now at work, to measure their intensity and foreshadow some of their probable effects, the writer strove to purge his mind of bias and his findings of blame and praise. The latter aim was all the more easy of attainment in that the law of cause and effect takes no account of morality and that the principal politicians, the results of whose follies and failings are now being visited upon the ill-starred Mexican people, have passed beyond the reach of censure, bequeathing to others, as they departed, the fair inheritance with the heavy curse attached. For the course of Mexican history, every page of which is framed with a black mourning border, bears a curious likeness to that of ancient Creek tragedy wherein grim requital fastens upon the innocent with the deadly grip of cruel fate.

The following analysis of the national and international difficulties which Mexico in the person of General Obregon has now to tackle will be found to differ from the views current in the United States which stand for the real beliefs of some and for the ardent wishes of others. Whether this non-conformity of the writer is a defect or a merit, coming events will show. Despite strenuous efforts he cannot claim to be absolutely impartial — no historian has ever reached this ideal. But at least he is sincere and disinterested. No sensible person imagines that all the evils which a decade of lawless orgies has inflicted on the Mexican people or all the vices engrafted on certain sections of it can be dislodged in a twinkling. There are some indeed which cannot be displaced by ordinary methods at all. Some devils, we are told, it is impossible to exorcise even by prayer and holy water. The circumstance should also be borne in mind that in public affairs there is one kind of slowness which ripens and another which rots, and that the latter was a characteristic of the Carranza regime while the former marks the methods of Obregon,

Foreigners who possess material interests in Mexico generally wear blinkers, keep only their particular goal in sight, believe in their own methods to the exclusion of others and are

INTRODUCTORY 13

impatient of contradiction. If some of the remedies which they confidently propose are specifics at all, it is often only against imaginary diseases, or artificially implanted vices. Such readers may well take exception to much in these pages and indeed to any study of the subject emanating from a detached onlooker, and if they would read an expose of the matter entirely to their liking they must write or dictate it themselves, as not a few of them are wont to do. Among them are many who, in their haste to pass judgment on the general problem which they confound with their own particular Interest in it, take no pains to understand its deciding elements, while the credulous and easy-going are misled by the wild stories deliberately circulated not only in the United States but also among the foreign residents of Mexico.

"Is It a fact," several distinguished Americans asked me in Washington last April, "that Villa Insists on being represented in Obregon's cabinet by one of his partisans, and what effect will that have on Mexico's foreign policy?" I answered — "It Is just as likely as that Eugene Debs Is about to pitchfork one of his comrades Into the Harding administration." "Yes, but here is the American newspaper that makes the statement. What do you say to that?" "Only that paper endureth all things which publishers or capitalists pay to have printed on it." My interlocutors frowned and fell silent.

CHAPTER II Mexico's Transformation

The Turks, of all races on the globe, have a proverb which says that fire and faggots, bloodshed and banditry, are sorryre formers. And what to English-speaking peoples may seem stranger still than the nationality of that saying is that its truth has at last been brought home to Mexico, to that restless republic which for years has been, seemingly, endeavouring to heat her house with sparks. And she has already begun to profit by it. A new spirit is springing up everywhere and new men are embodying it, a spirit of justice on the part of the country's leaders and an incipient respect for law and order among the rank and file, and the outside world takes no note of the change.

The bulk of the nation — the people who paid and still are paying the heavy cost of all the revolutions, rebellions and risings — needed no arguments to convince them. They, indeed, had seen and suffered enough to convert them to pacificism long ago, had they stood in need of conversion. The obstacles in the way of law and order were never of their making. The main difficulty, which until quite recently seemed insuperable, was to inoculate the leaders of the people with that salutary doctrine of peaceful evolution and to render them immune against the bait offered by interested foreign mischief-makers. And of effecting this even optimists despaired. For, whenever some semblance of a Government emerged from the reek and gore of civil war, there always remained a nucleus of agitators who, egged on by outsiders, continued the subversive work and played the part of a Bickford string, connecting makc-lx?licve ideals with bombism and bloodshed. Ideals? They knew not what they are. The English Revolution was mainly religious. The French Revolution was largely social. Most of the Mexican "revolutions" were neither, and as a

MEXICO'S TRANSFORMATION 15

consequence they often 'degenerated into a sequence of highway robberies. The last change of regime was a noteworthy exception. For it was the work of a few upright, selfless men who voiced and executed the will of the inarticulate people and satisfactorily answered the question so often put by foreigners: "If the Mexicans disapprove their Government, why do they not overturn it and set up a better one?" This has now been effected by a truly progressive group of democratic leaders whose watchword is law, justice, equal opportunity for all, and whose moving spirit is General Obregon.

Anarchy and violence are apparently now at last about to pass into the history of an epoch that is no more and are to be followed by a period of strenuous building up, of moral, intellectual and economic development, of friendly intercourse with foreign peoples whose co-operation is openly recognised as an indispensable condition of success. For the governing body is at last of one mind with the bulk of the people and is determined to turn the sword into a ploughshare and the battlefields into pastures and corn-growing lands.

While war is still destroying the achievements of civilised man in Europe, Asia and Africa, it looks then as though Mexico had really inaugurated an era of internal reconstruction — that Mexico of which it was recently and truly said that its normal condition was internal strife and anarchy. Even the casual observer can entertain no doubt that a vast change has recently come over the people and — what is more to the point — over those who now shape its destinies. To determine in advance the final outcome of this change, especially in view of the system of obstruction with which it has to cope abroad, is a task for a prophet. The utmost that a conscientious chronicler can undertake is to describe and characterise its principal signs and tokens. And such a one will have no hesitation in qualifying these as eminently favorable.

My opportunities of observation have been exceptionally great. I have journeyed with General Obregon over thousands of miles of the Republic, considerable portions of which were already known to me under the Carranzist regime, when soldiers had to escort the trains ; when we had to spend the night at Saltillo or San Luis Potosi lest brigands should derail or blow up the carriages and kill, rob, or hold to ransom the passengers.

In the month of March, 1920, the late President Carranza, in the course of an interesting conversation I had with him, assured me that he could not return the railways to their owners because no private company could run the trains in the face of such constant perils. All trains had to be accompanied by escorts of soldiers supplied by the State. But in lieu of rooting out the pests which thus preyed upon the people, he was preparing to have a line of blockhouses constructed along the principal railway routes with a view to reducing the number of outrages and rendering travel less insecure. That reminded me of the method applied by a Russian Commune to combat the cholera; they purchased five hundred coffins! The idea of defeating Villa, for example, never seems to have entered his head as a plan to be speedily realised. Neither had he any grounded hopes of quelling General Pelaez's rebellion in the South where the proprietors of the oil fields were compelled to pay tribute for their protection to the leader of the insurgents. And when I, an unarmed foreigner, desired to cross the Sierra from Oaxaca to Salina Cruz, it was to the rebel General Mexueira that I had to apply for a safe-conduct. But although I had absolute confidence in that General's good faith, I had none at all in the value of his safe-conduct outside his own district. For I was warned that there was a bandit zone between his troops and those of the Federal Government through which I must pass and where the highwaymen not only took the property of the travellers but completed the work by taking their lives as well. A journey of six or seven days across the mountains in those conditions was not particularly attractive. And as I could not get any one to accompany me I had to give up the plan and alter my route.

Whithersoever I journeyed. I found the people ground down by crushing exactions, terrorised by rebels, bandits. Federal soldiers and in perpetual dread of what the morrow might bring. In the State of Michoacan and elsewhere I visited

MEXICO'S TRANSFORMATION 17

manor houses on large estates — haciendas is the Spanish name — which a few years before had been luxuriously furnished, but having been gutted by a succession of bandits, were now in an advanced state of decay. They had no baths, hardly any furniture and that of the most primitive kind. The walls in some of the rooms were riddled with bullet holes, the roofs open to the rain. And the proprietors told me that they were afraid to spend a peso in repairing their homes lest they should be wrecked again. Some of these great landed proprietors, beggared and desperate, were preparing to go into voluntary exile in order to escape worse misfortunes than those which had already overtaken them. And since then they have emigrated to England, Spain or the United States.

Thus a dense cloud of depression overhung the country and paralysed the people. Enterprise was throttled. No capitalist except the oil companies would invest money or labour in any undertaking, however promising, because he could never be sure that the fruits of his labour would be his to enjoy. Indeed, the experience of the recent past had taught him to feel that he was working for others — for those who neither toil nor reap but merely harvest in what they have failed to destroy. And not only the products of the soil, but the land itself was occasionally taken from its lawful owners and given to favourites of the Supreme Chief. I saw several houses, which, together with orchards and fields, had been disposed of in this way, and I was told that the man to whom they had been presented, fearing lest they should be restored by some subsequent government with a conscience, had made hot haste to sell them. While I was in the State of Jalisco an acquaintance — a European — told me that he had lost his house and land in this way and his appeal to the Supreme Court had only elicited a confirmation of the arbitrary decree. He added, however — and this is the point of the story — ^that a proposal had recently been made to him to spend three thousand pesos in bribing a certain individual who undertook to have the irrevocable judgment of the Supreme Court reversed. Thus justice, the basis of all human society — ^was turned into its opposite by the very men who were justifying their revolution and their tenure of power by the necessity of establishing it on a solid foundation.

A severe jiulpiient has been passed upon the Carranza regime by the Mexican press of to-day. They describe the late President as a self-centred dictator who violated the laws, oppressed the people and was responsible to no one. Indeed, "there were no responsible persons anywhere," writes one of the i)rcss organs of the capital. "A few of the independent ncwsi)apcrs did, it is true, call loudly for a return to morality and intet;rity in puljlic departments and demand that the chiefs of the bureaucratic gang be called to account for their misdeeds. But their cries were in vain. Nobody was answerable for anything. . . . From the Minister to the usher each one nudged the other and gave a look of mutual understanding at his neighbour, casting a side glance at Don Venustiano the while, as much as to say: 'The Chief has to answer for us.' And the Chief . . . never deemed himself bound to offer explanations to any one of the good or bad use — and it was almost invariably bad, — of his versatile powers. . . . Believing himself, in virtue of the Constitution of Guadalupe, to be exempt even from the last judgment he was content to contract his nostrils. . . . Mexico's peril lies in the camarillas, in the parasites, in the abject and degenerate types who eschew fair play in the strenuous struggle for life and support themselves by selling their flattery."^ And one must add that it was precisely such types as these that were courted, "atmosphered" and bril)ed by foreign interests for their own purposes.

Such was Mexico's condition down to April, 1920, and Carranza expected it to last. To my question whether he discerned any clouds on the political horizon, he gave answer: "None." Then added after a brief pause: "Possibly a few tiny cloudlets in the guise of local riots after the elections. But nothing more serious. The population is contented." That was the President's mature judgment in the latter half of March. Nor did he modify it until he set out with a cargo of gold and a multitude of parasites on his journey to Vera Cruz which led him to the end of his earthly career. As for

MEXICO'S TRANSFORMATION 19

his tragic death, everything possible was done by the leaders of the revolution, and in particular by General Obregon, to save his life. But in vain. A plain-speaking, straightforward Mexican whom I met in Sonora thus explained the sad incident epigrammatically : "Carranza had with him a great quantity of gold and was surrounded by a gang of robbers. Is it a wonder that he was killed?"

Since May, 1920, a complete transformation has been undergone by the country, and it is interesting to note the people's mental reactions with the purer and exhilarating moral atmosphere created by the new regime. I had observed the beneficent change everywhere among all classes and in all walks of life. I accompanied General Obregon on his various journeys from Mexico City to Guadalajara, Colima, Manzanillo, Mazatlan, Culiacan, Guaymas, Hermosillo, Nogales (Sonora) ; then on his electoral campaign to Puebla, Tlascala, Atlizco, Tehuacan, Oaxaca, Orizaba, down through the States of Chiapas, Tabasco and Yucatan, and back through Vera Cruz to the capital of the Republic, Our trains were not escorted by soldiers, :we generally travelled in second-class carriages,^r— mingled with the people, listened to what they had to say, observed their demeanour towards the new authorities, and learned their grievances and aspirations. The reflections suggested by what we saw and heard were not unlike those which Arthur Young received during his travels in pre-revolutionary France.

Already the Government is assiduously repairing the damage caused by its predecessors and their enemies. The railways are being returned or about to be returned to their owners. Rebellions have ceased. Even Villa, who for years was the ineradicable plague of the country has repented and found salvation, and he and his partisans have become ardent tillers of the soil. The Government is dealing magnanimously with all its enemies. Gambling hells have been closed peremptorily and without a day's grace, wherever the writ of the

2 There are only first and second-class carriages in Mexico. We occupied carriages filled with workmen and peasants. We ate and slept when and where we could. On one occasion I induced the head of a railwaycompany to offer a special carriage to General Obregon, but the privilege was gratefully declined.

v/

Federal Government runs. The liquor laws are being rigorously enforced. The autonomy of the individual States — despite the undesirable results which it occasionally produces — is being respected by the central Government. The army has been materially reduced. The law everywhere is being left to take its course. Travelling is once more perfectly safe, and it looks as though in truth a new era had already begun. In a word, this is the first of Mexico's recent revolutions after which, to use one of Obregon's winged words, it is not necessary to liberate the nation from its liberators.

I

CHAPTER III Mexico in Carranza's Days

The task which confronted Obregon and his fellow-workers as soon as they took over the reins of Government was truly formidable. Even a past master in statecraft might well shrink from undertaking it when surveying the situation, taking stock of the available instruments and drawing up apian of action. To my thinking the two easiest problems of all, which might be settled speedily and satisfactorily with a reasonable measure of good will and readiness to give and take on both sides — foreign relations and finances — bid fair to become the most arduous, because complicated by a number of extrinsic issues. Foreign relations really mean intercourse with the United States Government, and that connotes compliance with the principal demands of the American oil companies.

As for the task of internal reconstruction, it is literally deterrent in virtue of its magnitude. On the part of the principal reformer it calls for a resourceful brain, an iron will and a considerable number of years in which to carry out a settled policy. And even these conditions are hardly sufficient. The man of destiny who has embarked on the venture requires to be seconded by a staff of honest, eager lieutenants who understand and sympathise with his aims and can adjust means to ends. And they are not easy to find. Hitherto in Mexico the best intentions of a leader were baffled and his programme altered by the exaggerated zeal, ignorance or personal ambition of his followers. An instructive example is afforded by the pristine agrarian plan drafted by Emilio Zapata, the pedantic construction put upon it by his adviser Palafox, and the utter fiasco in which it ended. The bulk of the Mexican people are relatively easy to govern. They are peaceful, patient, forbearing, industrious, moral and on the whole better than many more fortunate communities scattered over the globe. They possess a normal number of gifted individuals, and if they enjoyed the benefits of a stable, honest administration and efficient educational establishments, their country would undoubtedly be among the most prosperous on the planet.

But for the moment they lack these requisites and much of what thev imply. And one of the consequences is the extreme difficulty of finding a capable, honest and well trained set of men to form the rank and file of the administration. As General Obregon often remarked to me: "To make a code of good laws is child's play as compared with the selection of men who will administer them impartially and in the right spirit. It is of infinitely greater moment to have high-minded officials to apply the laws than to have legislators well versed in the intricacies of Roman jurisprudence to draft them." No matter how clear visioned the Chief of a reforming Government may be, he is powerless to help his people without efficient instruments. If the instruments break in his hands, he is no better off than a tyro. And that, in my opinion, is the standing danger in Mexico where communications are difficult and the representatives of the local Governments necessarily enjoy the full measure of discretion connoted by the term "State sovereignty." Hence, unless the authorities of the individual States are actuated by the same spirit as the President, they may baffle, instead of furthering his most beneficent schemes of reform. And that has already come to pass. As the Bulgarian proverb picturesquely puts it: "The lesser saints are the ruin of God."

No one who really knows the President will hesitate to testify that he is the one man in the country capable of coping with the task of reorganisation. And if by the machinations of outsiders he should be kept from solving the many-sided problem, none of his fellow countrymen is likely to succeed in working it out to a satisfactory issue. That is why so many are eager to thwart him and bring about intervention. A faint and far away notion of the situation of the country in the beginning of the year 1920, and of the difference wrought in it since then, first by the Provisional Government of Sefior de la Huerta, and especially by General Obregon, may be gathered

MEXICO IN CARRANZA'S DAYS 23

from the impressions which I received during my travels in Mexico in January, February, March and May, 1920, as compared with those which have been borne in upon me since then.

It is no easy matter at the best of times to gauge aright the internal conditions of any foreign country with a view to forecasting its future and ascertaining the bearings of those conditions on its international relations. And when the country under examination was the Mexico of Carranza, one found oneself attempting to decipher the hieroglyphics of national and international politics. For the Republic in his days possessed a vast variety of aspects any one of which might fascinate the observer's gaze to the exclusion or partial effacement of the others, warp his judgment and render his conclusions worthless. For the administration of that Dictator left nothing undone to take foreign visitors in hand and prepare the impressions which he desired to convey. And many more or less independent Americans from the United States, to say nothing of those who had axes to grind, allowed themselves to be hypnotised or used as semi-conscious agents of his propaganda.

It was quite possible, under that ruler, for a foreigner, especially if he were ignorant of the history, language and psychology of the Mexican people, to pay a flying visit to their fascinating country and even to reside there for a short while and return with a picture of its present condition and future outlook as different from the reality as were the distorted shadows of Plato's imaginary men on the cave-wall from the human beings hidden from the eyes of the spectators. A tourist might, for example, start from Vera Cruz, travel to Mexico City, spend a few weeks in that bright capital, visit Puebla and Guadalajara and return via Queretaro and Laredo without suspecting that there was anything organically wrong with the greatest Latin-American Republic. The trains which started at the scheduled hours might have arrived on time at their destination. No abnormal sights or sounds would have offended the eyes or grated on the ears of the stranger, seeing that the authorities invariably adopted special precautions for keeping them away. The theatres, churches, law-courts and cinemas were as usual open and frequented. The natives, too, whom the visitor met, could with truth have assured him that the conditions of existence were much better than they had been two years before, and some might give expression to their hope that they would gradually become normal again. And the serene optimism of the authorities could hardly fail to impress him with the belief that they were confronted with no prol)lcms more fateful than those which face every normally • growling and well governed State.

And yet despite the sagacity of such an observer, the unbiased character of his testimony and the correctness of the facts which he alleged in support of his conclusions, the general picture he painted would be wholly false and misleading. What such a flying visitor beheld was, so to say, the front room that had been swept, garnished and embellished, not the living apartments which stamp the dwelling with its distinctive characteristics. But there were then two Mexicos, one on the surface — smooth, polished, lustrous like a crust of ice and capable for a time of bearing the weight of a frail governmental fabric; and the other a river underneath — dark, abysmal, sweeping ceaselessly onward and rapidly eroding the layer of ice above. That the passing onlooker should take no thought of the rolling stream underneath Avas but natural. Surprising w-as the circumstance that the architects of the governmental fabric should have forgotten its existence and neglected to take its erosive action into account. They lived and breathed and worked in an atmosphere of factitious contentment and serenity which was calculated to impart to the visitor a false sense of the stability of things. Me, too, it impressed at first but without convincing. In some ways those blithe administrators resembled the self-indulgent Florentines who were enjoying a fleeting period of wild dissolute gaiety while the plague was stalking through their streets, withering human life and turning the capital into a charnel house. But the Florentines were at least conscious, if heedless, of the danger that compas.sed them. Not so the Carranzist roughhewers of Mexico's destinies. These men perceived as little,

MEXICO IN CARRANZA'S DAYS 25

suspected as little and were as self-complacent as the revellers in the palace of Babylon's last king, until the fiery finger burned the words of judgment and death into the wall of the autocratic banqueting chamber.

Now this unrealised fact that there were two Mexicos under Carranza — one of them phantasmal and the other practically inaccessible to the average outsider — is accountable for the pathetic optimism of many more or less truth-worshipping visitors to that enchanting land of unmeasured possibilities and amazing contrasts, and also for the distrust with which the new and beneficent changes of to-day are received by the public. And yet had he but swerved a little from the railway lines and ventured into the interior, or undertaken a journey outside the protected zones, kept an open eye and an unbiased mind, he would have awakened to the startling fact that the two aspects of the country were as unlike each other as the masks of comedy and tragedy. Every now and again the grim reality would be brought home to those who had eyes to see and ears to hear by misdeeds that left an indelible impress on the mind of the beholder.

During the first of my many visits to the Republic, I had several opportunities of contrasting the phenomena of the two Mexicos. I remember the case of an Englishman who had to take a railway journey of some eight or ten hours from the capital and then to pursue his way as best he could across country in the dark to examine a mine. His train started punctually, he arrived on time, and leaving the railroad pushed on at night accompanied by another man and after a lonely journey of some hours on horseback reached his destination. Having accomplished his work on the following day he forthwith returned and arrived in the capital with nothing unpleasant or noteworthy to report. He might have Imagined himself to be In his native land, so punctual were the trains and so safe life and property. In a word, everything appeared to be as satisfactory as in the much lauded era of Porfirio Diaz, But the very day after the Englishman's return the train on that same line was dynamited and some of the passengers killed and wounded. He was just lucky. That was all.