CZAR OF MEXICO.

 Glorifying a Murderer.

BY H. E. HOLLAND

Sydney Labor Council has done some queer things in its day. . . . But, while the Council won't hear working-class lecturers on working-class subjects, it joyfully opens its doors to lecturers from the Master Class. One such is Professor David, and recently he delivered a lecture on "Mexico" to the Council delegates. A daily paper reports that Professor David paid a high tribute to the ability of President Diaz. "He said that during his 30 years' rule the President had lifted Mexico from an ordinary turbulent Central American Republic to a high position amongst the world's nations. His rule had been of iron, but the progress the country had made under it had been so remarkable, that throughout there had been no opposition, and that to-day President Diaz swayed the people just as he wished. As an instance of his ability to deal in novel but effective ways with difficult situations, the lecturer mentioned that some few years ago a particular section of the Mexicans were renowned as the most expert horse thieves in the world. They easily evaded capture, and it seemed that nothing could check the impunity with which they appropriated other people's stock. But the President had them appointed policemen, with the result that they developed into the Republic's most vigilant officers, being, if anything, a trifle too severe on the horse thief."
 Now, the hands of Porfirio Diaz are the blood-red hands of the murderer. He is corruptionist as well. On the last Sunday in June he "made himself president of Mexico for the eighth time," as London Justice puts it. "The election, of course, was a farce. In order to ensure victory for himself he had the opposition candidate, and everyone else of a menacing character, carefully stowed away in prison. Ready to take advantage of any excuse for shedding blood, he had troops held in readiness wherever there was any likelihood of the result of the election being disagreed with. In many ways Diaz is a remarkable man. Truly a man of blood and iron. He is now 80 years old, and has been master of Mexico for very many years. His rule has been an infamous one. All the horrors charged to the Russian Czardom could also be laid to the charge of this Czar of Mexico. Zayas, the brilliant Mexican cartoonist, in one of his clever drawings, pictures Diaz grasping in his hand a blood stained sabre, surrounded by vultures, sitting on a heap of skulls. That pretty well epitomises his rule. Anyone desiring reforms, anyone daring to differ even in the mildest manner, has either been assassinated, hounded out of the country, or condemned to a living death in the horrible prison of San Juan de Ulua or the fever-stricken hell of Belen. Strikes have been suppressed by wholesale massacres and hangings — like that of Cananea — editors of opposition papers have been secretly murdered ; politicians have been forced to rot in prison tombs, like poor Juan Sarabia, who is now dying of consumption in the fortress of San Juan de Ulua, all in order that Diaz and the Yankee plutocrats— whose pliant tool he is — may retain their hands on the purse-strings and resources of that unfortunate country. The stories of Magnon, Villarreal and Rivera, of De Lara, of Modesta Diaz, of John Kenneth Turner, and scores of others, all go to prove what a monster this human beast is. Eighty, white-haired, palsied with age, feeble under the weight of years, he yet continues to dabble his hands in the blood of the Mexican people, and to utilise for his own foul ends one of the fairest countries on the face of the earth."
 And this is the monster — the murderer of striking unionists; the man who takes the professional horse thieves and makes them into ferocious policemen, and employs them to hang and massacre striking workers, to secretly murder the conductors of working-class or antagonistic papers — this is the human brute of whose virtues Sydney Labor Council permits a chattering professor, his heart aglow for the interests of the employing class, to gabble into the ears of its dull incomprehensibility. And no one there knew enough to arise in wrath and tell the "professor" that he was talking flapdoodle — which, as Mr. O'Brien told Peter Simple, is the stuff they feed fools on.
When one has read the story of "The Bloody Strike of Rio Blanco," as told by John Kenneth Turner, in a recent  Appeal to Reason, one is inclined to weep for the deplorably uninformed condition of the representatives of the economic organisations of the working-class in Australia that makes such a lecture as that of Professor David possible in the halls of Labor without indignant protest. Turner graphically describes the conditions which led up to a strike on the part of 8000 laborers at Rio Blanco, in the cotton industry. Under the rule of Diaz every law operates for the employer, and every revolving piece of State machinery is placed at the service of the employer when industrial troubles occur. The eight thousand workers in the Rio Blanco mill revolted against 13 hours a day for a wage that ranged only from one shilling to one shilling and threepence per day ; they also rebelled against being compelled to pay out of their pitable earnings 4s a week to the Company for the two-roomed, dirt-floor hovels they were compelled to live in ; and they further objected to being paid in credit checks upon the Company's store, by which means the Company wrested from them very cent, that it paid them as wages. These Rio Blanco workers secretly organised a union, which they called "The Circle of Workers." They held their meetings in small groups in their own homes, in order that the authorities might not learn of their doings; for, be it remembered, President Diaz was behind the Company. He was not only the Government of Mexico, says Turner. He was also a heavy stockholder in this infamous Company. Among the organisers of the Union was Margaret Martinez, a young factory girl, "who became a shining figure on that last bloody day when the soldiers mowed the people down." As soon as Diaz' Government learned that organising work was going on, action was taken through the police department ; a general order was issued forbidding any of the operatives to receive any visitors whatever. Their own relatives were even debarred; and the penalty for disobedience was jail. Diaz seems to have a mind that runs parallel ways with that of the N.S.W. Premier. "Persons who were suspected of having signed the roll of the union were put in jail, and a weekly paper known to be friendly to the workers was swooped down upon, suppressed, and the printing plant confiscated." At this juncture a strike occurred at the Puebla mills, in an adjoining state. The Puebla mills were owned by the same company as those of Rio Blanco ; and the Rio Blanco workers decided to delay their own projected strike in order to send assistance to their comrades at Puebla. The millowners had decided to quietly starve the Puebla workers into submission. But the action of the Rio Blanco employees threatened to defeat their wishes, and so they determined to shut down the Rio Blanco mills in order to cut off supplies from that quarter. As soon as the lockout was declared by the employers, the workers of Rio Blanco assumed the offensive, declared a strike, and formulated demands for better conditions. The Company (Diaz' Company) stopped all credit, and laughed in the faces of the workers. Eight thousand men and women and children starved. They climbed the hills and explored the country for berries, and when these were gone they ate roots and herbs gleaned from the mountain side. Slow death menaced them.
 They appealed to Diaz, who pretended to investigate their case, and relentlessly ordered them back to work — to long hours and low wages — on worse conditions than before. They had no choice, and prepared to comply. But they were weak with hunger and starvation. They wanted food to give them strength to work; so, on the day of their surrender, they appeared before the Company's store, and asked that each might be given credit for a certain quantity of corn and beans, so that they might live through the first week. The manager jeered at them. "To these dogs we will not give even water !" he said.
 It was Sir E. Shackleton, the explorer, and lionised darling of the "upper" classes, who — describing the sensation of hunger experienced by his party on a certain occasion — declared that before such hunger all authority and ownership must give way, and that he and his comrades were in such a condition that the prospect of death would not have debarred them from taking food, no matter to whom it belonged, if it had been available.
 So it was with the Rio Blanco strikers.
 Shrill and high above the supplications of the starving strikers now rose the call of Margarita Martinez. "They call us dogs ! " she cried. "Let us show them that we can be men and women. We begged for this food, and they called us dogs. Now let us take it like men. Long enough have we starved. Let us eat our fill." Down from the box she sprang, and forced her way into the store, followed by the starving multitude. They took their fill of food, and set fire to the store. "In their new-found power they forgot the towering might of the company and the ominous thing that stood behind it. For the moment they imagined themselves free men and women, and not merely a crowd of starving strikers in a frenzy. They had not expected to riot, but the government had expected it — perhaps even had intended that they should do so. Unknown to the strikers, battalions of regular soldiers were waiting just outside the town, under command of General Rosalio Martinez himself, sub-secretary of war. The strikers had no arms. They were not prepared for revolution."
 The soldiers came. Volley after volley was fired into the crowd at close range. There was no resistance. Without regard for age or sex, people were shot down in the streets, many women and and children being amongst the slain. They were pursued to their houses, and dragged out, and shot to death. Those who fled to the hills were hunted for days, and shot on sight. "A company of rural guards refused to fire on the crowd when the soldiers first arrived, and was exterminated on the spot." It is estimated that from 200 to 800 were massacred in this way.
 "I don't know how many were killed, " the man who rode with the rurales told me. says Turner, " but on the first night after the soldiers came I saw two flat cars piled high with dead and mangled bodies, and there were a good many killed after the first night." "Those flat cars," the same informant told me, "were hauled away by special train that night, and hurried to Vera Cruz, where the bodies were  dumped in the harbor as food for the sharks."
 Those who escaped death by shooting were subjected to various tortures. Men were rounded up into a bull pen, and "500 of them were impressed into the army, and sent to Quintano Roo, where the percentage of death for the convict soldier is almost as great as that for the slave of the tobacco barons of the terrible Valle National."
 Newspaper men who favored the strikers, and wrote down the rule of Diaz, were imprisoned for long terms. One journalist, Justino Fernandez, was tortured until he lost his reason. Diaz gave orders that the reading of the mill workers was to be censored, and no radical newspapers or advanced literature permitted to get into their hands. He also ordered that any one suspected of having evil intentions was to be killed instanter! And this reign of terror has been maintained. Men who have incautiously declared themselves have suddenly disappeared — and for ever. A cultivated Mexican told Turner: "The history of Mexico for the past 30 years has been the history of fifteen million people afraid of one man — and afraid with good reason."
 Margarita Martinez, the heroic girl who led the strikers from starvation to death, passed unscathed through the rain of steel bullets. "Her death — if death has already come to her was more lingering, her agony more prolonged. On the night of the massacre was she dragged to the Rio Blanco jail, where she lay for several days in solitary confinement. She was never taken before a judge, but with a handful of others who were supposed to be lesser leaders of the bread riot, she was hustled away to Vera Cruz, shoved into a little boat, carried over those same shark-infested waters which had swallowed her mangled comrades, landed at the fortress of San Juan de Ulua, the private prison of Diaz, and there was buried as choice enemies of Porfirio Diaz are buried — alive! Exactly what tortures Margarita Martinez endured before she died, even whether she is dead or not, none but the grim prison officers can tell. For no one who goes as a prisoner to San Juan de Ulua is ever permitted to communicate with the outside world. They cross the harbor in a little boat, they disappear in the grey walls and that is all. Their friends never learn how they get on, nor when they die or how. Yet there are facts known about the prison of San Juan de Ulua which permit one to surmise the fate of the heroic cotton spinner —facts which fully justify one in saying that imprisonment there is burial alive. It is known that the apartments where the prisoners are confined are below the sea, that through the cement walls the salt water from the ocean drips, drips, drips, night and day down to the hard and naked floor. It is known that the cells are so small that the prisoner can never be straight, that larger cells are crowded like the Black Hole of Calcutta, that political prisoners are fed on the vilest of garbage, that they are beaten and tortured, that they die fast and are fed to the sharks.
 " It was to such a living tomb that Margarita Martinez was sent three and one-half years ago, a martyr to the cause of labor. Long ago she may have passed away. On the other hand, she may lie still alive. If she still lives, it is hope that is the breath of life to her— hope of the coming of a less despotic government which, if it does not set her free at once, will at least charge her with some definite offence and give her a trial. Or hope of something far grander than that, hope, that her own people, the toilers of Rio Blanco, the slaves of the hot lands, the peons of the plateau, the common people of Mexico, will overthrow the despot, will open the doors of San Juan de Ulua and of every other hell-hole where Mexican political prisoners are confined, and will lead them, cheering, out into the sunlight and freedom."
 This, then, is the tale of the "benevolent despotism" of Diaz which has lifted Mexico, according to Professor David, to "a high place among the nations!" This is the doings of the man in whom the Professor asked the working-class unionists of Sydney Labor Council to see a hero, a patriot, and a genius.
 The world's organised workers see in him only a brutal tyrant, a hateful torturer, a bloody-handed murderer! And this writer can't help feeling that, if Professor David knows Mexican history at all, he must have known that he was not speaking the whole truth to the Labor Councillors of Sydney; and, accordingly he must have marvelled at the cheerful innocence with which his extraordinary asseverations concerning Diaz were received and applauded.
 This paper re-echoes the sentiment of Justice : "Thank goodness, he (Diaz) cannot live much longer." A Socialist movement will grow up in Mexico that will render the rule of such a criminal and the triumph of such criminality an utter impossibility. In the meantime, Professor David might be reminded that not even the deplorably-uninformed condition of his hearers in the matter of Mexican working-class history could justify his incredible presentation of the case for Diaz. And the Unions might consider whether a veto ought not to be placed on the coming of men of the master class to the Council to mislead the workers and glorify the murderers of their class !

International Socialist (Sydney, NSW : 1910 - 1920), Saturday 13 August 1910, page 2