Diaz Falls in Mexico – 5

Madero took the attitude that he was a presidential candidate in a free republic and began what he called his democratic campaign.

Continuing Diaz Falls in Mexico,
our selection by Dolores Butterfield.

Previously in Diaz Falls in Mexico.

Time: 1911
Place: Mexico City

Madero took the attitude that he was a presidential candidate in a free republic and began what he called his democratic campaign. He went from city to city, delivering speeches and laying his platform before the people. He was called “the apostle of democracy,” and the multitudes followed him like an apostle indeed. But he did not carry out his democratic campaign without sacrifice and risk. When he passed through Hermosillo, Sonora, the hotel-keepers closed their-doors to him. Torres, feudal lord of the state, had given out the necessary hint and Madero, for all his millions, could find no apartments for himself and his wife until a Spaniard — relying upon the fact of being a foreigner — offered them lodgings, “not wishing to lend himself to so ignoble an intrigue.” This was but one city of many. In all places he had the most tremendous difficulty in renting halls for his addresses. Frequently he was reduced to speaking in tumble-down sheds or mule-yards or vacant lots, the local authorities often hiring rowdies to create disturbances at his meetings. He was ridiculed, he was threatened, he was persecuted, but he went on unafraid.

Just before and during the elections every known Maderista, from Madero down, was arrested on charges of “sedition.” Things came to such a pass that in the city where I lived some sixty prominent Maderistas were arrested at two o’clock one morning without warrants and on no charge, it being noteworthy that the men arrested were almost without exception some of the best and most honorable men in the state. And this happened at the same hour of the same day in every city in Mexico. But in spite of the fact that many votes were lost to Madero through intimidation or actual imprisonment, so strong a vote was registered for the Madero electors that fraud was resorted to to cover his gains. The result of the elections was that Diaz and Corral were unanimously reelected — the former for his eighth term and the latter for his second.

The Anti-reelectionists then appealed to Congress and the Senate to annul the elections, alleging fraud and intimidation. Without the slightest pretense of considering or investigating these charges Congress and Senate — long the mouthpieces of Cientificismo — ratified the elections as just and legal. Every peaceful measure to bring about justice in the elections and insure the free expression of the nation’s will was now exhausted. The only recourse left to the people by the Cientifico regime was war. Their leader at the polls became their leader in the preparations for that war.

In the midst of this riot of tyranny, while the nation yet seethed with indignation at the outrageous electoral farce imposed upon it, the first Centennial of Mexican independence was being celebrated before the foreign diplomats with unprecedented pomp and display. The Anti-reelectionists declared that Liberty was dead and that instead of celebrating they were going to don deep mourning. They were thus a mark for all manner of persecutions from petty annoyances to the most unprovoked armed attacks. Some students were fired upon by troops while they were carrying wreaths to the monument of the boy heroes of Chapultepec; a young lawyer was arrested for making a speech beneath the statue of Juarez; and in Tlaxcala a procession of unarmed working men was fired upon and ridden down by rurales, several men and a woman being killed. Consecrating hypocritical hymns to liberty that did not exist and heaping with wreaths the tombs and monuments of the heroes of Mexico, while violating all the ideals for which those heroes died, drunk with the power they had wielded so long, the Cientificos pressed blindly on, following the path that Privilege has taken since the beginning of history and which has only one end.

These are some of the causes and circumstances that made the revolution of 1910-11 — not all of them, for there must be remembered in addition the Yaqui slave traffic, the contract-labor system of the great southern haciendas, and a dozen other iniquities, greater and lesser, which also contributed to precipitating the revolt. It was fortunate that that revolt was captained by a man of Francisco Madero’s type — a man who knew how to win the world’s sympathy for his cause and how to make his subordinates merit that sympathy by their observance of the rules of civilized warfare.

The actual armed contention of the Madero revolution was singularly brief, culminating in the capture of Ciudad Juarez, which was followed by the resignation of Diaz and Corral. There can be no doubt that the dictatorship could have held together for a considerable time longer and that Diaz surrendered before he actually had to. But he could probably see by this time that it was inevitable in any case, and he was willing to sacrifice his personal pride and ambition sooner than necessary to avoid bloodshed in Mexico if he could. And also he had it upon his conscience, and it was brought home to him by the mobs outside his palace, that he was not the constitutional President of Mexico, but the tool of the betrayers of her Constitution. That he had been shamelessly deceived and played upon by the impassable cordon of Cientificos about him is easy to judge. His message of resignation was one to touch any heart, combining pathos with absolute dignity.

The resignation of Diaz and Corral was taken by many to signify the complete surrender of the old régime and the triumph of the revolution. Indeed, for the moment it so appeared. But although the Cientificos were ousted from direct political control, their wealth and power and the tremendous machinery of their domination were still to be contended with before the revolution could follow up its political success with the economic reforms which were its real object.

Continued,

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