CHAPTER XI
THOSE CHRONIC INSURRECTIONS!
It was another long day’s journey to the southern border, through a warm sunny country of jungle and blue lagoon.
An air of peace and tranquillity pervaded the land. The engineer, as though infected with the lethargy of the tropics, loafed along from one tiny village to another, stopping at every high-peaked hut of thatch that arose from the low forests of wild cane.
Indians came aboard in merry, chattering groups. They were clad in brilliant rags, invariably tattered to shreds, yet blazing with scarlets and greens, and rivaling the plumage of the parrots and cockatoos that screamed at us from the bamboo thickets. They wore narrow-brimmed straw hats, of Guatemalan type, that seemed diminutive after the immense sombreros of central Mexico. Each had a hollow rod of cane slung over the shoulder—the local style of thermos bottle. And each was laden with an armful of infants.
The engineer waited patiently while babies were loaded and unloaded. Some of the Indians, embarking, would clamber aboard and receive the children passed up by friends through the windows. Others, disembarking, would clamber down and catch the children tossed to them by friends inside the cars. The confusion was astounding. Every one jabbered in a babel of native dialects. But the good humor of the warm countries always prevailed. Every one seemed eventually to find the right infant. And we would loaf onward through the wilderness, among rolling hills red with coffee berries, past the blue lagoons where schools of tiny fish leaped in silver showers, and wild fowl rose in flocks to skim across the placid waters.
Looking upon the quiet landscape, one would never have suspected that Mexico was on the eve of another chronic insurrection.
This railway was a link in the much-discussed Pan-American road, which dreamers hope may some day carry passengers from New York to Buenos Aires in a week. How soon the vision will ever become a reality is problematical. The existing links are few. European merchants, resenting the commercial advantages it would offer to Americans, are uniformly opposed to the project. And native governments, always suspicious of one another, particularly in Central America, fear its military possibilities.
Nightfall brought us to Tapachula, a pleasant little city in a rich plantation district.
A diminutive trolley, operated by a Ford engine, awaited us at the station. The motorman climbed out to crank it. The passengers crowded aboard. A host of hotel runners and porters attached themselves to roof, sides, and platform, until the car itself was invisible beneath its coating of humanity.
It rattled away upon wobbly tracks through a low-built plaster city—a city almost overpowering in its scent of coffee from the warehouses and drying floors—and landed us eventually at one of the most picturesque plazas in Mexico. It fairly blazed with color. Amid its green were masses of flowering purple bougainvillea. All about it were red-tiled roofs. Above it towered a grove of royal palms, tall and stately, and bursting far aloft into dark olive plumage, through which the façade of the inevitable aged cathedral gleamed white against a flaming tropic sunset.
The streets, bordered by high, narrow sidewalks, were rudely cobbled, and sloped to a central gutter. Horsemen with gay ponchos trailing behind them clattered over the rough stones. Long trains of burros plodded beneath sacks of coffee, driven by peons in scarlet rags. Tehuana girls, homeward bound from market, passed in their quaint costume, balancing earthenware jars above their turbaned heads.
Before the commandancia which faced the plaza, six musicians were playing upon a marimba, the sweet-toned Central-American xylophone, standing shoulder to shoulder, all tattered and barefoot, playing so swiftly that their sticks were but streaks of light, yet playing with perfect rhythm, with beautiful harmonies, and with a verve that would have delighted the most blasé jazz-lover on Broadway. The horsemen paused to listen. The Tehuana girls lingered at the curb. Army officers in the bright uniforms of peace-time, were strolling through the plaza, flirting with the señoritas.
Mexico was quiet, and charming, even on the verge of revolution.
The De la Huerta revolt of 1924 was but a comparatively small incident in Mexican history.
It will probably be forgotten by the time this book appears in print. Yet it is fairly typical of such affairs. And it is rather significant of current political tendencies which are likely to continue long into the future.
To understand it, as to understand everything that happens in Mexico to-day, one must glance into the past.
This originally was the land of an empire which combined savagery with civilization. The Aztecs normally were peaceful tillers of the soil, cultivators of flowers, and builders of monuments, yet they could fight courageously upon occasion, and were addicted to human sacrifices. To this empire came a handful of Spanish adventurers bent upon conquest. They were great warriors, these Spaniards, but they conquered mainly through their cleverness in playing one group of Indians against another. During the three centuries of their rule, there was much progress in Mexico—as the world of to-day judges progress, which means the growth of European institutions—but the Spaniard held the Indian in subjection which in many cases became slavery.
Into the soul of the Indian crept a spirit of rebellion. He rose and cast out the Spaniard. He chose his own leaders, usually from the mestizo or mixed-breed population, only to discover that they were as ready to exploit him as the Spaniard had been. Blinded by the eloquent promises of one politician after another, he marched in every revolution. The Spaniard had brought to Mexico the political doctrine that a governor is not the servant but the master of his people. Whoever gained office promptly forgot his promises.
To the foreigner, the one bright spot in Mexican history is the reign of the Dictator, Porfirio Diaz. He pacified a disorderly country. He built fifteen thousand miles of railway, established telegraphic communication throughout the republic, placed Mexico upon a firm financial basis, and raised it to a foremost rank among nations. He gave the Indian prosperity, but failed to educate him; he kept him in subjection as stern as that of the Spaniard. And rival politicians, whispering to the Indian that Diaz had sold his country to the foreign promoter, found him ready for more revolution.
Then recommenced the old story of one president after another. In the blood of each was that strain of the Spanish adventurer who had come to Mexico to reap a fortune at the expense of the native. The first to keep his promises to the Indian was Carranza. Under his new constitution, previously mentioned, the peon enjoyed so many rights, and the capitalist so few, that foreigners ceased to invest.
The Indian, theoretically, now owned Mexico. But he was penniless and ignorant, and he didn’t know what to do with it. Its riches were the sort that required money and engineering brains. Its varied climes would produce any crop grown elsewhere in the world, but in most regions they required extensive irrigation. Its rugged mountains possessed a vast store of mineral wealth—iron, onyx, opals, topazes, emeralds, jade, marble, mercury, lead, zinc, antimony, asphaltum, coal, copper, silver, and gold—but they needed machinery and transportation. Its eastern sands with their fortune in oil had already made this the third petroleum-producing country of the world, when only a tenth of the possible fields had been prospected, but they were of no value to the untrained Mexican peon. He found himself poorer than ever.
When, in 1920, Obregon raised his revolutionary standard, the Indian turned against Carranza. Obregon proved the most capable president since Diaz. He was adept at compromise. He quickly pacified the country, hanging the smaller bandits, and conciliating the larger bandits (like Villa) with the promise of forgiveness. He pleased the Indian with agrarian reforms, splitting up the larger estates into small land-holdings. He brought back the foreign capitalist with new concessions. Mexico did not become the heaven which Obregon’s American propaganda would have had us believe, but it gave much promise.
Its one dark cloud was a rising tide of Bolshevism. Obregon, with all his compromise, still favored the Indian. And the Indian, sensing his new strength, gloried in it. In Vera Cruz, where the new movement was strongest, workmen were striking constantly on trivial excuse or no excuse at all, tenants had formed a habit of hanging out red flags as a sign that they were tired of paying rent, and stevedores were refusing to unload steamers until the principal port of Mexico was so constantly tied up as to depress seriously all Mexican business.
The native landholders and property owners—not to mention many of the foreign promoters—were becoming seriously alarmed at the menace of this Bolshevism. When it became evident that Obregon was favoring as his successor at the 1924 elections a man who favored the Indian even more stoutly than he himself—General Calles—the moneyed interests promptly started a new revolution headed by Adolfo de la Huerta. The significant point about this revolution is that the Indian—or a part of the Indian population—promptly rose to follow the De la Huerta standard, deserting his own shibboleths to die for principles which throughout all earlier Mexican history he had striven to overthrow.
Among the fifteen million people of Mexico, only one million are of pure white ancestry. Six million are full-blooded Indians. Among the other eight million mestizos aboriginal strains predominate. With employment and fair treatment the natives are peaceable. But like their Aztec ancestors they are potential fighters. When discontent awakens the old spirit of rebellion first aroused by the Spaniard, they rise blindly to follow some new leader, believing that at last they have discovered a friend, when they have merely discovered another self-seeking politician bent upon their exploitation. When they do find a friend, they are too ignorant to appreciate the fact. They are the ready dupes of ambitious generals.
In Tapachula, the insurrection was marked principally by much blowing of bugles on the part of the Obregon garrison.
The civilian population remained unperturbed.
The soldiery hailed the affair as another good excuse for drinking. Possibly their officers had paid them as a first step toward insuring their loyalty in the campaign to follow. They promptly filled the local bar-rooms, and swaggered about the streets with the air of increased importance which comes to a military man in time of war.
As always in Mexico, the martial spirit brought to the surface the anti-foreign sentiment. The peon, whatever his opinion of gringos, is usually polite, but inspired by thoughts of battle—and a few swigs of rum—he occasionally tells the foreigner what he thinks of him. A fat sergeant, careening wildly by on a little burro, so drunk that he threatened at every lurch to overturn his diminutive mount, reviled my ancestry as he galloped past. A group of soldiers, making merry in a saloon near the plaza, set down their bottle of mescal to damn all Americans. One of them staggered out with the evident intention of picking a quarrel, but his attention was distracted at the sight of a Tehuana girl lingering at the curb. Seizing her arm, he grinned in an effort at blandishment. She broke loose with an angry, “Vaya! Run along! Andale!” and hurried down the street, while a policeman on the corner chuckled and twirled his own moustachios. The soldier turned to me again, muttering something about tearing a gringo’s heart from the breast. He started toward me, wavered unsteadily, collided with a house-wall and collapsed in the gutter.
For a day the soldiery swaggered all over town, but the next morning their generals—now in business-like khaki—rounded them up and marched them to the railway station, where all passenger traffic had ceased and all cars had been commandeered for transport.
They passed beneath my hotel balcony—a motley crew of evil-visaged little fellows, with cartridges glistening from many bandoleers—cheering and singing. Behind them came a nondescript mob of slatternly women, old and young and middle-aged—the soldaderas, or camp-followers, who transport the baggage, cook the food, perform whatever other services a soldier may require, and sometimes assist in the actual fighting, occasionally with a rifle, but usually with sticks or stones, wherewith they engage in combat the soldaderas of the enemy. Barefoot, bedraggled, unwashed, they were bent under loads of fruit-baskets, blankets, saddle-bags, water-jars, and even live chickens.
A few of the marchers glanced up at my balcony to hurl a last curse at the gringo. Then they vanished around the corner, bound northward to the scene of battle. Tapachula resumed its atmosphere of peace, quite as though Mexico were untroubled by one of its chronic insurrections.
One must not assume that a Mexican revolution is a comic opera affair. The least conspicuous uprising sows something of death, destruction, and a loss of feminine virtue in its wake. But Mexico is large and sparsely populated, and can stage a dozen revolutions at once without disturbance of its general calm.
The De la Huerta revolt raged principally in central Mexico. For a few months the republic was aflame from Vera Cruz to Manzanillo. But Obregon had the best generals. The United States, taking the quickest means to bring about order, allowed him to buy arms denied the revolutionists. The Huertistas, beaten and dispersed, fled southward into the jungles of Tehuantepec, fighting sporadically along the railway I had just traversed, until completely disbanded. American newspaper readers settled back in their easy chairs with the self-congratulatory comment, “There’s another revolution over! Those Mexicans must be a cut-throat lot!”
When one travels through Mexico one is amazed to discover that the Mexicans do not appear a cut-throat lot.
The great masses of Indian and semi-Indian population appear quiet, simple, peaceable folk. Now and then, after the tequila has flowed freely, some of them may beat their wives or cut their neighbors’ throats, but this is not their regular pastime. In fact, most Old-Timers in the country deny that crime is any more frequent there than at home.
Why then, the traveler always asks himself, can these people not elect a president without bloodshed?
One finds the answer by observing their politeness.
This politeness is extremely personal. The man who talked for half an hour to the ticket agent, keeping forty other persons waiting while he asked after all the members of the other man’s family, is a case in point. So are the two acquaintances—familiar to every one who has lived in Mexico—who meet upon a narrow sidewalk, embrace demonstratively, and stand there for another half hour, enjoying one another’s professions of love and admiration to such an extent that they force all other pedestrians to step out into the gutter.
It is a personal politeness which must be rigidly observed, no matter how much inconvenience it may cause the general public. One finds it everywhere in Mexican life—and this discussion might be extended to apply to the life of the neighboring countries given to revolution. It permeates business, where salesmanship follows the methods—now comparatively obsolete at home—of concentrating upon favorably impressing the buyer rather than demonstrating the superior merits of one’s goods. And when applied to politics, it becomes the good old principle of “What’s the constitution among friends?”
Mexican loyalty is an extremely personal loyalty. The Mexican may love his home, and the immediate land upon which he resides, but he has no conception of patriotism. He uses the phrase for oratorical purposes, but the idea is vague. He would rally to his country’s flag to fight a foreign invader, but beyond that, he has no devotion to his republic, or to the ideals and principles—whatever they may be—for which Mexico stands. He knows only loyalty to certain leaders. His political parties do not go by the name of Liberal or Conservative, Republican or Democrat, but by the name of the candidate. The Mexican is always an Obregonista, or a Villista or a Carranzista or a Huertista.
Once in office, the successful politician practices the spoils system, which is not unknown in our own republic, but which reaches a far higher point of efficiency in Mexico. Into office come all his personal friends. They have spent their money to elect him. Now they must reimburse themselves. Graft, fairly common in other lands, is an art in these countries. Scarcely a sum of money ever changes hands in the course of government operations without shrinking at least slightly. Political office is the quick, sure road to financial success. No one knows how soon a term may end, wherefore every one makes hay while the sun shines, for to-morrow it may rain bullets. Should one administration reach the end of its term—and Mexico’s latest constitution limits a president to one term—the old principle of personal courtesy to a friend continues. The retiring president names his own successor, whose election—since his troops control the polls—he can definitely guarantee.
The Mexican believes in this loyalty to friends. He expects the successful politician to give all the plums to his supporters, regardless of their abilities for the several posts. Not placing a high value upon honesty, except verbally, he takes it for granted that most of them will rob the people. He understands that they are loath to relinquish office. And in his heart, he would condemn the president as disloyal if he did not stuff the ballot boxes in favor of a chosen successor. His indignation is not aroused at such proceedings. He would do the same things himself if he were in power. But if he happens to be a rival politician, without power, and with no prospect of gaining it except by forcibly dislodging the other fellow, he affects great indignation. He whispers to the peon his horror at the prevailing misgovernment. “These villains,” he says, “are robbing you!” And he rises in arms, followed by the peon, to save Mexico from its unpatriotic despoilers.
As a matter of fact, it is only a comparatively small part of the population that follows. The great bulk of the Mexican people are peaceable; they are tired of revolution; they have lost faith in new leaders; they prefer to remain neutral, and to cheer diplomatically for whoever proves the victor. The revolutionary army is recruited like the federal army from the unemployed, from those who have tired of working and hope to obtain political office themselves, from young boys who are thrilled by the prospect of carrying a gun, and from a certain lawless element that welcomes the possibility of loot and rape.
Should the revolution prove abortive, the Government generals quickly suppress it. A few of its leaders are hanged, a few soldiers executed; the rest of the rebels slip away quietly, hide their weapons, and return innocently to their work. Should the revolution prove successful, the Government generals forget their loyalty to the President; they jump quickly to the other side, taking with them their ignorant troops—who are never quite sure whom they are fighting, anyway—and fight valiantly, as always, to save Mexico. The President flees. The revolutionists hold a banquet at the Palace, where they make flowery speeches about their patriotism. They conduct an election, make one of their number president, and accept his appointments to office. And there they remain, until another revolution throws them out, or until a squabble starts among themselves as to which shall next succeed to the presidency.
The American reading public always condemns the revolutionist. It can not seem to grasp the fact that elections are never honest in Mexico; that whoever controls the polls is the man elected; that Mexico has never had a constitutional president who did not first capture the Palace by force of arms; that revolution consequently is the only course whereby there can be a change of parties. Usually the revolution is justifiable. But invariably it brings to office another man who, like the man at the ticket window, is more considerate of his personal friends than of the general public.
The Mexicans are not a cut-throat lot. They are merely too courteous.
Yet Mexico always weathers her storms.
Even in revolution, unless one chances to be caught at the particular scene of the disturbance, this land is supremely tranquil.
In Tapachula the only evidence of the turmoil was an ever-lengthening line of brown-faced prisoners sitting crossed-legged on the street before the commandancia, picking with their machetes at the rank weeds that grew up among the cobblestones.
As in Hermosillo a moon smiled down over the low flat roofs. The lilting song of the marimba echoed hauntingly through the dim streets. And the plaintive notes of a gendarme’s whistle assured the world that all was well.