IV
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.