The American Egypt: A Record of Travel in Yucatan

by Channing Arnold; Frederick J. Tabor Frost

"The above is an epitome of the history of the Yaqui war, and it will be seen that justice and right are on the side of the Indians. The world does not know how the merciless war is carried on; but to give an idea of the ways and means used it will be enough to say that all the barbarous methods of the Spanish Captain-General Weyler during the last Cuban insurrection are civilised compared to what is being done to the Yaquis. There is no cruelty, torture, infamy, to which they are not subjected. Prisoners are condemned to a fearful martyrdom, and they suffer it with the sublime stoicism characteristic of their race.

"Men, women, and children are sacrificed with the same cruelty. To prevent non-combatants from becoming hostiles, the Mexicans seize them and transport them from their fertile soil and benign climate to the death-breeding climate of Yucatan, where they are delivered as slaves to the landlords, who buy them at so much a head. The men who commit this crime make the public believe that they are performing an act of mercy, that these non-combatants are prisoners of war whom they forgive and send to work as free men, intending to civilise and protect them.

"These wretched beings, far away from wife and children, from their soil and sky, in slavery, ignorant of the language of their masters who speak Spanish, and the language of the natives themselves who speak Maya, become homesick and die or run away, forgetting in their longing for freedom the immense distance of thousands of miles that separate Yucatan from Sonora. Homeward they flee, to perish in the lonesome woods from hunger, thirst or fevers, or to be devoured by the wild beasts that swarm in those regions.

"History does not register anything superior to the heroism of this race. Not even in the glorious times of Sparta were enacted scenes of intrepidity or deeds of self-sacrifice that surpass those of the Yaquis. One of the chiefs of the tribe was once pursued by a detachment of Rurales, a special body of cavalry very similar to our Rough Riders. The Indian chief was an excellent sharpshooter, as all the Yaquis are. He fired from behind a rock, killing one of his enemies with each shot. In the end he was surrounded by the Rurales. Then when a mounted officer of the detachment rushed at him, sabre in hand, he parried the thrust, jumped upon the back of the horse, pinioned the arms of his adversary and spurred with his heels the flanks of the horse, making it gallop at full speed towards a precipice near by. When the horse reached the edge of the abyss, it stopped suddenly, but the Indian plunged his knife into the animal's haunch. Neighing with pain, the animal cast itself headlong over the precipice, carrying with it the two men. Two cries were heard, one of terror shrieked by the Rurale, another of triumph emitted by the Yaqui.

"For what are these patriots fighting? To retain their small fatherland within the great fatherland: to live on the soil where they were born and where their ancestors are buried: to have the right of living in peace. They have not denied the rights of the Government: they have not rebelled against the local authorities. The Government has denied their rights: the local authorities have persecuted them.

"At present they are living in the mountains, constantly fighting. They are outcasts, pariahs, less than pariahs. They are treated as wild beasts; tracked and killed, hanged on the trees to be the food of the carnivorous birds and a warning to their fellows. Really, these corpses hanged on the trees are the shame of a society that boasts of being civilised.

"Poor Yaquis! poor race of heroes! destroyed by the infamous and unpatriotic ambition of a group at whose service is a nation of braves indifferent to what they are doing with their brothers of Sonora."

We hold no brief for the independent Indians, whether they be Yaquis or Mayans. They have many bad traits. The Mayans certainly are cruel, and they have become crafty and treacherous by long centuries of brutality and persecution. They have been guilty, too, of bloody reprisals; but mark that word! The story of the Spanish domination of the whole of Yucatan is a story of bloodshed, of basest cruelty, of the most hideous lust. In the name of Christ, the white race has ground down the rightful owners of the soil; evicted them, robbed them, murdered them, beaten them, defiled their women and even their children. Are not reprisals, then, fair? In a later chapter we raise the corner of the curtain on as black a story of slavery as the world has ever known, the blacker because of its cowardice and hypocrisy—the slavery of so-called civilised Yucatan. For that great cancer "Surgeon" Diaz is said to be sharpening his operating knife. And in this far-eastern portion of Yucatan, because might is right, the last pure descendants of those who had attained a great and (if Spanish historians are to be trusted) a noble civilisation are to be brutally crushed out. If Mexico values a fair name, if she wishes to be reckoned a civilised Power, she will yet turn back. She will refuse to write the last chapters of that story of blood of which the Spanish wrote the first four centuries ago.

FOOTNOTES:

[5] A Central News telegram recently published in the London papers read as follows: "A surprise attack by a band of Maya Indians was made on Mexican troops encamped in their district. A sharp fight ensued, and as the Indians were superior in numbers, great difficulty was experienced in driving them off. A Mexican lieutenant and eight men were killed."