“This horrible crime cannot be pardoned by God or man, and is still uninvestigated, crying to Heaven for vengeance with greater reason than the blood of the innocent Abel. So long as the criminals remain unpunished it will be a black and indelible stigma and an ugly stain on the race harbouring in its midst the perpetrators of this unheard-of sin. Words of reprobation are not enough, justice demands exemplary and complete reparation, and if the powers of earth do not take justice into their own hands, God will send fire from Heaven and will cause to disappear from the face of the earth the criminals and even their descendants. A murder so cruel and premeditated can be punished in no other way.
“If the courts here should wish to punish the guilty persons it would not be a difficult task; the public points its finger at those who dyed their hands in the blood of the heroic soldier, and we shall set them forth here echoing the voice of the people. The soulless instigator was Dimas Guzman. The executioners were a certain José Guzman (alias Pepin, a nephew of Dimas) and Cayetano Pérez.”
The matter was duly taken up in the courts, and Judge Blount himself tried the cases.
The judge takes a very mild and liberal view of the occurrence. He says of it:[14]—
“Villa was accompanied by his aide, Lieutenant Ventura Guzman. The latter is an old acquaintance of the author of the present volume, who tried him afterwards, in 1901, for playing a minor part in the murder of an officer of the Spanish army committed under Villa’s orders just prior to, or about the time of, the Wilcox-Sargent visit. He was found guilty, and sentenced, but later liberated under President Roosevelt’s amnesty of 1902. He was guilty, but the deceased, so the people in the Cagayan Valley used to say, in being tortured to death, got only the same sort of medicine he had often administered thereabouts. At any rate, that was the broad theory of the amnesty in wiping out all these old cases.”
He adds:—
“I sentenced both Dimas and Ventura to life imprisonment for being accessory to the murder of the Spanish officer above named, Lieutenant Piera. Villa officiated as arch-fiend on the grewsome occasion. I am quite sure I would have hung Villa without any compunction at that time, if I could have gotten hold of him. I tried to get hold of him, but Governor Taft’s attorney-general, Mr. Wilfley, wrote me that Villa was somewhere over on the mainland of Asia on British territory, and extradition would involve application to the London Foreign Office. The intimation was that we had trouble enough of our own without borrowing any from feuds that had existed under our predecessors in sovereignty. I have understood that Villa is now practising medicine in Manila. More than one officer of the American army that I know afterwards did things to the Filipinos almost as cruel as Villa did to that unhappy Spanish officer, Lieutenant Piera. On the whole, I think President Roosevelt acted wisely and humanely in wiping the slate. We had new problems to deal with, and were not bound to handicap ourselves with the old ones left over from the Spanish régime.”[15]
But it happens that this was the Filipino régime. Piera’s torture occurred at the very time when, according to Blount, Aguinaldo had “a wonderfully complete ‘going concern’ throughout the Philippine archipelago.”
Furthermore, it occurred in the Cagayan valley where Blount says “perfect tranquillity and public order” were then being maintained by “the authority of the Aguinaldo government” in a country which Messrs. Wilcox and Sargent, who arrived on the scene of this barbarous murder by torture four weeks later, found so “quiet and orderly.”
