“Don’t you believe it! He’s a damned wind-bag! Next time he mentions getting that sword stuck through his lung, you just ask him if he remembers the mule that got him up against the corral wall and kicked hell out of him!”
VIII
Guatemala has had its revolutions from time to time, yet its history—as compared with that of its immediate neighbors—has been fairly peaceful.
If it has not had a succession of good rulers, it has at least had a succession of strong rulers. Its Indians are a docile race, a race much more easily conquered by the Spaniards than were the Indians of Mexico, and much more easily dominated by the white landlords of to-day. And the army, if not impressive when on dress parade, is one of the most dependable armies in Central America.
In recruiting its soldiers, the government resorts to the selective draft. The Jefe Politico—the all-powerful local official—visits each coffee planter, and secures a list of the pickers who have picked the least coffee during the past year. These, provided his soldiers can catch them, are enlisted in the army. Once enrolled, the little peons are equipped with uniform, not very elaborately or neatly, but sufficiently to distinguish them from civilians. In the Capital, they are also equipped with shoes, not for efficiency but for the sake of appearances. Unaccustomed to footwear, they have to be trained to its use, and nothing is more amusing than the sight of a new battalion thus shod and stumbling awkwardly over the rough streets. They look uncomfortable and self-conscious, and at each halt will pick up their feet and glare at the shoes much as milady’s poodle glares at a pink ribbon tied around its tail.
Yet these little Indians, stupid and illiterate, make better soldiers than the more intelligent mestizos, or mixed-bloods. They are more susceptible to discipline. In most of these countries, virtue goes with ignorance, to such an extent that the mixed-bloods are called ladinos in Guatemala—a word that originally meant “tricksters.” The little Indians are far more loyal to the president in office than are the mestizo soldiers of the neighboring republics, and are less apt to desert the existing government when an insurrection threatens.
Guatemala’s several Dictators, also, have been artists at the business of discouraging opposition.
Of them all, Estrada Cabrera stands out head and shoulders above other despots not only of Guatemala but of all Latin America. Until a very few years ago he reigned for term after term, proclaiming himself re-elected when necessary, and quietly murdering any politician who gave the slightest indication of opposing him.
Why he clung to the presidency is a mystery. He was so fearful of assassination that he scarcely ever showed himself outside the palace. He slept usually in a house across the street, reached by a secret passageway. He ate nothing except what his own mother prepared for him. He would have a dozen beds made up each night, and only one or two of his most trusted guardians knew which one he occupied. He seriously handicapped the country’s mining interests by placing a ban on the importation of blasting powder, lest it be used to blow him up. On the one occasion when he attended a public ceremony, a bomb killed his carriage-driver and the horses, barely missing the Dictator himself. Since it was exploded by an electrical device, he thereafter placed a ban on all electric contrivances, and visitors to the country were relieved even of such things as pocket flashlights.
But from his isolation within the palace, he manipulated all the strings of government, and all Guatemala felt his power. He personally blue-penciled every foreign news dispatch that left the country, and sometimes even the personal cablegrams. He maintained an elaborate spy system, with one agent watching another agent, until every man in the republic was under survey. He permitted no public gatherings where people might discuss politics. He forbade the organization of any kind of society, and once suppressed a chess club.