"General Huerta may or may not return to Mexico some day, and may or may not hold office there again. At present he is giving himself up wholly to an agreeable and home life in this city (New York)."
Whether or not General Huerta was to "return to Mexico some day" depended upon the temper of the United States. He knew that when he authorized the statement. He did not know—or else he was incredibly bold—that the Government was in possession of the whole story, and that orders had been issued from the highest source in the country not to let him return. One day in the late summer he slipped away, ostensibly to visit the San Francisco Exposition. Government agents shadowed him and let him make his own pace. He took the southern route, and traveled so quietly that his flight was not publicly marked until he had passed through Kansas City. As he approached the border he became as eager as a boy at the prospect of his 'return from Elba'; then, as he was almost in sight of the soil from which he had been exiled, he was arrested on a technical charge and jailed.
In August Rintelen fled the country. The Providence Journal had just published an irritating charge that Boy-Ed was carrying on negotiations with Mexico; the German Embassy denied the charge, although Boy-Ed with his knowledge of Mexico had assisted ably in the plot; and the excitement of official interest in Huerta's recent connections made von Rintelen nervous. When he was captured at Falmouth by the British, his man-Friday, Andrew V. Meloy, confessed that he had inadvertently tipped over the plot when he had innocently telephoned a Carranzista to find out, for safety sake, whether the Carranza party suspected Huerta. It was this Carranzista who made a few inquiries of his own, and succeeded in planting the spy in the Holland House meeting.
The aged general, although he was transferred to a more comfortable prison, took his confinement bitterly. His dream had been bright indeed, and it had been bluntly interrupted. As the autumn came on his health showed signs of failing, and his career of dissipation began to total the final reckoning. The illness became grave, and after two surgical attempts to save his life, he died in January, 1916, heartbroken.
Von Eckhart, the minister to Mexico City, was to Mexico what Bernstorff was to the United States and he employed faithfully the familiar tactics of his superior: revolution, editorial propaganda, filibustering and double dealing. In the fall of 1916 the fine German hand could be seen prompting a note sent by Mexico to the United States urging an embargo on the shipment on munitions and foodstuffs to the warring nations (Mexico had neither foodstuffs nor munitions to supply). And in December, 1916, Eckhart was robbed of the achievement of a conspiracy of fantastic proportions.
In order to appreciate the fantasy, one must bear in mind the temperament of a Central American. Eckhart and his colleague, Lehmann, German minister to Guatemala, proposed to harness that temperament to a German wagon and drive the Latin republics to the formation of "the United States of Central America," which presumably would have borne a Prussian eagle in the field of its ensign.
Carranza disliked Cabrera of Guatemala; so, too, did Dr. Irias, a Nicaraguan liberal. Certain factions in Honduras disapproved of their president; certain factions in Guatemala could be counted on to support revolution against Cabrera; Dr. Irias, the defeated candidate, disliked Emiliano Chammorra, the President of Nicaragua, enormously. What more natural than that they combine forces and with German money and arms kindle not one revolution but a series of them, with an invasion thrown in for good measure? Accordingly they conferred with a Salvadorean politician, a Cuban revolutionist, and an associate of the Costa Rican minister of war. The cast complete, they planned to assemble revolutionary forces, with German military advisers, on the coast of Salvador. Using Salvador as a base, attacks were to be made upon Nicaragua and Guatemala, and at the proper time Carranza was to invade Guatemala from the north. Colombia's services were to be enlisted by the promise of restoration of the Republic of Panama—originally a Colombian province. As soon as the combined revolutionaries had succeeded in overthrowing their governments, they were to form the United States of Central America, with Irias as president, and William of Hohenzollern as counsel.
Our levity is pointed not at the Central American temperament and political instability, but rather towards the grotesquely serious objective of the German plotters. If their military forces had been Prussian shock troops they would certainly have succeeded. The use of a Mexican gunboat to transport German officers with an airplane and wireless apparatus from Mexico to Salvador exposed the plan. President Cabrera of Guatemala had a small but effective force of thirty thousand men, and a well-equipped artillery, armed—and he was prepared for attack from either frontier. He also enjoyed the confidence of Washington, and he informed Washington at once what was afoot. The answer arrived presently in the shape of the American fleet, on a peaceful expedition to survey the Gulf of Fonseca, its newly acquired Nicaraguan naval base. The revolutions failed for want of revolutionists, the German enterprise failed for want of revolutions, and of the conspirators only one, Tinoco of Costa Rica, succeeded in capitalizing the unrest by a coup d'etat which made him president. The plot never reached maturity in Colombia or Panama.
Before dismissing it from consideration, however, it is worth a moment's analysis. With any degree of success it would have distracted the United States, and perhaps have involved her marine corps as well as her navy. It contained possibilities of war between Mexico and the United States. It projected a blow at the Panama Canal. It concerned a territory in which commercially as well diplomatically the United States had definite concern and in which Germany had already shown a greedy interest. Incidentally it reveals—in its offer to Colombia—the same diplomatic technique as that which was shortly to startle the United States into the last step towards war, the so-called "Zimmermann note."