Hellraisers Journal: John Murray, Secretary Political Refugee Defense League, Visits Mexican Revolutionaries

Quote R Magon re John Murray, ISR p643, Mar 1909 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Friday July 9, 1909
From Chicago, John Murray Reports for Political Refugee Defense League

From San Antonio’s El Regidor of July 1, 1909:

From the International Socialist Review of July 1909:

THE MEXICAN REVOLUTIONISTS

I have just returned from a trip to two prisons where the United States government is holding groups of Mexican political prisoners. In the Leavenworth penitentiary, Kansas, is Antonio de P. Araujo, the young Mexican editor; Diaz Guerra, the leader of the revolutionary forces that attacked Las Vacas; Jose Trevino and Benjamin [Priciliano] Silva—the last named is rapidly dying of consumption. From Leavenworth I traveled south to the Mexican borderline where in the little town of Eagle Pass, on the American side of the Rio Grande, I saw Calixto Guerra in the Maverick County jail.

In the Yuma penitentiary, in Arizona, there is still a third group consisting of Ricardo Flores Magon, Antonio I. Villarreal and Librado Rivera, all members of the Organizing Junta of the Mexican Liberal party.

In Leavenworth, Silva’s case is the saddest — the man was carried in to see me on the back of a hospital attendant, so weak had the poor fellow become from confinement in a cold northern prison.

Of all these prisoners Calixto Guerra, whose extradition is demanded by the Mexican dictator, is the one around whom the most interest centers at the present time, for if he goes over the line thirty-seven other men will go with him. Guerra’s case is to be made a precedent—he is charged in eighty-nine pages of testimony, filed by the Mexican government, with having been one of those who attacked the town of Las Vacas on June 26, 1908—and the Mexican governor, Cardenas, of the state of Coahuila, attaches the names of thirty-seven additional Mexican political suspects, now living in Texas, to the demand for extradition.

If Judge Douglas grants the demands of the Mexican government, and Guerra is turned over to the waiting rurales, a man-hunt will immediately commence on the American side of the Rio Grande and never stop until the last political enemy of Porfirio Diaz in the United States has been taken.

Will the Mexican president be able to accomplished what the Czar of Russia failed to do in the cases of the Russian patriots Rudowitz and Pouren?

The court’s decision in Guerra’s case will be the answer.

It was an uprising to overthrow the Mexican government by force of arms that Calixto Guerra took part in, and he makes no denial of the facts. Here is the story, plain and to the point:

At four o’clock in the morning forty-five of us stood with our guns in our hands in the wet river-sand waiting our turn to cross. The first boat-load put off into the fog—a smothering river-fog that bridged the Rio Grande from bank to bank and swallowed up the rowers before they had made a dozen strokes from the shore. Seven trips of the boat landed us all on the Mexican side and in the gray light we moved towards the town.

Just outside of Las Vacas a guard discovered us and the fight commenced. Our chief had divided us into two groups and the cross-fire which we poured into the soldiers drove them back into the shelter of the town. We ran through the streets after them, killing many of troops in this first rush, and when they took shelter in the houses we burned two roofs over their heads, forcing them into the street again. Then the handful of Diaz’s soldiers that still resisted took refuge in their barracks and held that place until the end. We lost the town at the time when we had it all but won, for our ammunition gave out and the seven soldiers defending the barracks had an endless supply of cartridges for their Mausers.

Brave Canales was killed at the very door of the barracks that he was trying to burn. In all, twelve of the revolutionists were killed, but we made the soldiers of Diaz pay dearly for our dead as out of the eighty men of the 12th Regiment stationed at Las Vacas but seven held together at the end of the day—the rest had either fled or lay dead upon the streets.

It was a fight for principles, and Mexican freedom—I would do it again.

Such is the spirit of the men of the Mexican Liberal Party who fought and were beaten, but who are only waiting until they can reform their ranks to again attack the despotism of Diaz.

It is in the air along the border—there will be another uprising.

I sat in the sheriff’s office and looked at Calixto Guerra; he was a man of unusual personality, tall to the lankiness of a Lincoln, with a slow, quiet determination in his speech that compelled conviction, a dash of grey in his dark hair, and long, bony fingers that, as I watched, deftly rolled and crimped a cigarette. It was a picture that will not leave me until I know, for certain, whether he is to go free or be handed over to the man that hungers for his body, namely, President Porfirio Diaz.

At this writing, the date of the hearing of Calixto Guerra before Judge W. C. Douglas, of the Sixty-third Judicial District, has not been set—it may be in ten days, it may not be for a month—but the Political Refugee Defense League has obtained the services of the one man in the state of Texas best fitted to defend him, and that man is Walter Gillis, of Del Rio, who successfully fought the demand for the extradition of Juan Jose Arredondo and eight other political refugees in 1906. Fraternally,

JOHN MURRAY,
Secretary Political Refugee Defense League.

[Emphasis added.}