Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday April 13, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for March 1909, Part II:
-Found in Pittsburg and Girard, Kansas
Mother praised by Appeal to Reason:
Mother Jones is in the field appealing to the workers with the eloquence and force for which she is noted. She has already raised by her own efforts over three thousand dollars for the defense of the Mexican comrades. Her meetings are uniformly crowded and at the close resolutions are adopted voicing the protest of the working class and demanding the liberation of the patriots.
[Emphasis added.]
From the Appeal to Reason of March 13, 1909:
….PREPARING FOR THE BATTLE….
The Mexican cases become more important hourly. Along the Rio Grande the pickets, sentinels and spies are posted and there is a state of actual war, although the capitalist press makes no report of it. The war is between the rising proletariat under the leadership of such patriots as Araujo and Magon, and the Mexican despotism with the tyrant Diaz at its head. Stripped of all collateral developments it is simply a war between labor and capital, between freedom and peon slavery.
The managing editor of the Appeal [Fred Warren] has for some days been at San Antonio, Waco and other points in southern Texas, making a personal investigation. He reports a far more serious and complicated situation than most of our readers imagine. He is convinced that these cases are but the beginnings of what is going to prove a serious and far-reaching conflict.
Efforts are being mede to appeal the case of Antonio Araujo to the supreme court, and at all events to fight the case to a finish. Additional evidence has accumulated to emphasize the infamy of the conviction. A number of other Mexican patriots have been arrested in secret in Texas and Arizona, waylaid, beaten jailed and held “incommunicado” by collusion of the American police in the employ of the Mexican government.
So powerful are the Mexican influences in those states that the papers are silenced and the courts are virtually Mexicanized in their treatment of the patriots who are fighting for liberty.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 22, 1909
Antonio de Pio Araujo, An Innocent Man Imprisoned in a Strange Country
From the Appeal to Reason of March 20, 1909:
Araujo’s Address from His Prison Cell.
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TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE:
Evansville Press, Indiana March 20, 1909
It is hard to be sentenced as an innocent man to a long term of imprisonment in a strange country. It is in this unfortunate position that I find myself. But I have no regret and I address you in no spirit of despair. I have felt from the first that if the American people knew the truth about my case I would not now be in a convict’s cell. But the American people do not know the truth. In fact but few of them know anything at all about my conviction. The silence of the press was a part of the conspiracy to destroy my activity by sending me to prison.
Through the medium of the Appeal I have been given the opportunity of addressing myself to the American people, and I gladly avail myself of this privilege. Readers of the Appeal know that for some time there has been trouble in Mexico growing out of the awful condition of the people. For this the administration of Diaz, backed by American capitalists, is responsible. Myself and comrades of the liberal party were opposed to the administration. We were persecuted, spied upon and hunted down until we had to leave the country. When we landed on this side of the Rio Grande we felt ourselves secure under the stars and stripes of the American republic. But alas, we soon realized that the same power which had driven us from our native land also ruled the American states. Our papers were suppressed and we were tracked from place to place by the spies of the Mexican government, reinforced by American detectives, also in its employ. In due time we were arrested upon baseless charges. Some of my comrades have been in jail almost two years. This seems very strange in a land of freedom. Why is trial denied them? I do not know and no one can tell me.
Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 15, 1909
Eugene Debs and Fred Warren Travel to Leavenworth, Visit Mexican Comrade
From the Appeal to Reason of March 13, 1909:
With Araujo in Prison
BY EUGENE V. DEBS.
Returning from Texas whither he had hastened to ascertain the true facts in the Araujo case, the managing editor of the Appeal, Fred D. Warren, was up in arms, declaring the affair a monstrous injustice and his determination to aid the convicted Mexican by all the means in his power. This determination was made stronger by the connection he discerned between the case and the cases pending in Arizona with which Appeal readers are familiar and by its important bearing upon the whole question of the war in Mexico.
For, be it understood, the war in Mexico has begun. The despotism of assassination has done its worst and at last the people have revolted, for which thank God!
In this Mexican war the working class of the United States is deeply and vitally interested, whether it knows it or not.
In Mexico fourteen million working people are in peon slavery. Their wages, in American money, will not average 25 cents a day.
American capitalists virtually own these millions of slaves and grind out their lives to amass fortunes to squander upon syphilitic parasites. These American capitalists, in collusion with Diaz, the despot, have taken possession of Mexico. Millions upon millions of wealth are in sight. Diaz and his government-government by assassination-keep down the slaves. No labor leaders there. They are shot. Strikers are hanged and agitators waylaid and assassinated.
The Mexican government is the slave herder of the American capitalists. Diaz is the chief herder in the service of Rockefeller, Morgan, Harriman and other American plutocrats who own Mexico.
Hellraisers Journal – Friday March 5, 1909
Antonio de Pío Araujo Sentenced to More Than Two Years at Leavenworth
From the Appeal to Reason of February 27, 1909:
LETTER FROM MRS. SARABIA
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Antonio de Pío Araujo
As we go to press we are in receipt of a letter from Elizabeth Trowbridge Sarabia, wife of Manuel Sarabia, one of the Mexican patriots awaiting trial. The following excerpts will be of interest to our readers:
One of the worst features of these Mexican cases is that so many of them come and go and the public seem to take no interest, regardless of the atrocities committed and of the precedents set to use later against the American workers. One of the worst of all has taken place recently in San Antonio, Tex., where on the 21st of January, a young man named Antonio de P. Araujo, was sentenced to two years and six months in the penitentiary at Ft. Leavenworth, Kan., for the awful crime of being an associate editor of a Mexican Liberal paper published in the United States. There certainly is “liberty of the press” in this “free republic!”
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