Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: John Murray on the Prisons of Diaz, Part II

5th April 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

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

Hellraisers Journal – Monday April 5, 1909
John Murray on the Horrors of the Private Prisons of Diaz, Part II

From the International Socialist Review of April 1909:

[Part II]

[John Murray at San Juan de Ulua Prison, continues speaking with the sympathetic soldier…]

Without a word the soldier turned and walked towards the archway. I followed at his heels and we made our way around outside the walls, entered the arsenal and climbed an inner staircase to the battlements of the fortress.

Pointing out to sea, my guide showed me a small man-of-war coming into the harbor.

“That’s the ‘General Bravo’—look at it. Keep looking at it, senor, and while we are here alone I will stand behind your back and tell you all I know of the martyrs imprisoned in Ulua.

“The friends of Magon in the army are many. Here, in Ulua, all would be glad to see a way out of this hell—but will it ever come?”

I answered as I believed, in all sincerity, “It will come,” and with a look of encouragement the young soldier went on:

Six months ago I came to Ulua from Sonora, and never once have I seen the political prisoners. But this I saw with my own eyes:

Late on a Sunday afternoon, a boat with two occupants came rowing towards the guardhouse of the west side landing. I saw it before the others, being far-sighted, and this my first day of guard duty on the island. As the boat touched the pier, a white-haired lady wrapped in a black shawl, and trembling with age, was just able to mount from the rocking gunnel to the first stone step, where she sank down, panting and exhausted. The oarsman was a small, black Indian from the mountain tribes near Orizaba. Martin Jose Pico, our hook-nosed, thief-of-a-sergeant—ration-robbing is his trade-roughly demanded her pass, but she had none.

This was such a strange occurrence—a white-haired woman of over eighty years trying to gain entrance to the prison without credentials—that the officer of the day was summoned.

Captain Garcia likes not old women, and to the black figure seated at his feet on the stone step, his words were short and sharp:

“Speak! What do you want?”

“To see a boy who is imprisoned here,” replied the trembling, low-toned voice of the old lady.

“A boy? We have no boys. Who is he?” testily demanded the officer.

“Juan Sarabia,” replied the white-haired woman.

At this name the captain took a sudden step back, for of all the prisoners most strictly kept “incommunicado” is this famous revolutionist, Juan Sarabia. Even to mention his name is forbidden the soldiers of Ulua.

White-faced, the officer gripped the old lady by her arm and stuttered a rasping question:

“Fool! who are you?”

“His mother,” came the answer.

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Hellraisers Journal: From the International Socialist Review: John Murray on the Prisons of Diaz, Part I

4th April 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote EVD Mex Revolutionairies, AtR p2, Oct 10, 1908 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Sunday April 4, 1909
John Murray on the Horrors of the Private Prisons of Diaz, Part I

From the International Socialist Review of April 1909:

—–

[Part I]

S soon as we were alone at the end of the pier breasting the Vera Cruz harbor, the little, pock-marked secretary of the revolutionary group pulled from his pockets a piece of grey stone and held up before my eyes.

“Look at that!”

I took the fragment from his slim, brown fingers and turned it over curiously. It was a piece of coarse, grey coral.

“See! It’s porous. Now do you understand? The whole prison’s built of it.”

With an upward jerk of his hand he leveled an accusing finger at the white-washed walls of the fortress-prison shining in the sun across the waters of the blue bay.

“There it stands! On that island, yonder! San Juan de Ulua! The foulest spot in all Mexico—Diaz’ private prison for his political enemies!”

The corners of the man’s mouth drew down into a snarl and his eyes narrowed to burning slits of hate as he gazed in the direction of the fortress.

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Hellraisers Journal: Whereabouts and Doings of Mother Jones for February 1909, Part II; Found in Chicago and in Denver

9th March 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Mother Jones, Great Church upon Bodies of Girls, Dnv Rck Mt Ns p2, Feb 28, 1909 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 8, 1909
Mother Jones News Round-Up for February 1909, Part II:
-Found in Denver, Colorado; Scheduled to Speak at Protest Meeting

At the end of February, Mother Jones arrived in Denver, Colorado, where she was scheduled to speak at a “Gompers Protest Meeting” on March 1st. According to the Rocky Mountain News of February 28th, Mother made the following statements:

There is an industrial panic in the United States today, and it is not confined to any particular locality. The steel trust is now engaged in stamping out the independent steel concerns, and God have pity on the iron and steel workers when this happens and the rest of the people, too. In Illinois the coal miners are having their trouble, some working only one day a week, and some three days a week. The shoemakers all over the country are struggling against similiar conditions, and everywhere you turn you find this industrial stagnation…..

How can you expect labor to make very much headway with 10,000 judges ruled by the capitalists? Where can they get justice? Where can justice be had with Wall Street dictating the policies of the president, congress and the governors of the states?

Even religion is mixed up in the conditions. I saw in an Eastern city a $2,000,000 church built with the subscriptions of men whose daughters work in factories and stores for $3 and $4 per week. Oh, the farce of it all! Dare you tell me that a girl can work for $3 a week and be respectable? The idea of building a great church upon the sold bodies of girls!…..

I tell you that there is a limit to all things-and the limit will come in the present economic conditions of this country, and people will arise and take the industries into their own hands and right the wrongs that are making of this nation the most grasping in the world today.

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Hellraisers Journal: “Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution” by John Murray, Part III: the Mexican Revolutionaries

3rd March 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote Freedom Ricardo Flores Magon, Speech re Prisoners of Texas, May 31, 1914 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Wednesday March 3, 1909
Mexico City -John Murray Meets with Mexican Revolutionaries

John Murray recently returned from Mexico and has written an article about that experience for this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review. Below we offer the conclusion of that article in which Mr. Murray meets with a group of Mexican Revolutionaries.

Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution

BY JOHN MURRAY
[Part IIII]
—–

We turned into the mouth of a narrow street, cobbled from wall to wall. Herbierto knocked at a door. A window swung open above our heads and a voice called out, “Is that the doctor?”

“It is,” answered Senora Moreno. “Is the child still sick?”

“Yes, come in quickly,” replied the watcher, closing the window.

“A sick child?” I questioned, as the door opened and we stumbled through the dark passageway.

“No,” meaningly answered Herbierto. “A sick country, with the revolution as the only medicine.”

And the woman added: “That was the pass word.”

Around an oblong table in the room we entered sat two dozen men, as dissimilar in their appearance as their native land is varied, Mexico is half desert and half tropics and breeds its people small, light-skinned and still-tongued, or swarthy, heavy-boned and voluble, as unlike each other as sand and sage brush are to mountain torrents and black jungle-land.

“A friend from Los Angeles,” explained Herbierto to the group watching me in surprised silence, but as he read my credentials from Magon their faces changed and when the signature was reached, a slim, black-eyed boy warmly grasped my hand, asking the question which seems to echo through Mexico:

“How is Ricardo?”

I gave them greetings from their imprisoned leader. He was their hero, their master-mind, whose years of unflinching struggle against the crushing powers of the Dictator had kept hope in Mexico alive; and in return I heard the news of the revolutionary movement.

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Hellraisers Journal: “Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution” by John Murray, Part II: The Rio Blanco Massacre

2nd March 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

Quote John Murray re Rio Blanco Martyrs, ISR p653, Mar 1909 ———-

Hellraisers Journal – Tuesday March 2, 1909
At Mexico City – John Murray Learns Details of Rio Blanco Massacre

John Murray recently returned from Mexico and has written an article about that experience for this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review. Below we offer part two of that article in which Mr. Murray arrives in Mexico City and hears the story of the Rio Blanco Massacre.

Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution

BY JOHN MURRAY
[Part II]
—–

—–

Black clouds gathered against the mountains and as the City of Mexico was reached the deluge broke.

A sandal-footed, brass-tagged “cargador” seized my bags and carried them from the Pullman’s steps to a blue-flagged coach.

I kept my face glued to the carriage window and asked myself this question: “Mexico, Mexico, Mexico is—what?” The answer seemed to rise from the passing throng of bent-backed, human burden bearers, “Mexico is a land of cargadores.”

With leather thongs passed across their foreheads and around their heads, cargadores carrying as much as three hundred pounds, trotted by without a stumble. And in the steps of these men followed the women and children likewise loaded.

In no other country in the world does the human back so stagger under a dead weight as here in Mexico.

Arriving at the hotel in front of the Alameda, I went immediately to my room, locked the door and got out my list of addresses in cipher. It was a wearisome task to figure them out, one by one, but I dared not run the risk of being taken by the police and having them find names of Mexican revolutionists given me by the Junta in Los Angeles—that would mean prison for all. One person in Mexico in particular had been recommended to me by Magon. I would see him first.

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Hellraisers Journal: “Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution” by John Murray, Part I: Train Ride to Mexico City

1st March 20192nd March 2019 Janet RayeHellraisers Journal

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

Hellraisers Journal – Monday March 1, 1909
From Juarez to Mexico City – John Murray Talks with an American Cane-Grower

John Murray recently returned from Mexico and has written an article about that experience for this month’s edition of the International Socialist Review. Below we offer part one of that article in which Mr. Murray travels from Ciudad Juarez to Mexico City and speaks with an American cane-grower along the way.

Mexico’s Peon-Slaves Preparing for Revolution

BY JOHN MURRAY
[Part I]
—–

The third uprising of the Liberal Party failed but another is preparing in Mexico that will not be so easily snuffed out by President Diaz and his “partners,” so asserts the writer of this article, John Murray, who saw Mexico a few months ago in the fever-heat of revolt. With credentials from the revolutionary leaders he traveled from one Liberal Party group to another and was shown by them the underside of Mexico-the Mexico that President Diaz hides from view and guards with guns in hourly fear that it may rise and end his dictatorship.—Editor.

HE warm clasp of Tom’s hand tempted me to talk—in a moment, and my loose tongue let slip enough to give hint of my errand to Mexico. Now Tom Hart was the last man that I should have supposed would show the white feather—a bear hunter, mind you, and grizzlies at that.

“Look here, Bud,” he spoke with a down-drop of his eyes that was new to me, “don’t be so foolish as to rub the President’s hair the wrong way. You don’t know Mexico—it’s prison or death down here. You’re fooled if you think for a moment that this is the United States. Why, I have seen a bunch of rurales ride into a village before sun-up, where things were not going to suit the Diaz government, and call out the whole population, line ’em up and shoot down every tenth man. No trials. Nothing. That’s Mexico. And don’t you go for to stand on your dignity as an American citizen, thinking that you’re safer than a native to speak your mind free. I’ve seen Americans—yes, and there’s three of ’em right now in the prison of San Juan de Ulua—who might just as well be Esquimaux for all the protection that their nationality gives ’em. For God’s sake, old man”—Tom’s pleading startled me, for if he were possessed of such a crushing fear of Diaz what chance had I to escape contagion?—”don’t do anything to offend the Mexican government.”

“It’s too late, Tom, I’m into it now—up to my neck. You never held back when we were after the big-footed grizzly that killed our cattle in the pines back of the Loma Pelon ranch. The game I am after now is news—the true story of Mexico’s sandaled-footed burden-bearers and their nearness to revolt.”

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