by B. TRAVEN
In this way the Indian, Gregorio, through the great goodness of his more instructed and Catholic fellow citizens and fellow men, was saved from the prison which others of his fellow Christians had built and were keeping ready for him. The hope which his wife, his children, his mother, his friends, and his village had of seeing him again would be fulfilled, accurately reckoned, in two thousand six hundred and thirty-four years, on the assumption that he bought nothing, not even a grain of salt, at the company’s tienda more than was absolutely necessary.
7
The immediate benefits which accrued to don Ramón and don Gabriel were that don Ramón now had a reliable boy to accompany him at the bare cost of his food and that don Gabriel had sixty pesos in his pocket.
These sixty pesos, a larger sum than don Gabriel had had in his pocket for two years, fired his ambition. In his best days as a cattle dealer he had never made so much on one deal as he had now by dealing mercifully with an Indian.
Don Ramón treated don Gabriel as an old friend and made no secret of the business he conducted. He told him all about it in detail and of all the ruses which had to be employed to make it profitable. You had only to avoid open man-stealing. The Mexican citizen, he explained, was free. Slavery was strictly forbidden and severely punished. No Mexican citizen, whether of Spanish, mestizo, or Indian descent, could be kept or sold as a slave.
But debt was not slavery. A man, any man, was as free to contract debt as not to contract it; and if a debt was forced upon him, under threat of death or by torture, then it was not accounted a debt in law. Nobody compelled the Indian to get into debt, to drink, to set off fireworks in honor of the saints, or to buy his wife necklaces of glass beads and glittering earrings. There was no reason to call Mexico uncivilized because the dictatorship recognized debt and supported the creditor in exacting payments. He who has contracted a debt must pay it—that was good old Roman justice, respected by every country which called itself civilized. If the debtor could not pay in money he had to pay with whatever else he had. If he had nothing but his labor he had to pay with his labor.
“And over and above all that, and however you look at it,” don Ramón went on, putting forward the just and Christian argument for his trade, “the monterías and coffee plantations must have labor if the prosperity of the country is to be maintained and the Republic of Mexico to have an honored and respected place among the nations of the world. Only work, hard, indefatigable, and unremitting work, can put our beloved Republic on top. These are the very words our president, don Porfirio, used in his New Year’s proclamation to the Mexican people.”
“Yes, you’re quite right,” don Gabriel agreed. “He has said it a hundred times—and it’s the plain truth.”
“You’re right, amigo mio,” said don Ramón. “Cattle dealing is a great deal more cruel and merciless. I have seen that often enough. You have a fine horse, gentle as a lamb, used to good treatment and kind words, and then the buyer comes along, a rough, brutal fellow, well known for his cruelty to animals. He looks the horse over, and the animal instinctively feels the man’s brutality from the first touch of his hand. It trembles and sweat breaks out on it. But it is not asked whether it wishes to go with the dealer or not. The owner needs the money and must sell the horse. I cannot ask horses and mules whether they want to belong to this man or that. The idea is absurd. But I do ask a peon whether he will go to a montería or not. Didn’t we ask Gregorio a moment ago whether he would rather go to a montería or to prison? We asked him and what did he say?”
“That he preferred the montería,” said don Gabriel.
“Good. And that is how it is in the trade. It’s all aboveboard. There’s no compulsion. But all the same it is made clear that debts must be paid. The business depends on convincing the people that their debts must be paid and that you give them the opportunity of paying them.”
8
Don Gabriel quickly took to it. He saw there was a fortune to be made, without real effort and without the need of allowing a margin for losses. He did not consider don Ramón any brighter than himself; and no intelligence was required. There were thousands of indebted peons and independent Indians in the district he was best acquainted with. In his own village alone there were more than a dozen who were deeply enough in his debt to give him the right to proceed against them in any way and by any means not expressly forbidden by the law. It was not illegal to offer them the chance of contracting with a montería as a means of freeing themselves from debt. On the contrary, the government was glad to see debts paid off, and even more glad that the companies who paid it well for licenses and concessions should be kept supplied with labor, so that production could be maintained and exports increased. Exports were necessary to the finances of the country and kept up the value of the peso on the money markets of London and New York. It was therefore a highly patriotic activity to supply the coffee plantations and the monterías with labor and to keep the supply constant; it was just as important as dying gloriously and miserably for the honor of your country assured of the joys of paradise.
Neither don Gabriel nor don Ramón would have hesitated a moment to serve his country or to put a bullet, or half a dozen bullets, through anybody whose patriotism was in question—their country first and last. And it couldn’t hurt an Indian if he, too, by his labor in the monterías made his contribution to the fame and reputation and financial stability of the country to which he owed his life, his nationality, and the roof over his head. What is a man, even a poor ignorant Indian, without a country to belong to, without the right to call himself a member of the noblest, bravest, and most glorious nation on earth? He is nothing. A worm. A flea. A louse. A trembling reed broken by the storm. He has no place in the universe—a speck of dust driven hither and thither by every puff of wind.
It was a praiseworthy deed to release the Indian from the fate of being a speck of dust and to offer him the chance of helping to give Mexico a stable position on the money markets of the world. And it was pleasing in the sight of the Church too; for even the Church suffered when business was bad.
What had a lousy Indian to look forward to in his village? And what did he do for the glory of his country? He paid no duties or taxes—apart from the heavy tax on every glass of brandy he drank, on every cigarette he smoked, on every length of cotton he bought at a price which took into account twice over the heavy taxes the shopkeeper himself paid.
It was his duty to do more for the State than pay indirect taxes on his personal indulgences. This duty he could best fulfill by expending his strength to the last gasp in the holy and glorious task of increasing production for export.
To deal in cattle was mere self-seeking. To recruit Indian labor in order to put production on a competitive level was, on the other hand, a patriotic activity. As long as there is an unshakable conviction such as this, it is impossible to commit injustice or practice cruelty, to break up family life, to rob a man of all that life means to him. If you find the right formula, any crime can be justified and even sanctified in your own eyes and before the world.
9
Don Ramón had found the right formula, or rather, he had discovered it in the speeches of that great statesman, don Porfirio, and adapted it to his own purposes.
There was not a crime he did not have to commit in the task of rounding up labor, if he meant to thrive and to please his masters. Falsification of the accounts of Indians was the least of the crimes he committed in order to make them sign on.
Often he was generous and distributed brandy lavishly in some place where the secretary had the only brandy shop. This profited the secretary and the profit put him in a good mood.
When enough brandy had been given away to make the Indians quarrelsome, Don Ramón found ways of fanning the flame so that the quarrels ended in a free-for-all. As soon as enough men were involved, and a few killed, arrests were made. Next morning the secretary came down on each of the prisoners with multas of fifty to eighty pesos. Don Ramón paid the fines to
the secretary and the men were saddled with the debt. The secretary then witnessed the contracts and don Ramón had netted fifteen or twenty men at one cast. If a man refused to contract himself, the secretary charged him with manslaughter and he was given the choice of going with don Ramón to the monterías or going before a judge. He always chose the montería.
Don Ramón did not always succeed in getting the men involved in a fight. Either they were more good-humored than suited him, or else—and this was more often the case—their wives and mothers employed every device they could think of to entice the men home when they were drunk. Once in their huts it was a simple matter for the women to cajole or force them to lie down and sleep off their debauch. After they were asleep they did not as a rule get up again until they were sober.
Sometimes, however, when the men were half drunk, he could get them to accept a sum of money as an advance on contract wages. Once they had taken the advance and named their sureties, the agreement was binding and he had his men.
There were agents, don Ramón among them, who made use of traveling traders to entice the men to buy more than they had the money to pay for. The agents were only too pleased to advance them any sum they liked against contract wages.
Often, with the help of unscrupulous and avaricious secretaries or other officials, a whole troop of Indians, who were on their way through a place to some market or fiesta, were surrounded and put under arrest. They were then accused of having an infectious disease, or of not being vaccinated, or of coming from a place under quarantine for cattle disease or smallpox. The Indians did not understand what it was all about, but when the tumult finally died down they found themselves peons in a montería from which there was no escape.
It might happen that a trader or a Mexican ranchero was murdered and robbed on the road somewhere—or else there was a rumor that it had happened, although nobody could say with certainty who the murdered man was, what he was called, where he had lived, and who had missed him. But articles which presumably had belonged to the victim appeared on roads traversed by Indians from independent villages, and the Indians picked them up, believing that they did not belong to anybody. On arriving in the next town they were arrested and searched. The articles were found on them, and the whole troop, often including the women and children, were charged with the murder and robbery and as a punishment handed over to an agent who carried them off to the monterías.
Or it might happen that someone had cut a telephone wire and stolen a few yards of it. The village of independent Indians nearest the place where the telephone wire had been damaged was surrounded by soldiers. All the men were arrested, three or four were hanged from a tree in the plaza, and two dozen strong and healthy young men were sent to the monterías. There was no inquiry to find out who had cut the wire, though an agent or one of his underlings might well have been suspected of having done it. The Indians were charged and that settled it.
A high enough commission was paid to make it worthwhile to employ any device to recruit labor for the companies.
It did happen, certainly, that the agents went so far that even Mexican finqueros complained to the government of their brutality. Sometimes they were moved by humanity, but actually the finqueros and other owners of large properties were not interested in the fate of independent Indians. These independent settlements were against their own interests, for it sometimes happened that a few families of peons, who were tied to a finca and stocked it with laborers and so had a money value like any other cattle, left the finca as soon as they were free of debt and joined an independent Indian community. In this way the finqueros lost their laborers.
It was therefore an advantage for finqueros if the independent Indians were not too happy in their independence. The peons on a finca could not be recruited except with the permission of the finquero, and so they were safer from the agents.
Nevertheless, the large landowners had a certain inducement to complain sometimes of the agents’ illegal and violent methods; for if the independent Indians were treated with too brutal a defiance of the law by merciless agents and avaricious officials, they abandoned their villages and, taking to the bush and jungle, formed marauding bands which made the roads unsafe and did not even respect the cattle and buildings of the finqueros. The damage which was caused before the government could send soldiers was so great that the finqueros had good reason to protest when the recruiting agents went too far. If complaints were too numerous and if their methods were found to be downright criminal, and if, in addition, paragraphs appeared in American newspapers giving particulars of the barbarous conditions in Mexico, then a few agents were arrested and tried.
The agents had only one line of defense—patriotism: nothing they did was done for business reasons, still less from greed, but simply from genuine and unalloyed patriotism.
It was easy to prove it. Don Porfirio, the president of the Mexican Republic, had, in exchange for hard cash, given foreign companies licenses to denude the forests of valuable timber which were one of the great resources of the country. The more the national resources were developed the higher was the country’s credit on the international money market. It was therefore a highly patriotic act to make these riches available to the rest of the world. But the companies could not exploit these riches if they had no labor; without labor the best of concessions is worthless and the wealth of the country lay idle in distant jungles and primeval forests. It was a matter of patriotism to produce the laborers. If they did not come of their own accord they had to be brought by force in order to promote the wealth of the country. It was their duty as citizens, just as it was the duty of citizens to march through a barrage if their country called upon them. The individual has no personal right in his own existence, still less to his labor, if the State chooses to dispose of it otherwise.
No judge could withstand such arguments. The judge was an official of the State, and his existence as a judge, his high social position, and his prospects depended on the prosperity of the country.
The trial ended in the judge’s thanking the accused agents in the name of the country for the hard and thankless work they were compelled to undertake in the cause of its welfare and prosperity. No Indian who had been a victim of forcible methods was allowed to give evidence, because an Indian made an unreliable witness and had no right to appear before a judge except in the capacity of an accused person. He had nothing but his labor that he could offer to the State. So it was his duty as decreed by God to increase the greatness and glory of his country by working in the monterías. Of course, the agents were told not to carry their recruiting methods too far, and to respect the personal rights of every Indian, who after all was a man and a baptized Catholic like everyone else.
The agents promised to do so, affirming at the same time that they had done nothing wrong or in defiance of the law, as anyone could convince himself from the books and the way the accounts were kept.
“You see,” said don Ramón as he brought his exposition to a close, “the wheels are well oiled. I have pretty much a free hand. I am on excellent terms with the governor and with all other officials who could make themselves a nuisance. The jefe políticos, the local presidentes, and the chiefs of police have got to live too, and I never forget it. What does a lousy Indian matter? The world is no better or worse whether he lives or dies. But it is of some importance if he works. We only trouble about oxen and horses when they work; if they are no more use either to work or to sell, then their lives don’t matter a cent.”
10
It had been in don Gabriel’s mind to go into this business on his own and to stand on his own feet from the start, but don Ramón’s lengthy exposition decided him that it would be better to enter into a partnership. There might be snares and pitfalls with which you had to be familiar if you wanted business to go smoothly. He was clever enough not to let slip an opportunity which chance had so unexpectedly put into his hands.
“I have been thinking, don Ramón,” he said, “while you ha
ve been explaining the business to me, and it seems to me that you would do well to take a partner. To come straight to the point: How would you like it if we two carried on the business together in the future?”
Don Ramón was taken aback by this sudden proposal, but as a man of business he saw at once that it offered many advantages. Don Gabriel was acquainted with districts which he scarcely knew at all. He was on good terms with many other secretaries of Indian villages and was a friend of the jefe político, and he knew all the finqueros of the districts where the market for buying Indian labor ought to be good. With don Gabriel as a partner don Ramón could greatly extend the sphere of his operations.
There was another reason why don Ramón felt tempted to take a partner. It was this: Don Ramón took his contract laborers only as far as Hucutsín, where he handed them over to the overseer of the montería on the day of the festival of the Candelaria after the contracts had been stamped by the mayor. His responsibility ended when he had got his men to Hucutsín by that day, and for every laborer delivered in good order he got thirty pesos. But if he took his gang as far as the montería which had commissioned him, he would get fifty pesos a man. Some of the companies paid as much as sixty pesos.
This journey with them through the jungle was, however, dangerous and fatiguing. He had only once undertaken it, and then he had employed Ladinos to help him, and these Mexican labor drivers were expensive. They were unreliable, too, when the Indians became refractory on the march. They had their fixed pay and would not bother very much if some of the men tried to escape. Having no interest in the booty, they saw no reason to put themselves out. With a partner it would be another matter. He would have a stake in the business and so would be on the watch day and night to see that not a man was missing.