BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

REPRESSIVE ELEMENTS OF THE DIAZ MACHINE 155
more or less into the Mexican papers. I remember that
during my first visit to Mexico, in the fall of 1908, the
papers reported an epidemic of typhus. For the first
three days the number of new cases were daily recorded,
but after that the news was suppressed. The condition
threatened to become too great a scandal, for on the
third day there were 176 new cases!
According to an old prison director whom I interviewed,
at least twenty per cent of the prisoners at
Belem contract tuberculosis. This prison director spent
many years in the prison at Puebla. There, he says,
seventy-five per cent of tile men who go into the place
Come out, if they ever come out, with tuberculosis.
Torture such as was employed in the Middle Ages
is used in Belem to secure confessions. When a man
is taken to the police station, if he is suspected of a
felony he is strung up by the thumbs until lie tells.
Another method used is that of refusing the prisoner
drink. He is given food but no water until he
chokes. Ofter prisoners declare before the 1dge that
they have been tortured into confession, but no investigation
is made. There are—inevitably—records of
innocent men who have confessed to murder in order
to escape the torture of the thumbs or of the thirst.
While I was in Mexico two Americans suspected of robbery
were reported in the newspapers as having been
arrested, their wrists strapped to the bars of their cells,
and their finger nails jerked out with steel pincers.
This incident was reported to our State Department,
but no action was taken.
San Juan de Ulua is an old military fortress situated
in the harbor of Veracruz—a fortress which has been
turned into a prison. Officially San Juan de Ulua is
known as a military prison, but in fact it is a political