BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

CHAPTER IX
THE CRUSHING OF OPPOSITION PARTIES
Men and women on our continent are daily suffering
death, imprisonment or exile for contending for
those political rights which we have considered as ours
since the birth of our country, rights of free speech,
of free press, the right of assembly, the right to vote
to decide who shall hold the political offices and govern
the land, the right to be secure in person and property.
For these things hundreds of men and women have
died within the past twelve months, tens of thousands
within the past thirty years, in a country divided from
ours only by a shallow river and an imaginary geographical
line.
In Mexico today are being lived life stories such as
carry one's imagination back to the days of the French
Revolution and the times when constitutional government,
that giant which was destined to complete the
change from the Middle Ages to Modernity, was being
born. In those days men yielded up their lives for
republicanism. Men are doing the same today in Mexico.
The repressive part of the Diaz governmental machine
which I described in the last previous chapter
—the army, the rurales, the ordinary police, the secret
police, the acordada—are perhaps one-fifth for protection
against common criminals and four-fifths for the
suppression of democratic movements among the people.
The deadly certainty of this repressive machine