BarbarousMexico JOHN KENNETH TURNER

FOUR MEXICAN STRIKES 203
have been taken care of by the local police force, which
was strong.
Nevertheless, the soldiers appeared, leaping upon the
scene as if out of the ground. Volley after volley was
discharged into the crowd at close range. There was
no resistance whatsoever. The people were shot down
in the streets with no regard for age or sex, many women
and children being among the slain. They were pursued
to their homes, dragged from their hiding places
and shot to death. Sonic fled to the hills, where they
were hunted for days and shot on sight. A company
of rural guards which refused to fire on the crowd when
the soldiers first arrived were exterminated on the spot.
There are no official figures of the number killed in
the Rio Blanco massacre, and if there were any, of
course they would be false. Estimates run from two
hundred to eight hundred. My information for the
Rio Blanco strike was obtained from numerous widely
different sources—from an officer of the company itself,
from a friend of the governor who rode with the rurales
as they chased the fleeing strikers through the hills, from
a labor editor who escaped after being hotly pursued
for days, from survivors of the strike, from others who
had heard the story from eye witnesses.
"I don't know how many were killed," the man who
rode with the rurales told me, "but on the first night
after the soldiers came I saw two flat cars piled high with
dead and mangled bodies, and there were a good many
killed after the first night."
"Those flat cars," the same informant told me, "were
hauled away by special train that night, hurried to
Veracruz, where the bodies were dumped in the harbor
as food for the sharks."
Strikers who were not punished by death were pun-