SLAVERY HORRORS.

Evening Post, Volume LXXIX, Issue 66, 19 March 1910, Page 10

SLAVERY HORRORS.

m GRAVE CHARGES AGAINST MEXICANS. The American Magazine for Februaiy publishes another article on the alleged slave trade hoirors in Mexico, following up its exposure of the existence of slavery on the tobacco plantations in Mexico, detailed in its December number. Tho present article is from the pen of Mr. Harman Whitaker, who han just returned from a tour of the Mexican rubber plantations, where he was an eye-witness of the scenes he relates. The writer gives harrowing details of the awful existence dragged out by tho "enganchados," or labourers, malo and female, wno are kept continually in debt to their employers, and are practically slaves. Mr. Whitaker declare* that men, women, and children are worked to death daily in the plantations, driven by slave managers, who un> whips or prods until the wretched labourers collup«c from Fhecr exhaustion, and arc left to die in the fields. At night they are driven into heavily-guarded buildings and penned up without a regard for the decencies of life. Disease, under Mich conditions, is rampant among them, especially as there ip no pretence of sanitary methods. Itching bo res, eryt>ipelag, and blood- poisoning from insect bite*, declares the writer, are treated nliko with boracic acid, sprinkled on top of the sweat and dirt. Naturally, tho disease* are not cured, and the writer describes one cape that he wilnested of a sick man who wan given up an incurable, being driven to work "to get the laht that* in him," as the planter put- it. "Prodd«d along with machete pricks till he gained the plantation, the poor fellow fell down and was beaten to death." Another example of the horror* which came under his notice is described by Mr. Whitaker as follows : "My horn nhiod at a bundle of rags, which turned out to be a woman lying flat on her face in the mud of a marsh. The sight of a. white man was sufficient to cause her to rise and stagger forward another mile. When I mentioned the cate to the planter, he raid, 'Oh, she'll crawl off and die somewhere in the jungle.'" Planter« nre not supposed tc have the "enganchndos" longer than six months, but they generally manage to keep them twelve, nnd by that timo those who survive are broken and disease-ridden wrecks.