VENGEANGE OF THE MAYANS.

Oamaru Mail, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 10516, 26 July 1910, Page 1

VENGEANGE OF THE MAYANS.

STORY OF A TEN YEARS' WAR IN MEXICO. :■ : y--The news from Mexico .recently that the Ma van Indians had attacked and .sacked the frontier town of Valladolid. —Mexico's Peshawar—calls attention to :i prolonged War which-has been, .raging for ten vears practically unnoticed, ont.sido the-area of- actual hostilities... ■;. It-is the war. of a savage race against, a ruthlessly cruel, if civilised, oppressor. The savages'now appear, to have enlisted as leaders white men skilled m strategy, and have'for the moment, ac least, gained the upper hand. . ' "Until recently few people liave had any coherent idea as to who the Mayan Indians are, or where they came from. In the Might of later research, however, thev. appear to have originally come from India and to be the survivors of a race which was subdued and either massacred or reduced* to slavery by toe Spaniards in -the sixteenth century. . Their power was so utterly annihilated at -the time, and their survivors have been subiected to such persecution ever since, that the fact that they are left alive to light or sack a city, seems miraculous. • ''.'.-' General Bravo, the Mexican warrior who has the ten years' campaign m hand—the provisioning of the troops and' similar arrangements—has .made millions out of it. 'To. quote the latest and most .authoritative work on the country, "the' American Egypt":— Eastern Yucatan has been called his pocket '• property. lie has amassed there since the war started a fortune■ 0:1 manv millions of dollars, and his methods may lie guessed at train, his own-cynical confession that he is 'the sleeping partner of every merchant in the territory." This interesting record of travel in Yucatan, bv Messrs Arnold and Tabor Vrost, is published bv Messrs Hutchinson -Vnd Co.. and amounts to a justification of the reported achievement- of the Mavans. It is an exposure of the appalling Mexican methods of.treating the Indians. The trouble began when the Mexicans found out that ihe Mayans preferred trading with the British in 'Honduras to being robbed by the Yucatanesc. The Mexicans accused the British of selling arms to the Indians: and then, to make a cause of war. granted concessions to Mexican companies for working the maiioganv, chicle, and other' products of the Mayan forests, 'which belonged by treaty to the Mayans themselves. ' '\Yhat 'happened is thus explained by Messrs Arnold and Foster: — The Indians naturally resented the companies' trespass, and after due warnings, killed the trespassers: This was inst' what Mexico expected, and wanted. Talking blather about unprovoked outrages, cannibals, and a menace lit' savages to the republic-, she started a war 'of extermination. From -the first it was as cowardly as it is now. Troops were sent before dawn to surnri.se defenceless villages'. Men, women, and children were butchered' as thev slept, in .one ease—that of Chan- ■ .-iiot;-. a settlement of many hundreds 'was so successfully wiped out that when • we visited the district the inhabitants numbered about thirty. To the south of the peninsula the same policy' has been pursued. The Indians have been ruthlessly massacred whenever a cowardly opportunity offered. The Mexican troops have invariably gi>t the wor-'t of it in such open fighting as the country permits. "The'failure of the Mexican troops.may be attributed to more causes than the venality of Genera! ignaeio Bravo. As a matter of economy convicts are taken from the gaols and put into tlie fighting line. These criminals desert aim turn into brigands who levy war on their own account. —war against evcryhody—fjsid any one of their;, it is said, is ready to cut a throat for a dollar. The convicts lett in the ranks are miserably underfed and maltreafea. These are the men upon whom the Indians have now turned. The latter have also attacked the administrator." whom thev believe to be responsible for the aggressions of these pestilent warriors, and have slaughtered all of them thev could hud in the frontier town oS Valladolid. ..... This city is. thus described: —\ auadolid— railhead, frontier town —is the back or beyond in Yucatan. To-day iis the most important township on tin border line dividing the ensiavcc Indians from those few thousands whe are still maintaining their independence

In the revolt of 1847 and in all the lesser Indian rising;; it has been the .iumping-off ground' for the rebels. It is. a long, dirty street of shabby houses. ending in" a ,v.eed-clu.%ed, down-on-its-luck sort of plaza, at one side of which is a huge gaunt stuccoed church sur-rounded'"-by tumbling three-foot walls. The whole place has a shame-faced, seen-better-days kind of. air; and if it is indeed true that it has claims to be reckoned a health resort, one feels,, as did the martyr 10 gout when recommended to a very dull town for its baths, that "one prefers, the gout." . The despatches regarding the outbreak were meagre, but they indicated that the insurgents were sacking and burning towns and massacring, tire inhabitants. Messrs Arnold and Frost say of the natives: —Tin- Mayans certainly are cruel, and they have become crafty and treacherous by long centuries of brutality and persecution. They have been guilty, too, of bloody reprisals: but mark that word: The story of the. Spanish domination of the whole of Yucatan is a story of bloodshed, of basest cruelty, of the most hideous lust.