Page:Hands off Mexico.djvu/18

 We are told that we must send an army into Mexico to protect American lives. One answer to this is that such a course would not protect American lives, but would sacrifice them. Not only would the lives of Americans now in Mexico be in greater danger than ever before, but there is every reason to expect that far more Americans would fall in battle than the total number of Americans now resident in that country.

Another answer is that Americans are now reasonably safe in Mexico, and always have been. The existing Mexican Government does not kill Americans nor incite its people to do so. Considering our various invasions, the absence of anti-American riots is nothing short of amazing. Some Americans have been killed, nearly all of them by outlaws in isolated districts where they persisted in going, sometimes against the advice of the Mexican Government and even of the American Government. The list of Americans killed in Mexico in a period of nearly nine years, made public by our Ambassador in July (1919), totaled only 225. This number includes members of our military forces killed during our various invasions. It includes Americans who were members of Mexican rebel forces. It includes Americans who were killed by American citizens. It includes Americans who were killed presumably by members of a rebel force that was paid and supported by American oil corporations. It includes Americans murdered in a rage by a bandit leader who had been supported and then abandoned by the present Administration.

During these same years the murders of Americans, Mexicans, and other "nationals" in our own country run into the thousands. They include over four hundred lynchings, a number of bloody race riots, and numerous homicides committed for the sake of robbery. They include a far greater number of Mexicans killed by Americans than the number of Americans killed in the same period in Mexico.

Following the Villa raid, in 1916, uncounted numbers of peaceful, unoffending, and defenseless Mexicans, many of them small farmers on the American side of the border, were murdered by border rangers, local police officers, or others intent upon "making the Mexicans pay for Villa's raid," or "making this a white man's country." According to a report of an investigator appointed by Colonel H. J. Slocum, U. S. A., rendered