Page:Hands off Mexico.djvu/45

  to Wall Street met with official protests, often of a threatening nature, from him.

Although he had diagnosed the cause of Mexican unrest as "a fight for the land," and had endorsed that fight, yet from the beginning down to the present he has offered representations in opposition to the program of land nationalization and distribution which the Mexicans have tried to put into effect, as well as in opposition to all efforts to assume adequate control of mining, oil, and other great industries; to conserve the natural resources, especially in oil; to revoke invalid and oppressive concessions, to effect legal confiscations, to democratize finance, to curb or destroy the monopolies created by the old regime, or adequately to tax or control vested interests anywhere.

Every such representation involving a threat constituted an act of intervention and an effort to over-ride Mexican sovereignty for purely property reasons.

The Wilson policy of serving vested interests even went so far as to involve a stubborn and prolonged opposition to the Mexican party most genuinely committed to reform, and, by the same sign, of aid and comfort to counter-revolutionary elements.

As no other Mexican leader has ever been so violently hated and plotted against by the vested interests as Carranza, so none—not even Huerta—has met with such embarrassing hostility from the Wilson Administration, and there is every reason to believe that this hostility was due solely to the unwillingness of Carranza to accord to the foreign exploiters of Mexico the guarantees of governmental benevolence which they desired.

The current falsehood that Carranza owes his tenure to the favor of Wilson rests chiefly upon the facts that Wilson did not recognize Huerta, that he ultimately recognized Carranza, and that on one occasion he permitted Carranza troops to cross American territory in their campaign against Villa. How fallacious the reasoning is can only be disclosed by sketching the relations of Wilson to the various Mexican leaders from the beginning.

 

11.

WILSON'S AID TO HUERTA

There seems to be an almost general belief that Wilson was unalterably opposed to Huerta from the first, the reason being 