Page:Mexico and its reconstruction.djvu/306

288 as a semi-hero, if he confines his operations to the other side of the boundary. Evidence of guilt is hard to secure partly because of this sympathy and partly because of fear of retaliation by friends of the accused. Dissatisfaction is sure to result, especially when one country does not or cannot maintain as efficient a police patrol as does its neighbor. Add to these elements a roving population, one that gives only nominal respect to either sovereignty, such as the border Indian tribes were, and trouble is very likely to rise. If either side yields to the temptation to enlist these aborigines in its own military forces, either as guides or as soldiers, as both Mexico and the United States formerly did, clash is almost unavoidable. Looked at long after the event, it is not remarkable that there were such acrid interchanges between the two governments. It is to the credit of both that wiser counsels prevailed and that the many technical causes of war were kept in their proper perspective.

The meticulous insistence on respect for technical rights under international law, which some border incidents involved, makes the history of some of them amusing as well as illustrative of frontier conditions and psychology. One of these was the much-discussed case of Jesus García arising in 1896.

The incident arose in Nogales, a town located on both sides of the border, with a street running diagonally through it which crosses the boundary line. García was a powerful man described as "a low-down desperado," who was at the time of the incident "on a general drunk," "bulldozing the saloons." He and another Mexican came out of a saloon on the American side of the line