MEXICO: Apparent Failure

Stiff was Mexico’s reply last week to the stiff note of U. S. Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who demanded three weeks ago prompt compensation for $10,000,000 worth of lands seized since 1927 from U. S. farmers and ranchers in Mexico. To Mr. Hull’s assertion that “The taking of property without compensation is not expropriation, it is confiscation,” Mexican Foreign Secretary Eduardo Hay replied that no principle of international law “makes obligatory the payment of immediate compensation, nor even deferred compensation, for expropriations of a general and impersonal character. . . .”

Señor Hay contrasted the desires of Mexicans with the claims of U. S. citizens : “On the one hand, are weighed the conquests of justice and the uplift of an entire people, and on the other hand the purely pecuniary interests of certain individuals.” This, said Señor Hay with masterly blandness, justified Mexico’s “apparent failure” to pay for what she took.

To show that Foreign Secretary Hay meant business, the Mexican Official Gazette announced on the day the note was delivered that 1,800 acres of pasture land in the State of Jalisco had just been confiscated from Dora and Oscar Newton, U. S. citizens. In point of plain fact, Mexico had told Mr. Hull to go jump in the Rio Grande; that U. S. citizens who own little as well as big properties in Mexico will get paid for their seizure when, as and if the Mexican Government feels like it. All he proposed was that the two Governments appoint representatives to fix the value of the claims, and decide on a manner of payment in accordance with “Mexican law.”

Last week the Government of President Lázaro Cárdenas remained financially above water largely by reason of U. S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr.’s continued purchases of Mexican silver. Mexico was in the grip of an economic upset. One day last week the great square in front of the Presidential Palace was turned over to the 25,000 demonstrators of the CTM (Confederation of Mexican Workers). The CTM Secretary General, intense Vicente Lombardo Toledano urged support of the Mexican New Deal, proclaimed: “All property owners and capitalists in Mexico are Fascists!”