No. 501.
Mr. Romero to Mr. Bayard.
New York, March 19, 1887. (Received March 22.)
My Dear Mr. Bayard: I have to-day had the honor to receive your note of yesterday, in which, referring to our conversation of the 8th instant, relative to the punishment of the parties who are responsible for the occurrences which took place at Nogales, Ariz., on the 3d, you are pleased to inform me that there has been a misunderstanding on my part of the sense of the aforesaid conversation, and request me, if such was the fact, to assist you in correcting that misunderstanding.
I gladly telegraphed, without delay, the contents of your note to which I am now replying to Mr. Mariscal, and on the 11th instant I had communicated to him, likewise by telegraph, your views on this subject, as you are pleased to express them to me in your aforesaid note.
Desiring to keep you informed of the views and intentions of my Government concerning those who are responsible for the incident at Nogales, I called, on the 8th instant, at the Department of State for the purpose of informing you of the contents of two telegrams which I had received from my Government, dated respectively City of Mexico, March 5 and 7, and a written memorandum of which 1 left with you.
From the conversation which you had with me on that day I understood that, in your opinion, that question might be settled either by the Mexican Government’s surrendering the persons responsible for those occurrences to the competent authorities of this country in order that they might be punished here, or by their trial and punishment by the Mexican authorities. This was the understanding which I communicated to Mr. Mariscal by my telegram of that date.
From the conversation which I had with you on the 11th instant, in which you were pleased to show me the telegram you had received from Mr. Manning, bearing date of the 8th, and informing you that Mr. Mariscal had offered to surrender Gutierrez, I saw that either there had been a misunderstanding on my part of our conversation of the 8th or that your views had undergone some modification, since on the 11th you were pleased to state more definitely the views contained in your note of yesterday. I consequently, on that same day, sent a telegram to Mr. Mariscal, informing him that you thought that the question ought to be settled by the surrender of Gutierrez to the authorities of Arizona and the punishment by Mexico of the persons who took him by force from the possession of said authorities, and by another telegram of to-day I give him a summary of the contents of your note to which I am now replying.
I should be exceedingly sorry if my telegram of the 8th to Mr. Mariscal had been instrumental in causing a change in the decision of the [Page 873] Mexican Government with regard to the punishment of the persons who are responsible for the occurrences at Nogales; but I can assure you that I am certain that this has not been the case, because in all the telegrams that it has addressed to me (the contents of which I have brought to your knowledge), it has uniformly said that they will be punished by the Government of Mexico, and the misunderstanding that-may have existed on my part was rectified as soon as I communicated to it your views on this subject, as stated in your conversation of the 11th.
I am, etc.