Mr. Hay to Mr. Merry.
Washington, April 6, 1899.
Sir: Under date of January 8, 1897, my predecessor, Mr. Secretary Olney, addressed an instruction, No. 526, to your predecessor, Mr. Lewis Baker, as follows:
Sir: The Department has been informed by Mr. Thomas O’Hara, consul at San Juan del Norte, under date of December 5, 1896, that the Nicaraguan Government has appointed Col. Francisco Torres as governor intendente of Bluefields; that he is the same Torres who, at the request of this Government, was dismissed from office in 1894 (see Senate Executive Decument, No. 20, Fifty-third Congress, third session, “Affairs at Bluefields,” Documents Nos. 46, 51, 53, and 55), and that he has held public office nearly all the time the consul has been in Nicaragua, a period of nearly twenty-two months. Persistence in such ail appointment can not be deemed other than an unfriendly act, and you are instructed to make an earnest remonstrance against it.
I am, etc.,
Richard Olney.
The correspondence referred to in the foregoing instruction can be more conveniently consulted in the volume of Foreign Relations of the United States, 1894, pages 465 to 477.
Attention may be especially directed to the statement made by the Nicaraguan minister at this capital to Mr. Gresham, July 9, 1894, as follows:
Your excellency is not aware that my Government decreed the removal of Governor Torres as soon as he was suspected of complicity in the flight of Arguello, and that step was taken before Mr. Baker brought to the knowledge of our minister of foreign affairs the purport of your excellency’s note of the 12th of May last, thus conspicuously demonstrating that it acts with rectitude and severity in the punishment of the guilty.
I also refer to the statement of Señor Madriz, Nicaraguan minister for foreign affairs, to Minister Baker, under date of June 8, 1894, in which he said: “It was the undersigned who dismissed Governor Torres as soon as he had evidence of his culpability.”
Minister Baker’s reply (No. 759, of February 4, 1897) to Mr. Olney’s instructions above quoted communicated the categorical statement of President Zelaya, in which, while representing that Torres did not appear to have been in fact the person primarily responsible for the escape of Arguello, he admitted his negligence of duty, stating that the Government of Nicaragua had “not hesitated to remove him from office as a punishment and humiliation for such neglect, when requested by the United States so to do,” adding that the position then lately given to Torres was subordinate to another officer, having no authority or official character except in the absence of the officer in charge, and that in giving Torres this position no disrespect to the United States Government was intended or even thought of by the President.
The reply of Mr. Olney, No. 539, of February 26, 1897, authorized Minister Baker to “reply to the Nicaraguan Government that President Zelaya’s elaborate explanation is taken as a sufficient apology, under all the circumstances.”
I am advised that this same person, Francisco Torres, has been appointed by the President of Nicaragua to renewed command at Bluefields with extraordinary powers for the examination and adjustment of matters connected with the recent insurrection in that district.
[Page 562]That the action of the Government of Nicaragua in formerly removing Torres antedated or coincided with the formal demand of this Government for his dismissal from office does not detract from that demand. On the contrary it confirms its justice.
In the light of the correspondence in the case, the Government of the United States is wholly at a loss to understand the conferment upon Torres at this time and under the present circumstances of an apparently plenary office at Bluefields. You will bring this matter to the attention of the Nicaraguan Government with all due iinpressivehess, and you will make it clear to that Government that persistence in such an appointment can not be deemed other than an act lacking in friendliness to the United States, against which you are instructed to make earnest representations.
I am, etc.,