File No. 812.00/11552.
Chargé O’Shaughnessy to the Secretary of State.
Mexico City, April 19, 1914, 5 p.m.
868. I found Minister for Foreign Affairs at four p.m. and made plain to him the contents of your No. 762, April 19, noon. He complained that I had promised to sign the protocol and thereupon General Huerta had acceded to the demands of the United States. I told him that had he written to me a note asking if the salute would be returned I should have answered that of course the United States would live up to the requirements of international courtesy and that I could not sign any document of the nature which he proposed without first referring it to my Government. He said that the desire of the United States evidently was to humiliate the provisional government further by demanding from it an act which could come only from a sovereign government, without recognizing the said government as such; that if the United States did not consider General Huerta as representing the Mexican people, why did they ask him to salute the flag of the United States and have the salute of the American flag returned. He was very much overwrought and said that the United States desired to further humiliate this Government, that he could not advise General Huerta to comply with our demands on the present basis, and that he thought, in view of the care this Government had given to American interests, it was being treated very harshly. I told him that, so far as I was concerned, now having made the stand of the President of the United States plain to him, I must consider the incident closed and that matters must take a course over which I could have no influence.
At twenty minutes past four the Minister for Foreign Affairs descended from my automobile and took his own to go to see General Huerta and asked me if I would come to the Department of Foreign Affairs at six o’clock, which I told him I would do. At present therefore the Minister for Foreign Affairs, as the mouthpiece of General Huerta, has absolutely refused to salute the American flag unconditionally. He states that the whaleboat of the Dolphin was not flying the American flag at the time the sailors landed.