File No. 812.00/23455a.
The Secretary of State to the Special Commissioners.
Washington, June 3, 1914.
To the Commissioners: While the Mediators are debating the admission of a representative of the revolutionists, we take the opportunity of setting the whole matter under discussion at Niagara in [Page 523] its full light as it appears to this Government, a light which to us grows clearer every day.
The attitude of the Mediators toward the revolutionists seems to us to indicate as nothing else has their point of view and the radical error of that point of view. They seem to have conceived their outlined plan and to have conducted their discussions with you on the theory that it is the’ Constitutionalists who must be made to yield to the arrangement agreed upon, whereas it is obviously Huerta and the whole body of persons who in any degree support or sympathize with him who must be made to yield.
The discussion does not now turn upon terms of accommodation between the United States and Huerta. At the very outset it was understood and it is now obvious to the whole world that Huerta must be eliminated and with him his whole regime. The problem is how peace is to be secured for Mexico, and that means simply this: How is the triumph of the Constitutionalist party, which is now clearly triumphant, to be accepted and established without further bloodshed? Or, to put it differently, How are representatives of that party to be placed in control of the government under conditions which can be approved and assented to and earnestly pressed for acceptance by the Government of the United States?
We are not seeking a plan which we would be willing to enforce by arms, but a plan which will promptly bring peace and a government which we can recognize and deal with. Recognition or non-recognition is the only means of compulsion we have in mind. A plan which would require the backing of force would if acted on do Mexico more harm than good and would postpone peace indefinitely, not secure it.
With these thoughts and conclusions constantly in view—which we have urged repeatedly and from the first—we feel obliged to say that we could not consider the recognition of a provisional government made up in any part of neutrals. There can be no such persons in Mexico among men of force and character. All men of real stuff must have taken sides in one way or another and those who call themselves neutrals are quite certainly partisans of the kind of order and supremacy which Huerta tried to establish, whether they adhere to Huerta personally or not. We are convinced that peace can be secured only by facing the inevitable and facing it promptly and with the utmost frankness.
The plan, therefore, should be of this sort: an avowed Constitutionalist of undoubted character and ability, other than Carranza or Villa, should be made provisional president and should be personally charged with the formulation and promulgation of the necessary and inevitable reforms as a duty to which he would be definitely pledged beforehand; and a board of three persons acceptable to the revolutionists, but one of whom should be a conservative not actively identified with the revolution, should be associated with him to arrange for and have complete charge of the conduct and oversight of the elections which should be planned for to occur not immediately but at a definite future date to be proclaimed by them in consultation with the provisional president.
We should in no circumstances outline or even suggest the detail of the reforms. The provisional president would of course consult [Page 524] with whom he pleased in formulating them, and their success is entirely dependent upon their being of domestic origin and in no respect dictated by the United States or any outside Government.
Both the provisional president and the members of the election board should be pledged not to be candidates at the elections.
There should, of course, if we can bring it about, be a general amnesty.
This is a very simple plan. The Mexican representatives will, we fear, quite certainly protest against it, and the Mediators may be very reluctant to accept it until convinced by patient argument on the general lines indicated above that that is all that this Government can consider consistently with its avowed policy. But it seems to us in substance inevitable, the only sort of plan that would have the least prospect of producing the settlement and the peace that we desire. You will know how to present and urge it. We are delighted to feel that we have spokesmen whose force and method in handling this tedious and difficult but still hopeful business need no direction or improvement from Washington.* * *