After receiving from Vice Consul Yepis copies of his despatches 276 of
September 26 [21] and 280 of October 5, 1936, to
the Department, and his telegram to me of October 10, of which I have
the honor to enclose a copy,18 and as I had already mentioned the matter to the
President (see my despatch number 4002 referred to above), I asked the
counselor of the Embassy to call on Licenciado Beteta, the
Undersecretary of State for Foreign Affairs, to discuss the matter
further with him. I now have the honor to transmit herewith a copy of
the memorandum which Mr. Boal has prepared of his conversation with
Licenciado Beteta.
[Enclosure]
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Counselor of
Embassy (Boal)
Mexico, October 14, 1936.
I saw Licenciado Beteta on Saturday, October 10, and briefly spoke to
him about the Yaqui Valley situation. Today, at his request, I
called on him and discussed the matter fully. I left with him the
attached list of pending agrarian cases.19 I then went
over the Yaqui Valley situation, touching the high spots as given in
Vice Consul Yepis’s despatch number 280. We examined the chart
enclosed with the despatch together. Licenciado Beteta said that he
had had a long talk with the President on the Yaqui Valley situation
and on the agrarian question in general. He said that he had found
the President more conciliatory in agrarian matters than he had ever
thought he would be. He said that he (the President) was deeply
concerned to prevent any crisis with the American Government on the
subject and that they had discussed the subject of compensation
fully. He wanted to tell me personally and quite confidentially that
he was suggesting to the President a system of compensation which
was to be carried out case by case confidentially. The idea was
whenever property was taken from an American citizen under the
Agrarian Code he would be compensated by receiving a property, not
necessarily agrarian, and possibly a house, to be taken from the Bienes Nacionales. He said that this would
only apply to pending and future cases, all past agrarian
expropriations from Americans to be excluded, otherwise the
Government would not have enough properties to go around. It would
not be done as a matter of principle, but simply on a case basis and
without any publicity or giving out any information. He wanted to
know what I thought of this plan. I told him that it would be
difficult for me to express an opinion; that much, I supposed, would
depend on the character of the particular property offered in each
particular case.
Speaking of the Yaqui Valley, Licenciado Beteta said that he felt
that this district was in a class by itself. I had already pointed
out to him that the land had never been worked by the original
inhabitants of the country but that it had been bought, irrigated,
cultivated and developed by the American holders who had come in
under a legal contract with the Government, had paid their money in
good faith and were under a colonization contract which required a
certain percentage of the owners, when they came in over forty years
ago, to be American citizens. Licenciado Beteta asked if those who
were asking for ejidos were Yaqui Indians. I said I did not know,
that I was not under the impression that all of them were. He said
that this made
[Page 706]
a
difference to the Mexican Government. However, he was not under the
impression that all of them were Yaqui Indians.
He then spoke of the Laguna matter. He said he regretted that the
question had come up and told me quite confidentially and personally
that he could not make up his mind fully regarding it. He was not at
all convinced that the course being pursued now was the one to
follow. He asked if there were any American properties in the
Laguna. I told him I thought there were; that American interests
were involved to the extent of one-third in the Tlahualilo Company’s
holdings. I added that furthermore, there were four American
landowners in the Laguna, of whom three owned 3,321 acres of
cultivated land and one owner, 10,621 acres, chiefly uncultivated. I
said that while we had had some complaint on the score of the
Tlahualilo interests, we had not yet had complaint from the other
four owners. Mr. Beteta asked me to let him know immediately as soon
as we had some complaint.
In summing up the agrarian situation at this present stage, I pointed
out to Licenciado Beteta that we could not expect our Congress, when
it came into session, to remain indifferent to the protests of
Americans who were losing their properties. If we got fifty more
protests from the Yaqui Valley it would cause a terrific stir at
home. Furthermore, members of Congress would not wait until Congress
met to make their views audible. Once the damage were done, it would
be extremely difficult to undo. If the Administration were pressed
into a situation where it would have to make a public statement of
its relations with the Mexican Government, much of the improvement
in the Mexican-American relations in the last few years might be
undone. I pointed out that in most of the agrarian cases we had seen
there were serious irregularities and illegal acts. In many cases
laws—not the Agrarian Code only—had been violated in order to bring
about expropriations under the Agrarian Code. Thus, squatters were
allowed to remain on lands until they could qualify for claims for
ejidos or other claims against the land. I said that of course the
damaging effect of this might be lessened if the Government had
public hearings in Mexico City on appeal similar to those carried
out in the nationalization proceedings in the Department of
Hacienda. This would presumably tend to bring about expropriations
only where the law had been strictly complied with and would
therefore tend to diminish the cases where expropriation is rushed
through regardless of the Agrarian Code or other laws.
I asked if it would not be possible for the Government to put off the
taking of property belonging to Americans for a period during which
time they could evolve a process of compensation and thereafter only
take property as compensation could be made. Licenciado Beteta
[Page 707]
said he thought that
something like this could be evolved. At any rate, he was going to
try to work it out with the President.
