Spanish capitalists, who worked tens of thousands of the dispossessed Indians as peons on sugar plantations under a system of extreme exploitation.
Yucatan is separated from the rest of Mexico by distance and tropical forests. The natives are the Mayas, by nature pacific but strongly tribal and proud of their ancient culture. Yucatan has been called Mexico's Ireland and for a century the Mayas have been plotting to break away and join the Central America federation.[1] During the time of Diaz, the planters of Yucatan developed the henequen industry, involving an elaborate system of railroads, irrigation, and considerable capital. Gradually foreign speculators, who came to buy the henequen, acquired a strangle hold upon the industry. They controlled the local banks, loaned money to the planters at extortionate rates, and by 1908 held mortgages on nearly all the plantations, and were thus enabled to buy henequen at very low rates and hold it for high prices in American markets. Thousands of Mayan and imported peons who raised the crop were compelled to work for only a few cents a day, many of them branded and in chains.[2]
In these two centers developed strong agrarian movements, under able Indian leaders, of whom Zapata in Morelos and Carrillo in Yucatan became the most noted, but so universal was the land question that similar movements appeared in almost every Mexican state.
A large share of northern Mexico is semi-arid with a sparse population. Here peonage was never highly developed and was supplemented with free labor having a large intermixture of white blood and ideas of individual ownership.[3] Here, under Diaz,
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