Page:Barbarous Mexico.djvu/249

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FOUR MEXICAN STRIKES
217

every point, met this force of men at Naco and led them across the line. The crossing was disputed by the Mexican customs official, who swore that the invaders might pass only over his dead body. With leveled rifle this man faced the governor of his state and the three hundred foreigners, and refused to yield until Yzabal showed an order signed by General Diaz permitting the invasion.

Thus three hundred American citizens, some of them government employes, on June 2, 1906 violated the laws of the United States, the same laws that Magon and his friends are accused of merely conspiring to violate, and yet not one of them, not even Greene, the man who knew the situation, and was extremely culpable, was ever prosecuted. Moreover, Ranger Captain Rhynning who accepted an appointment of Governor Yzabal to command this force of Americans, instead of being deposed from his position, was afterwards promoted. At this writing he holds the fat job of warden of the territorial penitentiary at Florence, Arizona.

The rank and file of those three hundred men were hardly to be blamed for their act, for Greene completely fooled them. They thought they were invading Mexico to save some American women and children. When they arrived in Cananea on the evening of the second day, they discovered that they had been tricked, and the following day they returned without having taken part in the massacres of these early days of June.

But with the Mexican soldiers and rurale forces which poured into Cananea that same night it was different. They were under the orders of Yzabal, Greene and Corral, and they killed, as they were told to do. There was a company of cavalry under Colonel Barron. There were one thousand infantrymen under General Luis