Toward the end of the Diaz régime and in an effort to refute the attacks made in a book by the present writer called, “Diaz, Czar of Mexico,” the cientificos inspired James Creelman to write “Diaz, Master of Mexico”; whole chapters were also dedicated in an effort to discredit the exposé by J. K. Turner in his “Barbarous Mexico.” Several books published in the United States and England were bought by Diaz. One was “Porfirio Diaz,” by R. de Zayas Enriquez, and the other “Yucatan, the American Egypt,” by Tabor and Frost. The Mexican government inspired their consul in Cuba, J. F. Godoy, to write a book, “Porfirio Diaz,” which had “seventy pages of endorsements of Diaz written by prominent Americans.” Here we have the case of a man, Mr. Godoy, who actually went about--or sent about--among senators, congressmen, diplomats and cabinet officers, soliciting kind words for President Diaz.[4] Porfirio Diaz and his cientifico supporters thought that they could keep the Mexicans, peons, and the middle class workingmen down if public opinion in Europe and in the United States was misinformed about the real conditions in Mexico. The great reputation of General Diaz in America and Europe was essentially manufactured through laudatory articles in the press, magazines, weeklies and daily papers, by the publication of books, interviews of prominent Americans who came back from a visit to the “Great Old Man” in Chapultepec, who could have said as Macbeth, “And I have bought golden opinions from all sorts of people.” Judges, congressmen, senators, governors, members of cabinets, even presidents, princes and kings spoke in reverence and admiration of Don Porfirio Diaz. What chance had any patriotic, democratic, and free loving Mexican against the avalanche of lies, deliberate and unconscious falsehoods? Whoever heard in the United States of the Massacre of Papantla where 20,000 Mexican peasants, men, women and children were shot down in cold blood, and as a result half a dozen villages wiped off the map of Mexico? What newspaper in America published the story of the revolution of Tomochic, when 15,000 mountaineer peasants in Chihuahua were destroyed and only forty old men and women were left to tell the tale? And the murder of 15,000 men, the whole male population of Juchitan, State of Oaxaca, in revenge for the death of Diaz’s brother, and the assassination of 750 workingmen of the Orizaba cotton mills? Workingmen in Mexico were killed if they attempted to unionize or to strike, the peasants were slaughtered to take away from them their rights under the law; the Yaqui Indians were deported and sold into slavery in Yucatan to permit the great landowners in Sonora to sell their land to American syndicates. Anybody who protested orally or in writing was thrown into jail, where imprisonment was worse than death. We reproduce the description by a Mexican of a night passed in the prison of Belem, Mexico City. May 16.