Original Physical Actual Investment Damage Losses Railroads $150,000,000 $30,000,000 $60,000,000 Oil 200,000,000 5,000,000 100,000,000 Mines 200,000,000 15,000,000 100,000,000 Lands and cattle 50,000,000 10,000,000 20,000,000 Industries and public service 50,000,000 10,000,000 20,000,000 ------------ ----------- ------------ Total $650,000,000 $70,000,000 $300,000,000 Damage claims aggregating $500,000,000 are said to have been filed with the American State Department, but no official confirmation of this has ever been forthcoming. However, the claims which Americans have against Mexico, whether filed in the State Department or not, must be divided into two categories, the actual and the potential damage, and perforce includes also the claims due for loss of life and personal damages. The actual harm already done includes: physical damage to property; unwarranted and illegitimate taxes which approach confiscation; destruction of property values through such taxation and through the prevalence of banditry; destruction of property values by the driving out of stable government; destruction of the financial and credit system of the country through government decrees and repudiations; losses in legitimate profits which would have been made during the recent eras of high prices; actual loss in market value of property through the estrangement of the foreign capital which alone, in Mexico, presents a reliable buying element; destruction of property values through the exile of the foreigners who formed the industrious and capable organization which maintained those values. The potential damages are chiefly those which come from the fact that there hangs over all foreign property in Mexico to-day, and has hung for five years, a sword of Damocles in the threatened confiscation of such property under the radical “nationalization” plans of the revolutionary governments. These, briefly, provide that: foreign corporations and individuals are incompetent to own property in Mexico unless they renounce their citizenship and appear only as Mexicans before the Mexican law; the government may appropriate all large tracts of land, giving in return unguaranteed state agrarian bonds of virtually no value; the government may “nationalize” the oil in the ground, making it subject to the denouncement of any one, whether the property owner or not, when the whole oil-producing organization of Mexico to-day is founded on the principle of the oil belonging to the land itself; no foreigners, under any conditions, may own any land within sixty miles of the frontier or thirty miles of the seacoast.