The great oil business of Mexico owes its existence primarily to American enterprise. Of the $300,000,000 of cash invested in the oil fields, $200,000,000 is American. To-day, even after the colossal production during the war, only a small portion of this investment has been recovered, for only two purely Mexican companies, the Mexican Petroleum (American) and the Eagle (British) are paying dividends. The oil business in all lands is so speculative that its returns are quoted not as “dividends” or “interest,” but as “recovery,” for until the great investment in drilling, tanks, pipe lines, refineries and ships is got back, there is no surety that the venture itself will prove profitable. For this reason the losses of the oil companies through the Mexican revolutions can be only an estimate. From sources which I have been able to reach, I place the actual physical losses at about $5,000,000 for the American companies. This seems like a very small item, but it does not count the failures of most of the 300 companies which have put money into Mexican oil or the vast sums paid in taxes or lost through oppression. Nor does it take into consideration the potential losses if Mexico enforces her “nationalization” plan. These last would be legitimately included here, for as I say, they jeopardize the “recovery” of the investment still remaining unpaid for, and Mexican oil stock quotations have suffered as a result. Mexico still threatens to enforce the provisions of the new constitution which make oil the property of the nation and its exploitation a matter of concession, like gold and silver. The oil companies are fighting this plan, for they entered Mexico and invested millions in oil lands and leases from individuals (no land was ever given them) under a mining law which left coal and oil the property of the owner of the land, unlike gold and all other minerals. The actual bill of our oil companies includes, as the chief single item, a $2,000,000 loss due to the Battle of Ebano, fought over American property in the spring of 1915. Oil, tanks, pipe lines and refinery buildings were destroyed, a single cannon ball igniting a tank containing 850,000 barrels of oil, all of which was burned. The item of direct thievery (largely by federal troops) is only about $300,000, but petty destruction, murderous assaults, the killing of a score of valuable employees and the tribute to bandits and federal “generals” pile the total up. Tribute has been levied, first by the federal Carrancistas, and from January, 1915, to March, 1920, by Manuel Pelaez, the former rebel leader, to a total of about $2,000,000, Pelaez’s figure being a regular $30,000 a month up to his joining the successful Obregon revolution in 1920 and so becoming a “federal.”