For Alvarado’s henchmen closed the churches, burned their priceless historical records, and outraged nuns and priests. They turned the church buildings into “labor temples” and barracks and storehouses from which later was sold, over the counter, the liquor which had been confiscated in enforcement of “prohibition” in Yucatan. They turned the schools of towns and plantations into centers of propaganda and espionage under imported “teachers” who knew none of the Indian language, and many of whom could not write their own names. They confiscated great haciendas under the elaborately “socialistic” agrarian law, and for those upon whom the iron hand did not fall directly, established a reign of terror in the raids of the “Leagues of Resistance,” whose crimes, from night-riding and burglary to rape and murder, the Legislature declared to be “political offenses” in the name of “socialism,” and thus outside the jurisdiction of the common courts. His henchmen, foreigners, Mexicans and Yucatecans, raised up the previously contented “industrial workers,” railway men, porters and longshoremen (numbering in all less than 9,000 out of a state population of 300,000), forming them into unions whose increasing wages were overlapped more rapidly than they were raised by the rising costs of the handling of the imported commodities upon which they, like every one else, must live in desert Yucatan. Their wages, and the cost of living, multiplied eight times in the four years, while the wages of the farm workers little more than doubled, and a grievously added burden was placed upon the hacendados who from time immemorial have taken up the loss in increased food prices so that their farm workers may live. By such means, and with such control, General Alvarado acquired the domination of the industrial life of Yucatan and of henequen production upon which he built up his market corner. In the selling of the product so controlled, he raised the price of raw henequen from 7 cents a pound in New York to more than 19 cents a pound in the same market. So firm was his grip on production and on distribution that he could, and did, withhold stock which was sorely needed in the harvest fields, bringing about, in 1916 (through this means and through the soaring prices which had to be asked for the binder twine which was sold), an investigation by a committee of the United States Senate. This committee, after months of investigation, completely exonerated the American manufacturers from the charge of profiteering, and perhaps for the first time in the history of that august body, placed itself on record as asserting that a foreign government had acted the rôle of an iniquitous trust in creating an artificial shortage and artificially inflated prices for a product vital to the business of America’s farms.