Under The Volcano - pg. 108

But now it spoke of the Mexico of Juan's childhood, of the year Hugh was born. Juan had lived and died. Yet was it a country with free speech, and the guarantee of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? A country of brilliantly muralled village and where even each little cold mountain village had its stone open-air stage and the land was owned by its people free tp express their native genius? A country of model farms: of hope? - It was a country of slavery, where human beings were sold like cattle, and its native peoples, the Yaquis, the Papagos, the Tomasachics, exterminated through deportation, or reduced to worse than peonage, their lands in thrall or the hands of foreigners. And in Oaxaca lay the terrible Valle Nacional where Juan himself, a bonafide slave aged seven, had seen an older brother beaten to death, and another, bought for forty-five pesos, starved to death in seven months, because it was cheaper this should happen, and the slave holder buy another slave, than simply have one slave better fed merely worked to death in a year. All this spelt Porfirio Diaz: rurales everywhere, jefes politicos, and murder, the extirpation of liberal political institutions, the army an engine of massacre, an instrument of exile. Juan knew this, having suffered it: and more. For later in the revolution, his mother was murdered. And later still Juan himself killed his father, who had fought with Huerta, but turned traitor. Ah, guilt and sorrow had dogged Juan's footsteps too, for he was not a Catholic who could rise refreshes from the cold bath of confession. Yet the banality stood: that the past was irrevocably past. And conscience had been given man to regret it only in so far as that might change the future. For man, every man, Juan seemed to be telling him, even as Mexico, must ceaselessly struggle upward. What was life but a warfare and a stranger's sojourn? Revolution rages too in the tierra caliente of each human soul. No peace but that must pay full toll to hell -