Workers' Victory

After howling for two years for a wage increase (fixed at $7,300,000 by the Federal Labor Board last December) which Mexico's 17 foreign oil concerns continue to say they are "unable to pay," mobs of grimy, swarthy oil workers milled about the sun-caked oil fields one day last week seizing derricks, refineries, company rail lines and tank cars. Exultant peons in flopping shirts and trousers swarmed over company offices, quarters and stores. At the oil-loading docks at Tampico, they clambered aboard three British-owned tankers and claimed them for Mexico's 18,000 oil workers.

All this was authorized by President Lazaro Cardenas, originator of "The Mexican New Deal" (TIME, Dec. 3, 1934), who, the night before, had decreed expropriation of the $400,000,000 foreign oil investment, held largely by subsidiaries of Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil of New Jersey and California and Sinclair oil companies. U. S. Ambassador Josephus Daniels, to whom U. S. correspondents excitedly suggested that the Roosevelt "good neighbor" policy may have convinced Mexican workers that they can take U.S.property with President Roosevelt's tacit approval, replied: "Neither President Roosevelt, Secretary of State Cordell Hull nor I knew about the expropriation in advance. . . . It came like a bolt from the blue! . . . I have informed the State Department that all Mexicans are solidly behind President Cardenas."

Asked if the U. S. would intervene to regain the seized property of U. S. citizens in Mexico, the Ambassador observed philosophically: "What the word intervention means is purely a matter of opinion. . . . I don't see why [U. S.] tourists should discontinue coming to Mexico. . . . I don't think there will be any danger."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.