Appendix J 



or 25 miles north of Chihuahua City the morning after Co- 

 lumbus — over 200 miles away! Five Americans say they saw 

 him near Laguna, north of Chihuahua. One woman who did 

 not know him before said he brought her a prisoner to Columbus. 

 He was pointed out to her as "Villa." I don't know where he 

 was. But if he ever talks and was at Columbus, he will say so. 

 I never knew him to lie except to deceive his enemy in war. 



{Letter from Herbert H. Thompson, a Stanford journalist 

 stationed at El Paso) 



I enclose summary- of the facts relating to the jail holocaust 

 of last vear, as I got them from newspaper files and newspaper 

 reporters I talked with. If there is any particular point on 

 which you would like additional information, please let me 

 know. 



That the Mexicans of Juarez could have believed the El 

 Paso police guilty of a deliberate crime in this connection, is 

 significant. But what the police have done here, the Texas 

 Rangers have done all down the line. Again, fights between 

 rival bands of Mexican and American cattle rustlers are a cause 

 of race hatred. It looks to me as if one of the main things 

 needed in the cause of peace between Mexico and this country' 

 is an effective border patrol by a semi-militar\' body similar 

 to the Canadian mounted police, composed of men endowed 

 with a sense of fairness and justice as well as physical braver>^ 

 Mexicans commit their crimes on our side of the line, but too 

 often merely in retaliation. 



Villa raided Columbus in the early morning of March 9. 



The connection between the El Paso jail holocaust and the 

 Villa raid is based on report and inference. 



It is a fact that Villa's partisans in El Paso believed that 

 Villa intended to give himself up to the American authorities, 

 that Villa's presence near Columbus was given wide publicity 

 and that the militarv' authorities did not believe it necessar\^ 

 to take any unusual precautions against the possibility of a 

 raid on Columbus. It is also a fact that the report spread through 

 Juarez, and thence through Mexico, that Mexicans had been 

 thrown into the El Paso jail, soaked with oil, and set on fire 

 by the El Paso police as an act of race hatred. There is a 



C 818 : 



