Woodrow Wilson to Congress

Once more it has become my duty to call your attention to the unhappy posture of affairs in the Republic of Mexico, our neighbour, and to suggest the position which it seems to me we ought to take as her nearest friend, whose political and national interests are in many vital respects necessarily linked very closely with her own. Mexico has no government. The attempt to maintain one at the City of Mexico has broken down, and a mere military despotism been set up which has hardly more than the sahadowy semblance of national authority. It originated in the treason of Victoriano Huerta, who, after a brief attempt to play the part of constitutional president, has at last cast aside even the pretense of legal right and declared himself dictator.
This dictator, as he is without support of law or right, is also without force or means to establish order or give the nation a single controlling instrument of authority; and, even if he succeeded, could establish nothing but a precarious and hated hateful power which could last but a little while, and whose early downfall would leave the country in a more lamentable condition than ever.
The continuance of his command of an army and his unlicensed domination of the capital and the country immediately dependant upon it must certainly bring upon Mexico deep, perhaps irrevocable ruin, political, industrial, and social, whose effects will inevitably extend far beyond her own territory and which will create conditions under which neither her own people nor the citizens of other countries resident within her borders can be safeguarded even in even their most elementary and fundamental personal rights.
The paramount duty in the circumstances rests upon us, because of our long—established and universally recognized position with regard to the political development of the states of the western hemisphere and the legitimate and inevitable implications of that position.
We are bound by every obligation of honour and by the compulsion of sacred interests which go to the very foundations of our national life to constitute ourselves the champions of constitutional government and of the integrity and independence of free states throughout America, North and South. It is our duty to study the conditions which make constitutional government possible for our neighbour states in this hemisphere, as for ourselves, and, knowing those conditions, to suffer neither our own people nor the citizens or governments of other countries (if we may be so happy as to dissuade or prevent them) to violate them or to render them impossible of realization.
Again and again we have seen the same thing happen in those states of Latin America which have been so weak or so unfortunate as not to have governments at all times securely fortified against revolution. The ambition of some one man or of some small group of men has led to an attack upon the government and to its overturn, to the suspension of every guarantee of law or order, not in order to effect useful reforms otherwise impossible, but to afford the leaders of the revolution themselves an opportunity to grow rich by exploiting the resources of the country. Generally they have exploited those resources by granting to outsiders who were willing to pay for them in cash extensive concessions, unlimited private rights. Having got what they themselves wanted, they passed off the stage; but left their despoiled country to fare as best it might under the burdens their grants and concessions had imposed, and under the direction of foreign financiers, backed by foreign governments, rather than of their own regularly constituted authorities.
Revolutions just such as Victoriano Huerta has for the time effected in Mexico have been in the past the unmaking, or at least the serious and lasting embarrassment of constitutional government and national independence in other countries of Latin America. The whole civilized world will wish to see the repetition of such things in Mexico prevented. In just such circumstances as those existing there may outsiders step in, whether from the United States or from elsewhere, and upon cheap terms of temporary financial assistance gain permanent rights and advantages for themselves which may embarrass the whole future of the struggling republic. Such men with such purposes may spring up from any quarter to feed upon the disordered country; and the injury they may do the free constitutional development of Mexico may be out of all proportion to their intentions or their immediate enterprise. Foreign financiers, from whatever quarter they come, are but indifferent guardians of national independence. It is our plain duty to hold our own citizens back from such undertakings, entered upon at such times, when caution and deliberation are out of the question, and it is equally our duty to do all that we can to safeguard our neighbours to the south against revolutions and personal usurpations of power such as will expose them to similar selfish and fatal enterprises on the part of citizens of other countries over whom we have not right of control and perhaps no influence of any kind. Constitutional development and material exploitation from without are absolutely incompatible if capital goes in when all the safeguards are down. Therefore we must demand

a) the immediate and complete reconstitution of the national congress of Mexico recently dissolved;

b) the handing over to that body by General Huerta of the authority he claimed to derive from it and then took away from it by an arbitrary suspension of the constitution and the laws;

c) a declaration of amnesty by the congress and an invitation to delegates from the states now in revolution to join it;

d) the constitution by the body thus organized of a provisional government

;e) early elections under the direction of that provisional government for the choice of a new congress and a new executive to act under the constitution of Mexico as it stood before the usurpation of February.