Looming President

Most Mexicans decided last week that they know who will be their president in 1928. They decided when the Mexican Chamber passed 199 to 7, last week, a bill permitting the re-election of former Mexican presidents, providing that one presidential term elapses between the end of their tenure of office and their reelection. This measure was rushed through by the friends of onetime President Alvaro Obregon. He and President Calles are the twin political idols of the anticlerical faction now in power. Presumably the bill passed by the Chamber last week will be railroaded through the Senate with equal ease. After that a few months of intensive and unscrupulous campaigning should suffice to place Alvaro Obregon where he sat before he was succeeded by his good friend President Calles (TIME, Dec. 8, 1924).

Where is General Obregon? What is he doing? At present that doughty one-armed fighter is the commanding General of the 30,000 troops being placed in the field by President Calles (TIME, Oct. 4) to suppress and exterminate the Yaqui Indians, a group of tribes continuously rebellious against the succeeding governments of Mexico since the Spanish conquest (1521).

During the week General Obregon held a grand council of war at Guadalajara. His intentions, as announced by subordinates: 1) to confiscate all lands held by the Yaqui in their principal stronghold, the State of Sonora; 2) to distribute the Yaqui themselves throughout Mexico on small units of land, thus definitely finally breaking up the tribes as a national unit; 3) to employ in accomplishing this stupendous task every weapon of modern warfare, including poison gas.

Significance. The armies of General Obregon now in process of mobilization, engaged the Yaqui last week in mere preliminary skirmishes involving no great loss of life. Uncharitable critics of Sr. Obregon and Sr. Calles have intimated that the anti-Yaqui campaign so grandiloquently projected will degenerate into a mere employment of the soldiers of the republic to coerce the citizenry far and wide into voting at municipal, general and presidential elections in a manner agreeable to Sr. Obregon and Sr. Calles. Though this charge is based upon half-truths, it is equally certain that operations against the Yaqui will simply result in the killing of as many Indians as possible, with little or no likelihood that the survivors will be given lands in accordance with the program announced last week.

A further nefarious use to which the anti-Yaqui campaign will undoubtedly be put lies in the use of the soldiers thus mobilized to enforce the anti-religious policy of the Calles Administration, (TIME, Oct. 4 et ante).