Chamber Music

Things looked a little black for Governor Ignacio de la Mora of Jalisco last week. In Mexico City a strong group in the.Chamber of Deputies was demanding his removal, charging that he had reestablished peonage in Jalisco, that he had restored the priests to their original political eminence, that he was selling jobs, stuffing ballot boxes.

The afternoon the charges against de la Mora were to be heard, strange young men with their hands in their pockets entered the visitors' gallery in the Chamber. Two entered a cigar store across the street. The proprietor heard them say. "This is the day some of those Deputies will die!"

In the Chamber the attack against Governor de la Mora had just got under way. As unostentatiously as possible many of Mexico's lawmakers divided into little groups and stood near the exits eying each other. In the midst of an anti-de la Mora speech by Deputy Jose Manuel Chavez, two Jalisco deputies, Manuel H. Ruiz and Esteban Garcia de Alba, sprang up demanding to be heard. Ismael Lozano. President of the Chamber, denied them and immediately adjourned the session.

"I protest against this form of cowardice!" shouted Deputy Ruiz and rushed toward the rostrum.

In Washington, Representatives call each other names. In Japan, deputies sometimes fight with daggers and fountain pens (TIME, Feb. 16). In France they punch each other on the nose, have been known to use a dog whip (TIME, Nov. 17 ). In Poland they hurl inkwells, kick each other's shins (TIME, March 10, 1930). But in Mexico they do not fool. As Deputy Ruiz rushed forward, one shot banged out (witnesses later swore it came from the visitors' gallery), followed immediately by a general drawing and firing of guns by Mexico's lawmakers. Manuel Ruiz died on the steps of the speaker's tribune with eight bullets in his body. General Sebastian Allende went down in the fusillade with a shot through the spine which he insisted came from somebody's chauffeur, standing in the doorway. Deputy Esteban Garcia de Alba blazed away until a bullet through the hand sent his pistol spinning. From his dugout beneath the press desk the Associated Press correspondent counted more than 60 shots before hostilities ceased and the Red Cross and police rushed in.

The majority bloc of the Chamber reasserted its dignity next day by expelling from the party four quick-triggered Deputies--all of them adherents of Jalisco's Governor de la Mora.

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