A GREAT FIND AT FRIENDS OF LIBRARY BOOK STORE

By Juan Montoya
I have sometimes taken to task some of our Central Public Library services.

Sometimes they throw away books (sacrilege!) under the justification that they are infested with silverfish (dubious), or that they are moldy, etc.

I know this not to be true since when I looked closely at the discarded publications it seemed like some of them were almost new and you couldn't see any little bugs when you flipped the pages.

Nonetheless, the staff has taken to put the books in black plastic trash bags and one can't see when they heave the offensive tomes.

But once in a while, they do something that is admirable. One of the things that is noteworthy (and it's not Calvin Walker relaxing on his easy chair) is that they allow patrons to donate books for the Friends of the Library to sell at bargain-basement prices.

I have run into some arcane and hard to get books you don't find in the shelves or perhaps can't even order in inter-library loan.

I picked up one of these recently in the Spanish language section. It is a 221-page history of a most remarkable character in Mexican politics. He was Adolfo De la Huerta, who was born in Guaymas, Sonora in 1881 and died in 1955.

De la Huerta was interim president of Mexico in 1920. He studied accounting and music and was involved in the struggle against the regime of Porfirio Diaz. He studied accounting and music. Under the presidency of Venustiano Carranza (1914-1920), he was the official manager of the Interior Ministry (1914), Office Manager (1915), provisional governor of Sonora (1916) and Consul General in New York (1918).

De la Huerta had signed on with Alvaro Obregon and Plutarco Calles to overthrow Carranza and he was named to serve out the remainder of the term after Carranza was assassinated in 1920.

But it was his stint as Minister of Finance under the Obregon administration that earned him the respect of his countrymen. The country's finances, drained by the succeeding administrations, was in hock to lenders and De la Huerta moved to buttress the treasury by imposing a 10 percent tax on oil exports by the foreign oil companies.

This ran into stiff opposition from the U.S, government under the Warren Harding administration and his Secretary of State Charles Evans Hughes.

Hughes was insisting that recognition of the Obregon government be withheld until it signed a treaty that would state that the new article 27 of the Mexican Constitution would not be retroactive to the oil contracts American companies had executed with the previous Mexican governments at disastrously disadvantageous terms.

De la Huerta refused and went to New York to meet with the international bankers who held the loans. The bankers had met with representatives of a Russian delegations and had wrested concessions that would bankrupt that nation. But De la Huerta, with none of the dozens of financial advisers or technicians that the Russians had brought with them, met with the bankers with only himself and a few of his most trusted assistants. There, he used tact and intellect to not only extend the loans, but also to give Mexico more advantageous terms without altering the constitution. These were the Lamont-De la Huerta Treaties.

This so impressed the Hardin administration and Hughes that De la Huerta was invited to meet with both men at the White House.

Little did he know that Alberto J. Pani, Mexico's Minster of Foreign Relations, with the conivence of Obregon, had already cut a deal with the bankers and the U.S. government giving in to the demands that their concessions not be affected by the new Mexican Constitution. In the end, they gave in to the cabal of bankers and signed the Bucareli Treaties that were not abandoned until after the takeover of Mexican oil by Lazaro Cardenas.

This led De la Huerta to decalre himself agains his fomer ally and he had to leave in exile after his uprising failed. He returned to Mexico in his later years and held some official positions in Mexican government.

Thanks you Friends of the Library for making this enlightening book for the princely sum of 50 cents.