DID DIAZ KILL SABAS CAVAZOS AND EXILE HIS BROTHER JUAN CORTINA?

  

By Juan Montoya

When Porfirio Diaz was fomenting revolution in northern Mexico in 1875 against the democratically-elected government of Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada, who succeeded Benito Juarez upon his death in 1872 and was later elected, he came to Brownsville and met with many leading men of the time.

Diaz – who claimed Lerdo stole the special presidential election held later that year and defeated him – met with several U.S. supporters of his "revolution," including James Stillman and other bankers who promised to help him with men, money and arms in return for concessions in Mexico's railways, electric grid, and other public services.

In fact, the Stillmans let Diaz stay at the family home, now next to the Stillman House Museum while he planned his insurrection against the Mexican government.

Among some of the local leaders of the Mexican-American community who met and supported Diaz was Sabas Cavazos, the half brother of Juan Cortina, the colorful character in local history who was the bane of the newly arrived U.S. settlers and military. Family lore is that Cavazos loaned Diaz a sizeable amount to carry out his revolution.

In 2004, P.G. Cavazos, Sabas Cavazos' great-great-grandson, told a newspaper reporter that in the mid-1870s, Porfirio Diaz came to Brownsville to lead a revolution against Benito Juarez's successor – Sebastian Lerdo de Tejada – and that Cavazos lent Diaz $50,000 in gold coins – and other prominent Americans – including Stillman and and Richard King – lent Diaz money to help finance the revolt that would eventually take the Mexican revolutionary to power.

John (RIP )Ford wrote in his Memoirs: "Diaz asked if the Americans would loan him cash. He was told 'you are no doubt fully aware of the trouble that General Cortina is causing on this frontier. If you will give your word that, if successful in the revolution you are about to inaugurate, you will order Cortina to be removed from this frontier, Americans will loan you money.' General Diaz gave his word. He obtained money from American citizens. General Cortina was ultimately under Diaz's surveillance for nearly 20 years and forced to move to Mexico City. Can any gentleman dare say President Diaz has not fully redeemed his pledge?"

When Cavazos tried repeatedly in vain to collect on the debt after Diaz was president, he traveled to Mexico City to demand his money. Coincidentally, this came about after his brother Juan Cortina had been ordered to be shot on suspicion of treason, but was instead taken prisoner and sent to Mexico City.

That account has been disputed by other sources, including Francisco DeWitt Foster, a former aide to Tamaulipas Gen. Servando Canales, who says that Diaz was shown compromising correspondence indicating that Cortina was conspiring with Gen. Julia Quiroga and Gen. Ignacio Revueltas in early 1877 to thwart his efforts to unseat Lerdo. 

Ford said he personally delivered the correspondence to Diaz as he advanced on Guadalajara and that Diaz ordered all the conspirators captured and shot. But he also mentions that when Sabas Cavazos heard of the capture of his half brother and Diaz's orders to execute him, he telegrammed Diaz and himself later traveled to Mexico City and offered that the loans he made to Diaz be used as ransom for his life.

The Cavazos-Diaz correspondence was dated August 1877.

When he was placed under custody by rival Tamaulipas caudillo Servando Canales, who was ready to carry out the death sentence ordered by Diaz, General Manuel Gonzalez, a general who was himself later to become president of Mexico, also intervened. Diaz relented and had Cortina put aboard a Mexican warship at Bagdad and transported under guard to Mexico City.

In a June 4, 1877 telegram obtained by Dr. Marie Theresa Hernandez, Professor of World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, from her sources provides more details. Gonzalez, born in Matamoros, cautioned Diaz not to execute Cortina based on any information of possible treason provided by his arch-enemy Canales.

"From the newspapers in this capital (Morelia, Morelos) and from visitors from (Mexico City) I learned

that General Cortina has again been reduced to a prisoner, and although I'm unable to judge their veracity at a distance from those events, we both know, and especially me, that General Cortina behaved loyally with us in the times of adversity: he placed more than 300 troops at our disposition and his brother (Sabas) facilitated all kinds of resources to us. Cortina, then, is our loyal companion.

"The conduct of Canales has ignited hatreds and rancors that did not exist, at least on Cortina's part," the telegram continues. "When Cortina was about to be arrested by Canales, he did not believe that Canales harbored those hatreds because he believed the letters that Canales sent him expressing his friendship. What a surprise it was to him to find out that friendship was turned into a prosecution for death.

"I have no idea whether Cortina is guilty of (the accusations) against him; but in any case, it would be better for him to be transported to Mexico City. Putting him in Canales' hands would amount to a sure death over mere vengeance; but the responsibility (of his death) would not be limited to Canales, but also over the federal executive (Diaz)."

The family lore – confirmed by newspaper reports – states that while Sabas Cavazos was in Mexico City, he was falsely accused by a lower-ranking military officer on a bogus charge of trying to flee without paying him a debt, effectively placing him under court order and barring Cavazos from returning to South Texas. In fact, newspaper reports indicate that he was pulled off a train that would be talking him to Veracruz and then proceeding on a ship to Puerto Bagdad off the coast of Matamoros.

They believed that in 1878, Diaz threw a big fiesta for him. But Diaz wasn't going to pay back the money, said P.G. Cavazos, who was a longtime member of the Cameron County Historical Commission. Amid the fiesta, Diaz poisoned Sabas Cavazos' drink, he said. 

“The story goes that when Sabas Cavazos attended the banquet to toast to Diaz’s victory, he had two glasses of wine and that after he drank them he became violently sick and later that night he died,” Cavazos said. Many of his relatives thought that Diaz had poisoned him so he wouldn’t have to pay him back the 50,000 gold pesos."

Sabas died Feb. 25, 1878, according to Mexico City newspapers from "padecimientos morales," interpreted as "painful emotional (gastroenteritis) or psychological suffering."

Days later, the Mexican president financed a lavish funeral that carried Sabas Cavazos to his grave in a black, silver-trimmed hearse, he said.

Cortina was held in the military prison of Santiago Tlatelolco until his release to house arrest where he died October 30, 1894. Many historians attribute his banishment from the border with Diaz's efforts to gain recognition of his illegally government from the United States.

But that wasn't the end of the story. As a result of Sabas Cavazos undersigning the loans of cash and war material, his widow Hilaria G. de Cavazos was forced to sell some of his family's 41,124-acre ranch to pay the debts, some of them to the Fernandez brothers, who ran several mercantile houses in Brownsville. 

To pay off the large debts incurred to raise the loans, or ransom money, De Cavazos offered the huge ranch Los Veladores on which J.T. Canales (related to Servando Canales, Sabas and Cortina) had just been born, to her neighbor Capt. Richard King. Thus, wrote Canales, "Los Veladores passed out of our hands in 1878."