V. C. in Vera Cruz stands for Venereal City. “El Dictamen” is the leading
newspaper. It has only four pages, yet whole columns are filled with
advertised cures for scrofula, syphilis, locomotor-ataxia and all the
rotten ills that licentious Latin-America is heir to. The space we give
to weather reports on the front page, or to special news with extra
headlines, is given up here to nauseating advertisements. The first thing
one sees as he enters the plaza are billboards, walls and buildings with
sure-cure advertisements.
L. A. in Latin America stands for “licentious animals.” In Vera Cruz the
principal male pastime is to talk about girls and not of God. From 4 P.
M. to 2 A. M. men sit in the plaza portales drinking, smoking and talking
about the women who pass by. The leading subject of “town talk” is girls,
the one they went to the movie with last, the other one the night before,
and the one they hope to get tonight.
The people make themselves a sewer for immoral filth, court the devil
Lust that eats and burns up their blood; are spendthrifts of body and
soul; waste their inheritance to purchase dirty, loathed disease; pawn
their bodies to a dry-rot evil; make themselves patients for Lust’s
rendezvous, a hospital, where their bill of fare is pills, not beef, and
the doctor’s bill is longer than the moral law they have violated. What
I have written here about Vera Cruz morals applies to the rest of Mexico
where conditions are the same or worse.
The Ten Commandments are little in evidence in the country and free love
prevails with the fruit of seventy-five per cent of illegitimate births.
A respectable bachelor is not qualified to enter society until several
children call him “papa.” Few men are without a separate establishment
for affinities.