BARBARITIES IN ECUADOR.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 270, 11 May 1912, Page 1 (Supplement)

BARBARITIES IN ECUADOR.

GENERALS BURNED ALIVE. London, March 23. The triumph of clericalism in Ecuador at the beginning of this year was attended by indescribable cruelties. Following on the suppression of the rebellion, both the defeated generals at Guayaquil and Quito were murdered in a shocking manner, after being subjected to revolting tortures. Ample particulars in the Spanish newspapers at Madrid prove that in Guayaquil, after the capitulation of the de-* feated forces led by General Alfaro, the populace devoted itself to the assassination of the prisoners. General, Montcro, the president of the dissolved Revolutionary Junta, was dragged out of prison and taken to a public street. A huge fire already lit awaited him, and the general was flung into it, despite his desperate resistance and cries of horror. When he was already half burned alive, he was fished out of the fire and flung into a vat of water. He was then dragged forth and thrown back into the fire. His martyrdom before the end came lasted more than an- hour. In Quito, on January -28, the proceedings were even more appalling. The multitude penetrated into the prison and, with savage refinements of cruelty, killed more than one hundred Radicals, detained as conspirators against the dominant clericalist Government. Four generals and Senor Corral, the editor of El Tiemps, were brought to the cemetery of San Diego. It was then and there that the horrible mutilations—the cutting out of the tongues of the five unhappy men, and taunting invitations to them to make speeches —took place. The victims were afterwards tortured by a number of wounds carefully inflicted on the most sensitive parts of their bodies. Their hands and feet were then hacked off, and as a continuation of the hellish work, the victims were suspended to high beams, set up in the ground. When they were half strangled the cords were cut, and their bloody members were saturated with petroleum and set fire to. When the poor wretches were half dead the lire was damped down, the bodies wrapped up and carried off, and then the heads of the five unhappy men were cut off. The head and heart of General Eloy Alfaro were afterwards iixed on spikes and paraded through the city. Although the account in Le Preisa, of Quito, is not so detailed, yet it is evident that terrible cruelties happened. The leading article the day after the horrors is frankly antagonistic to Alfaro and his party, but the writer opens by saying that "if the events which we were condemned to witness yesterday happened once in 20 or once in 10 years, we should feel compelled to emigrate from this country." It proceeds: "The people of Guayaquil were not content with the legal punishment of military gradation and sixteen years' imprisonment inflicted on the greatest of all traitors that Ecuador ever had; tliey killed him, and his head was paraded through the streets amidst the horrifying shouts which only the offended dignity of humanity, wounded in its most delicate fibre, can give forth." Then comes the revealing sentence of the reticent leader writer: "We who are not accustomed —like the Yankees—to see the daily perpetration of lynching, to see palpitating, dismembered bodies offered ill sacrifice to these human wild beasts, were unable to witness without horror the things we beheld yesterday." "La Prensa" in the same issue gives an epitome, the frigid nature of which seems to indicate an official statement. After mentioning the shooting in their several cells of the prisoners who, however. in this account are stated to have been killed outright, we read: "Through the principal streets of the eitv the bodies were taken to the Ejido, where they raised five flaming fires, and there burnt them. The remains of Eloy Alfaro and Luieano Corral were burnt to ashes in the same fire." The Archbishop, Bishop Reira, and the Rev. Father Jose Maria Agnirre succeeded' in calming the wrath of the people and caused them to disperse.