411.12/2½
The Mexican Embassy to the Department of State
The Department of Foreign Affairs of Mexico has telegraphed to its Embassy at this capital that the Government of the United Mexican States is ready to enter immediately into arrangements with foreign governments for the purpose of allowing ex gratia indemnities to their nationals who may have suffered by reason of the revolutions that have occurred in Mexico since the year 1910. For that purpose the Citizen President of the Republic, on the strength of article 5 of the decree of May 16 [10], 1913,27 issued in the city of Monclova, Coahuila, by the then First Chief of the Constitutionalist Army, Don Venustiano Carranza, and of revised article 13 of the law of December 24, 1917,28 which created the claims commission, has seen fit to order that the Department of Foreign Affairs extend respectful invitations to the governments of every one of the countries whose nationals may have suffered damages through the revolution, in order that steps may be taken in common accord to establish permanent mixed commissions which shall respectively take cognizance of the claims of their nationals either because these have refused to accept the decisions of the claims commission created by the aforesaid decree of December 24, or because they preferred their claims to be taken from the beginning before their own permanent mixed commission. To that end the same Department of Foreign Affairs has been empowered to conclude, entirely on the lines of the [Page 505] principles of international law accepted in such cases, the necessary conventions.
In order to carry out this order of the President of the Republic, who is actuated by the desire of governing his conduct by the precepts of international law, the Embassy of Mexico, in compliance with instructions it has received to that effect, has the honor to extend a cordial invitation to the Government of the United States, through the Department of State, to appoint a mixed commission which may, as above indicated, pass upon the damages that may have been suffered by its nationals residing in Mexico. In so doing, the Embassy, in the most respectful manner, begs the Department of State kindly to communicate to it, after this invitation shall have received consideration, the decision which the Government of the United States may see fit to reach in regard thereto.
The Embassy of Mexico gladly avails itself of this opportunity to offer once more to the Department of State the assurances of its most distinguished consideration.
- File translation revised.↩
- Foreign Relations, 1913, p. 955.↩
- Apparently refers to art. 13 of the decree of Aug. 30, 1919 ( ibid., 1919, vol. ii, p. 640), which revised that of November (not December) 24, 1917 ( ibid., 1918, p. 793).↩