"I found Mexico to be a land where the people are poor because they have no rights, where peonage is the rule for the great mass, and where actual chattel slavery obtains for hundreds of thousands." ― John Kenneth Turner, Barbarous Mexico In Barbarous Mexico (1911), John Kenneth Turner describes the corruption and brutal labor system he observed during three years of involvement in a revolutionary movement which led to the overthrow of Mexico's ruler Porfirio Diaz in 1910. The book is organized around three themes: the slave life of the plantations, the elitism of the Diaz government, and the role of foreign governments in supporting the oppression of the Mexican people.