Prepare your umbrellas because a storm is about to break.

In a South American magazine titled El Diario Ilustrado, there is an article inspired by the trusts and other excesses that have plagued the United States. It is titled The New Criminal Type of Modern Civilization and features an illustration depicting a man kicking and beating a dying donkey on the ground. Below it, the caption reads: “Gratitude. Poor beast; it is so exhausted that it needs help.”

Among other things, seasoned with cayenne pepper and cumbari chili, the following lines appear in those pages:

“Massive trusts run by unscrupulous men rob the people of every country in the world. The cruelties and brutalities of the past are gone; in the old days, someone might stop a man on the road to rob him, strike him on the head, and leave him among the bushes. Today, the descendants of these bandits raise the price of bread, meat, and oil, or a stockbroker in New York or Chicago orders the price of wheat, coal, or wool to be increased, unaware that they are murdering thousands of poor people—committing risks that far exceed those of highway robbers of old.”

“They adulterate food, as happened in the Chicago canning factory; they render essential tools useless, as occurred with the lifeboats of the General Slocum, which sank in New York Harbor two years ago, causing the deaths of over a thousand people, most of them women and children. These are all part of the new method of theft—the modern system of evil of The Kings of Industry.

“These men have bloodier deeds in their history than Nero, Richard III, or Tiberius, because they send decrepit ships to sea, knowing they will sink in a storm. They cause train derailments through greed, negligence, and ill intentions, bankrupt insurance companies, and force workers in signal towers to toil sleeplessly, knowing that the slightest mistake can lead to a horrific derailment and the loss of many lives.”

The writer, Benjamin De Casseres, after sparing no one and emphasizing the impunity surrounding these actions, concludes his task with these powerful words:

“Civilization has eradicated highway robbers, pirates, and thieves who used to kill around the corner, but it has created far more formidable enemies in their place. The modern disciple of the respectable criminal is the adulterator of food, the cause of train derailments, the stock market gamblers, the forgers of liquids, the swindlers of patent medicines, the corrupters of legislators and judges, the careless and cheerful criminals with no name, who evade the law and are as evil as their methods.”

It seems to us that the new criminal type has found an artist who does not hold back. What a way to paint in the brightest and most fitting colors, showing us all the great misers who sacrifice every human sentiment to their insatiable greed!”