After decades of war over the Yaqui river lands, the Diaz government adopted a policy of removing the Yaqui population altogether. Families were rounded up in Sonora, marched or shipped to San Marcos and Veracruz and sent on to Yucatan, where they were sold to henequen planters at a fixed price per head and worked under conditions that contemporaries described as slavery; smaller numbers went to sugar estates in Oaxaca and Morelos. Encyclopedia.com records approximately 8,000 to 15,000 of some 30,000 Yaqui deported between 1902 and 1908. Mortality on the journey and on the plantations was very high, and few returned. Others fled to Arizona, where refugee Yaqui communities were established, or continued armed resistance from the Bacatete mountains, which persisted into the 1920s. The traffic was exposed internationally by John Kenneth Turner in 1910 and was one of the abuses that discredited the Diaz regime; deportations ended with the revolution, and the survivors' descendants were among those who returned to Sonora in the following decades.
The government of Porfirio Diaz and the Sonoran state authorities deported Yaqui families from the Yaqui river valley to henequen plantations in Yucatan and to Oaxaca, and opened their land to settlers and irrigation companies
No reliable enumeration exists because Yaquis avoided Mexican census-takers and many worked outside the valley; historians of the deportations (Hu-DeHart, Padilla Ramos) work with a figure of roughly 20,000-30,000 Yaquis in Sonora at the turn of the century. The upper end is used here and the range should be read as wide.
No count was kept. Contemporary and later accounts describe mortality of a half to two thirds among deportees within a few years, from the journey itself, from tropical disease to which highland and desert people had no resistance, and from the working regime on the henequen estates; applying those rates to the deportation estimates yields several thousand deaths. Turner's contemporary reporting alleged higher mortality still. All figures are inferences rather than records.
The sale of deportees to planters, the separation of families and the seizure of Yaqui land are documented in Mexican federal and Sonoran records, in Yucatecan plantation accounts and in Turner's contemporary investigation, and are summarised in Hu-DeHart's scholarship.
Mexico, United States of America