the denunciations of the system of exploitation of the peasants in some henequen haciendas that appeared after February 1905 provoked the anger of the landowners, who pressured companies to remove advertisements and readers to cancel their subscription to the point of threatening the newspaper's financial stability. In his efforts to maintain the newspaper and defend freedom of speech against such pressures, Pino Suárez participated in August of that year in the founding of the "Asociación de la Prensa Yucateca" (Yucatan Press Association), of which he served as vice-chairman. It seems to have been then, defending his newspaper, that he caught his first glimpse of his political vocation.”Pino Suárez "expressed his open and clear repudiation of the bad treatment received by the serfs of the large plantations", chiefly the Maya and Yaqui indigenous peoples, as well as indentured Asians (chiefly Chinese and Korean immigrants) forced to work as slaves on henequen haciendas. The conditions faced by these labourers is aptly described by Professor Timothy J. Henderson in the following excerpt:To ensure the latter enticement – cheap labor – the Díaz government outlawed labor unions and gave employees carte blanche to behave as callously as they wished. Repression of labor during the Porfiriato […] was notorious. One of the most famous accounts, journalist John Kenneth Turner's aptly titled Barbarous Mexico, contains harrowing descriptions of Maya and Yaqui Indians forced to work as slaves on hemp plantations under the brutal sun of Yucatán, starting well before daylight and ending well after sunset, their day's only meal a couple of tortillas, a cup of beans, and a bowl of rancid fish broth […] American capitalists found the lure of so much cheap labor well-nigh irresistible. Ex-president Ulysses S. Grant, toward the end of his life, took to preaching boundless opportunities for American capital in Mexico, mostly because, in addition to many valuable natural resources, Mexico could furnish workers who were ‘industrious, frugal and willing to work for a pittance, if afforded an opportunity’.” Felipe Carrillo Puerto, the future Governor of Yucatán, would later relate that in opposing the enslavement of the plantation laborers, Pino Suárez had first "fanned the revolutionary flame." Beginning in March 1905, Pino Suárez "began to publish a series of articles in which he attempted to analyze in depth the problem of labor relations on the henequen haciendas. This series, entitled Servitude in the fields of Yucatán, consisted of six articles"