Statecraft, Domestic Politics, and Foreign Policymaking: The El Chamizal Dispute
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Why did it take more than half a century for the United States to comply with the decision of an international arbitration tribunal?Why did it take so long to settle the Chamizal boundary conflict?The dispute arose when between 1852-1873 the Rio Grande shifted its course to the south in the El Paso area.The most radical shift occurred in 1864 when, under flood conditions, the river violently left its banks, cutting into Mexican territory to establish a new course for its flow and in the process leaving behind several hundred acres of land which had been formerly south of the river in Mexico.The shifting river continued to change course and had moved approximately 600 acres to the U.S. side of the river by 1873.This land had been clearly Mexican, but was it still?This question was raised because under the U.S.-Mexican Boundary Treaty of 1884 the boundary between the two countries was the middle of the river.However, if the river changed its route slowly, the boundary moved with it, but if the river changed its course "avulsively," the boundary did not change.Thus, was the course change of 1864 avulsive or not?Did Mexico lose 600 acres of national territory or not?The question was made even more complicated because the incidents occurred before the 1884 treaty was signed.To answer these questions the two countries submitted the matter to international arbitration, and in 1911 the international arbitration tribunal under the chairmanship of the Canadian jurist, Eugene LeFluer, decided that the 1884 treaty did apply retroactively, and that the river had in fact moved avulsively and therefore the land in question remained Mexican.The U.S. rejected the finding and refused to honor it on the basis that the tribunal had exceeded its authority.The matter became a cause celebre throughout Latin America, and a festering "burr under the saddle" of U.S.-Mexican relations.The Mexican diplomat, Vicente SAnchez Gavito, summed up the Mexican dismay, "Mexico never wins in its disputes with the United States for when considerations are decided against Mexico, Mexico accepts; but when they are decided against the United States, the United States does not accept."He added, "Mexicans are a sporting people, and when a decision
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".