I found that the people do not idolize their president, that the tide of opposition, dammed and held back as it has been by army and secret police, is rising to a height where it must shortly overflow that dam. Mexicans of all classes and affiliations agree that their country is on the verge of a revolution in favor of democracy; if not a revolution in the time of Díaz, for Díaz is old and is expected soon to pass, then a revolution after Díaz.
What no one predicted fully was that, less than a year after the crowds had gathered in the Zócalo to celebrate a hundred years of Mexican independence, Díaz would be in exile in Paris, Francisco Madero would be president, and Mexico would be launched into the first phase of a drawn-out revolution.
There was not, in reality, one Mexican revolution.9 Once fully unleashed by Díaz’s overthrow there were rather waves of unrest, sometimes mobilised by one or another political figure or military commander – Francisco Madero, Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Pascual Orozco, Victoriano Huerta, Venustiano Carranza – sometimes coming under their control, and sometimes engulfing them. Political instability flowed, in part, from economic volatility: fluctuations in international investment, in prices or in the amount of rain falling on different parts of the country. But it also rested on the pent-up anger of the Díaz years. Anger at the hacienda system of farming, which reduced some Mexicans to the level of slaves while providing enormous wealth for absentee hacendado landlords living in Mexico City or Paris, without a care for Mexico’s broader modernisation, often to the frustration of Díaz’s científicos. Anger at the arbitrary justice meted out by representatives of the state – often the stooges of local power-brokers – symbolised by the ley de fuga allowing government authorities to kill those attempting to escape the law, with the authorities themselves as sole witnesses and judges of any such attempt. Once unleashed, revolt became its own end.
In such a large and fragmented nation as the United Mexican States, the official name of the country, there were bound to be regional variations, key to the ebb and flow of the revolution. As in Helen Hunt Jackson’s description of Mexican California in Ramona, in Mexico proper there were distinctions between Mexicans of Spanish descent and those of Indian descent, with racial prejudices overlaying economic rivalries. The porfiriato had tried – and failed – to crush a long-standing rebellion of the Yaqui Indians of the Pacific coast by forcibly transporting them to the Yucatan peninsula on the other side of the country. And, as anywhere else, political instability provided an opportunity for local scores to be settled, for personal grievances to be aired, for heroes to be acclaimed and discarded, giving full rein to the fickle fortunes of war. Charles Macomb Flandrau summed up all of Mexico with the response he was given to a simple question about the likelihood of rain: ‘No hay reglas fijas, señor’ – ‘there are no fixed rules’.10
If anything united the vast majority of Mexicans it was distrust of the Americans – the ‘Gringo’, the yanqui. Less than two months after the celebrations of Mexico’s independence in the Zócalo, the lynching of a young Mexican in Texas led to an attack on American interests in Mexico City, including the Mexican Herald.11 After the revolution, the spectre of American invasion would consistently be raised as a rallying cry for political support for whoever was in control in Mexico City.
In May 1911, Francisco Madero had forced out Díaz, the porfiriato ending with protests on the street, the massacre of 200 protesters on the Zócalo and, in the wake of that disaster, a crumbling of the Díaz leadership. The old man was bundled on a slow train to Veracruz and a boat to France. But Madero – ‘a little man, of unimpressive presence and manner, highly nervous, overwhelmed by his troubles’ – had been elevated to the presidency on the shoulders of an uprising which he did not control.12 He won as a result of Díaz’s errors – belief in his own propaganda – as much as his own qualities. After Díaz had been dispatched to Paris – where Edward Doheny took tea with him the following year – Madero won an election virtually unopposed in October. At which point the new President, rather than launching himself into land reform, published a Spiritualist Manual based on the Sanskrit epic the Mahabharata, an epic of ancient India, under an assumed name.13 Madero had neither the steel to suppress dissent, nor the vision to push through reform. Fatally, as it turned out, he did not know who to trust.
Madero’s presidency itself unravelled within little more than a year. He could not put down an uprising by Emiliano Zapata in Morelos province, in the centre of Mexico. His inaction on reform led erstwhile supporter Pascual Orozco to start a fresh revolt in Chihuahua, in the north. The political capital of victory was rapidly squandered. Even as the country became more militarised and the army more powerful, central government authority could not be re-established. Madero, it turned out, was not Mexico’s saviour from itself.
At the end of 1912 Porfirio Díaz’s nephew, Félix Díaz, rebelled. In itself, the rebellion was easily contained and rapidly defeated. Díaz was imprisoned, along with Bernardo Reyes, a former minister and general. But the intervention of the porfiriato supreme court saved the younger Díaz’s life, and right-wing elements conspired to free both him and Reyes from custody. On 9 February 1913 the plan was put into action. Porfirio Díaz’s former army chief, General Manuel Mondragón, marched to the barracks where Reyes and Díaz were held. When the commanding general refused to hand over the two men to Mondragón, he was shot dead. Reyes was taken to the Zócalo, where he confidently expected to be proclaimed the new President. But troops still loyal to Madero had been warned. Reyes and 400 others were killed in the Zócalo in a hail of gunfire. So began the decena trágica – the tragic ten days.
Government forces and those of Díaz now settled into a stalemate in the centre of Mexico City. Downtown became a battlefield, littered with corpses. ‘Capitalists have sunk much money into the country’s undoubted resources’, wrote a journalist from the British magazine The Economist, ‘and it is perhaps unlikely that a state of anarchy will continue long … But at the present moment it is hard to see where the restoring hand of authority will come from’.14 In fact, the restoring hand of authority was nearer than suspected. On the day the coup began, rushing into the city to restore his authority, Madero ran into General Victoriano Huerta, minutes after an assassination attempt. Knowing Madero’s military commander was wounded, Huerta offered his own services to the President. Madero, fatefully, accepted. According to a later account submitted to Woodrow Wilson, the Mexican President then made a speech to the crowd with Huerta at his side.
Huerta, under the pretence of faithfully serving Madero, played the next few days with consummate Machiavellian skill, assisted by the American Ambassador, Henry Lane Wilson. The battle between government forces commanded by Huerta and rebel forces commanded by Díaz seemed strangely choreographed. This was because it was. With Wilson’s encouragement, the two bided their time. Huerta sent units loyal to Madero into battle to be shot; Díaz’s troops made no serious attempt to dislodge him. Meanwhile, Ambassador Wilson encouraged Mexico City’s elite in the belief that the United States would imminently restore order through military invasion. To forestall such a shameful eventuality, Mexican senators called for the President’s resignation. Huerta, having previously sworn his loyalty to Madero, now sent his men to the National Palace to arrest him.
The orgy of betrayals continued. Huerta invited the President’s brother, Gustavo Madero, to dine with him at Gambrinus, a downtown restaurant. When Madero turned up he was arrested and taken to jail, where he was blinded and shot dead. Huerta then surprised Díaz by announcing that he wanted to be President himself, rather than turning over the presidency to Porfirio’s nephew. Faced with Ambassador Wilson’s support for the move, Díaz had no choice, later accepting a diplomatic appointment from Huerta. Meanwhile, the minister of foreign affairs, Pedro Lascuráin, persuaded Madero – unaware of what had happened to his brother – to resign the presidency. The office then skipped to Lascuráin, who held it for less than an hour before turning it ov
er to Huerta, thus maintaining the fiction of constitutional due process. ‘VIVA DIAZ! VIVA HUERTA!’ topped the Mexican Herald the next day: ‘After a year of anarchy, a military dictator looks good to Mexico’.15
Finally, though safe passage abroad had been supposedly guaranteed by Huerta to Madero and his Vice-President Pino Suarez, the two were murdered on 21 February 1913. The false story was circulated that they had been killed in a shoot-up when an attempt had been made to rescue them. The ley de fuga lived on. According to a later confidential dispatch to US President Wilson, the place where Madero and Suarez were shot became a shrine: ‘passers by piled stones in a little mound over the two blood-soaked spots of ground and stuck lighted candles on top’.16
Towards the end of 1913 President Woodrow Wilson went to Congress to give an account of his first year, and to outline his observations on the state of the union. It was a mostly upbeat affair, and mostly concerned with domestic affairs. ‘There is but one cloud upon our horizon’, Wilson said. ‘That has shown itself to the south of us’, he continued, ‘and hangs over Mexico’.
For Wilson, the problem of Mexico had started on the day of his inauguration, when he received a telegram from Huerta: ‘In the name of the people and government of Mexico, and in my own, I have the honour to offer to your Excellency my most cordial congratulations on your elevation to the first position in your great Republic’. It was not easy to know how to respond. President Wilson was not ready to recognise Huerta’s coup through a formal diplomatic exchange. A neutral response was prepared, to be sent a few days later, addressed non-committally to General V. Huerta, Mexico City, Mexico: ‘I thank you for your cordial congratulations’.17
The dilemmas of how to deal with an unstable military-led regime on the doorstep of a democracy which pronounced itself a beacon of liberty to the world – and which increasingly wore the mantle of a great power – were inescapable. Was it better to extend diplomatic recognition to an unattractive regime and thereby hope to achieve a measure of political stability – or to refuse to recognise the regime on principle, thus emboldening its opponents and running the risk of losing both American investors’ money and the lives of American residents in the widening civil war which might follow? Was it preferable to intervene militarily to protect American interests and bring stability and freedom to the Mexican people – or rather to maintain the purity of neutrality and avoid a potential quagmire, but run the risk of appearing weak, and leave the outcome in Mexico to be determined by forces beyond one’s control?
Victoriano Huerta (seated left), brutal military strongman. ‘After a year of anarchy, a military dictator looks good to Mexico’, wrote the editors of the American-owned Mexican Herald. But the anarchy did not end with Huerta’s coup.
In April 1913 Colonel House confided that he thought military intervention would require 50,000 men, but that there might be guerrilla warfare after the initial pacification. (A subsequent War Department contingency plan suggested that the United States could have 3,000 men in Veracruz within a week, and 40,000 within a month – the minimum required for an expedition against Mexico City.) In May, Wilson’s own Assistant Secretary of State urged the US President to recognise Huerta’s government, arguing that non-recognition was itself a form of intervention, that it ran counter to normal diplomatic practice, and that the United States lay open to charges of hypocrisy as long as it dithered on recognition and yet failed to prevent American arms sales to the government in Mexico City.18 Wilson would not be the last President to grapple with the quandary of how to square American interests with American principles, or how to manage inconsistency in how those principles were applied.
Nor would he be the last to realise the very real limitations to American power, even in the country’s backyard. The Mexican problem was not an academic problem which could be dealt with philosophically by Wilson alone, at his leisure. Whatever the Monroe Doctrine might have said about the western hemisphere being off limits to European powers, the reality in Mexico was that other players were inevitably involved from the outset. And they would act according to their calculations of national interest, affecting the calculations and interests of everyone else, including the United States.
Britain, for one, was ready to go ahead and recognise Huerta, leading some in the US Cabinet to conclude that the Mexican situation was in reality ‘a contest between English and American Oil Companies to see which would control [the country’s resource wealth]’, with British-owned Mexican Eagle jockeying for concessions with Doheny’s Mexican Petroleum Company and Rockefeller’s Standard Oil.19 German grand strategists took an interest in what was happening in Mexico.20 Arms sales from outside parties could help tip the balance of forces within Mexico. Direct foreign military intervention could not be excluded. Japan, locked in dispute with the United States over the Californian land ownership law, was happy to take the opportunity presented in Mexico to show that it could affect American interests on Washington’s doorstep if it wanted. In July 1913 the new Japanese Ambassador to the Huerta regime, Minechiro Adachi, arrived in Mexico City to ecstatic cries of ‘Viva Japan’. A few months later Felix Díaz was sent on a diplomatic mission to Tokyo as the envoy of Victoriano Huerta.
Wilson’s dilemmas in Mexico were further compounded by the lack of sound information as to the situation on the ground. ‘Did you ever know a situation that had more question marks around it?’ complained Wilson to the press in May 1913:
Whenever I look at it, I see nothing but exclamation points. It is just a kaleidoscopic, changing scene. Nobody in the world has any certain information about the situation that I have yet found.21
Not trusting the dispatches provided by Henry Lane Wilson, President Wilson resorted to sending William Bayard Hale, a journalist who had played a key role in Wilson’s presidential campaign, to see how things stood and to report back, informally.
Hale’s reports in June and July made for depressing summer reading. They repeated circumstantial evidence that Madero had been murdered with Ambassador Wilson’s foreknowledge and that the ambassador had far overstepped his instructions in bringing Huerta to power. Huerta himself was described as ‘an ape-like old man … said to subsist on alcohol’. Whatever his military credentials or political intentions, he was not restoring stability. Emiliano Zapata was still active in the south. Unrest in the north had now come under the banner of the Constitutionalists led by Venustiano Carranza, a former supporter of Francisco Madero. Mexico, Hale reported, was reaching rock bottom:
There is no security for any sort of property or life. Lands are going out of cultivation; mines are closed down; only the most necessary labor and trade is carried on. Bandits and Government troops vie in cruelty to each other and towards the population. The Mexican is a savage and finds sport and pleasure in horrible excesses of cruelty. Except in its chief cities, life in Mexico counts for nothing today; non-combatants are shot to death merely by way of amusement … The abuse of women is extremely common.22
Despite – or because – of all this, American engagement was more necessary than ever before:
We are, in spite of ourselves, the guardians of order and justice and decency on this Continent; we are, providentially, naturally and unescapably, charged with the maintenance of humanity’s interest here. Civilization and humanity look to us, and have a right to look to us, for protection on this Continent … It is more necessary to maintain civilization than to pay fantastic deference to the formal prerogatives of a Government that has lost the ability to maintain civilization.
So much for America’s responsibilities in Mexico: how was she to act on them? Hale himself did not recommend military intervention. ‘Perhaps’, wrote Ellen Axson Wilson to her husband, ‘it would save us trouble in the long term to give them [all] arms and let them exterminate each other if they so prefer’.23
Wilson opted for a more diplomatic course. He recalled and fired Henry Lane Wilson. In his stead he sent John Lind, the former Governor of Minnesota, as his personal representat
ive, on a peace mission. But Lind’s mission was dismissed in Mexico. Federico Gamboa, Huerta’s foreign minister, responded archly to Lind that an American peace mission was odd given that the two countries were not at war. He claimed that most of Mexico was under government control, and that if the United States wished to show true friendship to Mexico it could simply ‘watch that no material and monetary assistance is given to rebels who find refuge, conspire and provide themselves with arms and food on the other side of the border’.24 He rejected the notion of an armistice, pointing out that ‘bandits, Mr Confidential Agent, are not admitted to armistice’. Finally he expressed surprise at the American call for elections, as elections were already planned for October, and refused the American suggestion that Huerta preemptively rule himself out of the presidential race, arguing that ‘this point can only be decided by Mexican public opinion when it may be expressed at the polls’. At the end of August Wilson reported back to Congress on the initial rejection of Lind’s mission – now calling on all Americans to leave the country and announcing a ban on the sale of weapons to Mexico. September found John Lind and his wife in the sultry heat of Veracruz, on Mexico’s Caribbean coast. ‘I confess that I have almost given up hope’, Lind wrote in a letter to Secretary of State Bryan.25
For the rest of 1913, with his diplomatic options now close to exhausted, and not ready to order military intervention, President Wilson was reduced to ‘watchful waiting’ as Mexico pulled itself apart. Huerta was becoming weaker, but perhaps not fatally. Venustiano Carranza was holed up in the state of Sonora, in Mexico’s far north-west. Zapata’s guerrilla operations in southern Mexico continued, with sporadic risings against federal targets. Francisco ‘Pancho’ Villa waged a media campaign in the American press from his stronghold in Chihuahua state, presenting himself as the only true alternative to Huerta, and cultivating the radical image of an insurgent revolutionary.26 In November Villa took the northern city of Ciudad Juárez by capturing a federal train, filling it with his soldiers, and riding it straight into the city, taking the garrison entirely by surprise.
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