The Friends of Pancho Villa

by James Carlos Blake

  He then ordered a cavalry patrol east to Carrizal, where the Carrancista garrison commander warned them not to enter the town. But they went in anyway—and found themselves in the biggest battle Pershing’s boys would get into the whole time they were in Mexico. The Carrancistas killed twelve of them, took twenty-three prisoners, and sent the rest running for their lives.

  Not even the raid on Columbus had caused such a furor in the U.S. as the beating the Yankees took at Carrizal—or worked up so many Mexicans into a patriotic lather. A lot of people on both sides of the border were howling for war. But the gringos couldn’t afford a war against us—they were too close to getting pulled into the European war. And Carranza sure as hell didn’t want a war with the gringos—he had too damned much to lose. After holding the Yankee prisoners for a week, he let them go as a gesture of “goodwill” toward the United States. A week after that he sent a team of representatives to the U.S. to negotiate once again about pulling their troops out of Mexico. They talked for the next six months without agreeing on anything except to stay out of war with each other.

  The Yankees knew damn well by then that Black Jack was never going to catch Villa. Their main objective now was to avoid any more skirmishes with the Carrancistas. Wilson even prohibited Pershing from going any deeper into Mexico than 150 miles from the border. It was pretty obvious they were looking for a way to get the hell out of Mexico without losing face, but the whitebeard, by refusing all alternatives to an immediate pullout, wasn’t making things easy for them.

  Meanwhile the Punitive Expedition had become a bad joke. The gringo troopers were out in the desert with nothing to do with their days but drill and curse the weather. In the evenings they could at least go into the nearby pueblos and drink and whore and fight each other. They were a miserable lot of soldiers, as much the butts of ridicule with some of their own countrymen as they were with us. For the people of the local region, however, those six months were the most lucrative they ever knew.

  The negotiations over the pullout of the gringo troops stretched out for so long that both sides were finally able to claim they’d made their point: the gringos could say they didn’t pull out of Mexico until they were good and ready, and Carranza could say he’d never weakened in his refusal to accept any resolution but unconditional withdrawal. The pullout began at the end of January, and the last gringo troops crossed the border into Columbus on the fifth of February, 1917—eleven months after they’d come charging into Mexico to put an end to Pancho Villa.

  •

  Long before the Yankees took their soldiers out of Mexico, Villa twisted their tail by letting everybody know he was very much alive and still a force to reckon with. By early June he was back in the saddle and directing an ambush of a Carrancista patrol near San Javier. He let the prisoners we took have a good close look at him, then set them free with orders to “Tell them all—the gringos and the whitebeard and all the oppressors of Mexico—tell them Francisco Villa lives! Tell them they will never be safe from the wrath of Pancho Villa until true justice prevails in the fatherland. Go! Tell them!”

  Around that time, Felipe Angeles sent us this item from the Kansas City Journal of 1 July 1916:

  Since General Pershing was sent out to capture him, Villa has been mortally wounded in the leg and died in a lonely cave. He was assassinated by one of his own band and his grave was identified by a Carranza follower who hoped for a suitable reward from President Wilson. Villa was likewise killed in a brawl at a ranch house where he was engaged in the gentle diversion of burning men and women at the stake. He was also shot on a wild ride and his body cremated. Yet through all these experiences which, it must be confessed, would have impaired the health of any ordinary man, Villa has not only retained the vital spark of life but has renewed his youth and strength. He seems all the better for his vacation, strenuous though it must have been.

  At the bottom of the clipping, Angeles had written: “Your recuperative powers are most enviable, my general.”

  Pancho loved it. He laughed uproariously when it was translated aloud by Miguel Trillo, a smart little fat guy who’d recently joined us and won Villa’s affection as well as a job as his secretary. I lost count of how many times in the next few years he had Trillo take out the clipping and read it for somebody’s amusement.

  We reunited with our boys in San Juan Bautista on the sixth of July as we’d planned. As the word spread through northern Mexico that Villa still lived, his legend grew greater than ever. Eager young boys flocked to join us. On September 16, Independence Day, we sneaked into Chihuahua City in the dead of night, took the Carrancista garrison by surprise, and got control of the town in quick order. We freed dozens of old compañeros from the prison. Hundreds of the Carrancistas threw off their uniforms and joined us too. Villa made a speech from the balcony of the governor’s palace, pledging that he would never stop fighting for Mexico’s liberty and true justice for all. He grinned at me through the rousing cries of “Viva Villa!” We left Chihuahua City with twenty automobiles loaded with loot, with chests of gold and silver, with cases of rifles for our boys.

  We would never again be the army we’d once been. The mighty Division of the North was but a memory. But we were still the people of Pancho Villa. We moved fast and struck hard, and if we were too few to hold the towns we captured, we were also too quick and elusive to get caught. And as long as we were armed and saddled and on the move, the Revolution still lived.

  SIXTEEN

  In March Carranza got what he’d always wanted: he was elected president. He took the oath of office on the first of May and announced that the Revolution was over, that its goals had been won, that national peace was at hand.

  Nobody believed him. How could the Revolution be over when Villa was still raising so much hell in the north and Zapata was still making war in Morelos? To add to the whitebeard’s troubles, Obregón loudly condemned the new government as being even more corrupt than the Porfiriato at its worst. He resigned as secretary of war and returned to Sonora, claiming he wished to live as a private citizen the rest of his life. Nobody believed him either. The next election would be held in three years and everybody knew damn well that Old One-Arm would be the top man in the running.

  But three years was a long time down the road. The whitebeard’s main concern between then and now was us—us and the Zapatistas. Until he did something about both Pancho and Zapata, he knew he’d never convince anybody that he had the country under control. He made a lot of speeches about the “plague of reactionary bandit forces” still “infecting” the country, and promised to use the full might of the federal army to bring an end to them.

  The commanding general of the Carrancista forces in Chihuahua was Francisco Murguía. Over the next three years we fought dozens of battles against him, winning about as often as we lost—although even when we won we always had to pull back, since there were never enough of us to hold any town we took. Murguía was a tough son of a bitch, but he was a big bullshitter too. He went around bragging that he could finish us off whenever he wanted, but he didn’t want to because then his boys wouldn’t have anybody to fight. It was a good line, and a lot of people believed it, but it was bullshit just the same. Murguía’s boys were good soldiers, yes, but we were still the best. There just weren’t enough of us.

  Like most men named Francisco, Murguía went by the nickname Pancho, but in Chihuahua they called him Pancho the Noose to distinguish him from Villa, who had long been called Pancho the Pistols. Murguía got the name because he preferred to hang prisoners rather than shoot them. He never lived up to his name as convincingly as in Chihuahua City one summer afternoon after beating us in a hell of a fight for the town. We penetrated deep into the city before his troops rallied and drove us back out, but 250 of our boys got trapped in town and taken prisoner. Pancho the Noose then announced to the townspeople that no Villista was worth a bullet, and he ordered all 250 men hanged. They were strung up in
bunches from the trees along both sides of Columbus Avenue, one of the main thoroughfares. They say that when the executions were carried out, the Noose laughed and said, “Look at that—so many pretty trees so full of rotten fruit.” After that, the street was known as the Avenue of Hanged Men.

  Villa was enraged by the mass hangings. “So that’s how this whoreson wants to fight, eh?” Two weeks later we got into a skirmish with a Carrancista patrol near Guerrero and took two dozen prisoners. Villa told them they were worth neither a bullet nor a rope. He had them buried in the sand so only their heads were exposed, then gathered the townspeople to watch our boys gallop their horses over the heads and crush them like melons. That’s the kind of war it had become.

  •

  We attacked Ojinaga twice within a few months, both times with sufficient fury to send the Carrancistas running across the river to safety in Presidio. The first time, we looted the town, rounded up every horse in sight, loaded up every weapon we could find, and headed back to the mountains before Murguía showed up with reinforcements. The second time, we did the same—and got even luckier: we found two strongboxes full of silver bullion on an army train idling in the railyard. Some of it we used to buy more guns from a renegade gringo who brought the goods in through the Chisos Mountains. The rest we buried up in the sierras—me, Villa, Trillo, Rosalío, and Calixto. We had gold and silver cached all over Chihuahua. “For emergencies,” Villa said, “and for our old age.” The way the rest of us laughed at that put a scare on Trillo’s face, which of course only made us laugh harder.

  Around that time, Villa at last kept his vow to punish the men of the Herrera family in retaliation for Maclovio’s desertion to the Carrancistas. We descended on Parral and routed the garrison force in quick order. Maclovio’s father and two brothers were dragged out of hiding in their house and brought to Villa in the main plaza, where the town had been gathered to hear the usual speech about his undying devotion to the ideals of the Revolution and his promise to resist Carrancista tyranny to his last breath and blah blah blah.

  “You invited me and my boys into your home and smiled at us like friends!” Villa ranted at the Herreras. “You raised your glasses to my health and good fortune. You swore my enemies were your enemies as well. And then you betrayed me!”

  The elder Herrera pleaded for the lives of his two sons, begging Villa to be satisfied with killing only him. Villa shook his finger. “No—sons of a traitor grow up to be traitors. It is in the blood.” Señor Herrera dropped to his knees, weeping and begging Villa for mercy—and immediately the two sons did the same. I felt the same disgust that showed on Villa’s face. The crowd cheered when he drew his revolver and shot all three while they were still on their knees and begging.

  As he reloaded, Pancho whispered to me, “Listen to them, our dear friends—so happy to see these traitors die. You have to wonder why they didn’t do the job on them before I got here.”

  “They probably didn’t want to deprive you of the pleasure,” I said.

  He nodded and smiled sadly at my sardonic tone. “Why don’t they fight for themselves, Rudy?” he said. “I never understood that. Why they don’t fight for themselves?”

  I knew he wasn’t talking only about the people of Parral—and it wasn’t the first time he professed astonishment over something so obvious that I had to wonder if he was really serious or cleverly joking. He seemed serious, however, so I said, “Hell, Pancho, they’re just people, that’s why.’’

  “Well shit, we’re people too. But we don’t let—”

  “Us?” I said. “Man, they’re not like us.”

  He gave me a look, then grinned, and then we both laughed.

  “Hell no, they’re not,” he said.

  The mayor was a Carrancista too, and many of the townspeople had deep grievances against him and wanted to hang him, so Villa gave permission and they promptly strung him up. As we watched them spitting on the dangling corpse and pelting it with stones, Villa said softly, “Well, maybe a little like us.”

  •

  In the meantime Carranza kept right on reassuring the gringos that he had things well in hand and that there was no need to fret about the safety of U.S. citizens who wanted to do business in Mexico. He hated gringos as much as we did, but he liked the taxes and bribes they paid him for permission to operate ranches and mines on this side of the border. It irritated us to see gringos back in northern Mexico and making profits from our land. Pancho wanted to kill them all, but I suggested that kidnaping for ransom was a better idea. “That way, we get money from them,” I said. “If they want to make a lot of money in Mexico, they’ll have to pay a lot of money in Mexico—pay it to us.”

  “And if they choose not to give us a bite of their profits, it’s their own fault they get shot,” Pancho said happily. He was tickled by the whole idea. “Rudy,” he said, “you should have been a goddamn businessman. Think how rich you could be by now if you had not settled for the honest life of a bandit.”

  Over the next few months we grabbed every rich gringo we could. It was such an easy way to get money—the bastards always paid. One of the first we kidnaped was a man named Knutsen, who owned a mining company near Laguna de Patos. We made him send a message to his brother, telling him to deliver $20,000 for his release. But we hadn’t specified that the payment was to be in gold, and the brother showed up with a satchel full of Yankee paper money. Villa thumbed through the bills and then flung them angrily across the table. “I don’t want this shit­paper!” he said. “It has pictures of gringos on it.” We made him go back and get the ransom in gold coin. To make sure everybody got the point, we shot Knutsen in both feet before we released him. The word got around fast: if Villa grabbed you for ransom, you paid in gold or you paid in blood—and you paid quick or you paid in both.

  •

  Pancho still fell in love with a different woman every few weeks, but he hadn’t gotten married in over a year. As far as he knew, only one of his legal wives was still alive and calling herself Señora Villa—Maria Luz Corral, the first wife he ever took, back before the Revolution. She was still living in El Paso, where he had long ago ensconced her to keep her safe from the perils of war. But though he had not recently married any of the girls he dallied with, he had not lost his sense of matrimonial honor. When the mother of a pretty sixteen-year-old girl came to him with the girl in tow and cursed him loudly as the devil who’d dishonored her daughter six months earlier and left her pregnant, Villa looked abashed. He neither denied nor confirmed the accusation, but he remembered the daughter very well and agreed that she was a good girl. To set the matter straight, he called for a priest—“the youngest one you can find,” he ordered.

  When the padre was fetched—a fellow barely into his ­twenties—Villa took him aside for a private chat. A few minutes later the faint-faced priest publicly confessed to his sin of deflowering the girl. He accepted the responsibility of his paternity, renounced his priestly vows, and begged to be permitted to marry her. “Well, chica,” Villa asked the girl, ‘‘will you accept this honorable man, the admitted father of your child, as your lawful husband?” When she hesitated, her mother gave her an elbow in the ribs and hissed, “Yes, yes, you little fool!” Five minutes later the mayor pronounced them man and wife and the whole thing was settled.

  As the newlyweds were escorted away by a happy throng of well-wishers, Villa gave a contented sigh and said, “What else is so satisfying as doing the right thing? You should try to become a better person yourself, Rudy. We have much to atone for, you and me, and good deeds do much to redeem the soul.” I didn’t realize he was being serious until he responded to my laughter with a pitying look and shook his head in dismay.

  His notion of goodness took a different turn a few weeks later in Jiménez when he spotted a beauty named Austroberta Ren­tería and was dazed at first sight. She clearly had eyes for him too, but he was set on doing the right thing, so he w
ent to her father and asked for her hand. But the father, a tough horse rancher named Ignacio, despised Villa and berated him for a vile and evil man. “I’ll never give my girl to you,” he told Pancho. “The only way you can have her is by force—and that will only prove to everyone what a dishonorable brute you are.”

  I nearly laughed at the look on Villa’s face. He was caught in the middle of three powerful urges—to do the right thing, to have the girl, and to kill this impudent old goat who dared to insult him so loudly. He resolved the situation to his satisfaction by ordering a few of the boys to take the old man into an alley, tie him down, and set fire to his feet. Within minutes, Ignacio Ren­tería was shrieking his wholehearted approval of the marriage.

  That afternoon a husky pair of our boys carried him to the magistrate’s office, his bandaged feet dangling, to witness the legal union, and that evening they bore him into the church for the religious ceremony, where he dutifully gave away the bride with full matrimonial propriety.

  Pancho seemed truly in love this time. He bought a house for Austroberta on a hill overlooking the town and held many fine fiestas in its grand patio. She was not only lovely, she was as lively and energetic as a pup; she had quick wit and an accommodating disposition. She delighted Villa with her skill at inventing new lyrics to old tunes, with the funny faces she’d make when she disagreed with something he said, and with her wonderful horsemanship. They often went riding together, and he joked that she must be part Comanche to ride as well as she did. I’d never seen him so happy with a woman.

  But of course he was not always with her, and marriage neither neuters a man nor makes him blind to all other beauty around him. A few months later, in Valle de Allende, he met a young lovely named Soledad. Green-eyed and pale as cream, she was unlike Austroberta in every way. She was moody and given to outbreaks of temper—much as Villa himself still was, despite his best efforts to rid himself of the troublesome trait. Their fights resounded with curses, threats, breaking glass, and crashing furniture. They could be heard all the way out at the corral, a good fifty yards from the house in which he’d established her at the edge of town.